Retro Game Friday: Heroes of Might and Magic

Hey all, I’m back with a true PC gamer classic for this week’s Retro Game Friday! It’s Heroes of Might and Magic!

Plot Synopsis: Lord Morglin Ironfist, is forced to flee his homeland through a magical portal, because his cousin, Ragnar, had usurped the throne after his uncle, Ragnar’s father, killed Ironfist’s father, the legitimate owner of the throne. He finds himself along with his few followers in a strange and uncharted land, called Enroth. The land is unruled but contested by Ironfist and three other warlords: the barbarian Lord Slayer, the sorceress Queen Lamanda, and the warlock Lord Alamar.

Plot: The plot isn’t all that special, in fact it’s pretty boring and bland. But this did pave the way for later games in the series.

Gameplay: It played like a Turn Based Strategy Game, a Sim and an Adventure style game at times and did so pretty reasonably well. By today’s standards, it’s a very mediocre game, but was pretty damn good at the time.

Art: It’s seen better days, the Artwork, while 2D, is very, very outdated. Heroes of Might and Magic doesn’t have the usual timeless quality I often praise 2D games for having.

Overall: Give this a whirl if you’re really bored, but later games in this series would probably be more fun to play. Probably.

For those who like: Sims, Adventure, Turn Based Strategy, Fantasy, Strategy, Action

Not for those who don’t like: Any of the above, or really bad artwork.

Retro Game Friday: Battlefield 1942

This week for Retro Game Friday I’m covering the first entry in a series that is incredibly popular now. It’s Battlefield 1942!

Plot Synopsis: Look up World War II.

Gameplay: This was a pretty revolutionary game at the time, as it had a massive amount of players that could play in a single match at one time. 64 players was pretty amazing. As for the rest of the gameplay it follows the now standard Battlefield formula of capturing locations and holding the majority of them to slowly whittle away the enemies spawn tickets which let an enemy respawn upon death. 1942 also allowed players to pilot various vehicles ranging from Jeeps to bombers. This made the matches get really insane when you had all 64 players playing.

Art: The art has aged poorly, but that’s to be expect of a 3D game.

Music: I don’t remember a whit, I was having too much fun gaming with my friend online.

Overall: It’s might be worth a try if you can get a free copy, but I’m pretty sure the servers for online play are down now so it’s not really worth spending any money on this.

For those who like: FPS, Military Games, World War II, Vehicular Mayhem.

Not for those who don’t like: Any of the above.

Retro Game Friday: Worms

This week for Retro Game Friday I’m covering a real classic. It’s Worms!

Plot Synopsis: There is no plot.

Gameplay: There was really no plot for the game, it was all about the gameplay. It was turn based and allowed each player to direct their worms to fire in a certain direction. The goal was to be the one with the last worms alive. The multiplayer was quite fun, I remember playing the game with my cousin and having a blast.

Art: The art has aged, and while it’s 2D it doesn’t quite look as amazing as other 2D games of the time. However given how much effort was spent on the gameplay rather than art it’s not too surprising.

Music: I don’t remember the music, sorry.

Overall: If you get the chance to give it a whirl for a few minutes it’s worth it just to enjoy the classic gameplay. Of course you could probably play later games in the series and enjoy it more.

For those who like: Tactical Games, Turn Based, Oddball Games, Multiplayer.

Not for those who don’t like: Any of the above.

Delay in Plans

This week instead of the usual Anime Sunday I’m going to make a quick post updating on why I haven’t gotten back to doing a post a day. It’s about my Delay in Plans!

What delay?: Well I really wanted to get back to full steam way back in the middle of May, but circumstances have lead me to be unable to do that. Mostly that’s because I’ve been spending half my time at my parent’s taking care of the family dog who is getting on in years, she’s 13 years old and while she’s still active and mobile she’s started to lose her hearing. This has lead her to being very unhappy when left alone for too long. So any day that my parents are gone for more than 6 hours I end up spending time there. Most of the time before this year I’d have just gone over in the day and walked her and hung out for an hour or two because my folks would be back later that afternoon. Unfortunately that hasn’t been the case these past few months and I’ve been spending entire days at my parents. In addition with all the stress of trying to get my data off my old computer, something I’m still struggling with even as I write this, I’ve been thrown off my pace of being able to churn out daily posts.

So what now?: Well for the time being I’ll still be attempting to give out a weekly review, of either a book or game, and I’ll be keeping to every other day posts. I’m hoping to get back to full steam by August, but at this point I’m reluctant to make any solid promises given how stressed out I’ve been.

