Minecraft Adventures: Mikeland Factions Spawn, another winner

Hello again just a quick post on the newest design of the Mikeland Factions spawn.For whatever reason you didn't know Mikeland Factions is a Minecraft server I visit from time to time, sometimes to play other times to just have a look at what's been made, most prominently the spawn area which is remade from time to time after certain patches, similar to other SMP servers.

The first time I featured one of their spawn areas it was a giant roman/medieval coliseum style walls and architecture with a bit of Chinese thrown in. This time they've done the "simple large structure" design and made one hell of a neat looking tree.It reminds me of our attempt to make something similar and I think we did a pretty good job. This of course is rather a pro job as they have obviously made the tree to look like an actual tree not a Minecraft tree and it seems to work quite well.

These were taken with the basic Minecraft texture pack.

Here's a couple of shots with my LB Photorealism texture pack

I took some shots of the area around the base and found some interesting sights apparently now there's someway to put play models in the world that move by themselves, it's really weird, kind of like a Herobrine thing.. There were models of Notch and Mike Sheen himself too, and no I don't know what that guy in the cage had done or why you should not let him out.

This is the gate to the Nether, work in progress apparently

 I really should have taken some pics of the previous ones though they may not have been that spectacular. I didn't get around to playing on the server again as I just couldn't talk smooth enough to get into a faction this time, I think it just gets harder each time I come back, and I really wouldn't blame people. The amount of  betraying and backstabbing that goes on is horrendous, especially on servers where PvP is allowed.You sort of need to play for a bit by yourself then with others until they trust you enough to take you in and I really couldn't be bothered doing that again not when I have my so awesome "unmodded" singleplayer experience..

JD

The Past and Times of Yore: GTA4, The Lost and the Damned, blacktop rollin'

Also Known As: Grand Theft Auto: The Lost and Damned, Grand Theft Auto IV: Episodes from Liberty City
Also on: PS3, X360
Genre: Compilation
Publisher: Rockstar Games
Developer: Rockstar North

I may have mentioned this ”expansion” in a previous post but only very briefly, The Lost and the Damned does deserve more recognition then just a few lines in a post mainly about the other one. I had never really bothered purchasing any of the previous GTA ‘Episode’ i.e. the previous Liberty City stories or the Vice City stories but because they were given such high praises by both my friends and the critics and also because GTA4 has been one of my favourite games ever, so I had to comply. GTA4 had a lot of intertwining storylines in fact it could have made 2 or 3 more ‘spinoff’ games based on just that game world alone as they are a great way of getting more play out of a game rather than just doing the main storyline again and again.

Johnny Klebitz and his custom "Hexer" bike which is new to GTA I might add as well as a whole heap more

Anyway, the Lost and the Damned is the story behind a Motorcycle gang who featured in GTA4, the protagonist is Johnny, a veteran member of the gang and it’s Vice President the story basically tells of the returning of Billy, the reckless and volatile club president and the violence and chaos that ensues both inside the club and with the clubs main rivals: The Angels of Death. You may remember Johnny from such GTA4 missions as ‘Blow your Cover’ and ‘Museum Piece’ and yes you do go through those missions again from Johnny’s point of view. I must admit though, the times you briefly see Johnny in those scenes he seems quite a bit different from what he is in the instance it’s almost like Johnny was just another crazy friend-of-a-friend that Niko meets but now he’s the protagonist and therefore one of the only calm and collected characters in the game. Apart from the members of the lost motorcycle club there is a few new faces but most of the characters that Johnny interacts with outside the club are characters that you have seen before.

From left to right some of "The Lost MC" members: Terry, Angus, Brian, Jimmy and Johnny

You start in the Alderney Island this time around largely based around the Lost Clubhouse situated there. The main difference that The Lost and the Damned (TLAD) has to GTA4 is that throughout most of the game you will be riding a motorcycle. This is possibly the main reason I enjoy this game as I loved the motorcycles you had in GTA4 and this one gives the same and much more, motorcycles give a different feel than cars and apparently you could even notice that when you drove cars with Johnny that he didn’t handle them as well as Niko did and vice-versa with the bikes. Almost every mission involved bikes in some way including gang wars while riding with your crew and motorcycle thefts for profit even the racing missions where you have a baseball bat and could knock other opponents off their bikes (which was immense fun I can assure you). One of the problems though is that sometimes the slightest thing on the road, for example a piece of wood can have odd results, sometimes you just run over it but other times it launches you 5m in the air in a full on frontflip often resulting in you crashing and losing the race, but I guess it’s all the more spectacular. The episodes games are obviously fairly short (only a third of the missions available in GTA4) but there’s still a decent amount of fun to be had, there’s the usual line of side missions and random encounters throughout the story, Congressman Thomas Stubbs who you didn’t see in the previous game makes an appearance and provides some comic relief from the otherwise dark and gritty storyline.

