Ugly Baby Studios » PC Gaming

Mutilate Rogues in WOW 3.1 Patch

Luke Lancaster — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:01:34 +0000

As a Mutilate-Spec Rogue in PVE, I experienced minute changes to my rotations for producing pve damage. This minute change, however, was to my benefit. Whereas before I needed to reapply a self buff continuously, I now only have to activate it once per minute-if combat even lasts that long. The Buff in question [Hunger for Blood increases damage by 15% and last for one minute, and requires a bleed effect on ones target(Though it isn't required to be a self produced Bleed effect). The part that was removed from [HFB] was the removal of bleed effects from the user, though it isn’t really a necessary function for pve.

Where there are Pros there are Cons, however, and the downside of the secondary function of [Hunger for Blood], makes it a useless talent in pvp. Sure, you get a damage buff, but in pvp (battlegrounds especially) you rely on burst damage to down an enemy quickly; using this cuts into the amount of energy you have left and slows your ability to react quickly to an opponent using his/her pvp trinket to remove a stun. Also, some classes that use deadly bleed effects, such as Warriors, stack these effects with no way to remove them. Without the aid of a healer, you will die even after you have slain your opponent. Prior to this patch you could easily remove these bleed effects and be right back to dealing insane burst damage for the faction of your choice (Alliance/Horde).

WoW-sers, those guys are pissed!

Jason Ward — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:38:02 +0000

And heck, we like pissed, because pissed is funny. We’re pleased to welcome a new victim…err, friend into the fold with the introduction of the Angry WoW Gamer. It’s a funny site so far, with reports coming in from both players AND the ‘toons they play…uh, get played by. The AWG joins us as the third site in the Ugly Interactive Media Network.

Beyond just humorous commentary there are also some cool pics from the field, including what can only be described as “a Fucking LAND SHARK”. Clearly, Blizzard has some classic SNL fans in their employ!

Spore E3 impressions

adam — Tue, 16 May 2006 06:57:30 +0000

During E3 this year we were lucky enough to have the opportunity to see EA’s upcoming game “Spore”
personally demonstrated for us by the game’s designer Will Wright. What we saw was possibly one of the most innovative games ever. The game revolves around evolution; you start with a microscopic view of
your tiny creature and evolve it constantly until you have a full blown race with cities and interstellar space travel capability.

There are six main stages to the game, beginning at the cellular level and ending at space travel. We were
shown two of the stages. Will started with the creature editor, where he created his creature from scratch with a very simple and easy to use editor, he said the goal when creating this editor was to make it easy for the average person to do in minutes what it normally takes the average Pixar employee days to do. It looked a lot like making something out of clay: he could form the torso however he wanted and then choose from a list of other parts to add to it, like legs and arms, and then he could choose from a list of textures which were automatically applied to his new creature in a surprisingly effective way considering that he just created a totally random shape. Once he was done creating his new creature the game play portion of the stage began. This involved controlling a single creature on land, where he moved the creature around to find things to eat, avoid predators, and find a mate to propagate the species. After mating, the creature

editor popped up and he was able to upgrade his creature with better feet, arms, and eyes. Then he played the game as a baby version of the new creature he just created. As a baby, he also paid attention to the social aspect of the game by playing with his peers and taunting a nearby group of peaceful animals with his siblings.

One of the important features of Spore is what he called “procedural animation”, which is a method for
animating your creatures without the need for a professional animator like a typical game would. With this procedural animation the game figures out the best way to animate your new creature and applies these animations seamlessly, no matter what kind of creature you create the game can almost instantly figure out how it would walk, fight, and show emotion. It’s all very impressive to see in person.

The last thing he showed us was the space portion of the game, he started out on his home planet with
several large cities, he went to his capital city and initiated the space ship creation, although this time he selected a pre-built ship instead of using one of the editors to create his own. He said that he wanted the editors to feel optional, so if you just wanted to enjoy the game play without creating any custom content then you should be able to do that. Once he had his space ship the people in his capital city started celebrating and setting off fireworks, and he was able to travel anywhere on his home planet very quickly, and for the first time the camera pulled back and you were able to see the whole planet from a distance, the planet looked more cartoony from a distance, with exaggerated proportions. You could also see a storm in the atmosphere of the planet, Mr. Wright said that the planets have their own weather systems and wind. He described his new space ship as the Swiss army knife for the rest of the game, it had many tools available, including an abduction ray, weapon systems, and terraforming tools that could be used on the surface of planets.
In this stage of the game it’s possible to travel to thousands of different stars and planets, and with the tools available it’s possible to take a barren lifeless planet and turn it into a lush environment suitable for life, you can even help the creatures of your new environment along and help them achieve sentience. But not all of the planets you find will be lifeless, some of them will already be rife with creatures, either taken from a local database on your hard drive, or downloaded from other players. It’s completely up to you how you interact with these creatures: you can abduct them, fight with them, or make peace with them and be friendly, it’s all up to you.

