Recently our favourite MMO game Rift went F2P with also the release of a new zone the Dendrome, new raids, new chronicles and much more. So that is what we have been doing for the past week or so levelling our rogue which we now have to level 60 (our second level 60) but what do we think of the game going Free-2-play?
Storm Queen Crucia
In most F2P games, spending real money usually gives you a huge benefit on other players who decide not to spend tons of IRL cash on digital items. Is this the case with Rift? No. Although you can purchase mediocre gear with real money, the top notch gear has to be earned yourself, through raiding or PVP which ever path you choose to take.. which is great.
There are some things I disagree with however. The fact that you can purchase holiday event items with real money at any time of the year, Items such as mounts or companion pets which a lot of us spent many hours grinding and doing daily quests to earn. Also it makes them a hell of a lot more special when they aren't an all year round thing you can just purchase off the Rift store.
Its sad to see that a game like Rift had to go f2p, Almost everyone playing the game now who did not want to pay for the subscription are loving it and saying its the best MMO. I think if people realised this earlier the game would still be p2p, but hell who's complaining. The servers are full and there are world events everywhere. No longer is it hard to find a group for anything. They have already had to open a few more servers to deal with the enormous queue times with new players and old returning players trying to get back onto the game.
If you have not played Rift yet, we suggest you give it a go, Why not? its free.
Gaming is my biggest hobby so as you can imagine when its time for E3 I get quite excited, So what have I thought of it so far? Ill start with what I thought of each conference separately.
Microsoft
Let me just start by saying I have always been an Xbox fan, I loved the original Xbox and the Xbox 360, hell we have two Xbox 360's so we can both play the games we love without that tedious split screen and Siri screen watching. As many of you know me and Siri even met on Xbox Live. However this year Microsoft has disappointed us both and many other people according to our Twitter with its latest console. I'll start with the pricing, the console costs £420 for the UK, $499 or 499 euros, You don't need to be a genius to work out the massive price difference between the £ and $.
Sure the exclusives for Xbox are great, one of my favourites being Halo, But Microsoft have been completely greedy this year. Especially with their not allowing used games rubbish. The rules for being able to give a used game to a friend or lend a used game to a friend is ridiculous. Pre-installing the game on your Xbox One and needing a internet connection at least once every 24 hours is also ridiculous. Microsoft's defence to this was that it is easier to play a game you own while you are at a friends house while logged into your Xbox Live account. Surely its easier to just take the disc over to their house?
What makes me chuckle though, are Xbox fan boys that will defend the Xbox and say its the greatest console ever, Then when you ask them why they can't tell you why they think that. At least now they have the excuse to say "the exclusives". There are even people on our Twitter feed that have already pre-ordered the Xbox one 10 minutes after their conference even before Sony took the stage. What's the rush guys? If that is not fanboyism I do not know what is, especially when you don't give the other consoles chance to show themselves off.
Sony
Never been a Playstation fan, I owned a PS1 and gave my PS2 away and did not buy a PS3, but Sony are doing things right. They had a great conference apart from some embarrassing freezes. The new FF looks great, I have never been a Final Fantasy fan but hoping to give this next one a go. The dig's at Microsoft I found quite amusing as they announced the PS4 supports used games. They did not stop there though, they went on to further destroy Microsoft by stating the console will not need to connect to the internet every 24 hours. If I had to choose between the two consoles, I would definitely choose the PS4, The kinect on the Xbox also pisses me off, our current kinect for the Xbox 360 has fallen behind the TV and we have not been bothered to pick it back up.. What a load of junk.
Sony finally revealed their console design, at first I thought it looked a lot like the Xbox One.. well it does but looks a bit more sleek and smaller. Another attack on Microsoft which I think everyone found amusing was this, their step by step tutorial on how to lend a game to a friend. Overall Sony done a great job at the E3 conference and I am sure they have won many Xbox players over to their console.
Nintendo
We currently do not own neither a 3DS or a WiiU, but are looking very forward to getting one, I'm personally really looking forward to Pokemon X/Y and Super Smash Bro's for the WiiU. It's also great that they are bringing out a 3DS version also I always thought it would be great to have Super smash bro's on a handheld. Siri is mostly looking forward to Donkey Kong. I'm hoping soon we can splash out and get these two glorious creations by Nintendo.
