Do you have a nanosuit? Do you find yourself always visiting strange tropic islands filled with Koreans? If so, you might have a Crysis.
Where we're going, we don't need paths. Remember that there are many ways to finish objectives. Go in stealth mode and sneak past the unsuspecting guards, or use strength mode and climb the mountain to the side. Don't forget that you can grab those guards as well. A quick switch to strength mode and you can send him flying into his compatriots.
Sweet ride. Shoot out a vehicles tires as it's driving and watch what happens! Another fun trick is to get into a vehicle and then enable stealth mode, your energy won't drain! Drive into an enemy camp (remember to hold down the shift key to give yourself a boost) and then jump out. The guards will run to investigate the vehicle. A grenade or a shot to the gas tank will give them something to talk about.
Flashlights bad, lasers good. If you equip that flashlight to your gun, they will see you, stealth mode or not. The laser pointer on the other-hand emits light in a spectrum invisible to the Korean eye.
Turbine has put up a page on the LOTRO site with a few details of the upcoming Mines of Moria expansion. Among the highlights are legendary weapons, crafting guilds, and trait sets.
There are some other things, but it is stock expansion hype (really, 200 new monsters, huh?). Check it out at http://www.lotro.com/moria.
Taken from the site (http://microlite20.net/):
Do you remember when the gaming table was full of pizza and soda, not rulebooks, miniatures and dungeon tiles? Do you yearn for a role-playing game that doesn’t require weight training to carry all the books? Do you want to be able to hold all the rules in your head - or in your back pocket? And do you still want to use all those lovely monsters, adventures and game worlds too?
So do we!!
Microlite20 is a minimalist role-playing game designed to be usable with the majority of d20 supplements, rules and adventures with little or no advance preparation. The rules for character generation, combat, magic and level advancement take up a single sheet of paper, meaning it is perfect for introducing role-playing to new players, gaming one-shot adventures or tailoring into your own game system.
The release notes for the preview beta of Book 14 are available, but I took the liberty of compiling the things that are important to me below. For those not in the know, Heren Vanista, the kinship that comprises of all the writers of this blog, plays on Landroval. Send Bookend a letter. He really likes letters.
Here you go:
- Animations and sounds for each Minstrel skill using their equipped instrument (no longer just the Lute!)
- New collection-based fishing deeds are here! Be sure to catch’em all!
- The Dressing Room UI now supports dye color previewing!
- New dyes for clothing available: Orange, Grey, Burgundy, and Turquoise!
- Optional crafting ingredients now stack to 20.
- New farming recipes are available from Novice and Expert farmhands! Farmers now have new crop options to add some variety to their harvest yields. All of the new farming field recipes have the potential to produce rare ingredients useful to Scholars in the production of new dyes, and wall paints for player housing!
- Single-use recipes for the Scholar profession are now available in loot! These recipes allows Scholars to make “Crafting Journals” for the following professions: Jeweller, Metalworker, Tailor, Weaponsmith, and Woodworker. The journals can be used as optional ingredients in single-use recipes for the five professions, allowing crafters to gain a significant increase in the critical chance for these recipes.
- Replaced the “woodchopping” animation with a new “hide tanning” animation for all of the Forester profession’s treated hide recipes.
- The Outfitter is now selling new outfits for crafters. A little retail therapy never hurt anyone, so go check them out!
- All dye colors can now appear on all clothing randomly appearing in loot (regardless of level and item quality).
- Chicken play: As soon as you become a chicken we now reveal the exploration deeds to you. This means those deeds have been versioned. If you are midway on one when Book 14 goes live you will have to restart the quest.
- Repeatable quests can now be shared with someone who has already completed the quest, as long as they would otherwise be able to pick up the quest again from the NPC. The fellowship Shared Quest filter will now filter out quests that your fellows don’t have.
- You can now Ctrl+right-click on many of the item icons in the game to create an item link in your chat window instead of dragging them to the text entry field. This includes item icons in the Auction house, crafting panel, quest rewards, vendors / barter NPCs, and so on. You can also re-map this command, “Item Link To Chat”, in the Key Mapping section of the Options Panel.
