Aion 1 week after launch user reviews

Last week I added that when Aion was released it received very positive user (not commercial) feedback.

See the results below.

Lets start with Gamespot

As from 23rd September

As from 30th September

Metacritic is less forgiving

As from 23rd September

As from 30th September

Looks like a slight dip, but still very positive. However people will be reaching levels 20+ soon as things may change. I’ll be getting on Aion next week and will do a mini review on the pro’s and con’s.

The first western review of Aion hits 9.1

IncGamers have produced a very good review of Aion, note it isnt a full game review as the user has only reached to level 20. However shows a few good points and cons. Check out the full review here.

Aion Revisited: Levels 1 – 20 Review [PC]

However Macs are great, bla bla bla. You don’t need to know this. However you do need a loan or an extended mortgage to buy Mac. Where with Windows you can buy a PC from as low as £200, Cheapest Mac is £500. Expect to pay an extra 2.5x what you would normally pay for a PC. I’ve compiled a truthful list of what I have noticed in using Macs, I’m not going to be biased on this. So if your thinking of going Mac let me give you the rundown.

Pros of using a Mac

1. When you get your new Mac, it makes you feel special. Not special-needs, its like you’ve joined the club and been awarded a brown star.
2. When you first boot you time the speed and compare it to Windows. Wow it takes 6 seconds to boot
3. You do notice the speed difference in apps and the OS feels stable (note, I’ve not upgraded to Snow Leopard yet)
4. Mac support is excellent, even if you don’t have Apple care
5. Major games are being ported to osx now, and is recognised in the gaming world (World of Warcraft, Call of Duty 4, Warhammer Online to name a few) More in development i.e. Starcraft 2, Diablo 3 to name a few.
6. Everything is preloaded onto a factory Mac, iLife is very good and you will use it daily to manage your photos. Even the video editor is spot on.
7. 

   Windows on a Mac, no problem

   You can run Windows inside osx using a free application called Virtual Box, yep its free and not developed by a noobie. Sun Microsystems have developed this and is very stable. There are other paid opens like Parallels & VMware fusion. You do not need to reboot, it shows directly in osx, you can open and close Windows as you please. Please note you will not be able to play games with Virtual Box its mainly for using none cpu / gpu intensive applications for example Internet Explorer, Sage, etc

8. Apparently you can run Windows games in Parallels and VMware Fusion pretty well.
9. You can run older Windows games without using a virtual drive, its this called Crossover and supports a heap amount of games including Values back catalog. But you have to pay for this app.
10. 

    Mac Firefox 3 and Windows Internet Explorer 8 Click to see in full screen

    Websites look so much better off a Mac

11. Easy installation, just drag the application into the Apps folder, if you want to delete just drag to waste bin. No installers (on most) apps, no compatible problems (unless your a early bird installer of Snow Leopard)
12. Bootcamp is free from Leopard to Snow Leopard, it offers you dual booting into Windows XP / Vista / 7 naively. So gaming on this is very good. I dual boot for Windows games that are not available on the Mac.
13. Little tweaks like having zip preinstalled is nice, you can just select your files and right click to archive the files. Easy as eating pie. You will notice other small tweaks added that makes life alittle easier like PDF viewer without having to download bloatware to just view it.
14. 

    Viewing a folder full of images is a breeze

    Viewing a selection of images is easy using coverflow, perfect for going through your stock image photography for work. Yep its all preinstalled.

15. Web developer, you will love this as most opensource development platform are supported. Ruby-on-rails and Php all work correctly
16. iPhone & iPods work without the need of drivers and software, its all preinstalled on your shiney new Mac.
17. Time Machine / Time Capsule is a god send. Get a second hard dive and set it up on the Mac. Your backups will be saved and categorized, daily, hourly, monthly & yearly. You don’t have to worry about loosing files ever again. Its backup doesnt slow down the computer like on Windows systems, you don’t even know its running.
18. You could buy Microsoft Office or get iWork which I use for proposals, works a treat.
19. No real need for Virus or firewall software, the firewall on osx pretty secure regarding virus’es as the market share is shifted on Windows your more than likely to get a virus. However this isn’t the case for Macs, but as Macs grow more and more popular this could be a problem in the future.
20. 

    Hitting the space bar on Mac does this

    Viewing a quick image view is a time saver, just select an image, doc, file and hit the space bar. Bam you see your image, hit space and bam its back. Saves so much time. You can even do it with multiple images.

21. Adobe supports Apple and if your a designer, UI designer, Mobile designer & even a web designer you will be safe. Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Dreamweaver….. all works.

Cons of using a Mac

1. Playing decent games requires you to buy a Mac Pro, iMac or Macbook Pro to play serious games, buying a cheap mac forget it.
2. Updating Memory officially is stupidly overpriced
3. Installing your own memory voids your warranty and may make the Mac slower than before if you buy a cheap brand.
4. Updating any other hardware is crazy expensive like video cards
5. Running Windows games off virtual drives will be slow and buggy, you may just use bootcamp to play that game with no problems.
6. Updating video card drives….. what drivers, your stuck with the factory Apple video card drivers so new games suck, there is no way to update your drivers in OSX without a 10.x.x release.
7. 

   Amd is the only one who offers bootcamp drivers, but they are nearly 2 years old

   Updating video card drivers in bootcamp. Windows says no its not compatible. You have to hack the driver to get it working, but once done you see a great difference.

8. Web designer and need to use IE 6 / 7 / 8 to test your sites? forget it, you can use Virtual box but can either install one internet explorer at a time. I know there is software to allow you to view multi IEs, but they dont work correctly as IE6 will think its IE8 and any detection scripts are out. To get it truly working you have to create a different image of each OS. However this is really a Microsoft Windows issue.
9. iPhone application development can only work on a Mac.
10. 

