Final Fantasy XIV Review

Just going to say this straight: If you're a fanboy of everything about Final Fantasy XI, you will like this game. If you are the other millions of players that didn't like it for the multitude of reasons not to, you will not like this game. Here is my first statement of this game: This game is junk and is not worth any kind of subscription fee. That being said, lets talk about it.

The game is in shambles in so many areas, but we'll talk about one of the most important features of any game: It's User Interface. The UI is utter crap and severely outdated. If you played FFXI through and through, then you're used to this old and broken UI for the most part. If you played almost any other MMO, free or otherwise, you will understand how terrible and clunky it is. Adding a friend to your friends list as well as just trying to get them into your party is tiresome and overly complicated to extremes. They don't tell you the commands to add friends to your friends list, let alone help you figure out how to do 90% of what's required of you in the game. Have fun guessing your way through it.

Exploration, where do I start? It's slow, tedious, overly long, boring. Do I need to use more adjectives to describe it? When the average MMO lets you use some type of mount type system to travel around, and for good reason mind you, this one doesn't. It baffles me as to why when the world is as large as it is, because it's huge. It would also help if the maps were a bit more intuitive as they can be cumbersome to try to navigate if you can navigate them at all for that matter. For instance, Kotaku.com found 90 some odd exact copy and paste areas of the map in a single area. Holy shit that's a ton of laziness and that was just one map! Don't worry, the environments suffer the same copy/paste problem as well.

Then there's the quests. Oh questing, how terrible you were. Here's a good example: QG(Quest Giver) "Go north and talk to <bob the fake npc>" Me: Oh ok, where north kind sir? QG: "North." Me: "Any general direction? How far north?" QG: "North. Do you not understand what direction North is?" Yes it's truly that open ended. They honestly just want you to wander and find it yourself. This isn't all that fun when you're level one and are having trouble just navigating the large town you start in. Yes, this is truly the quest you're given at level 1. Good luck and have fun.

The one thing I can say that's a positive is the graphics are astoundingly gorgeous for an MMO. They just look utterly fantastic, if your rig can run it (which mine could). I can say I haven't played a better looking MMO out there to date.

I don't think I need to say much more about this game, so I'm not going to. It's unfinished, unpolished and extremely rushed. Unless they just wanted to copy FFXI and make it prettier, which is probably what they were doing, except removing the Auction House in the process (Seriously, WTF were you thinking Square-Enix?). You will ONLY like this game if you played a LOT of FFXI or are completely new to the MMO genre and don't know better. Otherwise, go elsewhere. F2P MMO's are better designed and more polished than this. Steer clear and don't waste your money on this one.

Ever played Diablo? You like it? Then you should try Torchlight.

SO. I've been pretty bored on my days off of work as I've gotten used to being there all the damn time, so I was going through and looking for games to play. I was going through my games library on Steam and saw that I had Torchlight installed but couldn't remember what the hell it was, so of course I start playing. About 5 hours later I realize that I haven't eaten yet... Oops.

Anyways, for people that don't know about the game, it's basically a Diablo clone but with some updated features and one really lacking feature. You can play as three different classes that can essentially be three classes each (more on this later). They're the Destroyer (think Warrior type hero), the Alchemist (Mage) and the Vanquisher (Archer/Amazon from Diablo). Of course one of the great selling points is, of course, the updated features such as the UI, graphics, a talent-point-esque system and a few other random things. Some of the random things being you have a pet dog or cat that can hold items for you and bring them back to town and sell them for you. There's also an item enchanter that will either buff your item... or wipe every stat off it (starts off as 2% and goes up the more you enchant it). There's also a transfusion guy that just takes your stuff and makes it into better stuff (if you give him the right items) as well as a "Gambler" where you can buy a piece of gear and you get a random green, blue, yellow or purple quality item, hence his title. Lastly, you can fish in the game. It's really boring and tends to suck, but it allows you to catch fish that will change your pet dog or cat into other creatures with special abilities (not at all necessary to go through the game btw).

