Windows 7 Impressions

The last week has been a bit slow for me as a gamer. Usually I'll only play new games for about a week or two before a new game comes out that grabs my attention, but Borderlands has been a highly resilient experience and I haven't really found anything in the last week that has pulled me away from it (Next week: Dragon Age: Origins). I've been replaying the game, which I purchased on Steam after my Xbox died, and having a good time of it with a few of my friends.

Anyways, in the spirit of keeping my blog updated (see the sticky note in the top right corner of my desktop?), I've decided to type up a few of my thoughts on Windows 7, as it may pertain to a few of you.

I purchased my copy of Windows 7 before it released and installed it on release day. Although I have Vista installed on my laptop, I'd never taken the leap with my custom-built desktop, which was still sporting the ever-stylish Windows XP.

The upgrade process was very simple. Although I'm pretty sure I clicked through for a clean install of Windows 7 like the upgrade advisor said I should, the installation process ended up upgrading to Windows 7, leaving all of my drivers intact, and moving all of my old installation files to a Windows.old folder. The process took about an hour

While I haven't truly put Windows 7 through its paces yet, my first impressions are pretty positive. Windows 7's interface is nearly identical to Vista's, save for the obvious differences to the taskbar. While I was hesitant at first to accept the taskbar appearance change, I think I've come to like the new one more overall. Unlike the old bar, in Windows 7 the taskbar shows previews of pages you can open if you hover your cursor over the corresponding icon on the bar (see the three Firefox windows open above). This is pretty useful and is definitely an upgrade over the Vista system, where you could only see the name of each window. Smaller taskbar icons also allow for more windows to fit onto the taskbar.

A key difference for me was also the addition of gadgets, which are surprisingly nice. I have installed two. The first is a webmail gadget which checks your email periodically (I think that's how it works, though it does seem to pick up on new email pretty fast) and chimes when you have new e-mail. When I first log on, the gadget is one of the first things I look at and can save me a bit of time if I don't have any new mail. It's also great to have when I'm multi-tasking, or working on a document for long periods of time, as it does a good job of alerting me when I have new mail. The weather gadget is also fairly nice, since it saves me the trip to weather.com every morning.

Vista's visual changes are take-it-or-leave-it, (I'm on the take-it side) but one other nice graphical addition has been the inclusion of dynamic backgrounds. Windows 7 allows you to set your background to change periodically, which is a nice touch if you get tired of looking at the same thing all of the time. I have a nice rotating setup of art from games that I'm following or a fan of, as well as some Halo 3 pictures I've taken while playing that game.

Performance-wise, I haven't had anything to complain about. One of my concerns when I was making my purchase (I opted not to go for Windows 7 professional, which includes some XP reverse-compatibility pack) was that I would be able to play all of my old games. All of the games that I have tried to play on it have run just fine. While I haven't booted up my copy of Sim City 2000, I have booted up copies of Alpha Centauri and some pretty ghetto Paradox Entertainment games, which have both worked very well on the new platform. Moreover, I haven't had any issues with drivers (though I'm running the 32-bit OS and I'm told that the 64-bit versions of Vista and Windows 7 have most of the driver-related issues). Since I didn't upgrade from Vista to Windows 7, I can't comment on the framerate changes I've seen in some of my games yet, but I can say that my framerates are not noticeably down from Windows XP.

On the included applications side of things, I also haven't noticed much of a difference, but Paint does seem to have a few more drawing options, which I've actually made use of for a project I have been consulting on. You can see the fruits of my labors at the right (sorry, can't share images from the project, but this will give you some idea of the additional capabilities). Notable additions include transparent colors, additional commonly-used art pieces (arrows, thought bubbles, speech bubbles, etc.) and different brush styles. While we're not exactly looking at Adobe Photoshop for Windows here, the additions are pretty substantial and were a nice surprise.

I've bulleted most of my other application-related observations to save me time trying to tie all of them together.

• WordPad still does not have spell-checker, so you're going to still have to buy MS Office or go download OpenOffice for free.
• Internet Explorer 8 is still worse than Firefox.
• Vista's new games are back in Windows 7, though they got rid of my favorite one, Inkball. Chess Titans is definitely the best of the bunch if you haven't seen Vista's game selection.
• Windows Live is another promising addition, but unfortunately I haven't done much with it other that look around.
• If you're a math teacher, there's a handy-dandy math writer. You can do all sorts of crazy crap now.
  
