Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend (27 April) First Impressions

So I caved and pre purchased Guild Wars 2 Normal Edition in order to take part in the beta event last weekend.


My first impression was that loads was happening. Gosh I didn't know where to look first (luckily a guy shouting and waving at me pointed me in the right direction). Here are my first few impressions I got in the first five or so hours I played (if you just want an overall impression scroll down to the bold bit):

Controls: You can jump! And swim! It was amazing being able to do such things and were quite intuitive. I did change the assigned button for Jump from space to page down, however as I didn't want to move my hand to much for such a handy movement (and I play left handed). The new dodge movement was useful and only required a double tap on the arrow keys - saved my life a couple of times. Swimming was good too with the respective buttons to make you go up or down quite easily.

Interface: The interface was confusing at first. I was an Elementalist and so was confused when I tried to equip my Glyph skill as well as my brand new healing spell and found out I could only have one. Hm. The energy bar disappeared, as far as I could tell so I was dishing out skills like there was no tomorrow.

Storyline: The story started officially with the cinematic, which was different for everyone depending on what race and background you chose. I looked at human for both 'grew up in the city as nobility' and 'grew up on the streets'. You were shown certain characters in the opening cinematic who looked like they were to become important characters to you (like Fable). I only managed to see one of the three I was shown who had a bit of an Elliot feel to him from Fable 3. The only thing I missed was the few characters I came across did seem to feel a little shallow, with not much personality to them. But this isn't a RPG I suppose.

Professions: I only tried out the Elementalist profession, my favourite and the Thief profession.
    Elementalist: The energy bar seemed to have been ditched so instead of normal attacks with my staff/stave/whatever I just continuously barraged my foe with the first skills in my list. I couldn't use any other skills until I had gained enough EXP (I think that was what it was based upon) which unlocked the next one in the list, than the next and so forth. Some of the skills were awesome though.
   Thief: I didn't get to play this one as much (damn university exams) but it was loads of fun. It almost replaced Elementalist as my favourite. When I attacked with my dagger (I only had one at first) a could keep clicking on my first skill to build up a combo that steadily made more damage or added a condition such as bleeding. When I wanted to gain some health a nifty stealth skill was available which enabled me to turn invisible for a little bit while I regenerated health.

Character creation: The choices this time were a lot larger. You were able to modify how your character looked quite carefully with lots more skin tone, hair and eye colours. The hairs were nice too and were animated well when you moved the model around. Some of the hairs, however did look a bit naff but hey - it's in beta still, right?


So all in all I absolutely adored playing the game. I died countless times and ended up just in my underwear at one point (your armour disappears, literally if it gets broken). It was incredibly laggy, but considering the popularity of the beta that was understandable. The controls were easy to understand and the story was intriguing.


So that's my first impression of Guild Wars 2. If you want to know any more feel free to ask in the comments below.


PS: The swimming! It was so fun (and pretty). Just watch out for the Barracudas.

Bethesda Headphones Sweepstakes

Bethesda are hosting a sweepstake giveaway for some Astro A40 headphones with customised sides. They look rather cool in case anyone is interested. The competition ends on the 20th December 2011.
You can get to the sweepstake here.

Good luck y'all.

Does Berocca Really Work?

I was watching TV today and saw that Berocca advert, you know the one with the two lumberjacks dancing on a log? Cool dance but it got me thinking - does Berocca actually work?

I'm not an expert in supplements or vitamins or anything like that. I'm as ignorant as most people are so I did a Google search on what other people thought and found. Personally I find Berocca to have no effect on me unless it's in the late evening; I do find myself a bit more awake but then again it could just be a placebo effect. Someone I know finds no change either and he's a good 20 years older than me so, at least for us two it's not an age difference thing.

On Wikipedia, it apparently won the Boots Vitamin Award for 2004 to 2009 but it could be Wikipedia fibbing or people voting for Berocca because it's the easiest one to think of (availability heuristic anyone?). You can see it here if you want.

Wired have an interesting article on what each ingredient does here and seems to conclude that actually Berocca does nothing for you unless your body cannot make its own supply of Vitamin B12 or Biotin etc.

Someone else asked this question on Yahoo Answers (a questionable source of information, I know but have a look) and the highest voted answer was completely against Berocca and its supplier, Bayer. It did seem to spend a bit of time ranting about the company rather than the actual product though.

So in conclusion ... I have no conclusion. People seem to think that what Berocca claims to give is actually not required but you could say the placebo effect is worth it. If you want to spend an average of £5 on a tube of the stuff for a placebo effect, that is.

Remember, I have no knowledge of Berocca at all and the information I found is merely from different sources from a quick search on Google. Do take this with a pinch of salt and look into it more yourself if you really want to know what it does and if you should take it.

The Sims 3 Pets is on its way.

Hello, I know it's been a while since I've blogged last hasn't it?

Well The Sims 3 Pets is coming our way (at least, to us in the UK) at last and I thought I had better put out there Crinrict's great blog post about preparing for Pets and what to do before installing it. Pets is going to change how the game works so a lot of mods and such probably most likely will not work any more, especially scripting and core mods like Awesome mod and Twallan's mods.

You can get to Crinrict's blog post here.

Ciao

Dang!

Just a rant, but why won't my meshing work? ¬_¬
Meshing for The Sims 3 is hard, t'is all I can say.

Satellite

Did you know that the International Space Station (ISS) only arches over the UK's end of Europe once every 50 years?
Me and my parents found out that the ISS was in fact going over France tonight, which meant we could see it. So we went outside and wow! was it bright.
Apparently it's going over again on the 22nd of April directly overhead and will be twice as bright. So take a look ;-)

To the rescue!

My family and I were minding our own business this afternoon pottering in the garden, and what happens? Luna, our resident ninja cat decided to take a swipe at a baby Robin and rendered stranded away from its parents.
So now we've got a baby Robin in an old washed up ice cream tub surrounded by leaves and twigs. Now what?
Apparently, Robins don't like bird seed or crushed mosquitos (which Dad quickly supplied) but do eat cat food. Ok ...
Anyone have any ideas?