Being on a motorcycle and riding with others on motorcycles, I just can't get enough

Checkpoints are a new feature in the game which allow you to continue a mission from different points rather than starting again. This time around you can call on your biker buddies Terry and Clay to come help you on certain missions in which the way they help you changes each time, sometimes giving you in instructions for tactics or to set up ambushes (who would have thought?) also your ‘The Lost’ gang members will gain experience and be better at fighting. You can also use your fellow gang members for delivery of guns and bikes if you may happen to lose your motorcycle in some way and god forbid you don’t want to be seen driving a car. As well as the new motorcycles (and some cars) that were included in the game there are a few new types of guns including a very useful automatic pistol, a very powerful but short range sawed off shotgun, an even more powerful rapid fire assault shotgun a grenade launcher, pipe bombs and pool cues (of course).There is thankfully new music around this time to give a more biker feel to things, I especially love listening to “You’re going to Hell” by Alice Cooper. 

The Sawn-off Shotgun, very powerful, as long as you're only two metres away or less

As I said before I loved riding bikes in GTA4 and that’s what makes this one so good for me, it’s nothing complicated just good old gang wars, in fact it’s probably even less action packed then GTA4, not to mention TBOGT which is a veritable orgy of explosions. There’s something to be said about cruising down the highway on your chopper with the sunset in the background and music on your, er stereo, it’s something I really want to do if I ever have enough money for it. The Lost and the Damned is essential if you’ve played and liked Grand Theft Auto 4 as it’s the same city just a different story and cast and if you happen to like Motorcycles it’s even better.

JD

I can apparently backflip a motorcycle without trying, or meaning to in the first place

Minecraft Adventures: Ozgamerparty and the Tribalfield reunion

Some say that if people have lost interest in something they enjoyed it doesn’t take much to get them interested again, you just basically have to show them. It’s like the way you see someone playing this old game that you used to play and having heaps of fun, it makes you want to go home and play it too, or it could just be the lure of a fresh start in a new playing field from an old friend, in our case the old friend was Norc, the new playing field was Ozgamerparty and the fresh start was (yet another) brand new map.

In the aftermath of the last big tirade on the server we all just basically left ourselves to our own devices. I did stuff, some of it Minecraft stuff though I always did want to go back, and after hearing that our previous Lord and Master NoRC had announced his new gaming community Ozgamerparty complete with fully loaded Minecraft server was all it took for us to jump at the chance I was only a month into playing SWTOR before I stopped to start building again, and build we did. Most people from the old tribalfield were back on, factions were back, pretty much nothing had changed apart from the changes to Minecraft itself,a nd there had been a lot which I went into detail with in my last minecrafty post. I went in wanting to be part of a faction community and help build stuff that it needed and that’s exactly what I did.

An early shot of the Inquisition village

Another shot (photo by Kieran_Cahill)

I logged on and did everything I needed to on the forums and pretty soon I was back with my usual partners in crime, Kieran_Cahill and WarpageHD and before long we had built a nice gazebo for the centre of our claim. I of course started doing what I usually do when I see a whole lot of chests filled with random crap, yes I go and organize the shit out of it,  before long I had dug out an area underneath the gazebo and laid out chests and signs to organize the resources as well as some workbenches and torches cause you need that stuff don’t you. We then started to set up farms and houses and I created a mushrooms farm (which sort of worked) and after being harangued by monsters we decided to make a fence and doors around the Gazebo.  We christened the town "Inquisition" I also suggested that our faction be named TCF (The Chosen Few)  we also even had a secret base going in the desert.

TCF storage room

Alchemy Room

Around this time Angrathar and Lupidoo briefly joined our faction as Joro and Norc were still working out the faction system they had to reset all claims and you could probably guess what happened after that featuring what I remember a raiding party consisting of Mr_Cyanide, Mr_Azurite and Peanut who successfully managed to claim over our entire base and storage area and raid the chests. Once we alerted Joro and Norc about this certain thing started happening, namely TNT started falling from the sky, then the server getting appropriately reset, Most of which I have included in the video below. Most of them ended up leaving anyway with us taken the opportunity to raid Cyanide's lair.

Yerp that's TNT

A video of the TNT raining chaos that ended the debacle plus a few strong words from NorC

Nuff' said

After all that was taken care of soon we had created a pretty neat looking storage room with a carpet/wood floor brick walls and wooden roof, which included an enchanting table with sticky piston powered bookshelves, furnace wall and an alchemy room. We constructed stone paths around the town area and I decided to start making my Jungle TreeHouse which was made out of jungle logs and leaves, I soon found that jungle trees were the fastest way of getting wood, as they are very tall, 4 blocks thick and are surrounded by vines which you can use to climb to the top. You can actually still see a bald patch in the nearby jungle where I went crazy with the shears. I had a lot of fun making the brown carpet for my room as I had to raid about 7 or 8 dungeons before I had enough cocoa beans to make enough brown dye. Of course this was before I was told that you could dye a living sheeps wool and then get them to breed so instead of going around raiding so many freakin dungeons I could have just dyed two sheep brown then got them to breed and they would have made a brown lamb and I could have just done that over and over again in our sheep pen, remind me to do that too when I run out of lapis lzuli.

