Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Impressions

April 30, 2012 , , Comment

The first Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Event was so much fun, much more than I dared imagine. I’m now even more excited than ever about this game coming out (I didn’t think that was even possible). After playing in this first of many beta events, I know the folks at ArenaNet will make sure they get it right! I got to play through most of the human campaign as a Guardian and delved into some PVP action as well. There are still many improvements that could be made, so I’m sort of glad that ANet hasn’t announced a release date for the game yet:

  • Many world events in the human starting areas don’t have very long chains of events. As a result, the chain of events would repeat more than once as I was exploring an area for completion.
  • The interface still needs refinement including a stack button to easily combine stacks to save space in your bank and inventory. I also noticed that the interface fonts didn’t look very good when you set the interface size to small.
  • The PVP arena was pretty fun, but needs plenty of rebalancing. The current matching algorithms still need to be refined and it was pretty annoying to be forced to change to the opposing team from your friends by the match rebalancing.

Those were the biggest nitpicky issues I’d like to see fixed in the upcoming betas. I filed plenty of bug reports with typos in addition to these issues, and I’m sure the team is working their butts off for all of us.

Thank you ArenaNet for letting us all get a glimpse of your game! You have a winner here and I can’t wait for the next beta weekend! Here are my screenshots from the beta. The landscape and character designs are absolutely stunning. Enjoy the high resolution screenshots. I hope you guys like them enough to post them on Pinterest!

CyberSpeed Unleashed Review

May 28, 2011 , , , Comment

CyberSpeed Unleashed Cover ArtSixteen years later from the original game, Mark ‘TDK’ Knight has released CyberSpeed Unleashed, a remix album of the music from the 1995 game CyberSpeed. And boy does it get your adrenaline pumping and make you want to race again, preferably in a more modern racing game. CyberSpeed’s gameplay was… hectic, to put it nicely, but it was Mark’s music that really made the game stand out. The original game disc could be loaded into your CD player to play the soundtrack which was awesome. I fondly remember overloading a couple sets of crappy speakers listening to the CyberSpeed soundtrack at max volume when I was a kid.

The new CyberSpeed Unleashed remixes add heart-pumping bass, upgraded instruments, and some very welcome complexity to the originals, making each track a lot more interesting, while keeping the original riffs I love. The new instruments sound great, especially the butt-kicking bass instruments. Both Cluffy Flouds remixes also have all the ambiance I loved from the original tracks. The new Cluffy Flouds 2 remix is definitely one of my favorite tracks. The Boggit Protein Accelerator is another great track and is delightful light-hearted. The original game included silly future-age commercials that would air between races and this was one of the background tracks.

Some things I didn’t really like about the new remixes were some instrument choices. The low-quality violin instrument in CyberSpeed Race 5 detracted from the environmental ambiance of the track. The notes played by the violin instrument also weren’t held long enough which hurt the flow of the music. The low-high “boing” instrument in the background of CyberSpeed Race 6 was also really distracting and was just enough to prevent it from being one of my favorite tracks. I also wish Mark had incorporated more of the piano riff from the original CyberSpeed Track 5 into one of the remixes. The entire second half of Track 5 was great and was one of my favorite original tracks.

All-in-all, if you’ve played CyberSpeed before, you owe it to yourself to give this album a listen. It has all the extra excitement you wished the original tracks had and more. If you haven’t played the game before, DON’T! Just kidding! CyberSpeed has one of the best racing game soundtracks out there and should definitely be in your game music collection. CyberSpeed Unleashed is a great complement to the original soundtrack. The original has a lot more atmospheric ambiance which I enjoyed, but the new album gives you a lot more bass and is so much fun to listen to.

Favorite tracks:
Cyberspeed Track 4
Cyberspeed Track 7
Cluffy Flouds 2
Boggit Protein Accelerator

CyberSpeed Unleashed is available for download at CD Baby and iTunes