Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare

This really is a fantastic little game.

No, wait, hear me out. When I first heard there would be a third-person shooter based in the PvZ world, I initially cringed. Very hard. While Plants vs Zombies may be, hands down, the greatest casual game ever made (claim may or may not be supported by actual merit), the idea of an action game populated by cutesy zombies and flowers sounded terrible. Having given the game a fair chance, however, the opposite seems to be true.

Garden Warfare has two main modes:

* A horde mode, not unlike Mass Effect 3's multiplayer or Team Fortress 2's Mann Vs Machine mode, where zombies of various types of zombies spawn in a few areas and attack a garden that you plant in various parts of the levels. You can plant smaller defensive plants to slow them down and work as one of a few classes of specialized plants to defend that garden. Two types of soldier, the cactus (with a remote drone) and peashooter (with speed boost), a venus fly-trap-esque Chomper plant, and the Sunflower medic are available in this mode. 10 waves of defense and a boss wave against a large, overpowered zombie, then Crazy Dave comes to evac your team in his flying RV.

* Competitive multiplayer, where you get various modes such as Team Deathmatch, Kill Confirmed, control points, and others that you might find in a Call of Duty or Battlefield title. Home team is the Plants, with the aforementioned classes, while the opposing force is the zombies, with their own classes a soldier, engineer, mad scientist, and “all-star.”

Bolstering this is the customization options, available with microtransactions (don't do it!) or by earning in-game tokens by playing and/or winning matches. You can make some very colourful plants and zombies by purchasing card packs that include parts to unlock alternate models of characters (with side-grade abilities), customization items, and power-ups like defensive plants.

There is no story or campaign mode, but considering the story of the original game is “Zombies are coming to eat your brains. Plant things to stop them. Oh, and here's Crazy Dave, he'll sell you stuff” it shouldn't surprise anyone. The game is a little shallow because of that, but unlike other multiplayer-only games (looking at you, Titanfall), Garden Warfare wasn't sold at full AAA retail price. I honestly can't recommend even the standard price of $30, but if you see it on sale (and Origin has had it on sale several times recently), I recommend it.

Performance is solid. With vsync on, the game never drops below 60 frames per second, and the controls are tight on both gamepad and mouse/keyboard. Options menu is a bit limited, though.

Garden Warfare is a fun little romp with a rich color palette and a very imaginative visual style. It's also a serious game with a solid horde mode and decent competitive mode, too.  Recommended at a sale price of $15 or less.

Note: This review was written using a purchased copy of Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare. Hardware used was an i5 2500k / GTX 770 and alternately an X-Box One pad and Logitech G700s/Belkin Nostromo keypad.

Carmageddon: Reincarnation (Public Beta) Review

Normally, I avoid (and recommend avoiding) games that are in Early Access. I've seen too many go under or under-deliver, like Double Fine's Spacebase DF-9, pushed out the door before it was ready and pretty much abandoned, never to be feature-complete. Some have been successes, like Kerbal Space Program and Prison Architect, while some have been viral hits without even being completed, like Rust or 7 Days To Die.

I rolled the dice on Carmageddon: Reincarnation. The original Carmageddon was one of the first games I had for my first dedicated PC, eating up a permanent 200MB chunk of my 1GB hard drive alongside such classics as Doom II and Blood. I've long held it up as the superior PC equivalent to the more popular Twisted Metal series. It was better looking, with more personality and a physics engine that felt more like driving a real car, and combat much more visceral due to a lack of traditional weaponry like machine guns or rocket launchers.

In 2012, Stainless announced that it had reacquired the rights from SquareEnix and was launching a Kickstarter. I was not, at the time, in a position to financially back the game, but kept up with its development. The Kickstarter had a goal of $400,000 which was met in 10 days, and capped out at over $625,000. In 2014, the game launched on Steam's Early Access, and I immediately purchased it.

The alpha that initially launched was rough. Missing many features, art assets, and sound effects, it was barely playable and prone to crashing. It wasn't optimized at all, and trended towards a framerate in the low 20s on even the lowest of settings. Stainless kept up with updates for a while, but then there were some months of radio silence.

On Valentine's day, 2015, the game was released into public beta, with a massive update that re-wrote most of the game's code from the ground up. Multiplayer was enabled, the roster of cars and drivers was expanded, and some optimization was implemented.