Although Nintendo done it differently at E3 and instead announced their future game releases with Nintendo direct, I think it was the best way.. they cut out all the shit and focused on what really mattered. The games. GG Nintendo.
What a lot of people are excited about, us included is that Megaman is joining the fight in the new Super Smash Bros and also a weird arrival is the Wii trainer.
Getting use to being a parent.
As you may know, or not know depending if you have been following our posts or not.. We have become parents, these last 2 weeks have been tough for the both of us, Mainly Siri of course. On May 8th our beautiful baby girl Lucy was born and she is an absolute stunner. This might be normal for any parent to say about their child, but take a look for yourself and let us know what you think of this gorgeous little masterpiece of ours.
Being our first child we are still getting use to the fact that we are now mummy and daddy, though I must say we are picking it up pretty quickly! as for our Youtube channel and web shop, we have not completely stopped with them we simply just needed a small break to get use to the changes of our life. I am already eager to start making Youtube videos again. Might even get time to continue our Minecraft Hardcore series!
I will also be taking GFX design requests from our twitter followers, to build an online portfolio of designs. ( I can't just make designs for the sake of it, I need a goal!) so if you shoot us a mention on twitter with what you need I'll do my best to sort you out (time dependant of course).
So we will not be so active on the youtube channel, or even this blog for a short while for the reasons stated above. However we are still relatively active on twitter, so give us a shout there!
As you know Siri is pregnant, and we have most recently.. today in fact been given a date on her induction, she will be induced on the 6th of May so any time after that our little girl should pop out into this glorious world. You may have or may not have noticed that we have not been very active on many things, mainly youtube and this blog unfortunately this can not be helped as we are very busy trying to get prepared for our first baby which we are both excited and nervous for.
When we are settled with the baby I am sure we will be back to making videos and what not as soon as possible :) here are the scan photo's to date, next ones will be real photos!
Books to Video Games, is it a good idea? This is debatable of course but it seems this happens a lot less often than movies to video games.. the best example I can think of a book that has been made into a video Game is Alice in Wonderland, in fact the book was made into an animated movie as well as a real motion picture movie and also a video game. Each of these were very successful and enjoyable to watch and play. Slicing the eyes out of a teapot in Madness Returns? Priceless!
Animated Alice, Actor Alice, Video Game Alice
But why do we see less of books to video games is this because game developers don't want to risk time or money on something that may not be something gamers enjoy? Or just because it's a lot more difficult to recreate a world from a book rather than imitating that of a movie? Comics on the other hand were recreated into video games already on consoles such as the NES, Spider-Man and Batman for example.
My opinion is that it is a lot harder to create a character from a book in a graphical way than it is to say find a short actress with blonde hair and blue eyes, I also believe it's based on a publicity factor. Why would you want to waste money and years of time to create a game based off a book that no one is so interested in that they are going to buy the video game of it. Which I can understand because there are so many people that love to read but don't enjoy to play video games (HOW DARE THEY), I for one do not enjoy reading but I live for video games.
However, if a book is made into a movie.. For example Lord of the Rings (everyone loves Lord of the Rings) and then that movie becomes a great success.. Then all the ground work is there to make a great game. The characters are easier to create, the environment and every aspect of the book/movie is so much easier to remake into a video game. The best thing is, the name is so well known that any Lord of the Rings fan is most likely going to go and purchase the game!
There are countless Lord of the Rings video games out there in this current day, even Lego Lord of the Rings and a Lord of the Rings MMORPG, Which are spread between all platforms. Which brings me onto my next subject..
Video Games to Movies
So is this a good idea? Well if the games a great success, why the hell not right guys? No. Do you remember Super Mario Bro's the Movie? What the hell was that. It was eye bleeding terrible, there was no resemblance to the game what so ever apart from they shared the same names! But that was not the only fail of a video game transition, it may take home the prize for most terrible movie ever, but it was not the only fail.
