October 31st is quickly approaching and that means you have two things to do. One being that you only have a week or so to carve a pumpkin to decorate your doorstep for the night’s trick-or-treaters. The other issue that needs taking care of is that you’ll have to stock up on a year supply of Halloween candy. We here at X3F can only help you with one of your duties, so we’re leaving the candy stockpile up to you.
Posted over at Xbox.com is a set of four downloadable Xbox 360 themed pumpkin carving stencils to aid in creating the ultimate 360 pumpkin. The stencils feature such iconic 360 themes like the ring of light, the infamous “X” logo and the silhouette of our white console. Don’t think you have the talent to make a 360 pumpkin? Well, you’re wrong, it’s actually quite easy. Simply choose your favorite design, download it, print it off, cut it out, slap it on your orange gourde of choice, hollow out said gourde and start cutting out the black stuff. Then all you have to do is light a candle inside and voila! You now have Xbox 360 Halloween pride. Just be leery of the dreaded red ring of death … it’s reported that Halloween brings four times the amount of red ring failures than normal. Boo!
Is it any wonder that Spore keeps getting pushed back further and further when creator Will Wright is doing things like taking his sweet time to make a cameo appearance in The Simpsons Game? Good lord, man. Every waking minute you have should be spent poring over Spore. In fact, now that we think about it, do you really even need to sleep? At this point it is probably assured that Will has rigged up some machine that eliminates his need for sleep cycles altogether. Probably whipped it up during downtime while developing The Sims.
Check out Game Head’s latest video above, which includes the fabled Will Wright appearance. He’s sandwiched between Call of Duty 4 tidbits, but it’s a small price to pay for his lines alone. Plus they make his little mustache look evil as well. Now, get back to work.
Eurogamer reports that Capcom plans to release a third game in its Commando series on Xbox Live Arcade. Better known as MERCS in the United States, Commando is a top down arcade shooter. Commando 3 is set to feature 3 uniquely equipped characters as well as co-op vehicles. The game is being developed by Backbone (they seem to make everything on XBLA, don’t they?) and is scheduled to release this winter for 800 MS Points. Naturally, it will support online leaderboards and the like, though online play has not been confirmed at this time. We’re going to go out on a limb and say the feature is probably in there.
Lavinia over on WoW Ladies found a pretty funny definition for “gold plz” that got me thinking. What if we “redefined” a few WoW phrases to make them a little more “accurate”?
PUG: (noun) A group of people who probably aren’t finishing an instance today.
DEATH KNIGHT: (noun) What we’ll call Ret Pallys after WotLK is released.
THE BARRENS: (noun) A section of the world where those who can’t play, chat.
OVERPOWERED: (adjective) Anyone who beats me in PvP.
Those are all right, but I bet you all could come up with even better ones. Choose a term from WoW and “redefine” it to better describe what our world is really like.
SouthPeak Games, after having gifted us with a forgettable RPG and a nauseating zombie hunt, has announced plans to break ground for the Wii by announcing Pool Party, its first title for Nintendo’s console. If upon hearing that you had hopes of scantily-clad babes and jocks doing belly flops off the diving board, you may be disappointed, as this game concerns a pool of the other kind. You know, pocket billiards.
SouthPeak says that the game will include both single and multiplayer modes across 13 different types of pool, from 8 and 9-ball, to snooker, rotation, and black jack. In addition, Pool Party will include multiple environments, as well as various pool sharks to control. The title, which is expected to ship for the Wii in February, will also marry playing pool with waggle for what the publisher describes as “the most definitive pool simulation yet seen on Nintendo hardware.” SouthPeak, Lunar Pool would like to have a word with you.
edit: it appears that the game is in fact already out, and has been for some time at least in North America, making the announcement sent our way some strange mix of internet tomfoolery and mysticism.
It’s Tuesday again — and you know what that means. It’s time for your weekly dose of talent spec dissecetion with Build Shop! This week we’re checking out another Priest build, this one focusing on the much maligned Discipline tree. Though the tree is still an odd assortment of talents (some mana management, some damage improvement, some buffs for our buffs…) with no easy path to the top, it’s slated for major improvements in the next expansion and is getting a bit of love in the upcoming patch 2.3. With the 41-point talent, Pain Suppresion, being re-envisioned for patch 2.3, I’m thinking Discipline may be worth a whirl for a healing Priest. And, hey, even if things don’t work out, it can’t be as bad as Lightwell.
