This weekend I attended the EB Expo 2012 in Sydney (really, it was just an excuse to wear my Teemo hat). I thought I’d just quickly note down my impressions of the games that I looked at and the event in general.

(Might go back and clean up this list later… [But I’ll never get around to it])

Venue

The venue itself was good with plenty of room; 2 halls and a 3rd building for extra stuff like inidie developers, tournaments, king comics, madman, etc. I thought there could have been more cool stuff from vendors, but I’m guessing EB wanted to be the only place selling stuff. There was also a distinct lack of swag, very few booths even had bags. I actually like getting random stickers, posters, mousepads, magazines, pens, notepads, etc.

God of War Ascension

The demo area was a bit hidden so got in quickly. The demo was about 10 minutes long with several different areas and a boss fight. I’ve actually not played the other God of War games, but I really enjoyed the demo. The game was resposive, with a cool dodge mechanic, and plenty of gore.

Skylanders Giants

Apparently this is a big thing now? The only memorable about this booth was getting a free Dark Spyro figure (rare swag get!).

Sony

The Sony both was interesting with plenty of games and demos going on.

• Need to keep an eye out for Jet Set Radio on the Vita.
• PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale was not very impressive. While I was expecting a Smash Brothers clone, it wasn’t even a good clone. All the stages seemed to just be a small box too, sometimes a visually interesting box, but still a box.
• The Wonderbook game had some pretty cool AR effects, but I’m not sure if there’s any real game play there

Just Dance

Really big presence with two big stages, as well as two smaller ones in the Nintendo and Sony areas. It looked ok I guess; a bit clumsy with a Wiimote/move controller though.

Rayman Legends

I was impressed with the demo on the Wii U, especially the last scene/event (nice blend of platforming and music). The Wii U controller added an interesting aspect to the game where a 3rd person could control a character that could find and move objects in the world that normally couldn’t be interacted with. It played OK, but I’m unsure if it was just a gimmick. Still, as a 3 player party game it looks very promising.

Epic Mickey 2

Can’t believe I stood in a line for this…

TT eSports

• +10 points to TTeSports for having CS:S computers setup.
• -10 points for having no mechanical keyboards on display
• But another +10 for having a keyboard signed by Tasteless, Artosis, HD and some other big names in SC scene.

Alienware

Alienware booth was, well, filled with Alienware stuff. Small area, but they had a lot of computers setup (maybe 15 desktops and laptops) with several different games. The hosts were a little annoying but those keyboard are sexy.

Nintendo

Over in Nintendo Land.

• New Super Mario brothers on WiiU (5 Players) prefect party game, but what did you expect.
• I’m a little confused about the new Scribblenauts, it’s a good portable game, but I’m not sure if it works on a home console.
• ZombieU sounds like a good concept and has some interesting use of the WiiU controller for inventory management and being able to scan the room. Still felt a bit gimmicky though and the game itself wasn’t that impressive (the handholding by the Nintendo reps was a bit over the top too)
• Didn’t see anything interesting on the 3DS XL. Console itself was nice to hold, but damn that screen looks bad compared with a Vita. I’m sure Black and White 2 will be a success.

Assassin Creed 3

Why would you demo an area that had a stealth failure condition!? They were showing off the outdoor free running in the demo videos which looked very cool. But in the playable demo you were stuck in a inside a town for the most part hiding from enemies and climbing boxes. I found the whole demo a little frustrating.

Farcry 3

+20 points for having Keyboard and mice, as well as controllers and having a very open demo world. We were told where to head towards to unlock the minimap, and then left to screw around for 10-15 minutes. Had plenty of fun mucking around, but didn’t really see anything new about the game (but it’s hard with demos and short time). Overall I was still impressed and had lots of fun.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

Very cool combat, loved the blade slicing gimmick. Didn’t see much else of the game, but that’s all I needed to be very interested.

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed

Please Sega, just kill Sonic and stop making horrible games.

Indie Game: Giant Robot Destroy Everything

An in development indie game on IOS and Andriod. You make shields to deflect projectiles, kill enemies and protect your Giant Robot. The robot even does the gangnam style dance if you play well enough, worth keeping on eye on just for that.

www.giantrobotdestroyeverything.com

Anime: Mass Effect: Paragon Lost

Watched the entire anime movie thanks to Madman. The movie was enjoyable, but also a little confusing where it all fits into the universe/canon, to me it seemed to fucked with the background of ME2. Overall it was OK, but not great.

Cosplay

There were lots of amazing cosplay outfits. My top picks were Plantman from Megaman, Madoka and Mami from Madoka Magica, Seras from Hellsing (honorable mention to Alucrard too) and the Black Mage.

