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review: tv season premieres

Sep 26th, 2010 by

it is fall and that means the season premieres of various tv series are upon us. with several tv shows (such as 24, Heroes, Lost) coming to an end earlier this year it was the logical choice to look for new, promising series to watch. i have decided to give the brand new shows “The Event” and “Undercovers” a go in addition to season 7 of “House” and season 3 of “Fringe”. but let’s start chronologically…

monday kicked off with “House” which started exactly where season 6 ended… with Cuddy and House about to land in bed. the medical mystery or the patient of the week could be classed as sidelines (or even nonexistent) because the entire episode more or less focused on the Cuddy/House relationship, them taking a day off and having sex. the most entertaining part was doubtless the “patient” of the week, the only neurosurgeon on the premises of princeton-plainsborough who apparently suffered from a case of food poisoning after attending a seafood festival and eating toads eggs. the team of house was tasked to “cure” the sick surgeon as soon as possible otherwise the ICU and ER of the hospital would have to be shut down since there has to be a capable neurosurgeon present at all times. after drugging that poor surgeon with various weird drug cocktails he was totally stoned and couldn’t resist to take his clothes off… hilarity ensued. but apart from that not an overly exciting episode which clearly served to set the theme for the season to come: House and Cuddy having a relationship and how that will affect their work.

monday was also the premiere of “The Event“, a brand new tv series about, well, “the event”. my decision to give it a go was solely based on the “logo” of the show and the fact that Laura Innes (Kerry Weaver from ER!) appeared on the cast list. i don’t want to write too much about it because that would spoil your enjoyment… however, it can be best described as a mixture of “24″ meets “Lost” meets “Fringe”. be warned tho, the first 15 to 20 minutes can be utterly confusing but bear with it and i am sure you won’t be disappointed. it eventually leads up to what i assume is “The Event” and that can only be described as a proper “WTF” moment. by the end of the first episode you are left with a lot of questions that according to the masterminds behind the show should be partially answered as soon as next week. it definitely managed to get me hooked and looking forward to the next episode.

on wednesday there was the premiere of “Undercovers“, the new show of J.J. Abrams (Alias, Lost, Fringe). the name is quite telling, it’s about a married couple of former agents that gets called it whenever the CIA has a difficult or too sensitive case on their hands. it’s very much a spy series and reminded me a lot of Alias but i found it funny and entertaining. it is not as riveting or engaging as “The Event” and i don’t think that is even the intention but it’s solid entertainment for sure.

last but not least the premiere of season 3 of “Fringe” was aired on thursday. season 2 ended with a cliffhanger and a lot of  unanswered questions so i was quite eager to see how the story will develop. again, i cannot write too much about it but the episode mainly focused on Olivia (which was also the name of the episode) and it set the theme for the season to come. again, i am curious and eager to find out how they will resolve the current issue regarding Olivia.

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realID and the virtual world

Jul 2nd, 2010 by

the latest patch of World of Warcraft introduced “RealID”: a feature that enables communication across servers (and potentially across games) within battle.net. it’s a nifty addition for sure since i do have a few real life friends that still play on different servers. WoW is at times a fancy chat (curse those raid down times!) and i was quite pleased to be able to talk to them directly in-game now without having to tab-out and use AIM/ICQ/MSN.

“RealID” is what the name suggests: it displays your real life name to friends once you have accepted their request to be a RealID friend. well, i have no issues with that. people that are my real life friends naturally know my real name and vice versa. however, there is a little twist to RealID: a little feature called “friends of friends” quite similar to Facebook with the most notable difference that Facebook offers several layers of privacy options (ok that is up for debate but still) and you can always just use a nickname or fake name on Facebook. RealID uses naturally the name of the WoW account which usually is the name on your credit card and hence you cannot really change it or billing will be messed up.

