Warhammer Online Collectors Edition Released!

The Official Warhammer Online Collectors Edition was released on March 26th, I just purchased mine today for $92.20 with shipping and tax included at the EA Store, get yours while they last! The folks over at EA Mythic have this to say:

EA Mythic is proud to present the Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Collector’s Edition, a limited-run, premium version of the game for true Warhammer fans. It is the perfect addition to any Warhammer collection and can be proudly displayed alongside your army of miniatures. This special oversized box contains unique collectibles and exciting in-game content to help you get the most out of your journeys through the battlefields of the Age of Reckoning. Only 60,000 units of the Collector’s Edition will be available in North America. (We’re making a couple extra, but those are for us!)

The collectors edition includes 7 pounds of swag! An exclusive games workshop miniature which depicts the greenskin warboss, Grumlok, and his shaman, Gazbag, in rich detail.

A full-color 128 page graphic novel, Warhammer Online: Prelude to War. Written by acclaimed Games Workshop writer, Graham McNeill, the oversized book is richly illustrated by Chad Hardin, Joe Abraham, Rahsan Ekedal, Tony Parker, and Kevin Hopgood. Each of the graphic novel’s six chapters tells a unique story that together detail the events leading up to the Age of Reckoning.

A 224-page hardcover collection of original art from the game. Each of the glossy, full-color pages showcases the talented work of the concept artists and offers a glimpse at a world in the making.

Bonus in-game content such as “The Librams of Insight”: Readers of the Librams of Insight are granted special insight into their own actions and earn experience at a higher rate for a limited time. (+10% XP modifier for 60 minutes, 3 uses, 90 minute reuse timer.)

Purchasers of the Collector’s Edition will begin their adventures in the Age of Reckoning with twelve (12) additional quests awaiting them in the Tome of Knowledge. Each quest offers an exciting reward, as well as an exclusive character title, that will aid the player in their battles on the frontlines.

The WAR Collector’s Edition includes twelve (12) bonus heads for additional character customization options. Each race gets a truly unique look (with male and female versions) that is sure to turn heads on the battlefields and be the envy of everyone in the army.

Along with all of this great stuff, the WAR Collectors Edition also includes Open Beta Access, Live Game Head Start, and additional in-game items. I certainly can’t wait for Open Beta and the official release of WAR!

Top 5 Botched PC Game Launches

A staff member at 1Up wrote this article about the “Top 5 Botched PC Game Launches”, and their horrible beginning first days of release. Number two on the list just happens to be Steam/Half-Life 2, which I personally experienced and it wasn’t enjoyable.

Installing a new PC game can be something like a blind date. Yeah, sure, it may have sounded great when your friend was saying you’d be perfect for each other, but if things start off on a bad foot — like, say, she vomits in your car — you may just not want to bother with the rest of the night. Plenty of atrocious PC game launches litter the past, but what we have here are our five “favorites” — the ones that still make us shake our heads and cluck our tongues and make other such disapproving gestures with our bodies as we recount their particular horrors. And while it would be easy enough to fill this entire list at least two times over with MMOs alone, we decided not to do that, as it’s just too much fish-in-the-barrel shooting even for us. So let’s laugh, cry, and get annoyed all over again at five of the all-time worst PC game launches. We promise, reading this list will not automatically reformat your hard drive!

5. Hellgate: London

When Hellgate opened on Halloween, 2007, s*** hit the fan. Never mind the ongoing demonic invasion and dimensional gash in no-longer-jolly-old England; players paid up to fight it off. But persistent crash bugs were a bad start. And while lost progress in an action-RPG is always painful, double and triple billings chafe in any context. Many subscribers to Hellgate: London’s optional membership program, who exchanged $9.99 a month or a flat lifetime fee of $149 for priority server access, easier in-game transportation, and other perks, reported massive problems and mistaken charges. According to popular gaming site Shacklenews, one user claimed that he was “charged two times on November 3, one time on November 4, and one time on November 5″ and summarized the situation as “the worst online gaming experience I have ever had.” On developer Flagship Studios‘ support forum, others claimed to have proof of payment with no subscription to show for it.

