A random collection of thoughts about games, here goes.

The Division was free last weekend on Steam, and I played it for about an hour. It was… fine? Good graphics and setting, but I failed to really see the point of the game. I mean its not a pure FPS, and it’s not really an MMO, but I think it wanted to be a third-person sorta FPS with MMO-like features? Not my cup of tea either way.

I continue to play Grim Dawn, and I’m still really enjoying it. When the Diablo formula is done right, it really is entertaining, and Grim Dawn nails a lot of what works in that formula. In particular I like how what items you get somewhat shape the direction of your character, without completely changing how you play.

For example, my main character uses a 2h gun, with a heavy emphasis on fire damage. Naturally I look for +fire damage items, but for a bit I got a lot of +electricity and +chaos gear that was too good to pass up, and I was able to move some skill points around to work around that. From a gameplay perspective I was still throwing bombs and shooting stuff in the face, but from a power perspective moving those points around helped up my DPS, and I was able to do that again (in reverse) when I later found more +fire damage stuff.

In EVE I was part of a large battle a few days ago (can’t find a good battle report link, sadly) that was heavily in our favor against CO2/TEST/PL. The ping for the fleet came at a perfect time, but I didn’t have the required Mach battleship, and they were all sold on contracts. Luckily someone in the fleet was willing to loan me his while he switched to a Loki, and off we went.

The battle involved about 1000 people total, so Tidi wasn’t cripplingly bad, but was in effect just enough to make following the FC easier. We ended up butchering a lot of enemy Machs, T3Cs, and smaller stuff. This link is to my killboard, and you can see all the stuff I was in on on May 9^th. Also of note, I’m approaching 1t worth of destruction, which is a nice little milestone.

Finally on the mobile gaming front, SuperCell has been hyping the next update to Clash of Clans as the games biggest yet, but they keep delaying revealing the details. There is a lot of speculation, and personally I’d love if the game got a version of Boom Beach’s operation, where the clan works together to take down tough NPC bases. Speaking of Boom Beach, our group (Supreme Cream!) in that is still up and running operations regularly, so if you play and want to join, go ahead and apply. Same goes for CoC, we still have a couple spots open. In CR we are always full, but I can open a spot up for a blog reader if needed.