New games incoming

Last month I had a little poll to see which open-world, first person shooter was favoured by my modest following of readers. Despite the 250 or so hits the blog has received in the last month, no one took the time to vote. This isn't the first time this has happened, so I get the impression you lot don't like voting in polls regarding first person shooters.

Never the less, I decided to resolve the matter in my own way; by purchasing Rage: Anarchy Edition. How did I go about making this decision? It had nothing to do with ratings, reviews, or recommendations. Instead I looked to see which of the three titles I was interested in playing was still available from the various online retailers. Since Rage was the only title available, Rage is what I bought. OK, so it's not a 'new game' as such, but it will be a new game for me.

As an added bonus it was on promotion, so I managed to pick up both Rage: Anarchy Edition and Deadpool for only R299. The downside is it will take nearly three weeks for the package to be delivered. That will at least allow me some time to progress in Diablo III, and possibly even try my hand at playing Call of Duty: Ghosts online. That said, I have spent quite a few of the last couple of evenings watching soccer (or football if you prefer), instead of gaming or reading, so perhaps I wont get all that much further in Diablo III before Rage and Deadpool arrive.

It has begun...

I finally got around to finishing Diablo II: Lord of Destruction last week, more than a decade after its original release. To be honest, I don't really remember what the outcome of the game was. Other than the fact that the loot dropped by Baal was pretty useless, I barely remember the closing cinematic. Come to think of it, was there even one?

So this weekend I decided to get started on Diablo III. I'd watched the opening cinematic for Diablo III when I installed the system updated, but I decided to watch it again for inspiration before creating my character. It's mind-blowing how much more realistic the Diablo III characters, Leah and Deckard Cain are drawn, when compared to Marius and The Dark Wanderer of Diablo II. Even more amazing is just how good the controls for Diablo III are mapped to the PlayStation 3's DualShock controller. It feels as though the game was developed specifically to be played on a current generation console. Initially I was a little sceptical of how the mouse and keyboard controls would recreated for console controllers, and I'm relieved to say that this was actually done exceptionally well.

For now the only advantage of using a mouse comes in the form of being able to left-click (or right-click, depending on what action you've assigned) on the monster I wish to attack, and by holding the mouse button, my character would continue to attack the enemy until it died. I find selecting which monster I want to attack with the controller a little more hap-hazard, and continually having to mash 'X' to attack is beginning to get a little frustrating. That said, I haven't tried holding 'X' while attacking, so that could be easily solved. But while attacking with the mouse in Diablo II, I never accidentally looted chests, used shrines, or opened doors. All of which have happened to me so far while playing Diablo III on a console. While no biggie, I have also unintentionally dropped chandeliers while fighting one monster, and waiting for another to step under said chandelier. Perhaps the 'loot/ use/ break/ open' action button is the one thing I would change, and have it assigned to another button. Since I've only played a few hours, maybe I'm doing it wrong.

Based partly on the results from the Diablo III character class poll (thanks to the person who voted), the fact that Act V of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction is set on the foothills of Mount Arreat, in the heart of the Barbarian homeland, and that I have never played using the Barbarian, I created a Barbarian class character.

Despite not having spent much time playing Diablo III, and apart from the few quibbles above, I've enjoyed every other aspect of the game so far, and am looking forward to spending many more hours exploring the world of Sanctuary, slaying beats and monster, while searching for better loot, and levelling up my character.

Lastly, here's a link to a cool infographic that Blizzard put together for the one year anniversary since the release of Diablo III.

First person shooter poll results

The final result of the 'First person shooter poll' was really a no result, since nobody voted. So I took matters into my own hands, and bought Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition and Portal 2, neither of which were titles in the poll.

I played quite a bit of Borderlands on my brother's Xbox 360 while back home. It was amazingly good fun, especially when playing co-operatively.* The comic book graphics and dark humour are brilliant, and I really enjoyed playing as Mordecai. There is little doubt that I will eventually get the sequel too, but I'll hold out until I've finished Borderlands, or a Game of the Year (GotY) edition of Borderlands 2 is released.

I also ended up buying Far Cry 3 (which was one of the options in the poll) as the price was reduced by a further 25%. So from having no first person shooters a month ago, I now have three, even though Portal 2 isn't a conventional shooting game.

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* Except when my brother (playing as Lilith) ran around looting all the chests, and scavenging dropped ammo from around me, while I was busy taking on various badass bandits, bruisers and psychos; or when he used phasewalk too close to me, inadvertently depleting my shield; or when he ran away from the conflict, waited for me to soften up a couple of the tougher opponents, then reappeared with his shotgun, killed everything with a single shot, and got the experience for doing so.

February poll results

Last month I ran a poll to see what visitors wanted to see more of on the blog. It ran from 14 February, until the end of the month. During that period of time Here be Porpoises received approximately 273 hits. Of those 273 hits, only one person completed the poll, meaning that 0.36% of the site's visitors voted.

This is what 0.36% of 273 looks like

Fortunately I had allowed voters to choose multiple options, as the sole person who took the time to vote selected two of the five categories; they wanted to see more posts about reviews and downloads.

No love for the sea animals

With that information, I wrote a brief review of the new How to Destroy Angels album (that post has had 13 views since 19 February). As for the addressing the downloads part, all I can say is that of the 96 posts I've written so far, just over 20% of those have included links to download free music. I will try post a few more download links in the future, but I like to first listen to the music before I share it on this blog, just in case I think it's rubbish, and undeserving of the promotion.

On the topic of free downloads, if you're interested in free image processing software I suggest you check out GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). So far I have been able to use it to do everything I'd previously used Photoshop for, except automatically stitch together photos to make a panorama. That said, a quick Google search for "creating panoramas in GIMP" returns links to several GIMP plug-ins and how-to tutorials.