Ragnar’s Realms

Today,  

Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, PvP, Classes, Talents, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance, Battlegrounds, Arena

Each week, Arcane Brilliance attempts to give Mages something to read. Immediately thereafter, Warlocks also get something to read, only their reading material is instant cast, applies a DoT, and can turn into an invincible demon from the nether-regions of Hell. Mages complain, and Blizzard responds by giving Arcane Brilliance a 2 second stun. The catch? It only works if the reading material crits, and only if the target is a frozen sheep.

Alright, it’s Saturday, and by now you’ve hopefully had time to make the trip to Theramore or Stonard to pick up your new Portal and Teleport spells. If early, unconfirmed info is your thing, you’ve no doubt taken a look at the leaked WotLK Alpha talents and formulated your own opinions on what the future may or may not hold for Mages. If not, well, there’s no time like the present. Go ahead, I’m not going anywhere.

All set? Good, because we have lots to talk about. Last week we discussed some basic, flexible talent builds you can use to get your Mage ready for raiding. This week, we’re exploring the PvP side of things. After the jump, We’ll go over a few templates you can use to begin building your PvP Mage, including my own Mage’s spec, so be sure to click the blue text below this sentence. I mean, how can you pass up the opportunity to mock my spec and tell me what a noob I am? Get going…clicky, clicky!

Continue reading Arcane Brilliance: Building your Mage, part 2: PvP

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Today,  

Filed under: Wipeout, Video

If you read our hands-on impressions, you’d know that we’re in love with WipEout Pulse. Looks like IGN is quite enamored too — and they have videos to show you. Unfortunately, these videos don’t quite capture how intense the game really feels when it’s in your hands. The silky smooth framerate adds a lot to the experience. New modes, like Elimination (our favorite), are a welcome addition to the franchise. And, the experience “loyalty” points you get after each race has us trying to grind for more unlockables. It’s just a better game than Pure, and that’s saying a lot.

Check out all of IGN’s videos here.

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Today,  

Filed under: Microsoft Xbox 360, Action

With years of planting and kicking bombs, exploding walls, and collecting power ups under his belt, it’s easy to think that Hudson’s iconic Bomberman’s particular shtick has been throughly explored. Not so, says Hudson big cheese John Greiner, who notes that the company has “lots more planned” for the Bomberman franchise in the coming year.

This is on top of the already announced Bomberman Land titles coming in January, as well as a newly kicked off New Year’s contest over XBLA’s Bomberman Live. While Hudson has not shed light on its plans for the portly pyromaniac, we assume that the company will not endeavor to reinvent the wheel, as such a move would be unheard of in Hudson’s history.

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Today,  

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Virtual selves, RP, (Roleplaying) All the World’s a Stage

All the World’s a Stage is a column for inquisitive minds, playing with roles every Sunday evening.

The media usually portrays WoW as a “boy’s game.” That’s not to say girls don’t play too, of course — just that the game is basically about qualities such as aggressiveness and violence, and our culture expects males to be interested in that sort of thing.

Whether such a designation is true or not, the “masculine equals violent” stereotype is very pervasive, and it is natural for many male players to begin the game with a powerful and intimidating character in mind. The player may imagine that his avatar is warm and kind-hearted inside, but outwardly, his character looks as though he could rip out your throat with a flick of his pinky finger.

But there are many men out there who don’t like such exaggerated manliness in their characters, just as there are many women who don’t want their character to look like a dainty barbie doll. Being a person isn’t just about just one gender attribute, after all. Indeed, female characters in WoW can achieve a full range of human attributes in their appearance; they can look friendly and intelligent, yet lightning quick and deadly at the same time. However, the appearance of male characters is often so filled to the brim with “strength and honor” that there’s not much room left for any other human quality.

Continue reading All the World’s a Stage: If looks could kill

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Admin wrote: 

Filed under: News

That crow’s for us. We really thought that HouseMarque had a snowboarding game up their sleeves. Too bad too, a new game in the vein of 1080 Snowboarding could’ve been great. Still, this does mean that the Live Arcade now has a proper golf game, rather than just a mini-golf one. Team Xbox posted some screens of the game a little early and the first look reveals a light-hearted take on the graphics not unlike Hot Shots Golf. While not for everyone a niche title like this does have its place and should hopefully add to the list of games that appeal to the so-called casual player.

[Via xblah]

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Admin wrote: 

Filed under: Microsoft Xbox 360

That leaked Target circular was dead-on: beginning July 13th (today!) the mega retailer is offering the 20GB Xbox 360 console for $299.99 (a $50 price drop) along with a free $25 Target gift card. That’s great news and all but we’ve been confidant about that price drop for weeks now; what we weren’t sure about was whether or not the Xbox 360 Arcade or Xbox 360 Elite would see similar drops, or if the $50 discount on the 20GB console is simply a clearance sale to make room for the rumored-to-be-introduced-shortly 60GB console.

According to a real-enough looking Circuit City ad for the week of July 27th (note: Soul Calibur IV listed as “in store Tuesday”) the Xbox 360 Arcade will still be $280. Depending on how you factor in that $25 Target gift card, the 20GB Pro system could actually be cheaper than the hard drive-less Arcade, at least while it’s still on store shelves (note: the Target ad clearly states “Quantity limited”). So, permanent $50 price cut or clearance sale on the soon-to-be outmoded 20GB model?