I honestly can not say one movie that was based off a video game that I enjoyed or would go back to watch again, sure watched Tomb Raider the movie.. Did not leave the cinema with my mind blown of how great the movie was. But it was blown by WHY THE HELL ANGELINA JOLIE. She looks nothing like Lara Croft. Which is why for me, movies based of video games usually ruin characters for me. Especially when you like the actual character then only to see the character you spent many gaming hours with is played by someone you are not too fond of. Little tip from me; do NOT watch Dragon Ball Z the movie. You may cry, or worse.. go on an insane kamehameha rampage with yellow hair and 6 episodes of screaming.
If you are still reading my ramblings, I would like to know what your opinion on video games to movies is. Send us a tweet and let us know. But do I think they should stop it completely? Nah, because it can be done right, though I would personally like to see more CG movies based off video games, rather than real motion pictures. Also movies have done it well with comic book characters such as Batman, Batman movies are great. They are amazing. So it can definitely be done. Let's just wait and see what Blizzard have up their sleeve with their upcoming World of Warcraft movie.
Hey guys! its been a while.. we have been quite busy over the last months so we have not been able to squeeze in time to update our blog.. but lucky for you today is going to be an extra long one, and because we have a lot to tell you it will be written in sections. SO lets begin!
Our Real Life Situation
As most of you already know, Siri and I are having a baby.In our last posts we were not sure of the sex of the baby and were eager to find out, but guess what ladies and gentlemen we now know that we are having a little..... Girl! We are both very happy about this! (not that we would have not been happy if it was a boy) well maybe a little disappointed.. no I'm kidding of course we would love it the same no matter what sex the baby was! Here is a picture of our beautiful little daughter..
Picture from a 32 week scan of our little girl!
We thought it was a pretty amazing picture of her, you can see her chubby cheeks and her brown eyes... (that was a joke) As you can imagine we are very excited and very nervous considering she is going to be our first child! In the past months we have been back and forth the hospital on many occasions sometimes even twice a week! But as long as she is healthy that is the main thing.. We have already got most of the stuff ready we need for her, there are just a few bits and bobs we need to get which we will get tomorrow. We have a nice throne on wheels for her! (Pram) lucky for us we have had a lot of help from others (from siblings who have also had babies).
Gaming!
Number 1 badass General RAAM
GAMESSS! So what have we been playing recently? we have played a lot of our usual games such as Rift and some Black Ops 2 here and there. However we recently bought the newly released Gears of War: Judgment which unfortunately we were both a bit disappointed with :(... So now you are going to hear why we are disappointed with it! Okay, so first off I myself have been a massive fan of the past Gears of War games, both in campaign and the Multi-player they were all an unforgettable experience. Mainly because how different it was from other games. They also each have a campaign you would not forget any time soon. The final boss of GoW was a complete badass, no one could forget General RAAM and that final battle with him on a speeding train? EPIC.. Unloading 50 torque bow bolts into him and 500 lancer bullets and the bastard would still be walking towards you!
Locust Queen Myrrah
Then there's Gears of War 2 though the last boss was not as Epic and unforgettable as RAAM he wielded a staff with chainsaws on either side. THAT'S COOL! that's what we want to see! Also at the end of the game you got the chance to ride a Brumak devastating everything in your path. Gears of War 3.. We loved this game.. Myrrah is AWESOME!! who would have thought the locust queen would look so cool! (I need to get her outfit for Siri to wear :P) but again, the end boss battle was fun and I still have not forgot about it. Which brings me onto Judgment *Sad Face*.. Though the campaign was fun there were NO rememberable moments, there are optional omen signs you can activate to make the segment of the chapter "harder" which if you don't activate you will probably have a boring time even on a harder difficulty. Also we were hoping Judgment would give a back story on Myrrah.. it does not, its all about Baird. The final boss is called Karn, you spray him with a Lancer until he dies whilst he sits on a nemesis. We were surprised when the game ended after killing him.
Anya Stroud
So enough on the campaigns im sure you want to hear our opinions on the Multiplayer ? You don't? well we want to tell you anyway. Gears 1 Epic multi player was ruined by no dedicated servers and horrible lag. If you were the host you felt like a god, same with Gears 2. With no lag these games would have been PERFECT in my opinion. Then Gears 3 game. One of the best multi-player experiences we have had on a console, So much fun.. only set backs were weapon balancing. It was also the first gears to allow you to play as female characters, one of them being Myrrah :) and another being Anya. We spent countless hours on this games multi-player. This game introduced Micro-Transactions for weapon skins.. but they were here nor there.
