Just getting started. I really suck. Normally I get excited when I see a ! above someones head because it means they have a quest I can do. Evidentally that is not the case here. ! are a bad thing. That could be hard to get used to.

I've been advised to play through the older games before getting going on MGS4. I think I can muscle through them. We shall see. Hopefully I can ignore ALL spoilers until then.

So far... not good. I have to say that this game has been pretty disapointing so far, but I can put my finger exactly on why I don't like it. Normally it's just a general feeling about why I don't like particular games. This one has some very specific flaws. But it also has plenty of strengths that are making me want to give it more time before tossing it aside.

For starters, the game is clunky. Very VERY clunky. The interface is easily one of the worst aspects of the game. None of the key bindings are intuitive and the tooltips are just annoying and provide very little info. They seem to be extremely wordy and have a bit too much "lore" in them. I just want to know what the heck they do.. I don't care if they are "calling demons from the depths of Targarus" or whatever the hell they are talking about. Couple this with the extremely clunky animation (the game looks great when it isn't in motion) and you have quite an ugly visual the entire time. At least the spell effects are extremely cool. Everything else looks like bad photoshopping in motion. It's really weird.

The game does little to provide the player with any kind of information about what is going on. There is a combat log, but it doesn't seem to capture everything. There is also plenty of "floating combat text" above enemies you are targetting, but the text is super-duper small and flies by too quickly to give you any kind of idea how hard you hit something. The best you can do is watch how far their health bar dropped and make a guess. I can't even figure out how to get numbers to show up on my own health/mana/stamina bars. It's really annoying.

There also seems to be a major lack of buttons available. Having played WoW as much as I have, I have gotten used to having at least 5 action bars to either hotkey or click on. In AoC you get about 16 buttons (1.5 action bars), with about 5 of those only available by holding down the ALT key. You can scroll through alternate button bars too, but that is a huge pain in the butt if you want to get to things fast. Hopefully some good interface mods come out and make buttons galore available. Why this isn't there from day 1 "out-of-the-box" is truely a mystery.

The best thing about WoW that got so many people into it so quickly was how well the game held your hand through the first few levels, and taught you about the game by providing super fast explanations without flooding the player in a dozen different aspects of the game at once. That is not the case in AoC. I am sure at least a few dozen things have been flashed across my screen that I am expected to know about right now, but don't, since they flew by so fast. The tutorial system is really quite bad here. The devs should have done a better job of sliding the players into the experience.

The game has a really bizarre instancing setup. You can solo play in your own private instance (if you don't know what an instance is then you don't probably care abouy MMO's) that is called "nighttime". It's basically the same as the day setting, but with less people, and solo missions. You can't get ganked here. But you also can't run into other people here. You are basically playing solo on your PC with a chat window open to talk with others playing. It's really kind of lame. The game also does very little to explain this to you. Where as WoW is a giant open-ended world with instance "portals" scatted around, this game seems to be several instances overlapping each other. So if your guild mates are in one instance and you form a part with them, you can actually be standing in the same spot in a City, but not see each other because they are in a different instanced version of that city. Which sucks. Think of it as a "parallel universe" like is often mentioned in sci-fi and comic books. Despite being on the same realm server the devs seemed to think their hardware can't handle having everyone in the same zone, so they split things up like this. I personally think this was a retarded decision on someone's part, and honestly, they should be fired for it. Why take the second M out of MMO if you are going to charge $15 a month for it. Monumental stupidity really. (Yes, I realize my spelling sucks and there is some irony here. Thanks.)

Good things are here though. Leveling means automatically learning spells (OMFG finally someone came to their senses about this). Repair bills seem to be non-existent.. completely awesome idea, or the lack of a completely asinine idea. Take your pick. The quest log is actually pretty slick once you get used to it. Did I mention the spell effects are awesome? Yes, they indeed are. The classes seem to be pretty varied and creative, although at first glance it's really easy to draw comparisons with WoW classes. Hopefully they get fleshed out a bit more and can gain a bit more identity to individualize them from others.

