Friday, May 6, 2011

WoW's Undead Have Nothing On This

Guuuuuuhhhh; Being bored out of my mind recently I went through some of my oldest reviews and have come to two conclusions: 1) They weren’t long enough, and 2) over 90% of them were reviews that had good scores. I mean come on, what kind of reviewer doesn’t have a decent amount of rejects under his belt? (No I’m not counting my recent rant of S4: DL) So unsatisfied and demoralized I continued my search for games. Eventually I stumbled into Forsaken World and Hoping I could make a bad rant or two I downloaded it and played it.

Unfortunately much to my disappointment the game was really-really-really-REALLY good… Forsaken World is the counterpart to Perfect World, the Yang to its Yin in a since. The graphics are awesome the visual effects are nothing short of stunning and you couldn’t get any more racially diverse if the game was based off of League of Legends.

I’m being completely serious, most people are waiting for future games like Guild Wars 2 or Star Wars: The Old Republic to be the “WoW Killer” when they don’t even realize that one is right under their noses right now, if more people knew about this game WoW could be dead within the month.

I was all ready to flag this game with a perfect score when some unknown all powerful force tapped me on my shoulder and convinced me to continue playing, so I did; what I found was quite possibly the games one fatal flaw.

GRIND QUESTS! – Quests that take half an hour at least to complete; the ones that have you kill a ridiculous number of monsters or ones that require you to collect a large amount of items from a monster that have a small amount of chance of dropping. Sure the game play is so amazingly good that you should be able to look past it, but the fact still remains: They are there!

















On that note I raise this question: “Why would you pay $15 a month to play WoW for endless hours at a time when you can get the exact same satisfaction from Forsaken World and not ever pay a cent?” If the 11 million members of the WoW cult stopped playing for a week and spent that week playing Forsaken World instead, my guess is half of them at least would never go back.

Forsaken World gets a 8 out of 10 it’s addictive, it’s amazing, and I’m going to keep playing it even as I go through the other games I review.

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Everything is Darker and Stupider

Most of you remember my (little less than a) review I gave of S4 League a while back right? Well Alaplaya released the second version of the game a while back. S4 League Season 2: Dark Lightning. You’re probably wondering why it took so long for me to mention this version of the game, well to be honesty for the longest time I didn’t think I should, but let me tell you S4 has taken a turn for the worst thanks to the introduction of a few nasty upgrades.

For starters in order to accommodate the drastic new changes to ENS4 League, the graphics have actually gotten worse. Last time I checked with better version comes better graphics, with this it’s just not possible I suppose. The games just become too big for their greedy little hands.

On the subject of greed, several new AP items have been introduced. There are three new outfits for boys and two new outfits for girls (who consequently later got 2 new hairstyles). These are all AP exclusive outfits (excluding the off chance you find them in a Fumbi Dance), all of which at one point you could have gotten permanent unlocking the ever overpowered “Capsule EXP Force.” Stats higher than any other stat available in the game, exclusive to people who spend the right amount of money at the right amount of time. It’s one thing to want to make money off your game, it’s another to excessively reward people who want to spend money. Turning them into what I call “instant pros” since their damage and defense are right up there with any pro who actually worked his way up (who at this point are few and far between).















S4 also got new weapons, the origins of which are a controversy. The first weapon are the spark and homing rifles. These weapons have a dandy little thing called “automatic aim.” When you use the weapon you sacrifice your ability to critical but the fact that the weapon hits 100% of the time from almost any distance more than makes up for it. The next weapon is the Twin Blades, which are often frowned upon for being long ranged melee weapons, but what most people don’t seem to realize is that the Twin Blades have so many issues it wouldn’t matter if they could hit the entire length of the field…okay I’m excadurating; point is not many people know how to use them correctly yet more people would rather see them go then the 1 hit kill Spy Dagger, which I think makes no since.

I suppose you’re wondering if there’s a moral to this ranting and the answer is yes. Alaplaya, at some point you forgot that MMOs aren’t about making a quick buck, they’re about having fun with groups of people. No game stresses this better than S4 League so you need to stop thinking with your wallets and start thinking with your heads. Don’t reward people who spend real money on a game. Well if you have to give them customization and originality, but don’t give them power. The way you’re running things right now totally defeats the purpose of S4 being a FREE 2 PLAY game.

Consequently S4: Dark Lightning gets a 2 out of 10