• Microsoft Security Essentials (not included but launched recently) is a great freeware security system.
  

If you were sitting on the fence about getting Windows 7, hopefully this article has given you a little more information. I tried to include most of the information that was relevant to me, hoping that you would find these same considerations important to you as well. In general, I'm pretty happy with my purchase, though there is nothing terribly special about the new OS. It's just a slightly upgraded experience that has some additional graphics support (DX 10 and 11). If you're tight on money, or happy with XP, feel free to stick with it, but if all of the bells and whistles in Vista and Windows 7 appeal to you, by all means, Windows 7 seems like a pretty harmless upgrade.

One of the benefits of a small readerbase is that you get 1 to 1 feedback, so if you have a question about some aspect of Windows 7 you don't see covered on other blogs/websites, I'll check for you!

-Jon

Borderlands Initial Impressions

Well, I was planning on doing a full-blown review of Borderlands later this week, but 15 minutes into yesterday's play session my Xbox died (E 74 error message). So, while my Xbox flies away to Texas for a new GPU, I decided to write up my thoughts on Borderlands for the time being.

Simply put, Borderlands is fantastic.

Borderlands plays very much like a first person shooter with RPG aspects, and is similar to games like Mass Effect. In its first person shooter aspect, it plays very much like original Halo. Your character can hold between two and four weapons at a time, depending on how far you've advanced in the game, has a shield which automatically recharges after a short period of not taking damage, and a health bar that does not recharge. Key differences include Borderlands' compass, which generally provides the same information as Halo's radar but in a different format. You also have a deployable special ability depending on your character, which can be a turret, a hawk, an invisibility ability, or an all-out melee-only rage. Cover is handled in much the same way as Halo, meaning that instead of "wrapping" to cover with a button press as in Uncharted 2, Mass Effect, or Gears of War, you simply duck behind cover manually, as in Call of Duty or Halo.

As an RPG, Borderlands is like many others in that it allows you to customize your character in a number of ways. Although your gender and appearance is tied precisely to your class, there are plenty of substantial customization options to choose from. Like most other RPGs, Borderlands allows you to also customize your character's specialization as you level. Each of the four character classes has a skill tree, allowing players to specialize in one or two different roles, depending on your level. In addition, each class has an assortment of class mods that give them and sometimes their teammates passive bonuses. Oftentimes, these bonuses are to a few skill levels, but other bonuses include team ammo regeneration, team health capacity and regeneration, team shield capacity and regeneration, damage increases, and even team experience bonuses.

Borderlands' item system is probably the most dramatic way of differentiating playstyle irrespective of character class. In an earlier article, I listed some of my favorite elegant game mechanics, including Diablo's item system. Borderlands uses a similar system to Diablo II's Magic and Rare items. All of the guns in the game have one or more mods (four or five at most) to basic things like clip size, fire rate, zoom, accuracy, reload speed, and raw power. There is also a coloring system to items to differentiate them in power level relative to other guns that can be equipped at the same level. Generally speaking, an item with its name in green that can be equipped at level 10 is going to be better than a white-named item that can be equipped at the same level. This increase in power level is generally a result of having more or better weapon modifications to some sort of base item. Since there are also different gun companies in the game which tend to feature different sorts of bonuses, weapon statting in this game is truly a deep subject. As you play through the game, you will probably identify a few types of modifications that you like best.

Gearbox has also found a way to make some of the weapons feel very different from one another using several particularly unique weapon mods. Some of the more unusual weapon varieties include shotguns that use shotgun shells but actually shoot rockets, weapons that have burst firing (shoot more than one bullet/rocket at a time), and three varieties of elemental procs.

The grenade mods are another highpoint, as Gearbox substantially differentiates those as well. Although I wish that there were more levels of each grenade type available, there are a number of different grenade effects, such as sticky grenades which stick to enemies (duh), longbow grenades which teleport to their target instead of flying through the air, grenades that steal life, "cluster" grenades that spawn additional explosions, and grenades that are more powerful against health, shields, or armor.

The best way to experience Borderlands is clearly co-operative play. While the singleplayer mode is entertaining, working with teammates to take down baddies is ultimately much more satisfying, and potentially much more rewarding. Since there is no loot-sharing mechanism, I recommend playing with players that you know, but I've also played a few games where guns were shared reasonably well by complete strangers. Voice chat over Xbox live is fantastic, as it makes it much easier to coordinate with your teammates, but most of the encounters in this game can be successfully attempted without much strategy. Borderlands does a good job of letting you know when your teammate is down, and where your teammates are at all times.

