So at BlizzCon 2011 they were selling a limited edition Mega Blocks Battlecruiser from SC2. 1750 parts... the lego kid in me took that as a challenge. This weekend I finally had enough time to build it in a space that was roomy enough for me to also film it, so I could make a sexy time lapse of it. Here are the epic results!



http://youtu.be/JY1jQRjkWzg?hd=1




(I would have embedded the video in this post but it looks like that functionality has been removed from the blog edit page *sad face*)

Note: Before anyone cries "NDA breaker!" please be aware there is NO NDA on this Beta.

So on friday I got my much anticipated Diablo 3 Friends & Family Beta invite, thanks to some kick ass friends I have at Blizzard. It's been a long wait for this game, and there is still a bit longer to go, but I want to take a moment to talk about my experience so far.

It's been mixed...

The game itself is amazing. It's every bit a worthy sucessor to Diablo 2 and I simply love the mechanics, the story, the art, the controls, all of it. When it comes to the game I am in heaven.

Now lets talk about this Always-Logged-Into-Battle.net bullshit. At first I was ok with this, I figured it was quite similar to how SC2 worked and all was well. It doesn't seem to be that way however. To be honest though, take what I am saying with a grain of salt, because without intimate knowledge of the under-workings of their DRM scheme, and a list of "known bugs" for their Beta, this could very well be an artifact of a beta bug and not the DRM. However given HOW it happens, and the circumstances around it, it looks VERY much to be Battle.net related.

The game requires you to be logged in just like SC2 and WoW, fair enough. The problem is, there is a host of connectivity issues plaguing Battle.net right now. It's to be expected because of the high demand for the Beta as well as the fact its a fresh new system, and that is sort of the purpose of this test. The results though are frustrating. When you select a character and try to click the "Campaign" button to load into the game, and if the servers are flakey, nothing happens. Nothing. After about 45 seconds or so of not being able to interact with anything an error will pop up with a cryptic error code. I had this happen for 20 or so tries before the game finally let me load up my first time. This would continue to pop up any other time I tried to start a new game on a small percentage. Once I was finally in all was well, until I was in the middle of a dungeon and suddenly none of the monsters could "see" me anymore, and I could no longer interact with any object in game. I couldn't pick things up, I couldn't attack, I couldn't even use the UI. Hell clicking "exit game" didn't even do anything. After roughly a full minute of inactivity I was thrown back to the main menu with a "connection lost" popup. After multiple tries to load back in I finally made it, but was rolled back a bit in progress as well. This probably happened to me once or twice an hour, give or take. What the fuck.

Now, let me be very clear here. I am *not* thrashing Blizzard for these things actually happening. This is a closed Beta, with all sorts of kinks to be worked out. Battle.net is sure to experience quirks. What I do not condone however is the fact that this is even allowed to happen in the first place. A SINGLE PLAYER game should never put a user through these kinds of experiences. Ever.

I sincerely hope this is either a quirk of the game's Beta code and not Battle.net (highly doubtful) and that it will go away at launch. If not though, I think Blizzard really needs to rethink their DRM-that-they-swear-isn't-really-DRM-so-to-speak strategy, because it made for one hell of a shitty experience.

E3 2011 is over, and I have finally had time to decompress. In doing so, I dug through the hours of video I shot with my fancy new D7000 and put together the following little gem. It's my first ever attempt at a produced video, so bear with the rough edges! ;)

This year two eagerly awaited games will come to the gamers: Mass Effect 3 and Gears of War 3. Notice what they have in common? For years now some of our best loved and most powerful franchises have run their course with many of them being touted as "intended to be a trilogy" in some sound byte or talking point when interviewing their designers. Now this is not the case of them all, but this is the predominant theme in some of the top franchises. Others have greater ambitions and are still chugging along nicely (I'm looking at you Elder Scrolls and Fable), and don't bring up Halo, thats a whole different breed of creature on its own right, spread across multiple platforms and developers.



At the core though, some of our beloved games and franchises that started their trek on current gen consoles are now reaching their peak, so to speak. After these two titles some other well loved friends of ours are due, having recently passed their Sequel milestone in the last year or so. It kind of makes you sit back and think... what's next? I mean new games and new hits pop up all the time, but some of the core titles in the current gen world are entering their twilight, soon to have their swan song. Maybe they will branch out into offshoots, spinoff, prequels, who knows. As long, though, as they are not owned by Activision it is safe to assume however that their core story arcs are tying off before they move on to new things, if any at all. That makes me a bit sad and nostalgic, like when I watch a series finale of a beloved TV show.



