Travelogue

As I had mentioned earlier after I quit WOW I was trying to find a game that would hold my interest beyond a few days. About 2 months back I bought Supreme Commander and though it was nice too look at and had good gameplay it was not much fun. It seemed like a souped up TA with pretty graphics. The sides were not distinctive enough the economic model was still the same etc and somehow I didnt like the fact that your units had no character. It felt like playing a board game and as a result I soon got bored of it and didnt play it much.

Enter Universe at War: Earth Assault
This has got be the most fun RTS I have seen since WC3. Warcraft 3 set the level for the RTS genre and I think UAW has borrowed the best from WC3 and Starcraft and then enhanced it more. The heroes concept from WC3 and the distinctive units from Starcraft. There are 3 sides namely Novus,Masari and the Hierarchy. The hierarchy are the evil race that invade earth to harvest it for resources and the Novus are a race of sentient machines who oppose hierarchy and come to earth to stop hierarchy. Masari are a race that at one time saved hierarchy but later were betrayed and the remanants of Masari were slumbering in earth and the coming of hierarchy has awakened them.

Humanity sadly has little to no role in the game!. Each side has a unique economic model and resource costs. Where hierarchy sports Giant walkers which serve as garangutan war machines as well as production centers, the novus build flow networks and their units can flow along these networks to redeploy rapidly across the maps. Masari are the slow bloomers in the game and are like the protoss in Starcraft. They have incredibly hard to kill units but are expensive. Each side sports different super weapons and different heroes. Where novus relies on viral attacks to shut down enemy machines/take control etc the masari hero can teleport units around the map.

The campaign is average in quality but the mulitplayer gameplay is just superb. I have been playing online on live though the population at this time is minimal the games are a lot of fun. 5 minute rushes that made warcraft/starcraft fun can happen as well as superb end game if you do survive the rushes. Overall a must play for any RTS fan!.

http://petroglyphgames.com for more information

Its been over 6 months since I quit World of Warcraft and I am still to find a game that can hold my interest. A factor to contribute to it is also the fact that I have been mostly stuck with Ubuntu:) and no windows but still. Over the last 6 months I have been thinking of what made me play WOW for over 2 yrs whereas no other game in the past has ever managed to hold my interest for so long. I have played various RPG's and even bought guild wars about the same time as I bought WOW. But my guild wars copy has hardly been played heck I still have my guild wars and it runs under linux too ( via wine ) but somehow i still can't get myself to play it more than an hour before I get bored of it.

What I have realized is
- Wow was fun. Questing in wow/guilds/pvp everything about the game was fun. Heck even farming/finding friends to quest with everything about the game rocked. What wow got right was the community features in the game. Guild wars chat channel is crappy no linking/no auction house/no in game e-mail etc makes the game rather boring.
- Wow had all the features superbly implemented. More importantly the cities were superb hubs to hang around, the characters had well Character..Guild wars characters look lame...all human is so boring! The mobs in WOW were fun, its certainly fun to kill a 2 headed Ogre than a stupid scorpion or something named Charr or a centaur all of them making the same sounds.
- The regions were gorgeous, the shared world was amazing... running around in stranglethorn vale randomly running into enemy faction characters and deciding whether to be nice or gank the guy had a rush of its own or not knowing if you were the one going to get ganked.
- Essentially I am still to find another game that had the capability to involve a player so much as WOW did. I guess thats why its also known as World of Wowcrack!

Enough about wow now to the new games to look forward to!

It seems massively multiplayer gaming is finally coming of age in India. I have been playing one for the last 2+ yrs namely World of Warcraft and secretly hoping that someday blizzard will launch india servers. I was just browsing through some stuff and saw that sify relaunched a korean game A3 in india sometime back and as of yesterday you can download the client via games on demand service on indiagames.com.

The game is subpar at best from what I could see. But what is interesting is the business model MMORPG's are taking in india. Compared to the US and Europe where most people are charging monthly subscriptions for the game, Chinese prefer to pay as and when they play. Eg prepaid gamer cards which are sold for certain number of hours of play. Thats the model in which WOW is working in China. You go buy a gamer card, register an a/c and play for as long as the card lasts. Most of Wow gamers in China play from gaming cafes. It seems most people entering the Indian market are also looking at a gamer card model instead of a pure subscription model.

The next 2-3 yrs look to be really interesting with gaming taking off in a big way in India. Especially with some serious money being pumped into it namely XBOX360 launch, UTV buying stake in indiagames, reliance launching its gaming portal Zapak.com with Zapak tv and gaming events being organized through the country. SKOAR 2007 just happened in Delhi from Jan24-Jan26th organized by the Jasubhai digital media group publishers of SKOAR the gaming magazine in India.

Also reliance seems to be pushing zapak.com a lot they are planning on launching Zapak gamer Cafe's as well as launching some MMORPG's in india.

In short, we have some very very exciting times ahead:)) One thing to look forward to would be the launch of XBox live service in india.