What wonders does the in box of mystery hold for us today? Cryptic announces veteran rewards for players who keep an active subscription to Star Trek Online. Saith Cryptic: “Skill point bonuses, titles, costume pieces, character slots… Veterans will be rewarded every 100 days! Rewards will be retroactive, too!” Nice of them! They’ve also announced a “Come back to STO” weekend and a “Recruit a Friend” program; all these kick off May 7. ...
Lots of people really do ask me what I DO in EverQuest? Truth be told, most of the time I am either working on my Epic 1.5 (the rogue epic quest is THE WORST of them all), do monster missions for gear and experience, or do the Boomerang! event in Brell’s Rest. It’s a simple arena game; everyone in the party chooses a team – red, blue or gold, like in Star Trek – and each is given boomerangs in their opponent’s two colors. You enter, are transformed into a gnoll of your color, and you run around and fling boomerangs at enemies while dodging boomerangs thrown at you, as well as explosive barrels that drop randomly from the ceiling. You get one point for hitting an enemy; lose one point for being hit twice and lose five points for being blown up by an explosive barrel. After five minutes, the top three get gold tokens (used to buy high level uber weapons), and everyone gets silver tokens appropriate to their point total, used to buy a wide variety of gear and augments. ...
I was really looking forward to Shin Megami Tensei, I really loved the RPGs upon which the MMO is based, the MMO absolutely nailed the look and feel of the RPGs, the action was smooth and the frame rates high, worked great on my computer. Well, except for the crashing, but it was early beta and they have doubtlessly fixed all that now. I can’t explain why I am not playing it. It’s a good game! ...
Constant disconnects making it impossible to finish any instanced dungeons are getting a little bit aggravating. Talking to other SMT testers while playing DOMO confirms it: It is hard to get a really good sense for the Megaten closed beta when it’s so hard to stay connected in dungeons. And dungeons (and groups to do them with) are vitally important to advancing in Megaten. The loot dropped there sells for a lot, the experience is 5-10x better than in the outside world, you can gain access to more powerful demons ages before you could get them via fusion… Dungeons are central to SMT, and when they aren’t working, it’s just frustrating. ...
Aeria Games never had me sign a NDA for Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine (or in fact, ever, for any of the games I’ve beta’d), so, given that I’m just barely out of the tutorial, here’s some screen shots. Remember, this is from closed beta and what it looks like now may be 100% different by the time it ships. At least there will likely be less Japanese in the cut scenes… (Who or what is Nizero?) ...
Ever since I first heard that Shin Megami Tensei was being made into an MMO – and that it was coming HERE – I changed my desktop to the SMT: Imagine wallpaper and looked at it every day. Today, I got the golden ticket – I was in! Probably every Aeria Games player got in if they wanted to, but I don’t care. Installing it right now. I don’t know what this will do to my DOMO career – just joined a guild tonight, too. Oh well. ...
I really didn’t INTEND to play Wizard 101 all night. I just thought I’d log on and farm the Jade Oni a bit for my epic robe while watching the disc of Buffy Netflix sent me. Takes over half an hour for me to solo it (it being a 7500 health Life mob that resists most spells I cast at it). There was someone about to kill her, so I joined in, then I spawned her again and killed her solo. A friend asked for help with Crusher and Meowiarty in Big Ben, so I ported to her and helped with those. After, I returned to the Jade Palace and there was someone hanging around, bored. We got to talking about the end game and the Kensington instance and stuff and he offered to help kill the Oni again (way easier with two people), and yay, got my robe :) ...
Just saw that Aeria Games is adding Shin Megami Tensei to its stable of free-to-play Asian import MMOs. Brought to the West previously as single player games for the Playstation consoles and known here as Persona, Shin Megami Tensei will be a horror/fantasy MMO where high school and university students battle the forces of evil by bonding with Personas that give them supernatural powers. I loved the Persona series back on the Playstation; I was really into the Japanese RPG scene back then, and these were some of the best. Twisted, dark plots. ...