MapleGeek

I’ve mentioned MapleGeek before. It’s the first private server community I have ever been a part of, and the third one I played. A couple of years ago, before [i]real[/i] private servers were available, I used to browse through the Xtremetop100 rankings fishing for an actual working private server. In January of 08, I made that search again, but didn’t have to look far. MapleGeek was #1, and it was the first one I’d seen that didn’t lie about the fact that it didn’t have a server yet. The ad said that it was awaiting the release of the OdinMS source. I then tried to join OdinMS, but was of course stonewalled, they put the [i]private[/i] in Private Server. So I signed up for MapleGeek!
Anyways, they ended up closing down that summer due to a number of reasons, but now, about a year later, it’s back and under new management. One of the former MapleGeek staff set up a new forum for MapleGeeks to reunite, and we’re now merging with an existing private server.

Check out http://www.MapleGeek.com for more info on that. If you join up on the forums, chat me up. My display name is LiteralLight.

Guitar Hero Update

It’s been a while since I posted about Guitar Hero. In fact, it’s been a while since I posted at all. Therefore, I feel it is appropriate to take a moment to brag about how my skills have improved. The last time I posted about Guitar Hero, I was talking about how I got 5 stars on “Number of the Beast” on Expert. This was, in fact, a big deal to me at the time, as it was extremely hard for me to do. Since then, I have gotten over 500,000 points on that very same song. I have also achieved 5 stars on all Guitar Hero 3 Career Mode songs, and also gotten the achievement for scoring 200k on “Cult of Personality” without using Star Power.

I have purchased and played through Guitar Hero: World Tour. I enjoyed the enhanced gameplay, especially the feature that allows notes to be played while a sustain is continuously held. The slider notes are great as well, as I’m a fan of the Hammer-ons and Pull-offs, and slider notes take that one step further, getting rid of strumming altogether :) World Tour fails, however, to amp up the difficulty until the last couple sets of songs. The only one I have yet to beat is “Satch Boogie,” thanks to its section of extremely fast slider notes. I have also yet to achieve 5 stars on “Trapped in Ice” by Metallica. The other songs, however, I found easy to master. I do appreciate the track list, especially “Hotel California,” a song I had not heard before playing it, but now greatly enjoy.

I bought Guitar Hero: Smash Hits last Wednesday and beat it on Thursday. I beat “Through the Fire and the Flames” for the first time on Thursday, and achieved 4 stars on Friday. Today, I achieved 5 stars on “Psychobilly Freakout,” and 5 stars on “Play With Me.” Now, I am only two stars short of a 5star full game, having 238/240 stars. The ones I’m missing are one from “Raining Blood” and of course, one from “Through the Fire and the Flames.” These are all on the Expert difficulty.

I loved Smash Hits, because it has many songs from the original Guitar Hero, which is not available for the Xbox 360, and I’ve never played it. The re-frets of the GH2 songs are excellent as well. Guitar Hero: Smash hits adds the function of seeing your progress on how many stars you’ve while you’re still playing the song, much like Rock Band does.

Left 4 Dead

Four survivors battling through hordes of zombies, barely holding on by the skin of their teeth in an attempt to reach an evac point. That’s the basic summary of “Left 4 Dead,” but doesn’t even begin to describe the fun. There are several different gameplay modes, including single-player campaigns, two-player split-screen cooperative play, plaver-versus-player splitscreen play, and online play that pits special player-controlled zombies against the survivors. “Left 4 Dead” is fast action, adrenaline pumping, on-the-edge-of-your-seat gameplay through and through. At times players will be rushed by hundreds of zombies at once, and at other times they will be traveling through the dark hallways of abandoned buildings, hearing the soft crying of the “Witch” zombie and desperately trying not to startle it, for one attack from the Witch means instant incapacitation to anyone unfortunate enough to face its wrath. At other times, the mighty “Tank” zombie rushes the team, bashing away until the survivors have pumped enough lead into it to finish it off. Players must also keep an eye out for “Boomers” which explode upon being shot, and even worse, their puke attracts hordes of zombies to the survivors’ location, as well as “Hunters” who can leap insane distances in a single bound and once they pounce on a survivor, only a fellow survivor can save them from sure death. “Smokers” grab survivors with their tongues, pulling them away from the group and making them susceptible to a beat-down by the zombie horde.

Thankfully, there is a wide variety of weapons at the survivors’ disposal. From automatic shotguns to sniper rifles, there are plenty of guns to fit any player’s fighting style. Moltov-cocktails and Pipe-bombs make useful explosives, as the cocktail sends up a wall of flame and the Pipe-bomb beeps for a few seconds prior to exploding, attracting any zombies who hear it to pile on top of it.

Health packs are few and far between, and on harder difficulties players will find themselves having to decide whom amongst them to save. Pain-pills can be found every so often, but the temporary health boost they give wears off slowly.

