Telltale games did a good job with Tales from Monkey Island a few years back, but kinda failed with the Jurassic Park game last year, and having played lots of FPS zombie games like Left4Dead, Zombie Panic Source, Resident Evil, etc.. I was not at all convinced Telltales adventure point and click would be very exciting or give you the real feel of the zombie apocalypse.

But I gave it a go anyway and man am I glad I did. The game completely sucks you into an awesome atmosphere and story from the start, the dialog is great and you have to make some hard choices (I expect these to become much harder in future episodes).  The puzzles in the first episodes were very easy and the episode should talk around 1-2 hours o play.

The controllers were a bit clunky at first but I got used to them pretty quickly. My only complaint so far is that a couple of the timed dialog options (you have X seconds to answer them) are a bit to quick, I’m a pretty fast reader but for like 1-2 of the dialog options I didn’t even manage to read the options before it timed out and auto-selected.

I’m a big fan of the walking dead tv series, or at least I was at first before the drama took completely overhand. And I can highly recommend this game to anyone who’s into the zombie genre, I’ve obviously just played episode 1 of 5, but so far the game is a lot better than the TV series.

Rating: 9 / 10

I haven’t really played the game for over a month and not sure if I’m going to again, maybe if they implement character transfers between servers I’ll give it another go.

There are several reasons why I’ve stopped playing:

End Game PVP was broken, then they broke it some more, then they removed it

Battle of Ilum which is supposed to be the end game open world PVP area was totally broken, so at first everyone were just farming the objectives in turn.

Bioware tried to fix this but in doing so they screwed over all of the servers that had uneven faction balances, so on our server the empire could take over the republic spawn point and spawn camp people, many of who was unable to leave the pvp area. This also made some people gain pvp rewards insanely quickly and pretty much pissed off all of the PVP’ers in the game.

Horrible support
In WOW you actually got a game master to appear, and the game masters KNEW the game, and you could actually have a conversation with them. In SWTOR you file a ticket, this ticket is almost never fully read by a human, you just get a pre-made response that touches upon the theme of your question, but is not an actual answer.

Also some of the support people appear to not have played the game, and are unfamiliar with even the simplest MMO mechanics of the game they are offering support for.

End game PVE is buggy and some bosses are unplayable

The last month we were raiding we were never able to do SOA (last boss of Eternity Vault) because of all the bugs, gearing up was quick and easy and there were not much incentive to continue past hard mode raids.

But the main reason: DEAD SERVERS

For some reason the asshats at Bioware/EA decided it would be an awesome idea to just put up 90 fucking servers just for EU alone (10 servers would be more than enough).. So most of the servers have really really small populations. My main and my guild is stranded on “Scepter of Ragnos” where I just took this screenshot:

People are complaining like crazy in the forums and many people are not playing because their lvl 50 characters are stuck on dead servers which are no fun to play on at all (impossible to get groups together for raids/pvp/word bosses/etc..) but Bioware hasn’t done anything and were ignoring the problem for months. There are so many posts about dead servers on the forum that it’s not even funny.

Meanwhile the community itself are abandoning the low population servers and moving to one of the 4 servers that actually have people on it. Most of the people I’ve been playing with have moved to “Tomb of Freedon Nadd”  where I just took this screenshot:

Scepter of Ragnos mostly have imperial players, so republic fleet there would be about 2-4 people.. So the server where my main is has 15 people on, while the server everyone has moved to has around 200

Character Transfer

The only thing that has even a remote chance of getting me to play again is enabling character transfers. But even that has a slim chance at best, since most people I’ve been playing with is fed up with the game, and our guild which was awesome barely has any players left.

When character transfers come you probably won’t even be able to transfer your characters to highly populated servers (where you got your alts now), because players there are already complaining about queue times during peak hours. So You’d have to get lots of guildies and other people to agree to move to move all your characters from both your dead server + tomb of freedon nash to a third server.

I’ve totally lost faith in Bioware’s ability to manage this MMO after everything that’s happened, so if I had to make a guess, I would guess the player base is going to continue diminishing, until EA gets pissed about the missing $$$ and turns the game Free2Play, after that the game pretty much dies completely.. Which really is a shame cause the game itself is pretty good, and the class quests and stories are unrivaled in the MMO genre.

For more info on what’s been going on lately with Trekwar see the devblog post on the Trekwar site.

