Rorshac’s Game of the Week

We finally cleared Naxx last night.  This was about a 5 week affair.  We started, as told in a previous post of the alternate measures we took to get into Naxx from the start.  We have streamlined our groups, and have really maximized our progression crew.  We are currently using secondary groups, composed of 5-7 vets and the 3-5 newer folks.  We use this crew to farm  earlier bosses for gear and to speed up the rest of the run for the harder final bosses.

Bosses we farm:
Instructor Razuvious

Gothik the Harvester (my personal favorite fight)

Noth the Plaguebringer

Patchwerk

and if group makeup is right entire Arachnid Quarter and maybe Heigan the Unclean.

The Saph fight, pictured about, took us about 12 tries.  It is amazing to watch the progression of this fight, it goes from pure chaos to a beautiful dance.  We went from strategies of everyone on one side to lines of people.  We finally settled on 2 sides, one on the left, one on the right, collapse to the middle during flight phase, then get back out.  One big thing to note is in 3.0.8 they reduced his aggro range dramatically, in fact I have to run up to him and spit in his face before he notices me.  The nice part about this is it helps with the cleave problems.  It took us 8.45 minutes.  We were so excited and happy, this was 3 weeks of trying, meddling and tweaking.  I know this is hard to understand, we sometimes have problems moving, hell out first 3 wins against Heigan left the same three standing for the fight (which took 20 minutes one time and 30 in another).  Due to this fact we do require almost everyone to have 2 pieces of frost resist gear.  Needless to say we went on to Kel’Thuzad.

After three attempts he was down, we celebrated, distributed loot and moved on to kick the dragons butts in OS.  Our victory against Kel was a bit unique.  We lost a few people during the fight, at the beginning, we lost our enhanced shaman, who’s rez was on cool down.  Our Boomkin got him back up once rebirth was off cooldown from the first attempt.  When we hit the final stretch we lost out tank healer to a ice block.  I am the main pally tank, I tried getting a FoL off, but after one push back then another, I knew he was dead.  He was out of reach of our priest and our OT healer (ret pally) missed him by a second.  We then continued to beat on him as best we could….then….BAM! iceblock on our priest…he then took a dirt nap.  Well our OT healer came in, our boomkin shifted to heal and  needless to say we did it.  So with our two main healers laying on the ground, we celebrated a great victory then went and did OS, then hit up the Vault, it was a great night.

Next up is the Eye, wish us luck, I am sure something unorthodox will happen and we will try to skate by on skin of our teeth, however this is the way of this rag tag group of bad news bears on Shandris.

We finally cleared the 4 main wings of Naxx last week.  We had a good time and made made a lot of unexpected progress last Sunday.  We learned a lot in Naxx, we are a reasonably small guild with some limited resources.  Due to this fact we came up with some very interesting and creative ways to handle many of the bosses.  For instance we started in the Spider wing with only one tank, we had a pet off-tank the entire wing.  This posed us some unique challenges.  Against Anub’Rhekan we had a Rhino off tank the add.  While I would tank the boss and pull him around the room.  This only took us two tries to get a handle on.  We felt this was a great accomplishment.  We had some issues with hand the pet off-tank the adds, this did pose a big issue when it came to the enrage with Grand Widow Farlina.  We lost the adds before the enrange.  We were able to avoid wiping through the use of a front end burn, coupled with a staggering of the adds deaths.  I did have to divine protection at about 30% health left, the healers were able to top me of and keep me alive to about 10%, at which point I died, and DPS just burned her.  This also only took 2 tries.  Then comes the big spider, after plenty of wipes, we got lucky and beat her.

We then started some more clearing of the Spiders we now have the big old spider down a little bit better, we still wipe, but we use two tanks to make it a little easier.  We taunt after the enrage web wrap to help make life easier.  As our DPS gets stronger, that last 30% burn will go much quicker.

Our key to Patchwerk was two Pally healers, we had the bacon on the MT and the hateful strike eater, which was me.  That kept us topped off almost the entire fight, our first attempt we had about 25 seconds to spare before the enrage, now we can handle it with minutes to spare.

The ultimate point to this post is you can do somethings while short handed or different then the standard write ups on most Naxx advice guides.  You can find alternate ways to progress when short handed or have an odd class make up.  In fact, I am very proud of this, it added a new level to the game that was not there before.   One or two people in the raid were privately messaging other folks in the raid that this was going to be a disaster.  I was told about this after the fact and I smiled.  Needless to say those individuals are no longer in the guild and have moved on.  Guides on the internet are mere guides, they take some thought and insight to adjust them to your group makeup.  You will surprise yourself in some of the many ways you can accomplish your goal.

If you have any questions on Naxx or would like to know what other things we had to adjust for Naxx, please drop me a line and I will help you out as best I can.

So Madden is out, has been patched, so Brett ended up on his respective team, my Bears are my favorite team and I finished the training to get my Madden IQ.

Yup, this is the typical experience when first firing up Madden. It is simple straight forward and designed to customize the game just for you. The Madden IQ score helps you in game by setting the difficulty for your season and Franchise experience. This is both a blessing and a curse. I excelled at the running portion, so much so that I am a All-Pro, the rest put me in the middle of the tier. I liked this, passing defense has always been a weakness in my ability to play the game. Also, reading defenses when passing has also been a problem. This helps adjust the play to your ability. The problem though, is I ran so good during the test phase, I can barely rush for more then 50 yards in one game. Now I am not a Madden expert, I love football, played football, and wished it was where I ended up somewhere after High School, so I do have the understanding of the game, but passing and passing defense have mystified me in the newer versions of Madden.