As it stands now, the game is still in a rough state, but it's a faithful update of the original. If you've played the original, you'll absolutely adore Reincarnation. The cars handle much the same way, and the Classic Carma mode is a spot-on modern recreation of the original game. The damage models are insanely detailed, and the repair mechanic is amazing and hilarious to watch, especially when you hit a full repair and your own driver ends up flopping alongside  the car until you slow down enough for him or her to re-enter the vehicle.

Multiplayer is still hit or miss, with connection problems and a low population (which will hopefully change after the game goes into full release), and the AI is still abysmally stupid, doggedly sticking to the track and often ignoring the player car or driving straight into walls when the car is damaged. Optimization is still not complete, too, as the game chugs along in the mid-20s framerate on low settings on my GTX 770, but at least looks much more visually impressive in beta than it did in alpha.

But it shows promise. I eagerly anticipate the full release of the game, and recommend getting in while it's still priced for early access and includes the original trilogy of Carmageddon games with the purchase.

Bottom line: Recommended for fans of car combat, fans of the original series (especially the first game), and those willing to put up with the growing pains of a game in beta for what's likely to be a solid final product.

Disclosure: The copy reviewed was purchased personally. A review copy was not provided. Hardware used was an i5 2500k and PNY GTX 770 XLR8, with an X-Box One pad for controls.

FFXIV: A Realm Reborn - One Year Later

With my time in the game nearing the one year mark (since live release not beta), I figured now is as good as any time to do up a review.  After spending far too much of my life playing a certain well known MMO, I never thought I’d jump back into another.  I dabbled in a few here and there since my days in WoW, but never for long or with much interest.  Then again, I never expected to have one come out that met just the right criteria to give me without much reason not to play.  So, without further ado, we have the chronicles of my soon to be year in the world of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn.

I suppose I should first start off by saying that even as huge of a fan of Final Fantasy as I am, I admittedly never played the original Final Fantasy XIV aka Version 1.  I never even played XI to be perfectly honest.  At the time these MMOs for the series came out, I just wasn’t in the mindset of that game genre for one reason or another.  Having now been immersed in A Realm Reborn (ARR as I’ll now refer to it throughout the review), I do sort of wish I had given that one a chance even if it performed less than stellar.

With this being my first MMO in a while, I hoped the transition back into that style of play would be smooth.  Barring any time adjusting to the game’s particular interface, the world itself, and various aspects of gameplay, the learning curve into ARR wasn’t bad at all.  The primary challenge that I personally face is playing on a PS3 as opposed to a PC.  It obviously presents limitations in things like target acquisition and casting spells, but you learn to get past it.  Anyone that can’t help but resort to PC methods, fortunately keyboard/mouse setup is an option with the PS3.

For those that enjoy the actual lore and story of a game, the one you’ll experience in ARR is wonderful.  Throughout any of the various classes and jobs you level, as well as all the dungeons, there is a really good amount of exciting storyline.  Even some of the quests you encounter have some really neat stories.  What’s really nice is that you can go back and watch cutscenes later on that you may have skipped.  I’ve skipped some in the interest of time, but the content I’ve followed thus far has been fantastic.

Visually, ARR is absolutely gorgeous as any long time fan of the Final Fantasy line would expect.  The world itself is filled with a plethora of stunning environments, in both the main world and the unique dungeons.  Characters are just as pleasing to the eye, with a nearly infinite amount of choices for how they appear, as well as numerous outfits that you can often customize as well.  Even now, I still find myself briefly distracted at times just gazing at my surroundings.

All around, the time I’ve spent in ARR has been extremely fun and well worth playing.  Being just a casual player, there’s a good amount of dungeons and content I haven’t touched yet.  Even so, I don’t feel as if it’s necessary to rush through it in order to get my money’s worth.  Coming up on a year on playing launch, I would easily suggest this game to anyone looking to try an MMO.  Or, you know, maybe trying to get out of Azeroth and into Eorzea.

