So why a new account and not a rename? Well I guess I like to have a second personality. That’s not to say I don’t like who I am, or am ashamed of anything I am, far from it. But I often feel like the geek side of me yearns for other geeks, and I don’t really know any in real life. None that I have regular contact with anyway. So I just felt like ’splitting’ my online life a bit, following and talking with like-minded internet folk on a separate account. Although real life family and friends are welcome to follow my new account it’s not for them that I’d be posting things. It’s for Me and people with similar interests. I may switch between the two accounts on more personal things or post on both I’m not sure yet.

Eek.

So reading through the new PC Gamer I read the preview for Supreme Commander 2 and it reminds me I’ve not yet completed SupCom1 or it’s expansion. I’ve played most of SupCom1 and about half of the expansion so for the past few days I decided to finish the expansion, Forged Alliance. It is one bloody unforgiving game, and I have a love/hate relationship with it. I love it because it’s Total Annihilation x 100. Although there are only a handful of missions each one takes me between 2 and 3 hours to complete, which for an RTS is a bloody long time! I’m sure if I wasn’t so meticulous about my base building and actually sent out small groups of units as I went along that I could shave off an hour but that’s just how I like to play my RTS’s, trying to make an impenetrable base is part of the fun and SupCom certainly gives you the tools to try and achieve this. The part where it is rather unfair, is that the maps all start off small and as objectives are completed, the map expands to reveal additional enemy bases. Which wouldn’t be so bad if for the fact that the reveal usually comes along with a new armada heading your way. And even though I know this will happen and you can usually tell which way the map will expand, I still manage to let it catch me by surprise. Last night I’d spent ages building up a base with a couple of small bases the other side of the map, ferrying troops over and taking out the Commander in the south east. Then when I did, the map expanded and a few dozen air units came in from the north and obliterated me. I had not put any defences to the north of my base as at the time there was no north for the enemy to come from. I had plenty of units but they were the opposite side of the map, and for anyone that hasn’t played SupCom, I’ll tell you now the maps are huge and take forever to cross, even with air transports to help you. So I watched my base slowly decay and they finally got my Commander, game over.

I’ll be back tonight though. I think I’ve only lost 30 mins of play, and now I know I can just take out the southern Commander to wipe out his entire base, I will try and blitz him rather than slowly wade through his base, destroying it as I go. Oh and yes, before I do that, I think a few shield generators and anti-air emplacements will be installed to the north of my base!

Looking forward to SupCom2 and also C&C4 which are both out in about a month, so I’m all set strategy wise for the foreseeable future.

It goes without saying if you know me, I love Star Trek. I’ve played almost all related games. They’ve mostly been a mixed bag, but there are very good ones out there. Bridge Commander nailed space combat. Naval in style, it was all about manoeuvring your ship to face their weakest shields with your strongest weapons. Then there was Elite Force, where firing a phaser never felt so good (even if there were some silly weapons in there that weren’t very Trek-like!). If they were to fuse these two games together for STO they’d have had gold-dust. So what went wrong?
Well, before I go into the lengthy list of what they got wrong, I’ll talk about what they got right.

The Ship

The space combat feels good. The ships aren’t nippy fighters, they’re slow to turn, hulking big ships with the nice and simple phasers to take down shields and torpedoes to blow up the hull. Yeah there are variations of that, disruptors, cannons, quantum torpedoes etc, but it boils down to the main Trek weapons. To spice things up you have special abilities dictated by your crew, which leads me to the other thing I think they got right.

The Crew

As you progress through STO you will steadily build up your bridge crew. These guys, like you, fall under the Tactical, Science or Engineering categories and each will bring special abilities both in space and on ground. For example my Science officer can fire a beam from the main deflector that drains enemy shield power on all 4 sides equally. But on ground he’s my doctor, ready with a hypo spray and medical tricorder. You can customise these guys in the same way you do your own character, the main difference is you can’t equip them with a ‘kit’, something that grants special abilities. You can change which special abilities they have though by getting new crew members to train them.

The Feel

One thing that’s quite clear, is the game feels like Trek. The ships, the uniforms (even with their customisation), the bases and planets all feel right. Each mission can feel like an episode of the show. The missions often have multiple stages, seeing you fend off enemy ships in space before beaming down to a space station or planet and back again. They can feel like adventures, especially when you’re playing with others.