Summary

Overall, a great weekend. Looking forward to it doing it all again next year.

Cardinia Reservoir

Lasted Updated 2012-10-26

Stats	Slots	Tons	Damage	Heat	Cooldown	Long Range	Max Range	Dps	Dps per ton
AutoCannon2	1.0	6.0	2.0	1.0	0.5	720.0	2160.0	4.0	0.67
AutoCannon5	4.0	8.0	5.0	1.0	1.7	540.0	1620.0	2.94	0.37
AutoCannon10	7.0	12.0	10.0	3.0	2.5	450.0	1350.0	4.0	0.33
AutoCannon20	10.0	14.0	20.0	7.0	4.0	270.0	810.0	5.0	0.36
LB10XAutoCannon	6.0	11.0	10.0	2.0	2.5	540.0	1620.0	4.0	0.36
UltraAutoCannon5	5.0	9.0	5.0	1.0	1.1	600.0	1800.0	4.55	0.51
SmallLaser	1.0	0.5	3.0	2.0	2.25	90.0	180.0	1.33	2.67
MediumLaser	1.0	1.0	5.0	4.0	3.0	270.0	540.0	1.67	1.67
LargeLaser	2.0	5.0	9.0	7.0	3.25	450.0	900.0	2.77	0.55
ERLargeLaser	2.0	5.0	9.0	10.0	3.25	675.0	1350.0	2.77	0.55
SmallPulseLaser	1.0	1.0	3.0	3.0	2.25	90.0	180.0	1.33	1.33
MediumPulseLaser	1.0	2.0	6.0	5.0	3.0	180.0	360.0	2.0	1.0
LargePulseLaser	2.0	7.0	10.0	9.0	3.25	300.0	600.0	3.08	0.44
PPC	3.0	7.0	10.0	9.0	3.0	540.0	1080.0	3.33	0.48
ERPPC	3.0	7.0	10.0	13.0	3.0	810.0	1620.0	3.33	0.48
StreakSRM2	1.0	1.5	5.0	2.0	3.5	270.0	270.0	1.43	0.95
SRM2	1.0	1.0	5.0	2.0	3.5	270.0	270.0	1.43	1.43
SRM4	1.0	2.0	10.0	3.0	3.75	270.0	270.0	2.67	1.33
SRM6	2.0	3.0	15.0	4.0	4.0	270.0	270.0	3.75	1.25
LRM5	1.0	2.0	10.0	2.0	3.25	1000.0	1000.0	3.08	1.54
LRM10	2.0	5.0	20.0	4.0	3.75	1000.0	1000.0	5.33	1.07
LRM15	3.0	7.0	30.0	5.0	4.25	1000.0	1000.0	7.06	1.01
LRM20	5.0	10.0	40.0	6.0	4.75	1000.0	1000.0	8.42	0.84
MachineGun	1.0	0.5	0.04	0.0	0.0	90.0	200.0	0.0	0.0
Flamer	1.0	1.0	0.4	0.6	0.0	64.0	64.0	0.0	0.0
GaussRifle	7.0	15.0	15.0	1.0	4.0	660.0	1980.0	3.75	0.25
Anti_Missile_System	1.0	0.5	2.0	0.0	0.0	90.0	200.0	0.0	0.0
NarcBeacon	2.0	3.0	0.0	0.0	3.5	270.0	270.0	0.0	0.0
TAG	1.0	1.0	0.0	0.0	0.0	450.0	450.0	0.0	0.0

I just wasted far too much time trying to work out why a regex would work for my example test cases but not with real data. Turns out “.”, DOT_ALL, and newlines are more complicated than I realised.

My problem essentially came down to not knowing that the IMAP messages I was working with used CRLF and that my OS/shell/applications were silently converting text to LF when I was constructing my test cases.

nikic has a good post covering many details with PCRE and newlines

The BWE is now over. I thought I’d record some of my thoughts (good and bad) from my play through this weekend. Overall I played ~25 hours split over two characters, a level 14 char Elementalist and a level 21 Norn Guardian.

Note: I’ve been following GW2 for a while now, and while getting hyped up, I still knew what to expect for the most part.. With that, I had high hopes and I think they were almost all met.

Being in Australia the latency wasn’t great. Not horrible, but there was a delay on using all my abilities that made the game feel a little sluggish. I got used to it in PvE, but it might affect PvP a lot more.

Graphical the game looked great, and for a GW player getting to see familiar places was pretty awesome (e.g. Temple of Ages, and the Wizards tower off the coast of the Kessex Hills).

Performance was pretty poor on my system (laptop with a GTX-485), but this is widely reported and being worked on.