Later image of Inquisition

Pretty soon we had the arrival of the infamous Jason1211 who we included in our faction being the friendly people we are, he then basically did a whole bunch of crap including somehow getting items from creative mode and moving them into Survival making a new claim within our claim and making this gigantic pillar shaped base in the sky to store his mass amount of goodies. Some time after this resulted in Norc warping us up to the complex and giving us superpowers so we could burn the items and demolish the whole thing making one hell of an interesting waterfall. And thus ended the terror of Jason, he basically said that everything he makes just gets destroyed and he’s leaving for good. In some ways I think we miss him as annoying sometimes as he was he was most often entertaining. I mean I don’t pvp myself but even Warpage, Kieran and Cyanide’s little skirmishes together had a certain charm to it as long as there’s no base defecation involved.

Jason's Tower exterior on the OZgamerparty real-time map

Me and Kakashi inside the tower

oops, must have been water underneath there

Here's a video of us riding the waterfall all the way down after we've destroyed pretty much all the tower. Music is: Ohio Players - Love Rollercoaster and Barrington Levi - Here I Come (yes it is a kind of odd selection)

Below are some photos and video of the event created by Joro, it was basically just us armed with whatever we were given fighting off hordes of spawned zombies and giants, not to mention all the monsters that had spawned there already, pretty soon we had bows and arrows and we’re taking on a group of Ghasts which got quite intense indeed. The finale was a battle with a spawned Nether Dragon who we noticed actually destroyed things where it flew as it demolished half the Jungle before we eventually killed it.

The dudes!

Giants!

Ghasts!

Enderdragon! (photo by Kieran_Cahill)

Here's a video of the encounter

Amongst the other things which got built were Warpage’s “Creeper Head” house complete with a sticky piston powered collapsing mouth entrance and also Lupidoo had built a house, which was full of traps as he was trap crazy for awhile, I couldn’t walk anywhere without running into (or onto) a working or not working supposed trap of his, I thought he was supposed to be a Panda who lived in the Jungle? Anyway he also made us a faction flag which I swear is already the flag for some country.

For TCF!

Me and Lupi experimenting with some Redstone work, song is 'Internet Friends' by Knife Party

In regards to what was happening around us, Mystic Duck’s town of DPRS was in fairly full form to the east of us in which we created a large underground railway to connect the two towns in which Lupidoo and I dug out the stairway and I made the station on the top but apart from that we were fairly oblivious to others around us apart from random people who pop out of our nether portal cause of some flaw with nether portals that pushes you out the nearest one in the overworld. Other things that happened included Keiran created a pretty huge office building which I decided I’ve be responsible for decorating two floors of, and I reckon it turned out pretty well, one floor was the reception, the other was a club I called “The Creeper Club” (yes I’ll admit I didn’t put too much thought into the name) I got most of my design from the Minecraft Furniture site and server which is a great resource in which I found designs for things including, couches, pool tables, a piano and of course the bar design.

The Democratic Republic of Sandwich

The Lobby

The 'Creeper Club'

The bottom two levels of the building

Round about this time Bioware had announced that there would be a free week of SWTOR available for returning players, and since I had cancelled my account for Minecraftin  purposes this was the ideal time to play. I came back a couple of times to find that not much had happened apart from Kieran making one freakin huge express railway which went all the way to our not so secret base in the desert (well one of the deserts) I had been away for a while but decided to come back at one point, and the whole faction base seemed fine, then the next night I come back in and everything Is royally f’ed up griefed looted and whatnot.

Inquisition after the reckoning, it's been pretty much cleaned out now though the larger buildings are still standing

Kieran's Minecraft Interstate (photo by Kieran_Cahill)

Now I’m beyond caring about this kind of stuff bit it is a bit of a shame, I don’t really know what I’d rather, for them too not touch anything at all except loot the chests or for them to grief everything we’ve made and leave our stuff. Well life goes on I suppose I’ve recently taken up with Lupidoo and his VIPA Theme park making faction which quite fun as they had a maze, an obstacle course and a rollercoaster going. But due to the arrival of the third installment of Diablo we’ve got other things on our minds now not to mention I just can't get away from SWTOR.