Asian gamers encountered another crisis altogether. In November 2007, Infocomm Asia Holdings (IAH), which operates Hellgate’s Southeast Asia server, apologetically announced that a forthcoming patch would entirely erase all progress players had made over the previous two weeks. The proposed compensation — a 30-day free subscription — couldn’t cut it with an increasingly irate audience. According to Singapore-based paper The Straights Times, “the resulting uproar…sent IAH back to the drawing board” in search of a less drastic solution. In the end, and with Flagship’s intervention, IAH avoided the reset switch. By then, however, it was Hellgate’s reputation that needed a reboot — and perhaps someone, somewhere learned that any PR points gained by launching a demonic-themed game on Halloween aren’t always worth the hassle.

4. Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

Books could be written about everything that went wrong with Vanguard, and that’s before you do any real digging into the early development mess, where the money bled off to, what Everquest co-creator and Sigil CEO Brad McQuaid was doing through all of it, and what happened in the parking lot afterward. Shoved out the door way too early for what were admitted to be financial reasons, the game was just plain half-baked, plagued by enough bugs, missing content, and instability to compete with the very best of the worst. From little things like a “display hoods/helmets” option that didn’t do anything because none of the hoods or helmets in the game even had any graphics to frequently previewed back-of-the-box features like flying mounts that didn’t make it into the game until long, long after release.

Vanguard staggered away from its absolute train wreck of a launch and slowly, steadily recovered. These days, it’s pretty well healed up and finally living up to promises that were made and broken long before. But it’s still hard to forget that, until lately, players were paying for the privilege of participating in a really, really long beta.

3. World War II Online

Where Germany waged lightning war that engulfed Europe in 1939, MMOFPS World War II Online sputtered into history with all the majesty of Jed Clampett on the highway to Beverly Hills, shooing off many potential players with its opening salvo in 2001. Would-be warriors were forced to download a 70MB patch before fighting — massive in the age of 56K modems — followed by subsequent hotfixes for slide-show framerates, audio oddities, a faulty interface, flat-out missing features, Hitler’s monorchism, and much more. In fact, for months, there was no war worth mentioning. Fed up players sought refunds, and as they continued to complain online, sales tanked. Codeveloper Playnet waived subscription fees for a few months before cutting costs and filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Despite these setbacks, WWII Online soldiered on with an improved infrastructure, yet more patches, and multiple rereleases.

2. Steam/Half-Life 2

Yes, yes, we all love Steam now (not). It’s the model of digital distribution and community management in PC gaming right now, utterly shaming Microsoft’s embarrassingly inept Games for Windows Live initiative. But back in the day, we were even harsher on Valve than we now are on Microsoft — because the official launch of Steam on November 16, 2004, which coincided with the launch of Half-Life 2, was an utter nightmare. Or at least it seemed that way at the time. To be fair, some of what we complained about at the time was simply because we had never seen it before. Like, for example, a single-player game that required you to be online to play it. What seemed unreasonable and demanding back in the day is now more par for the course. That said, the initial launch was a disaster, with Valve’s servers backed up and crashing due to bottlenecks and general instability, making it literally impossible for many players — whether they’d bought a boxed copy or a direct download — to validate and play Half-Life 2. Yes, gamers finally had the most anticipated PC game in years in their hot little hands, but they couldn’t play it because the online validation was busted. As an advertisement for Valve’s new distribution system, you couldn’t have asked for anything worse. Since then, of course, Valve has gone out of their way to fix and improve Steam, and now we can’t imagine living without it. On November 16, 2004, though, it felt like one of the biggest WTF moments in PC gaming history.

