Star Wars: The Old Republic (PC)

In a galaxy far far away, a year ago (almost exactly) BioWare released a game called Star Wars: The Old Republic.
(Ok, yeah it was a year and 3 months -I know someone would have corrected me on that eventually, but you get the point... )
Amongst friends, this little MMORPG is called SWTOR.

It has been speculated that SWTOR was the most expensive MMO ever made and you can actually see why (the brand, the voice acting on EVERYTHING to name a few) but regardless it went free to play within the first year of its life.

The Saga Begins

The story takes place thousands of years before the events in the Star Wars films (which was a bit of a disappointment for myself personally because I really wanted to have Darth Vader as my companion! :P) The Republic and the Empire are at peace (kinda) after centuries long war but the whole galaxy is divided in two.

So you get the point, good versus evil - pretty much what Star Wars has always been about.

When you start the game, you get to choose your side (Dark Side for me all the way!) as well as your race and your job. There are 9 races and 4 classes to choose from (and all classes have 2 different choices to specialize in).

I chose to play a Sith Sorcerer (Oh what a surprise that I choose a class that can cast magic...well in this case USE THE FORCE). My boyfriend went for the Bounty Hunter.

I actually bought this game (Collector's Edition with all the geeky bits, like the Darth Malgus statue!!) already around this time last year.
Back then  the game felt more like offline single player game rather than a MMO. There was hardly anyone ever in the fleet (an area where everyone supposedly gathered) and you were able to progress in the game on your own without any trouble.
The storyline was good and it kept me interested for a good month or two, but that is relatively short time for a MMO which is supposed to keep players paying for subsciptions for years.

So, few weeks ago I decided to dust off my security token and log on my character to see if it REALLY had gotten that bad that BioWare felt the need to end the subscriptions and let everyone and their mother come and swing a bit of lightsaber.

I logged on and I was really surprised to find the fleet full of people:

Gaining Levels

Just like in all RPGs you start as a level 1 noobie who doesn't know how to equip a weapon and basically gets oneshotted by the first monster that comes across your way (In my case, I was a slave dreaming of becoming a Sith Lord).
Soon enough however you are running from one quest to another, gaining some levels and learning new abilities and spells.

In SWTOR there is no such thing as "grinding for exp" - well I mean I guess you could do that, but the quests give you more than enough exp to level your character. In fact I found that if you do all the quests on your way, you will soon be "too high" for the storyline and you can just fly through them - even as a squishy sorcerer.

You can also gain exp by doing warzones. It's like a PVP (player vs. player) area where you have different tasks, like for example take over the turrets before the enemy does, or play spectator sport called Huttball where you need to co-ordinate your team to take the ball across the opponent line. Naturally you also kill other players while you do this... or in my case get killed and be the easy pray everyone goes after for extra points...

Huttball Arena

Aaaand then there are the spacebattles which before used to give ****loads of exp but now hardly any, however they are still fun! (Not quite like the king of retro spaceshooters R-type, but you still feel pride at your mouse clicking skills when you finish a battle succesfully)

Ok, so it's safe to say I am quite enjoying playing SWTOR again, running around, doing missions for the storyline, however I am not 100% convinced if I will continue playing once I finish the storyline. The cap level at the moment is 50 and I am 47 - so I don't have that much to go.

ANYWAYS, moving on...

Free to Play

Like I said earlier, the game went free to play (In November 2012) but because I was a paying customer before I had something called "Preferred member" account, which meant that I still had access to some of the cool things, like sprint at level 15 and cargo bay when I finally got my own ship, two things I would not be able to play the game without.
However some other things weren't free to even the preferred members anymore, which made me pretty sad, afterall I had paid quite a bit for the game AND I had paid several months for subsciptions.
I soon noticed that everything that was even remotely handy or cool looking cost extra money. You had to pay extra to be able to hide your headgear (because lets face it, some of the headgear can be pretty damn ugly...) you had to pay extra to customize your crew members appearance, you had to pay extra to be able to sell more items in the markets etc... So after only one day of playing I decided to become a subscriber again (to a free to play game) because buying all these things on their own would have ended up costing a lot more than 1 month subscription.
Plus what's the point playing a MMO if you cant customize your gear to look awesome????