What went wrong

For me, the bad things fall into three categories, usability, repetition and the small things. Usability wise it is very, very unfriendly. The tooltips may as well be the technobable you get in the show. There are stats for things that aren’t explained, and often the tooltips seem auto-generated. When I get +7.5% deflector power I’d like to know what advantage that actually gives me, and as far as I can tell there is nothing in-game that explains this or the other half a dozen stats your ship has. The quests are hard to track, there are options hidden away and the maps are horrible.

Now to the small things. You can actually visit your own bridge but it’s lifeless. You can’t even sit in your own chair! There is a sit emote hidden away in the chat menu, but you have to position yourself standing on the chair first for it to work. Why can’t you just right click on the chair like the majority of MMOs? Also you can’t do anything on your bridge. It’s mainly for RP reasons as far as I can tell. And if that is the reason, why can’t I visit my ready room? Perhaps this is something planned for the future.  On a similar note, I’d love to be able to roam my own ship. I don’t expect it to be filled with NPCs and things to do yet, but the option to wonder would be cool and you could also have scripted missions where you can fend off invaders. Plus you know, holodecks are a must. I want my Irish village damnit!

Time Squared

The final thing is repetition. All MMOs have it, it’s their ability to disguise it or distract us from it that makes or breaks an MMO and so far STO has not managed to hide it. Sure they don’t have you doing “kill mob X to get item Y” style quests, but they do have “Kill X patrols” quests that unfortunately take a long time to complete. Often you have to travel most of the way round a planet to kill 5 groups of ships and it can take a good 15 minutes. When all you usually get loot wise are shield or engine batteries (essentially health and mana pots), there’s no sense of progression as you do these kill quests.

Quest rewards are mostly numbers, with XP, skill points, bridge officer points, Starfleet merits and Energy Credits, which although are useful they are a bit boring, often feeling like meaningless numbers. You do get other things for your ship or to equip on your character, but not all that often.

Overall

It’s hard to dislike the game for me, having grown up on Trek. You can live in the Star Trek world. You can fire phasers, redirect shields and beam down to new worlds. It could easily be an RPers dream. It just lacks any kind of polish, any thought to usability or sense of progression. When I spend a talent point in WoW, I get a new ability or improve an existing one in a way that feels like it’s making a difference. In STO I’m spending hundreds of points to improve weapons and shields yet it doesn’t feel like there’s a difference. I’m sure there is one, but it just doesn’t feel like it and I think in any game you need to feel like your character/ship is getting more powerful as you acquire more abilities and equipment.

So because of these reasons I won’t be subscribing to STO. I’ll revisit in a few months time, hopefully when there’s a bit more polish and a bit more content. But by all means give it a go, it’s not a bad game, just not quite as good as it could have been.

For Christmas I got my wife a little book of promises I’ve made to her. I won’t list them (some may make you blush and/or vomit), but the general gist of it and the reason behind it was that with the arrival of Hannah, she has dominated our lives, so for 2010 I have promised to be a better husband, to focus more on ‘us time’. Hannah will always dominate our lives, and rightly so, but there’s no reason we can’t plan to do more couple-y things!

So they are my promises, and here are my ‘aims’. Things I aim for in 2010.

Work: Little and often. It is the habit of a lifetime that I shall never break, but I can try and make a dent into it. It has always been my nature to work on things last minute. I actually perform better under pressure. My job doesn’t help things. With school holidays never more than 7 weeks away at any time, the temptation to leave work until then is great. And of course, without fail, once those holidays do arrive I don’t want to do any work at all. However, if I just did about 30 minutes a day and perhaps more at the weekend, I’d probably easily keep up!

Gaming: I have already started to, but I need to try more things! I play WoW to death and miss out on some great indie games. I also have the terrible habit of buying a game and then not playing past the first couple of hours. I need to get round to doing those games! Mass Effect, Fallout 3 and Dragon Age stare at me with sad eyes from my shelf every time I fire up WoW.

Blogging: More of it. I like writing. I think I am good at writing. Not in the creative sense. I’d struggle to write a story. But I just like composing letters, emails, posts etc. Trying to perfect them. I also miss the glory days of being well known in certain online communities. Those were fun days, but those sites are now dead or dying, so I guess I miss the ‘audience’. I know few people in life with my interests, and I can count how many of those I actually see in person on one hand, and of those that I see more than once a year on one finger, so an outlet for my interests is needed, even if these words fall on blind eyes. Were things in life not as good as they are and I had never met Kat, if I hadn’t decided I want to be a teacher, the idea of being a games journalist/blogger (delete as appropriate to your snobbishness) is a fun one. A dangerous one, I don’t think I could live the freelance kind of life. But it’s fun to imagine what it would be like.  So I think I’ll post more on things that interest and outrage me and just pretend there is an audience.

