Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Gothic Lolita in a videogame?


While I was looking at the updates on the latest fighting games at Fighters-Generation I found this very interesting character design from recent ARC Systems Fighting game BlazBlue, which appears to me at first glance to be very similar to Gothic Lolita fashion style. It's unlike a typical Maid or Nun design that you would usually see with a young girl Anime character, I wonder if this means that Gothic Lolita is starting to become more widely known? But then again this is a very niche Japanese fighting game series that has not even been released in the West. I do like the character design though!

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Will there be a WoW Patch 3.4 ???




My guess is that Patch 3.3 will drop sometime in November. Now, if you recall, Blizzard said that 3.3 is going to be the final content patch for WOTLK. But Blizzard also said at the time that during BC, patch 2.3 would be the final major patch of that expansion. But as we all saw, the players ran out of content faster than Blizzard expected, and the 2.4 Sunwell patch was released with a lock out system to drag out the content before WOTLK was ready for release.

So let's make a rough guess and say Cataclysm will be released next year in say... June or July, to be cautiously optimistic. Now if that's correct, then that would mean that the space between the last Major content patch and the Cataclysm expansion will be about 7-8 months. If we feel like Blizzard will wait till "the game is done", this wait becomes longer.

Now to put things into perspective, Patch 2.3 in Burning crusade dropped on Live servers in November 2007. Now if Patch 2.4 did not get developed before the pre-release patch for WOTLK, then WoW would be without a major content patch for, wait for it.... 10-11 months.

With 2.4 added to the roster however, this drops back to a more modest 5-6 months.

Will the 3.3 patch be able to drag out content for that long? Will Blizzard rely on small additions to the Argent Tournament in order to keep people playing? What can Blizzard do to keep people interested until the middle of next year?

Will Blizzard even try and rush things out the door in order to hold on to the player base? Or do they already have this content lull planned to allow people to go to the competition and get the other games "out of their system" before we come back to Cataclysm? Nah, that sounds just crazy... .... or is it?

Yes, I'm here!


Well I've been mucking about in all these different games for the past few weeks, Batman : Arkham Asylum, Fallout 3, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Street Fighter IV, and of course; World of Warcraft.

Batman seems like just a very good mish mash of ideas you always would like for a Batman action game, and executes it almost perfectly. It doesn't try to pretend to be something its not, its a straight, linear no-holds barred Batman adventure with a good story supported with great voice acting. I think you can really see the love that was put into this game by the developers.

Fallout 3 makes great use of the Oblivion engine and although it seems like some of the mechanics are a bit dated the world and characters really pull you in. It's a great immersive game and I only had one problem in that I couldn't have my character specialised as much as I'd like to. Much like how Fable ended where your character was kind of good at everything at the highest level part of the game so you really didn't feel like a distinct character.

D&D Online was a lovely game, but I feel like something like Neverwinter Nights Online servers can still easily give this type of game a very good run for its money.

Street Fighter 4 just keeps reminding me how much like Street Fighter 2 it is like, and I'm starting to miss my old Dudley and Urien from Street Fighter 3. I hear Super Street Fighter 4 is now in development, so I hope they hopefully add a few more features that will please SF3 players. :)

Finally WoW, sigh.... I've decided to stick with Strangewayes my Mage, and he's now my main, he's now got 98 Mini pets, and I'm nearing the final goal of obtaining the extremely rare [Hyacinth Macaw]. Apart from him and 2 others, I only have some holiday pets to obtain. I hope there is an achievement for 100 pets.... but I suppose they will award me with another pet. Sigh.

And soon the Lich King will be released from within the Icecrown Citadel! I wonder if it will take a while to take down, like Yogg Saron?