Battlefield 4 Campaign Review

     I'm going into this one with my eyes wide open. I'm fully aware that a single-player mode on Battlefield 4 is about as useful as the vestigial tail on human being. Almost literally no one plays Battlefield games for the single-player. No one except me. Normally, I wait for these types of games to hit $10 or so, pick them up, and blow through them on the weekends. It's my version of going to see a big, dumb Michael Bay movie. I've done it for every Call of Duty game after Modern Warfare (the last truly good single-player campaign in a Military Shooter), the last couple of Medal of Honor games, and Battlefield 3. The worst of these that I've played has been Battlefield 3.

     Until now. I'm not going to get into EA's Origin client here, as it would easily double the length of this review, but they've recently started a Game Time feature. It's inaugural event was a week's free playtime on Battlefield 4. Decent deal for those waiting to pick it up for the multiplayer (if there's anyone still waiting to do that), but even better for someone like me. This type of game generally tends to have about 4-6 hours of campaign time, and according to Origin, I have approximately 6 hours start to finish logged, including a couple of bathroom breaks and lunch where I left the game paused.

     Story-wise, this is pretty much what you'd expect from a Modern Military Shooter. Take a country that the US is currently not on great terms with and have them make an unfeasibly effective strike on the US or its forces. Pretty much the same storyline as Battlefield 3 or your pick of any recent Call of Duty game. Characterization is weak, save two of your squad, and the mcguffin of the story is a man who seems to have telepathic powers of persuasion. I reached the end of the game, and I still seriously didn't understand why he was so important. Your squad consists of super-competent Chinese security agent Hannah, borderline-insubordinate Irish, and newbie-cipher Pac. I found myself shouting at Irish at several points and wondering how he became such a high-level operator given his total lack of respect for pretty much every other character he interacts with. Hannah seems almost a bit too competent at times, and Pac is just there. Until he's not.

     Technically speaking, I marvel at Crytek. How a developer so well-respected can fail so hard on basic competencies of programming is beyond me. Battlefield 4 came out on consoles, so I know absolutely that they know how to program gamepad support. And while pads are supported in the PC version, that support is so lackluster and lacking that they may as well not even have coded it in. There are no button prompts for the pad. Every action from opening doors to navigating menus is hard-coded to the keyboard prompts. The fact that there are no sequence-breaking QTEs that can only be performed with they keyboard (like last year's Battlefield 3) is balanced by the fact that the weapons menus during gameplay can only be used with a mouse, even when they are activated by using a gamepad. Pad support isn't the only problem, though. Missing event triggers, AI pathing problems, and collision detection are terrible eyesores. I ran to the top of a building only to have my squad hit the roof and freeze. I had no idea what to do next, so I ended throwing myself off the building so I could restart the checking point (after I'd found a wall not guarded by an invisible wall). Next time up, there was a helicopter waiting for us. I lost count of the number of times an NPC would walk straight into me and push me around the map. I was hit by a tank doing at least 30 MPH and instead of dying was just pushed right along in front of it. Sniper shots were foiled by the empty spaces between bits of scaffolding, as bullets ricocheted off of empty space.

     This may be a great multiplayer game, and even that's debatable given the problems its had in its early life, but as a singleplayer game, Battlefield 4 is yet another argument that online shooters really should just do away with the mode altogether and leave it to games like Spec Ops: The Line that want to use the format to tell a proper story.

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs

I have a confession to make.

I never finished the first Amnesia. It's more accurate to say that, according to Steam, I have played 28 minutes of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. That includes times spent setting up options in the menu. So in reality, I've gotten far enough that the first strong gust of wind howled through a corridor before I quit. I'd like to say that's because I didn't like the controls. Admittedly, I do prefer gamepads to mouse and keyboard, but the atmospheric elements of Amnesia: TDD kinda scared me.

Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs recently went on sale for 66% off on Steam, so I decided to roll the dice. It does, for the record, support gamepads. As far as the technical aspects of the game, Frictional teamed with The Chinese Room, creators of Dear Esther (developer of 2008's popular First Person Walking Simulator Dear Esther). It's got a fairly hefty options menu, and the game looks gorgeous (when you can see it).  It ran well on my GTX770, and once I'd nailed down a particularly nasty case of screen tearing (disable in-game Vsync, both regular and adaptive, and enable it in the Nvidia Control Panel or your ATI equivalent), the game ran at a smooth 60 FPS with no screen tearing. The gamepad controls were responsive and simple to learn, and even the object manipulation mechanic of the first game translated well from mouse to thumbsticks.

