Ok, so I finally decided to pickup an Elder Scrolls game this fall and play through it.  I’ve had enough of my friends spending hours upon hours in these games over the years that I thought I should check it out.  Besides, buying this game helped me qualify for a $100 reward certificate from Best Buy because of all the games I bought this last fall.  Now, on to discussing the game.

Skyrim is the fifth game in the Elder Scrolls series, set in a fantasy world with races of elves, humans, orcs, & khajiit (cat people).   You start off as an innocent person caught up in a civil war (reasons for your capture vary, depending on character class you select).  The game begins with you being carted away by the empirial army of Cyrodiil, along with other prisoners of war, to a small hamlet where you are to be executed.  As you lay your head on the chopping block, a dragon swoops down and starts attacking the settlement.  During the chaos you escape with the aid of either an empire soldier or a fellow prisoner.  From there your adventure begins.

The game has a fairly simple plot line.  You discover you’re a “dragonborn”, a person that can speak the language of dragons and if you kill a dragon, you absorb it’s soul (otherwise, dragons are essentially immortal if killed by someone else).  Words in the dragon language come out as ‘shouts’ and depending on the words you say, the shout has different effects (cause damage, create fire, etc).   Your ultimate mission in the game is to face against the oldest dragon, Alduin, and defeat him so that he doesn’t destroy the entire world.

Skyrim is packed with tons of side quests.  There are entire tertiary plot lines you can optionally play through, with each helping you improve your character’s skills in certain areas.  The Thieves Guild plot line improves your stealth skills, the Mage’s College plot builds up your magic skills, the Dark Brotherhood plot improves your sneak attack and combat skills, and the Companions plot line improves your standard combat skills.   Each of the optional plots is somewhat interesting, but albeit predictable.  They all follow the same basic pattern of “Do some menial tasks, discover some threat against us, take out that threat, and become our new leader”.   Completing the side plots doesn’t even require actually using the skills that the plot focuses on.  You technically can become the ArchMage of the Mage’s College without using magic at all.  Skyrim also employes a dynamic quest generating system that can potentially keep the game going forever (or until you get bored with the same side quests over and over).

Overall though, Skyrim was a fairly basic game that was drawn out way longer than it should have been.  The game takes forever to play with the constant loading screens (every time you open a door, it seems you get a loading screen) and amount of walking you have to do.   I’ve seen lots of people saying this game should be “Game of the Year”, but I just don’t see that.  Making an immensely long game doesn’t make it a great game.  That’s all Skyrim is – a long game.  The plot is fairly basic, with most of your time wasted on side quests or grinding skill levels up doing mundane tasks.  With how much they drag the game out, it really doesn’t have any replay value.  The storyline is pretty much the same, regardless of how you play it.  The most annoying part of the game though, was the fact that they didn’t get more variety in voice actors to play the parts.  It felt like they used 3-4 people to voice every character in the game, repeating dialogue all over the place.  Guards in every city say the same lines.  Shopkeepers all say the same lines.  After a while, I just wish they’d let you turn off all mundane dialogue and save me the time of having to listen to them.

Quality is another area of development that this game is severely lacking in.  I’m not unfamiliar with running into occasional bugs in games.  Skyrim is full of them though, more so than most any other game I can think of.  The game tries to give you an open world where you can explore and do things in whatever order you want to, but it fails to deliver on handling it if you do.  When I finished the game, I had a good dozen or so quest lines that were impossible to be completed because I found an item before I should have, I talked to someone before the game developers thought I would, or I explored a cavern or dungeon before being told by a character in the game to do so.  I even found one bug that literally broke the game during a key plot sequence.

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Great game?  Hardly.  Fun?  Sort of.  Long?  You bet.  If you want to play a time sink, Skyrim is the game for you.

I’ve been a bit lax in my writing of game reviews for all the new games I’ve been playing in the last month or two.  Hopefully I can get caught up over the holiday break.

Anyways, here’s a short series of articles I’ve enjoyed reading.  They have to do with shadowcasting in old adventure games.  Pretty interesting reading (if not a bit on the technical side).

Shadowcasting in C# Part 1

Shadowcasting in C# Part 2

Shadowcasting in C# Part 3

Shadowcasting in C# Part 4

Shadowcasting in C# Part 5

Shadowcasting in C# Part 6

The last installment of the Gears of War trilogy released recently, easily my own most anticipated game this year. Gears of War has always been a different style from most shooters, placing the player in a 3rd person perspective looking over the shoulder of the character you’re controlling. The ingenious cover system and it’s implementation into the game makes Gears of War unique among shooters. The final Gears game did not disappoint.

The story is set 2 years after the previous Gears game, after humanity on the planet Sera had sunk it’s last remaining stronghold into the ocean in an attempt to destroy the locust horde beneath the surface of the planet. In this game, humanity is on the brink of extinction and so is the Locust horde. Both are being attacked by a new life form called the “Lambent”. The Lambent is a parasitic life form that comes from the immulsion fuel supply that is widely used on the planet. The Lambent is what pushed the Locusts to emerge from beneath the surface, causing them to flee. In this game, you learn that the main character’s father is still alive (presumed dead in the backstory of previous games) and has a potential solution to the Lambent problem. You fight across Lambent and Locust infested areas, crossing land and sea in order to find him. This game throws a ton of character development at you as well, really showcasing the toll that this war has taken on these people.