as mentioned i have no problem with real life mates knowing my name in a virtual world but i am worried by the fact that my real name is visible to friends of my friends who i may not know at all. the most popular argument in this debate is “oh come on, it’s just your name and not your address or any other personal details”. well, it might be just my name but a simple google search using my real name does come up with things about me (professional things mind you) that i do not want people i play a game with to know. i strongly believe in keeping the professional life and the personal life separated and RealID threatens to break down that separation.

one great aspect of the virtual world is that you can be whoever you want to be, you can create a virtual self that can have as much or little in common with your real self as you want it to. mind you, virtual worlds like WoW are a fantasy after all. it’s not like i have something to hide from my virtual friends but it kinda defies the purpose of a virtual life as outlined by Sherry Turkle in her book “Life on the screen: identity in the age of the Internet“: virtual worlds offer us the chance to have multiple identities and experiment with them as we form in true postmodern tradition something that can be called “patchwork identity”. i am a female tauren deathknight in WoW and a media scientist in real life and i want to keep it that way.

i strongly hope that Blizzard will add some privacy options to RealID in the future that either offer you to display a nickname or deactivates the “friends of friends” feature. i like RealID but as it is right now it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable.

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chernobyl and me

Jun 24th, 2010 by

what is about to follow is a very personal blog entry. today is the 18th anniversary of the death of my father. he died from colon cancer aged 42 back in 1992. i don’t know why i feel compelled to write about this though… it’s something that has been on the back of my head for years: the question why? why my father? why so young? i don’t want to exaggerate but the experience of losing my father when i was 13 years old shaped me. it seems like ages ago but it’s still present some days like today.

so what does that have to do with chernobyl you may ask? let me explain! those that know me better are well familiar with my interest in everything nuclear; in fact at one stage during school i wanted to study quantum physics and work at a research nuclear reactor. nuclear reactors hold a certain fascination… i can’t exactly pinpoint it, but it’s partly due to the fact you can’t see, hear, smell, taste or feel radiation and yet it can kill you. running a nuclear power plant is like playing with fire: if you aren’t careful enough you can get burned… or burn the whole plant down. and that what happened on april 26, 1986 in the reactor block 4 of the chernobyl nuclear power plant.

what followed is well known (at least i assume) and the impact of the meltdown was underscored by cold war politics and the way communism worked. (in fact, one could easily point out the communist system as one of the culprits that eventually led to the meltdown but that would be too easy. shift changes and less experienced night shift workers were/are also common in western countries.) so reactor block 4 blew up and nobody actually knew the extend of the incident or how to deal with it properly. brave firemen rushed to the site to deal with the fire but eventually that made things worse and the top of the reactor blew off and spew a crazy amount of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere. naturally, communist russia didn’t tell anyone in the west about the incident: mind you, cold war times didn’t promote open communication between the east and west at all. only when workers at a swedish nuclear power plant picked up unusual high radiation readings things started to surface… and the nuclear fallout cloud was well on its way to central and western europe.

i do remember quite clearly the day when it was made public in austria: authorities urged everyone to stay inside and discard home grown vegetables and fruits. in school we weren’t allowed to go play outside in the playground in the breaks. but my father, being the man he was, ignored all of that. by the time the fallout cloud reached austria it was raining heavily and hence all the radioactive isotopes came nicely down with the raid. and my father was out in the field all day long, right out there in the radioactive rain… you can’t see or smell radiation so he didn’t believe that it could do any harm to him. he even insisted on eating the home grown salad from our garden, just to prove nothing could happen to him.

well, he clearly was wrong. in november 1991 he was diagnosed with colon cancer… he underwent surgery and one round of chemo but he lost the fight to cancer on june 24, 1992. of course i can’t say with absolute certainty that chernobyl is to blame for him getting cancer. “official” reports say that the overall effect on the health of people in central/western europe is negligible and the fallout cloud did not cause an increase of cancer. anyway, austria got hit by the fallout pretty hard and there is still a lot of cesium 137 in the ground. in fact authorities still issue warnings not to eat large amounts of wild mushrooms.

