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Monday, November 1, 2004
Gaming Weekend
This is the first weekend in a long time - longer than I can remember, in fact - where I spent a good deal of time just playing video games.
To be more specific, I played two games: Guild Wars and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
I should really start by speaking about the former, because I feel that it will really take the world by storm. I am so keen on it, in fact, that I intend to create an OtakuBoards guild once the game ships.
Basically, Guild Wars plays quite a lot like Diablo. However, it just seems more fun than Diablo ever was (for me, anyway). I'm unsure quite how to quantify that for you, except to say that it has to be played to see what I mean.
Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of Guild Wars is the unique streaming technology that it uses. You download a tiny client and then download the "first chunk" of the game (which consists of all the basic stuff to set up your account and such). It's only a few MB, so reasonably small. And my connection to their server was lightning fast; faster than I ever normally get on the Internet under normal circumstances.
When you create your character, choose the class and so on, you enter the world and begin a tutorial.
When you go into each area, you basically have to download that area to your computer. It sounds horribly clunky but in practice, I've never seen anything so beautifully fast and smooth. For me, on a 256K connection, it only took a minute or so to download the very largest environments. It's just insanely, insanely fast.
Best part is, even at this early stage, the game is very bug-free. The visuals are gorgeous (very ICO-esque) and the manipulation of the character and the world around it is so seamless. It doesn't take long to pick up the important bits and it's incredibly easy to travel all around the map and create parties and so on.
The Guild system is also amazing. I have some screenshots of this game too, which I will post up in the future. For now, I recommend going to GuildWars.com if you want to learn more about this amazing title.
Oh and, to add to that, the game never lagged for me, even once. And that's despite the fact that it was a foreign server and my Internet is the base ADSL connection. As I said earlier, I've never seen anything that ran so wonderfully smooth. Definitely worth a look. And best of all, the game will be free to play online; no monthly fees. ~_^
Secondly, I bought San Andreas. If you haven't read the reviews, you really should. I say this because it would take me far, far too long to explain what the game is like. There is literally so much to it that I couldn't do it unless I had a few hours to spare.
So, reading reviews will be a good indication. I recommend IGN, GameSpot and 1UP; each review is accurate and each one has slightly different focuses here and there.
I also purchased a PSTwo. I knew that thing was small, but I wasn't truly prepared for the size. It's only marginally bigger than a DVD case.
I'm really pleased with it. It's super-quiet and I don't get any disc read errors or anything. However, the same was true on my second PS2 that I bought only a few months ago. So, who knows how long this one will last. My hope is that Sony ironed out the quality issues a bit more with the PSTwo. If this unit decides it will collapse, I may not be online, because I'll be sitting in the corner of my room with my eyelid twitching. o_O
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