Playnation @ Prinsep St

Headed over to this place to check it out with a couple of friends. Basically it's a shop filled with all kinds of games from the likes of Wii, X Box One, card & board games. They serve you drinks and you can order food as well. It's the prefect place to chill with people and enjoy some fun time, be it whether your a hardcore gamer or not!

When I was there, it's pretty heartening to see that the place was not infested with 12 year olds. In fact, the bigger areas were filled with people who looked like work colleagues and the smaller cubicles had couples playing video-games. It's nice for a change to see an environment where I know I'm not among 'F*ck you lah, cb* kids who all hide behind the safety of their computer screens. It figures though, that's why their not there.

Here's how the place looks like:

Interior of Playnation

Started out playing the 'BANG!' card game, died first though, kena aimed sia. Followed on to play some fastest fingers first, word-related card game which was actually quite fun. Guitar-heroed for the larger portion of the time I spent there, while the other group played the multi-player raving rabbits game on the Wii.

You can check the place out yourself! For more info, you can head over to their site:

 www.playnation.com.sg

Dota 2 TI4 Grand Finals

Newbee vs Vici Gaming

Firstly, I want to say that I've never expected these 2 teams to end up in the grand finals. Heck, I've never even heard of them before. I guess this shows that the Chinese teams are really stepping up this year by securing the 2 finalist spots. They bested all the famous American/European team favourites (e.g. NaVi, EG, C9 etc) which is quite a feat to accomplish.

I've never been following the whole of TI4 tbh, I only decided to watch this game seeing as it is the grand final and I had nothing to do at 2.35am. Still, I remember in the midst of the event that watching the games live really had a heck of a different feel as compared to youtube replays. It's the whole sense of uncertainty that no one that in the world knows what's going to happen next.

 I've missed the first game where Vici Gaming won, starting viewing from the 2nd game onwards.

Live-stream of the TI4 grand finals

2nd game onwards, Newbee were really stomping Vici Gaming quite hard. Essentially, they managed to make good counter-picks vs Vici Gaming. Vici Gaming were really stubborn with their draft, especially in how they continued to pick heroes that weren't effective at all such as NP & Veno. 

Perhaps it's some kind of reliance on how their consistency with drafts like that in the past going bad and coming to haunt them now. To me, if they picked tankier heroes , the game would have gone down a lot differently. Hell, they should have picked gankier heroes with more ccs seeing that they grouped up so much.

After Vici Gaming's 2nd loss, you could tell from the way that they were playing that they have kind of given up.

Newbee won with a final score of 3-1 in the best of 5.

Props to Newbee overall for showing such a solid performance in the finals. They've actually beat the odds from almost failing to qualify to becoming grand champions! Well deserved victory!

Newbee lifting TI4 shield trophy

The team wins a total of 5mil USD (~1mil each). Money like that can definitely change their lives a lot. Then again, they gambled their youth away for a small chance at the money, not something many of us (esp in Sg) are willing to do. Respect for being a classic example of going all the way with something that your good at!

All the best to all the teams (whether they did well or not) for the next TI! Seeing that there are new champions every year thus far, everyone has a fighting chance!

Heroes of the Storm Alpha Invitation!

My oh my, this certainly wasn't something that I was expecting to see in my email given the amount of people who really want to play this game asap.

Normally when I get invites, it would be during the beta stages of things, earliest I got was closed beta. Pretty excited that I actually managed to get the Alpha invite for such a fan-raving game. :D

Basically, HotS is a MOBA style game (something like DotA) featuring all the famous characters across all the blizzard games in a single battleground setting.

Let's get crackin' now!

Thoughts on D&D Neverwinter

This game is certainly worth a visit for anyone who is a fan of both MMO & Action RPGS. It has mechanics that is similar to Wildstar whereby you have to aim the majority of your skills which adds the action element to the typical leveling up experience like any other MMO.

It's the first time I actually tried something from the acclaimed Dungeons & Dragons franchise, famous for their medieval settings and mythical folklore. It gave me a different taste from the kind of graphic intensive games that I usually play.

The leveling process was really enjoyable. I'm usually the kind of guy who skips quest texts and all the lore-related bs and make the mad rush to max level. However the story was really good and reading the quests really made the whole process enjoyable instead of an endless quest-grind to lvl 60. The game's a lot easier to play as well as there are directions provided to the locations that you are required to go to, making traveling a lot less time-consuming and putting more emphasis on the actual encounters themselves. I certainly had loads of fun getting to level 60.

A plus point to add about this game is something called 'The Foundry'. It's basically a medium where players can design dungeons and quests for other players to play. This creates a hell lot of diversity in the game which is really nice.

The currency system in the game is something that I kinda have a problem with. In light that it is distributed by Perfect World Entertainment which is essentially notorious for making their games pay2win, Neverwinter has shown signs of that as well. 

There are a few main currencies in the game which are zen, gold, astral diamonds and other 'tokens'. Zen is bought with real money, gold can be found anywhere and is used for buying necessities such as pots/identification scrolls, etc from vendors whereas tokens are earned from dungeons/quests and are used to trade in for gear. Astral Diamonds is the 'real' currency as this is what people use to buy/sell anything and everything in the auction house. Not to mention, there are only limited ways you can earn astral diamonds. These ways only grant you about tens of thousands of diamonds whereas gears and epics you really need costs 100s of thousands or even millions! That sucks. Zen is mainly used to buy loads of perks such as epic mounts which can be insta-equipped at level 20, rarer companions which are a lot more useful and refining items which makes upgrading a whole lot easier. These elements are not directly pay2win in the sense that you don't directly buy powerful gear, but it definitely makes it easier to win if you pay.

End-game content is pretty grindy as well. Basically it involves daily quests and dungeons that you have to do to earn extra 'tokens' of sorts to upgrade your character further. At this point, it feels really repetitive as your repeating the same few quests again and again just to make your character more powerful which kinda makes it feel like a shitty maplestory grind.

Anyway, here's the character that I've built thus far:

Equips

Companion

They've even got a freakin' Owlbear mount

If you wanna try this game out, I'd reccomend it for the leveling process and unique flavour but the end-game portion of it tends to get grindy and pay2win. Still, it's a F2P game and it wouldn't hurt to give it a shot.