Lupidoo's VIPA Amusement Park

It’s a lot of fun to play and build with people but it is hard if for example you’re like me and don’t appreciate raiding and griefing, I’m just wondering why I bother making anything significant in multiplayer at all, sometimes I do think of going on Fusionblox again, as I’ve been back there numerous times in order to fix connection issues and have found that my tree mansion was pretty much intact and untouched for about a month before the survival map got reset in order to makes use of the new updated features. I’ve never really thought of us as a raiding/griefing server but I guess we are, it just strikes me as odd how claimed land can still get affected but I’m not going to get into all that.

I am thinking to myself of actually doing an experiment where I create a new singleplayer map and just play the game, and play it without mods like singleplayercommands and toomanyitems especially since Minecraft now has an ending (well sortof) . I probably felt this way the most after watching the gameplay for the XBOX360 Edition of Minecraft which I noticed features such as in game tutorials inc helpful windows that come up telling you about the particular item you have selected.

Minecraft Xbox Gameplay Review by BobLob

The PC version could really do with this too, as whenever I play multiplayer now it seems that some people are just pro at it and are either pooping out diamonds already or have built a giant redstone powered base that can give you any item you can  think of, I reckon it’s best when you start off with nothing, but of course you always get to the point where you have a good base and a stable food and resource income, so what next?

I will get round to doing that sooner or later, singleplayer in itself is a sanctuary for friendly builders and creators like me who just happen to like doing it in survival mode and I always like going back to basics. I’ll be on the Ozgamerparty server for the time being, though I’d hate to say it but Minecraft after all this time seems to have run it’s end for me, it’s this harrowing experience when you could do anything but end up just jumping around and exploring which is fun I guess but needs more meaning, and that’s always been the problem of Minecraft, the tutorials and information from the xbox version would help but I guess you just have to create your own fun in the end. But the Minecraft adventures don’t end there of course.

JD

I'd rather be lonely than live in fear

Hustlin' through the Old Republic: I arrive fashionably late

Well it’s here, it’s been here for a while now I just decided to obtain it when the timing was right, as I had enough things to do and play already if you hadn’t noticed the lack of posts in February and March I indeed have started playing Star Wars the Old Republic (SWTOR). In case you didn’t know it’s been out since December 23rd 2011 in the US but we down this part of the world had to wait till March 3 before it was officially released in AU but the part I’d been waiting for was the Australian based servers, yes you read that correctly and I’m going to say it up front, Star Wars the old Republic has Australian based servers, there’s currently only 3 of them but that’s better than most MMO who have “Oceanic” servers with the correct time zone but located in the US still. In this field Bioware has already stood out above the rest.

A Jedi Shadow on Belsavis

So as you’ve probably guessed it’s time for another post title: Yes, Hustlin’ through the Old Republic, it may sound cheesy but it’s the best I could come up with I was thinking of Fresh Prince of the Old Republic as I like to think of it as World of Warcraft being West Philadelphia but of course WoW wasn’t a bad place at all as I’m sure Will Smith would agree, and also my mother didn’t make me leave there in order to live with my rich cousins in SWTOR as the song goes. But hustlin’ has that kind of ring to it, the term “hustle” basically means to make money in any way possible, a lot of the time illegally and that’s what you’re doing in SWTOR, well mostly and as it only has one type or layer of currency your dealin’ with big money. I suppose this name would suit more if you were playing as a Smuggler or Bounty Hunter who happened to be doing the ‘underworld trading’ mission skill but as with all MMO’s currency is a very big part of the game especially since you have to pay people to train you for new abilities but anyway. As with my WoW related posts this topic will be my adventures through SWTOR and anything interesting that happens during the time, of course I’d have to remember to record it but I always have a few things to show, I will try to feature as much as I can any updates, announcements and special events that happen as well, though there are more than enough sites that do this already.

I was meandering over the fact that should I make this first post a review of SWTOR itself, but of course as Zero Punctuation had put it, it’s very hard to “review” an MMO even after a couple of weeks playing, So I decided that I would treat this first post on the new topic as an introduction to the game. I never did one for my WoW posts but if you’re reading this blog there’s quite a big chance you already know what WoW is, I did one for Minecraft thanks to Dave a bit after I had made my original posts and I suppose I did do a “teaser” post for SWTOR earlier on in 2011. But I’m happy for this to be just an introductory post but I will also give you the basic info which you don’t need to hear it from me, take it away Wikipedia:

 
The original "Deceived' trailer

Star Wars: The Old Republic, abbreviated as TOR or SWTOR, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game based in the Star Wars universe. Developed by BioWare Austin and a supplemental team at BioWare Edmonton, the game was first announced on October 21, 2008, at an invitation-only press event. The video game was released for the Microsoft Windows platform on December 20, 2011 in North America and part of Europe. Early access to the game began one week before release, on December 13, 2011, for those who had pre-ordered the game online; access opened in "waves" based on pre-order date.
Although BioWare has not disclosed development costs, industry leaders and financial analysts have estimated it to be between $150 million and $200 million. If accurate, this would make it the most expensive video game ever developed. The game had 1 million subscribers within three days of its launch, making it the world's 'Fastest-Growing MMO Ever', compared with rivals such as World of Warcraft. 
*taken from Wikipedia