One of the disappointing aspects of Borderlands is its reward system. While the aforementioned badguys often drop good loot, the best way of acquiring loot in this game seems to be scouring chests. While I haven't beaten the game, the easiest way for me to get loot at various points thusfar has been to find an easily accessible chest or couple of chests, create a game, loot the chests, start a new game, and repeat as desired. Complicating matters, there is one example of a chest in the first third of the game that seems to dole out level 22-25 items although all of the surrounding enemies are only level 15. Additionally, in the second area, there are two weapon chests in town. Starting a new game, looting the chests, and selling the guns back to the vending machines is only a three or four minute process, and is basically an infinite money cheat, if you have the patience to run it over and over.

With all that said, Borderlands is still an outstanding game, and is easily recommendable to fans of first person shooters that might be looking for something a little bit new, Fallout 3 players that wish it was actually a first person shooter, or loot whores in general.

And honestly, who isn't a loot whore?

-Jon

Aion Impressions

I've been playing a bit of Aion over the past few weeks, participating in both the end of beta and the first few weeks of release. Having recently reached level 20, I thought it would be a good idea to take a step back and evaluate some of what I've seen in this game.

It's very difficult to give an accurate, comprehensive review of a game without leveling to the level cap and participating in all of the end game experiences that are provided for players. Regardless, I thought it would be a good idea to type up some of the things I like and dislike about the game. Since I've spent all of my time playing on the Elonian side of Atreia, some or all of my comments may not apply to the Asmodian playing experience.

Likes:

• Beginning area: The starting area of the game plays very smoothly and is fun. NCSoft has wisely decided to design menacing enemies to fight against--you won't be spending your first few levels slaughtering giant ants or garden rabbits.
• Graphics: Aion is gorgeous, and looks much better in-motion than it did in the screenshots I saw before I purchased the game. I have a higher-end system (2.4 ghz Quad core, 9800 GTX, 3GB ram), but I was able to play the game with a great framerate at 1680x1050 resolution with most of the settings maxed.
• Back-to-basics gameplay: This may not be a plus for you, depending on your particular preferences, but the pace of play in this game is definitely a little slower than World of WarCraft's. Although I've only played until level 20, to this point most of my combat involves maximizing cooldown usage. While you'll still obviously be doing all of your own targeting, the game helps you stay on target. If you are a melee character, your character always follows your target around if your target runs or is not right in front of you, provided you've activated auto-attack. This differs from World of WarCraft, where you have to chase down fleeing characters, or opponents can run through you, forcing you to turn around if you want to target them. All in all, Aion plays a little more like World of WarCraft's predecessors in the combat department.
• There is a ton of information about NPCs available to you: When you are questing, you will notice that all quest NPCs relevant to your objectives are displayed on the mini-map and the game map. In addition, many of the mobs and nearly all of the quest NPCs are clickable inside of quest descriptions. By clicking on them, you can read a little bit of background on the NPC, see some information pertaining to what region of the world they inhabit, and where to find them. This is particularly useful for areas that you have not explored yet.
• Personal stores: Have some useful loot to offload? Simply set up a store (hotkey Y) to put your items up for sale. While Aion has an auction house, the auction house costs money to use, and if you are in an area where people will find your wares useful, you can sell your items posting fee and commission free simply by setting up shop anywhere in the world. Once you have placed items from your inventory into your store and set prices (the game even helps you by making price recommendations), you can set a store message and click to immediately set up shop. I've had a number of people buy tradegoods and random armor/weapon drops from me. In addition, the game remembers what you put in your store, and what price is it set at, meaning that once you have stocked your store, anything that didn't sell during your first session is saved for the next time you open your store. This makes setting up shop a breeze, and is basically something I always do if I get up to watch tv, make dinner, or work around the house. It's also a great way to make you visually AFK if you're grouping.
• Item "gemming" system: Most of the weapons and armor in this game have sockets. Players can customize their armor by adding different runes into these slots. Although there don't seem to be any "rune words" or bonuses for gemming an item with a particular brand of rune, the gem system is definitely one of my favorite things to see in a game. From a developer standpoint, it makes designing armor much easier, since players can use one set of armor to do many different things.
  