this all led to me being quite interested in radiation, nuclear fission and the chernobyl accident in general. the internet is a wonderful source for information in this regard… since a year or so you can book guided day trips to the “exclusion zone” (30 km around the power plant) and see the places of the worst man made industrial accident yourself. some people who went there post awesome pictures and reports. it’s both awesome and creepy at the same time. i often say i would like to go on a day trip to the chernobyl nuclear power plant… time stands still there, everything is like it was at the end of april 1986 with all the cold war atmosphere to it. considering the remaining reactor blocks were only shut down back in 2000… it cannot be so dangerous. yet it still has a dangerous aspect to it… step off the road into the vegetation and you are greeted with a hefty dose of radiation… the fascination remains…

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WoW and the Dungeon Finder

Feb 15th, 2010 by

i have a confession to make: i am fascinated by the WoW Dungeon Finder. it is basically a crossover between a “Looking for Group” tool and the cross-realm PvP battlegrounds. that means from any place in WoW you can queue up for five man (PvE) instances and within a short period of time a group will be assembled (from your cross-server battlegroup) and ported to the instance. no more lfg spamming, no more waiting around to get a group going and no more frustration if someone has to leave in the middle of the instance!? oh wait, i’m not so sure on the last point.

so the basic promise of the Dungeon Finder is to provide easy and fast access to five man group content. each instance party needs one tank, one healer and three dps and if you queue up you get to select the role(s) you want to take over. for dps classes the average wait time until a group is found is around 20 minutes, whereas tanks (and possibly healers) get a group significantly faster (apparently the wait time for tanks at lvl 80 is 3 seconds!). if some member of your instance party drops out, you can tell the Dungeon Finder to look for a replacement. which works well if your healer or a dps bails, but if your tank legs it, you are most likely screwed.

i love the underlying functionality of the Dungeon Finder to be able to access five man instances from everywhere in the game world. porting you directly to the instance and using the cross-realm battlegroups as “pools” for player recruitment it does enable indeed easy and fast access to small group content. however, the social side of doing instances gets a bit lost. you don’t know which people you end up doing an instance with which can be both a blessing (if they suck) or a curse (if they are awesome). either way, if those players aren’t from your server the chances that you will ever meet them again are slim. so what i would love to see included in the Dungeon Finder is being able to add people from your cross-realm battlegroup to your friendlist so you can invite them to a party and queue up with them for instances if you enjoyed playing with them.

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Review: Fringe 2×15 – Jacksonville

Feb 6th, 2010 by

so last week i was complaining about the lack of Massive Dynamic and the absence of Nina Sharp in recent Fringe episodes… et voila! this week we get the full package of the most exciting stuff: Nina Sharp is back, so is Massive Dynamic, Cortexiphan plays an important role… and yes of course William Bell and the alternate universe. guess they did hold back and broke out the big guns for the winter season finale and February sweeps.

anyway, it wasn’t overly clear to me why “they” (the people of the alternate universe) did send an entire building to “our” universe. Walter and William Bell did the same thing with a car 25 years ago and i assume that was a test to see if it is possible to pass objects through the “gateway” between the two universes… well, from what we have learned so far it is very well possible (i guess the car was just an ethical test subject) since we know Peter (the current version of him) is from the alternate universe and Olivia herself paid a visit to Mr Bell in the alternate universe and returned.

it does make sense though that if you send an object/person/whatever to the other universe, something of “equal mass” will return since both universes are in balance. i assume there is a certain time frame until balance will restored (the car of the original experiment returned within 35 hours) and that explains why Olivia could briefly visit Mr Bell in the alternate universe. my assumption would be that the corpse of “our” Peter is buried in the alternate universe to maintain equilibrium.

i love it when Walter concocts weird drug cocktails but i was surprised to see Cortexiphan being administered intravenously. guess that speeds up or amplifies the effects of the drug. and i knew the moment when Walter mentioned that Olivia will be able to identify objects from the alternate universe by seeing them having a “glow” that Peter will glow sooner or later. however, the hotel from our world that was eventually pulled into the other universe shouldn’t have had a glow unless Cortexiphan made Olivia detect anything related to the alternate universe…

all in all a very enjoyable episode that did answer some questions and created even more questions. if there is a war coming between the two universes, why don’t “they” just send an invasion force over? why swap two buildings? to test the procedure of crossing universes further? granted, the special effects with the man who survived the first swap and ended up with two heads, four arms and four legs was kind of impressive but still… it was never really answered why?