Shall I recommend this?

If you have never played SWTOR before, buy it from Amazon for £7.22 with free delivery. You would spend that money on beer or junk food anyway, so no harm done!

(UPDATE: I think you can actually download the game for free at: https://account.swtor.com/signup - So go get the beers after all!)

The game is fun for a while until you get bored doing the quests.
Protip: When you buy the game, remember to order a 2nd copy for your gamer friend and make them create a character with you!
The game is a lot more fun with someone else and quite frankly I probably wouldn't log on if I had to do all the quests on my own. Not because they are hard but because it's just simply more fun with someone else.
If you don't have any friends who play games (or who don't admit to play games because even though it is 2013 gaming in some societies is considered lame :P) then at least try to get into a guild and befriend the people who are already playing the game.
And by the way, the best reality check is to join a guild which is run by a 13 year old kid... I do feel old sometimes!

Regarding end game... I have no idea unfortunately. If I get there and decide to do more than one raid, I will let you know what I think about it. But there are so many games coming out and only so little time in a day (especially when I work as well!!) that it might be that once I become the new emperor I might let my Sith go rogue and rule the galaxy on her own.

Oh and my character's name by the way is Ig'Alima Ningirsu - anyone know where that name comes from?

My Boyfriends Bounty Hunter

I might be alone with this, but I can imagine Meg popping out from that as a massive Sandworm....

My Ship!!

THE list (and a few lines about LoveFilm)

My list of games to come from LoveFilm (they all didn't fit in the screenshot but you get the idea)

LoveFilm is actually great way to get a bit of an idea of a game before you buy it. Only downside is that you never know what you are going to get... Like now, they sent us Mass Effect 2 AND 3 in the same patch... well, I guess I know what I will be doing over the weekend :D

Simpsons: Tapped Out (Android iOS)

Monday to Friday my alarm goes off at 6:45... Way too early if you ask me, especially if you have been up until 1 am playing games or usually watching Family Guy (Damn you BBC3 for changing the times for your shows!!)

I have created a bit of a ritual for myself to wake up my brain from the fuzz. I play with my phone for a bit, check my facebook and email. Usually by the time I delete the last junk email (the only kind of email that seems to arrive to my email inbox) I am ready to get up and face the world.

The games I play on my phone change quite frequently (mainly because I get bored of them!) - at the moment I waste a few minutes everyday of my life building a little Springfield in the latest EA game made for smartphones and Ipads called Tapped Out.

Now before I go any further, let me just say that I do play other than building games and no I am not a EA fan, it's simply a coincidence, I didn't realize Tapped out was a EA game until just now, when I started writing about it.

So let's talk about the game a bit.
It's again one of those "here are your tools, build a road, add a house" kind of games.
The player is tasked to rebuild Springfield through a number of missions that involve various characters from The Simpsons cast. At first you only have Homer but as you progress further you unlock more characters and places you recognize from the show.
To build a new house or unlock a new character takes absolutely forever (24h on average) so it really does feel like a massive waste of time. However, I seem to be weirdly addicted to seeing what I can get once I build the Springfield Elementary School, Moe's Tavern, Kwik-E-Mart... and when do I get to see Marge? What about Reverend Lovejoy? There are also some funny things (which you would expect from a Simpson's game) here and there that has made me chuckle occasionally.

The game is free to download from the Android shop (I assume it's the same for Iphones) but as with all free to play, time management games there is the option to speed up the progress and buy additional items by purchasing donuts with real life money.
(I was actually reading from Metro this morning how some kid had spent £1000 on donuts in that game...). Personally I wouldn't bother with it, just because you choose to waste your time on this game doesn't mean you should waste also your money!!!