Epic Games improved even more so the wildly popular survival game mode, Horde, in this installment. Added to the Horde gameplay is a form of tower defense strategy. Players can build fortifications, turrets, & decoys to aide them in their efforts to hold off wave after wave of Locusts and Lambent. In a twist, another game mode was added to this game that takes Horde and turns it on it’s head. Beast mode allows players to play instead as the Locusts and try to attack the human defenders. You have a limited time to complete the wave, earning additional time with each kill or fortification destroyed. Each kill also earns you money and allows you to select bigger, badder creatures to play as with each subsequent respawn.

The multiplayer portions of this game got a boost with the addition of dedicated servers. The biggest complaint most people had with the first two Gears games was the poor networking code and how dependent gameplay was on the host Xbox’s connection quality. With this game, ranked matches (and others, depending on server load) are hosted on dedicated servers, guaranteeing that no one player in the game has a significant advantage over the others.

Video games are a business and Epic Games has followed suit and introduced a pre-payment plan for downloadable content (DLC) for Gears of War 3, much as other game studios have done. The Gears ‘Season Pass’ will cost you $30 outright, but it provides you with access to the first year’s worth of DLC with no additional cost. Also, gamers can now purchase additional weapon skins for their guns to make them all nice and pretty. You could fork over money and buy them all ($48) or just buy the ones you want, which are relatively cheap individually (~$3 each).

Overall, this is a great game to play. The in-game feedback you get for doing specific accomplishments (ribbons, medals, achievements) is great. Different combinations of rewards unlock different little ‘extras’ in the game, such as weapon skins, playable multiplayer characters, or mutators for Horde mode (like skulls in Halo). There are many options available to you when you load up the game, whether it be single player campaign, co-op, arcade campaign, beast, horde, or versus mode. The game is fun to play and will be around for quite some time.

Over the last few months I’ve noticed myself getting more and more frustrated with my gaming experiences.  This has also coincided with a breakdown of the group of friends I’ve played games with for the last 4-5 years or so.  I’m one of the leaders of a gaming community, so it’s not like I’m without people to play games with.  It’s just that now I end up gaming with a larger group of people, but less frequently with any one person.  I’m starting to miss that consistency I used to be able to count on.  For a long time, I could always rely on the fact that when I signed onto Xbox Live in the evening that there would be at least 4-5 people from that core group of friends online as well, and almost always we would be in the same game.

That consistency builds familiarity with each other and our gaming styles.  We could roll into an online game in Halo, Call of Duty, or Gears of War and pretty much steam roll most of our opponents, all the time enjoying good conversation and having fun.  Over the last few years, that core group has broken down as we’ve all moved on with our lives.  Some guys have had to stop gaming due to shift changes at their places of employment.  Others have had school commitments to worry about.  Some have had access restricted because of military assignments and others have simply just stopped gaming.

While I can find good people to play games with now through the online gaming community I help manage, there just isn’t anyone that I game with regularly enough to get that sense of camaraderie that I had before. I’ve tried focusing more on the technical aspects of winning games, such as strategy and map control, but that usually comes off as harsh and demanding of people that I’m not as familiar with and who aren’t familiar with me.  The end result is one that I really don’t want to embrace, and that is that I’m going to have to consider simply giving up gaming.  Gaming with different people every time I play, even if they’re good people, just isn’t fun and enjoyable.  I miss that friendship that comes with hanging out with the same people consistently.  Unless I find something like that soon, I may just give up video games.

So, my Xbox Live gamertag got hijacked last night. This happened to a friend of mine a little over a month ago, so I am suspecting that someone is getting information through Microsoft (call center employee?).

What happened….
I was playing a game of Halo Reach with a group of friends when I was suddenly kicked off of Xbox Live with a message that my gamertag had been signed in on another console. Since my gamertag isn’t on any other console I own, I immediately tried signing in again. No luck. I went to my computer and tried to sign into Xbox.com, only to get a message that my password was incorrect. At this point, I realize what is happening and begin to have my password reset. I get the reset password link in my email and change it to something else. Once I got into my account, I notice that whoever had it had purchased 6000 Microsoft Points (online currency) using the credit card linked to my account. That’s roughly $75 worth of MS points.

I begin recovery of my gamertag to my console ( a process that takes 20-30 minutes ) and call up Xbox Live support. I talk to someone in their billing department who is able to see what happened. I inquired what my options were. They said they could refund the MS points for me and they could also do an investigation on my account to determine who had done this. I asked what that would accomplish. I found out that it would be unlikely any legal action would be taken against the perpetrator, and the most likely action would be simply banning their IP address and console they used from accessing Xbox Live services. Also, if I wanted to have them do an investigation on my account, I would be locked out from using it for up to a month while they looked into it. Once the investigation is complete, I would be given a free month of Xbox Live services. Because of the ineffective actions they would take if they found the person and the time I would be without Xbox Live services, I declined to let them take control of my account for the investigation.

To better secure my account, I have since changed the Windows Live ID account linked to my gamertag, changed to use a different password, and also removed any payment methods linked to my account (credit cards, paypal). I will be making any future Xbox Live subscription payments or MS point purchases using pre-paid codes that I will purchase in a retail store like Best Buy.

I still don’t know how they hijacked my gamertag. I don’t know if they brute force cracked my password, hacked into Microsoft’s database, or some Microsoft employee compromised my information. I don’t know if they have a huge list of gamertags and accounts that they are working through or if they had just mine. I would encourage anyone who uses Xbox Live services to do as I did and change the password and account associated with your gamertag and look at removing automatic payment methods from your account.