Lottery: Seriously, I really need to get round to winning the jackpot. I need to stop buying these faulty tickets, they just don’t ever win.

That’s it really! So, imaginary audience, what are your promises and aims for 2010?

Be warned, there’s a lot of waffle here! So much so I think I’ll have to insist you click to see more…

(EDIT: I’ve just realised how horrid the headings are in this theme. I can’t be bothered changing them now but hope to soon)

Games

WoW wise, I’ve slowed down since I hit lvl 80. It also helps I’ve finally got my Chef’s Hat, costing 100 Dalaran Awards. So I don’t have to do the daily cooking and fishing quests. Though if I have the time I do indulge on the chance I’ll get a rare item. I have been loving the random dungeon finder and runs are so quick with this that I can usually squeeze in a random normal, heroic, the Tournament dailies and the cooking/fishing quests in an hour-ish. The dungeon runs are pretty soulless as groups tend to be of the “GO!GO!GO!” variety. However my aim really is to gear up a little more (got some good healing gear, though need some decent leg and trinket items!) and then start looking for a family oriented guild. I’d love to start doing 10 man raids but most people organise this for 7pm ish which is bang in the middle of bathing and putting Hannah to bed. I’d want to start at about 9pm really as that gives me time to go to her if she hasn’t settled and hopefully anything after that Kat can deal with!

Still on the topic of games, I’m getting rather excited about Star Trek Online. In fact I’ve just pre-odered it after reading Tom Francis’s preview. I have no doubt certain aspects will be ropey (such as ground combat) but the idea of an MMO that lets you develop a party of characters is quite appealing, and of course ship combat.

Other than that I’ve picked up a few games in the sales:

• Osmos
• Braid
• Ben there, Dan that & Time Gentlemen Please (Double Pack)
• Red Faction 3
• Borderlands
• Braid

Some of those were very, very cheap in the Steam sale. I won’t go into detail about them all, but I’ve completed Ben there, Dan that (available free here), enjoyed quite a bit of Osmos, a few minutes on Braid and a few hours on Borderlands and Red Faction 3 each. The latter I was…a little dissapointed by. Red Faction 3 is great in concept, I think the problem is actually with me. I don’t like the GTA ‘living city’ style game, they’re a bit too free form? The demolition physics are fantastic, and the game is certainly great for a quick ‘blow everything up’ game but just didn’t grip me.

Borderlands on the other hand has the mechanics that appeal to me (an FPS Diablo, essentially) but the UI has not really been designed for the PC which just smacks of laziness. I shall try it multiplayer though where I think it’ll fare better.

Rob recently got Dawn of War 2, and we’ve played a bit of Last Stand and campaign co-op which seem quite fun.

Comics

I’ve just caught up with the recent Matt Fraction series of Iron Man and I have to say I’ve really enjoyed it! In addition to that I’ve continued with Dark Avengers, New Avengers, Astonishing X-Men and Captain America.

Dark Avengers I quite enjoy, I love Norman Osborne and am just waiting for him to finally snap. New Avengers is as usual a bit average but fun fluff.

Astonishing X-Men has just about recovered from the truly awful Warren Ellis initial run. I don’t know if he realised it was shit, or it’s the new artists or both, but it seems much better at the minute so I’ll stick with it. I’m hoping really that Joss Whedon returns to the series. Or actually if Kieron Gillen would. Gillen used to be my favourite games journalist a while back. I think all the awards made him a bit too pretentious for a while, but from the previews of his run on S.W.O.R.D (which is tightly linked with AXM), I think he could do the series well.

Captain America is getting back to being one of my favourite series. I have to say I’ve not enjoyed it much since Captain America died and Bucky took the mantle. I loved Bucky, but since he’s been Cap and they’ve OD’d on the WW2 stuff I’ve found it a bit of a bore, and dissapointed that during Dark Reign that a new Captain America hasn’t been the beacon of light for our heroes that he should have been. Though I do understand that Brian Michael Bendis has had the major heroes fail so that they can rise better than ever, which is pretty much what is happening. There’s only 1 issue left of the ‘Reborn’ series to go where Steve Rogers will return. Which I’m excited about because I love Steve. And the prospect of there being 2 Captain America’s is interesting, I wonder if Bucky will be renamed?