Verdict: If you are a massive Simpsons fan, go ahead and download it to your phone, I am sure you will enjoy it. It has original voice actors (!!) and from all the free to play, build a town games for your phone, this probably is the best one I have played so far.
Sadly....
EA doesn't seem to have a very good month, because Tapped Out, just like SimCity which I reviewed few days ago has had massive server issues. You have to always connect to the internet to be able to build your Springfield and more often than none I have received this on my screen:

Things to come...

Next on my list are:

PC: Star Wars: The Old Republic - Is there life after you go Free 2 Play?

Android: Simpsons: Tapped Out! - Would you pay real money for items in games like this?

Stay tuned :)

Some more pics from SimCity

SimCity (2013)

To anyone who has never heard of SimCity I have two things to say: 1) Shame on you, you have a massive hole in general knowledge! and 2) If you were a child who used to play in the sandbox building houses and roads, this game is for you!

The basic idea of all the SimCity games is that you build a city and then run it. It is a simulation of a city (hence the name). There are some scenarios you can play to give yourself some tasks (like make people happy or increase the tax revenue this and this much) but I find the most enjoyable part of these games is simply building a small village and turning it into a succesful megacity.

It might sound simple, building houses and roads etc. but it gets more challenging once you have to start dealing with budgets, power shortages, air pollution and all the other issues that we face in the real world as well.

Back in 1993 (when we still had a ancient intel 386 computers) I remember installing SimCity 2000 in dos (c:/cd simcity.exe ... *pulls hairs, how did these commands go again!!?? c:/Format c.*.*!!!!!!)



SimCity 2000


10 years later (This time already in the Windows era - I believe it was either Windows 2000 or Windows XP I had back then) I installed the shiny new SimCity 4 on my PC.




SimCity 4

 Now, another 10 years later (so the time flies!) I rushed to the Game shop on my lunch break on Friday and bought me "still warm from the oven" copy of the newest SimCity. I opted for the Collectors Edition because I am a fool for tin boxes.

The launch of this game has been widely criticized and Amazon even stopped selling the game for a while because people were buying the game but weren't able to play it at all. I had my concerns, but I decided to make up my own mind.

So I got home that evening and began my mission....

Installation:

The game was fairly quick to install. I already had an Origin account because I have been playing Sims3 through them, but my boyfriend made a new account for himself and it took maybe 5 minutes, including the installation of the Origin Software to his laptop.

The unique thing about this new SimCity is that you play the game online. It's not really a multiplayer game but you have the option to play with friends (will go into detail later).
As great as this feature is, it also has it's setbacks; you require a constant connection to the internet to play the game - even if you want to play on your own. And THIS is the thing that was causing so much trouble for Maxis - sorry EA, who runs the show nowadays for SimCity.

Ok so, once the game was installed I was already itching to start building my city, however I was a bit mortified when I saw the "now on queue for 30:00 minutes" note on my screen.
Well, at least I had time to have some dinner!

After my chicken kebabs I returned to the PC and the little child got over me again when I saw the countdown only had 2 minutes left. All the servers were yellow (i.e. pretty full) but none of them were down - great!

I managed to get to the main menu of the game when the little sign of major annoyance appeared on the upper left corner of my screen "Servers are down!" And then this lovely thing appeared on my screen:

I starter to understand the frustration of all the angry people on Amazon reviews...

I was determined to play the game so I kept on trying. I changed to another server (Europe East 3) and after few pulled hairs and several swear words later I managed to make my way through the tutorial!

After that, I don't know what magic tricks EA did to the servers (well besides adding a LOT more servers) as I had no issues loggin on what-so-ever... and for the whole weekend I was completely sucked into the world of SimCity.

Playing SimCity:

So, you start with a piece of land which has no buildings, only a road leading to it and if you are lucky, train tracks going through it.
You have no goal what to do, if you want, you can just sit there and admire the countryside.