Will Discipline really be a viable alternative build in 2.3? Read on for my thoughts.
First off, some thoughts on what you lose by speccing this deep into Discipline:
Spiritual Guidance: increases your damage and healing by 25% of your spirit. But while I like loading my healers up on spirit and love this talent — but in the end, with the amount of spirit you’re likely to have (while also trying to pick up enough intellect, stamina, healing, mp5..) tends to make this talent a bit weak, in my opinion. My personal rule of thumb is that if you run around 300 spirit, it’s a worthwhile DPS talent, and if you run around 400 spirit, it’s a worthwhile healing talent. It’s in my builds regardless, because a buff is a buff, but I don’t think I would miss it much.
Spiritual Healing: increases the amount healed by your healing spells by 10%. There’s no question about it — losing this will hurt. However, I hope it can be made up with utility found in the Discipline tree.
Lightwell: Though there is some argument that Lightwell is much improved in recent patches (the healing has been much improved from its original version and players can no longer clickclickclick the lightwell to run it out of charges), I don’t think I’d miss this talent.
Empowered Healing: Gives your Greater Heal an additional 20% of your bonus healing effects. The usefulness of this talent improves as your gear improves — so if you’re thinking about keeping or dropping this one, you just have to get out your calculator and do the math.
Circle of Healing: Yes, this AoE heal can be useful in a lot of situations. And then there’s a lot of other situations where it will collect dust on your toolbar.
In the end, losing Spiritual Guidance, Spiritual Healing, and Empowered Healing will really drop your heal numbers. (How much they drop depends entirely on your gear, however.) But Discipline is starting to offer some interesting alternatives:
Mental Strength: increases your mana pool by 10%. The age-old argument of the Priest class has been whether a bigger mana pool is more important than bigger heals. I’ll let you in on a little secret: they’re both important, though in different amounts at different times.
Force of Will: This talent doesn’t have anything that will help your healing — but it does provide a nice boost to soloing by giving you +5% damage and crit on your offensive spells.
Power Infusion: The gem of the three, PI is a 15s buff on a 3m cooldown that increases spell damage and healing by 20%. It can be used to buff your abilities — or someone else’s. A very nice buff, all in all.
Enlightenment: +5% to your intellect, stamina, and spirit. 5% isn’t a lot, really, but you’re getting a little of your three most important stats. It’s nice, but I still envy Druid’s Heart of the Wild talent and its lower position in their tree.
Pain Suppression: Though on the live realms this is more of a PvP talent, I believe its changes make it PvE-viable and even desirable. At present, Pain Suppression is a self-buff that reduces damage taken by 65% for 8 seconds on a 3 minute cooldown. Really more of a PvP ability (and even then, it seems like it’s only going to delay the inevitable). However, come patch 2.3, the skill is either being nerfed or buffed — and your opinion in this matter seems to side squarely with whether you have the talent now or not. Come 2.3, Pain Suppression will be castable on others, but will only reduce damage taken by 40% for 8 seconds on a 2 minute cooldown. And, in addition, it will reduce your target’s threat by 5%.
The build I’m discussing here is based around the idea of using Pain Suppression in a PvE healing environment — with some allowances made for soloing (in the form of Force of Will and Searing Light). We start off in Holy with what I consider the essentials to any healing build:
Healing Focus: though you may argue its usefulness (since Priests can’t take many hits, anyway), it’s only 2 talent points to get what most other classes pay 5 for. Totally worth it.
Improved Renew: I use Renew a lot.
Holy Specialization: Since I’m not picking up Inspiration in this build (I’ve decided I simply don’t crit enough to make it worthwhile), I could take this one or leave it. However, I need to put points somewhere to get up to tier 4…
Divine Fury: Reducing the cast time of your healing and damage spells is a no brainer. If you’re putting any points in Holy, it should be for this.
Searing Light: Doesn’t help my healing at all, but it’s a nice buff to my damage, and with most of my favorite talents further up in the tree than I can go, I have points to spare.
Improved Healing: You could swap this out for Inspiration, too — when 2.3 hits the live realms, I could go either way, myself. But while an Inspiration proc can be a lifesaver, this will provide a continuous benefit.
And in Discipline:
Unbreakable Will: Honestly, I don’t entirely like either of the first tier talents here, but I usually go for this one because I hate getting silenced.
