Newbie Blogger Iniative: Time flies when you’re having fun

Last Updated on Thursday, 31 May 2012 02:16 Written by Kadomi Thursday, 31 May 2012 02:30

Today, it’s May 31, so the Newbie Blogger Iniative comes to an end. It’s a wrap! In an example how not to do it, I totally dropped the ball on sending link love to new blogs for the past two weeks. The first week I was off on a day-trip and the following week my computer’s power supply imploded. Consistent posting frequency, I struggle with it. Syp compiled a massive list of all new blogs, and all the advice posts that were published during the NBI, so please, enjoy. Even if the Iniative ends now, you can start blogging any day, any month, any year. If you have the urge, advice is out there. Just do it. Thanks go to Syp for creating the iniative in the first place, and I was glad I got to participate!

All new blogs:

• Lotro Family of Flosiin Nightsong
• Red Neckromonger
• Casual Aggro
• SWTOR from Scratch
• Elfkina vežička
• Unwavering Sentinel
• Windy Acres Ranch
• TL-DR
• Saali in Taborea
• Bad Tauren
• Musings of an Altoholic
• Neurotic Girl
• Geo’s Ironman Challenge
• Crafty’s Corner
• Scattered Thoughts
• The Poison Mushroom
• My Staff is Bigger Than Yours
• Vagabond Goes for a Walk
• EVE All Night
• Dreadblade
• Priest All The Things
• Brazokie’s Blog Space
• Warp to Zero
• Altaclysmic
• Winniekin’s Adventures / Winnie goes F2P
• Diminishing Returns
• World’s End Tavern
• Warrior Needs Time Badly
• We do it the WASD Way!
• Middle-earth Initiative
• That Was An Accident!
• Aggrolicious
• Conveniently Placed Exhaust Port
• Adamant Nomad
• Toastman’s Blog
• Ravalation
• Gaming for Introverts
• The Incidental Analyst
• Funsponge
• Bloodthorne
• AntiPlasmaFrequency
• Kemwer Game Blog
• The Adventures of Danania, Supergirl of Lorien
• Unliving a Death Knight
• Deathstomp
• MMO Juggler
• White Charr
• Not Too Heavy
• Flask Half-Empty
• Raspberry Jammed
• Click to Loot
• Kaw Kaw! Get in the Bag!
• Mistress of Illusions
• Malefic Incantations
• MMO One Night a Week
• Omens of Onterion
• The Blue Haired Geek
• TFScribbles
• Glimpses from Middle-earth
• Goetia’s Letters
• /con mmob
• Gaming Abroad
• Backseat Game Design
• Divinity’s Reach
• Big Numbers
• Trippin Tyria
• Eons and Eons Away
• Horrible Ball of Fire
• Image Heavy
• Casually Vicious
• The Frugal Gamer
• Gaming Brew
• The Roaring Silence
• MMOARprz
• Game Delver
• The Diverted Muse
• Newbie Hobbit
• Battlemastered
• thenotsonewnoob
• Auction House on Farm
• Giddeon’s Hammer
• Noob Raider
• The Altoholic
• stnylan’s musings
• The 10th Level of Gaming Hell
• commentarilies
• Inside the Magic Shop
• Beyond Tannhauser Gate
• Argus or Bust
• Lotro Cinna
• Warlockery
• Stabby McStabStab
• Healing Mains
• The Loony Bin
• Warcraft Street
• Real Adventures in Fake Worlds
• GnomeGates.com
• Hipstalotro
• The Butterfly Gamer
• The Mighty Viking Hamster
• Why I Game
• Wald’s Wanderings
• Ald Shot First
• Sephora’s Closet
• Donovan Drones
• Beyond Reproach
• The Horn & Ivory Gates
• Landroval Style
• MMO Asylum
• Renai Hunter

All sponsor advice posts:

