Games like this are the very reason why piracy isn't as bad as the RIAA says it is. I mean, some game developers do deserve to get no money for what they made. You can't just throw any piece of crap into the market and expect profits.
Piracy doesn't kill creativity; it kills the untalented and the uncreative.
The concept was great. The execution has a lot of room for improvement. A golf course's worth of it. What could have been a Diablo/Caesar hybrid turned out to be something that I wouldn't pay more than 10 bucks for. Sure, Tilted Mills is an indie company, a David among the Goliaths that are Blizzard and etc. But that tale is famous precisely because David's chance of winning was so slim! And here is Tilted Mills proving this point with this game.
And now they have released an expanded version (aka original plus expansion) but opinions of it are so poor that even software pirates aren't wasting their time to rip it. When there isn't a pirated version of a software, something has to be terribly wrong with it.
Better luck next time, Tilted Mills.
Warrior Epic is fail. I was surprised when I got invited into its closed beta phase, and I was surprised again when they announced its release on the 19th of May. After a few hours spent on it, I can say for sure it sucks and isn't ready for release.
I had to download it four times. First three times, it gave me a "Corrupted Installer" error. Fourth time, my NOD32 quarantined an important file within the installer under suspicion of being a variant of the Genetik trojan.
I closed my NOD32 and installed. After installation, the .exe couldn't be found. I opened NOD32 and un-quarantined it.
When I ran it, the .exe file vanished again. I opened up NOD32 only to find that file quarantined again. I un-quarantined it and ran it. Took some time to patch. Then when it ran, again the .exe file vanished.
So I opened NOD32, un-quarantined it and ran again. This time it's fine, but the game sucks.
It's not the usual MMORPG in which you run around in one huge world like WoW, Lineage 2 or RoM. Instead, you join a lobby in which people host games that you can join or you can create your own game. Each game is an obstacle course filled with breakable stuff containing loot and mobs, and each course are designed for a different set of levels.
...
I deleted it after an hour of playing, then went to their forum and gave them a piece of my mind about the download and installation process.
People often speak of the writing technique known as "deus ex machina" like it's something only bad writers use. Like it never happens in reality.
The fact is, read enough historical articles in Wikipedia and you see it happening all the time. I just found a great example of a deus ex machina in the story of Saladin, one of the greatest Muslims the world has ever known.
Nur ad-Din had aimed to unite the Euphrates, the Muslim lands in the Middle East, with Egypt to create one continuous stretch of land to fight against the Crusaders.
This modern map can be used as an approximation of what it was like then. Jerusalem was still Christian territory (a Crusader state), a tiny error in a huge swath of Muslim lands. Saladin was only the vizier (something like a Prime Minister) of the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt, while Nur ad-Din controlled Syria.
When Nur ad-Din persuaded Saladin to attack Jerusalem with him, he agreed. Saladin would attack from the south, while Nur as-Din from the north. But before Saladin attacked, he realized that if the plan succeeded, there would be nothing to stop Nur ad-Din from going further and annexing Egypt.
Planning to use the Crusader state as buffer between him and Nur ad-Din's ambition, he left the game saying, "gtg politcal plots."
It was then that Nur ad-Din realized that Saladin was not to going to be his minion willingly.
Later the Caliph, for some reason, just died and the Caliphate of Egypt was dissolved. Saladin, whom historians suspected to have a hand in the conveniently timed death, rose to become the Sultan of Egypt.
Eventually it came to the time for a final showdown. Nur ad-Din summoned his armies from Mosul (northern Iraq today), Diyarbakir (SE Turkey today) and Al-Jazira (NW Iraq and NE Syria), and Saladin summoned all his troops from outside of Cairo.
It was obvious to everyone that Nur ad-Din was planning to invade Egypt to fulfill his goal of an united Muslim front once and for all, and Saladin had already prepared Yemen as his escape route.
Suddenly, Nur ad-Din died from an illness. A fever due to complications from a peritonsillar abscess, basically a complication from tonsillitis and involves pus in the tonsil.
And the man who was about to become a nobody like the last boy he served went on to become a hero.
Who said there is no deus ex machina in real life??
An interesting excerpt from the article on the First Crusade:
"According to Ming and Qing dynasty stone monuments, a Jewish community has existed in China since the Han Dynasty, but a majority of scholars cite the early Song Dynasty (roughly a century before the First Crusade).[100] A legend common among the modern-day descendants of the Kaifeng Jews states they reached China after fleeing Bodrum from the invading crusaders. A section of the legend reads, “The Jews became merchants and traders in the region [of the Near East], but new troubles came in the 1090s. Life became difficult and dangerous. The first bad news was heralded by a word they had never heard before: 'Crusade,' the so-called Holy War ... Jews were warned; "Convert to Christianity or die!"[101]"
The Cyanide and Happiness comics are actually pretty good, especially because they don't even need to use vulgar language (which is also the official language of certain regions of the world). Now they even produce Flash shorts, going beyond the realm of still pictures.
Thinking of the components to get for my next desktop, but I'm quite outdated in terms of knowledge of desktops. I wasn't even aware of the existence of 1 TB hard drives!
I'm seriously considering using the formulae provided at hardwarezone.com for a $20XX computer. Or a $2XXX one. In fact, this sounds good to me:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 & Gigabyte EP45-UD3R ~ $645
Corsair XMS2 DHX PC2-6400 DDR2-800 CL4 4GB (2X2GB) ~ $99
Palit GTX285 ~ $559
Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB ~ $175
Samsung SATA 22X DVD Rewriter ~ $31
Corsair HX620W PSU ~ $174
Cooler Master CM690 ~ $129
Total ~ $20XX
Then throw in a 24" LCD monitor and a wired keyboard to complete the set. According to many members of that forum, a graphics card like that would be wasted on any monitor smaller than a 22".
Total of the whole desktop set would be around $2500. And yea, screw the soundcard. The integrated card should be able to support 7.1 surround sound and I'm not an audiophile.
Now that I've confirmed that it's not RoM that is dying but the zone I'm leveling in is dead, I've been looking for other games. Now trying Ether Saga Online, a "cute" MMORPG loosely based on the seriously overused "Journey to the West". Again it's a free game that has a cash shop in which players can buy stuff using real money.
I'm hoping that players don't need to spend money to enjoy playing the high-level characters in this game, though this is from the same company as Perfect World...
The Street Fighter Collab is finally out on Newgrounds. After making us wait for such an ungodly amount of time, they've finally released it.
As the name says, it is a collab, ie a collection of many short Flash movies by many artists, using the topic of Street Fighter. Hence anyone who has ever tried any SF game would be some interest in it.
Many of the artists involved are amateurs, so it explains that bad drawings in most of them. The jokes are mostly crude stuff, and there is a movie during the ending credits that contains gay sex. If you can handle a little homo crap, then go ahead and watch it.
I find 2 parts actually funny: the part by Chakra X and the other by zombiepimp. I really like the way Chakra X change the way I see Zangief doing the Spinning Piledriver. Watch it and you'll understand what I'm saying. The other part is about Zangief (again) showing Ryu his pick-up line in bar, which ALWAYS works. LOL!
Even though Stamper was the guy who started this whole thing and took half a year to put all the parts together, his part was definitely not the best. True that he's got the best drawing in the whole collab, but his humour is... different. All his part did was it got me aroused, then a little disgusted. The 2 things about it that were remotely funny were Guile's pubic hair (which was a tinier version of Guile's hair) and how it ended.
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