After a good old fashioned beta delay due to "critical bugs," Square Enix supposedly opened its doors for the open beta yesterday.  I say supposedly because there are people out there, like me, who can't even get to the login screen to REQUEST A KEY.

It would seem that this open beta test is as much of a test on their webservers as it is their actual product.  Sad.  How can a company as large as Square Enix have such terrible websites?  All I know is, it's day two after open beta launched, I have the client fully updated, but I can't play because I can't access their site to get a beta key.

The most disfunctional part about this whole process for me is that I was in the "closed beta," and had a key for that.  Why in the hell the closed beta keys just didn't transfer over to open beta is beyond me.  I'm sure they have some good explanation for that as well.  I just can't believe that FFXIV is so popular that it has kept their beta key website down for 2 days.  Perhaps "critical bugs," did it?

Bravo.

Well, I still have about 20 hours left on my account and I've discovered two things:  APB can be REALLY fun and REALLY frustrating.  Your experience may vary from mission to mission, but it's usually one extreme or the other.

For example, APB's main flaws are noticeable during the core part of the gameplay: the combat.  Sure, it feels and plays like a good old fashioned shooter, but buried underneath is a poorly thought-out RPG system that gives an extreme advantage to those with better "upgrades."  For example, a team of 4 players with tier 3 upgrades for their character and weapon will roll a team of 6 players with anything less, most of the time.

Rather than provide straight stat boosts with upgrades, Real Time Worlds would have been better off using a certification system similar to Planetside, which allowed players to specialize in specific roles based on how far along they are.  The more a player plays, the more branches he or she can specialize in.  What this does is remove actual stat bonuses that give some players an inherent and sometimes unbeatable advantage over others.

In the end, APB suffers from a lack of balance, some technical bugs, and a piss poor community.  That's

right, the only thing worse than the game's rearing imbalances are the people who play it.  Need help?  good luck getting it in district chat.  Have a complaint?  Well, "you mad bro?"

Where APB shines is its customization features, which it has an abundance of.  Check out these screenshots of my sweet ride.  I bought the car blank and used the in-game design tools to create symbols and paint the outside.  Yeah, it's not amazing, but it does show off how detailed this game's design tools are.

Yeah, I played the original Starcraft a lot when I was younger.  But most of the games I played on Battle.net back then were against the computer, called "COMP STOMPS."  I never did get involved in the ladder games and only did a handful of 1v1s, whcih I lost by huge margins.

Flash forward and I'm much older and experienced.  Starcraft 2 is everything I hoped it would be in terms of a multiplayer experience.  The ladders are well done and the matchmaking is appreciated.  I'm not very focused on the team games so much because I find them to be very annoying.  They rarely turn out to be competitive games because they almost always involve an early 2v1, 3v1, or 4v1 rush that knocks one player out of the game from the start.

Nevertheless, I've secured a position in a Gold division for 1v1, which I think is fairly decent given my absolute inexperience of playing against human opponents.  I also had no beta experience with Starcraft 2, which is a shame because I'm sure I'd be further along by now.

Here's the take away:  Starcraft 2 is one of the best RTS games of all-time.  It has managed to capture the attention of many friends of mine who have never really played an RTS game at all.  And, you can count on Starcraft 2 being around for a long, long time, so dedicating time to learning it and getting better shouldn't be seen as a waste.

See you on the ladders!

Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty

Releasing next week, I'll be at the midnight release at my local GameStop for sure.  Whether I take the following day off work or not... I'm not sure.  However, to say I'm excited about this would be an understatement.  I feel like Vegeta when he first turned Super-Saiyan.  Yeah, a DBZ reference.

The latest trailer doesn't fail to excite either.  A lot of people have been focused completely on the gameplay and multiplayer for Starcraft 2, since that's what has been fine tuned during the beta process.  Of course, let's not forget Blizzard's ability to craft an engaging story too!

Kingdoms of Amalur

Remember Big Huge Games?  Maybe not, but they are the minds behind some great games such as Rise of Nations and the less aclaimed but still great Rise of Legends.  Most of their titles are RTS games, but they've been secretly working on new projects in conjunction with 38 Studios, that development company founded by Curt Schilling.

Kingdoms of Amalur is a single-player, fantasy RPG.  And, while it looks exceptionally generic from what we can see in the trailer, it does have a few things going for it.

