Bethesda did a good job at making Skyrim, the 5th game of The Elder Scrolls series.  With so many good reviews plastered all over the Web, I won’t even bother making one.  I guess all you need to know can be summed up in a handful of points

- the world is huge

- you can do a lot of stuff

- dragons, lots of em

- you can catch butterflies

Ya rly

These are also the reasons why I’m always raring to go back to the province and get my hands on Komo II (I can’t get a decent computer yet, saving up for the wedding+house).  Unfortunately, I only go to Laguna every other week, and as we all know, gamer – games = sad.  The only thing I will have for one and a half years in Manila is a laptop and DSL connection, so I have to make do with that.

To curb/fuel my love for this game, I’m planning to write a glorified play-through of my character as he explores the world of Skyrim.  I already have a sneaky assassin type character that I’ve been playing for about 72+ hours, but I’m going to start from scratch again, since i played that character “normally”. Here’s the list of self-imposed challenges to make the game hardcore without sacrificing fun.

- Limited Fast Travel: The game allows players to “fast travel” to a previously discovered place anytime by opening the world map and clicking the destination.  This will be restricted.  However, fast travel via caravans are still allowed.

- Limited Saves: Quick saving is limited to “boss” encounters and upon entering an area, preventing me from save-scumming. In normal play, expect me to quicksave once every 10 seconds, so I’m basically immortal.  With this restriction, I won’t have that sense of invulnerability.  Since I don’t want to waste my progress, I won’t be imposing a “perma-death” rule (plus making a new character every time I die can get tiring even with the cool gameplay and graphics).

- No bug abuses or exploits: That means backstabbing essential NPCs to raise my skills is not allowed… same goes for the Oghma Infinium glitch, Artisan loop, and taking double quest rewards.

- No quest markers or in-game compass:  If I want to find out where i’m supposed to go, I have to bring up the world map, not just follow a quest beacon a la Call of Duty.

- Waiting restricted to certain places: The game allows you to wait anywhere as long as there are no hostile creatures nearby, but staying in one place for 8 hours outdoors is less like Skyrim and more like David Blaine

- Time scale will be set to 4: Skyrim’s default game time is set to 20 minutes for every minute in real-time, which means 1 day in Skyrim will take just a little over an hour.  I adjusted this to 4 minutes for every minute in real-time to improve realism without making it too tedious.

- Eating on a regular basis: It would be weird for someone to go without days of eating food, so the character has to eat something once every 4 hours (that’s every hour in real-time with the adjusted time scale)

I’m gonna be using some mods taken from Skyrimnexus, but most of these are just meant to enhance performance.  The only mods that will affect gameplay in this playthrough are Thu’um Mic (a mod that lets you activate dragon shouts by speaking to a mic) and Valdosa’s Arrow Crafting and Item Meltdown (allows you to craft arrows and melt down gear to get raw materials).

I’ll be taking screenshots all the time while jotting down key events, then i’ll post the “chapters” here every week.  If you’re not into Skyrim or computer games in general, dont worry; I’ll try to make this look like a novel instead of a play-through.

I’m begging for people to read this >_<’ pls enjoy.

They should really nerf that Manta Style.

Capitalizing on DotA’s success, Riot Games released a game called League of Legends (LoL.. no really).  The game was released back in 2009, but it really started gaining popularity just recently, as Garena got the rights to releasing the game to the Southeast Asian gaming scene.

Since I already have an  existing Garena Account (for playing Starcraft), I decided to try the DotA Clone and play a series of matches.  I had a bit of trouble getting a feel of the game, since it wasn’t as clone-y as I believed it would be.

Instead of DotA’s hero taverns, LoL’s character selection gives you a list of available champions (heroes) to choose from.  The game features more than 70 champions with about a couple more released every other week or so, but only a few heroes (Something around 10-15. Dunno, I forgot already) are available, with the roster changing every week.  If you want to play a champion outside of the free heroes roster, you have to unlock the champion by using your IP.  Some heroes cost more IP to unlock, while others can be unlocked after a few games.

90% of the games during the week involved who clicks the ninja, the werewolf, or the armadillo first.

Once the game starts, you’ll have 90 seconds to purchase items to improve your hero’s stats.  This is similar to DoTA, except you only have a single NPC selling all the items.  The item shop can also be accessed using a hotkey (P), although you can only buy items if your champion is near your spawning point/fountain.

Ooh, shiny...

