Betas

I've been playing the Diablo 3 and Mists of Pandaria Betas, so I figured I'd talk about those some.

D3 is fun, no doubt. I really dig the classes and while you often feel like there is no way you'll ever get killed, it's easy to get overconfident and realize how insanely wrong you are about that. I haven't died much, once you figure out how to pull and fall back when you get enough mobs on you, it's very manageable. I need to try Barbarian though, so far Wizard and Demon Hunter have gotten most of my play time, and both are primarily ranged classes with some point blank escape abilities. I imagine a pure melee class is a bit more hectic in the fray.

My biggest gripe is that you're very limited about what abilities you can hot-key. They only give you a few keys to begin with, and on top of it you can only bind certain abilities to certain keys. The beta only lets you go up to level 13 or so (haven't capped it out yet) but very early on I started seeing issues. They put utility spells on the same key are main nuke abilities, forcing you to choose between a reliable high damage ability, or something like a snare, or a target-less random AoE spell. None of that would be so bad, except there is no quick way to swap those abilities out, and even if you do swap them manually, the new spell is on Cooldown for a few seconds. Maybe as you level up and get more spells this is less of an issue, but it's a little peculiar to me. Right now I'm largely ignoring the new spells they're giving me and just using the main spells I get near the start.

The sound and ambiance is spot on though, it feels like a real dungeon crawl all game through, and love the sounds the creatures make. Know what else is pretty cool? Booby traps in the dungeons. It's definitely fun, and since I got it free from the WoW annual pass, I'll be playing it, but I can't say I would have bought it if I got into the Beta before buying it.

In a lot of ways it plays just like Torchlight, which makes sense since Torchlight is a Diablo clone, but you'd think the long awaited D3 would have some more tricks up it's sleeve. I suppose expected more.

On a related note, Torchlight 2 will be released sometime later this year, intentionally later than Diablo 3 so they don't go head to head with Blizz. The Mac port will come some time after that, but no relative date on that yet.

I'll be doing another, longer post later about Mists of Pandaria when I get a chance. I'm not home right now, so I don't have access to my screen shots, which I'd like to share. In short, Mists is fun. Despite the complaining of quite a few people regarding the new Talent system I found myself putting more time into my 5 choices than I have put into the 30+ choices the old system gave us since I first started playing. I also feel that the reworked Glyph system plays a bigger role in customizing your character than it did before. They give you some hard choices that will help you customize your game play to your liking. Oh, and the minor glyphs now are just plain fun. Glyph of Polymorph makes it so your Poly lasts 24 hours on critters, so I spent half an hour turning all the squirrels in Stormwind and all the frogs in Darnassus into turtles, pigs, sheep and rabbits.

Frost Mage in PvE is very fun, no small part of which is due to the interaction between frost orb and the new Cleave mechanic Ice Lance has been given. Holy Paladin healing isn't bad, but there seems to be an issue with mouse over macros (possibly all macros) on the Mac which makes healing reliably a real pain when you're as addicted to mouse overs as I am. I failed 2 groups twice trying to work it out, it was shameful. I'd like to report on the state of Druid tanking, seeing that it's a hot topic, but since the character copy gave me 2 copies of my Paladin and none of my Druid, and I'm out of copies, I can't. Hopefully they'll get premades working soon, and I can give my bear a shot.

There is definitely a longer MoP posting coming soon enough.

I applaud Blizzard and Runic Games for doing a real Mac Port of their games, as opposed to cheating like some other developers are doing these days. But I'll go on about my feelings regarding Cider in a future post.

Upcoming Posts:
Mists of Pandaria
Cider is Bullshit (did I ruin it?)

So stay tuned, kids! Oh, who am I kidding, all the hits I've gotten so far are web crawlers.

Who I am, who I used to be

I guess I should post who I am, aside from an angry person. I'm not that angry, in truth. Just mildly so.

Alright, I'm a 30-something gamer, who once upon a time enjoyed a minor degree of fame in the Mac Gaming world under the name Mac_Jedi.

Yes, I was kind of a big deal. On the internet.

Back in '99 and the early 00's, I hung out on a website/in an IRC chat channel called osX. It was dedicated to Mac Unreal Tournament players, and making UT mods work on the Mac. It was run by a great guy who went by the handle EkoSonic. He was a musician, but the site was his side project and he fostered a great community.

A separate organization popped up a while later called Macologist, we had a lot of shared members as Macologist did what osX did, but for just about every game out there. You can read about what they did in that link there. I spent a lot of time in their IRC channel too. They launched a website to host their mods, and decided to expand into game reviews and features, which is where they picked me up. 

I just finished playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and they were looking for a review to post, so I wrote them one. About a week later my review was posted, a few days after that I was declared their Reviews Editor, and was helping to run the site. I have no idea what they were thinking, either.

From there I did a bunch of games for them, after a while we got kinda well known and I was getting free games to review! Seriously, companies like Feral Interactive and Aspyr actually gave me free games. I still don't get it. 

I made some great friends during all that, including but not limited to R0gue and Santaduck (whose real life names I'll withold) who made Macologist possible

Eventually, around 2005 a lovely woman by the name of Omaha Sternberg had an internet radio show called iGame Radio asked me and a few other Editors (you know from legit websites) to join her in a Christmas gift-giving episode, I don't remember all the details but Omaha eventually asked me to guest co-host, which became a regular thing for a while.

So for a short time, the name Mac_Jedi was known. 

Eventually Macologist folded (we had free server space that evaporated, and couldn't manage the costs of our bandwidth, which was massive for the time) and personal issues kept me off of iGame Radio for so long, I was ashamed to ever come back.

By this point I was a qualified adult, with a real job and everything and my gaming started to slow down a bit. I became a MMO Player, thanks to WoW, and used my Playstation (2 and 3) to feed my habit for other games (except First Person shooters, I have no idea how anyone plays those with a console controller). 

In WoW I would rise through the ranks, and eventually earn GM (more of a first-amongst-equals type of thing) which was awesome, as I presided over some great times. That too has faded recently, especially as most of my guild is playing SWTOR now, which has no Mac client. So I'm the GM of a declining WoW Guild, which means my members expectations are low, and I'm free to play other games again without feeling guilty. Until MoP comes out, I hope.

I'm also bored.

For the past 10 years or so, I've been doing things. Reviews Editor, Radio Co-Host, GM of a highly active WoW Guild... and now, despite my recent purchase of a house and all of the nonsense that goes with that, I'm bored.

So here it is, something to fill my time with, something to justify my gaming habit, even if it is more tame than it once was.

Currently Playing :

(in no particular order)

• World of Warcraft (including Mists of Pandaria Beta)
• Diablo 3 Beta
• Team Fortress 2
• Anything Angry Birds  (don't judge me)
  
    
  

First Post!

First Post!

Alright, that's out of the way.

I was going to make my first post about who I am and why I'm making a blog that I'm sure no one will read.

I've decided that will be my second post. My first post will be about how Google needs to allow people to petition for names that have been abandoned.

I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find an address name that hadn't been taken already. That in and of itself is fine. I'm late to the Blogger game, I get it. But the fact that all the names I wanted were abandoned long ago ( themacjedi who last updated in 2004) or made one post (macjedi - one post in 2007) or even worse... took the name and never put a damned thing up (macologist). You know the worst one? The one calling themselves The Mac Gamer whose first dozen posts are about PC and Xbox gaming. Seriously.

I know, I know. It's not a real domain and it's not going to expire. I'm just bitter. Those names all mean something to me and I can't have them. I'll explain why in my next post, I suppose.