- Added 3 more looting options: Roll/Pass with Free For All, Need/Greed with Free For All, and Master Looter with Free For All. If the item is below the current threshold, any person in the group can pick it up. If the item is at or above the threshold then the Loot Policy will be in effect for the item (Roll/Pass, Need/Greed, Master Looter). In addition, for all landscape chests the first player to open the chest will always be able to loot the items below the threshold. All items at or above the threshold will follow the normal Loot Policy.
- When you are too far away to do a fellowship manoeuvre contribution it will now be clear on the UI that you cannot use that contribution as is.
- Smoothed out Companion following.
- Emotes
- Burp
- Charge
- Chuckle – new!
- Clap
- Congratulate
- Fidget
- Hail – new!
- Poke
- Shiver
- Slap
- Think
- Whippitydo – new!!
- Wince
- Yawn
- Ahem
- You can now drag items from your inventory into the “Item Name” field of the “Auctions” tab on the Auction UI to populate it with the name of that item.
- Lore-master skills “Light of the Rising Dawn” and “Cracked Earth” – Fixed a rare error that left a book stuck in the Lore-master’s hand when the skill failed to execute completely. maiki note: not a rare error
- The Oleif twins have resolved their dual identity crisis by having their leatherworking member take on a new name, “Fielo.” Now when one gets in trouble, the other feels pain! (points for spotting the reference) (extra points for a youtube sample) kgo
- The height requirement for the summer festival horse race has been lowered to allow dwarves and hobbits to complete this quest.
- The Prologue for “Volume II: The Mines of Moria” is now available! Speak to Barbethnir in front of the House of Elrond to help the Fellowship prepare to embark on their errand of secrecy.
OSRIC is an open gaming platform, released as OGL. Reading through the manual, it is a pretty great tool. If someone wanted to make their own game, or to even have pen and paper role-playing without the need to buy expensive manuals, they could do it with this.
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My current games of the moment are Lord of the Rings Online and Assassin's Creed.
The presentation for Assassin's Creed really surprised me. You play as an ex-assassin in modern times who's been kidnapped by a power hungry organization. They strap you into this machine they call the Animas and have you relive your ancestor's memories, they're after a very specific bit of information.
I think the premise is rather interesting, but in the end I think it hurts the game. When playing as Altair, his ancestor, it was difficult to stay immersed in the game. As soon as you finish a major mission, your memory fast forwards, breaking you out of the world.
The visuals and combat system are very satisfying. The cities are richly detailed and are fun to explore.
My next game of the moment will be Mass Effect, made by Bioware, it looks like a hybrid RPG and FPS. I'm very excited.
As read on the Guardian Games Blog (link via @Belldandy):
You heard it here last... Yep, Namco has announced a new character for Soul Calibur IV and it's yet another Star Wars refugee. Darth Vader's Secret Apprentice from Force Unleashed is the incoming pugilist, joining Vader himself as well as pint-sized sentence-mangler, Yoda. "The Secret Apprentice is a great fit for Soulcalibur," said someone from the Force Unleashed camp, whose originality chip was clearly malfunctioning. How did the phrase 'great fit' become obligatory when describing any kind of 'franchise crossover'?
That's cool and all, but we don't really know if he is a total knob yet. Also, I wonder if he will be on a specific system (like the Wii?!). I am so tired of separating characters like that. I want Vader and Yoda to fight!
OMG, Lucas never gave us that!
EA has made a proposal for a hostile takeover of Take-Two, the people who put out the Grand Theft Auto games.
http://eatake2.com
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21.May.2008 Demos
Two demos of possible interest have been released: LEGO Indiana Jones and The Penny Arcade Adventures. Both can be downloaded from FilePlanet
Tomorrow Metaplace, our favorite not-game, is having a stress test. From the site:
Reminder!
We will be having a public stress test of a graphical social world tomorrow, Wednesday April 30th at 5:00pm Pacific time! In preparation, please make sure you have the latest version of Flash. To participate, you do not need an account - you just need to come here to Metaplace.com and further instructions will be provided.
See you there!