But in all seriousness, Pokemon has been a series that has been able to stay consistent and adapt new and interesting gameplay that keeps people like myself coming back for more. I really doubt that the newest addition to the Pokemon line up will be any different. Heart Gold and Soul Silver are due to be released March 14 of 2010, and it looks just as exciting as when the originals were released back in 2000. As an extra incentive pre-orders will also receive  the Pokewalker, an external adventuring device! (Learn more by watching this video!)

Recently I’ve been exploring Diamond and Pearl, trying to catch up to all of the new interface changes and Pokemon. While some of the new features can be aggravating (like the dance competition) there haven’t been that many changes from the older games. Spoiler alert! Team Rocket is no longer around. Instead they’ve been replaced with a new threat, which is basically Team Rocket but with a “green”er perspective.

For those of you have played the newer games in the series, you may or may not be happy to hear that they have remade Heart Gold and Soul Silver in the same style as Diamond and Pearl. There have been many complaints about the newer series, generally revolving around how strange the newest pokemon look. I have to admit, the character designs have slowly began to decrease in the awesomeness of the original series. On the other hand though the designs of the world, and the variety of activities in the gameplay make up for it in my mind.

Hence my excitement for the newest addition to the series. I expect for Pokemon Heart Gold and Soul Silver to have all of the awesomeness of their originals, and all the variety of Diamond and Pearl. Perhaps my view is a little biased. Gold and Silver were my favorites because they were close to the original games (Red, Blue and Yellow) but had been updated with better graphics, a larger variety of pokemon that were still within the realm of reason and had new applications to increase the variety of gameplay.

I strongly suggest this game to anyone who loves Pokemon but feels overwhelmed by the changes the series had gone through over the years. This game will be fantastic, and I believe that with my heart and soul.

I really like Grow Cube because you actually pick little people, and you can watch them interact with their environment, just as if they were our ancestors learning how to live off the land. On the other side there’s a weird tree house and a tube that fills up with water.

Grow Tower is fun in that not only does the game challenge you to place the objects in correct order, but it also challenges you to make the highest tower you can. The animations are a lot of fun and the team is very creative with the way the objects you use change and grow. I really recommend this game, but don’t take it lightly. I have yet to beat any of them so far, which is a testament I think to how well their put together.

First on the list is Maple Story. Perhaps you’ve seen some of the cute little chibi avatars on adds inside gaming magazines, or little flash adds on other websites. I like Maple Story because unlike most MMO’s, this is more of a hack’n’slash and the slashing is done on adorable little mushrooms, or trees, goo things, etc. The characters clothing and appearance are customizable (my favorite!) and it’s 2D. This does lead to it’s own problems, like getting cornered by a difficult enemy. The enemies are pretty hard and leveling is slower than I prefer, but over all this game is a lot of fun. Check your compatibility before hand because this is one that you have to download to your computer.

I’ve written about Adventure Quest before. Poor graphics, weird creatures, but lots of fun. This could at least help you kill a couple of hours and you don’t need to be a Guardian to play. Although it is a plus as far as server space goes. On the plus side, it’s a web based adventure, so no downloading or taking up hard drive space!

Flyff (Fly for Fun) is another good one. It is a 3D environment unlike Maple Story or Adventure Quest, and once again, you have to download it to play. But it’s still free! Your character is customizable, like Maple Story (You pay real money for the super cute items). I like Flyff because it’s easier than Maple Story (the monsters are more compatible to your level) but isn’t as confusing as other MMO’s like WoW or EverQuest. It’s also a lot of fun to play with friends. The cool catch to this is eventually your characters get the ability to fly around. Considering it’s free the graphics are pretty decent too.

Finally I’d like to share with you the newly Open Beta version of Grand Fantasia, an online MMO by Aeria Games. I haven’t played it yet but from what I’ve seen the graphics are just as good as Flyff and it’s also free! Players who get to level 50 by the 5th of January get a special trophy and are entered in a raffle to win 1,000,000 AP (I’m assuming that’s money for the world).

I hope that some of these can bring you some Holiday cheer! Who knows, maybe that 20 bucks Grandma sent you will go towards supporting one of these excellent independent games!