• Stropp’s World: Being a blogger superstar, Just do it, The pros and cons of self-hosting
• StarShadow: Some blogging advice, Themes and widgets, Screenshots, Menus, categories and tags
• In An Age: Advice for new bloggers
• Tish Tosh Tesh: Who Am I?, Blogging is a social activity, For love or money, Thinking linking, Traditions
• Tastes Like Battle Chicken: Build your own boss, Week 2 challenge, A few words of wisdom, Week 4 challenge
• Tales of the Aggronaut: The Google Reader blogroll, Getting started, Be open-minded (unlike me)
• Wadstomp Gaming: The importance of social media, Submit a guest post, The best advertising payouts, Be sure to burn your blog to feedburner, Create your own voice
• Beau Hindman: General advice, Indie games and bloggers
• Games and Geekery: Why you should blog, Learning about blogging from perfect strangers
• Skycandy: Blogging wrong, blogging right
• Shards of Imagination: Choosing the subject of your blog
• MMO Compendium: Keeping up with the industry and bloggers
• Contains Moderate Peril: Some general guidance, Mind your language, Stats, Episode 61
• Lotro Fashion: Screenshots make your blog interesting
• High Latency Life: Finding your voice, You need a thick skin
• Scary Worlds: Mobile blogging, Creating a good title, Advice you don’t want to hear
• ETCmmo.com: General advice
• Nerdy Bookahs: Why do you want to blog?, Why haven’t you started your blog yet?
• World of Matticus: WordPress plugins, Finishing your blog setup, Making connections
• World’s End Tavern: General tips
• Parallel Context: The best advice
• Tremayne’s Law: Read Think Write Edit
• Jaded Alt: So you wanna be a blogger?, What’s in a name?, If you remember nothing else… write!
• Avatars of Steel: Curling up with a good blog
• Blog de la Burro: Why I started blogging, Some advice on blogging, Does traffic matter?, How to deal with writer’s block, What you should blog about, Are comments important?, Is it ever okay to rant?, How to get noticed
• Inventory Full: How the Bhagpuss came to be, Take a moment, Backing up your blog
• Gamerlady: Tips to start
• Just One MMOre: How to be consistent and make it painless and easy, One question high-traffic blogs ask
• Spinksville: Picture manipulation tools and copyright
• T.R. Red Skies: Quick tips, Objectivity, relating and heart
• Live Like a Nerd: WordPress plugins for bloggers
• I Have Touched the Sky: Avoid barriers to commenting on Blogger, Blogs lists and RSS
• Thade’s Hammer: Advice for the new bloggers
• Levelcapped: Tell me about yourself, None of my business
• Psychochild: What makes your blog special
• Bullet Points: The worst advice you’ll ever receive about blogging, You are your blog
• A Casual Stroll to Mordor: Learn how to podcast, Writing for the web
• Contains Moderate Peril: Episode 58, Fine-turning your blog
• A Green Mushroom: Blogging tips and hints
• Too Many Annas: Picking a name
• Grimnir’s Grudge: It feels good to be a blogger
• Gankalicious: Never tell the truth, Meeting interesting people, Who the hell reads this?
• Herding Cats: Creating a podcast on the cheap with WordPress
• Distilled Willpower: 8 blogging tips they won’t tell you
• Vicarious Experience: From there to here
• TL-DR: Protect your blog!, Tags and Categories
• Multiplaying: You should be blogging
• Blue Kae: Advice is a strong word
• Screaming Monkeys: Top five tips
• Caer Morrighan: Get started with WoW blogging
• Hawt Pants: New blogger advice
• Tiger Ears: Why I started blogging
• Berath’s Brain Burps: Sage words, How to get lots and lots of hits
• Just One More Unlock: Newbie blogger tips, Opportunity
• Hunter’s Insight: An idea is formed, What not to do
• ALT:ernative: Starting at the beginning, The first idea
• Epic Slant: Tips and links, Guest post
• MMOGC: 3 little things
• A Journey through the Mind: My 0.2 ISK
• Red Cow Rise: What and why to post, Blog setup and community building
• Epic Slant: Writer’s block
• Creeping…: So you think you can blog
• The Ancient Gaming Noob: Playing blogroll breadcrumbs
• Dragonchasers: How not to build an audience
• Welcome to Spinksville: What you should write and how to write it
• The Stories of O: Top 4 tips
• A Ding World: Blog posting
• The Wild Boar Inn: Blogging tips
• Professor Beej: Stop writing!
• Nomnom.info: 4 blogging tips
• Gamer BC: A solid foundation and a step forward
• Casual Is As Casual Does: Tips, tricks and who am I kidding
• Roll One Hundred: Managing screenshots
• Bullet Points: I refuse to call it a blogosphere
• KIASA: Good advice
• Pumping Irony: Before taking the plunge
• Life is a Mind-Bending Puzzle: Wrapping up advice all in one place
• Rikna’s Rants: The blog rings, By this keyboard I rule!, Guests and cross posts
• Sheep the Diamond: Advice from an old bull

Torchlight 2, the better Diablo?