At certain intervals along the way, players stop in “Safe-houses” which zombies cannot enter. Inside, players can restock on ammunition, switch weapons, and heal up with the med-packs that can be found there.

“Left 4 Dead” is a great game to play with a friend. Players will be watching each others’ backs and calling out for help all the way through each challenge.

Fable II: Bartending

My personal favorite job in Fable II is Bartending. It’s very easy to do because, unlike Woodcutting or Blacksmithing, the bar always fills in one direction (Left-to-right/clockwise) and it always turns green at the same point. Basically, bartending is just filling pints of beer all the way full, but not overflowing. If you don’t fill it enough, you earn less gold and you break the chain. Every three pints filled adds one point to your multiplier, and you can get a multiplier of up to 15. A5-star bartender earns a base of 75 gold per pint, so at a 15x multiplier, every pint is worth 1125 gold. A pint takes about 3 seconds to fill and send down the counter, so once you’ve gotten a chain of 45 pints of beer, you start raking in 22,500 gold per-minute. That’s alot. After about five minutes of bartending with a 15x multiplier, you’ll have earned enough gold to buy any building in the town of Bowerstone (The castle excluded, of course).

Fable II

The other day, my older brother brought home a game he’d borrowed from a friend. I didn’t place much interest in it at first, but after my brother played for a while we discovered a co-op mode. I was given a crash course in the controls of the game and soon found myself blasting enemies with powerful spells (that look quite awesome I might add). My brother turned in early that night, but I stayed up literally through the night, creating my own file and playing through the storyline. Though the battle system is amazing in its own right, there is much more to Fable II that makes it one of the coolest Role-Playing games I have played. Not only can you customize your character’s skill set to be a sword-bearing warrior, a sharp-eyed marksman, a powerful spell-caster, or any combination of the three, you can do a number of jobs, from chopping wood to assassinating given targets, you can own a house, tavern, shop, and virtually every building in the game. You can execute a number of expressions that will affect people’s opinion of you, choose to eat pies and cheeses and become fat or fruits and veggies to stay thin, walk the holy path of Good or take the lower road of Evil. You can buy a wide array of weaponry, clothing, furniture, potions, jewels, and gifts. You can start a family (or a few families, if you wish) who love and adore you and give you gifts, or you can just use them for personal gain.

Rock Band 2

I know I’m way behind the curve here, but I finally got myself a copy of Rock Band 2. I played it all night long to unlock “One Step Closer,”

then played for the rest of the week working on unlocking all the songs and finishing my solo career. I have finally *finished* the career in the since that I have beaten the “Rolling Stones Rock Immortal” setlist, but I do not yet have the 900 stars required for the Endless Setlist 2 (I have 707 so far, and I just need to keep completing setlists). All in all, I give RB:2 a 9.5/10 because it has great gameplay and great replay value. I was a little dissapointed that I cannot transfer the songs from my original Rock Band disc to Rock Band 2 without a way to connect my X-box to the internet and $5 worth of Microsoft Points or whatever it’s called… Also, the “Impossible Challenges” are not-so-impossible. The songs that make up the marathons are about as difficult as GH3’s “Raining Blood,” “Cliffs of Dover,” and the last half of “One.” I never failed any of them on Expert Guitar. Yeah, the setlist was most certainly difficult, especially as one has to play six songs in a row, and the fingers do turn to jelly about halfway through the sixth song. However, taken one or two at a time with a short break in between, the songs on the Impossible Challenges are relatively easy to beat. When I saw the words “Impossible Challenges” I was thinking along the lines of “Through the Fire and the Flames” and I must say I was a little dissapointed. Rock Band has never been as difficult on the Guitar as the Guitar Hero games, understandably, but I was still hoping for a little more of a challenge. I do have a challenge, however, in getting 5 stars on some of these songs, and it will most definately take me a while. I will continue to work on that, and once that gets boring, I’ll see about getting an internet connection for my X-Box so I can download more selections to play. I am looking forward to getting the Who’s album, as “Who Are You” is one of my top 10 favorite rock songs of all time–OH! and kudos to Harmonix for re-doing “Carry On Wayward Son.” I LOVE this song and I love the re-vamped chart for the guitar. The awesomeness factor of this one song almos makes up for the non-challenging Impossible Challenges. Some of my other favorites from the RB:2 selection are “In the Middle” by Jimmy Eat World, “Alive” by Pearl Jam, “White Wedding” by Billy Idol (I’d never really been into this song very much, I’d just heard it a few times on the radio and liked it), and, of course, “One Step Closer.” Harmonix definately beat Activision in their choice of a Linkin Park song, because “What I’ve Done” (On GH: World Tour) is waaaay too easy, even though it is a great song. “One Step Closer” is a bit more challenging, so one can enjoy the music and the note chart as well.