Then there is Judgment, Don't get me wrong I do not hate this game by any stretch of the imagination, But does it surpass Gears of War 3 for us? No. There feels like to be a certain trend with recent video games that like to make the game easier for the less skilled players to make them feel good and make them want to play more. This is fine.. but please leave it for Call of Duty games.. I also HATE the fact that you are COG vs COG, What the hell happened to killing Locust? It was nice to have the ability to play for both sides. Not only that you only have a choice of about 4 characters until you unlock more then you have I think 6 (I can't remember off the top of my head). There is no longer "DBNO" you shoot someone, they die.. no longer beating their face with your fists or their own arms.. or the classic curb stomp.
MICRO TRANSACTIONS! what is it with developers these days are they not making enough money already that they have to further milk released games? For a start Judgment comes with FOUR maps out of the box.. If you BUY the VIP pass you get a double XP playlist, plus 2 onyx guard skins.. male and female. You can also buy double XP.. Skins for your character and skins for your gun! The game is fun but little things like that ruin it for people who don't want to spend money on digital items, personally I would rather earn them so you have something to show off in multi-player. For me it just feels like a half made game which they will complete with DLC... Do I recommend you get it? Sure if your a Gears fan like us of course go for it.. but if you can wait for the price to come down that might be better for you , rather than paying £40 for half a game.
Making a Living
So enough of video games for now, We are in the middle of starting our own business, we are starting an Online Webshop called Xan's our shop will be selling Video game related products, Hand-crafted products, and Anime/Manga products. We are hoping to kick off the website in two weeks. We have our facebook page up already, you can head on over and check it out if you want!(We appreciate all the support we can get).. It's proven quite difficult to get publicity on our store but we wont give up until we are successful ;) Here is the Design I made for the facebook page.
Store facebook page design
We will update you on how we are doing with our store in future blogs, as we don't want to give away to much of what we have planned!
Almost done I promise.
In other news we bought Euro Gamer tickets for the Expo in September, we are super looking forward to this and nervous as we will have our by then 4 month old baby with us. But we have wanted to go to a gaming expo for a long while now, so its something we won't be missing!
We also made a MMO version of the Harlem shake which got retweeted, Liked, and commented on by Rift themselves which we are quite proud of, currently the video has 70 likes! one of our biggest milestones.
Tomorrow is the release day for Defiance, a game we are very much looking forward to playing.. Unfortunately because we ordered it on Amazon we won't be getting it until the day after release day.. but in doing so we saved ourselves quite a bit of money so its all good.
If you are interested in knowing what Defiance is or about we have a video of us playing the Beta on the Xbox 360 version of the game.
Our Youtube is making some good progress, which is nice because its a big hobby of ours to make gameplay videos to share our gaming experiences with others. We are currently sitting on 6,000+ total views. We have started a Google+ account now also to maybe help us promote our Store/Youtube channel.. and even maybe make new friends! feel free to add us if you want.
I'm going to leave it at that for now.. Hope you enjoyed our ramblings, we will try to update our blog with more frequent and smaller posts in the future!
Yesterday we went to see Les Miserable's in the Cinema, and to my surprise it was actually worse than I thought, Siri was also expecting better and was slightly disappointed though I think she enjoyed it more than me. It was like watching a music video of a song that you hate, but it goes on for hours.. imagine that, that was my Les Miserable experience. There were no words spoken they were all sang, so in the heat of battle where death is almost certain they are singing to each other. I was surprised at what actors were used for it though a lot of top actors were in it, Though I think Borat was a bit out of place in this movie.
So what would I rate this movie? I do not think I could give it a fair rating myself as I did not enjoy it at all. However if you love musicals and want to spend almost three hours of your time listening to people trying to sing every last word to each other then this might be good for you.
In other news, today we went to see the Midwife and we got the chance to listen to the baby's heartbeat, which was nice to hear and we were not expecting it either. Its hard to believe how fast time is going, wont be much longer now! We have also started watching the second season of Game of Thrones, we really enjoyed the first season. We are a big fan of fantasy movies, games or anything in the fantasy genre!
