The League of Shadow

 
Stream games to your TV, Netbook, PC, Mac? check

Hardware: around 100 bucks? check

Release: 09 check 

For around 100 bucks you will be able to fire up a 720p version of Madden football without any hefty console or hardware. Just a little tiny box, a controller and a monthly/yearly fee (not annouced) . This will be a big win against piracy if it takes off. This could also be the future of home media.  

The league will try to get into the summer beta and give you more direct details on this badassery. Stay tuned.  

This is a totally knock off of World of Warcraft!  How many times have you heard that?

Everquest was knockoff (3D version) of Ultima Online. Anything after EQ before World of Warcraft was an EQ knockoff. Even World of Warcraft was considered an EQ knock off. Now anything after World of Warcraft is considered a knock off, including new games like Age of Conan and Warhammer Online.

If someone makes a online RPG or MMOG (Mass Multiplayer Online Game) it’s going to follow a similar format for now. So let’s get away from the term knock off. Although Mythic did make Ultima Online, so really they are knocking off themselves? Whatever…

Here are my first impressions after about 3 hours of the game.

First the servers were not ready for general public until 9/18 and I was able to pick up a non pre-order on 9/17. This is no big deal, unless you have been waiting for this game and took a day off of work to play and were kept out of the game until the following day. I did not, so I could care less, but if you did I understand why that sucks.

The EA manager for master account creation does kind of suck. It’s not hard, but how can you possibly make that even a little confusing, it’s been done 100 times before? The graphics suck. Ok let me back up a little. I have been playing Age of Conan that likes to ass rape my computer (2.6 Dual Core, 3gigs of RAM, 8800gt video card) on medium settings, but is by far the prettiest MMO out there IMO. This game looks like a slight upgrade from WoW. Seeing as World of Warcraft launched in 2004, that’s not very good.

What is good is the performance. This game runs beautifully. AoC runs like crap sticks. The lesson here is Warhammer wanted performance over beauty. It also looks like the graphics suffer from lack of shader technology and texture mappings. Both of these can be upgraded fairly easy at a later date. I am also quite sure that later uber-equipment will be much prettier.

If you liked the more watered down version of MMOs that World of Warcraft introduced, with easy location of quest givers and where the quest is supposed to take place, then you will love this. I like it too. When I had time to take shifts between coffee and Miller Light all night and chase some fuckin ghost across North Karana, I would have said I liked the challenge. My time is precious so I want to get on with questing for my pretty blouse.

The battle mechanics are smooth and easy to figure out. From level one you can get in a queue for PVP, I mean GVG, wait RVR…fuck it… capture the flag and kill other players. I enjoy this part of it. Your character gets boosted to a level (minus the skills) that allows you to slightly compete with higher players on the battle field. I saw zero lag during my night of play, in city, or in a full battle zone.

There is a monster wait time in queue to log in already. Add more servers jerks. I wont be cancelling my Age of Conan account (I am still hoping for certain things to get ironed out, as I think that game has monster potential) but I will dive into Warhammer for a bit because it is very very fun so far. I am not going to give this a rating after one day. I may revisit and let you know later. If not oh well, I will drop a picture of Keely Hazell out there for you!

(all images are from IGN.COM )