The game is presented in a very slick interface. In fact, it looks like they stole…err…borrowed from a competitor for one of their feature. Players on various teams have special abilities or roles, for instance, Brian Urlacher is a “Smart Player”, which is identified underneath him with a lightbulb icon. This seems to be taken from 2K’s All-Pro Football 2K8, except these players are identified on the field, on both sides of the ball all the time. This is nice for those who follow their team but not the league. The pre-snap configuration features includes a nice drop-down list on the left hand side of the screen that shows what audibles can be called and what all of the buttons do. This is a wonderful addition as I was almost always confused as to what button does what pre-snap, post-snap, etc. This concept is taken even further, by using the Madden IQ system, it will put icons over players heads when in situations you might need help in, say for instance, pass coverage, this will help remind you what button to hit to knock down a pass, or dive for the INT. I really like this feature it is not obtrusive and really helps me play better. As you get better the icons start going away. It is a really nice adaptive system (as long as you don’t over excel during testing.)

The have a wonderful replay system at half-time that helps high-light 5 key plays to the half, albeit cheesy, it is nice to see the feature used. Along with the replay feature offers one of the coolest innovations in this genre, Rewind. Now time manipulation is nothing new to gaming, but I do feel it is something new to sports. With this option, I have the opportunity to rewind a play and do it over. In my case I only seem to get one of these a game, depending on your level of skill I bet this is adjusted. This can turn a barely incomplete pass into a touch down, or expose a open receiver for that game breaking first down. In my case, it turned a botched field-goal into a game winner. This is a great feature that adds a lot more to the game. I cannot believe it had not been attempted before (it may have been, but I am unaware of it).

Now onto my major beef with the game, I have two of them. First, commentary. This is at least an upgrade over the last few years and does seem to be getting a bit more adaptive. However it still seems out of place and a bit robotic at times. Organic commentary is still a ways off. My biggest complaint here is the stupid announcement, in what seems like once EVERY set of downs is “Remember, this game was brought to you by EA”. Duh, I bought it, unwrapped it, saw the logo. I know this and do not needed it pounded into my head. I guess this is the EA corporate machine at work. Speaking of that machine, problem 2, odd in place adds. My half-time reporting is brought to me by Sprint and my on-screen stats, by Snickers. These seem out of place and I do not like them. I spent 60 bucks on a game and you are going to bombard me with advertising. I understand this is part of the game machine now a days with budgets approaching 20 million plus on some titles, however this is so in your face and obsessive it turns me off to it. There are ads in the game I will review next, “Mercenaries 2: World in Flames”, but the are not in your face. I was running around and saw an ad for some movie, and said, thats kinda neat, on a billboard, out of the way. That is how it should be done. I know that are reaching for more gains per game and ads help capitalize on that, make them stadium ads, not TV presentation. I guess with the medium growing closer to that, we will have to deal with more products going to the TV presentation style. If this becomes adaptive with “updates” including ad upgrades, I will begin to get even more frustrated. Lower the price of games or ditch ads, your choice.

I will get off my soap box and get back to Madden. If you have taken a break from the series or are an every other year guy, you will want to give this one a look. They took a lot of things and polished them. They really seemed to grow the product a lot. The need to fix the commentary, but aside from that it is neat. There are a whole slew of features I have not even touched including Fantasy football score tracking, sports tickers, etc.

All in all if you like football and are looking for a game to keep you entertained, this might just do it. From what I hear, Midway may have a diamond in the rough for the casual football fan in Blitz: The League II, so keep an eye out for a review of that.

As one can tell from the title, there are some similarities between the God of War franchise and The Force Unleashed. The demo hit XBOX Live today, I fired up the PS3 and check PSN but it was not listed yet. I woke up bright at early, kicked-off the download, and then slept for another hour knowing that when I got up my dreams would be a reality.

Since this is a demo with many features crippled, I will leave some judgment for the release version. Loading times on menus, subtitles always on, things of that nature just seem to frustrate. The demo offers two small scenarios, a Force Grip Lesson and what feel like 1/4, it better be at least that or smaller, of a level. The voice acting is great, the controls, albeit clunky at first begin to shine after a while. I found myself fumbling along trying to pick something up, charge it and toss it in a timely manner. Towards the end it really started to come along.

What it has in common with its brethren, God of War, is the following:

• Baddies when you kill them drop orbs.
• There are stylized combos that are rated.
• Bigger guys, like an AT-ST are taken down with the cut-scene follow the flashing button twitch puzzle.
• There seem to be a level up system, however that was not fully explained in the demo.
• And, It Looks just as Awesome!

That is really it, when it comes to comparison. What I did play, I loved. It felt like a StarWars game. It sounded like a StarWars game. You do really feel like you control the force and are all powerful. Even though it is more or less the same canned animation, there is something gratifying about force pushing open a door.

I saw a video of the level a few days prior to the release and I was getting gravely concerned for the title, it almost executed one of my number one flaws in many games, endless streams of enemies that are scripted events (Stranglehold Review). As it turns out, the part in question was just a poor player. The room in question is actually a bit of a sandbox to play with your force powers. You can fight your way through and leave the room at any time. My biggest complaint is I only felt in peril twice. Now the demo might just provide a health boost or reduction in damage, however, I took a lot of shots and my health bar barely dropped.

The game seems like it should be great, this little sample, though short, shows the potential this game has. Now lets just hope it is long enough, has a good story, and there are no whiny children or gungans in it. Looks like they might just salvage parts of the franchise just yet.