In Honor of #FemShepFriday

Just a few screenies of my FemShep as i played her through Mass Effect 1 and 2, in honor of #FemShepFriday.

Mass Effect:


Mass Effect 2:


And another cool one from Mass Effect 2:

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

I have to say i am always a little bit worried about a game when i see the EA logo, but so far Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning has been a lot of fun.
At times the game reminds me a lot of Oblivion, which of course is no surprise.
They definatly took a lot of the great designs/ideas from games like the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, which are definatly my favourite game series.

Although i am not really impressed with the storyline, the gameplay definatly makes up for it, really solid.
At times there is a bit too much of the "onrail" feeling, where you can't jump over a few rocks or treetrunk and have to walk around it, while you should have been able to just step over it, it feels a bit like Dragon Age at times, where there is just one path to take and eventhough it looks like you should be able to walk up a small hill the game simply won't let you. So it's not really a full open world game.

Right now i started my playthrough as a rogue character which is a lot of fun, especially the "stealth kills" are a lot of fun, really cool to sneak up behind a character and stab them from behind, most of the time resulting in a "one shot kill" and a really cool animation.

I am pretty sure i will be spending a lot of hours playing Reckoning.

More Origin/EA account problems.

In a post (Thanks EA, for not making it complicated...) not that long ago I wrote about the problems I was having trying to get my 3 EA/Origin accounts merged into one account.
According to EA CS this was not possible (personally think that's a lot of BS).

So on to my new problem.
I recently bought some simpoints through Origin and only after the purchase noticed I was logged into my main Origin/EA account (which logs in automatically) and not on my "sims account".

The simpoints were automatically credited to the main EA/Origin account, without a serial key or anything else given that would allow me to transfer/give it to my sims account.
So now I am stuck with simpoints on my main account and since that is not a sims account i can't use them.

I have contacted EA CS about this issue and they would contact me back (apperantly they abandoned the ticket system, hmm wonder why.. :) ).

Anyways it has been 2 days and they still have to contact me, so yet another bad EA/Origin Customer "Service" experience for me.
And it also leaves me to wonder how long it's gonna take to get this "fixed".

If they would just give us the option to merge accounts this would not be a problem at all, afterall i allready contacted them about this and allready told them i was afraid something like this might happen, if you have 3 accounts and forget you are not logged into the right account it's an easy mistake to make.

I never asked for 3 accounts, so give me an option to merge them, or let me transfer all of my stuff into 1 account.

Oh man how much i love Steam!!

Going back in time with the Sims.

I have been playing a lot of The Sims 3 lately, really enjoying it.
I also (finally) started playing The Sims Medieval again, i only briefly played it when it came out.

Initianally i never got into it because it is quite different than playing The Sims 3, where The Sims 3 is quite the "open world", The Sims Medieval is not.
It is heavily quest based and very little open world, i don't know if later on the world will "unlock" for me to freeplay, but right now i basicly look at the questlist for available quests and choose one, when i finish a quest, i get the rewards for it and get to pick another quest.

Most of the time you have to pick a main character, that can be your king/queen or if another character is needed you will have to pick them (like a doctor or spy) and often you also get to choose a secondary character that will play as a support role.

Often two characters will work together in solving/finishing the goals in a quest.
This is quite different from The Sims 3, as usually you play with just one character (or a family), in The Sims Medieval you get to play all sorts of characters like the king/queen, a doctor, a spy, a wizzard etc.
Although you have to unlock these so called hero characters by doing quests and earn points to buy/unlock facilities for them.

So far i have been having a lot of fun playing through the quests as they have many, sometimes surprising, twists and turns depending on the characters and their traits.

And the expansion The Sims Medieval: Pirates and Nobles ads a lot of more options/fun to the game.

So, yeah if you like the sims and some questbased gaming you might like The Sims Medieval just as much as i do :)

SWTOR: Burning Sensation

Finally got some time in to play SWTOR again and hit 27 on my smuggler.
I do have to say that how much fun the first 10 levels were it feels more and more frustrating since hitting level 25.
Maybe i am doing something wrong and messed up with my character skills, but often even the solo missions turn out quite difficult towards the end, and result in many trial and errors, meaning lots of dying. Very frustrating.