There's two dungeons in the game (seems small, just wait) that both contain quests that you can do that are given from town. The first dungeon is of course the story based one and is about 40 levels deep, give or take (sorry I don't remember). The 2nd one is an endless dungeon that just gets harder and harder the deeper you go and has more challenging enemy waves and better drops (makes sense, right?). The story dungeon tends to take about 7 hours for your first play through, give or take. Another feature of the game that is similar to Diablo is, of course, the random drops, sockets and point-and-click gameplay. There's also a hardcore mode for those that want the extra challenge. In hardcore mode, when you die, you're gone and that character is now unplayable. There's also two cache's for you to use in-game. A shared cache that is accessible to all your characters (there's separate ones for Hardcore and Non-Hardcore) and a personal cache. The only thing you can't share is money. Also, max level is 100.

Lastly, there's a good sized fanbase for the game and the developers are very fan friendly, so they've allowed the fans access to the game's editor. So you can find all kinds of fun fan-made mods that do everything from change the UI or skin of your character to new monsters for dungeons or extra vendors that sell random potions (or anything really). The mods can be really game changing for both the good and the bad, so USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

What really sells this game is that it's only 20 dollars. Pretty cheap considering it's an EXTREMELY fun game.

Now, the only lacking feature, and it's a very lacking feature, is there's no multiplayer. None. The only drawback, but it's a huge one. Thankfully they are making Torchlight II at the moment, which will indeed have multiplayer, and will also be very cheap. Quoted from developers of the game: "The price of the game will be comparable to the original game and will most likely 'start with a two."'

Well, my opinion is that you should indeed play it if you want something that's not Diablo but plays like it (or just really sick of the extremely outdated features). It's great fun and, as I said, it's only 20 dollars.

Sweet new Monster Hunter 3 PSP

I was looking through my usual websites and happened to stumble upon an awesome Monster Hunter 3 PSP. It wasn't because it had a Monster Hunter theme that I thought it was awesome though. It was due to the actual hardware improvements that the PSP could really use.

The first, and in my opinion the biggest improvement, is the new concave analog stick. It's heavily updated and looks much more comfortable with extended usage as well as better overall control. Anyone that's used the original PSP can account for the terrible analog stick it currently uses, so this could be a great improvement. The buttons also look to be concaved as well, which should be an improvement.

The second physical improvement is, what looks like handgrips that jut out from the back. I'm wondering if they're bigger for a second reason which is the extended battery life as I have no idea how large the new battery is physically. I know that the first generation battery tends to be a bit larger physically than the 2nd and 3rd generation, so who knows.

Well these are great additions that I'm looking forward to for the PSP. Hell, even cosmetically I think it looks good.

How to shutdown your computer... on a timer!

So I was done with my computer for the night, but wanted to use it to listen to some music while I pass out. So me being me, I decided that I'd look up how to shut it down on a timer. So here's how it's done (this is for PC's by the way, I'm pretty sure this won't work on a MAC OS):

Right click on your desktop (anywhere)
Go to New > Shortcut
In the text field for "What item would you like to create a shortcut for?" type in this: "shutdown -s -t 1800" without the " ". (The number is in seconds. 1800 seconds = 30 minutes)
Click next. Now, name it!
If you want to change the time at some point, you can right click the shortcut and click "Properties" and change the number to whatever time you want.
Now when you double click it, you'll now have an awesome new shutdown timer!

Now lets say you click it and now you're sitting there going "Shit! I don't want it to shut down in 30 minutes?!" Well, we have a fix for this.
First, right click your desktop and go to New > Shortcut
In the text field for "What item would you like to create a shortcut for?" type in this: "shutdown -a"
Click next and name it!
This will make it so you can stop the countdown whenever you want.

Well, have fun guys!

So you found my blog...

So you somehow stumbled upon my blog. Nice. A good start for me since it's brand new. As it's a brand new blog, you probably have no idea what you can expect from me on here, so I'll share it. The first and foremost things you can expect on here are things about video games, movies, gadgets, music and computers. This is named Entertainment For The Masses, isn't it? As far as I'm aware, those are the types of things that are indeed entertainment for the vast majority of people, and that's what you can expect on here.