Jahger - The End of a Worgen's Journey

So I finally reached level 85 (Cataclysm level cap) on Jahger, my Worgen Hunter. The new high level Cataclysm zones are really good with significant use of World of Warcraft's phasing method to present a world that develops as a result of your successful questing. There are also a lot of ongoing battles presented with actively fighting combatants on both side - unfortunately those areas really clog up my internet tubes, which means some areas were played at latencies of 5000 ms+ :(

Ding!

Although I can't give a proper review of the expansion, I'll offer some thoughts on the aspects added by the expansion that I have experienced:

• Low-level questing (1-60): Revamped and greatly streamlined. The style has changed to a more linear progression through each zone. I enjoyed it sufficiently that I've been inspired to write leveling guides for some of the zones. Not all of the zones have received the same amount of attention - Sithilus is just as crap as it always was.
• High-level questing (80-85): As mention already, I've enjoyed the zones I've played through so far, Mount Hyjal, Deepholm and Twilight Highlands. They are an evolutionary step forward from the level 70-80 zones in Wrath of the Lich King, mostly in terms of being able to sustain a clear narrative through each zone from beginning to end. Unfortunately the new undersea zone, Vashj'ir, was bugged for me upon arrival, so I haven't been able to experience what is likely the most unique zone in Azeroth at the moment.
• New races: The Worgen starting area is excellent and I hear the Goblin starting area is similarly top notch. After that, your race is largely cosmetic with racial abilities only having a minor affect on gameplay. The Worgen racials, improved critical hit chance and short-term speed boosts are nice to have. Not having a racial mount is disappointing.
• Revamped dungeons (1-60): Most low-level dungeons have been modified for better suitability with the new dungeon finder tool. Having the dungeon finder made it a breeze to do dungeons while leveling. As a DPS only class, wait times were typically over half-an-hour, but I'd just get into the queue and carry on questing until a group was ready. The changes are few and some dungeons, like Blackrock Depths, are still too sprawling to be suitable for random groups from the dungeon finder.
• New dungeons (80-85): Seven new 5-man dungeons have been added and I've played through 3 of the early ones - Blackrock Caverns, Throne of the Tides and Stonecore. Not all the groups I joined were successful since, unlike most older dungeons, boss abilities are actually significant, even if it just requires you to worry about extra spawned enemies or moving out of the fire. I look forward to trying the other dungeons and seeing the kind of challenges these dungeons might pose in heroic mode.
• New raids (10 man & 25 man): Three new raids (12 new raid bosses) have been added but you need to get better gear even after reaching level 85 before you should consider entering them. With an overseas holiday coming up, I'm not likely to see the inside of a raid for quite some time.
• New battlegrounds: There are two new PvP battlegrounds and one PvP "battleground" zone. Although I did a bit of PvP while leveling for variety, I haven't ended up in any of the new battlegrounds yet.
• Archaeology profession: Everyone can pick up the new profession of archaeology as it's a secondary profession. I put it in the same category as fishing - brain-dead and boring.

Deepholm, the Elemental Plane of Earth

So Cataclysm has greatly benefited World of Warcraft with a few bugs (the Vashj'ir zone for me) and disappointments (archaeology) keeping it from perfection. But WoW players of all types should find some part of the expansion to keep them entertained for many hours.

I am not a Cylon!

Between a family member in hospital, getting ready for an overseas trip and writing up Cataclysm leveling guides, I've been struggling to level up Jahger through to the level cap of 85. He's currently stalled at 84. I had hopes of doing that final push this last weekend. But the gods had other plans for me...

This weekend I finally had a chance to play the Battlestar Galactica boardgame again. Our game last time was a bit chaotic and overly long as we were all just learning the rules. This time, everyone at least remembered the basics and the two games we played, each about three hours long, were exciting and tense affairs the whole way through.

First game, I played as Commander William Adama, Admiral of the fleet. As Admiral, you get to decide on the fleet's destination each jump, plus get to make command decisions for many of the crises. In the end, with Cylon players on either side of me, and our population about to run out, I was able to make the final jump to Cobol and get a victory for the humans.

Second game, I played as Apollo, the Admiral's son. He's the Galactica's CAG (Commander of the Air Group), and so for the first time I was really involved in the space combat. It was a fun change of pace from the "big picture" decision making that I'd experienced with the President and the Admiral. This time both the President and the Admiral were Cylons. With these two to play after me, our morale about to run out and me out on a Viper in space, I had to use the Executive Orders card to get someone else to make that final jump. Again a victory for the humans!

