Beta beta beta beta beta~

I had an okay weekend I guess.  I spent most of Saturday playing piano and beta testing Legend of Edda in its closed beta.  Sunday (yesterday) I spent about 2.5 hours playing violin and guitar and then spent the rest of the day beta testing Kitsu Saga from Aeriagames.  After that, I did some game hopping.  I'm not sure if its an actual term, if not, I invented a new term!  Dahahaha~  Anyways, it's the act of jumping from one game to another in small durations so that one can play various games in a short span of time.  It also shows will power if you can pull yourself away from one thing to go to another.  So, I think it went something like: Team Fortress 2 (PC), Beat Hazard (PC), Trine (PC), Global Agenda (PC), Mount & Blade (PC), Cabal Online (PC), Sega Superstar Tennis (PS3), Demon's Souls (PS3), and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (PS3).  I think that's the best game hopping in terms of quantity I had.  And yes, I enjoyed it.  I got something out of every one of those games (well, maybe except Mount & Blade because all I got were extra items...).

Anyways, it's a new week and I'm planning it out as I go along kind of.  I might skip finishing a game this week in order to devote time into beta testing Medal of Honor and work on a music project I have in mind.  I haven't much got to do what I wanted to set out for post graduation, and so I thought I'd start doing some of that now.  I've also noticed how much I written about videogames and have been considering doing an actual public blog to share with the gaming community.  We'll see.  I'm also debating whether I should do some open beta testing for CosmicBreak since it's back up for a 2nd round.  I enjoy that game and am considering to play that game for real and devote some time into it.  I don't think I've devoted as much time to any game lately as much as I have for Team Fortress 2 and League of Legends, both which have over 100+ hours of gameplay logged in.  I've been trying to log more hours into Global Agenda since I haven't really played it since I've bought it.  It's a shame that I don't since it's a fun game.

Here are some quick comments on recent betas:

[Legend of Edda - CampusGames]

The voice-over is kept in its original Korean language, which I don't mind and am kind of glad for.  The game is pretty straight-forward in terms of typical MMORPG elements.  You are sent somewhere, you get a quest to kill x amount of enemies and then you turn it in.  There are six classes to choose from, and you get one of the skills right from the start.  The graphics are adorable and the environment is very clean (meaning it's not cluttered and hard to get around).  It bothers me a little that the camera is fixed, but it's not that big of a problem.  Honestly, it's not a game I'd want to really log in hours to.  The fact that I've played over 30 Point-n-Click MMORPGs makes me more picky on which ones are good and which ones feel more desirable to play for long durations.  If you've never played an MMORPG or want some type of time killer, then it's worth a try when it's out of beta.  The quality of the game is nice though.

[Kitsu Saga - AeriaGames]

Had to do some research, but found out that this game was developed in Taipei, Taiwan and a lot of the text still has grammatical errors, coding errors on names, and some text is still in Chinese.  A lot of the games that come from China have been kind of "ho-hum," cookie-cutter, boring with good ideas.  The number one common issue I have with Chinese developed MMORPGs is that there is an incredible amount of walking an each one.  Not so with Kitsu Saga.  The places are close by, the story progresses smoothly, and battles don't take forever (seriously, Legendary Champions takes 2-3 minutes for one enemy to die...)  Something that bothers me specifically in this game is that the labels of names of your character, players, NPCs and enemies are huge!  They take up so much screen space that I can hardly find my way around.  I'll be sending that in to Aeriagames and see if they'll do anything about it.  I do like how in Kitsu Saga, and many other Chinese MMORPGs, how there is a auto-routing mechanic that allows the player to click on the destination name or person they need to speak to and the character will find that place.  I spent much more time on this game than I did for Legend of Edda.  It takes some time to really get into the game's core combat system when you choose a clan and is given abilities that can fight multiple enemies at the same time.  The quality of the game is poor, but the gameplay is interesting.  I may beta test it longer, but I don't think I'll be playing the actual game.

[Cosmicbreak - Cyberstep]

Back up with its 2nd open beta in the process, Cosmicbreak provides all that's fun in an MMO and allows the players to do them fairly quickly.  Instances, PvP, FvF, PvE, Quests and such can be started remotely from the main city or by walking to a certain area.  The RPG is action based is reminds me of games like Virtual-On and Exteel, both which I really liked.  The game is fast paced, the PvP is exciting, and the boss battles are large scale and intense.  The voices are kept in its original Japanese language, and I think it fills a certain atmosphere into the game that makes it feel right.  Oh, and the game doesn't take up that much hard drive.  It's less than 1 GB worth of memory.  Lots of customization, lots of characters to use at the same time, no grinding, levels between players don't mean as much as the team-work and skill it takes to pvp, and clean graphics makes this at least a must try.  I'm gonna continue playing it when it launches.

[Medal of Honor - Electronic Arts]

I'm about to try it right after this blog post.  It's open beta from today till friday.  I didn't care much about this game, but the more I see footages of it, the better it keeps getting.  I just hope the gameplay is just as good.

[Nucleon - Team Awesome Fabulous]

What's this you say?  Why it's one of the games that spawned from the Week-Long competition I hosted in the videogame development club!  I also did the music composition and sound effects for it.  We're practically done with beta and planning to publish it this Friday (I hope).  I'll finally have a published game under my name to add to my resume.  Once I get word that it's out on X-Box Live Arcade, I spread the word.

That's it for now, I wanna try Medal of Honor.