I was recently looking for a printed strategy guide for the game but was unable to find one as yet apart from some crap “atlas” from Prima games that’s trying to be passed off as a strategy guide. Now of course you might be thinking who the hell would buy a printed strategy guide to an MMO when all the information you need is freely available online? Well I’ll tell you why, it’s because I like to read about a game I’m currently playing and reading about it makes me want to play it more, also reading a book is both easier and better on your eyes than staring at a screen the whole time, and also I like to read while eating and the guides have a wealth of information that can keep me entertained for weeks. I now have four different WoW Strategy guides, an original guide plus one for each expansion and reading them all and seeing how World of Warcraft has evolved is good fun to read and reminisce of how the game used to be and I look forward to doing this with The Old Republic.

It’s been a while coming since my original post on the subject, and I think SWTOR has lived up to my expectations and of course as you’d expect as a previous WoW player I did have a lot of expectations but I didn’t really want to, I didn’t want to view this game as just another WoW rival that will fail like some others in the past. But it didn’t, it hasn’t it has cost Bioware an incredulous amount of money and resources but it’s held firm as far as I can see. I went into SWTOR with a lighthearted attitude intending to have some fun and play the game the way the designers intended and not try to change things around so much because of the quintessential fact that it would be “more like WoW so it’s better” I’m trying my hardest to keep away from this but with the release of the newest major patch which includes the simple, functional and very useful user Interface editor it was one hell of an effort not to try and re-arrange everything wow-style. But to be honest the whole experience has been rather good and possibly getting better as I go further into it.

A good explanation of the SWTOR gameplay mechanics in a group flashpoint (dungeon/instance)

Before I purchased the game I had decided long ago that I wanted to be on the Republic side and I wanted to be a Jedi Knight. The reasons for this were that at the start I guess I just wanted to be the good guys, I played Horde most of the time which I were (almost) convinced that the Horde had more morality and was more of an Alliance than the Alliance itself but this is open to  debate amongst WoW lore junkies everywhere. But with the Galactic Republic I never necessarily saw them as evil, though if I could nerd out for a bit and imagine myself there to be honest I would be kind of hesitant to pick the way of the Jedi. I knew that since there was technically only 4 main classes and two of them were Jedi/Sith that it was going to be lightsabre mania right from the start and that I probably should pick another class, but I knew couldn’t the “lure of the lightsabre” as I like to call it was too much.  My brother who plays as a smuggler and was always going to play as a smuggler did say to me in a  conversation some quite obvious traits with players that were:

• Not many Smugglers or Troopers around at all i.e. not many non-Jedi, but of course an MMO with only 4 main classes per side two of them being force-swinging lightsabre wielders and the other two being supposedly boring ol Shooty Mcgunguns (with the possible exception of the Bounty Hunter which is probably the most popular non Jedi/Sith class) you could probably guess that was going to happen. But anyway, that’s that I guess, at least the two separate Jedi/Sith classes on each side can heal/tank respectively. 

• The majority of players were human and sure enough I looked around and they were, and I was, of course I could come up with a few of reasons for this. One being that when you select a character you select the race then you get the option of selecting the bodytype, and the reason you are able to do this is because the only difference between the different races is their heads, everything else is pretty much humanlike unlike WoW in which each races body is significantly different. The second reason is that humans are usually the base to get chosen as that’s what we are and can identify with, the majority of major Jedi characters in the Star Wars movie series were human as well. The last reason is that in SWTOR your initial surroundings and main storyline are governed by your class not your race, so class in all respects is the biggest decision whereas races in WoW determine what your character looks like and how they will move/talk/dance/etc, their starting area and home city and also what mounts you will be able to (easily) acquire.

Republic side character select screen

 Most of this is true but it’s not exactly a dire blemish on the game, every main class has an advanced class that specializes in either healing or tanking so a whole group full of Jedi can do an flashpoint (aka instance or dungeon for all you WoW people out there) without any trouble as long as they have the appropriately capable advanced classes. Frankly though I do miss the way WoW handles the races, It’s one of the main reasons I really enjoyed creating a new character. For example as an Undead (or Forsaken) character, you woke up in a  tomb and your starting area was the dreary and gloomy but somewhat hauntingly beautiful Tirisfal Glades where you can get your Skeletal Warhorse with whole area being of undead-style as well as your home city which was the massive Underhalls of a ruined human city. Now you don’t quite get any of this for races in SWTOR the only relative difference is their social abilities and non-body shape related looks, you don’t get a unique starting area for your race, this is done through classes as I mentioned before but I suppose this really doesn’t bother me as the class starting areas are involved and exciting enough though having no home city apart from a allegiance wide space station. In regards to the vehicles available I’m fairly unimpressed, I would rather a certain build of each vehicle be assigned to each major class for example Jedi Consulars would have the Rendill line of speeders, I enjoyed the variety and character of the mounts in WoW, the SWTOR mechanical mounts, are fun to skim along with, one way which you (usually) wouldn’t be able to travel like in WoW but they don’t come very close to the fun and companionship (even the mechanical ones) of the WoW mounts.

