Roleplaying games

Today got an email of a friend of mine, that was all pissed because couldn’t find the quest mode in the card/rpg game I reviewed some months ago, “Magic Stones”. After a brief discussion with him in chat, I found out the problem: he didn’t buy from the original author, but from another site!!!

Often portals or other online resellers have old/outdated versions on their sites, so if you find a demo on a portal that interests you, is always better to try to buy it directly from the author to avoid surprises. It isn’t developers fault, since mostly are forced to accept such deals to earn more money to support themselves. And portals don’t update their games, so if the author 2-3 months later adds new feature/updates, the portals version is always outdated.

You must be careful about search engine ranking problems though, because often you would just do a search for the “gamename”, and not always the first result is the original developer. So in this case if you do a search on Google for the word “Magic Stones” you could find yet another portal reselling the old version. Unfortunately Google just places the result based on the “link” power, so a portal could easily get on 1st places.

What is the solution then? easy! - just google for the developer name! in this case, search “Winter Wolves”, or for other good roleplay games like Avernum, etc, always google for the author/developer name, like “Spiderweb”.

That way, you’ll buy directly from author supporting himself and his hard work, and also you won’t have unpleasant surprises!

Hope this tip will be useful to someone.

I’ve already talked about the graphic bug I’ve encountered for this game, so I’ll move on. It’s not all that negative, luckily
The game itself, as already said, isn’t much different from the other classics, like Everquest 2, DAOC, and so on. You have the classic cycle: kills to make adventuring experience, earn new spells/skills, level up and kill even more bigger stuff. Buy new equipment to become even more powerful.

Ah the equipment, of course, can be made by other players, artisans. I didn’t test the crafting system carefully so far, but doesn’t seem to bring any particular innovation. A fun thing, now you can harvest directly on the corpses, for example on poor wolves cadavers to get the wolf skin, and so on. Then you can make new stuff using your crafting skills and try to resell it to get some Gold pieces, which in Vanguard are always welcome, like in any other MMORPG

The last part, the most innovative, is the “political” part. Yes you can become a politician! you have to learn your way up to become the best diplomat, then you’ll be able to influence things in a much larger scale.

It is a MMORPG made for hardcore fans. Reminds me of the first Everquest: getting to level 10 will take a few days of play, while in EQ2 or World Of Warcraft will take you one afternoon, if you know where and what to hunt. Also the death penalty is quite high, and this adds up to the overall difficulty of the game.

The gfx, if you’re lucky enough not to have bug, is very good, but in my opinion not much better than EQ2. The world though is HUGE, that must be said - and the 17Gb of installation says it all!!

Overall , is a good game for the hardcore players. Those more “casual” oriented, will probably find it too hard, or too slow. It has many bugs and problems as it is now, and I would reccommend to wait a few months to see how things progresses! Even EQ2 when released was in this situation, but after 1 year it was greatly improved.

I’ve recently bought the latest Sony’s MMORPG, called Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. I must say that at first glance seems quite similar to many other games like everquest 2, and I’ve been playing it only since a week. The first impression definitely wasn’t positive. But let’s talk in order.

First of all, the graphic, which is awesome. But, as the title of this post suggests, there are LOT OF BUGS

On my Nvidia Geforce 6600, was a total pain to make it work! I had installed the default drivers that were working fine for ALL the games I had played in the last 2 years. But no, on this one, there was a really nasty text bug, explained well by the screenshot below:

In practice the text was like “baking” on the background texture, and if you tried to scroll up/down, it was “painting” everything making all the quest (or other game texts) unreadable… I tried to setup the various options but was useless, I found out that turning the setting UseStencil=False in the Vgclient.ini was solving that bug, but creating another interesting side effect (see below):

everything was invisible!! hard to play even in that other “graphic mode” !

I was very pissed until I found some strange drivers on a site called www.3dguru.com . I was reluctant to download any .exe from relatively unknown sites (the fear of spywares or trojan on internet is justified those days) but I was so desperate that I gave it a try - and it worked!

Yes I could play the game like a normal person - but what a PAIN!!! also, for some reason those drivers don’t make the OpenGL games work properly. So once I’m bored of Vanguard, which I presume within a few months maximum, I’ll probably uninstall them and reinstall the official Nvidia ones…