Silent Resolve: Less threat means I die less, and I’m all about that.
Improved Fortitude, Inner Focus, and Meditation: All of these talents provide excellent benefit for a tiny number of talent points. If you’re this far into Discipline, there is no good reason to skip them. (Plus, Meditation in 2.3 will provide twice as much mana regeneration!)
Mental Agility: This only works on instant cast spells, but when it comes down to it, there are quite a few spells in our arsenal that are instant cast. (Renew, Power Word: Shield, all buffs, Prayer of Mending…) Also, there’s not really another good place to dump the points. (Though I do kind of like Improved Inner Fire — especially if I’m PvPing.)
Mental Strength: If you’re this deep in the tree, I don’t see why you’d skip out on +10% mana. Also it’s a requirement for Power Infusion, which we want.
Divine Spirit: This isn’t a spirit build, but Divine Spirit is still a nice buff. But dropping these points elsewhere certainly doesn’t break the build.
Force of Will: A pure damage talent. I’d say you could skip it to focus more on healing… but there’s not really a good place to put the points that will help your healing at this point in the tree — so why not help the times you aren’t healing?
Power Infusion: This buff is one of the reasons we’re bothering to go this high in Discipline.
Enlightenment: It’s not the best talent ever, but it’s not a bad all-around buff, either.
Pain Suppression: This baby’s the reason we’re here!
The build, in the end, is one of trade-offs. Are you willing to sacrifice a good chunk of healing for improved utility? With the change this build is based on still only on the test realms, it’s impossible to say for certain — but I, for one, am keen to give it a try when 2.3 hits the live realms.
When screenshots described as “work in progress” look this good, you know a game’s headed in the right direction. It turns out that the version of Super Street Fighter II: Turbo HD Remix shown at Capcom Gamer’s Day in London wasn’t the most recent build available at the same. To make up for it, the developers decided to post some screen-captures of the game on their blog. The high-res images show off the Ryu and Ken sprites, two of the game’s levels, and the character select screen.
As with anything on Daedalus, one of their most recent articles was a fascinating exploration into the deeper psychology of playing an MMO. The article of fascination this time deals with the player life cycle in an MMO like WoW, and indeed he primarily uses examples and quotations from WoW players to build his argument.
Daedalus believes that nearly every player will fit this cycle in one way or another, and each step in the cycle has some variables within it that seem to include the majority of the player populace. For instance, when we first start playing the game, we begin for one of two reasons; either we are interested in exploring a new world on our own, or a friend introduced us to the game. Personally, I fall into the second category, as it was a dear friend that introduced me to the game. The general progression of the player life cycle and he sees it is this: entry, practice, mastery, burnout, recovery.
While I can admit that nearly every player will go through the first three steps, I wonder about the last two. Does every player burn out at some point during their play of the game? The article mentions burnout in various cases, grinding, social obligations, rerolling, so I suppose the answer is yes. I have myself gotten so tired of playing the same zones over and over that I run my new Blood Elves to Brill just for a change of scenery. The trick I suppose is finding that hook that brings you back into the game, and usually that hook is friendship. For those tired of raiding, tired of responsibilities, just being able to spend time with those you have connected with in-game can be the true motivation to keep playing.
We sure do love giving things away. Case in point, we owe someone a brand new copy of Forza Motorsport 2, so let’s get on with it shall we? The winner of last week’s Fanswag Weekly giveaway is … Eddy! Congratulations Eddy on your fantastic random drawing skills. Perhaps you would do us the honor of creating a nice X3F livery?
Be sure to check back on Wednesday when we give away our next bit of swag. Oh, and just so you know, this week’s prize is something pretty special. Find out what it is on Wednesday.
It’s rare that the intersection of film and video game makes for any good news, but this just happens to be one of those odd occasions. The film buffs of Ain’t It Cool News are going to be putting together a reunion screening for the greatest video-game-related-yet-not-video-game-based film of all time: The Wizard. In attendance will be big brother Fred Savage, director Todd Holland and the titular wizard, Luke Edwards. Conspicuously absent from the list: Jackey “Lucas” Vinson, who apparently hasn’t acted in 15 years. You may remember Vinson from his love of the Power Glove and its plentiful badness.
Tickets to the Dec. 7 show at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas go on sale on Nov. 5 on their website. If you’re in the area and you don’t go, well … we’re not sure we can be friends anymore.
Lavinia over on WoW Ladies found 