So three games now, three victories for the humans and me a human each time. Is the game too easy for the humans? It certainly didn't feel like it. Every time we've been about to run out of one of our resources and we felt that if the Cylons' play had been slightly different or with a bit more luck, they'd have won.

What has helped the humans is that every time one of the resources has ended up "in the red" before halfway through the game. This ensures that there is one fewer player on the Cylon side. It's clearly meant to be a balancing mechanism to ensure one side doesn't run away with victory. However, it could lead to some non-intuitive gameplay where the humans want to let one of the resources drop in the early stages. Well there should be plenty more games for us to see if that's a real problem or just us newbies fumbling around for strategies.

A proper review will come as soon as I get a chance to experience the other side of the game. Since it's determined by randomly drawn cards each game, I don't have any control over whether I play as a Cylon or not. For now, I am not a Cylon.

Indie Smarts Pack II

Following on from my thoughts on the first two games of the Indie Smarts Pack from Steam, I've spent some time on two more games from the pack.

Puzzle Agent is an "adventure" game by Telltale Games who are probably most famous for their Sam & Max episodic adventures (which I've rather enjoyed but are not to everyone's taste). Like normal adventure games, Puzzle Agent, will see you wandering between locations, talking to characters and solving puzzles to progress the plot. Unlike normal adventure games however, the puzzles are generally logic-type puzzles that are abstracted out of the game and have little or no direct relevance to what's happening in the story. To be fair though, this is the game's conceit. You are an agent for the FBI's Puzzle Research Division, specially trained for all the bizarre puzzles that seem to be rife within Scoggins, Minnesota.

Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent

Once you get past the bizarre story, strange graphics and linear progression, you're just left with the puzzles. I really enjoyed these kind of puzzles from puzzle books while I was in primary school and some of the puzzles in this game can be quite fun to solve. But the puzzle difficulty is about the same - only really appropriate for younger kids. Every single puzzle was solved on the first try except for a few cases where the instructions were unclear. With solving all the puzzles I could find, I finished it in 3 hours. So way too easy; way too short.

Typical puzzle mid-way through the Puzzle Agent

Puzzle Dimension is a maze-like puzzler where you have to move your ball through a 3D maze-like platform, passing through each special tile (marked with sunflowers) en route to the destination portal. The challenge mostly comes from the special tiles that make up the gameplay area: you can't stop your ball on ice tiles, some tiles can only be crossed once before crumbling beneath you, etc. You'll have to carefully plan out a route needed to reach all sunflowers and the portal keeping all the special tiles in mind.

And added to the above is the three dimensional nature of the puzzles (hence the "dimension" in the game's name). Although you have only 5 moves for your ball (forward & back, left & right, jump), the gameplay area itself curves through three dimensions with gravity changing to be relative to your ball's current orientation. Since the maze isn't constrained by walls, this allows you to do things like drop off the edge of your current tile onto another tile in a completely different part of the puzzle.

Puzzle Dimension - an early level

Solving the puzzles is good fun and the 3D aspect of the game certainly sets it apart from similar free flash games I've seen. Although earlier puzzles don't really use the 3D much, it is soon incorporated to push up the puzzle difficulty by a significant factor. The levels in a given set get a bit samey, but you can easily enjoy short sessions of a few puzzles at a time.

The final game in the pack is Droplitz. Unfortunately I have been unable to get this to run on my PC :(

Final summary of my thoughts on all 5 games:

• Lumines - Gameplay 9/10 (fun!), Difficulty 5/10 (only challenging under time pressure)
  
• QuantZ - Gameplay 4/10 (sparkly but annoying), Difficulty 3/10 (may get harder in later levels)
  
• Puzzle Agent - Gameplay 6/10 (some puzzles are fun), Difficulty 1/10
  
• Puzzle Dimension - Gameplay 7/10 (fun in short bursts but lacks real variety), Difficulty 8/10 (puzzles are nicely challenging straight after the tutorial)
  
• Droplitz - Didn't work
  

Overall there are two good (and very different) games in the pack that you can play casually any time you feel like a quick brain workout. I'd especially recommend getting Lumines even at its $9.99 Steam price.

