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What’s the funniest insult you’ve seen or received?

August 14, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

There’s a funny thread in the forum right now, simply asking for the funniest insult you’ve seen or received. There are a few immediate classics inside, though my favorite has to be from Zileas. He says his funniest was the following:

Your Mom is like a free to play game. You can unlock her with effort, but it’s a lot quicker just to pay $5.

So what’s your funniest in-game insult? Though this doesn’t exactly qualify, one of the more hilarious things I’ve seen lately was a Vlad on my team who had taken mid and started to rage after a buddy I was playing with used Shen’s ult on a low health Ashe instead of the similarly low health Vlad. He started calling “gg,” threating to feed, and verbally abusing my friend for his use of Shen’s ult. At the time, Shen was 0/1/9 – pretty much a textbook definition of a solid tank – our team was up at least 10 kills and we were up on turrets. The other team surrendered at 26 minutes, but to read chat you’d think we had been losing since the five minute mark.

league of legends

baddies funny funny lol stories funny threads insults lol forums losing losses nerd rage rage

I think we’ve hit post Season One stability

August 13, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

I don’t know how much time you guys spend on the forums, but I’m there pretty much every day just to keep up with what’s going on in the game, even when I’m out of town or otherwise engaged throughout the day. If there’s one thing I’ve noticed over the past week or so, though, it’s that things seem to have stabilized.

I’ll be the first to admit that Season One brought enough frustrations to warrant a lot of the grief that happened on the forums, on this blog, and even in-game to an extent. Some of those things have been reverted or changed – the level requirement for ranked, some of the matchmaking algorithms – but for the most part it seems people are settling in to the new mechanics around the game. If the biggest thing the community complains about is the price of a rune page (which is expensive, but not totally unreasonable), I think things are definitely calming down.

What has your experience in game been like? Most of my recent games have been pretty tame. There are the random idiots that seem to make the world explode, either by their own rage or encouraging it from others, but even the typical “we lose because of x” has slowed back to what I consider normal levels.

league of legends

complaint threads complaints griefing rage ragers rune pages season one trolling trolls

All Roads Return to WoW: The death of complexity

August 13, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

I’m back with my old raiding guild, and even though I’m not raiding I do like to be prepped in case a few people are out of town for a raid night and people still want to go. It’s a nice way for me to see the content without committing too much time and I’m not burdening any guildmates with my wacky schedule.

I asked the raid leader what they tend to be missing when they’re missing people and it turned out to be DPS with the occasional healer. As a druid, I can fill both those roles, which is pretty cool. After gearing up my cat stuff a bit, we talked again and he asked if I was going balance because of the ease of use over feral dps. It struck me as a bit of a weird question. For a game like WoW, I would think complexity is a good thing. The complaint I hear most often about the game is that it gets boring, that everything feels like playing whack-a-mole, regardless of your role, spec, whatever.

Whatever the reasons, it seems complexity has had to exit stage left, at least as far as PvE is concerned. I’m still impressed by the amount of fun I can have in arenas, despite the constantly shifting meta-game from one toon to the next. I’m happy to have stumbled into one of the more complex DPS roles, even if it was by accident.

All Roads Return to WoW

cat cat dps cat form dps druid druid rotation feral dps build feral druid feral rotation tauren cat form

Galio impressions

August 12, 2010 / Jeff Morgan

It’s no secret that the last several champion releases have been heavily overpowered. The working theory was that Riot was trying to encourage sales by releasing strong champions and then slowly nerfing them back to reasonable levels. There are a few obvious reasons that’s not the case. For starters, Xin Zhao and Vladimir have remained relatively unchanged and still sit at the top of their respective role lists. Then there’s Galio, who bucks the trend with a completely mediocre presence in game.

From the Champion Spotlight, you’d think Galio is meant to be a tank. His passive – converting a percentage of your magic resist to ability power – also points that direction, but only his shield skill is great for tanking. I find Galio a bit more like Morgana, though people have also called him Nunu 2.0. The big problem with Galio is that building as a tank means your damage output is minimal, even with his passive, and his ultimate is easily countered by stuns.