Over the next few months as I periodically went over to their house I turned on Super Mario World and played it as fast as possible. I knew it was going to be another major stint before another chance came up where I was going to play again. It was my earliest version of speed running through a game. Every time I was sitting down to play I had most of my immediate family and some extended family nearby watching me play the game. Felt like being at the biggest event of gaming when I sat down to play.

Finally on some major holiday. The actual holiday escapes me, as I really only remember playing Super Mario World with my entire family watching me. I had finally gotten to the 8th zone in the game where I got to see Bowsers castle. My entire goal was to rip through the levels as fast as possible and finally beat the game I had been playing off and on for months. Then, the moment came where I made it to Bowser. The end was in sight and I had my entire family watching and cheering through the entire 8th zone up until here. I went through the three stages of Bowser and nearly died in the process, while hearing the “oooohhh” and “ouch” echos behind me. Bowser went down for good on the last hit. I had a moment of silence just due to the fact where no one had seen the end or knew what was going to happen next. Finally the Princess was released and gave Mario the whole speech. At this moment my family cheered like crazy and congratulated me on beating the game.

I can easily say, the moment I beat the game and had people cheering me winning was the biggest moment in gaming for me. I see videos like the SF3 Daigo vs Justin fight and it reminds me of the way it felt back in the day to beat a game. There are moments now for me where I see my son playing games like LEGO Indiana Jones and I can see how cheering him on gives him a similar feeling. I have yet to experience anything like winning Super Mario World again.

What was the last epic gaming moment for you?

Let me first off start by saying that my name is ###### and yes, I botted in AION. Why did I do it? Well that takes a little bit of explanation. And don’t misunderstand me when I write this. It IS wrong. It’s cheating plain a simple. However, in light of this latest “Bot Exodus” there are a lot of kids spitting on the corpses of these dead bots. Understandable, I was one of them at one point. But I figured I would like to post some sort of reasoning behind the madness. I didn’t do it to be an asshole and sink an economy. But, like I said, this all takes a little bit of an explanation.

Like many who were sick and tired of the WoW fanfare, and disenfranchised by the fail that was Warhammer Online… I had blindly drank the NCsoft Kool-Aid thinking that AION was going to be the MMO to end all MMO’s (heh big mistake). It promised the depth and balance of WoW, merged with the epic fortress sieges of Dark Age of Camelot. The graphics were (are) amazing, the classes perfect; I was in heaven. What was even more amazing was the beta, where we had the opportunity to play all the way to level 30. I did so pretty quickly, and enjoyed what little PvP there was to be had until release came.

This game was going to have it all, or so I thought. And I am an MMO pro. I had several max levels in DAOC, WoW, CoH, CoV, WAR …. So getting to level 50 was going to be a piece of cake. You see the critical thing to remember in any MMO that hails from the eastwestern American market is that Asian players are far more obsessed with the leveling than they are with the quests, or even really (from my personal observation…) the end game content. I think Ragnorok is a prime example of this. The grind itself is the payoff, not the completion of quests or raids. Once you hit max level, you got to reset your character and level them again for a “super max level” character. And NCsoft US did a great job of hiding this end content from us through a couple of different means. Primarily, they didn’t say a damn thing about their game from the time you start leveling to the time you finish. All of the video podcasts I saw were just a verbal beat-off of their end game content. Talking about how amazing and complex the game was. Looking back on those videos, they never really touched any critical parts of the game… like time to level (in an American market). And they left their community completely in the dark with absolutely no acknowledgement or feedback discussion; think of Mythic and their development process as the polar opposite of this communication fail.

The game then came out and it was amazing. I shot up to level 11 in the first day before taking a break to sleep. The next day was 11 – 13. As to be expected. The next day was 13 – 14, and then after that it was about a day or two before the next level. It is also important to point out at this point that I try my best to win in RL. I have a pretty good advertising job in the bay area, I have a girlfriend, bills, and the whole lot that comes with being an adult. So the good old days of college where the epic leveling grind session was a thing of the past. I had, on a good night, about 6 hours to devote entirely to AION. Which I think is pretty damn good all things considered. This would be ample time to make it to the end of the game and experience the sweetest open PvP known to man. I mean I did this in WoW and WAR while working a high end job. No sweat right? Wrong. Dead wrong.co

