About a half hour ago Guinsoo posted the tweet you see pictured. It sounds to me like there’s another emo skin on the way to pair up with Emumu. The real question: is it a skin for an existing champion or something for the new champ? Could it be a mummy skin for whoever is set to release next Tuesday?
I had almost forgotten about the Champions Online F2P launch today. My MMO fire has all but died out in the wake of my Minecraft discovery and the joys of playing jungle Nasus in League of Legends. I was browsing the Minecraft subreddit, though, and found a post that reminded me of the release. I jumped on Steam to sign up for the new service and download the client.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem possible to download the client from Steam. All you get is an executable file that then downloads the necessary files. I pulled the executable from the official website and started my download. Minutes later, my internet connection was all but crippled, but I was only pulling files from Cryptic at 16 kB/s. Yes, 16.
I’ll probably queue the client to download overnight, but that doesn’t make my day one experience any better. The free-to-play model is based on the idea that your user experience is good enough that people will want to pay for more content. So far, I’m not feeling great about Champions.
Football has never been my game. Not in real life, not in video games. I’m just not good at assessing the risk involved in each play, the progression of the game, the fact that the Hail Mary is both fun and stupid, and not just fun. All through college, though, I endured a rivalry between two of my closest friends in whatever Madden game was the most recent.
It got intense. There was yelling, swearing, controllers were broken, consoles powered off mid-game, shouting matches across bathroom stalls, but the game count usually ended up pretty close. And every year about this time, each friend would pick their Super Bowl favorite and stage the game, complete with an array of beer, snacks, and of course, more yelling. As little interest as I have in football, it was always a good time (it was also easy to talk everyone into some Halo once the game was done).
It’s strange, but I’ve missed that these past several years. I’m still in touch with my friends, which means I know things I have no business knowing about the sport. I know my friend Brian, a Browns fanatic, might weep like a child if the Steelers win. I’ve heard the Packers are favored over the Steelers (although checking the lines at the BetUS Sportsbook shows the Steelers +110, whatever that means).
For all that, though, I wish I could sit down, drink some beer, and watch my friends hash things out on Madden. I probably won’t watch the Super Bowl this year, not even for the commercials, but I’d be willing to watch two people play a video game of the same game, because for me, it’s a much more personal rivalry.
On any given day I’ll spend about 20 minutes on Reddit. There’s a lot of crap there, and a lot of good stuff goes overlooked (just check the ‘what’s new’ tab of any subreddit and you’ll see what I mean), but there is so much good, so much funny, so much interesting that it’s always worth my time, even if that time is shared with a certain porcelain throne.
Today, one post in particular caught my eye – ‘DAE think a middle school kid reviewed Dead Space 2 for IGN?’ As someone who writes about video games for a living, I had to check it out and, honestly, I found myself wondering the same thing. I’ve seen sites run guest posts from aspiring youngsters for big debuts. The perspective is usually refreshing but still relevant, even if some of the more complex critique is missing.
In this case, though, it was just a bad review. I feel a little guilty writing that. The internet can be a cruel place, as Greg Miller, the writer, surely knows. He’s receiving a lot of crap for it. Check Twitter for #HireMeIGN and you’ll get an admittedly funny look at Greg’s world right now.
That’s the part that’s so interesting to me. The review was poorly written, there’s no way around that, but people are trolling this guy in ways I rarely see. I’ll be taking a deeper look at the situation later in the week on our parent site, Bullz-Eye.com. Stay tuned.
Riot recently announced that summoners will soon be able to play co-op games against computer controlled champions for IP. It sounds like a cool system, at least for getting back into the mix if you’ve been away for a while or want to test a new champion. More interesting to me, though, is the screenshot that’s in the current client for the service.
As you can see above, the picture shows what appears to be an updated client with some new features. For starters, there is a ‘Game Mode’ field. This could mean very good things for players who, like myself, enjoy a little variety. I would love to see all-random deathmatch implemented, and it would be interested to have an All Random All Mid option as well. The bad news is that the field is blank other than ‘Classic.’ Granted, Riot probably doesn’t want to leak anything, but that could also be an indication of just how far off these new game modes might be.
It’s hard to see much else. The new format is much more conducive to multiple maps in a list format, instead of the current grid button system the client uses to select game types. Any guesses as to how far away this client is? I’ll say six months.
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