1. Ultima IX: Ascension

All hail the king of gaffed game launches: Though Ultima IX hit store shelves in 1999 (following a troubled development cycle that saw at least four different versions of the game and its engine), the box may as well have been empty. Eager RPG fans booted the game up on their fancy Voodoo3-equipped Pentium II rigs, only to run headlong into myriad 3D engine bugs and crash after game-halting crash. Eventually (after several half-assed attempts on publisher EA’s part to fix U9’s flubs), an unofficial patch was released anonymously by one of the game’s developers, which at least made U9 playable. Given how much dirty laundry’s come out in the years following U9’s release (the usual corporate drama, repeated design reboots, and “creative differences”), we can’t say we’re surprised at how terrible it turned out — and despite several sequel attempts, Ultima’s never regained the ground it lost thanks to this dud. Such an unfitting end for such a magnificent series.

Earthrise

I have spent the last couple of hours reading and posting on the Earthrise forums about this upcoming game. Earthrise is a post-apocalyptic MMORPG estimated to be released in 2009. This game looks promising, it is certainly going to have a lot of PvP and a new PvP looting system. I have been a longstanding fan of open world non-consensual PvP, there is nothing funner in an MMORPG to me, than a fight that you cannot predict nor expect, it takes more skill to fight unprepared in the open than it does in a fixed battle. I added some high res screen shots from the Earthrise website, as you can see the game looks great, so its a good thing I will have a new desktop to run this game by 2009. Here is a brief overview of the game:

“In the aftermath of the Third World War, mankind has managed to survive and build a new society: the prosperous city of Sal Vitas. Cloning, nanotechnology and quantum engineering are part of a new reality. Thanks to these technological advances, the human species has become immortal; each individual’s consciousness is stored in a data vault, ready to be uploaded into a cloned body as necessary. New energy sources have been discovered. There is a unified government that takes good care of those citizens who abide by its strict laws. Paradise, it appears, might really have come to Earth, and the people have embraced it.”

Sounds promising, and the dev team for this game seem like they are on the ball with things, so hopefully this game will prove to be as good as it looks now, we will have to wait. I’ll keep you updated on future Earthrise updates, and you can visit their website @ Earthrise, feel free to join their forums and begin discussing the future of this game.

New Laptop!

I have just received an HP Pavilion dv2025nr Entertainment Notebook PC, it is an early graduation present from my parents. I enjoy this laptop quite a lot, and it has been working well so far. It has an AMD Turion 64×2 GFX Card, touch sensitive media controls, 1 gig of RAM, 100 gigs of hard drive space. Although it is for my school work, I have been playing a lot of audiosurf on it, which is a very fun game.

New Blog!

I just created this blog courtesy of wordpress.com, I have used their blogs in the past and they always seem to work great. I felt a need to start documenting and posting some of the games I play in the PC World. Most of my games are distributed by Steam, such as Counter-Strike: Source and Day of Defeat: Source, which are two of my favorites. Once I get out of high school (about 2.5 months left of my senior year) I will quit my part time job at KFC and take up my summer job doing structural repair before college. I am going to Ferris State University with my friend TJ (Gilo).

Anyway, once summer starts and I am working full time again I will be able to afford a new PC, currently I am still using my old Dell from 2003! It has lasted a long time and has been through several graphics card updates as well as power supply replacements. For my new computer I am looking for something with a good price, I rather like this one, which I can get at my local best buy. It is a Gateway 9600, yes I know Gateway doesn’t have the greatest rep and are mostly remembered as those huge white monsters we all owned back in the mid 90’s. However, I’ve been looking around for a PC for quite awhile now, at places such as iBuyPower, Dell XPS, Velocity Micro, Vigor, Alienware, and others. Many of these offer overpriced computers with fancy cases, so I have decided I am just going to buy mine locally at a Best Buy or Circuit City to avoid all the annoyances of purchasing a PC online.

So hopefully soon I can get rid of this old rig and move onto something a bit faster, actually a lot faster. The specs on the Gateway 9600 are as follows: AMD Phenom quad-core processor 9600, 3GB RAM, 500GB Serial ATA II hard drive, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT, the only bad part is it comes with Vista, and I can always update the graphics card. This Gateway 9600 comes to $1,099.99, which is a great price for what you are getting, to make a machine even close to as good as this on Alienware the prices were up in the 4K range!