As you can see, there’s an item tree that shows the “recipe” for purchasing higher-level items.  However, unlike DotA, LoL’s item shop is more user-friendly.  If you have enough money to buy everything needed for a high-level item, you only need to double-click on the item’s icon.  All the prerequisites will be bought and combined instantly.

The battlefield itself is like DotA’s typical 3-lane map, complete with neutral creeps and six towers for each side (2 per lane).  However, LoL’s version has several bush lines, which you can use to hide from the opponent – perfect for escaping or setting up ambushes.

Like this.

You still get your typical creep minion wave, but instead of all of your minions getting upgraded when you destroy an enemy inhibitor (LoL’s equivalent of DotA’s barracks), you get a single super minion per wave.  This might not seem like much, but a super minion can take up an ungodly amount of damage and tear through ordinary minions with ease.  Fortunately, inhibitors respawn after a few minutes, so teams still have a chance to recover and push back.

Getting items is fairly easy compared to DotA because (a) you can’t “deny” minions and (b) you don’t lose money when your champion gets killed.  The items are fairly cheap (I don’t remember anything going beyond 5k) so it’s easy to farm up.  LoL was definitely designed with user-friendliness in mind.

The game looks like a cartoonish version of DotA, but I think this is actually a good thing.  Somehow, Riot managed to make the game more acceptable to the general public without turning it into a kid’s game.  Sure, they don’t have the menacing creeps, but there’s still blood, family unfriendly deaths, and  plenty of fanservice available.  In fact, a significant portion of the fanbase actually criticized how the game had too much boobage.  Riot answered the criticism, saying that it was necessary to easily discern female characters from male ones.

Hmm... Thats a tough call.

Another fun thing about LoL is the numerous shout outs and references to different media in forms of dialogues, actions, skill names, and even character skins. Unfortunately, since most Filipino gamers are not Internet-savvy *facepalm*, these subtle easter eggs are left unappreciated.

I don’t think this game will replace DotA any time soon, but i wouldn’t be surprised if this game becomes available in every computer shop.  Arguably the better one of the two DotA clones (there’s another MOBA called Heroes of Newerth aka HoN, but I’ll save that for a later article), this game is definitely worth a try if you want to get acquainted with MOBAs or if you want to take a break from DotA.

1. Multiplayer Battle Arenas like DotA, HoN, LoL, and GrandChase

2. MMORPGs like Ragnarok, Cabal, Flyff

3. First Person Shooters like Counter-Strike, Special Force, and Crossfire

Notice something missing there?

These days, I don’t see a lot of pinoy gamers playing strategy games anymore

It’s quite rare to see Filipinos playing strategy games in computer shops these days.  I can barely remember the last time I saw people in a computer shop playing Brood War or Starcraft 2. Red Alert 3 and the rest of the Command and Conquer Series? Almost nonexistent.  Battle Realms? Yeah right.  Then there are those turn based games like Heroes of Might and Magic and Civilization.

Today, macromanagement is largely unheard of, and micromanagement means controlling three units at most.  This is because majority of Filipino gamers want to play games where they can find something to identify themselves with.  They want things that can represent them in the gaming universe, and an army isn’t one of those things.

Although there’s nothing wrong with playing games that fall under the three common categories, I can’t help but feel disappointed with how Filipino PC gaming devolved into what it is today.  Here’s a painful example that majority of our country’s gamers don’t really know much about games:

I was playing as the human faction in a Warcraft III skirmish game late September of 2010.  As I was pumping out several dwarven riflemen from the barracks, I heard the following comments from a couple of guys behind me.

Guy 1: Pre tignan mo o andaming Kardel! (a DotA hero that uses the same graphics as a dwarven rifleman)

Guy 2: Pano yun?

Take note, this isn’t a different game; IT’S WARCRAFT III’s DEFAULT PLAYING MODE.  If it was a different game, I probably wouldn’t mind.  It’s these things that really spells doom to the “gaming” community. It’s like treating a car as a music player just because it has good sound system and ignoring the rest of it.

Back then, the Filipino Gaming Community was diverse.  Although most gamers back then prefer to stick to a few game titles, they still have a basic grasp of how to play most games available to them.  These days, people who know how to control more than 12 units at once are a dime a dozen.

Will variety ever come back to the Filipino Gaming Community?  As for now I highly doubt it.

I’ll be publishing my thoughts about different stuff that I like here so expect articles about

1. Video games and gaming in general

2. The Internet

2. Anime

3. Airsoft

4. Geek stuff

5. Anything Interesting

If someone has any suggestions on how to pimp my site’s looks, feel free to help me!