Okay, this is my first video for quite some time, so excuse me if its a bit rough. For ages I’ve been meaning to record some gameplay from the Viking: Battle for Asgard game and I’ve only just gotten around to it. It’s a 20 meg video so be warned, it might take some time to cue, but I did cut it down quite a bit from the original. I just grabbed some nice kills that I described in an earlier post and my first ‘raid’ so to speak. Im currently playing a lot of Dragonball Z Burst Limit, but I think the last few fights have got my adrenaline rushing so I might pick this back up again sooner than I thought.

Enjoy:

I signed up for the Mythos Beta ages ago, installed a big file and deleted it shortly after. Recently, a friend of mine has tried it again and convinced me to give it a go. After a lot of screwing around I decided to download it and jump back on. I have to admit, I was quite surprised. Instead of the excessively confusing and awful game I remember I was treated to something that played very similar to Diablo. In fact, if Diablo and World of Warcraft had a baby, it would be Mythos. When I mean baby, I mean baby.

Meet Loco. He is the character I have made, you can choose from 4 races and 3 classes. This isnt a hell of a lot of choice, but they do the job of steering clear of the Blizzard races, while still retaining the same elements of every RPG. You could say it looks like the character creation screen on WoW, but a lot of things use it, its nothing new to use a good layout. For some reason he has a cigar/cigarette. This wasn’t because I chose a Pyromancer class(although it’s quite convenient, it’s because he’s a Gremlin. Don’t feed them after midnight, don’t get them wet, give them tobacco.

The main things I took a little bit to get around were the movement and the ‘quest instances’. The movement works like Diablo, your basic point and click movement. I don’t really mind this at all, but after WoW, it just feels a little weird. The other thing was the instances are more ‘dungeons’. The first quests were easy enough for me to solo, even as a spellcaster. I only have 2 spells so far, one which is basically the awesome Burning Hands spell from Baulder’s Gate, and the other is a basic flame arrow that goes through rows of baddies.

There isn’t really much else to say at the moment, but I highly recommend it to MMORPG fans. It might not be past it’s infant stages, but a free *decent* game is hard to find.

I decided to give in to my primal hurty instincts and I went out and bought Viking from JB. From the reviews, it just looked like one of the many ‘brutal fighting games’ that game out around the time of Ninja Gaiden, Heavenly Sword, Assassin’s Creed and Conan. I’ve only played it for 15 or so minutes, and I can pretty confidently say, it is. However, I haven’t really done a lot other than hack up grunts to pieces. And when I say pieces, I mean pieces. The devs also made a nice little decision to keep the mangled corpses around the landscape instead of simply letting them disappear. My problem with games like Ninja Gaiden and Heavenly Sword is they are not brutal. Not that they were meant to be, but they are sold as having vicious combos and moves. The thing is, ninjas aren’t brutal, slim, sexy chicks(pixels though they may be) aren’t brutal, they rely on speed and finesse in the killing. This is reflected in the great graphics, smooth action and the blood. It spills with each sweeping slicing strike.

Viking, Conan and God of War are brutal. The characters are brutal, the moves are brutal. The graphics are dark, often poor, but there is blood spilling everywhere, the clean smooth strikes are replaces by powerful hacks of oversized weapons. The first eye opener in Viking only came when I got into combat, the movement is pretty slow, the main character looks like a rather hefty Norseman and it takes a bit of getting used to, but the fighting is just insane. The first finishing move impaled the bad dude on my sword, and the Viking went for a straight decapitation with his main hand axe. However, instead of making a clean cut, this took 2 hacks at the neck. Something that simple does wonders for atmosphere. You ‘feel’ the aggression and imagine that if it took 10 blows to sever the head, you would still hack till it’s off.

There was also a small stump of spine sticking out of the neck-hole, further showing how it was not a clean swipe and just pure rage that killed this baddie. So there you go. 1 mob, 5 second fight, sheer brutality.

Pretty cool huh?

As I said before, I really like Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, no matter how hard it is to say. I have trouble with the colours, but in all, its just a nice simple game and is good to kill time. I decided to use the pink-gi wearing Dan for some reason and noticed something a bit strange. In all Capcom fighters the winner gets a taunt screen. Some of the taunts are lost in translation and wind up being more hilarious than intended, but Dan’s taunt screen worried me a little.

Wtf Dan. W-T-F?