Another major feature of Spore is the game’s ability to share your creations with other players transparently, meaning that you don’t have to do anything to give and receive creatures, buildings and ships to populate the enormous galaxy that you can explore. This is not a multiplayer game, so after you share your creations with other players they are all autonomous, but they do retain some of the characteristics that you have given them, meaning that the creatures that you have created and shared will mimic your behaviors even after you send them to other players. You can scan things with one of the tools on you space ship, and if those things were created by another player then you will see a “created by” section after you have scanned, this gives you the ability to tell the game that you like the things that that player has created and that you want to download other things that that player has made, very handy for seeing what your friends have been up to.

An overly simplistic summary of Spore would be that it’s a combination of Will Wright’s previous games,
from Sim City, to The Sims, and everything in between, with the ability to create and share your own content all along the way. This game is enormous in scope, there are more stars and solar systems in this game then a player could explore in a single lifetime. It’s been in development for many years and we should all get to
experience it for ourselves sometime in 2007.

Neat! free City of Villains game!

Jason Ward — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 00:59:54 +0000

As an interesting promotion, Computer Gaming World is giving new subscribers a free full version copy of City of Villains! According to the press release the game comes with everything that the retail box version does, included free 30 days worth of subscription time.

Not bad! Now if only someone would give away Guild Wars with their magazine…

Expanding World of Warcraft

adam — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 16:00:00 +0000

For those of you who don’t know it already, WoW seems to be expanding its universe even further as Blizzard is growing the World of Warcraft into a whole new form of art. Already a success, the world’s greatest MMORPG has 6 million players worldwide and its servers host up to 500,000 players at any given time;
even so, the game is going a couple of steps further.

Recently while checking out Blizzard’s news I found out that the music from WoW will be
featured in a concert series called “PLAY! A Video Game Symphony” The orchestra is composed of players from around the world including the Chicago Pops, the Stockholm Philharmonic and the National Symphony. Some of the world’s best musicians will be performing WoW’s “Legacy”, “Legends of Azeroth” and “The
Shaping of the World”. Game footage will be displayed on massive screens while the orchestra plays. Now that is one awesome way of experiencing a game’s art.

The two hour concert will also include scores from 20 game titles, including Final Fantasy, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrwind, Metal Gear Solid, The Legend Of Zelda, Halo, Super Mario Bros., Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, Kingdom Hearts, Shenmue, Silent Hill, Battlefield 1942, and Sonic The Hedgehog. All the scores will have their most memorable moments played on big screens, and many of the scores for fellow developer
Nintendo’s games will be heard live for the first time.

Current scheduled performance dates start in May 2006 and end in September 2006, with the concert traveling to many different cities around the world. The site states that more dates are currently being lined up. Hopefully one of them will be in Southern California; I am certainly more than interested in checking it out.

To see if you live in one of the lucky cities where PLAY! will be performing, go to http://newsletter.vugames.com/bz0306nl01/ or visit PLAY!’s official website at http://www.play-symphony.com/ .

Unreal Tournament 2007 Announced!

Jason Ward — Tue, 10 May 2005 09:49:31 +0000

Source: BeyondUnreal

The long-discussed Unreal Engine 3 based game, formerly codenamed “Envy” by Epic Games, has now been officially announced and will be showing behind closed doors at E3 later this month. From the screenshots posted today (some of which are reposts) the game looks to be one of the most gorgeous of the upcoming generation, certainly looking to appeal to those for whom eye-candy is everything.

According to the article, UT2007 will not be in any way an extension of the UT2003/4 codebase but is an entirely new game built from scratch on the new engine. It should feature numerous new vehicles, possibly with destructible components, 8 team support and numerous new gametypes.