It sucks. Why?

It seems the game basically consists of one popup and one button. Here’s a screenshot:

Of course I realize that there’s much more to Diablo 3. And I’ll probably like it. But what good is good gameplay, nice graphics, and polished character classes for your action RPG if you can’t actually play it?

I am absolutely sure that Blizzard employs competent people. Anything else would simply make no sense; and since none of their launches are ever smooth, I guess we can conclude they decide not to invest enough money into the infrastructure to cushion the launch peaks. Saves them money in the long run, of course.

But if the company doesn’t want to handle the peaks, then they should not hype the game in such a way as to generate peaks. Open up the servers before you start selling the game. Then you’ll have a more organic log-in behavior.

The worst is that nobody managed to edit the little “breaking news” box on the startscreen to let the players know what’s happening.

I am really, really tired of games companies not doing their job. I’ve actually created a “blacklist” after the Mass Effect 3 debacle, committing myself to never buying a Bioware title again. Well, Blizzard, congratulations. You just made my list. I am sorry to tell you that you will never sell Titan to me, whatever that will turn out to be. I’ll still play Diablo 3, but it’s the last of my money you will see.

Update, the next day: Well, I guess my sarcastic comments came around to haunt me, from a karma point of view. 19 hours and 16 minutes after launch, I still can not play the game I bought because the servers are overloaded. Again or still, whatever. This is a textbook example of how not to launch a game. And be that as it may, I am one annoyed geek.

• Dawn of War 2 (+Chaos Rising, +Retribution): Awesome Real-time strategy game in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Loved this one, and they are cheap, too. Highly recommended.
• Space Pirates and Zombies: Top-Down space shooter with some RPG elements. Very fun – and pretty – indie game. I guess it’s a bit Star Control-ish. Recommended.
• Tiny Tower (iPhone): A toy, rather than a game, really, but keeps you occupied in a doctor’s waiting room. So-so.
• Mass Effect 3: 95% of the game is alright, but the ending is so bad it ruins not only the rest of the game, but takes down all enjoyment I had with Mass Effect 1 and 2, as well.
• Borderland: Stylish first person shooter with some RPG elements (classes, skill trees). A lot of fun.
• Demigods: PVP tactical game about light and dark side demigods fighting each other. Fun, but unfortunately not too popular. Buy it cheaply.
• Dear Esther: Not really a game; more a toy or a randomized audio story with graphical elements. Very beautiful, but annoyed me after half an hour. Pass on it, unless you want to support the Indie publisher or like the genre.

I bought a lot of games on Steam in the past half year, and I still need to test many of them…

• Mass Effect: One word: Awesome. Best CRPG I have played in a long time, only topped by its sequel.
• Mass Effect 2: Beyond awesome; an absolute must.
• Solar 2: Beautiful. Kind of cool. But also a little too hard, and fairly pointless. A toy rather than a game. Buy it cheaply.
• Civilization 5: Good evolution of the franchise, way too buggy. Wait another year, then buy a discount version when the glaring stability issues have been fixed (hopefully).
• Dwarfs! Very fun but a little on the simplistic side. Again, buy it cheaply.
• Plants vs Zombies: One of the best Tower Defense games ever. Must have.
• Universe at War: Earth Assault: Very fun, but crashes so often it is a definite “do not buy”.
• Nexus: The Jupited Incident: Old game, looks like publisher is defunct. The game is a space strategy sim a little similar to Homeworld. Very fun game so far.
• Torchlight: Fun Diablo clone. Buy it cheaply.

Of these, you absolutely must get the two Mass Effect games. Play part 1 before the sequel, even if the sequel is vastly superior: Many of your choices in ME1 will affect quests and conversations in ME2.

Until I have time to write a formal review, here’s some screenshots to whet your appetite…

• Alien vs Predator 1: Watchable, if you like Aliens or Predators. Switch off your brain first though. The Weyland tie-ins are neat.
• V for Vendetta: Well filmed, a bit too predictable and hard to suspend disbelief in a few places. Good message I guess. Definitely watchable – once. Not a classic.
• Star Wars: Clone Wars. Actually the movie is just the first few episodes of the show added together. Once you understand it, it becomes cool – the show is definitely better than the prequels. Recommended for any Star Wars or Science Fiction fan.
• Iron Man: Fun bubble-gum movie. Definitely one of the entertaining comic superhero movies. Recommended.
• The Dark Knight: It could be an excellent movie, if they had left out the half-burnt guy’s subplot at the end; it was, overall, about a half-hour too long. Also, the cellphone sonar thing was dumb. Keith Ledger really did do a good job, the Batman actor was too wooden.
• Chicken Run: Watched this years ago, still a fun movie. It’s an Aardman animation (of Wallace & Grommit fame). Awesome movie, too, if you like Wallace & Grommit, you’ll love this one.
• The Mummy: Another movie I watched a long time ago; good, straight-forward Indiana-Jones style fun. Highly recommended.

The Kraken, you say?

That’s right. Hades uses “the Kraken” to terrorize humankind. I mean – come on! Hades isn’t the god of the sea (that’s Poseidon), the Kraken is about as un-Greek as Godzilla.

