Nuggetty Goodness

While reading this here post, I came to the realisation that very few games I've played allow for the kind of sexy Kate Beckinsale has in Underworld - you know, all sleek and black and covered and reeking of dangerbyooty. In fact, the only game that came to mind that let me come anywhere close to an approximation of that look is Guild Wars, with their girly sins.

Best part is, two pieces of this set are starter armor models, two are non-elite, and only the boots are elite. (Elite = expensive.)

The guy beside my blondie is Unknown Sin Who Happened To Be Standing There, and my girlfriend is Suicide Granny.

It's beautiful, and the presenter looks so happy. =)

Incredibly beautiful world. Unfortunately, its beauty is matched by its lagginess and confusingness (lol is that even a word) and bugginess.

Especially for the charr personal story, things are so ridiculously easy up to the arena bit, the leadins of which are ridiculously easy... then the siege devourer appears. That + lagging at least 3-5 seconds on all my skills in there, not to mention moving, makes the fight impossible. Not sure what's happening there, I don't lag THAT badly anywhere else.

When I managed to finally beat it on a fluke, I couldn't figure out how on earth to get OUT of the arena, so in desperation I teleported out.

WHOOPS! Now I have to do the fight AGAIN, everything I did has been reset.

._.

Also keep getting errors when trying to log into my existing charr, and when trying to create new characters. I have no idea whether that's because we're only allowed one character in beta, since the error messages certainly don't say *that*. So I'm left trying to log in over and over, and then seeing errors over and over.

And the LAG! Not even just on skills, MOVING seems so slow compared to GW. Not to mention the zoom. WTB MOAR ZOOM PLZ. Zoom feels like I'm stuck in a closeup. >.<

Contrast this to how amazingly smooth the intro is for a newbie in Prophecies, and how you can zoom way back to get some proper perspective.

I'm probably not touching GW2 again until the actual release. The beta can go hang.

Unhappy nugget is unhappy.

Added:
So I went and tried a human necromancer after it stopped bugging out... Uh... okay the Charr setting is gorgeous. The human one is just blah, on top of all the other problems.

The human area actually left me convinced that GW is more beautiful than GW2. The charr area at least really impressed me in terms of looks.

...I feel like someone who got engaged to this gorgeous all-round wonderful (by general repute) girly, even though there were some niggling misgivings, and who decided to BE OPTIMISTIC. And then this morning I had me a little grope and... AAAA THERE ARE TEETH WHERE TEETH SHOULD NOT BEEEEE.

._. Here's to hoping launch day doesn't make me feel the same way.

DA TASTIES!!!!

Zomg this is absolutely lovely. Particularly because I have trouble getting steaks as rare as I like in most restaurants. They look at me and insist on hearing 'well-done' when I say, 'rare', which results in my having to start repeating, 'BLOOD, I want BLOOD.' The blood trick gets me rare steaks, but also very strange looks.

But nao, nao I can cook my OWN! Mooohahahaha.

Steaky Goodness Requires
Miso - enough to liberally coat and massage into your steak bits
Cooking wine - I use Chinese plum wine
Onions - enough to cover 2/3 of your pan after slicing
Salted fermented soybeans - roughly 1/6th of the amount of onions you use
Steak! Any sort, after the 24-hour miso marination it'll be juicy and tender
Strawberries - enough to arrange prettily around the plate
Ghee - dollops for frying

Side Dish
Sweet corncob - 1 per person
Ghee -  to taste
Salt - to taste

Marinade da Steak

1. Slice steak into 1.5 inch thick bits
2. Massage with miso till steak is coated and happy
3. Plop in a soup dish
4. Pour plum wine over the lot till the bottom of the dish is covered
5. Cover dish with aluminium foil, toss in fridge
6. Ignore for 24 hours

Make da Steak

1. Dollop ghee into frying pan, use more than you think you'll need
2. Wait till ghee does a kinda nice streaky thing when you tilt the pan
3. Scrape miso off steak bits with spatula (if you have paper towels you can blot with those, I am too primitive a cook to have them)
4. Plop in pan, steak bits should sizzle nicely but not attempt to kill you via oil splattering
5. If steak attempts to murder you with oil splatters, turn heat down until it stops doing that XD
6. Cook to the doneness you like
7. Put on plate to let it rest