• The mind of Ken Rolston, lead designer of the Elder Scrolls Morrowind and Oblivion games
• A world crafted by R.A. Salvatore, which I don't fully appreciate because he is unknown to me.  Nevertheless, his name sounds very fancy and all important-like.
• Todd McFarlane, creator of Spawn.
• It ISN'T being developed by Cryptic Studios.  (Sorry for the cheap shot)

The trailer doesn't show us much of anything except a guy who enjoys slashing at skeleton warriors.  Also, pay attention to the opening monologue.  Remind you of anything?  **cough** Lord of the Rings **cough**

Exit question:  How exactly does one kill a skeleton warrior by repeatedly stabbing it between its bones?  I mean, if they had organs or something to stab, sure.

MMORPG.com wrote an article citing Bioware's latest update (emphasis mine):

During E3 we gave live demos of multiplayer game play in The Old Republic for the press. Now we want to share the demo with the world. This demo shows how a diverse group of players use their abilities to complement one another in battle.

Is Star Wars: The Old Republic a single-player game with a multiplayer option?  I mean, specifically referring to a game's multiplayer component, when that game is being labeled as a MMORPG like World of Warcraft is simply redundant, and makes me raise an eyebrow.

Of course, maybe I'm simply reading into it and drawing conclusions based on nothing.  But, what I am most surprised about is the fact that NOBODY else that I have seen, on a blog or mainstream website, has noticed this little detail and questioned it.

The Old Republic is being anticipated as a heavily-instanced game, and most fans of MMORPGs and Bioware have accepted these terms.  But, does this change anything?  Considering one of the major criticisms of this game is that it is basically another Knights of the Old Republic, but with MMORPG features, gamers who stand on this side of the aisle might just have some more ammunition.

Whether you chalk this up to just bad word choice or not, one thing is for certain--Bioware is taking a very single-player style of game development and trying to adapt it to create a succesful multiplayer game.  Hey, if they can do it then more power to them.  Unfortunately, that entire design philosophy goes against everything I know to be true about MMORPGs.

If a developer were to release an FPS game today without unlockables or character progression for their multiplayer, they would certainly come under fire.  Gamers from all over would be holding it up and declaring, "What is this... Medal of Honor: Allied Assault?  Battlefield 1942?  What do you mean I don't get 5 experience points for every kill I get or an additional 2 for every headshot?"  Hell, you could have put me into that category not too long ago.

I have nothing against genres changing and evolving.  I've been harping that the MMORPG genre is archaic and needs to evolve for years now.  FPS games with experience points or unlockables aren't evil or wrong either.  No, my issue is with something a bit more ideological--something I've noticed most recently while seeing and playing latest Medal of Honor, which hopes to reboot the struggling but classically popular series.

Unlockables and Experience Points Are Ruining FPS Gaming

Remember when FPS gaming was about skill--when the difference between fragging and being fragged was knowing how to triple jump from the ground level to the top level to grab the armor replenish powerup?  In the days of Jedi Outcast (PC), I would join servers and 1v1 duel other players for hours with no promise of experience points, unlockable light sabers, or special unlockable characters.  Why?  Because it was F-U-N.

Today, words like "fun" are determined by the number of unlockable goodies offered in a game's multiplayer.  How much content a game has is based on the number of skill levels a player can advance to and how many weapons he/she unlocks along the way.  God forbid that all the weapons and gadgets were available to you from the start anymore, right?

I played Battlefield 2142 for over 300 hours, according to my Xfire, and still haven't unlocked every single unlockable, and yet my motivation for playing had nothing to do with unlocking EVERYTHING.  But my concern is that the FPS genre is succumbing to this "completionist" mindset that, in my opinion, has ruined RPGs and MMORPGs across the board.  "What the level cap wasn't raised?!" is often a criticism of the Fallout 3 expansions and DLC.  Gamers were upset that their virtual characters wouldn't be gaining anymore levels while they played the additional story arcs, etc.  Whatever happened to playing games because you love the story, characters, world, or gameplay?

The most striking thing about this game is its scale.  You can actually fly your ship past a space station, see a planet in the distance and think, "I'm going to enter its atmosphere, find a continent, and land my ship there."  The tech demos you'll notice below are from April 2010, so they are rather recent.  I've been following this game's development for just over two years now and I've been impressed with their vision and progress.  One gem of this video, aside from showcasing the ability to enter and leave a planet's atmosphere, is a planet with rings much like Saturn.  And, realistically, the closer the starship gets to these rings, the less they look like actual rings and the more they look like large collections of space rock and debris maintaining a steady orbit.  The scale is so impressive that each individual asteroid within the ring can be examined closely.