• The VPS <-> SAN connection at vps.net has been down around 5 times the last year, putting the filesystem into read only mode and requiring a manual restart
• It’s not possible to get a VPS with high amounts of memory without it becoming ridiculously expensive

The dedicated server is not that much more expensive than the VPS I had, but it’s a bit faster and instead of just 1.2 GB ram it has 24 GB. So now I’ll be able to run several very large Trekwar games now that alpha testing is approaching.

Today I spent a good portion of the day moving stuff over.

Mumble: This was literally just tar’ing it and ssh’ing it to the new computer.

Tomcat: I installed the newest version and just copy pasted the <host> sections of the old config file. and copied over the JSPWiki that trekwar.org uses

Mysql: I ditched mysql and instead went for hsqldb, this required some rewriting of the aakretech.com website and the sql stored procedures, which took over an hour.

SVN: This also took about an hour, moving the repository was easy, but had to rebase all the local repositories and generate new ssh-keys and stuff.

Trekwar: An development version which has been running for months was shut down and copied straight over just like Mumble

Misc: Also there were some cron jobs (Like the one that keeps the Trekwar bug list updated), config files and other junk and stuff that had to be moved

DNS: What took up most of the time was sorting out and waiting for DNS stuff, previously I used vps.net’s dns servers but now I had to set up zones both at dynadot.com where my domains are registered, and zoneedit.com where I have some zones (primarily to be able to get mail forwarding at the same time as having a normal A record for aakretech.com). I suspect Dynadot’s DNS manager to not update properly, had to re-edit many of the zones before it took, and I’m still waiting for aakretech.org to go from their DNS to ZoneEdit :/

You can never have too much memory, and yes I named my server after Rudolf Clausius since it’s located in Germany.

Used Fraps to record it and ended up with this movie which is pretty funny

 View on youtube

The guild is <Orange Pixel> at the Scepter of Ragnos server (EU – PVP)

Really enjoying endgame in SWTOR so far (hardmode raids), can’t wait for the third raid to come next month.

What started out great in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead has gradually taken a turn for the worse, measuring the IMDB ratings for his movies (where he was writer, and often director) .

Now as this graph clearly shows, since he started with a high rating (8/10) his movies gradually declined until falling off a steep cliff in 2005 when he started making zombie movies again, and they are just horrible (not in a good way) all of them.

The graph deceptively makes it looks like the last movie was a step in the right direction, but that last movie was “Survival of the dead“, the very movie that inspired this blog post. It is beyond retarded, it’s so moronic you actually have to watch it do be able to wrap your head around it. It has without a doubt one of the stupidest plots, worst bunch of actors and poor/idiotic effects I’ve ever seen.

I can’t for the life of me begin to understand how it got a IMDB rating of 5.1/10  Even the 4.4/10 rating at Metacritic or 4.8/10 at rotten tomatoes  are WAY to generous.

And to top it all off, he has the nerve to criticize Zack Snyders 2004 Remake of Dawn of the dead, which was totally awesome:

“It was better than I expected. … The first 15, 20 minutes were terrific, but it sort of lost its reason for being” — Romero

“Lost it’s reason for being”?! reading that in context of Survival of the dead is just fucking hysterical. Romero hasn’t written anything that good for 32 fucking years!

Fuck you Romero!

Click here to see it

Seeing that I have some sort of weird fetish about doing double blinded experiments, I did a test on 4 brands of orange juice from the store across the road.

At first I was planning to do this experiment like I usually do them, but during the start of testing something weird happened.

In the first test one of the juices got a score of 6 (1-10) but in the subsequent tests got 2.5 and 3. The reason for this is “The orange juice deviation”, a law of nature that states that “If you drink two different types of orange juice in a short time span, the second one will taste fucking weird”.

I tried rinsing with water between each test, but that did not help, so I had to do the testing another way to avoid interference between the different samples.

So to avoid the taste testing being influenced by the previous one, I drank 24 cups of orange juice over the course of 3 days with a minimum of 30 minute delay between tests. Thanks to my GF Stacy for helping with the blinding (she suspected it was all a ploy to make her get me juice).