Last Updated on Tuesday, 29 May 2012 11:19 Written by Kadomi Tuesday, 29 May 2012 02:30

Hah, got your attention with that one, didn’t I? I’ll be honest upfront: I can’t tell you if TL2 will be the better Diablo. A short story: I got into the TL2 beta weekend last week, the beta lasted from Saturday to Tuesday. I played TL2 for about an hour on Sunday and found out the hard way that Print Screen does jack all. Screenshots are bound to F6. Why, Runic Games, why? In any case, from that hour of playtime, I have zero screenshots. But that was cool, because I still had til Tuesday.

Monday morning, I decided to quickly finish my first playthrough of Diablo 3 on normal. I finally made it through to the Lord of Terror himself. Ate dust, tried again aaaaaand….BOOM! With a loud bang and the smell of silicone, my computer turned itself off. Took me most of the week to replace the dead power supply, and by that time the TL2 beta was over. So instead of giving you a very detailed look at the beta, you’ll have to do with my rushed first impression.

I enjoyed the original Torchlight quite a bit. It was pretty much a one on one copy of Diablo, just with a different art style, less locales and a really crappy story. It made up for that with fun gameplay and the addition of innovation in the form of your pet companion that can return to town and sell all your shit for you. It was single-player only. Torchlight 2 seems to offer more of the same, but this time you get single-player, LAN and Internet multiplayer. The last two bits should make the heart of every oldschool Diablo LAN player sing. In the beta, you only had the option to use Internet play. It didn’t look quite as elegant as Diablo 3′s multiplayer. Inside a lobby, you can see all open games, and to play you create your own game. You can set the amount of maximum players for the game, and password protect it. Which I suppose is nice, no friends coming in to stomp your game if you haven’t told them the password yet.

Torchlight 2 is a game on a budget, and so the movie sequence at the start was fairly unexciting. In Torchlight, you killed Ordrak underneath the town of Torchlight, which supposedly brought an end to the corruption of the mines. Of course that didn’t work, as someone managed to steal the essence of power from Ordrak, destroyed the town of Torchlight and is now creating havoc everywhere he goes. It is up to the hero to stop this mysterious person. Yeah, so the story? Doesn’t feel much better than in the first part.

But what about the gameplay? In the first Torchlight, you were indoors at all times, first in mine levels, then in lush old ruins, etc. until you got to the final baddie at the bottom level. In Torchlight 2 you actually get to travel outdoors. In my hour of gametime, I got to level 7. The scenery is all green mountains and rivers, with temple ruins thrown in. On the way to the main quest, I ran into a sidequest temple. Areas you can enter are clearly marked as to what level they are intended for. I pretty much had to do the sidequest, because I wasn’t high enough level to move on to the next zone for the main quest. The graphics are very cartoony, and there’s no marked difference or jump in quality from the first game. You definitely have to enjoy the cartoon approach.

One of my favorite features from the first game is back: the companion pet. You can still feed the companions fish from pools to change them, they still sell stuff for you but this time around, you can also have them shop for you! Out of Identify or Town Portal scrolls? Need more health potions? Your pet will take care of that for you. Very handy.

As far as classes go, none of the classes from the original game made it back. We now have Engineer (melee with steampunk gadgets), Outlander (guns and magic), Berserker (melee with animal powers) and the Embermage (all magic, all the time). I played Outlander and went all dual-wielding pew-pew without being forced to wear stiletto heels. Take that, Demon Hunters! From the start, I felt the difficulty curve much more reminiscent of the original Diablos. Health regenerated ultra-slow, and I actually had to start chugging potions. No cooldown on those, so it’s back to chain-chugging like back in the good ol’ days. In the temple ruins, I ran into two champion mobs, and to me they felt like bosses in Diablo 3. You definitely had to be on your toes, and the fights required thought. And that before I even hit level 7.