Once I got to level 20, I started to suspect something was up. NCsoft took out some of the elite mob grind spots and replaced them with regular mobs. So my buddies and myself couldn’t start farming for fun. Quests started giving out A LOT less, and I was spending a more than “a few” evenings a week just to get a single level. I came to the full realization that something was seriously wrong with this game when I approached level 31. It took me 10 hours, with rested xp, just to get a level. The quests at this point offered little to nothing in terms of xp. Hell, the reward was the same as killing a few mobs, and half a map away. The time to kill the mobs would be more beneficial than turning in the actual quest… what?? Yeah that, and the fact that teaming up with someone did NOTHING for xp gains. I mean, I know DAOC took a while, but atleast there were group and camp bonuses when you teamed up with people. And the XP from Fire Temple? Laughable at best. Loot drops were miserable and inconsistent. So twinking my way to level 50 was out of the question. If you just pair up with a buddy, the return just wasn’t as fast as grinding by yourself.  Thus all of my friends that I planned to play with… all went their separate ways. It was the only decent way to level… by yourself. The guild chat became the only real way to interact with anyone. And thus the real grind began. After about a week of this I started to pull out my hair. This was a waste. It was going to take months, if not beyond the first of the new year, just to get to the max level. The sweet-sweet bread and butter of PvPvE. That’s all I wanted. And it didn’t make sense. Why would a game, so feverishly centered around end game PvP combat and fortress seiges make the road to PvP combat take so long? It was so completely counter intuitive. Now I know what you are thinking, you can PvP while you level by going through rifts… yeah, well a level 20 something really stands a snowballs chance in hell against a 30 something. I once saw a level 40 on my side take down 6 (six… a  whole six) players, a full group, of level 30. To make matters worse, my account was banned (during their first “exodus”) for apparently being a Chinese bot. And since all I was doing at this point was grinding, I fit the mold perfectly. The truth of the matter was that for a weekend I had gone up to my parents to play, and my father, who is paranoid as ever, has a proxy. So getting my account back took long enough to convince the GM’s that I was an American. Great, I’m grinding so much I look like a Chinese player…. And this set me back in being able to catch up to all of my friends. Most of this was a result of NCsoft’s gameguard…. Or lack there of. A program like Blizzard’s Warden, which monitored all ongoing processes on your machine. They took it out before launch, so there wasn’t (and still isn’t) a concrete way to prove that anyone is using anything malicious to advance in the game short of an IP address. This was also at the beginning of what I like to call the “Bot witch-hunt,” since NCsoft doesn’t even have the technology to properly detect bots. Most likely I was probably “reported” by someone who just wanted me out of their Beluslan grind spot.

Being behind, I got desperate. There needed to be some sort of silver bullet to alleviate this grinding hell. I purchased a guide. I grabbed the one by Kozen. It got favorable reviews, but after I did most of the quests, it only gave me about 20% of a level. Completely worthless and a waste of $39 bucks. I then started to notice something about the people I was playing around. None of them responded. I toss them a buff, no thank you’s. I warned them that opposing faction players were coming to get us, no response. A lot of them had weird names like they just slammed their face on the keyboard. No guild, no title. After a while, and cruising on the forums, I realized these were bots. I was surrounded by them. Everywhere I went. They attacked faster, more efficiently, plus they camped all of the quest mobs that I needed to kill. I tried using that report feature, but obviously NCsoft had tuned out at this point because all of those assholes were still there. Leeching anything I needed in over to move forward in the game.

You know that old saying, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em?” Well I took a long hard look at my experience with AION. I wasn’t having fun… at all. Planning my life around this game was getting on my nerves. I had already been unjustifiably banned once. The PvP was obviously not happening any time soon. The grind was very isolating and boring. In a game that was an MMO, it was Online, and Massive, yet the Multiplayer was flawed beyond repair. So I did the unthinkable. I read up on some reviews, watched a few youtube videos, and then purchased a bot. I would like to say for the record, that it was at this very point that I had quit AION. The justification went as follows…

I hate this game and the time it takes to get to the end is not worth it and tedious beyond belief. I’m already F’d and have no desire to continue wasting my time. The PvP, while not worth the effort, seemed entertaining, so if I could make it to level 50 then maybe I could have a little fun.