That’s it for this little update, Anime Sunday will return in two weeks with a look at the Summer 2017 Anime Season!

Video Game Tuesday: WoW vs. FFXIV

For this week’s Video Game Tuesday I’m going to be talking about the differences between WoW vs. FFXIV.

Art: Let’s get the obvious one out of the way, the art styles are completely different in each game, but FFXIV has the advantage of being newer and it blows WoW out of the water in terms of Art. There are some impacts however to having such great looking art assests however. Winner: FFXIV

Open Connected World: WoW has the advantage here with most of their content out in the world having no loading screens, FFXIV has great looking areas, but they are behind loading screens. This wasn’t originally the case, but with A Realm Reborn they broke up the 6 main zones into smaller pieces to reduce server strain.  Winner: WoW

Customization: WoW added the Transmogrification system in patch 4.3, and it helped add a bit of customization to their game. But it didn’t add much, you still never see your characters body under all that armor unless you run around naked, and the body itself isn’t customizable all that much. In contrast FFXIV allows for vast amounts of customization from character height to hair color highlights. In addition their version of the Transmog system, the Glamour system allows for all sorts of customization of the character and they even added fun items that you can glamour onto your battle gear like a Santa outfit, or even no clothes out all (well except for the standard undergarments each race wears). Not only that, but where as WoW recently introduced the Garrison System, their take on Player Housing, FFXIV has truly customizable Player Housing in their game, for both their guild system (called Free Companies or FCs) and private player owned housing. Winner: FFXIV

Combat Gameplay: The combat gameplay is pretty similar between both of the games, the only difference really is the fact that you can play FFXIV on the PlayStation systems. This does have some impact on things which I’ll cover later. Winner: Neither.

Crafting Systems: The crafting sytem in WoW is really basic, and while it is easier to level up it’s not that fulfilling compared to FFXIV’s crafting system. It’s certainly much more complicated, but once you get into it it’s quite fun. Winner: FFXIV

Gathering Systems: WoW has the better gathering systems, where FFXIV had such a great crafting system they tried to do the same thing for gathering and it just doesn’t work as well. You can still fail at gathering something even with a very high percentage of success, like 97%, and it will occur often. This means leveling up the gathering profession is not only frustrating, but very difficult to do. Winner: WoW

Storyline: FFXIV has the better story hands down by far with their plot making you feel like an epic hero by the end of Act 1 of a Realm Reborn and even though you still get some menial tasks, it’s joked about quite a bit by NPCs, it’s not nearly as bad as the ones that WoW seems to have endlessly.

Questing: FFXIV has the better quests, with some of them having voiced cutscenes and others being just awesome. You’d never get a questline like the Hildibrand quest line in World of Warcraft. Hildibrand’s questline was the most I’ve ever laughed in an MMORPG due to the game and not something a player did. Winner: FFXIV easily

Modding: WoW has allowed mods to be made for their game allowing players to make things like Deadly Boss Mods, or Auctioneer which help out greatly in the game. FFXIV has none of these things, but makes up for it with having most of the functions of mods being in built into the game. You can’t customize the look of your action bars like in WoW, but you don’t need to. Things like Auctioneer or DBM or DPS meters however aren’t in the game and while some people complain about it, and PC users use third party programs to do it anyway for some things, it’s a bannable offense to do so. Winner: Neither, WoW requires certain mods to be played with anything other than perfection, FFXIV doesn’t require it of you, but you won’t progress far in endgame content with subpar skills like you could do in WoW with DBM.

Raids: WoW has the more clever and interesting mechanics for raids, but because they are done assuming 99% of the player base is using boss mods to help with them they can do so. FFXIV on the other hand has less interesting raid mechanics, but has more fulfillment because you have to rely purely on your teams skill to complete. Winner: FFXIV, because it’s much more skill based than WoW.

Class System: FFXIV allows you to be everything with one character, which is quite fun. However doing so means you need to grind out the additional classes to level them up, which isn’t that fun. WoW on the other hand only allows one character to be one class.  Regarding class feel the advantage goes to FFXIV because each class is quite different visually and mechanically. Winner: FFXIV

Overall: I enjoyed WoW quite a bit, but the story of the RTS games never really got into the MMO. FFXIV has a great storyline and is a fun MMO at the same time, which for me makes it the winner. Others will disagree, or point out that I’m not touching on Mythic raids in WoW. You are right, I’m not covering those things because those things require a time and skill investment of hundreds upon hundreds of hours to participate in. Mythic level raids are great, but to be honest you’d never complete those things without something like DBM, FFXIV doesn’t give you that choice and requires pure skill for their most difficult content. Winner: FFXIV