Darkshore Leveling Guide

I've really enjoyed the newly revamped early level (sub-60) zones for World of Warcraft that have been introduced with the Cataclysm expansion. Having previously written a leveling guide for a Northrend zone long after most people would have leveled past it, I've decided to write some leveling guides for the low-level zones that I enjoyed with my hunter, Jahger.

The leveling guides I'm writing and have read should probably be called questing guides or zone guides, as they are just a step-by-step guide to completing all the quests in a specific zone in the most efficient manner. Discovering all the quests (from sources such as Wowhead), their inter-dependencies and then optimizing the route to accomplish them all is a fun challenge. But after that is a lot of hard work - testing the route, writing it all down in a clear step-by-step way, creating the maps, retesting... overall I've run the Darkshore zone 5 times and can now reconstruct the optimal route from memory :P

The end result, my first completed guide for Cataclysm, is the Darkshore Leveling Guide for Alliance characters from level 10-20 and is part of the excellent collection of free leveling guides available on WoW-Pro.

Although the guide caters for the possibility that you're a first time player, I personally would recommend only using it when you're trying to level your umpteenth alt character to max level as quickly as possible. Newcomers would do well to just take their time and enjoy the upgraded, streamlined, leveling experience provided in this post-Cataclysm World of Warcraft.

Just for interest's sake, I've reproduced a very short sample from the guide. Personally, this is the most significant section for me as it details a quest that I never found on my first time through with Jahger.

To Cliffspring Hollow (9) and Maw of the Void (10)

10. Leave the cave, and jump down to the left of the waterfall. Follow the top of the cliffside and you'll see the top of a massive waterfall ahead of you. Jump into the water and swim over the edge of the waterfall. Go into the big whirlpool, Maw of the Void, at 52,31. You will be sucked down into Bashal'Aran's Collapse.

Follow the only path out up to Telarius Voidstrider. Kill him and loot him for Writings of the Dark Herald. Use it to get the quest Writings of the Void.

11. Use your hearthstone to return to Lor'danel. (If your hearthstone is on cooldown, return to Bielara Ivyshroud at the foot of the path and talk to her to return to the surface, then walk back to Lor'danel.)

Turn in:

• The Boon of the Seas
• Writings of the Void
• A Cure in the Dark
• The Corruption's Source
• Bearer of Good Fortune
• A Troubling Prescription

Get the following quests:

• The Final Flame of Bashal'Aran
• A Love Eternal
• A Lost Companion

Indie Smarts Pack I

While my WoW Hunter has progressed steadily on to level 80 (out of 85), Steam's holiday sale has seen me buying more games than I'll have a chance to play. The first of those games that I've put any time into are two games in the Indie Smarts Pack...

Lumines is a Tetris-like game of falling blocks where you're simply trying to make squares of the same colour. Although there are only two different colours and it seems really simple, the key is that blocks are only cleared on a timed sweep of the playing field, allowing you to stack large numbers of blocks in one clear.

Lumines Challenge mode

Despite this, the game can be played at a relatively pedestrian pace and so the base game (Challenge mode) takes a really long time to play. But the joy of Lumines for me is the Time Attack mode. Choose 1, 3, 5 or 10 minutes and clear as many blocks as you can. With the added time pressure of trying to get as many blocks within each clearing sweep as possible, the game is exciting and keeps your brain working overtime.

Lumines Time Attack mode

There are also other modes (Puzzle and Mission) that can be interesting diversions, but I really appreciate the opportunity to squeeze in that quick 1 minute game afforded to me by the Time Attack mode.

QuantZ is similar to many puzzle games where you're matching up gems of the same colour, what really defines it is that it is played on a 3D surface, typically a cube. Some pseudo-physics can be used to shift the gems around and onto other faces of the cube, but otherwise the 3D-ness just seems like an excuse to pretty the game up. This actually describes much of the game which seems overly sparkly.

QuantZ early level

The gameplay itself is unchallenging as I'm really in danger of running out of gems to clear the level (except when I mess up due to the 3D interface). It might get harder in later levels, but you have to play through all these easier levels first, and all the sparkles in the world aren't going to get me to invest the time needed to get to the "fun" part of the game.

So one winner and one loser so far, but there are 3 other games in the pack that I still want to have a look at. Meanwhile, maybe I can sneak in a few quick Lumines time attacks before lunch.