Two Brothers, One Gaming Blog. Keen and Graev bring you their latest PC/Console views, MMO Adventures, and more from a unique and refreshing perspective.
For the next few hours we will be conducting updates to our site and experimenting with design changes. The site will be live during these updates, so if something breaks or looks totally bizarre just know that we’re working on it and should have everything stabilized soon.
If we can get the site looking good, we will keep the changes.
Keen and Graev
Update: We’ll continue working tomorrow. Working on it right now.
MMO slumps are always an interesting time for me. Right now I’m between MMOs as I wait for FFXIV A Realm Rebort and WildStar to launch. I’ve been tempted to go back and play WoW during this 7 days trial Blizzard is running; anyone who ever had an account can come and play completely free for 7 days. A lot of my friends have gone back to quickly run all of the raid finders to see the content. I logged in tonight because I never uninstalled, and signing up for the trial was instant and no pain at all. I just can’t see myself seriously playing WoW. I’m not playing because I need my WoW fix, I just feel like I’m missing out if I don’t take advantage of something free.
Marvel Heroes came out today. Graev and I have been waiting for this one for many, many months. We both signed up for the founder package and bought a hero like five months ago (or whenever it first came available). I picked up Rocket Racoon (because I have an unhealthy obsession with small characters, especially when they are animal-like) and Graev bought Hulk. Marvel Heroes is free to play, and you can install and play entirely through Steam. If you haven’t been following the game, think of it like Path of Exile meets a high instanced MMO, or Diablo 3 but when you run out of town you see lots of other players fighting the same monsters as you. It’s hack n slash with Marvel super heroes. We’ll write up a more formal review after we log enough time to give adequate impressions.
This massive tank holds like 18,000 buckets of apple juice.
Minecraft is still my go-to-game. Our community server is getting more and more packed each night. I built a workshop, mined out miles of caverns, and collected an enormous nest egg of materials. One of my friends is really fond of building worlds with one of the mods (this stuff is way above me) and I had her create me a really bright, colorful, cheerful world. I built a castle and warlock tower with Graev (he wrote about this a few days back) and I have relocated most of my building to a new workshop. I’m in the process of assisting… or rather watching… one of my friends build me a biofuel system.
Check out the screenshot on the above/left. On the surface is a cart that goes around on a track planting and chopping trees. It deposits those trees, wood, and apples into a box that sorts them down into machines which burn the wood into coal, juice the apples, and convert the trees into mulch. In the end I get apple juice and some sort of biofuel. My goal is to have a renewable energy source to fuel my crazy storage system that uses gregtech ME stuff. I won’t even pretend to understand any of this stuff.
Animal Crossing: New Leaf comes out on Sunday, and between all these other games I’m almost not even bothered by the fact that there aren’t any great MMOs to play. This might be the first slump in years where I think I’m okay with them taking their time to get it right. I say that, but in a few days I’m sure I’ll be complaining about wanting a virtual world.
We’re facing an epidemic here, people. Over the past several years vast quantities of water have been rapidly disappearing from our online virtual worlds. We’re already at the point where you cannot find a body of water that is more than knee-deep. If we don’t do anything to solve this crisis– Yeah, this bit is going on too long… But really, where has all the water gone? Some of my fondest memories in MMORPGs have been related to water and now it seems like most games don’t bother with it at all.
Water in SWTOR never goes above the knees.
First off I should probably mention that large bodies of water are terrifying. If you don’t agree then you are a crazy person. You don’t know what kind of crazy, messed up stuff is going on down there. Giant sharks, huge kraken things, slumbering old gods, male water horses that give birth? It’s a freakshow, man. And no, I do not have an irrational fear of water that stems back to a horrific family vacation on a house-boat. This shit is legit. On a more serious note… Water can be really frightening but also very exciting. Back in EQ I LOVED raising my swimming skill and exploring underwater locations. When I got the water-breathing spell I was happier than the fat kid in school on pizza day. Of course I was that kid, but that’s neither here nor there.
WoW did do some pretty good stuff with water, and GW2 tried (though I think they missed the mark), but aside from that I can’t really think of another game that has really done much at all to create a real underwater experience, and that’s a real shame. Underwater zones offer the opportunity for some more interesting encounters and tense situations that you don’t normally find on dry-land. It really doesn’t have to be underwater, either. Navigating the ocean on your own ship and suddenly being ambushed by water monsters that leap onto your deck would be AWESOME. Even better would be some kind of giant sea creature, leviathan or kraken dude wrapped around your vessel. I mean, dang… That sounds like it would be so much fun but nobody wants to do it. I won’t go into detail about how many games have promised me boats and straight-up LIED to me. It’s a sore subject around here.
It really bums me out that water is pretty much only knee-high these days. Maybe I’m alone in this but I want the danger and excitement of sailing the open seas, exploring under-sea ruins, and stabbing some fish dudes in the face.
I feel like I’m incredibly late to the party.
Of course I’ve known of the existence of the PlayStation Plus program, but I never really knew just how awesome it would become. I suppose I wrote it off back when it first came out because it wasn’t a required service like Xbox Live, and I must have figured they would never offer anything worthwhile. Of course I was wrong, which obviously doesn’t happen that often.
I’ve probably mentioned a few times by now that I have a new Vita. The PlayStation brand hasn’t been getting as much of my attention as it deserves over the past few years so I wasn’t really aware of any of the Plus offerings until I found out about their whole “Instant Game Collection” thingy. It’s actually pretty awesome that I can play games like Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Gravity Rush, and Disgaea 3 just by being a subscriber and it’s what initially caused me to sign up for a year of the service. Not only that but just recently Sleeping Dogs appeared among the PS3 offerings so I feel pretty jazzed about that. They also cycle these games every month so you are constantly getting new and interesting things to play as long as you are subscribed. I’d say it’s worth it for the ability to play these games alone, but you also get great discounts and exclusive deals on stuff.
It actually makes me wonder what exactly it is I’m getting with my Xbox Live subscription. I believe I’ve been a member for 8 or 9 years, at least according to that big number next to my gamertag, but I’m not really sure I have anything to show for it other than some truly horrific customer service experiences. Sure it grants you the ability to play games online and do some other minor things, but those seem to be free on every other console… I’m actually scratching my head on this one.