OR you could start building stuff.
First task on your list is to make roads, build residential houses and add some industrial buildings so people have somewhere to work.
The way it happens in SimCity games is that you draw "zones" which determine which kind of buildings the little Sims will build to the area as they move into your village.
You don't really have to worry about people moving in, it seems that they have been queuing to move in to this area at least as long as it took you to queue in to build it for them.

The thing I really like about this SimCity compared to the old ones is the level of detail you can go in with every Sim that moves to your town. You can actually see their little van driving down from the highway, unloading the materials to the empty slot and start building their house. They have a name and they have feelings, you can see what they are thinking and what makes them happy/sad by just clicking them.

As the Sims move into your village they soon start to request some basic things that we take for granted, such as water and electricity. You need to quickly build powerplant and water towers (But what about sewage and rubbish collection? - well... yes, you need to take care of that too!!!).

In the old SimCity you had to draw the electricity lines under the ground, same with waterpipes, you had to take care of them and fix any broken bits - luckily in this new version this task has been removed and as long as you have a road leading to a building they will have all the services.

As you see your village get bigger the money that was given to you in the beginning (50 000 Simoleons) starts to shrink with alarming rate. It costs A LOT to build roads and provide expensive services to the growing demand from everyone moving in.

I soon realized what the goal (at least for me) in this game was... I wanted to make a lot of money! But it turned out to be a lot more difficult than I first had anticipated.

There are many different routes you can take. You can make your city a tourist hub with all the sights around the world (such as Sydney Opera house and Big Ben), or turn it into the new Las Vegas with massive hotels and casinos. Your city can find success in becoming the educational hub of the region, specializing in building high-tech items. Or you can mine ore and coal or drill oil and sell the goods by trading them to the rest of the region. Which ever route you take, there are always negative side effects to the choices you make and finding the right balance can be quite challenging.

My first city was very chaotic. I wanted everything. I built all the services, educated my sims, gave them parks and once I started to struggle for money I increased the taxes which made everyone mad at me and soon I felt like starting over (doh!)

My 2nd city was a bit better, I decided to go for the educational route, since afterall educated sims recycle, commit less crime and get sick less often, I can only win, right?
Wrong.
Educated Sims also refuse to work in factories and mines, they demand expensive parks and public transportation for less pollution... I had more wealthy Sims but my industry was struggling to find workers and people started to move out. All I was left with snobby upper class who didn't want to pay such high taxes and all they wanted to do was walk their poodle in a overpriced boulevard.

When I created my 3rd city I had a battleplan in mind. I was not going to educate my Sims at all and if they wanted to spend all their days shoplifting they were free to do so, I would just ignore it.
I chose an area with a lot of ore and coal to mine and started a little village that was only concentrated on mining.
I kept my Sims stupid (sounds pretty harsh...) so they happily kept working in my mines and earning me big bucks! In no time I had so much money that I didn't know what to do with it.
I had a massive problem with not being able to provide enough houses for everyone who wanted to move in and soon I was faced with a problem of running out of space.

Now, all my 3 cities were in the same region, one was a chaotic "a bit of everything town" another was full of snobby upperclass elites with high education and the last one was a massive mining city with rednecks living in trailer parks... Sounds pretty realistic to me!

Sometime on Saturday my boyfriend decided to buy the game as well and he joined my region. He built his massive metropolis around gambling and tourism. People from my cities went to visit his city for shopping and gambling while all the criminals from his city came to my snobbyville to loot their upperclass cutlery.

And this is the thing about playing SimCity online I quite like. You can share resources and plan how you want to rule the region. If one city can't support itself for some reason, another city can provide much needed funds. Or like for example my hillbillyvillage was able to collect all the rubbish from the fancypantsland so they didn't have to have a garbage dump in their neighbourhood. And my police officers went to my boyfriends city to catch all the arsonists and murderers that were planning to move to my cities.




