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My All Time Top Games part 1 August 20, 2007

Posted by Sharny in : Entertainment, Fun, Gaming, Life , add a comment

I kinda wanted to make a list of my all time top games, just to think about how much time I have spent playing different games and in that sense how good they are because quite frankly all I really play now is World of Warcraft but it doesn’t make the games I’ve played in the past bad and they still deserve a good mention.

I’m gonna go down in (to my best recollection) amount of time played, starting with the most. It’s going to be a 2 part post, the first part doing 1-5 and the next finishing it off, hopefully with 6-10.

1. Runescape
Ahh, runescape, my first taste of that fickle genre, the MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, but I’m sure you already know that). This comes right at the top because I played this game pretty much every day for over 2 years. Runescape was really more of a job than a game because it didn’t matter what you wanted in the game, it was all going to take a lot of work. You want that cool barrows armour? You’re gonna have to work. You want to be level 100? That’s a good 100 hours of grind right there. The only real merit is that some of this work didn’t require much attention, fishing for example was just waiting (quite realistic really…) and occasionally moving spots or going to the bank when you were full. What excitement.

The only really thing that kept it going so long was the pking (that’s player versus player by the way). Really, in itself, it wasn’t that exciting. I mean, most combat on these things does boil down to attacking and then waiting as numbers appear on you and your opponent but with others there’s usually some hardcore mashing of a few keys and running around in circles. With runescape all the real skill came down to timing of when to eat, which also relied on a nice net connection to make sure your timing didn’t go to waste.

The big thing about PKing was the revolutionary idea that when the enemy died you actually got to take the things they were holding and wearing. Unlike most MMORPGs, in runescape PvP was a big gamble, essentially a balance between the best equipment and what you could afford to lose. The possibility of reward and fame from pking was what kept it alive but really I should have quit much sooner. I was never that good at it really and it turns out I’m actually quite reasonable at WoW PvP which, despite having mediocre rewards, is actually a lot of fun.

2. Battlefield 2142
The latest in the battlefield series, it’s a bit of a difficult in terms of placing. I must have played it every day for a good few months before it finally got boring. It’s definitely a game worth playing and as with most of the games on this list it’s the multiplayer that really keeps it going. Gaining ranks and unlocks through the online play was a lot of fun and as with many of the best games it had those difficult to achieve unlocks that really keep you going. Unfortunately now its drifted away and I’m not interested in it any more but I will buy the next battlefield game, providing it is on PC, as BF2142 has provided me with a lot of fun.

Here’s where things get a bit difficult to classify as its really difficult to know how much time I spent playing these games, I’m going to try and put them into the best order I can though.

3.World of Warcraft
Yep, the beast of the MMORPG world. Whilst playing runescape I heavily criticised WoW so to anyone who read some of my forum posts about it back in the day would probably be tempted (and rightly so) to call me a hypocrite for playing it. It just turns out its much more fun than I realised it would be, both the PvP and PvE is a lot of fun. I’m particularly enjoying the concepts of different classes playing different roles in a group which is something that didn’t really exist in Runescape although it of course plays a big part in most MMORPGs.

I imagine I’ll be playing WoW for about another year, or until I get bored. I doubt I will carry on after going to university. I haven’t found it as addictive as runescape once was but its good fun and I have vowed to make sure not to play it beyond the point of having fun because that would be making the runescape mistake again.

4. Age of Empires 1 & 2
The original age of empires was first real experience of PC gaming and one of my early gaming experiences entirely. I’m not sure what it was that made it so great but it was just a brilliant. At first I could only play for very limited periods of time which kept it very fresh and left me longing to play more. When I finally had a computer of my own I quickly got AoE2 and played that for a while, after I finally got online with it that extended the game a bit longer but it eventually just faded away. Even though its not a series I ever play any more it is the sole reason that I grew to love the real time strategy genre, which brings me nicely to the next game.

5. Starcraft
It’s difficult to know where to place this gem, so I used a bit of chronology here. I was first introduced to this game by a friend who had 2 macs in his house both hooked up for LAN games. He, actually owning the game, tended to beat everyone who faced him at it but when the time came I bought my own copy thanks to those versus matches.

Really, the attraction of starcraft wasn’t in the single player game, which I found too hard, what was really great about it and remains so to this day is Blizzard’s Battle.net. What with the Starcraft editor being changed lots of great custom maps appeared and I spent many, many hours playing things like Simpsons massacre and sunken/tower/stargate/whatever defence. That’s what really kept it going as a great game and still keeps people playing today. Unfortunately, I can never seem to get onto battle.net any more, I do go on starcraft occasionally though as it is such a great game

I’m going to continue this post another day, with hopefully the 6-10 of my all time top games.

New Turisas album - hooray May 30, 2007

Posted by Sharny in : Entertainment, Music , 3 comments

My copy of the new Turisas album The Varangian Way arrived yesterday, only the day after it was released so I’m pleased about that for starters. I bought their first album on a whim but it pretty much blew my mind, what they dub as “battle metal” is a sort aggressive folk metal with orchestration. I wouldn’t really expect many people to like it if they didn’t give it a shot but personally I think its awesome.

This new album is much more varied than the previous one, there are areas with much more use of the acordian and violin as well as quieter and louder areas with more aggressive stuff that resembles more of the bulk of the metal genre I suppose. For me that’s great as I really love the folky stuff but it also has variation that I really appreciate and given that I enjoy other areas of metal it all fits together nicely. My first listen gave me a good feeling about it, I’m listening again at the moment and enjoying it even more. I would advise people to buy it (and the first one, totally mind blowing) but

  1. No one reads my crappy blog
  2. No one cares what I have to say about this album

Didn’t stop me writing this post though eh?

Spider-man 3 May 7, 2007

Posted by Sharny in : Entertainment, Scraps , add a comment

We went (me and friends) to see Spider-man 3 on sunday. Overall I thought it was really quite a good film. The action was top notch and the effects worked very well, the battles were fast paced and on pretty big scales. There was also good storyline and drama with strong underlying messages. More of a surprise was the humour, actually. There were lots of bits where it was actually very funny and I enjoyed that, I like a good bit of humour. It hasn’t been getting the greatest reviews, I’ve seen people complaining about the cheesiness but actually I quite liked it, it was pretty entertaining. Overall my opinion is pretty useless but I did enjoy it so…err…there we go. One thing I did find funny was that all the characters seem to be able to circumvent the physics of free fall, it took them a loooong time to fall. Either that or the gravity on this earth is much weaker than ours.