Thursday, February 16, 2012

How I've played Diablo 3 beta so far

As a mentioned in my last post, I'm most excited about getting Diablo 3 this year and the class I want to play primarily is the monk. I thought I'd take this chance to post a few of the abilities that I've enjoyed as I've played in the beta.

First, I find that the basic attack I enjoy most is Deadly Reach because it does a good job of hitting a cluster of enemies. Blinding Flash or Lashing Tail Kick I like to use as my primary spirit dump. Then the main signature ability, and the one I enjoy the most is Dashing Strike, because it allows the monk to quickly dash around the battle and get to the high priority targets quickly to then be able to clean up the minions later. It is a good thing that abilities will be able to be modified with runes, otherwise I feel like every monk would feel the same by always needing the Dashing Strike ability for mobility.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

This year in gaming

There are a couple things I'm quite excited for that are coming out this year and will affect the gaming part of my life. The first one is on "early release" today and that is the PS Vita. I'm the kind of person that is always excited about a new piece of hardware, and since gaming consoles are released so infrequently and are relatively inexpensive, it's a good chance to get the latest and greatest for me. The bundle I'll be getting is the one releasing next week that comes with an 8GB memory card and the Super Stardust download game. The only other game I plan to get at release is Escape Plan. If I remember, I'll post something about my thoughts on the games and the hardware after they come out.

The second gaming item for this year that I very much look forward to getting is Diablo 3. This is a game I have wanted since I was much younger. It will give me a chance to play satisfying hack-and-slash rpg game play with my brothers and friends that live all over the place. I've been in the beta for a while and I can say from experience that it is a very enjoyable experience to fight your way through hordes of beasts and demons on the way to collect shiny new gear. For the record, I plan to play a monk as my first "main" class. Oh, and Diablo 3 is supposed to come out in Q2 of 2012, so I presume that I should get the full release version by the end of August.

Finally, I want to talk a little bit about the new expansion for World of Warcraft, Mists of Pandaria. MoP will bring a quite large redesign to the classes in WoW, probably one of the biggest changes to happen to WoW yet. I think this change is much needed, and will show the rest of the MMO industry that it is important to actually rethink things instead of just sticking to what everyone else has done. For those that don't know, the design of talents in MoP will change from the talent trees (dump a bunch of points in early talents to unlock new tiers) that have been in WoW since it first came out to a much different system. Talents will appear every 15 levels or so, and will effectively be a choice among 3 options, each providing a meaningful decision. Now, everyone gets the basic necessities of their spec and instead can have actual variation that isn't just choosing to be worse than everyone else.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

New Minecraft Server

Earlier this week, I built a new computer with parts purchased from newegg (and an SSD and HDD I had sitting around). The parts I got include the following:

  • CPU: AMD FX-4100 4 Core (3.6 GHz) $109.99
  • MOBO: MSI 760GM-E51 $69.99
  • MEM: Patriot 1333 DDR3 4x4GB $69.98
  • CASE: Antec Three Hundred + 430W PSU $69.99
  • HDD: 1TB (not sure of the details)
  • SSD: Intel 160GB
  • DVD+RW stolen from my old Compaq
The total cost including shipping but not the drives came to $327.28. I installed Ubuntu 11.10 on the SSD and I use the HDD for minecraft server backups (daily at 3am). One of the first things I did after putting everything together was to overclock the CPU to 4.0 GHz by increasing the multiplier from 18x to 20x. There's something satisfying about having a computer running at 4 GHz. I haven't had a chance to play on the Minecraft server much, but it appears to be a bit better than my old machine which only had 2GB of DDR2 and an old Athlon X2 5000.

Running a Terraria server on my linux machine is a new thing for me, so I don't have all the scripts in place yet. However, I found it relatively simple to get TShock to work by just installing the new version of the mono runtime. Once I get my scripts in place to make it easier for me to start and stop my two terraria worlds remotely, I'll consider posting a version of the script for other people to use if they are interested.