Space Rangers 2 - Rise of the Dominators

This game was released in North America in March of 2006 with reviewers giving it a 84/100, it can still be purchased thru Stardock.

This game is mostly a lot of fun.

Now what I mean by that is the part that I really enjoy is flying my ship around, fighting other ships, and doing some of the missions.

Now the flying part, its pretty simple, you have a 2D map and you just click where you want to go with in a system, you can also bring up your star map and fly between systems. The only thing you need to consider when flying between systems, is how far will my engine take me, and how much fuel do will I need. Even this is fairly simple to figure out, when your star map is open you will see a green ring, that will show you how far you can fly, and if you want to fly to a system beyond your reach, the game simply won't let you.

One thing to be careful of thou, if your trying to get all the way across the map, try not to do it in the largest jump as possible, you never know when a system will get attacked, and there is nothing worse than being stuck in the middle of a fight with no fuel and no way out. Two ways to avoid this is either take smaller system jumps, or carry extra fuel along. However if you do find yourself with no way out, either the closest systems are all under control of the dominators, or you are to far away, try and land on a unihabitanted planet. You can than wait till the dominators are defeated, or one of the closer systems is liberated so you can jump to safety. You may also want to lift off from the planet once in a while to see if there are fuel canisters from destroyed ships or help in mopping up the last of the dominators.

Now fighting other ships is also very simple, and a little annoying. It simple in all that you do is select your weapons and point at the ship you want to attack. It's annoying because that's all you do, you have no control over how your ship maneuvers or how it attacks, and sometimes you will wonder why is the ship doing that? So most battles come down to, do I have a better ship than he does.

Flying missions is another almost fun part of the game, and when I say almost fun I mean that some of the mission are fun and interesting and some ore tedious and make no sense at all in a space sim. Missions like, we need you to track this ship down and destroy it, we need you to get this to planet x asap, those missions I enjoy especially the flavour text that goes along with them. However managing and building a ski resort, starting a band and the other nonspace missions are tedious at best and down right annoying at worst.

One other mission type is the where you have to fight the dominators in a rts type game, which while interesting after a while it becomes more and more frustrating. You can play this part as a traditional RTS or you can take control of the robots you build and play them like a FPS. I found this part annoying since it seems the computer can pump out as many robots as fast as possible that you may find yourself quickly overwhelmed.

Now there is one part that I haven't gotten to, and that's apparently a space battle between you and the Keller which is suppose to happen inside a black hole.

For now I'm just going to fly my ship around shoot down pirates and the dominators and just have fun.

RGX

Blog Graphic Title

I would like to thank my sister for creating a great header graphic for me, you can see her web site at www.lizardgirl.com

EQ2 Drama

Everquest II, for people that don't know is a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game otherwise know as a MMORPG or MMO. This means that there can be hundreds if not thousands of people are playing at the same time, while this can be great for meeting new people, this can bring its own problems.

When you get lots of people playing together everyone bring with them their own personality quirks. Normally its not a problem, but when it is, enter the drama.

Drama happens when someone forgets that they are playing a game and lets their personality get the better of them, whether its complaining about some loot drops, whether its complaining about people in your guild, or just throwing a fit. All it does make other players not want to group with you.

People seem to forget they are playing a game, when something happens that annoys you, you can either choose to ignore it, (the ignore command works great for people who spam the channels), or you can just log off and quit playing for awhile.

But yelling a people just doesn't do any good, an you will probably come to regret it after you've been banned from the game.

RGX

Everquest 2 Instance Zones & Groupings

Welcome again the first topic I want to talk about Everquest 2 instances and groups. Now for those that don't know what an instance is, it is basically a dungeon just for your group of up to 6 players. Now normally these can be done with any type of group, however lately the instances are now require more specialty classes to complete.

First a little background a group normally consists of 6 players. The two main requirements are a Tank, normally a fighter type that can take lots of damage, and the healer. The rest of the party can consist of a variety of other classes, scouts, mages, etc.

However lately the instances are now requiring you to have certain classes, such as an extra healer, a mezzer, mana regen, etc.

Now the problem arises when you can not find these classes you may be sitting around for hours on end hoping that one of these needed classes will log on, meanwhile there may be any number of players looking to join a group but are not the required classes.

SOE really needs to address this problem, making instances require certain classes to complete the zone is a huge waste of time for players, and makes the other classes that are not the required classes feel unwanted, and makes the wonder if they should role a new alt or betray to a class they may be more important to a group.

One of the ways that SOE could fix this would be to make a smart dungeon, one that would look at the makeup of the party and create a dungeon that while challenging for the party the party will still be able to finish it. The dungeon could also be set to either look at the levels or let the group going in select the level, so a group that consists of 70-80 level players can chose a level 70-79 dungeon, or they could choose a level 80 dungeon if they wanted more of a challenge, where a group consisting of all level 80's could only select the level 80 dungeon. Also the players could select the level of difficulty for the dungeon like they do with Poet's Palace you have the option to choose normal, hard, very hard.

This would also give the players a unique experience all the time, since they never know what monsters lurk in the dungeon and what loot would drop. For SOE this would give them a unique advantage in the world of MMO's.

Just my 2 cents

RGX

Welcome

Welcome to my Blog. This blog is basically, to start with, going to be about anything and everything, but most of its going to be about games, and normally the ones that I am currently playing. I hope to update this site at least once a week every Sunday, but sometimes it may be more. Sometimes it will be me ranting sometimes it will be actually news and game play advice. So if your reading this I hope you find it interesting, and remember its just my own opinion.

RGX