What about you guys? How do you feel about certain franchises (potentially) ending? Are there ones you hope will close out graceful and leave you with a good memory, or are there ones you hope endure until every last bit of life has been squeezed out of them?

So this weekend is wondercon, the San Francisco branch of Comic Con. The one thing I was more excited about than anything else (even hot girls in spandex outfits!) was the chance to really put my 3DS's StreetPass through its paces. I suspected there would be a healthy dose of 3DS owners there, and I was right.

I have to say, Nintendo really improved on the whole peer to peer encounter thing that they first tried with the original DS. I really liked it on the old system, but it was fairly impractical. You had to have the game you wanted to enable it on loaded up, at a specific screen, and then put to sleep in that mode. A lot of finagling had to take place to get things ready and you can only enact it with one game at a time. With the 3DS the biggest improvement, to me at least, was that you can enable streetpass for multiple games simultaneously even if the game isn't even in your unit at the time. It's always on all the time, whether your system is sleeping or actively gaming.



I threw my 3DS in my messenger bag on sleep mode with both SSFIV and the normal Mii StreetPass enabled, and headed down to the event. I learned a few things from this little experiment. Firstly, if you are out at an event where you expect a LOT of activity, like Wondercon or PAX or E3, check your system often. Each type of StreetPass (Mii, SSFIV, etc) seems to have a 10-encounter limit per title. Once you max out, it stops accepting any new encounters until you clear our your queue. If you don't load it up and clean it out, you might miss out on a lot of activity. Secondly, you can only use Miis you have encountered for the mini RPG or the Puzzle game if no one new has arrived yet to "push them off" the list. In my case, I acknowledged the 10 new visitors, and then closed the unit and went about my business, completely missing out on the puzzle pieces they had and the fights they could have done for me. Both of these issues I am sure have perfectly logical technical design reasons/limitations behind their implementation, and I am ok with them now that I understand them, just wish I had known it sooner. (Then again I never bothered to thumb through that massive King James Bible sized manual so the fault is my own really.) Finally, in the case of Super Street Fighter IV, those mini figure battles have to be processed in the Log in order to accumulate the points earned. Sadly there is no way to speed through it, and sitting down and watching through all those battles is fairly time consuming and annoying. Fortunately though you can let up to 20 of them sit in your log before it fills up and you need to clear some out.



All in all, this weekend totally made owning a 3DS right out the gate all the more enjoyable. I was thinking all week how awesome StreetPass would be come E3 or PAX, not at all thinking about Wondercon. I'm glad I got to experience this now, as to get a better idea for how I plan to approach those other events this year once I have a fair amount of various games loaded up for StreetPassing, so as not to miss out on anything awesome. Most importantly, I want to point out that at the end of the day, after logging 30 or so SSFIV matches (and watching them all) and about 50 Mii exchanges (and clearing that queue 4 or 5 times) I ended the day with about 50% battery life. Considering how fast this thing drains, and how comparatively crappy its over all battery life is, thats fairly reassuring.

Updated on 2-11@11:30am PST

So who likes multiplayer matches where you get to kick the #@%! of the guys who made the game? Nothing says "I LOVE YOUR GAME DUDE!" like spanking around the very folks who spent the last few years of their life on it! This saturday the 12th you can do JUST that in Dead Space 2!

At 11am PST and again at 3PM PST Saturday the 12th you can play against the DS2 Devs on Xbox LIVE! (and playstation network as well!). The best part? Forget those silly "viral achievements" that some games have, instead kill us and you get a special "Viral Suit" delivered to your inventory automagically!!! (The viral suits available are going to be a "Viral Blue", and a "Tiger Striped Viral White")

Checkout the list below of the Gamertags to be on the lookout for (including yours truly!), just send us an direct game invite and we will try to join in for a match or two. Just be warned random folks have flooded our inbox with friend requests to dont be offended if you cant add us as a friend, we still love you anyways!

Darth Nougat
EA Sargonas <-- Hey that's me!
codecow
DS2Dev01
seanvora
Tolga1984
Rudoff
DS2Dev02
snodom
EgoTheLarge
The Iceist



Xbox LIVE Game With Developers Page