This is not an overly complex game, though. It's pedigree shows through, as many sources have said that this game is far simpler in its gameplay mechanics than the previous Amnesia title. Your lantern has unlimited oil. There are no items to pick up, no laudanum to keep you sane. Your character is obviously far more mentally stable, seeing as the monsters in this game doesn't affect your ability to cope with the world around you.

Where A Machine For Pigs really shines is its storytelling. You wake up in a caged bedroom of a properly posh Victorian mansion, and bits of story are slowly fed to you throughout your descent (a dark one!) into the heart of a Steampunk monstrosity of brass tubes, gears, pistons, and oh-so-many nauseating swine carcasses. Like many dark horror stories, there are aspects that fall apart if you look at it too closely, but the game wraps up before most people have time to question those aspects. The game runs about 4 to 4 and a half hours, but that's a tight 4 and a half hours, with very few wasted moments, and a hectic (if overly obviously scripted) sequence later in the game where the monsters really come into play. Overall, it's dripping (quite literally at times) with atmosphere

Is it worth the usual $20 price tag? That's all going to depend on whether you're a big horror buff. Personally, I'm not. That I only paid < $7 for the game, goes a long way to my personal valuation. I feel I got my money's worth, even though it didn't quite hit that “dollar-per-hour” magic mark. If you're a fan of horror, I recommend this at a higher price than I paid, especially if you like your horror to come from the storytelling as much as the gameplay.

Titanfall Beta

I used to be a Call of Duty fan. I say this with some not-insignificant amount of trepidation, as I know the reputation the series has around core gamers. That reputation ranging from "Madden with guns" to "barely a casual game." I feel very strongly that the series peaked at COD4: Modern Warfare, and has been steadily going downhill since, with Treyarch's recent Black Ops entries trying desperately to stem the tide of stagnation and entropy that's been seeping into the series since 2009, when Infinity Ward seemed to stop caring about innovation and start recycling their work.

     When I'd heard of the fracture at Infinity Ward, with a lot of the founders and team leaving to form Respawn, I was intrigued. I wasn't happy to learn they'd landed at EA (I'll leave the circle-jerking about EA for another time), but I was encouraged by some statement they'd made about maintaining creative control. I mean, these were the Modern Warfare guys. On the one hand, if anyone could, they could. But then, Bioware couldn't..

     Titanfall is the first release from Respawn, currently in an open Beta. It's painfully Infinity Ward, too. Despite using the newest version of the Source engine (and the old girl's looking pretty fantastic in her dotage), it feels just like the cobbled-up Quake engine that the COD series has been using since 2007's COD4. Right down to bullets that magically curve around corners to kill you after you've taken cover. But it is fast, it is slick, and it handles incredibly well.

     On foot, it calls comparisons to a less-than-successful shooter-with-legs in Brink. In an extensive (and surprisingly-not-boring) tutorial, you'll be taught the basics in wall-running, ledge-climbing, and taking full advantage of the verticality of the levels. Which you'll want to take advantage of. Because if you don't, you're going to die when another player spots you from a rooftop running across an open field. It also invites comparisons to Brink in that the story, according to the developers, comes not from a single-player campaign but from multiplayer matches themselves.

    Titanfall also borrows heavily from the MOBA genre, much like free-to-play Monday Night Combat, with squads of AI-controlled NPCs which are less agile, less intelligent, and far less deadly than you and your fellow players that, as far as I can tell, exist solely to inflate your scores and lower the time needed to call down your Titan. And when your Titan falls, the game changes from Call of Parkour to Mechwarrior on speed. The Titans, while not terribly different from your average mechanized armor division, manage to convey a sturdy sense of weight while still remaining agile and not breaking the flow of gameplay.

     A few minor niggles in the PC porting that I've noticed. The refresh rate is... strange. FRAPS tells me I'm getting a solid 60 frames per second, but I can still see frames jerking periodically, like it's not *really* hitting that solid 60. It could have been my imagination, but there seemed to be a very mild mouse acceleration effect. Swapping over to a gamepad was easy enough, and the game handles button prompt switching on the fly among the best that I've seen.

