The Game I'm Looking For

It's easy to deride the gaming industry as it stands but the question is what does PC gaming need to be great again? What has it lost that once made it so great.

One word comes to mind, Bullfrog. Dungeon Keeper, Populous, Theme Hospital, each a completely unique idea perfectly executed. Peter Molyneux of course is still around but we no longer get games of that caliber. I wonder if it's because of the fact that authorship of games has disappeared. They are now the products of corporations, not the vision of one man.

Before, a small team could create a game that could compete on a world wide market. Now, with graphics paramount this has disappeared almost entirely. One man operations like Gratuitous Space Battles are frankly shallow. On the opposite side we have ASCII based games like Dwarf fortress which have depth but no graphics to speak of at all.

It's amazing to me that something has not happened to bring back authorship. But the fact is that tools like XNA do make it all easier but there is a huge difference between making some pixel art and building 3D model and traversing 3D space in code is no trivial task. Before a writer or developer could mock up a game with a chance of being successful in a few days (at least a simple one.) Now it would take much longer, we see people trying to sell their 3D pong remakes that it took them months to create. Creativity has given way to necessity.

I hope that we will see soon that the power returns to the author, Prometheus needs to come down a second time and put things right again.

Game Review - League of Legends

I haven't played many releases lately, I have to admit. In fact I'm beginning to realize that I have settled into a new market category lately, I am now a casual gamer. But have mainstream games given me a choice? Their constant rehashing of the same ideas frankly makes me sick, Dragon Ages bored me to tears, the latest Call of Duty about as interesting as glaze drying on terracotta. No, anybody of above average intelligence has no place in the modern gaming world.

So, you have two choices. Make your own game (I am trying to do this but it's hard.) Or maybe just taking the whole thing less seriously, don't look at games as an investment, look at them as just a bit of fun. And the best fun of course, is that which is to be had for free, this brings me to a recently release DOTA clone; League of Legends.

For those not familiar with the concepts of DOTA (Defense of the Ancients, an immensely popular mod for Warcraft 3), you essentially pick a hero from over 40 candidates and enter a team based battle to overcome the other side. Through the course of a single game you go from level 1 to 18, unlocking abilities and purchasing items as you go. It is a damn good recipe for a game which provides a good variety of experiences within the thirty to forty minutes it takes to play a game. Let's break it down.



Community: This is a multilayer only game and DOTA, if famous for anything, is famous for it's awful community of highly strung thirteen year olds. My impressions of the community so far, it's okay. If you "feed", that is die too often thereby giving the other side a huge advantage in experience, you will probably get given out to but that's understandable to some extent. Trash talkers do exist but I've found once I became competent at the game people were friendlier.

All in all, don't expect too much help while you are learning the game. Luckily there are excellent guides on the games forums that will help you along just fine. Once you aren't dying every two minutes the community is relaxed enough in general. The best part is that unlike certain other games (Looking at you Demigod) you can always find a game and it's really easy to pair up with a friend in a matched game. It's all as easy as it should be and then some.

Graphics: We live in an age of 4850s, GTXs and whatever else you happen to have strapped to your motherboard and Leage of Legends won't be using the majority of the available power. The design is great however and every hero looks unique and is fun to watch. Hero abilities are well realized and everything is distinct on the screen so visual confusion (in what can be a very visually confusing game) is kept to a minimum.

Interface: The interface is sublime, from the air based application that handles finding a game and managing your heroes, allowing you to have it in the background while waiting for a game to the amount of information neatly available on your screen at any one time. This game sets a standard for things to come with its ease of use.

Gameplay: Gameplay ranges from frenetic to relaxed. Comebacks happen all the time and every kill you get is extremely satisfying. Each hero plays fairly uniquely, even if they aren't all equally viable. It's a genuinely fun game to pick up and play but the depth is there too that keeps you interested.



Summing up now because I've run out of time. League of Legends is a great little game that you don't need to pay a penny for. So if you are like me and just want to have a bit of fun without getting annoyed at the horrid state of modern gaming give it a try. I'm in there as Vonkrieger.

85/100