And that is exactly what I did. I wasn’t playing AION anymore, I was playing “BOT.” And honestly it was a little more entertaining to watch it grind than actually performing the grind myself (which is sad). Set the guy up in an area of my liking, then take the girlfriend out to a nice candle-lit Champagne dinner. And come home to a bot happily working away next to 10 other bots happily working away. Turn him off, play for an hour or two, and then get some much needed rest. I played other games. I went outside, I ran while the sun was out. It was great. In my entire AION experience, The bot was the smartest move I made. It honestly felt like I was playing WoW again in terms of getting my time back. I had a life and a killer MMO character to boot.

(God I just expressed appreciation for WoW …. *shudders*)

Then when I thought the leveling couldn’t get anymore unbelievable…. It became more unbelievable. In the low 40’s I was clocking in 10, 11, 12 bot grinding sessions and still no level. When I used to wake up to a new level, I woke up to half a level. I started setting up the bot to run while I was at work. I eventually made it to level 48 where it took me 18 hours of non stop grinding just to polish off most of a level!!!! Good thing I was almost done… I hit 50, with a sense of accomplishment. I had totally gotten away with it. Lord only knows how many hours were clocked in total. I honestly never want to know. Even running the bot for that much time proved to be a lot of work. Trust me the feeling was pretty strange since I wasn’t physically there for most of it.

A few days later, came this most recent bot banning, and of course I was banned. It happened right before I went to work. I was brushing my teeth when it happened and was about to level for work. When I tried to log back in, the game informed me that the account was locked….. meh. So I got caught along the way. All good. Like I had said earlier… I quit playing this game when I got the bot. And the botting game was more fun than the leveling game in AION, so it just meant both games were over now. When I got to work, I found out that half of my guild had been banned too. Some guilds in our alliance were virtually wiped clean. Those of us who weren’t banned, have now canceled their accounts…. So we are all most likely going to go back to WoW after we take a month break and get caught up on a little console gaming for a while. Meanwhile I can think of a handful of people off the top of my head that the bot banning missed, and are still going strong at the time that I am writing this.

For what it was worth, it was fun. It was wrong, but fun. I feel that a lot of this could have been avoided, and most of this is NCsoft’s fault in the first place. I know it might seem wrong to blame the victim, but something I realized along the way is that the victims are actually just the normal guys who haven’t considered bots an option. Ironically, the people I sympathize with the most are the people who are going to rip me apart after I post this. It’s funny to read the posts of people cheering on the death of the bots on the AION message boards because most of their characters are around level 25 – 29. They have absolutely no idea just how much time this game is going to be consumed, and I won’t be surprised if the subscription totals start dropping off at the end of December and fall completely flat in January. NCsoft built this game that was going to take forever, because they didn’t have any content or filler to keep most of the high levels interested enough to play honestly. The worst part is that it didn’t need to be this way. They had the power to change all of this for an American market while the game was released a year before in China. If anything this was a market research fail. But an entertaining couple of months to say the least. I am glad the pressure of this game is off of me now. And I am looking forward to an honest run of WoW Cataclysm and Star Wars: The Old Republic. Hopefully they will learn from NCsoft and put a little bit more thought into the journey to max level.

Peace

- ######

Update: 12/11/09 – I have been getting a handful of emails regarding this article. I figure I would just make this clear before it becomes trend for my inbox– The person being referred to in this article (the part colored in blue) is not me. I had asked this person to give me his perspective on AION and what I got was a lot more than I expected. I have kept in contact with this person and we are both amazed at the attention this article got, and very intrigued with the feedback. It has been a pleasure reading all the opinions.

At least judging by the massive disappointment shared by all PC gamers, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is a big fat let down. Lets site the reasons why this game is being touted as the worst release this year for a game so highly anticipated.

The absolute biggest and most disappointing part of this game is the multiplayer. First off, Activision has done away with the Dedicated Servers. Really?? Why would anyone in their right mind pay for a game where you are force to play on a peer to peer network. There is already a petition in place with roughly 200,000 signatures to have this feature reincluded. Easily this form of online play caters to the host of the game itself and pits every other user at a disadvantage.

The other big dump on our faces was the drop in the allowed players in each match. Now the game only allows 9 vs. 9 gameplay. Not 64 vs 64 or not even 16 vs 16… 9. You and eight other people get to wander around ghost town’s of maps while you kill each other in host lagged combat. YES!