     Titanfall is pushing the multiplayer shooter genre in a pleasantly non-modern-military direction, considering how tired and overpopulated that subgenre has gotten, mainlining some serious sci-fi civil war into the mix. It's a proper good time, with only a few marks against it. Sadly, those are pretty significant marks for me. It's an EA game, which means that if you're on PC, you'll be using Origin. And there's no single-player campaign. While I've made a few exceptions before for games without single-player story campaigns, they're very few and far between. I'll pass on Titanfall, but that doesn't mean you should. If you enjoy manic, fast-paced competitive shooters, this one holds a ton of promise.

Broken Age

I grew up on adventure games - King's/Police/Space Quest from Sierra, Sam And Max Hit The Road from LucasArts, even Loom and Leisure Suit Larry.  If it was point-and-click, I liked it *way* more than most of the other game genres. Somewhere along the line, though, the adventure game got pushed aside by FPS (First-Person Shooters), RTS (Real-Time Strategy), and action-oriented 3rd person games. Don't get me wrong, I've found a title or franchise in each genre that I've admired, but point-and-click adventure games always held a special place in my heart.

King of this genre, for me, was the work of Tim Schafer. From his work at LucasArts (Monkey Island 2, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, etc) to his founding and subsequent work at Double Fine (Brutal Legend, Costume Quest, etc).  Long have I pined for the glory days of point-and-click adventure games.   Thankfully, my prayers (and the prayers of thousands of gamers) were answered in 2012 when Double Fine launched a Kickstarter campaign for a new adventure game project. I followed their journey with game design, concept art, soundtrack samples, and general nerdiness when it came to the behind-the-curtain of "how a game is made".  Earlier this month, our patience and loyalty finally paid off: we get to play the game we backed - Broken Age.

Now, currently, only Act 1 is available and I haven't completed all of it (you can readily switch between two main characters in 2 separate stories), but what I've played is wonderfully whimsical and full of nostalgia.  I lamented the day the games went from the hand-drawn animation style of "Sam & Max" and "Curse of Monkey Island" to the all-CG look.  This gradually changed over time and by the time Broken Age came out, I no longer cared: the movement and design of the colorful characters had me enthralled.  At the top of Act 1, you have a choice to play the story of Vella (voiced by Masasa Moyo) or Shay (voiced by Elijah Wood).

Vella is a girl who has been chosen to represent her village in the "Maiden's Feast" which is a ceremony not unlike "The Lottery" where a member from each village is sacrificed to appease a horrific monster.  Vella is not convinced this is the way things should be done anymore and sets her mind on changing things.

Shay is a young boy living on a suspiciously safe spaceship watched over by a "Mother" and "Father" figure (represented by a ship-generated "Sun" and "Moon" respectively). After becoming bored with the "missions", Shay finally comes in contact with a wolf character hiding out in the bowels of the ship who asks for Shay's help in saving and protecting the universe.

Double Fine makes sure that their years of game-making experience shines here. Dying in game has never really been an option for the point-and-click titles: if you're afraid of your character dying, how can you effectively try new things in order to solve puzzles? The instant immersion of the game world ensconces you like a warm blanket and begs you to "just dream here for a little while longer". I had a heck of a time breaking free for food or sleep. Congratulations, Double Fine: I'm loving what I see so far. Keep up work like this and we might see a resurgence in the point-and-click adventure genre which is sorely needed and I can't be the only one that misses the glory days of this level of storytelling.

Gears of War

Gears of War is a MANLY game for MANLY men. The MANLY main characters shout MANLY things at each other while shooting MANLY guns at MANLY monsters. It's all a bit overwhelmingly MANLY if you ask me.

Yes, Gears of War is an older game. It was released in ... (checks) ... oh. 2006. Why am I.. a retrospective! A postmortem, if you will!

Sorry. Gears of War is an over-the-shoulder, third-person, cover-based MANLY shooter, released in 2006 for the X-Box 360, then rather haphazardly ported a year later to the platform of my choice, PC, with an extended campaign and some extra multiplayer maps. In addition to the usual performance issues and Games for Windows Live fun, there was also a digital certificate that expired in January of 2009, rendering the game unplayable for a lot of people until they patched it.