Vehicles, fun but still just machines

When I started my character I suppose the hardest thing I had to work out was what to name myself as I said in my WoW posts I discovered the name “hbui” from mashing the keyboard which was a surprisingly more suitable for an mmo then my usual FPS “JDman”, so when I had to come up with a name that I was going to use for SWTOR it was kind of a weird experience deciding how to choose but eventually I just decided to use the same parameters as before, 4 letters, grammatically incorrect and no special characters. So my first character would be named: “Jxan” nothing special I know but MMO names aren’t supposed to be, I actually realised now that I could have made a second name but meh, it’s less to type in as was my argument before spaces in names.

Jedi Knightin' it up

As a Jedi it’s pretty basic, use the right abilities at the right time, manage your attacking enemies, choose the right companion for the job. Things get a bit more complicated when it comes to classes in the game. The Republic side has 4 main classes that being Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular, Smuggler and Trooper, with each having its own advanced class which basically slightly change your style of play, for example my Jedi Knight is a Guardian, so he uses only one Lightsabre, further to that the advanced classes have 3 different skill trees for the Jedi Guardian there is defense, vigilance and focus which are basically the tank tree, the damage over time dps tree and the pvp style burst damage dps tree that is shared over both the Jedi Knight advanced classes. Now this is all well and good but my main problem (and probably a lot of other people’s problem) is that there is currently no dual-spec option so my dilemma is that I want to be able to tank in instances, so I am tank specced, but most of the time I’m not tanking just dpsing and the times I am able to tank for instances usually someone picks up the role anyway, I’ve also been mulling over if I should be keeping a separate set of gear for DPS as because I’m supposed to be a tank I’ve favoured endurance (which increases health, similar to stamina) over strength with most of my gear but then again whenever I did that in WoW I always had to keep checking whether the dps gear I was getting was better than my tank gear, but I spose the stats are a little bit different and it’s vice-versa in this case. I must make a point here to mention the Datacrons which add a marvellous element of treasure hunting and platforming which is pretty much unheard of in an MMO and I’ve had lots of fun laughing at less agile players falling to their doom.

My current Jedi Knight Skill Tree many say the skill tree system should be scrapped in favour of Blizzard's new system

The next points I need to make is that of your companions yes you now have these npc characters that follow you around and help you, and you don’t just have one, by the time you reach level 50 you will have a whole posse of different characters well that’s if you could have them all out at the same time which of course you can’t. Your companions serve a lot of uses, they can tank, heal or do damage in battle, they make comments about random things and can serve as a love interest for your character and they can also perform Crew Skills. Which as you would have probably guessed are similar to the crafting skills in WoW, main difference being that you yourself do not make the stuff and you do not gather the stuff either (well most of the time) it’s your companions that do this. So there is the usual gathering skills where you collecting crystal or hacking systems for valuable data and crafting skills where your making new Jedi colour crystals or droid parts  but there is also a mission skill, where for example you send your companion away for a set period of time to go pick up some illegal goods or do some diplomatic shizz yo in which they come back with rare items for use with your crafting skills. The thing that gets me though is that crafting things take much longer than it does in WoW and I’ve found that kind of hard to get used to, as my usual way of things is to go ok I need 3 of these, then wait up to a minute while I make them, in SWTOR each thing takes about 2 minutes minimum, with semi-rare items taking about 8, I’ve just had to keep remembering to get my companions making them while I’m running around doin other stuff, the mission skills are easy enough as they take thing longest (up to 15 minutes!) but all you need to do is use a non-active companion to do the work. When you request your companions to go on these missions or make these items they simply just disappear, apparently either back to the ship to get crafting or wherever else their going.

Kira Carsen, a Jedi Knight Companion

Bowdaar, a smuggler companion

 One of the biggest differences between WoW and SWTOR is the storytelling inside the game, in SWTOR your have you own classes main storyline which basically leads you from planet to planet each with its own storyline and mini storyline inside it and coupled with the fully voiced players and NPCs and authentic Star Wars sounds and music it’s a very immersive experience, much more then some MMO's which have little or no specific storyline for your character. we all know the whole Bioware conversation mechanic that you’ve seen in the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series as well as many others. Where if someone asks you a question then you have 2 or more answers or actions depending on what they have said and you have the option to pick the polite, controversial or downright offensive reply. SWTOR’s spin on this is sometimes your actions can have Light or Dark side consequences so you could probably guess what that would be: “kill the slaver and free the people” or “accept bribe from the slaver and commit the people to their doom” they aren’t always about money of course though being a Jedi I really couldn’t do anything bad like the good natured sap that I am.