Graphic. No, not graphics, but graphic. This is not an MMO that any kids should be playing. I've already seen a few boobies, and plenty of blood. This is good. I am tired of playing MMO's with kids that need to be trained the entire time. "No, you don't need to pom/pyro the boss before the warrior gets in there." You know what I am talking about. Granted I am not terribly keen on the idea of naked chicks running around a game, it does add a layer of humor about the whole thing. If people just get used to the idea then it will become a non-issue eventually. And after all, this is Conan "The-non-Ahnold" version.

So far I am only level 10. Note the title of this blog post is "early" impressions and not "I'm over 100 hours in, here is what I think." Leveling seems to happen super fast and I expect to be up into the 30's by the end of the weekend. We shall see. I'll try to provide more info as things progress.

I made a thread in the Site Enhancements & Feedback forum with the suggestion of adding a Ranking option to the Games Wishlist page. The thread spells out the suggestion that I have, but unfortunately it hasn't received much attention. Probably because the forum itself doesn't get a whole lot of traffic....

So, I figured making a link to it here, and adding a link in my sig might beef up the hits a bit and get more people asking for such a feature. I would find it very useful to be able to put a star rating next to each game on my wishlist to flag how much I desire specific games. The collector in me is screaming for it!

Anyways, if you think it's a good idea, bounce on over to the thread and slap your name up in the thread with a big old "Bgrngod is a genius, me want too!" or something. Make sure to remind them how freakin' smart you think I am. And if you don't think I am smart, well then just shut the hell up.

Today has been nothing short of painful. I picked up GTAIV on my lunch break and have it sitting in the trunk of my car. I need to go home and play it. I wonder if anyone will notice if I sneak out right now?

10/10 from Gamespot. That says a lot. I have a feeling this could be the year that finally trumps the legendary gaming season of '98. It's freakin' April and we are drowning in excellent games. Good times. Good times.

BTW: Gamespot's Oh-so-awesome blog editor won't let me have this blog contain all capital letters... like just GTAIV for example. Stupid Gamespot....

So as you may, or most likely didn't, notice, I haven't made a blog post in awhile. Well if you read the last one you might be able to guess why. I've been playing on my new rig quite a bit. Out of all the games at my disposal, COD4 has been getting the most attention. I'm liking it a bit more. It still has a mountain of problems, and too often collapses into an irritating mess of "noob tubing and 'nade spam" as it is referred to. But, at least I am having fun with it.

I'm starting to branch out a bit more and build very specific builds for specific tasks. I have a stealth build, a defense build, a "shotty boom boom" build and my "You got noobed" build. Last night I killed my pure sniping build, sniping kinda sucks in COD4, and replaced it with a "Sneaky Saw" build.

This new "Sneaky Saw" build consits of the UAV Jammer and the Saw light machine gun as the key features. The other stuff is optional. This weapon is ridiculous. It has a ton of bullets, shoots at great range, shoots FAST, and does a lot of damage. The only downside to it is the reload time takes forever. However, that is an easy trade off for the advantage. I've been regularly getting wins in 1 v 4 situations if I keep alert and take cover. Many a cap points have been saved/taken with this thing.

My "You got noobed" build consists of RPG's and Martyr along with the overkill perk to carry a sniper riffle. I routinely warn everyone in the game that I am packing noob gear so watch out. I usually then walk around trying kill people by hip-firing with the sniper riffle. It gets amusing sometimes. Normally I do this when a round is just going poorly and I want to have fun instead. Yes, this happens both when I am winning and loosing. Destroying an incompetent team is not fun. Niether is getting destroyed because the rest of your team is incompetent.

My scoring has been getting better, but not as consistent as I would like. I often land in the top 3 or so, I'm pretty much playing HQ exclusively, and occasionally I can take first. Every now and then I land near the bottom after going 0-8 or something. Those rounds are when I go Noob and just chock up the round.