The MAC version, and subsequent sequels on PC, were never released due to poor sales of the first game. Cliffy B, well-known and out-spoken games developer insists that this was, obviously, due to piracy and not at all to the game being out on a popular and newly-released console for an entire year before reaching PC, and the port not being particularly well done.

My impression of this game suffers from having played the PC version of Bulletstorm, Epic's joint venture with People Can Fly (of Painkiller fame), and spiritual, er, side-story to the Gears of War franchise, also featuring MANLY men shooting MANLY guns at MANLY monsters while shouting MANLY things at each other. But it also has Jennifer Hale, a color palette of more than three shades of grey, and is first-person and therefore not as reliant on MANLY hiding behind chest-high walls while MANLY monsters shoot at you. Which, coincidentally, failed on PC as well, because of piracy (obviously) and not because the demo was released 2 months after the game, and the game suffered horrible frame-rates on resolutions that were not multiples of 8.

As I write this, I'm most of the way through Act 4 of 5 acts, and I'm not entirely sure of what the story is. Maybe the game skipped a cutscene early on, but there are monsters.. not sure if they are aliens or not, but they're ugly, and they come out of holes in the ground, and there's some kind of resonance machine, and Marcus has a landing strip on his chin. Which is totally MANLY. The game has overwhelmed me with an eye-soothing color palette of at least 5 colors, including grey, dark grey, light grey, dull yellow, and dull green. And possibly some brown, but I admit that might have been a mixture of grey and brown.

Has the game aged well?

Not really, no. I've played several games since, from the forgettable Inversion to the detestable Kane & Lynch 2, to the combat sections of Mass Effect 3, that do this style of gameplay just as well, if not better. The hyper-masculine protagonists feel awkward and forced, and the plot can be resolved in pretty much two sentences. It's not a pretty game, and even if the character models are well done you can tell the developers had to skimp in other places like color palettes, enemy diversity, and AI to get those shiny character models.

I'm honestly going to have to say to give this one a pass. Maybe the sequels are good. Until someone hands me an X-box, I'll just have to look elsewhere for my chest high walls.

[Gears of War for PC is available for more than it's worth at this point at next to nowhere.] 

Defiance

I may have mentioned elsewhere, or may at some point mention, or possibly gripe incessantly about how I hate MMOs. It's something that I'm kind of infamous for amongst my gaming circles. It was with great hesitation, then, that I approached Defiance, a recent post-apocalyptic MMORPG from Trion Worlds.

I'm a huge fan of the Fallout series from way back when, but I've played Fallout 3 and New Vegas to the point of which I just don't want to go back anymore. I've spent that much time in the DC and Mojave wastelands that I just can't go back in anymore, and the old games sadly haven't aged well (and barely run on modern systems). I'm also a fan of the Borderlands series, with over 1500 hours between the two games and their various DLC campaigns, so when I heard there was an MMO that was "like Borderlands on Earth" and "like Fallout with Aliens" I had to at least take a look.

This wouldn't be the first time I'd been let down by an MMO with an interesting aesthetic, though. Fallen Earth was suitably action driven, with direct control with your mouse instead of point and click, but it felt weak and empty in the gameplay department. Secret World was a fantastic world to poke around, but it had that same control and interface MMOs have been using since WoW took over the market. Same with Old Republic (when all I wanted was KOTOR 3!), but that's another story.

Steam recently had a free weekend for Defiance, which was mysteriously 2 days shorter than the usual Thursday-to-Monday deal, but I gave it a shot. My first big problem with MMOs was notably absent (possibly thanks to Steam and its stringent update policy), as there was no staggeringly huge patch to download. Setup was easy enough, and I was surprised to learn that not only did you have direct control over your character (like in a 3rd person action game), but the PC version also supports gamepads, with a very clever, very familiar control scheme. Anyone that's played Borderlands will be right at home with these controls.

Eight hours and two cramped hands later, I realized just how long I'd been playing this game, and just how much it felt like the last time I'd spent this long in the wasteland. The controls are tight, the shooting is satisfactory, character movement feels fluid and natural, and the color palette is pleasingly diverse. I was even able to pull a strategy in that I'd used in several other games, as I'd picked a cloak as a power and the game was generous with the double-barreled shotguns. I even had fun gathering with two dozen other players around a piece of fallen debris wiping out armies of raiders or giant bugs.

