Demigod

My friend sent me a preview for a relatively interesting game called Demigod last night - why did it catch his/our attention? It's at least partially inspired by a map from Warcraft 3 called "DotA," which stands for Defense of the Ancients.

The game lets you play as a Demigod who's fighting for the honor of becoming a full fledged god. There are two major groupings for the Demigods, one called "Generals" which sounds like it'll play a bit more like an RTS, and one called "Assassin" which seems to be more like a 3rd person shooter/RPG. I'm curious as to how the two will do against each other, whether either type will have a significant advantage. For instance, since it sounds like you don't personally aim the General Demigods attacks, does that mean any time it attacks you all shots hit? Or are you able to dodge, at which point the question arises, how will the general EVER hit you if he has no control over his projectiles? I'm really crossing my fingers that they'll find a good balance between the two Demigod groupings, as admittedly, I'm looking forward to this game.

Just looking at some of the preview pictures on IGN (Article here, images here) makes me want to learn how to do bump mapping, because these are some beautiful models in my opinion. Graphically speaking, I already like this game. I think it still needs a little polishing here and there to make it truly perfect, but all in all, it looks really good where it's at now. I'm especially impressed with some of the effects, and just hoping those aren't just going to be serious lag makers. Who knows, maybe my future computer upgrade will be enough to keep lag out of most games. Here's hoping!

And speaking of hoping, here's one hope I have... that they have a unit that's reminiscent of the "Goblin Techies" in the DotA maps, they're my favorite little buggers... mostly because they're hilarious.
Their abilities are...
Land Mine - places a land mine that blows up when an enemy steps on it/goes near it.
Explosion - Blows up the techies causing massive damage to nearby enemies.
Stun Ward - Drops a ward which will stun nearby enemies when they activate it (this ability seems a bit... out of character... in my opinion. Still quite useful though.)
and their ultimate - Remote Mines - Which allow you to manually detonate them to deal more... accurate damage.

These guys are arguably the strongest and weakest in the game... why is that? Their spells have incredible surprise value, and if the techies take the time to set up traps, they can take down even the most powerful of tanks, though, the Gorgon is always tough with her overpowered mana shield...
So, with all this obvious power, how can they be weak? Simple. A SINGLE ITEM in this game renders the majority of the techie's abilities completely useless. Either the Gem of Trueseeing or the Revealing Wards (Not sure if those names are right, this is going from memory, and I never buy those items ^_^;;) both allow you to see invisible units - which includes the techie's mines.
Once even ONE enemy hero has these items, it renders a large amount of strategies useless, and the only way to get the jump on hero's like these is to place the mines at the top of a ramp, so that the fog of war will cover them until they're already on them... and even that is difficult to do, since they have shared vision with the mini-minions the computer controls, and those guys are always leading the front as the generic cannon fodder.

Ah well, if they don't have a similar character in Demigod, at least I can look forward to going back to DotA with the techies, running towards an enemy, yelling "HUUUUG!" and blowing myself into pieces, taking them and a few random NPC's with me.
So much hilarity ensues when the techie's are about.

Meeemmmoorrriiieess....

And now, completely ignoring Brawl for the time being, I am going to make a bit of a post about an older game - Diablo 2.
Recently (Sometime around Wintereenmas) I got into the mood to play Diablo2, but ignored it for the time being for various reasons (other games had a stronger call at the time ^_^;;)

So last week I finally sat down and started, and created my Paladin, a TeslaFroster (Which is a paladin who mainly uses the Holy Freeze and Holy Shock offensive Aura's, usually boosted with resist lightning and resist cold defensive auras)

Anywho, I beat Act 1, 2, 3, and 4 already, which is amazing for me. Why? Because usually I get bored during either Lut Gholein or Kurast. For some reason though, this time I'm much more hooked, I think I might actually make it through the game for once!
That's not to say I never beat it before - I had. Then it never held my attention long enough to get me through the next difficulty, nor for any of my other characters to ever meet Baal. Heh.

I always ended up wanting the highest level spells but never wanting to level up to that point to get them. I LIKE the shiny effects, but don't like waiting to get them. Heh.

But I don't know, suddenly, Diablo 2 LOD is holding me like it did the first time I played it. Whenever I see a golden or green item I practically squeal when grabbing it, and am halfway to bouncing in my seat when Cain is identifying it.

I'm hoping this feeling will carry over into Hellgate: London - which a friend of mine has lent me. Currently, my computer can't support it, and while I have the Video card, Mobo, CPU, and Ram all ready and waiting in the corner of my room, I don't have a power supply that can keep it powered >_>;; So until I buy that, I'm going to be kicking it with some Diablo 2, Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, Warcraft 3, and whatever else I see in my stack of game CD's.

So yeah, random blogpost for very little reason... lol

"Stay a while and listen!" - Deckard Caine

Super Smash Bros Brawl Glitches!

To kick off my first Gaming related blog here, I'm going to start with some smash bros Brawl related stuff ;-) Expect Youtube videos.

With March 9th growing near, anticipation for Smash Bros Brawl draws near, at least, for those of us who DON'T have a hacked or Japanese version.
For those in the same boat as me who are impatiently drooling over this games release, it's pretty safe to assume that you've been watching lots of videos about Brawl. If not, well, now is your chance to see a few interesting ones.

First off, I wanna start with a few glitches... for instance, here we have a pretty nifty one - GIGA JIGGLYPUFF!


Basically, it's possible to make an incredibly oversized Jigglypuff in the Zelda: Twilight Princess stage by using Jigglypuff's Final Smash in the bridge's gap when it's being repaired. I'm curious if this is actually a useful thing, but either way, pretty silly. Not exactly groundbreaking, but it's still fun to see a game that spent so much time getting pushed back have some cool glitches. Now let's just hope no one finds any that completely screw the game up, eh?

Infinite Jumps - Bowser and Kirby have been confirmed to have LIMITLESS JUMPS.
However, this only works when the characters are above ground, so it almost doesn't seem like a glitch.
This can happen by using the characters Side+B move in the air - you then have your jumps back. It's not too hard to find video's of this on youtube as it is, so I'll just leave ya to your on finding any more than this one.

Toon Link's D-Air glitch - As many know, Toon link's D-air moved (Called the Pogo in some circles) gets it's own momentum, sending it down at a pretty nice speed, like Bowser or Yohsi's Down+B...
There is a way to glitch it, however, losing ALL momentum. This can be used to extend Toon Links recovery, but other than that, it seems slightly useless.
Regardless, you can see it in action here.


Finally, while this isn't a glitch, it seems pretty neat.
Apparently, the more damage Lucario takes, the stronger his attacks become!
This is sort of shown in a video, using Lucario in the training section of the game.


A friend of mine will be trying to figure out if this effects all of his damage, and to what extent to see if it's of any serious use or not, so I'll give an update when that comes around.

Until then, I'm out ;-)