It’s been a while since I made a Minecraft video! In today’s episode I investigate a couple of the recent changes to the game, and bimble around a bit trying to remember what the heck I’m doing.
I have a soft spot for fishing games, especially fishing minigames in MMOs, so I’ll be interested to see how the fishing system develops. I’d love to see more types of fish, and interesting fish recipes available eventually. I also had my first (and second) glimpse of the new Octopus, and gave it a fine Minecraft “Hello!” with my steel sword.
I cracked. I’ve heard so many folks talking about Magicka in the last few days that I decided to pick it up while the special Wizard Survival Pack DLC is still included. That special offer ends tomorrow, by the looks of it, though it’s just a few free items and a spell, and I’ve no idea if it is actually useful. Still, free stuff is free stuff, and I might as well get it while it’s warm.
I’m a little late to the party, and it’s likely you already know far more than I do about how the game works. From what I gather, you create magical spells by combining elements in different combinations, with a wide variety of effects. Sounds like intelligent fun, and I’m going to force myself to avoid any spoilers, for a while at least!
Although I’ve purchased and downloaded it, I’m not going to boot it up just yet. I’m still feeling a bit iffy and don’t really fancy battling internet dragons today. In any case the reports are that Magicka is rather buggy at the moment, though patches have been flowing freely, with another large one due to drop on Monday, so leaving it a few days might not be a bad idea anyway.
Once I’m a bit more chipper I’ll report back on how Magicka plays. I might even knock up a video, though it will pale next to the awesomeness of this one!
I’ll insist on being the green wizard, of course, but as it doesn’t sound like that’s one of the popular choices I’ll probably be safe!
The picture below is a split screen. On the right is what Egyptian State Television is showing. Essentially, they’re showing live pictures of all the places that the protesters are not, claiming that all is peaceful. It’s an embarrassingly transparent trick, but when it is coupled with the shut-down of the internet and communications, it can be effective. The Egyptian authorities have also begun shutting down the international news agencies, starting with Al Jazeera. Slowly, a curtain is being raised to shield what is to come from prying eyes.
On the left is part of Tahrir Square, the center of the Cairo protests. In the last hour I’ve been hearing them get buzzed by jet fighters, drowning out the sound of the journalists reporting from there. It’s an extremely noisy business, clearly intended to intimidate. The Egyptian government can’t seriously intend to use jet fighters against their own people, can they?
Things are approaching a climax. I hope for the best.
I’ve just started some new medication, and it’s giving me some fairly impressive dizziness and nausea. It’ll most likely just be for a few days while my body is getting used to it, but it does mean that I’m less than eager to go running around in phase 5 of Rift’s Beta test. Hopefully we’ll pick up the liveblog in phase 6.
This post is far too short. Help me out, Mr Reeves!
Unbelievably, that’s really the only video of that performance I could find. Still awesome though!
We’ve just had some mildly amazing information about the upcoming changes for Rift’s 5th Beta phase. They’ve obviously been extremely busy over the last couple of weeks since phase 4.
Public Grouping is the biggest change, but as a Rogue I’m also pretty excited about the changes to Rogue energy regeneration.
The changes detailed under “Invasion Improvements” sound like they may deal with many of the concerns I’ve had with invasions in my liveblog. Many times I found myself facing invasions many times more powerful than anyone in the vicinity had any hope of standing up to. Hopefully things will scale a little more sensibly from now on.
Current Beta players all received a 25 use key this week, so we can expect this next phase to be pretty packed. If anybody hasn’t already gotten their hands on one, drop me a comment and I’ll sort you out.
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Beta 5 Preview!
We’ve tried to take as much advantage of the relative calm between Beta 4 and Beta 5 as we possibly could. Here are some of the highlights to look forward to in Beta 5 tomorrow. We’d like to detail a number of them and also shed some light on a few things for Beta 6 and beyond.
New For Beta 5
We’re expecting Beta 5 to be at least twice as big as beta 4! By the end of Beta 4, we were running a total of 18 servers. 8 in our Europe datacenter and 10 in the US. This time we’re opening up with 16 in each region, for a total of 32 servers, all with higher population caps, more than doubling the number of people who can be online at once.
If you get caught in too long of a queue during the middle of beta, know that we’ll be keeping an eye out to see if we need to open even more.
Public Grouping. This was a big one for us — just about the single most requested item — and we’re really happy to have it in game for you to try out already.
First, as you’re wandering around the world and target people, if they’re solo or ingroups/raids that are willing to accept new public members, you’ll see a new button in the target frame that lets you join their group or merge your group into theirs if it fits.
Trion Developers Aaron Hooten and Gavin Irby, the designers behind the Scarlet Gorge zone, just got off RiftIRC where they shed light on some of the zone’s secrets. Scarlet Gorge is the first zone you encounter that is shared between the factions, so is likely to also be the first time many players encounter World PvP.
Below, I’ve done my best to organise the sometimes chaotic chat into individual questions and answers:
<Rifty> Motorboat asks: Can I ride on that cable-boat thing in the video? <Gavin> Hell yeahz you can <Aaron> Depending on your level of “scared of hieghtsyness,” yes. <Gavin> I’m just going to ride and do knockbacks on other players all day Continue reading Rift Scarlet Gorge Devchat Log – 21st January, 2011
This is a rather ancient post I made on my original website, long before the days of such useful things as blogs or WordPress. I’ve cleared out most of the posts from that time, and am in the process of tidying the rest away, but I thought this might provide a small amount of entertainment. It was the year 2000, and a pattern had already begun to emerge. Some monsters were ubiquitous. Today you might poke fun at the boars, but back then the little chap that was everywhere was the rat.