I’m still not 100% sold on skills being tied to weapons. Some combinations seem very situational and others seem very balanced with no real need to weapon swap at all (e.g. Greatsword with the Guardian). I wonder if getting rid of the auto-attack for another skill would help even out some of the weapon sets (while moving the auto-attack to an innate ability). The Elementalist however was great with it’s wide selection of skills regardless of weapon.

I was surprised at the personal stories, I was expecting a separate story for each race will little flavour quests based on your character questions, but while levelling with another Norn we had completely different stories through out the BWE (last quest was level 18).

However, the pacing of the personal stories seemed a little odd, it was very hard to keep up in level if you just stayed in your races zones (even if you did ever heart/event/POI/etc). Going to another zone for a while was a simple solution but not really intuitive. I wonder if it would be better if their personal quests made you explore (or at least travel) to other zones?

I enjoyed most hearts and events (the swamp event was pretty damn awesome). Though with many people they turned into zergs, I think 3-6 people was the most enjoyable.

Overflow… Overflow and parties… I’m told it will be fixed by release. I certainly hope so.

In general I thought the UI was OK. It wasn’t very intuitive but it was functional. I would like to see a better skill selection system, an explanation to exactly what the core stats do, and a guild panel that makes sense (I’m still not sure if you invite a character or an account).

Not sold on the Gem store either. Most things in there I didn’t mind, but some of the boosts and things like bag slots irked me a little. Maybe with the Gold → Gem conversion is won’t be that bad.

Crafting was way too complicated, I can see what they were going for, but there’s just too many intermediate items and crafting materials.

That’s it for now, I’m sure I’ll update as more things come to mind.

Today, over six years after I first played Guild Wars I’ve achieved 30 / 50 points in the Hall of Monuments.

Monument Collection (Text)

Found this little bug today in some old (untested code). I was amused that the code would have worked using pre-increment operator (and yet, still been wrong).

# Simplified example, in the original code this was 3 lines long
# Assume use_record_map = false;
record_id = (use_record_map) ? lookup_record_id(foo) : record_id++;

Pythons lack of ++ / — operators makes a little more sense now (one extra character in exchange for removing several type of bugs. Even if they are rather obvious bugs).

E/Me Obsidian Flesh Vaettir Farm (HM)

Skills

• OgVFI7QIlMPkLo0n2wXlBgMwSgWF
• Elemental Lord (Optional)
• Glyph of Swiftness
• Obsidian Flesh
• Stoneflesh Aura
• Mantra of Earth
• Wastrel’s Worry
• Arcane Echo
• Storm Djinn’s Haste (Optional)

Attributes

• 12 + 3 + 1 Earth Magic
• 3 + 1 Energy Storage
• 4 Air Magic
• 4 Inspiration Magic
• 11 Domination

Weapon

• +20% Enchantment length

Armor

• 5x Geomancer Runes (I think you can get away with a +10 earth shield instead)
• Sup Earth Magic
• Minor Energy Storage

Notes

• If you get attacked by the Wurm in Bjora Marches, just put up Obsidian Flesh right away and you’ll be fine
• When you have all 60 mobs drag them in between the building + wall to stop them scattering
• Be careful not to let them body block you
• Elemental Lord isn’t required, and only gives you an extra 1s on Obsidian flesh.
• A faster, nicer A/Me run can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ1h2GoOpag

In other news, currently at 29 / 50 points in the Hall of Monuments.

Some more random Fraps footage this time from Guild Wars. Been busy getting points in the Hall of Monuments.

Nothing impressive, but I had never done much end-game content, and maybe it will help save someone else some gold after seeing how easy it is.

I took 6 heros: Three Discordway Necros, Prot Monk, Panic Mesmer and a SoS Ritulist. Ump came with me on his Barrage Ranger, and I had some stupid Ele/R spec (with unspent points…).

The entire run took less than 30 minutes and I’m sure if you had a real build and knew where you were going, it would be very fast.

Walk-through:

• Clear out the spawn area without accepting any quests
• Take the Clear the Chamber quest from the spawn area and clear out the new mobs
• Head north/west and take out all the mobs on the way
• Talk to the Reaper of the Labyrinth and take the quest Restoring Grenth’s Monuments
• Head south until you reach the Reaper of the Forgotten Vale
• Clear out any nearby Coldfire Nights to the north
• Take the quest Wrathful Spirits and kill all the Wrathful Spirits (Making sure not to let the Mayor die)
• Hand in the quest and capture your spider (remember to flag the Heros well away from you, or they’ll kill the spider as you start to charm it)

Recorded 2011-09-20