TEST 2 DATA SET
1	lerum		6
2	sunniva		6.5
3	first price	7
4	sunniva		8
5	first price	6.5
6	first price	6.5
7	first price	7.5
8	eldorado	5.5
9	sunniva		7.5
10	first price	7.5
11	lerum		7
12	first price	7
13	lerum		6.5
14	sunniva		7
15	lerum		8
16	eldorado	6.5
17	lerum		8
18	sunniva		8
19	eldorado	6
20	lerum		6
21	lerum		7
22	eldorado	7
23	sunniva		8
24	sunniva		7.5

Test 1 – drinking 4 glasses of randomized juice.

Test 2 – drinking 1 glass of random juice.

So what’s the conclusion?

I’ve always been buying the Eldorado juice, however I clearly think Sunniva is the best (highest score in both tests). however the 1 Liter pack of Sunniva is almost twice the cost of the 2 Liter pack of First Price which is a very cheap brand. Despite that First Price did came in second and who doesn’t love a juice with a small standard deviation?

After that I got a lifetime subscription for Star Trek Online, which kinda turned me off MMO’s altogether :)

I’ve been playing a couple of the SWTOR beta weekends and got early access 6 days before release, and I’ve made it to level 30 so far (think there are around 10-20 lvl 50′s on my server (Scepter of Ragnos)).

And so far I must say… SWTOR is fucking awesome!

Riding a shuttle between two areas of the map

If you just gave me the game and let me play the first 10 levels (Starting planet), I would be 99% sure the game was made by Bioware. Unlike for example WOW where you just accept quest, go kill/collect and return, the quests in SWTOR are really amazing. The quest chains make up wonderful stories in classic Bioware style (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, KOTOR, Dragon Age), and you can very often choose different ways to do the quest. The NPC voice acting also adds to your total immersion in the stories.

The class quest, which is a long quest line that follows your character between level 1 and 50, is absolutely brilliant, I’m playing as a Bounty Hunter and the story is comparable to a really good single player RPG. Also the companion system is great, and you get a really close connection to your characters, much more so than in KOTOR / Mass Effect.

 Me and my kickass companion Mako

So far I can only judge the lvl 1-30 part of the bounty hunter class quest, but I’ve heard the other classes (which have totally different class quests) are equally good. So I’ll probably be making alts just to play the story lines.

The instances I’ve been in so far are all good, like the quests you can also affect how the instance unfolds by choosing dark side / light side.

I’m playing as a Bounty Hunter Bodyguard (healer), and the healing mechanic is really good, each time you use a healing ability you gain heat and you need to keep your heat level low and not overheat to be able to heal. This means you can heal forever if you manage your heat properly, but dealing with big damage spikes is a bit hectic (but very doable).

The graphics are really nice, although some people complain it’s too cartoony (mostly WOW fanboys it seems, which is ironic beyond belief). I’m glad the graphics is not realistic (skyrim, age of conan), I don’t think that would be a good look for this game.

I'm trying to be a ruthless bounty hunter, but Mako with her big puppy eyes makes it hard at times

So far I haven’t experienced a single disconnect (saw 2 lag spikes during 1 beta weekend, that lasted about 5 seconds), so for me the launch has been close to perfect. I came across 1 bug in a class quest, but the forum had a workaround.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what the end game is like.

To sum it all up in one sentence, “I’ve played many MMO’s, but I would say this is the first MMORPG I’ve played”

Update 2012-04-23:

The sentence above is deliciously ironic, since Bioware has totally screwed up the game (90 servers on EU side, 5-10 would be enough), and now it’s actually a RPG without the MMO part on the server where I have my main =)

I pre-ordered SWTOR (Star Wars The Old Republic) on Origin in July, and today I had to get the product code for it so I could continue playing.

SWTOR appears under my games, but for some reason it says it’s unreleased when it was released 2 days ago (Also notice the goddamn BF3 beta game that I could find no way to remove from “my games”).

I click the info button and it says I purchased it on July 28th, and gives me a product code.

But the product code is not working, and says it’s already been used. And after 30 minutes with EA live chat support they say I haven’t ordered it, despite being able to say why it shows up under my games and gives me a registration code.

So now I have to go to the mall tomorrow and get a physical copy of the game. I could probably have ordered it on origin, but then I would end up having 2 battlefield games (1 not working) and 2 swtor games (1 not working) under “my games”. Also the downloadable game is 15$ MORE expensive than the on in the store.

Fuck you Origin!