You make many dark or light side decisions with a few consequences

The bottom line though isn’t about the morality of you or your character, there are many items in the game that you need a certain amount of light/dark side points to be able to use it, so as Zero Punctuation mentioned you may as well just pick your allegiance from the start as to get some of the best items at the end of the game you need to have selected the light side option most of the time. The only other difference I can think of is that is you select dark side all the time it visibly shows on your character as I saw with a level 50 Jedi who looked very evil indeed. One thing I really do want to try is play as a Sith and pick all the Light side options, which I really want to see how it works because aren’t Sith supposed to be evil? Well I suppose Jedi are supposed to be good.

Dark side corruption changes

 Not too long into your main characters storyline you receive your very own Starship which serves as a mini home base for you and your crew. It’s basically how you get from planet to planet and also how you access your space combat missions, but to be honest there’s not really much else you do there, just mission briefing and access to your Cargo Hold, you’ll probably spend a lot more time on the main Republic or Imperial space stations which sit near their respective fleets and basically act as the home cities for each allegiance. Apart from getting from planet to planet the space combat missions are probably the main thing you will be using your ship for and I must admit they are good fun I was always wondering how Bioware could pull off space battles in an MMO. Basically it’s like an arcade game, when you start, your ship is at the bottom of your screen and you can move it around quite quickly with the mouse in order to dodge incoming fire and you aim your lasers and missiles using the mouse as well. There’s a few different kinds of missions  including destroying an enemy battlestation, destroying an enemy ship or series of fighters or protecting an allied ship which is possibly the hardest as the upgrades to your own ship make little difference when you’re not the one being shot at. I could possibly argue with my brother forever on this but I can’t help not feeling that this was put in just because it was a Starwars game and it had to have space battles so this is what they chucked in. I suppose it wouldn’t been a semi-large hole in the game  without it and the arcadiness suits because we don’t want to bother ourselves with X-Wing vs Tie Fighter levels of complicatedness in an MMO.

Space Combat, you have to see it to believe it (or understand it)

The graphics in SWTOR are what you’d expect them to be, for an MMO cannot have the fancy graphics of other games for the reasons enclosed in that conversation of course, I never expected the graphics to be anything more than acceptable, there is a bit of popup in the scenery though, especially around the foresty worlds such as Taris or Alderaan, I’ve recently travelled to the desert planet of Tatooine which is very good looking for a desert. What sometimes takes me by surprise is the size of some of the rooms/caves/buildings in the game, whether it’s huge storehouses giant caves or just massive ships or space stations the sheer size of some places is sure grand to look at. One very interesting feature with the characters models is that you have the option of “Unifying the Colours” of your gear so for example remember all those times in WoW where your armor looked kind of like this well Blizzard had their own way of fixing that and so do Bioware. The armor and robes that you get in SWTOR aren’t quite bulky or outstanding as of those in WoW, this allows the unify colours button to basically turn every other piece of gear that you have to blend in with the base colours of your chestpiece, which makes you look pretty cool and is a great feature.

Smuggler Sharpshooter on Alderaan

Overall my experience with SWTOR has been a good one, I’ve played my first character to level 30, I’ve joined a guild, I’ve learned a lot about the game so far and am mostly happy with the experience, there’s so much more class and spec combinations that I want to try  for example Jedi Consular Sage with Telekinetic spec I’d also really like to try the Sith side an be and be a “Good Sith” who always takes the light side option. Whether or not I go back to WoW at some point though remains to be seen, though before I was switching between WoW and Minecraft, now I’m switching between the three of them, and trying to watch the whole 3 Kingdoms TV series as well, sigh I spose I’ll always have too much to do or play.

My current interface setup with Tatooine in the backdrop

 Stay tuned for more SWTOR posts as they come, I can assure you I’ll be playing for a while yet.

JD

Facing the council for "misuse of the force"

Minecraft Creations: The Tree Mansion in the Green Hill Sanctuary and The Jungle Tree House‏

Yes, yes I concede I'm treehouse crazy no wonder the infamous Jason1211 called me a "tree hugging hippy" These two creations were done on two different servers, well one mostly in singleplayer, the Green Hill Sanctuary on FusionBlox and the Jungle Treehouse on the new Ozgamerparty Minecraft Server

Green Hill Sanctuary and Tree Mansion

Ahh a sanctuary, I’m becoming increasingly fond of creating sanctuaries for myself in Minecraft, whether it be on a cloud made of wool in the sky or a house dug into the ground I sometimes feel the need to shield myself off from monsters and sometimes even other players unless I’m in a town community as I am currently. However the setting for this creation was rather a lonesome one as I had mentioned in my previous post I had come from a brief stay in the Mikeland Factions server I had returned to Fusionblox and was still having a lot of trouble finding a group of people to build with, it did seem a friendly server but very group-oriented so much so that I couldn’t even find the group of new guys to play with, also I have to mention that there were a few restrictions on this server so unless you paid a fee you couldn’t get access to certain features such as teleporting and chest protection. So I was wandering alone by myself and finally decided to just go back to what I had done in the beginning and build one my own, while watching the conversations go past and listening to Skype and thus began to build my ingenious creation.