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Review: Fringe 2×14 – The Bishop Revival

Feb 1st, 2010 by

i’ve been watching Fringe with great pleasure so far and i really enjoyed most of the episodes but the latest episode called “The Bishop Revival” made me feel uneasy because of the underlying “Nazi” theme to it. i am Austrian and Nazism is a touchy subject for me for obvious reasons but what most non-Austrians or non-Germans do not know is how we are made feel guilty about everything related to that dark chapter in our history. i strongly believe that it is important to learn about what happened in Nazi-Germany and the holocaust and its absolutely right that you are taught about it in history lessons in school. however, the way it is taught makes you feel guilty and uneasy about the whole deal. you know that it was just wrong what Hitler and the Nazis did and yet you also know that your grandfather was drafted into the German army and fought for Hitler because he didn’t have a choice. so in short it is a delicate subject.

what happened in the latest Fringe episode then? well, some 100 year old Nazi scientist (bear with me, this is Fringe and sci fi after all) shows up at a Jewish wedding. one elderly woman (who is a holocaust survivor as it turns out later) gets agitated when she sees the Nazi and appears to know him from somewhere. a few moments later half of the wedding guests choke to death. the Fringe team is called in and they find out that the Nazi used a scented candle to disperse a poison gas that killed every jewish person at the wedding.

as the episode progresses it is revealed that this Nazi scientist was involved with gruesome experiments (that apparently stopped him from aging) and is using a poison that can be tailored to kill very specific people like for example people with brown eyes or dark hair or whatever. so when the Nazi sees Walter Bishop at another crime scene he recognizes him mysteriously. it turns out that Walter’s father used to work undercover with those Nazi scientists and did smuggle research results out of Germany. in the end Walter concocts a poison specifically tailored to kill the Nazi before he can release the poison gas at a “tolerance conference”.

the underlying subplot with former Nazi scientists migrating to the US is hardly new; it was used in several X-Files episodes as well and it really did not bother me. what bothered me tho was that the Nazi used a Jewish wedding as a science experiment to test his poison gas. i found this quite tasteless and it made me feel really uneasy. yes it is television and sci fi and it wouldn’t work in real life because there is no DNA string or whatever that denotes that you are Jewish but still… it just was not right.

also, the “artist” who bought the German books that Walter’s father used to smuggle the research out of Germany… his obsession with swastikas and Hitler images was unsettling. considering that the public display of a swastika (unless its for educational purposes) is a crime here it it wouldn’t surprise me if that episode got censored for German/Austrian television.

i wish Fringe would start using Massive Dynamic as the “evil entity” again, i really miss Nina Sharp. or more “Observer” involvement and more “Pattern” related events please!

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is LotRO too casual?

Jan 24th, 2010 by

ever since the first expansion – Mines of Moria (MoM) – in November 2008 lotro seems to release new content updates/patches too slowly. i am by no means a hardcore player but if you play lotro almost every night (as i do) you get through new content pretty fast and then what? that’s the big question.

lotro’s second “expansion” – Siege of Mirkwood (SoM) – came out on December 3, 2009 and now at the end of January 2010 i have two characters at level cap (level 65) that are raid ready (enough radiance armor for the new raid instance Barad Guldur) and a third alt at level 63. my main character did all quests in the new area of Mirkwood, leveled several new legendary items to level 70, maxed the skirmish soldier and farmed the 3 and 6 man instances ad nauseam. additionally, my kin Hope and Glory completed Barad Guldur, the new 12 man raid instance in normal mode one week ago. granted there is still hard mode to crack but everyone seems worn out and you can clearly notice a general raid-fatigue.