More often than not i have really big problems beating some of the "end bosses" of the solo missions and i can't imagine it was designed this way, i really hate to group up for solo missions, i don't mind for the heroics, as they are intended to be group missions.

I also tried soloing the Hammer station flashpoint, i could manage the dungeon until the first boss and there was just no way for me to beat him, the trash mobs were very easy (i am 10 levels about requirement) and i could have solo'd them but the first boss is a whole different story.
I really hate it, when there's no way to beat a boss especially if you are way above the level, it's almost like i am hardly doing any damage whatsoever yet they hit like a truck.

Maybe i have played too many single player games lately and have been spoiled :)

Anyways i am gonna try and stick with it, i really wanna finish the smuggler class storyline and definitely wanna play through the other class stories as i really think there's some awesome stories in there.
So hopefully i am able to get through these frustrations before i get burned out on SWTOR.

Fallen Earth: Get to the chopper!

I have been going through my old email and found some emails from Fallen Earth with codes for some free stuff, i have always been subbed to the game eventhough i hardly played it.
Think i took a full year subscription since launch, anyway since i was still subbed i got some free stuff when the game went free to play.

Going through those emails i actually had the urge to, first get that free stuff (hey it's free) and second play the game again.
So i logged in and played for some time.
I still think it's a pretty good game and i like the atmosphere, however i still can't get used to the combat, it still feels "off" to me.
Maybe i am too spoiled by other games, but it just doesn't click with me.

There are still some combat problems that look familiar to me as they were allready there during the beta and some rubberbanding problems.
But since Fallen Earth is now F2P i think those issues are not that bad, cause for a F2P it is actually a pretty good game.

Having been away from the game for some time i really needed some time getting back into it, personally i think they over complicated some things as the game is really not that intuitive.

The free stuff is actually quite cool, especially the spiked chopper and yes that outfit, pimpin it out :)

Fallen Earth is really one of those games that i like but just not play that often.
And i almost forgot, they also have that pretty cool iphone app, that you can use to log into the game and check your character, check your mail, do some crafting, do auction house stuff and chat, pretty cool for a F2P game.

Bethesda games: It's all about community

I have been playing a lot of Fallout New Vegas lately, and as usual i developed a love/hate relation with the game.
Some time ago i stopped playing because i got tired of the crashes, however, the urge to play FNV always comes up again..

It bothers me that a game can be so "crash happy", and to say it's the mods i use that's causing it, is a bit too much.
I won't deny that mods can cause crashes and i am sure some of my crashes were probably caused by them.
This does however not change the fact that when i started playing FNV for the first time, without any mods whatsoever, it crashed within the first 15 mins of the game (talking about a warm welcome), so this was definatly not caused by any mods.

Doing a Google search on Fallout gives a ton of results on crashes/freezes etc.
I find it pretty wierd that this gets through QA, either they don't care or they don't do QA testing.
It's almost as if they are counting on the community to fix their problems, and the community does exactly that and more.

It's the awesome community behind the games (Fallout 3, Fallout NV, Oblivion, Skyrim) that make these games as great as they are, without the community behind them the games would be forgotten pretty quick.

Imagine Blizzard or BioWare releasing a game as buggy as Oblivion, Fallout etc, there would be riots, yet the communty seems to forgive Bethesda for it.
Sure these games are awesome sandbox games and with the community made mods and improvements there's unlimited gameplay.
I have seen so many mods and game improvements out there that are way better than what the game devs put in the games themself, sometimes i really wonder if the game is just rushed to get it out and make money, they know it's going to sell because there's a huge community behind their games.

I have to admit, so far for me Skyrim does appear to be more stable and i have had only a few crashes/bugs, but i can't wait until the dev kit is released and we can see some real improvements to the game.

Sure Bethesda i forgive you, although i often feel like pulling my hairs out when i encounter yet another bug/crash, i'll keep playing until i am tired of the crashes, then i'll ragequit.... and be back for more later.