Make da Tasty Soybean Onions

1. Mix sliced onions and soybeans into your leftover miso and plum wine marinade
2. Pour the whole lot into the pan of tasty leftover cow-juice and ghee
3. Cook until onions are nicely caramelised with just a hint of bite

Make da Silly Corn

1. Violently yank corn leaves and silk off corn, cackling all the while
2. Pour a mug of water into rice cooker
3. Put (empty) bowl in rice cooker
4. Balance corn on empty bowl
5. Close, hit cook, ignore till it beeps

 

Serve da Tasties

1. Move steak bits to new plate, so their juicies don't bleed all over and offend your eyes - and so kittehs can lick the resting plate
2. Cover with tasty soybean onions
3. Slice strawberries and arrange around steak bits
4. Steal corn from rice cooker
5. Dollop ghee on corn
6. Sprinkle salt on corn

EAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT! YAY! EAT! EAT! EAT!

Particularly try eating strawberries with steak AND onion and soybeans all in one mouthful. O.O It is surprisingly wonderful - the strawberries sit on top of everything like a sweet fruity melody, and the rest is just amazingly umami.

This Clicktale review is completely independent – we’ve used it on several projects where we wanted to better understand user interactions. We’ve had a chance to look at both the way it collects data and how it reports this information. We’ve also had the opportunity to compare the results against other other software tracking tools, as well as other approaches to the same task such as physical eye tracking. We started using Clicktale based on many of the positive reviews we’d read, but on further investigation many of these were paid reviews (via affiliate commission).

Yes, a subs-based AAA fantasy MMO is not even half as fun (or IMO) even half as good as an asian F2P AAA fantasy MMO. (Not to say that I think there is anything wrong with F2P asian MMOs, just that the focus of their studios tends to be a little (ok a lot) different and the general perception of them seems to be bad.)

And this is despite these two being more or less polar opposites with where their studios and dev teams are coming from.

Rift just glows with love love love... in every aspect but its art direction, which is honestly, quite terrible.

Forsaken World just glows with love love love for profit... in every aspect, including its art direction, which is very strong.

Why do I think FW is better, and more fun?

FW has better combat mechanics.
The classes are better thought out, and combat flows more smoothly. Rift combat feels incredibly clunky and unwieldy for some reason. None of the souls I've played have really seemed to 'gel'. Be it from the press eleventy billion buttons builds that some mages have, to the press just two buttons builds that some ranged rogue builds are. FW classes, in contrast, have *flow*. Once you get into the groove, once you know what you are doing, they just *feel* right.

FW has better sound.
FW has great sound - with some classes showing it off better than others. If you have played a bard to a highish level in FW (60+), you'll KNOW the difference between how water/wind/light bards sound just by listening to them play (assuming proper play) - no need to even look at the screen. Contrast this with Rift, where everyone sounds the same. ._. Not just the players, even the mobs sound the same! As someone who usually turns off the music, but leaves the sound on, and who depends on the sound for cues on what to do next, the fact that everything in Rift sounds more or less the same is a big downer.

FW has better art direction.
FW is an attractive, vivid world. While there are some stylistic choices I may not personally like, (hrmm Stonemen), I cannot argue that they are beautiful in their own way. Whereas Rift is bland bland BLAND. And don't even get me started on mage gear. Good lord, I'm convinced Rift mages have the ugliest gear in the MMOverse, even when you discount rendering engines (of which Rift has a rather good one).

I would say those are the three main things that stand out for me. FW, while I played it, was an MMO where I looked forward to jumping into the game world. Rift is just kinda blaaaaah.

This makes me feel sad, because Trion so obviously loves its game and cares about its community. But that isn't enough to overcome the three points above. It's like eating a dish made with the finest ingredients and a great amount of love which has unfortunately, somehow turned out tasteless.

Needless to say, I won't be renewing Rift into month 3, though I wish Trion and the Rift community all the best.

...here's to hoping GW2 won't break my gameynugget heart.