Dislikes:

• Size of the main cities: Transportation in the game is a huge issue, but nowhere in Elonia is it more frustrating than the capital region, from what I've seen. Getting from one end of the capital to the other can take around five minutes, and if you want to get to an outlying hub for a quest or two, that can add an additional three or four minutes to the trip. The cities are so large, in fact, that there is actually a set of teleporters (2) to make travel easier. The main problem with these, in my opinion, is that they cost money to access, which frustrated me whenever I turned in a quest and ported back to the entrance just to remember that I needed to hand in another quest before porting back. Note to developers: Don't make your game frustrating. There is a big difference between challenging and frustrating. Challenging is when players can become frustrated fighting a monster or boss, but when they ultimately beat the boss, all that negative sentiment they've been building up makes victory all the more sweet. Frustrating is when you have mechanics in games that never provide for this experience. I'm never going to feel good about the hours I've wasted walking around your game because the transportation system is slow and inadequate.
• Charging for everything: This goes a bit off of the point I was making at the end of the last bullet, but in this game, almost nothing is free. Money is very easy to come by, meaning that transportation, resurrection, item fees aren't overbearingly expensive, but I personally get annoyed when multiple costs are imposed on game actions.
  
• Gold-farming spam: This has been widely reported on game websites, but farming spam is much worse in this game than it ever was in World of WarCraft or other MMOs I've played. Generally, I would say I received a gold spam broadcast about every second or two, and would receive a private message advertising a currency website about once every five minutes. I realize that fighting gold spammers can be difficult, but NCSoft has had over a year to fix it. Blizzard has definitely stepped up their game against gold farm spamming. I expected that NCSoft would have done a better job.

Overall, I've enjoyed the time I've spent with Aion. Aion is definitely the most polished MMO that I've played since World of WarCraft, and reminds me a lot of Dark Age of Camelot, which is probably the MMO that I've enjoyed the most. At the same time, Aion has made me re-evaluate how I spend my time playing games. While there was once a time in my life that I didn't mind spending hours upon hours questing or needlessly running around cities that are too big for their content, in the last few years my time has been at a bit more of a premium. While I've enjoyed the time I've spent with Aion, it has also made me realize that the MMO genre in general is just not the best use of my limited time.

-Jon

PS3 Slim Unboxing/Initial Impressions

I've been wanting to get a PS3 for some time now, and the PS3 Slim's announcement was the perfect opportunity to do so. I've owned the Xbox 360 since Halo 3's release, but could never justify a $500 purchase for a handful of games. That's not to say I was dying to try MGS4, Little Big Planet, Valkyria Chronicles, Uncharted, and Killzone 2.

I picked my console up from GameStop a few days ago and thought I would deliver my initial reaction to the system.

Overall, I'm pretty impressed. The form factor is nice, though I wish that there was a way to stack it with my 360 without blocking the 360's vents. (This is probably MSFT's fault, not Sony's). I really appreciate the drop in power consumption, (though I hear rumors that the processing power is a little lower), and also like the buttons on the front of the machine as opposed to the original PS3.

There was also a bit that I didn't like. While I appreciated the included wireless networking (Xbox 360's wireless card costs an unreal $100), I did not appreciate the fact that the unit shipped without any form of HD video output. The first night I owned the system, I had to play Valkyria Chronicles at 480p, which was terrible, and in my opinion, unacceptable.

OS-wise, the PS3 is far inferior to the 360, in my opinion. While the OS menu is clean, crisp, and easy to navigate, the icons generally lack any color and many of the themes and backgrounds available make it very difficult to read most of the native fonts. I also found the PS3's store a little hard to navigate. What I did like about the PS3 was the Home system, which, when completely implemented, should be awesome.

Software-wise, the PS3 delivers incredible values on its games. Most games that are more than a few months old can be had for $40, as compared to the 360 where most games remain at $60 for a year. Nearly all of the games that I previously mentioned (excepting Killzone 2), are at this smaller price point or lower. On top of that, multiplayer on the PS3 is free, as compared to Microsoft's $5/month Xbox Live Gold. Exclusive-wise, the 360 seems a slight advantage (I'm a big Halo fan, loved Mass Effect, enjoyed Fable II, and liked Gears of War).

Overall, I'm very happy with my purchase. While I love my 360 a little too much to give up my XBL Gold subscription, I will definitely be checking from this point on to see if a title plays better on the 360 or the PC. Although I believe that the 360 is still a better system overall, the Slim is a huge step in the right direction for Sony. At the very least, I would expect to see as many PS3s as 360s under the Christmas tree this year.

-Jon