Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft

Hearthstone was created by Blizzard that has entered its open beta on Janurary 14^th.  I was able to get a beta pass prior and have played around with the game over the last couple of months as well in the open beta.  It is a player versus player game that involves cards.  These cards are used in combination to destroy their opponent’s cards as well as their lifepoint/health.  There are many of game modes you can pick from; from playing against the AI or against a player in normal or ranked matches.   You can gain cards through playing to earn coins to buy packs of cards, through “quests” or spending your own real money in the shop.

You can play as many different types of classes, each represented by a hero.  Jaina Proudmoore is representing the mage class and I found her to the easiest hero to play while I was learning the game.  Each hero has its own mechanics as well as unique cards to its own class.

Hearthstone was design to give card games an online interactive mimic of games such as Magic the Gathering and Yu-gi-oh.  Though they do not have a player trading card system to allow for players to trade cards.  They have created a more of a crafting of cards system where players take unwanted cards and turn them into dust to craft cards of their choice.

I had watched this game prior to playing it myself on streams of other players.  First starting as a “while I’m in queue, I’ll play hearthstone.”  The matches are short games where even League of Legends players played and finished while in the queue for games.  The scene for this game has grown to be quite large while it is constantly in the top five games watched on Twitch.  While playing this game, I found it as a novelty to card games that already existed and had hoped for something to be new.  While each class had its own difficulty as well as how well each were balanced against each other, I felt like it was still lacking.  The first couple of plays I did with the game were good and I enjoyed it but after it just wore off.  I felt myself falling into a bit of disappointment with both my luck in getting cards as well as just feeling like I was playing the same thing again and again.  I was never a person fond of cards and had my own few that I did enjoy.  The game itself is well designed and I would say it is somewhat balance but still in need of more balancing.  It is very enjoyable for those who favour both card games and World of Warcraft.

Cheers! Happy Gaming!

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World of Warcraft….The Movie?

Back in January of this year, there had been rumors floating around about a WoW movie; not that every possible player wasn’t already dreaming of it happening. Throughout the last couple of years since about 2006, the rumor mill has been going only for it to be confirmed this year at Comic Con.  At Comic Con, they produced a test film teaser, and officially and finally, confirming the movie to be made.  The slated director is Duncan Jones, who directed Moon and Source Code and production is to start early 2014.

Digging a bit further into it, the movie is dated to come out in 2015, only a year’s worth of production to be had.  Will it be enough time to appease the masses?  Will the long awaited suspense of years desiring such a film have us become overcritical when it does come out?

 

Marvel Heroes is now live!

Fuck World of Warcraft, screw Diablo 3, who cares about Skyrim. Marvel Heroes is here. If you are a fan of Marvel or comic books in general, Marvel Heroes is the way to go.

For those of you that have not purchased any of the starter, premium, or the ultimate pack, you won’t be able to log into game servers just yet. You have to wait until Tuesday.

Marvel Heroes is a Diablo style game with the characters being Marvel based. You get a starter character which you get a choice between Daredevil, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, Storm, and Thing. No matter who you start off with, you are going to have a good time. You can also collect other characters within the game by getting them as random drops off of bosses. Within the game there are short little cut scenes that show up when you progress to the next stage of the game. You see Wolverine, Storm, Captain America, Luke Cage, and Spider-Man. These characters not based off of Marvel: Now as far as I know, since Spider-Man’s comments in the cut scenes are quick come-backs and jokes about the situation.

The game-play graphics are fantastic. Lots of area of effect graphic elements and other character graphic elements. I hope you have a good graphics card and some RAM, cuz my computer shut down twice because I had my settings running too high. Even so, obviously with the beta there was going to be collision issues, but so far in the live version, I have not seen anything go wrong. Boss fights are for the most part simple, you figure them out pretty quickly, and if you know how the character is in the comic books, you have a head start on how they might act in the game.

The story within the game is very well written. From what I have experienced so far, there are 2 main hubs for characters. You start off in Avengers Tower trying to get a piece of a tablet from more of Avengers based bad guys.You get to battle the likes of the Hand, Hydra, A.I.M, Green Goblin, Elektra, and Kingpin just to name a few.Then the game moves you over to the Xavier School and you go on to fight the Purifiers, Reavers, and Juggernaut. In the end, the big boss fight will be against Dr Victor Von Doom.

The way the instances work makes me very happy. I don’t think it’s the same as Diablo 3, since I have not played it in a while. When you enter an instance, you are automatically group with up to 4 other people. You do not have to go and try to find people to join a group. And the difficulty of the instance changes depending on how many people are in the group. But any area is solo-able. But when you get grouped up, the rewards at the end are more plentiful.

As far as end game goes, from what I hear there is one set up. I know there is an end game PvP arena as well as daily challenges to complete for rewards. And there are guilds that are being formed in anticipation of said end game content. But guilds are not live yet. There is also a crafting section with Hank Pym where you can add abilities to your costume as well as upgrade rare quality items into epic items.

Probably the best thing about the game is that you do not need a lot of time to play. You can come and go as you please. No matter what, you should at least give Marvel Heroes a shot. I mean, come on, it is a free game!

Game Rating: 9.1 / 10

Check the game out for yourself! Marvel Heroes