There are less offensive points, too. Like making the Pegasus a brown/black horse. I actually had to laugh out a few times over these screwups, and my Greek mythology is decidedly rusty.

Another criticism I have are the characters. They’re not well developed and most of them are fairly annoying. Especially Perseus’ attitude gets on your nerves after a while.

Getting that out of the way, the movie was fairly entertaining. Some of the CGI shots were neat – I loved the Olymp’s “miniature Greece” that the Gods walk over, clouds swirling around their ankles. The big scorpion beasts were neat, too. Some of the scenes were obviously created in an effort to “wow” the audience of the 3D version, such as stingers and stuff that probably shoot out of the screen in 3D.

Yeah, I avoided the 3D version, since I don’t have depth perception anyway, and those glasses are just annoying. I also feared that the glasses would just discolor the movie. Unfortunately, the non-3D wasn’t exactly crisp. The image was blurry and stuttered in many locations: It looked like many places it wasn’t more than 10 frames per seconds. While the blurry image could have just been a badly adjusted projector, the “stutter” wasn’t. Quite honestly even a regular DVD would produce better results, nevermind the Blu-Rays I have recently come to appreciate. Maybe this does explain the recent problems of cinemas I heard talked about. If even a fairly standard Playstation3 + Full-HD TV combo can produce a better image than a cinema, then why go to the cinema? The ticket price for 2 persons (14 Euro total) is about what most of the cheaper BluRays cost, and no doubt cover many rentals.

I wouldn’t want to recommend Clash of the Titans. You can watch much better movies. Is it a terrible movie? No, there’s worse. Is it really worth-while? No, it’s not. But if someone else wants to see it, at least you won’t be bored in your seat for two hours. 2/5.

• Zone design is great, the zones look really nice.
• Quests are much less annoying – there are of course still FedEx- and kill-ten-grue-type-quests, but over all it is MUCH more imaginative, and has many nice extras (for example there’s a quest to free Murloc babies, which has got to be ones of the cutest things in a video game ever).
• Death Knights are actually a fun melee class, which I had not thought would ever happen; their starter “campaign” is also really well designed.
• Less reputation grind… it seems.

The bad:

• It’s more of the same. Really. If you have played WoW at all, you have played the expansion. Unless you are a WoW ultra-nerd, you should get tired of it really quickly.
• Inflation got knocked up another notch. My mage made 500g profit, just by questing, in three days of game-play.
• It absolutely sucks to be a new player at the moment, or to play a low level character. Unless you are level 70 or higher, and thus able to consume the WOTLK content, you will play this game alone for a long time.

Bottom line:

Wotlk gets 3/5. This is what the first expansion should have been like – Northrend totally puts Outland to shame. There’s enough to keep the old timers happy for a while, and some of the new additions are quite nice, but it is not compelling enough to warrant anything more than a “for fans” recommendation.

The young Chihiro moves to another town with her parents. As her father takes a short-cut, they end up in a decommissioned amusement park – something that isn’t very unusual in Japan. It’s deserted, but yet there are food stands, and the parents gorge themselves despite Chihiro’s wish to go. Things begin to go really weird at this point: The parents turn into huge pigs (literally), and Chihiro is trapped in a weird fantasy land. She ends up in a bath house for gods, and has to work there while trying to save her parents and escape.

To make it short, I totally love this move. It’s well-drawn, in a great style that just screams “mystical fairy tale land”. The characters are nicely-created as well, even though there are some bits in the second half of the movie that betray its Disney funding. The atmosphere is one of sense of wonder, and I kind of wish that we could explore this strange world further.

If you like fantasy movies and/or Japanese anime, you should definitely watch this movie. Even if you are not into Anime, Spirited Away is fairly mainstream… so give it a try anyway. It’s also very appropriate for children – there is some blood, but nothing truly terrifying I think.

Two thumbs up – this is an awesome movie.

Jumpers is an action movie about a guy who discovers that he has the power of teleportation, as well as his subsequent run-in with a secret government-sponsored organization that is set up to kill his kind. There are really not many surprises in this movie, the action is passable, and I did kind of like the premise. This is one of those movies that’s very watchable when you are stuck iun a jetliner for 12 hours, but otherwise it would be a waste of money to rent it.

The Spiderwick Chronicles is an action/fantasy movie about a house plagued by goblins. The owner, Arthur Spiderwick, wrote a book about faeries, and now the evil ogre Mograth is trying to get that book (an obviously has been for 80 years, the poor bastard needs a life). When the great-grand-nephews of Arthur move into the house and discover the book, all hell breaks loose.

As you’d expect, the premise works out to another crummy Hollywood fantasy movie. The beginning is alright but it deteriorates quickly. The design of the monsters in the book shown in the first minutes – is pretty neat and reminds me of Brian Froud’s work, but the ones in the movie itself are normal CGI fare. If I had to sum it up in a few words, I would describe Spiderwick Chronicles as a cross between The Gate and Labyrinth, and it fails at it. Again, it’s watchable… barely.