From the Front

From the back

The bottom entrance to the Sanctuary

Stairs up to the main Sanctuary area from the entrance

An early shot of when I was setting out the base

I had been wandering through a forest when I came across a small raised hill, which gave me a good idea for a wall, but a very environmental wall, well as environmental as chopping down trees then making them into wooden plants then building a wall, can be so I built the wall about 5 or 6 blocks high around the entire hill, this was basically just to keep out the monsters as I decided to create an entrance at the front and dig out an entryway with some steps to the top of the hill which was covered in trees. I called it my “Green Hill Sanctuary” sanctuary from monsters that is (well technically spiders could climb the walls) you can’t get sanctuary from other players not matter how hard you try, unless you’re an admin but of course if you’re an admin you already have to deal with moaning players on a daily basis.

Main House Entrance

The raised foyer entrance area with boxed plants

The Main Foyer area

I then started work on what would be humble abode, and you guessed it, it would be a treehouse. This treehouse was actually a variation on my first major treehouse that was created back in March/April 2011, I basically used the same design structure I had used in the past which is basically making large square (or rectangle) wooden platforms on top of the surrounding trees, then joining them together using stairs and more wooden planks. This time I decided to focus on more interior than exterior and made the rooms quite large, of course I had to factor in rooms for both Enchanting and Alchemy, so this made the whole structure a bit bigger (though the library can double as an enchantment room). I made roof access and fences around but it was really just for convenience as most of the features were inside the house.

My throne or viewing/reading room

The Library and Enchanting Table

The Alchemy Room, yes it's quite big I know

The Pool room with what's supposed to be a fish tank

In the past I was finding it hard to fill some of my larger houses or creations especially with so many floors or open spaces. I used quite a few inspirations from a website I found that detailed various ingenious and well designed Minecraft Furniture, most of the designs you see here come from what I've seen both on the website and on their server, even though things like a Minecraft gym or pinball machine might seem bizarre I urge everyone to take a look if they are ever stuck on how to properly furnish a house or building.

The entertainment room big-screen TV and couch

The Pinball, Popcorn and Fairy Floss Machines (The creator of the texture pack I use must have been kind of religious)

The master bedroom

As I mentioned previously I had to get a mod to do some pretty tricky things for me to get this into a singleplayer map for me to be able to work on but of course in doing this he had to take the rather large chunk of land and dump it into another so the whole hill didn’t exactly match up, I decided to just fill in the gaps with dirt and make a staircase up to the entrance from the lower ground, this didn’t exactly work as I’d hoped, and the funny thing was a short time after it had been completely finished I went into the FusionBlox server and found that the survival map hadn’t even been wiped for the new patch yet but ahh if I hadn’t of had it moved I would have lost it and had to rebuild in singleplayer anyway. I think that it came out pretty well I had a rooms for just about everything and I also made a small farm inside the sanctuary I named it the Tree mansion though it really wasn’t that big, tree house wise it was quite a mansion indeed.

This is a walkthrough I made of the whole Sanctuary, sorry it's not the best quality it's the first time I've tried soemthing like this before.


Jungle Treehouse

After the whole debacle with making the huge tree mansion in multiplayer. I decided that my first house on the Ozgamerparty Minecraft Server was going to be simple but still effective and worthy of my talents (insert ego-related remark here) though I have long since realised that it's not easy to change nature to your own designs (unless of course you are these people) I have tried time and time again to make a good looking tree house, but due to spacing requirements you just end up with a big fat trunk and one hell of a job if you're going to make it look like the rest of the trees in Minecraft.

Front view

View from the top, there is a trapdoor at the very top leading to the leafy roof

The bottom level

So I decided to just build a reasonably small trunk nothing too big with a sort of leafy roof, I used all logs and wood from jungle biomes and planted ferns around to keep the jungle theme.I also made one hell of an effort to get enough cocoa beans to carpet my bedroom in brown wool, all I can say is that it took a lot of dungeon searching and infiltration. The whole thing has 3 levels and a balcony on two and also an underground basement, nothing too fancy just simple and functional.

The basement with underwater pond

My Bedroom in the middle level with brown wool floor

The top level with enchanting table, brewing stand and cauldren, I glassed up the roof to avoid falling leaves.

Thats it for now, stay tuned for the full report on the new Ozgamerparty server and the Tribalfieldies return.


What I really want is a house-tree