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Admin wrote: 

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Breakfast topics, Expansions, Death Knight, Wrath of the Lich King

So with WoTLK fast approaching, there’s still plenty of discussion and debate about that whole Death Knights being all races thing. We’ve already covered the lore aspect, but another thing lot of people have been discussion is how Racial abilities will work with Death Knights. Some people are concerned that abilities like Gift of the Naaru aren’t something a Death Knight steeped in shadow should be able to use. Now me, I think that if the Naaru can forgive the Blood Elves for M’uru, they can forgive Draenei Death Knights and give them back Gift of the Naaru.

Still, commenter Clayton sent an intriguing thought into WoW Insider’s secret headquarters the other day: Who says Death Knights have to use racials? When you consider what a Death Knight is, there’s at least some measure of sense to it. Death Knights have undergone a radical change. They’re suffused with dark energies, they have forsaken what they knew of love and life and light, they have forsaken whatever skills they knew in the past, all to take up the Runeblade. It is true that not all Death Knights become actual undead, but the total control the Lich King exerts over them leeches away much of their former identity. Because of this, it seems possible that Death Knights could have lost their connection with their racial identities, and through that, their racial abilities.

This could also be a quick and easy way to ensure a bit of balance between the various races. There’s a whole lot of considerations to made with racials and Death Knight abilities. Will Arcane Torrent combined with anti-magic tanking abilities just make Blood Elf Death Knights too powerful against casters in PvP? Giving Death Knights their own unique set of “racials” based around their class would be an easy way to sidestep this, and probably justifiable since Death Knights are their own seperate “hero” class category. Then again, it might put them under undue pressure to make special racials for all other hero classes as well, so they might want to stay more flexible.

Which side of the issue do you fall on? Should they keep it simple and just keep the racials like they always have? Or do the Death Knights need a whole new set of racial abilities, and if so, what?

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Admin wrote: 

Filed under: News

Not all previews of the soon-to-be releases Ninja Gaiden II have been glowing. According to impressions from Next Gen: Edge the game is cursed with a major design flaw, a bad camera.

“This isn’t a problem with it getting caught on a corner occasionally, nor the odd confusing switch of perspective. It is a constant problem: obscuring foes, breaking up combos, losing track of Ryu, and flicking back and forth between positions.”

While this isn’t the first preview we’ve read citing the camera as an issue, previous impressions came from older builds of the game, however the most recent build shown at press events was the final code. So are we in for heartbreak when Ninja Gaiden II drops next month?

While the preview does praise Ninja Gaiden II for being one of the best 3D fighting engines ever made, they wonder how Team Ninja got the basic design of camera control utterly wrong. Remembering the original Ninja Gaiden had camera issues, is this something you’ll be able to deal with or did this just break the deal for you and cancel that Ninja Gaiden II pre-order?

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Admin wrote: 

Filed under: Nintendo DS, Sony PlayStation 2, Sony PlayStation 3, Sony PSP, Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Xbox 360, Business

Stemming from a recent SEC filing and financial report, EA’s third quarter software revenues — broken down by platform — reveal that the Xbox 360 proved to be the most rewarding during the three months ending September 30th. A Gamasutra report ranks the revenue for the period, which saw the releases of Boogie, Madden ‘08 and Skate, as following:

• Xbox 360: $218 million (an increase of $52 million over the same period last year)
• PlayStation 2: $73 million (a drop of $196 million compared to the previous year)
• Wii: $59 million
• DS: $47 million (up by $33 million)
• PSP: $21 million (down by $43 million)
• PlayStation 3: $17 million

Does CEO John Riccitiello still think the publisher backed the “wrong horse” by initially focusing on the PS3 and Xbox 360? Judging by third quarter revenues, it seems said horse was actually two buffoons in a poorly constructed costume — except the one controlling the front two legs could actually make out where he was going. Driven by superb Madden ‘08 sales in October, the Xbox 360 yielded roughly the same amount as every other platform combined. Wii software revenue shows promise for the system’s third-party developers, quite unlike the PlayStation 3’s $17 million. With lackluster hardware sales and unimpressive software revenues from one of the world’s largest publishers laying quite the rocky road, it’s no wonder Sony has to talk supporters out of jumping ship.

(Wait a minute. Did we just put a ship on the road? We’ve got to stop mixing our metaphors like that.)

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Admin wrote: 

Filed under: Shaman, Patches, Items

MMO Champion has a bit of information about some of the latest changes coming in patch 2.3.2.

First is something of a non-change for Shamans in particular: Blizzard had in mind to add a 30-second cooldown to Earth Shield, as well as a 50% mana-cost reduction, but now they’re putting this change on hold until they can figure out exactly how they’ll resolve the thorny issue of whether this spell should be dispellable or not — it’ll probably be in patch-2.4, in one form or another.

Secondly, there are some item changes in the works: one epic throwing weapon, the [Spinesever], is going to be nerfed a little bit for some reason, and a number of model certain Zul’Aman gear are going to be updated. The [Ancient Sin’dorei Longbow] from Zul’Jin himself struck me as a particularly sad reuse of an existing (and ugly) bow model. Fortunately, as you can see on the right, that bow is getting an invigorated look (on the top). A number of other items, are getting update too. Check out their post for all the details.

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