The setting isn't terribly original, but the back-story (if you're paying attention to it) at least sets it up differently than most post-apocalyptic wastelands. Also, bonus if you're watching the show, you at least know who these two recurring characters are, and are kinda flattered when one of them keeps hyping you up as a badass to the local NPCs.

Like with any MMO, we have to talk business model: Defiance is a one-time, upfront purchase with no monthly fees. There is a cash shop I'm not terribly happy with, but I only got about 12-13 hours into the game. Most of what I saw in the cash shops were rare and powerful weapons, and bigger, faster vehicles. Like the Dodge Charger. The branded, just-like-in-real-life, only Mad-Maxed-out Dodge Charger. I can't say if these weapons, vehicles, and costumes are available from just playing the game, but I'd found 5 or 6 purple items, and about six outfits and hats from the 12-13 hours I spent, plus enough in-game currency (scrip) to buy an upgraded quad-bike.

Defiance was $41.99 this weekend on Steam, usually at $59.99. If I hadn't been short on scratch from having moved, I probably would have broken and bought it. As it is, I'm setting the game aside after spending more time on it than a lot of games in my inventory, and will come back to it when the price has dropped. If you're looking for a more action-oriented online experience, and you're willing to drop full-price on a game that you'll probably get your money's worth on, Defiance might be for you.

Defiance is available athttp://store.steampowered.com/app/224600/

World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria

Mists of Pandaria is the latest expansion for Blizzard’s powerhouse World of Warcraft.  With this expansion comes:

·         Level cap raised to 90

·         New zones to explore

·         A new playable race, the Pandaran

·         A new player class – the Monk

·         New dungeons and raids

·         New achievements

·         A new pet battling system

The Pandarans are Panda like creatures. The males are large and remind me of the Kung Fu Panda.  I was not sure how I would feel about a “fluffy” toon, but I must say, they are fun.  Despite their size they move very gracefully and give a distinct Asian theme to the game.

The new class, the Monk, is a very versatile class. Monks are a hand-to-hand specialists and can only wear leather. Despite this they are tough.  The Monk can cover all of the classic roles of the game depending on the path you choose, Tank, Healer, or DPS. So far I have been playing mine in the DPS role and the Monk can handle their business. I will probably switch over to the tank role once I can take the Dual specialization.

The new starting area is one part anime, one part Kung-Fu Theater, and all fun.  The new scenery is gorgeous with new creatures to interact with and in many cases defeat. It is a mixture of mountains, hills, rice patties and temples. Your character starts off being trained in the class you chose, but something is wrong. The great floating island that is your home has become erratic, no longer floating smoothly. Over the course of the starting quests you gain the help of the four elements and find out the cause of the islands behavior.  Once you uncover the issue and deal with it you then pick which faction you wish to join – Horde or Alliance. Once you make your choice you are locked in, no way to go back (unless you pay Blizzard the $25 for faction change).

I have not had a chance to explore the new level 85+ zones. I have been having too much fun playing a low level Pandara and leveling.  That will be in a future review.

With Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard continues to show why they are the king of the MMORPG.  Each expansion has added new zones, usually a new class or race, new dungeons, and lots of new quests.  Many other MMORPG’s have come out: Age of Conan, Warhammer, even Star Wars: The Old Republic.  While those games are good, they are limited. I know many people who play WoW who played those other games and once they got to the end game content, grew bored and went back to WoW.  Blizzard keeps the game fun with new things to explore, not completely the usual grind of killing monsters and turning in quests.

Mists of Pandaria retails for $40, $20 less than their previous expansions. You can purchase it online through your Battle.net account or through your big box vendor.  There is an option to upgrade to the Collector’s Edition for an additional $20, which gives you a new mount and pet.  I plugged in my code and low-and-behold I found the full expansion already downloaded and all the new content became unlocked as soon as it became 09-25-2012.

For me, Mists of Pandaria is worth the money. I am a long term World of Warcraft player, dating back to before the first expansion.  There are so many new things that if I get bored with one toon I can hop on another or create a brand new one. The graphics are excellent though with the last patch we have had to turn the graphics settings down or risk very low and jerky frame rates.  The game has grown and you can easily play solo or with groups. You can play Player Vs. Player to test your skills against others in the real world.