My miner town with its trading port in front and my boyfriend "New Las Vegas" in the horizon


Conclusion:

After the little hickups to actually log on the game, I found SimCity a very pleasant experience. I am a seasoned SimCity fan so it was nothing revolutionary, but I had forgotten how addicting it is to see your city grow bigger and overcome all the obstacles. You can easily spend a day playing around with different options and layouts for your city - so much that I actually forgot to have lunch on Saturday!

Having said that, there are some things that this newest addition to the SimCity series left me a bit cold with.
Like for example, In the old SimCity you had newspaper articles pop up from your city, which I found really interesting because it gave you tips on what you should be doing differently.
Yes you have your advisors saying "You have a worker shortage" but it took me a long time to actually realize that certain level of wealth in the neighbourhood led to people not wanting to work in low paid jobs (I know, quite self explanatory in real life but when you are playing a game you don't really think that way).
Also EA removed the "cheetah" speed (for now) which makes the game really drag sometimes. Often you need to collect taxes to be able to build something and if that something is for example a recycling centre that costs 65 000 and you are earning 500 per game hour you can go to the shop and back and your city is still collecting the money for it.
Furthermore... living in London I have to ask this... if there is so many people demanding for public transportation why there is no underground network?! We demand the tube!!!

Would I recommend it?

Don't buy it just yet (but buy it in the future!)

Not because the price is still high - I am sure the price will stay high for a long time because this is one of those games you can pick up one rainy afternoon even 5 years from now and still enjoy it as much as you did the 1st time - but because the servers are (at least at the moment) still a bit buggy.

It's not one of those games that you play months and months (or years) like you do with some RPGs. I played it one Saturday and now I probably won't pick it up for a week or two - but I know when I pick it up I will hear myself say "just a bit more..." and end up going to bed at 3 am still wondering how I could have prevented the people moving out from my city after a zombie attack...

Games

Big gaming companies have finally awoken to the reality that there are more and more girls and women who play games - yay!
I am going to review some of them from a very female perspective with very little technical knowledge nor experience with building computers, graphics design nor any other specialized field that some other game reviewers have.

Long story short, I play games because I like playing games. I am not an expert in any field, I pretty much know how to turn on the PC and press "play" but I am not a total blondie either - I for example know how to build a spellcast for my whitemage in FFXI ;)

I own PlayStation 3, Nintendo DS, PSP, PC, Laptop (specs coming later) and a Samsung S3 smartphone.

About me: I am a young woman who plays games. I work and live in London, UK. I am not obese slob (like Eric Cartman in the Wow episode!) nor do I have any serious addiction (at least at the moment!) to any RPGS (Like Penny did in Big Bang Theory to Age of Conan!).
I do get engulfed sometimes to gaming if something really takes my fancy but I try to keep my real life in check as well.

I mainly like fantasy RPGs (big Final Fantasy fan!), but recently have also played a lot of SWTOR and last weekend I wasted the whole weekend by playing the newest SimCity (which by the way is pretty addicting regardless the problems everyone seems to have with logging on for the moment). I also have soft spot for games such as Civilization, Red Alert, Starcraft, Settlers, Diablo series etc. without forgetting my secret guilty pleasure MARIO! I play quite a bit also with my smartphone, mainly to pass time while commuting to work.

Occasionally I might write something about movies or TV shows I watch.
I am a huge Family Guy fan (and American Dad) and everytime Family Guy is on, yes... I always sing the tune with the show like a 5 year old.
I like Sci-fi, loved Farscape (yes!) and Babylon 5. Star Trek Voyager is my favourite of Star Treks. Loved Lost the 1st time I watched it and actually liked it more the 2nd time because I knew what I was looking for. Battlestar Galactica was awesome for a bit but they dragged it too long. Same goes with Heroes, which was brilliant to begin with. ANYWAY - I shall write about all these later.

Thanks for following my site and I appreciate all the feedback and comments that I get!