The single player gameplay doesn’t even make up for this travesty. The single player mode is at best an eight hour experience. I have already read reports of people powering through the single player mode in five hours. Why will anyone pay $60 for a 5-8 hour experience? I certainly will not.

Infinity Ward is dead in the water as it stands. You can see the reaction by every gamer who was has been thoroughly disappointed. Throughout every major site the game is receiving some of the lowest rating and reviews around. I will not be surprised if at this rate Infinity Ward shuts it doors tomorrow, because they must be seeing the disappointment through the sheer poor sales volume they are seeing right now. What are your reactions?

While I was playing this I couldn’t help but think back to games like Roller Coaster Tycoon. While I never played that one I did play Zoo Tycoon, which kept me occupied for hours on end. I think what I liked most about it was it was something that was appealing to both me and my Mom (yeah, I like playing video games with my Mom). Unfortunately it was a little too frustrating for her, although not nearly as frustrating as the Facebook Application versions.

Zoo Tycoon had similar problems to the first Sims game. The animals got sick and whined way more than they should have, and it was almost impossible to make them happy once they got depressed. If you tried to decorate the front of the animals cages by planting decorative flower patches the zoo keepers had a hard time getting to the animals, unless you gave them a clear path to walk on. But then the people would complain they couldn’t see the animals. That wasn’t the only thing they complained about. Too much garbage, bathrooms or not enough trash cans/ bathrooms, being hungry, being thirsty, being tired… These people never stop complaining. Eventually after looking up hints and cheats I got so good at the game that I had over a million dollars at one point (which was pretty amazing for me).

The Tycoon games are really good for kids because their clean, not impossible to understand, and they’re actually fun. If you really like “sim” games but don’t want to invest money in a game you haven’t heard about (like the Tycoon Series) then here you go. I would suggest any of the “Tycoon” games for sim lovers for the reasons stated above. While the originals have their flaws, one can assume that like the Sims 2 and 3 the developers managed to get out the kinks and annoying whining (at least a little) that make the original games a pain. It will be worth your money to avoid the annoying “click” games.

This brings me to my main point which is; Why are kids games so hard? When I think of all the Disney games I used to play as a kid, I can’t believe I even kept trying. The Lion King, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, Toy Story etc… They were all impossible! Why do they make games for kids so hard? Do game developers think that it needs to take 2 decades for a kid to beat a game for the parents to get their money worth out of it? Playing difficult games like this is discouraging for children, and it’s not fair to give them a challenge that they can’t beat just because someone decided the game controls should suck. “Oh they’re just kids, they won’t notice.” No, they won’t, until they grow up and realize that the people who made these games were jerks who decided that a games worth was based on its difficulty.

On the flip side I’ve played games for “kids” that were way too easy. I did a video review of the game “Crystal’s Pony Tale” for the Genesis a year ago. I mostly complained about how ridiculously easy but stupid the game play was. But that’s my point, why do the games have to be dumbed down? Why do they have to be short and easy, or long and hard? I believe that the reason why games like Mario or Zelda go on to be popular for decades is in fact because they are games that are challenging, but not impossible, with decent controls. This is what I’m dreaming for the future of gaming (as well as the decline of “shooter” games. There are way too many). As they say at Disney; “Dreams do come true.”

The story is based on Japanese mythology, specifically about a boy (Kisuke) on the run looking for a certain sword and a girl (Momohime) possessed by the soul of a swordsman assisting this young man. The game play is similar to Odin Sphere (2D side scrolling). You collect different types of swords that each have their own unique capabilities, but can only be used for so long before breaking. Don’t worry, the swords can be repaired. Also like Odin Sphere you have the option to play different characters to learn different parts of the story.

This game is amazingly beautiful and the character designs are so far from what we see on a game to game basis that I can’t help but be thankful for the variety, even if some do seem a little odd at times. Another good thing about this game is that you have the option to play on a Game Cube or Classic controller if you hate the Wiimote as much as I do. Which brings me to my one complaint about Muramasa; Why was it only published for the Wii? If you’re fortunate enough to own one, I strongley suggest picking this game up, you won’t be disappointed.