I often will be playing and get into my old mode of play that works so well in TF2. RUN!!!! GUN!!!! That doesn't work here. I have to make a mental reminder to check corners etc and then things start getting better.

Anyways. That's what I've been up to. If you play COD4 then feel free to add me on Xfire. The more people I know the better. I warn you though, I don't hold back on cursing out crappy players that aren't even trying. "It's HQ you idiots, not DM. You have NO reason to be camping on the other end of the map behind that dumpster...."

Laters.

I put together my new PC last weekend, and have it almost finished up today. Hardware wise, it's all done. Now I just get to work on the case and lighting etc. Here are the important specs:

Xfx 790i Mobo

QX6850

2 x BFG 9800GTXs for SLI

Corsair XMS3 PC10600

Tagan 1100w BZ Series PSU - ESA certified

2 x WD 140gig 10,000RPM Raptors in Mirrored Raid1 (I think mirrored is Raid1 at least.. not 100% sure)

LiteOn BR/DVD reader

ZEROtherm Nirvana air cooler

X-Fi "fatality" branded (groan) Sound Card

New G15 keyboard (the orange one)

I went with a Danger Den Water Box, but quickly found out that was a mistake. There is no 5.25" bay, and the distance between mobo tray and lid is not high enough for my air cooler to fit. I realize it's a "Water Box" and all, so going with air cooling seems foolish, but my intent was to go with air cooling for awhile, then upgrade to water later on down the road. Oops. Now I have to sell it off and get a different case. Hopefuly Danger Den pulls through and does a custom Water Box Plus (5.25" on these) with an extra inch of clearance for the lid. That'd be just about perfect. Until that happens I am going to have PC guts all over the place "torture rack" s.t.y.l.e. in the current case.

Also, I started off with 2 BFG 8800GTS OC 512MB cards, but after having them in for 3 days I woke up on monday to find out the 9800GTX cards were released. I quickly put the GTS cards up on Ebay and ordered two GTX cards. I ended up turning a profit on the GTS cards, of about $15 each, which was nice. However, the GTX cards made my 3dMark06 score go from 16500 to 16595. A grand total of 95 points. I wish I had done some more in-game testing with the GTS cards to know for sure how much of a difference these GTX's are really going to give me. Synthetic benchmarks don't really tell you a whole lot. Especially at the end of their life-cycle when CPU becomes more important with them.

Also, I started out with a Q6600 that my fiance was going to sell me for $150. She won a QX6850 at PDXLAN (I blogged a bit about it) and had installed it in her PC. She was getting a very minimal performance gain from it since her mobo is stuck at 1066 FSB vs. the Qx6850's 1333 FSB rating. With the Q6600 and 2 GTS cards I got a 12169 on 3dMark06. After swapping CPU's it jumped over 4k to the 16500 score. I was pretty stunned. She was too, so she told me to keep it. Yay me! (love that woman) If I ever sell it though, she gets the dough. I'll just have to burn a hole in it before it comes to that.

The PC itself was actually the most difficult build I have ever had. I've built a LOT of PC's over the years, and this one easily had the most problems. I'll make a post about it this weekend probably. But to leave you with a hint of how things went... the last problem I had was solved by renaming a file from idecio.dll to Idecio.dll. Yes, just one capital letter fixed it. Don't ask, cause I don't know.

EDIT: I foolishly went through my Photobucket and "cleaned" out pics. One of the pics I deleted was the one I had linked above showing the rig in the first case I bought from DangerDen. Ooops. I have it now linked to a top down shot of the 9800GTX on the board with an 8800GTS that I took to show the comparison length of the cards. Here is a link to what it looks like now in the new case. Wires are still a mess, but I have a sleaving kit ready to go. I've never done sleaving before so this should be a learning experience.