there is no word from Turbine yet on when the next content update will be released or what it will contain. i remember vaguely that they mentioned some announcement to be made in mid February 2010 and if this is actually true i would not expect to see the next content patch going live before mid March. what is one supposed to do until then? level more alts to level cap? grind skirmishes? farm Barad Guldur? there is no easy answer to that. an expansion that raises the level cap by five levels, introduces one new area (Mirkwood),  no new skills, virtues or traits, three 3 man and one 6 man instance and one raid instance that contains three bosses… seems a bit thin content wise, doesn’t it?

i really like lotro, it is a great game, no doubt about it and the dx10 graphics are just awesome. the lore, the storyline, questing and instance design is well done and it really developed into a polished, enjoyable mmo over the past 2.5 years. content updates came pretty fast in vanilla lotro: about every two month something was added and come to think of it, the free content patches that introduced Evendim or Forochel were as elaborate as the paid “content patch” that brought us Mirkwood.

my theory is that selling lifetime-subscriptions wasn’t such a good idea and now Turbine lacks the funds to keep developing free content updates in an acceptable time frame. during the lifespan of Mines of Moria (and that’s roughly 12 months) we saw two major content updates and a few smaller ones. the major updates included Lothlorien and the raid instance DN (with six bosses) whereas the small ones introduced minor things like new crafting recipes or the disappointing lair boss known as the Turtle/Toitle.

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Jack Bauer is back

Jan 23rd, 2010 by

yep, that’s right, it’s day 8 for jack bauer and he is back on the job despite stating in the very first hour of day 8 that he is retired and doesn’t work for the government anymore.  well, guess he changed his mind and he just can’t say no when there is some terrorist threat looming on the horizon. i was a bit surprised by jack’s miraculous cure (if i recall correctly it didn’t look good by the end of day 7 at all) and i hope this will be elaborated at some point during day 8.

so here we are, jack bauer chasing terrorists, setting up perimeters, yelling for medics, pointing the gun and yelling “do it NOW”. all the things we came to love and associate with our favorite counter-terrorist “agent” (or whatever he is these days). i don’t want to tell any details about the plot so far, but it is your typical 24 fare mixed together… you know, assassination attempts, nuclear devices, bio weapons, moles… all the fun things that make jacks day so exciting! i am eagerly awaiting the next episodes for sure.

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Aion and the grind

Jan 22nd, 2010 by

well, it has been a while since i last posted here and aion is long filed under the “tried, was disappointed, didn’t subscribe” tag. yet another hyped, newly released mmorpg that failed to deliver what it promised. my open beta impressions where mostly positive and to be frank the first 20 to 25 levels are fairly enjoyable. id even dare to say that if the gameplay quality in terms of storytelling and character development from level 1 to 10 would last until you reach the level cap, i would be a good game. but alas, it does not. it turns into a huge korean-style grind fest past level 25 with free for all zergplay PvP. so why did things go awry?

