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Tag Archives: games

I might SMITE…

I’ve just been spending a lot of my limited free time lately (what’s not spent with my family), playing Planetside 2 and Smite.  Both are competitive play games, and being involved with a competitive team, you can imagine the level of  dedication exceeds that of the normal nerd level of play.

Which let me plug my refer-a-friend link in smite while I’m at it.  If you are interested in playing it with me, you can use this link to setup your account.  Just click play for free, and create an account.  If you already played tribes and global agenda you should already have a Hi-rez account and can leverage that.

I know about planetside 2 because you’ve talked about it before, but what is smite?

I’m glad you asked:

Smite is a third-person MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena), a style of action strategy games popularized by DotA (Defense of the Ancients) in the late 90’s early 00’s as a mod for warcraft 3.

The general concept and game mode circles around 2 bases, connected by 3 lanes, that are defended by turrets with a continual line of attackers spawned per lane lovingly referred to as minions.  The minions job is to be countless, and to dive continually to their deaths in the assault on the enemies base.  The job of the player (you) is to insure these minions deaths serve the greater purpose of gaining you experience and gold and to aid in the destruction of turrets and bases by being your fodder.

Sounds easy right?  Yea, it would be if you weren’t facing 5 other players who want to do the same thing, oh, and they want to KILL YOU.  So 5 v 5 action/strategy combat is born.

What separates Smite from other MOBA’s aside from the character concepts is the third person perspective in play and that all abilities and attacks are considered skill shots (meaning you have to aim them).  The games are faster paced than traditional MOBA’s as well which makes it a blast for someone like me to play.

Much like other games in it’s genre there are multiple play types: Arena, Domination, Conquest (traditional mode), Assault (random hero single lane conquest), Joust (1v1), Joust (3v3), and a random game mode referred to as Mode of the Day.  Mode of the day is usually pretty interesting because of some of the silly combinations they come up with forcing some unique character perspectives in play.

If you end up playing, let me know, you can friend me as lot3k (think low tech).

Another fluff post…

So my free time has been spent lately helping with 2 children with walking pneumonia, 1 infant (perfectly healthy) working a full time job with more than a full time workload; and a lot of the cool, fun stuff I’m doing at work (in my opinion anyway)…. I can’t talk about here

.:: sadface ::.

(I still think my wife has been working harder than I have)

Trick or treating was fun, both Will and Maggie had a blast at their last Trunk or Treat @ HSBC, and run around their neighborhood.  Will was all go, all night; and Maggie was super fired up about her candy!  I was exhausted afterwards of course, but I was overjoyed to see their excitement!  Glad I got to TC this week.

As far as my gaming; I’ve been able to play a little bit of Borderlands 2 (not even 20 yet), and Torchlight 2 (wiped out my save so had to start over) which I have enjoyed.  AC3 was released, and Halo 4 is coming next Tuesday.  Alas, my consoles are packed for the move so I won’t be getting/playing them right away which pains me a bit.  I’d get AC3 for PC, but I have already played all the others on my PS3, so I wish to maintain that trend.

And for coding; I’ve been doing a fair amount of (windows) scripting lately, but nothing really ground breaking.  I did write a SQL to email script in both vbscript then re-wrote in PowerShell (since I was informed CDO will be depreciated in future releases of exchange) which I plan on sharing here in another post once I’ve scrubbed them.  They are actually jokingly easy to do, but very useful for anyone that hasn’t got a paid tool for this kind of thing.

In the short term I’m going to share a simple script to quickly gather OS service pack information from AD from a list of machines and dump it to a csv I wrote for a buddy of mine (seriously, in PowerShell this is crazy simple).

Expect to see that post around Monday or Tuesday; until then, have a good one and pray for us (or keep us in your thoughts).  There’s a lot going on, and we all feel a bit overwhelmed.

So Global Agenda…

Ok, so this has been out as a retail release for more than a year. (Originally released in Feb of 2010) I remember being completely psyched for this game.  A Sci-Fi FPS MMO made by a company about 2 hours from my house, what’s not to love?

 

 

Long story short, I’m not sure what happened but I never ended up buying it because of my new job and how busy I became etc.  However they just recently went FtP (Free to Play) and with a price like that it’s hard NOT to play right?

Anyway, lets keep this simple:

Graphically, the game has a very stylized look.  Nothing amazing per say, but it has a clean look about it.  The interface, although functional, feels and looks a bit clunky.  It would be nice for a native method to scale it down, but overall the games appearance is sharp enough that it remains appealing.

Sound wise, the game is alright.  Though admittedly the music gets turned down rather fast so I can hear people run around in pvp.  The sound is clear enough, and diverse enough that you can use them for audible cues.

Gameplay, well I will say this first off.  I like the gameplay, the mechanics, the pve (surprisingly) and the competitive play.  I did not however, start out liking them.  The simplest way that I can put it is this, there is an amazing simplicity to the 4 class system that works, and enough diversity play style wise to keep me entertained.  The 4 classes are:

Assault: General tank and heavy artillery.  The class take and deal a considerable amount of damage when speced properly and in pvp can be a king for offensive objective control.

Recon: Stealth? Melee? Sniper? Yea that about sums the class up.  Very very sneaky.

Medic: Poisons and heals.  Decent damage if required to fight.  Overall this class plays well in pve and pvp for their healing and general CC utility.

Robotics: Turrets, drones, heal stations, and recharge stations.  The assault in pvp can be the offensive objective king, but a robotics player is the defensive one.  Similar to medic in the amount of versatility, but forced largely to choose mobility or survivability.

Each class has 3 trees, one of which is a universal tree called balance.  The other 2 are class specific that focuses on play style specialties.  For instance, assault is: balance, tank explosive. 

I can honestly say as well from my perspective, that balance seems very real.  I have yet to be on any particular class and just feel as if I am hopelessly lost against a particular pairing.  Like any class based shooter, you should expect limitations to your role, and respond to fill it.

At the same time, the min maxing that people enjoy from other MMO titles exists here as well, so it IS capable to get an edge, it’s not the kind of thing that is out of hand.  To be honest with you, I feel CoD titles are less in balance with unlocks than this title is.

Another point of interest is the AvA system, achievements, PvE instances, and just random loot hunting that turns this into a very fun and addictive title.  I highly recommend you give it a try (it’s free after all) and just play your way up to 20.  You might be surprised, and feel free to contact me in game.

lotekness

Global Agenda