Rock Band Revisited

Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten a chance to play RB2, but I did finally get a replacement disc for my Rock Band game. I played around on it today and got gold stars on 4 songs without really even trying. It’s so much easier on RB than on GH, because with GH if you miss just ONE note, you have to start all over. With Rock Band, it’s simply a matter of getting enough points (I think I heard somewhere that the requirement for Gold Stars is 1.5x the requirement for 5 stars) so if you can keep a 4x multiplier through most of the song, time your overdrive right, and whammy like a mad man, you can get Gold Stars easily! Anyways, I had a great time playing “Dead or Alive” with my little brother (He’s almost 10) and jammin out solo as well.

GH: World Tour

I haven’t gotten to play World Tour much, but I like what I see. My friend got GH:WT for Christmas, but only has the Guitar, so I stopped by his house to play it for about an hour. They’ve got a [i]big[/i] selection of songs to play and all of them are great. The slide bar is hard to master and I haven’t gotten the hang of it. I like the new feature where sometimes there is a sustained note with other notes you have to play while keeping the first sustained, as well as the fact that GH followed Rock Band with the ability to gain Star Power while you already have Star Power activated. Expert has moved up a notch on many songs, thanks to the addition of the slidebar, and I think it will be quite a while before a large majority of players have very many 5 star performances on the harder songs! I can’t wait to play it more and would love to try out the drum set.

Combat Arms

Nexon enters the First Person Shooter scene with Combat Arms. It has several maps, each different from the rest, and a unique weapons system: You use GP you gain from matches to buy weapons in the shop, but the items expire after a set amount of time and you can purchase a weapon for 1 day, 1 week, or 3 months. Some items can’t be purchased until the player reaches a certain rank. Players rank up by gaining EXP points in combat. There are several play modes: In “One Man Army” anyone is free game to kill, it’s everyone versus everyone. In “Elimitation”, two teams fight against each other to reach a certain goal of kils (Anywhere from 30 to 140). In “Capture the Flag”, the point is obviously to capture the opponent’s flag and bring it back to your own. In “Spy Hunt” everyone starts out as allies and three intel cases are spread accross the map. As soon as someone touches an intel case, they become an enemy and everyone is out to kill them. The object of the game is to obtain all THREE cases at once, and when this happens, the player with the cases becomes a “super spy.” He gets a whopping 500 armor points, a Gatling Gun, a Flamethrower, and an extremely souped up rocket launcher. I’m not too sure about “Search and Destroy” but I believe the point is to plant a bomb in the opponent’s base. Since it’s a Nexon game, there are obviously many hackers, as there is a public Cham hack that’s easy to find if you looked hard enough. There are hackers in almost every match, and since the Cham hack is impossible to prove (Without a confession from the hacker, or a screenshot of the HACKER’s screen), few of the hackers get punished. There’s also an “OPK” hack, which puts all of the opponents on one spot so that the hacker can easily kill them all with a knife, but that’s considered “VIP” and typically has to be paid for. In short: Combat Arms is a great game to play if you want to hack!

Maple Story Private Servers

They’ve been out for quite a while now. The first one opened (I believe) in December of 2007, the next one soon after, and then, with the public release of a different source in early March, private servers began to pop up everywhere. What is a private server, you ask? It’s basically a copy of a popular game but everything can be edited by the “host” or “owner” of the server. Experience rates, drop rates, items found in shops, you name it. MapleStory private servers range anywhere from 5x EXP all the way to 100,000x EXP. In some servers, everyone is a Game Master, and can spawn whatever monster or item they want, warp to any map they want, and be any class or combination of class they want. On most servers, though, the owner picks a small team of players to be Game Masters and moderate the regular players, as well as look out for hackers. These Private Servers are much more fun than Nexon’s versions, because the Game Masters actually exist, usually talk to you, sometimes are fun, and often throw awesome events. Events could include monsters that drop NX-Cash items, monsters that give a TON of experience (20k exp * the server’s EXP rate), monster invasion, boss runs, hide-and-seek, trivia, and tons of others. Some servers give out Wizet Invincible Hats as the ultimate prize. These babies give 999 to str/dex/int/luk, 999 accuracy/avoidability, 50 speed, 20 jump, and 200 weapon defence and magic defence. Many servers also offer the ability to be “reborn” once you hit level 200. You start back as a level 1 beginner, but you keep all your items, stats, and all your skills that you have mapped to your keyboard. For instance, if a player is a Night Lord the first time through, they can keep Flash Jump, Haste, Dark Sight, and Shadow Partner, and be reborn as a bowman. Shadow Partner works with all projectiles, so the Night Lord/Bowman will shoot 2 arrows with a regular shot, 4 with double-shot, 8 with strafe, and 2 streams of arrows with Storm of Arrows/Hurricane! All in all, Private Servers provide a ton of fun, and if Nexon could just take a few ideas from them, MapleStory Global would be MUCH better off!