Now, this type of scale is impressive by any standards, yes.  But, we have yet to see what happens when  you start factoring in other variables.  For example, Infinity is supposed to be a multiplayer game, and yet we see very little of how multiplayer can work within a game world of this scale.  Also, while the planet terrains are impressively varied, there is very little representation of civilizations.  Hopefully, the game world will consist of more than large planets with absolutely no life.

Not convinced by my words of hype?  Watch the videos for yourself.

At the core of this failure is the lack of an economy.  Free Roam doesn't allow players to collect money like in single player.  Instead, the only thing players accumulate is XP, which then allows them to unlock better mounts, titles, and weapons.  The biggest problem with this move is that it limits the replayability.  If players simply have to reach the level cap to get access to the best weapons, outfits, mounts, and titles, then there is no reason to keep playing after you max out your experience points, at least not from a character progression standpoint.

Free Roam also lacks much of the depth the single-player world has.  For example, there are no trains to hijack, rob, or save.  Killing animals can still be done but you cannot skin their hides and sell them for money.  There is an apparent lack of NPCs and so towns like Armadillo feel empty and barren.  Essentially, there is just less of everything--a watered-down version.

This doesn't mean it isn't fun though.  There are a number of "gang hideouts" placed throughout the map that you can take on with your friends, but once you've completed them, they are the same over and over.  And, if you do find an innocent NPC to kill, doing so usually means having lawmen NPCs come after you, which can be entertaining for a while, but you and friends can only hold them off for so long before getting bored and letting them kill you so your wanted level goes away.

In the end, free roam is a great step in the right direction, but a very small one.  It definitely proves that gamers are ready for this style of gameplay.  Frankly, I'd love to see them develop on it using DLC.  Time will tell.

Anyway, aside from that, I've purchased my first "smart" phone.  I've never been a heavy cell phone user in the past.  And, unlike many people I know, I've only owned 3 cell phones prior to my new Droid.  But, this thing is really impressing me.

I was looking for something that had the touch sensitivity and response of an iPhone.  I'm tired of touch screen technologies being laggy to the point of being unusable.  I originally bought an HTC Touch Pro 2, which seemed like a good phone, at first.  The thing comes loaded with Windows Mobile, which should have been a red flag from the start, but I thought, "I like Windows 7, how bad could the 6th version of Mobile be?"  Well... it's bad.  Don't get it.  Ever.

When I found out the HTC Incredible was coming out in late April I immediately starting looking up extra stuff on it.  Sure enough, it seemed promising.  Now, I own one and let me say, it's awesome.  The only major downside to this phone is the battery life.  It struggles.  Yesterday, I left my apartment with a full charge and went to work.  The battery was dead before 7 p.m. and that's after no calling, some texting, and a few brief internet searches.  Of course, many Incredible owners have already been discussing ways to help improve battery life, some of which involves changing a variety of settings while some involves waiting for more powerful, third-party batteries to go on the market.

Either way, it's an awesome phone.  I'm not sure how heavy I'll get into the gaming on it...I find mobile gaming to be fairly terrible in most cases.  If I find anything worth mentioning, I will.

Oh, and yes.  The box really does open up like that when you first buy it.

Apparently, DICE feels that including any kind of numbers or details wouldn't do the changes justice.  When one forum poster asked about the lack of details, DICE employee "Bazajaytree" responded:

Thats the point of not telling you, so you dont go looking for the changes instead you feel what the changes are.
We'll tell you later what the changes were.

For example, once in BF2 we put in our changelist we had tweaked an assault rifle. The feedback ranged from "Horrible changes it is ruined" to "OMG this is so much better" and in the end we didn't actually change a thing with the gun. So telling you what is changes doesnt get an unbiased review of whether you think the changes are for the better or not.

You know, I agree with this idea.  Players read detailed numbers like "Weapon X damage increased 0.25%" and either complain or rejoice while not really understanding the changes at all.  It is almost impossible to calculate the changes without already knowing the base numbers and percentages, so why should DICE even bother?

And, interestingly enough, they even did a test which showed that players made gut reactions over absolutely nothing.  What this proves is that almost all of it is based on perception.  Could you imagine if MMO developers released patch notes that didn't offer any details about weapon/spell changes?  There would be a huge backlash over it.

What do you think?  Should developers include all details in their changelists and patch notes?  Or, is it better to just let the players figure it out on their own by, I don't know, playing the game?

Oh, and still no server filter for Hardcore mode... really?