Month: February 2010

‘Ultra’-heavy beat

I like many other City of Heroes/Villains players am becoming excited about the upcoming expansion that due to arrive in July (on last update), but with all that anticipation it’s easy to overlook another important update that the game is having sooner.

The next free update (Issue 17 : Dark mirror) looks set to land very soon and it’s going to arrive all guns blazing bringing with it a revamp to Paragon City and the Rogue Isles with the new “Ultra mode” graphical setting.

It won’t take you much searching to find many gamers comments/thoughts & reactions to the game to all be of a similar nature, the game looks old and out-dated. A fair comment considering that the game is about to celebrate it’s 6th anniversary and the technology it was designed for is so far from cutting-edge it’s scary.

I thought I’d look at the specifications needed to run the game if you bought it now:

  • Minimum : Video Card: NVIDIA® GeForce 2 Series, ATI™ Radeon® 8500 or Intel® i865G Series Video Card
  • Recommended : Video Card: NVIDIA® GeForce™ 6200

A quick peak at the latest Steam hardware survey and it’s easy to see that many people have hardware that is capable of doing alot more, so a move to improve the existing games graphics is one that can only be a benefit to all players old and new.

I’m looking forward to seeing the game through enhanced graphics and judging by the screen-shots it’s going to be very nice indeed, the development team have been busy working on the new expansion and retro-fitting the existing game. Not a small task when you think of all the textures and effects that can be found in a single zone.

Image from : http://eu.cityofheroes.com/en/news/article/ultra_mode_issue_17_and_going_rogue

Oh and remember there is a Double XP an account reactivation weekend from the 4th to the 7th of March

Blitz

I’ve spent the best part of the last 3 weeks jumping various games my allotted time being partially arranged around the baby/visitors/work & sleep. It’s been rather sporadic to say the least.

My excitement for Modern Warfare 2 has started to wain a little, it’s cause hasn’t been helped by the large percentage of blatant hackers in the game that can’t be reported in any shape or form.

But enough with the old and in with the new, well newish, ok, ok, once were new.
My current play list looks something like this:

  • Everquest 2 (14 day trial) — frustratingly XFire isn’t recognising EQ2 so no time is being marked against it. I’m not sure I could face another standard MMO at the moment but the characters are very detailed and i’ve found the none way-pointed missions  lead to more exploration.
  • Wizard 101 — Rach and I have been trying out some less resource intensive games that allow us to pick up and play when we get a spare minute. I’m finding the game is scarcely entertaining
  • Spellborn — I’ve taken to playing a little Spellborn when I fancy a change of pace. The game delivers something different each time I play.
  • Warhammer Online — I’m playing the free Tier one stuff but with multiple builds, mostly to get a  feel for how the classes are designed and how they work with the other player classes.
  • Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 (On the XBob) — I’ve been having some great fun with this title certainly one to try if you’re a Marvel fan.

Still to come:

  • Mass Effect — Everyone is Raving about Mass Effect 2 so I’ve decide to try and get the original game completed first, the only problem is I have to re-install it since my HDD swap.
  • Myst online – Hopefully I’ll get back into trying this now free title once more.
  • Chaos Rising Dawn of War 2 — looking forward to this expansion when it arrives.

Throw all that into the mix with everything and I find myself struggling to get a blog post writing in a week.

But it’s all good fun