The female versions of the four TL2 classes

Character progression is done via skill trees, just like in Diablo 2 and the original Torchlight. Everytime you level you have to assign attributes for your character, and can assign a point in one of the three trees per class. Of course this means the return of various different builds, which was one of the features that gave D2 so much longevity. I remember reading skill guides for the various classes in Diablo 2. There were specialized sites out there to publish guides. But I’ll be honest again: I prefer D3′s much more lightweight system. It gives me flexibility to tailor my character to an encounter, without having to brood over me having misspent my points somewhere. In D3 you get a new power when you level, in Torchlight I often felt I dumped points into an ability without feeling any real impact to the change. It isn’t fun for me. In the end, the cookie cutter builds will win anyhow.

Torchlight 2 overall feels like a very colorful, improved version of Torchlight, which has always been a derivative of Diablo 2. It just feels very oldschool. You still need scrolls of Identify and Town Portals to use those abilities, which probably means that you can tactically use Town Portals in combat again. In the first Torchlight, I had to cheese the final fight like that to be able to kill Ordrak. If you are a retro gamer, then you should find great delight in what Torchlight 2 is offering. It’s a colorful dungeon crawler with outdoor areas and fun gameplay. It’s not really offering any kind of innovation to the genre. It’s as if time stood still. Which some will herald as awesome, and some might be disappointed about it.

TL2 will release an editor at a later time, and people will be able to write their own mods. That’s very interesting, and could give TL2 real longevity. Longevity is something I ultimately feel D3 won’t have, at least not compared to D2. People seem to be tiring of it already, and the auction house seems to be part of that issue. TL2 might not have this problem at all.

For 20 bucks, it’s a steal, so any fan of the genre should pick it up. That’s a lot of gameplay value for little money. Or you could pick up the original Torchlight for even less money, to see if you like the colorful brand of the game. You’ll never come as close to playing Diablo 2 in a modern setting again.

If you would like to see a couple more bloggers talk about the Torchlight 2 beta, here are some more views:

• Pete at Dragonchasers thinks TL2 is the sequel to D2 that D3 isn’t.
• Arb from Arbitrary Genius about her beta impressions
• Paeroka from Nerdy Bookahs feels it’s more Torchlight 1.5 than 2 but generally liked the beta
• Jim from the Gaming Nook liked the beta as well, finding the loot more interesting (I agree!) and wonders why he would pay 60 bucks for D3 when TL2 will only be 20.

So, did any of you play the beta, and are you planning on buying the game? Is Diablo 3 still holding up for you, or did it give you a taste for other similar games?

Review: Red Seas Under Red Skies

Last Updated on Monday, 28 May 2012 04:14 Written by Kadomi Sunday, 27 May 2012 03:22

Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Set two years after The Lies of Locke Lamora, this book continues the story of Locke and Jean after their flight from Camorr. In the first part of the book, we receive plenty of flashbacks into the time between Camorr and their current home, the island city of Tal Verrar. There, the two of them are working on an elaborate two-year scam to catch them their biggest coup yet. Of course, things turn out very differently, when the Bondsmagi of Karthain and one of the rulers of Tal Verrar catch wind of their presence and uses them for his own bargain.

Red Seas Under Red Skies has all the markings of what made the prequel so outstanding for me. The writing is still extremely entertaining, the characters are colorful, and the women of this world are remarkable and all tough as nails and powerful. Yet I am only giving this book four stars, whereas the prequel got five. Unfortunately, I felt this book dragged a bit in the middle part. I think it took way too long for Jean and Locke to end up on the Poison Orchid. I mean, sure, I learned a lot of nautical terms as well, but I just felt that went on way too long. I also missed some of the astounding twists and turns from the first book. The twists here were all fairly rushed at the end. Maybe I just didn’t like the setting. I preferred the faux-renaissance world of Camorr to Tal Verrar and the pirate life.

I did however really enjoy all the characters aboard the Poison Orchid. I am always impressed when an author is not afraid to kill off very likeable characters, so be prepared to be shocked. I also appreciated the deeper insights we got into Locke and his motivations, and added depth for both him and Jean.

Despite my misgivings, I would fully recommend reading both books, and the last part of the book left plenty of open questions, to make me anticipate the next book greatly. It’s a colorful world I wouldn’t want to miss.



View all my reviews