  • the epic grind: i can live with seven digit numbers required to level up if the “grind” is masked by doing quests that require you to kill x or bring y or deliver z to some NPC. questing is something i consider essential to any RPG and it should give you sufficient amounts of xp. lotro does it right: there are more than enough quests to go around and you will easily hit the level cap by doing quests only. aion however has a minimal amount of quests (around 5 quests per level) that in turn give you around 5% of the total xp required to level up. so to fill that 95% of your xp you need to grind: kill the same mobs over and over again for hours on end. not my idea of having a good time in an mmo.
  • the free for all zergplay PvP: for a game that claims to focus on PvP you expect epic battles and that skill > numbers of players. well, another disappointment here. skill doesnt matter, the side that brings the higher levels/more numbers win. at lvl 25 you enter the abyss, the huge free for all PvP area and there is little protection for lvl 25 characters: they will get ganked/zerged/killed repeatedly by bored higher level characters. at least in WoW you had a chance to move to another area if you got ganked and corpsecamped somewhere.
  • the ridiculous harsh death penalty: if you die, you have a permanent xp loss and suffer from soul sickness, which requires you to pay a rather hefty sum of ingame money to get rid off. by doing so, you get a certain percentage of your lost xp back. granted, you dont suffer from permanent xp loss if you die to another player in PvP. however, if you take damage from another player and get some mobs trained on you that kills you, you get permanent xp loss. its not exactly fun to blow 80% of your ingame money on soul healing bills on one single evening. (trust me, that can happen easily.)
  • the flying combat scam: flying around and fighting sounds like fun, but in reality it isnt. in most areas you cannot fly and when you can fly, your flight time is limited to 2 minutes tops. so if you fight in the abyss chasing opponents and you run out of flight time and there is no place to land safely.. you plummet to your death. and guess what? yep, soul healer bill here i come.
  • PvE instances with bosses who dont drop loot: imagine you do a PvE instance for 2 hours, you fight your way through thrash mobs and when you finally kill the endboss he drops… nothing. not even money or some vendor trash. now how fun is that? your effort of doing an instance should be rewarded in some form or another. having endbosses of PvE instances drop some loot only once a blue moon… outrageous.
  • crafting is just a time and moneysink because the crafting process can fail and you can lose the materials you gathered. same goes for slotting runestones into your gear: if your armour piece has 4 slots and you managed to put 3 runestones in it… theres a chance that the attempt to slot a forth one can fail and hence destroy all of your runestones in the item.

i guess i could go on why i consider Aion yet another mmo fail. one thing is for sure that i wont fall to the hype of upcoming mmos again… WAR and Aion did in fact teach me a lesson.

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Aion open beta impressions

Sep 11th, 2009 by

i am currently playing in the Aion open beta and i find myself having a rather good time in this new mmorpg. my very first impression was “oh this is so eastern/asian”. well yes, it is korean after all but it is adjusted to feel not as strange as FFXI does to the western player. graphics are very nice (farcry engine) but i have to admit it isn’t as nice as LotRO in dx10 and on ultra high settings.

the game itself is standard mmo fare, you get quests to kill stuff, bring items or the famous fed ex type where you have to talk to someone or deliver something to someone. combat feels smooth although there isn’t any skill queuing so you do end up smashing buttons. however, there is something very asian about combat: your in and out of combat health/mana regen sucks and you do end up sitting down and resting a lot. several quests have nice cutscenes and your campaign quest chain is really very well done and prompted me to say “wow” several times.

classes are pretty generic mmo as well: tank, dps, caster, healer. at level 10 you get to chose a sub job and can specialize. the first char i tried was a scout (dps) and at level 10 i had the choice of assassin (melee dps) or ranger (ranged dps). i went for ranger but only to discover that its not my cup of tea in Aion. naturally you have to kite the mobs you are killing but eventually you will end up being in melee range and having to melee them down. to do that, you need to switch weapons because you can only have either your bow or two melee weapons equipped. i found that bothersome and the fact you need to buy arrow and carry a nice stack with them around made the decision to dump the ranger easy.

next i tried a mage and although being very squishy its the typical nuker/glass canon. at level 10 you have the choice between sorcerer (nuker with CC) or spirit master (dots and a pet/summon) and i opted to go for sorcerer. i enjoy nuking and seeing those big numbers on your screen.

i also tried a priest but i am not level 10 yet, so the decision if i should go cleric (main healer) or chanter (support class with buffs and some healing) still has to be made. currently i am tempted to try chanter because a pure healing class is most likely a pain to level.

i think i wont try the tank class. templar is the sword and board main tank and i can’t see myself playing a tank in a mainly PvP game. gladiator sounds like a dps warrior with aoe capabilities but again, i don’t think i want to be a melee class in Aion.

open beta still runs until sunday.

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