The ’11 Comic-Con has come and gone, but Game Tokers were there! We were neck-deep in comics, movies, anime, booth babes, nerd rage, and the best of all, VIDEO GAMES. Riding sky high with a certain strain that goes by the name of Skywalker; we made a run for the trenches and tried to blow the con wide open from the inside. The Spaceman and I (Barbarian, rawr) got our munchie-covered hands on some sweet demos of some anticipated games, and ones that just might be sleeper hits. Get crunk and grab your junk, because this is the Game Toker Comic-Con!
Table of Contents:
Arena.net has me thoroughly impressed by Guild Wars 2. In the rock-solid demo they had available for the con 3 races were available (Human, Charr, Norn) and ALL the classes announced so far. I had the chance to play warrior, guardian, necromancer, and ranger, and I can’t tell you which one I had the most fun with. The combat seemed very solid, and very dynamic. Tons of weapon combos (and therefore skill combos) were at my fingertips and did my best in the 25 minute timeframe I had to try them all for each class. From my investigation it seems different weapons are better for certain roles, some good for AoE, single target, healing, so on so forth. I could be mistaken, but there may have been collusion detection in combat, if I swung my sword and the animation hit an enemy, it did some damage. The graphics were nothing special, but the texture design made up for it and distracted you from the lack of polygons, and after finding out the build we played was considered “early alpha” from a dev, there is only room for improvement.
The Spaceman received a tip from the previously mentioned dev that there was a hidden dynamic quest that he didn’t see anyone at the con find, so after following this tip we ended up fighting a spider-queen after lots of searching for the last eggs to trigger her revenge. The people at Arena.net not only impressed me with their addicting game, they impressed me with how they treated their fans. After telling an Arena.net person the secret code somewhere at the con, they gave you a special pass that got you into a special meet-n-greet at the Hard Rock across the street from Comic-Con. The place was full of demo machines and music and an OPEN BAR! The night also consisted of giveaways that I got so close to winning, and I can’t forget about the night ending with an all too familiar Rick-Roll!
Bioware’s fifth pillar of gaming is the foundation of SW:tOR and it does not disappoint. I played a smuggler since it’s the class I plan to play when it goes live, I had some fun with it; the animations are smooth and clean, the combat is much like other MMO’s out there, like WoW but lacking auto-attack. The graphics were good, but on the demo and machines they had it running on it would seem they don’t have their final textures going, so we’ll have to wait to see how the art design turned out. The story is really engaging, though the color palate of the game kept me from getting totally immersed, the quests however felt all too familiar. “Go and kill this many of these people, go deactivate (right click and wait for a few seconds) this over there,” I just hope later on the reasons are engaging enough to forget how tedious these tasks are. Still have hope for this game though, can’t wait to sail the stars smuggling questionable things.
Now you can have both with only one payment of the usual $59.99 price tag. But enough about that. Here is the Mesmer.