I’ve also started reading Ultimate Avengers, which has the brilliant Mark Millar returning to the Ultimates universe. So far I’ve really enjoyed it, quite a radical move to have the Red Skull as Cap’s son, and Cap going ape shit about it! I think this’ll be on my regulars list.

Last week I got the JMS (I can’t spell his full name…) trades of Thor. With Thor, Cap and Iron Man all returning to former glories soon for the up coming Marvel event ‘Siege’, I feel I need to complete the trilogy and get caught up. It also helps that there are Cap, Thor and Avengers movies in the works which has got me excited about these characters. In the next few weeks I think I’m actually going to bite the bullet and subscribe to these titles from a comics. Yes I know it’s about 3 times more expensive than waiting for the trades, but the 6 month plus wait for those is too long!

Other stuff

Well work is work. Nothing much to note. My degree is going ok, submitted my first assignment for the new course last week, I think I’ve done ok. My other course starts in a couple of weeks so yay, double the work!

Hannah wise she’s of course as lovely as ever. The super cute thing at the moment is that she really loves books, always bringing them to us to read to her. One of them has flaps that reveal pictures, and one of those is a tiger mask. So we say “Tiger, rarrrgh!” and she says “Rarrrgh!” back! It’s so funny. It’s impressive too that she can be looking through the book on her own and she will recognise the picture and say ‘”Rarrrgh!”. However she some times gets it wrong, and apparently a giraffe and an elephant also go “Rarrrgh!”…

Anyway I shall try and update more, which I always say but hey, perhaps I’ll keep to it this time?

BUY IT!

Yeah I can understand the counter arguments. Centralising everything to Google creates a monopoly, less visits to the actual websites means less revenue from ads etc. But still, it’d be cool. Perhaps make the feature optional? Commercial websites could make it a perk of being a paid subscriber? I don’t know.

In other news, I’ve got my MAC code from Virgin and going begging back to Zen Internet. I got pissed at Zen when I went over my limit and they charged extortionate amounts for additional bandwidth. After months of shitty pings and streaming video using Virgin I’d gladly pony up the extra £10 for top quality service. Despite the price, I always had a great connection with Zen and they have won multiple awards for it.

This should mean more time for WoW, rather than the roll a 6 system I’m going through. I don’t get huge amounts of free time (even less as the work from my OU course picks up soon) and when I do I like to play WoW. There’s nothing more annoying that logging on to see a ping between 1000-20000ms before being disconnected. I’m really enjoying playing my druid and I dinged 75 last night making this the highest character I’ve played. I’m about 500g off Epic Flight Form (despite having to wait to lvl77 and another 1k to use it in Northrend) and really enjoying the lore in Northrend. I’m looking forward once I hit 80 to taking my time to find read all the little interesting books and doing missed quests, fishing in Dalaran for coins and doing all the obscure achievements.

Warcrack indeed

A little bit of druid love then. I love this class. You can do pretty much all the main play types with one character (with dual/re-spec anyway). Want to be a ranged DPS/mage? Normal or Moonkin form. A warrior/tank? Bear form. Rouge/melee DPS? Cat form. Healer? Tree form. Added to that the greatness that is instant cast travel, flight and aquatic form and you have what is pretty much the most versatile class in the game. I spend most of my time in Cat Form doing PvE, and have dual talent specced as a restoration druid that I use mostly in instances.

So the second notable thing, and of course the best, is the fact that Hannah can now walk! Nursery phoned one day to say Hannah was projectile vomiting and needed picking up. I was off work with the same illness so was the one that went to pick her up. When I got there they asked if she was walking at home, to which I said no of course. She had taken 6 unaided steps at nursery that day! Then at home she did it again, all the while being ill. As opposed to me who was a useless lump on the sofa most of the day. She usually walks for at least a little bit every day now and she’s building up confidence. It was brilliant that first time we saw her do it, both myself and Kat got very misty eyed when she did it! It’s amazing how proud you feel at each milestone they meet.

So that was October then. We’re now just a month away from Hannah’s 1st birthday which is unbelievable. That year has gone REALLY fast and she has changed so much. It’s been a fantastic year because of her, and the first of many.

Fast forward to now, Hannah is 10 months old and I am each day astounded by how much I love her. I think she is perfect. There’s no baby smarter or better looking. She’s the best thing there ever was or will be in the universe.

There, just had to get that off my chest. You may start the vomiting…now!