Galio feels just about right around the level 5-12 range. His Q and E skills hit hard enough to deal reasonable damage and the laning phase is just about perfect for his ultimate – not enough people to interrupt him. Beyond that point, though, he feels extremely vulnerable. His ult can actually be a bad thing. Consider your situation – you ult, causing 3-4 champions and whatever creeps are nearby to attack you. Granted, you get some beefed up resistances, but if you miss your shield or the shield wears off, you take a good bit of damage through there. If someone interrupts that ult, you have 3-4 people attacking you and there’s very little you can do about it. The speed boost is nice, but it’s not going to get you out of that situation.

As you cruise toward late game, you start to feel the pain of your MR stack. Your abilities aren’t doing much damage and they’re on a fairly long cooldown. By this point the people you taunt are blowing through your shield quickly and giving you some hefty damage for your trouble.

This isn’t to say Galio can’t be useful – he can. I think he’s best placed as a support character like Morgana. If you have a solid tank Galio can be good for getting your carries into position or even helping Amumu close the gap for bandage toss. Also, you don’t necessarily have to make use of your passive, even though it would be nice to. Galio has pretty solid AP ratios, so building for magic penetration could actually yield some interesting results.

Champions, league of legends

galio galio abilities galio ability list galio build galio impressions galio skills galio tank new champ support tank

Xbox LIVE Summer of Arcade Review: Monday Night Combat

August 10, 2010 / Jason Zingale

monday_night_combat-title

I didn’t have very high hopes for “Monday Night Combat” when Microsoft first announced this year’s Summer of Arcade line-up, nor was I immediately taken with it after playing a few rounds. (Though that likely had more to do with the fact that the tutorial isn’t very helpful in explaining how to play the game.) But while it’s certainly not the best-looking title of the bunch, “Monday Night Combat” eventually wins you over with its incredibly addictive gameplay. At its core, the game is a class-based, third-person shooter à la “Team Fortress 2,” but it also implements the tower defense genre into basic strategy, and is set in the middle of a “Smash TV”-like game show complete with a sex-neutral mascot named Bullseye who pops up throughout the course of matches to taunt the players. Better yet, when you shoot him, he drops coins, which is the lifeblood of the game. Coins can be spent on upgrading your Pro’s abilities, building and upgrading turrets, or even unlocking jump pads that allow you to reach higher areas on the map.

There are really only two game modes to choose from: Blitz and Overkill. The former tasks you and up to three other players with protecting your moneyball (a New Year’s Eve-sized piñata filled with coins) from an onslaught of enemy bots, while the latter is a 6-on-6 Deathmatch-style battle to see which team can breach and destroy the other team’s moneyball first. Though Blitz is a great place to start because it gives players a good opportunity to try out all six classes (Assault, Tank, Support, Assassin, Gunner and Sniper, each with their own unique weapons and abilities), Overkill is where you’re going to have the most fun. Not only must you figure out how to strike the perfect balance between upgrading your Pros and turrets, but you also have to decide what’s more important: killing enemies or escorting bots to the other team’s base. Only bots can take down the shield protecting the moneyball, but you need coins in order to purchase them. It’s a simplistic yet necessary give-and-take system that forces players to work as a team, and it’s one of the main reasons why “Monday Night Combat” succeeds as a great multiplayer game of the once-you-pop-you-just-can’t-stop variety.

Want more Summer of Arcade? Be sure to come back every Wednesday through August 18th for a first-hand look at Microsoft’s newest XBLA exclusives. Next week: Grab your tomb raiding gear and join Lara Croft in her search for the “Guardian of Light.”

Reviews

class-based shooters Monday Night Combat Monday Night Combat review Smash TV team fortress 2 tower defense games XBLA Xbox LIVE Summer of Arcade