    Building your own Mac could save you 2/3's of the price

    Its stupidly expensive, a decent spec Mac Pro can cost £3000. You could build a better spec for around £1100 if you built a comparison PC. However this would have be a compatible Hackintosh spec.

11. Copying files from bootcamp to Mac is a problem. Its only compatible with Fat32 on file transfers and the limit is 3gb per file. NTFS can be read by Mac but cannot add to the drive. So you end up setting up 3 partitions on a Mac: 1 for Mac, 1 for Bootcamp NTFS and 1 for transferring files between os’s in Fat32.

Conclusion

If you currently use a PC for email, word processing and browsing the net, you wont feel the pinch from the move. However if you depend of specific software, you may have to find alternatives or use Virtual Box to run them in realtime. Gaming, forget it unless you buy a Mac Pro. Don’t get me wrong, games run well but the later games suffer due to the 2 year old+ video cards they supply in Macbook Pro and iMacs.

If you are a gamer get a Mac Pro or build your own hackintosh. Best of both worlds

However I’ve not touched Windows 7 nor Apple Snow Leopard. I’m going to dive in to build my own Hackintosh and will review both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. I’ll be recording my problems along the way building it.

Aion seems to be a hit

Its early to say it but Aion seems to be getting praise from gamers. No official review has been set yet by a gaming site, nor will be taken seriously until they get midway. However I’ve been looking at peoples responses for the game and some of them are hailing this a world of warcraft killer.

As from 23rd September 2009

Not that I trust Gamespot but I trust the gamers over their bias paid reviews

198 gamers average score of 8.9

Metacritic is a great honest site that takes the averages from all sites, but their user score is slightly less.

28 gamers average score 8.2

Be wary of early hype

Early adopters are all looking for a replacement to World of Warcraft (as I am too). At first glance be fooled into the games beauty, then to be shot into grinding all through the mid-levels. I’m expecting a dip in these reviews over the next 2 weeks. However I won’t be diving into this game for at least 2 weeks (when the hype is slowly dies down). I remember the pain of starting MMO’s from day one, too many on servers, down times, etc. Check back soon for an update on the reviews.

I’m actually playing this game off a Mac using the new beta client. Please check back soon for the review.

I’ve not touched an MMO since World of Warcraft, but some other new MMO’s were hitting the shelves. I took the plunge and dived in.

Champions Online

I never played City of Heroes before Champions Online, I had been following it since it was suppose to be Marvel Online Universe. But when Microsoft and Marvel pulled the plug, they went for an untouched IP ‘Champions’. I never played any of the role playing games before so it was an interested take. I instantly purchased this game when the retail servers went live. Crazy downtime but was shocked on how great the character creation was, this was a game in its own right. Creating such diverse characters is awesome. The game is very good also, takes you through a tutorial and is very very different from other fantasy MMO’s like World of Warcraft. The game is good, but feels very unfinished. I was downloading a 80~mb patch daily with fixes.

Mytic Fusion creation

Things I loved about the game (Pros)

1. Character creation is frigging awesome, you can create whatever you like. Just don’t copy like what I did. I cloned Doctor Manhattan from Watchmen and had to change his name and clothing. Unfortunately the game didn’t have any blue male genitalia to choose from. So Mythic Fusion was born, a cyborg like Cyrix from Mortal Kombat was born. You will spend hours changing costumes and tweaking your hero.
2. You have a choice of 16 different classes or you can be a hybrid. I.e Fire and Ice spells or Gadgetry and Power Armour. You can do whatever you like.
3. Missions are fun, these are very similar to World of Warcrafts quest system.
4. Group missions are very fun, you can just walk into an area (with no group) and start doing a group quest with total strangers. Taking down villains to roll for gear or items. Very much a copy from Warhammer Online
5. Crafting is good, but with time it will get even better. You choose from 3 different types of trade skills Arms, Science and Mysticism. But each trade skill is split into 3 sub groups to choose from, you can only choose one. I opted into Mysticism / Enhanced Armour as most of the items boosted my recovery and dexterity. This will get better later on.
6. You can fly at level 5, thats right you don’t have to fork out insane amounts of gold or wait until you have played for 1000 hours. As soon as you leave the noob zone it gives you options on how you would like to move, choices from flying, ice snow board, fire, tunnel, teleport, rocket boots, super jump, flying disk….. to name a few, its really good. Plus no cool down.
7. Super group (Guild) is easy to setup, all you need is 5 people in your group. You meet at Millennium city and setup a group. Once setup you can add your 2 super group colours and symbol. Same ranking systems as World of Warcraft. Whats even cooler if that you can change the name of your super group any any time, over and over. Your not fixed to one name.
8. Native Xbox 360 controller support really enhances the game play. Its an action MMO and button mashing on an Xbox 360 controller is great.
9. Its World of Warcraft friendly as in settings. Upon starting up the game for the 1st time it gives you keybinding options ranging from ‘Fantasy (i.e. WoW) keybinds, Other hero (i.e. City of Heroes) keybinds & FPS (i.e. COD) keybinds. Makes jumping into the game a breeze as your familiar with your favorite bindings.
10. PvP is great, however no ganking as PvE has no factions. You can only PvP in arenas and certain areas, but you have to join a queue. The reward system matches World of Warcraft, honour for gear. As you level up you unlock new PvP scenarios. For example around level 10 you unlock a PvP event similar to the UFC. You fight in an octagon, 5 vs 5 the team to get 15 kills wins. Sounds boring but its really fun apart from the noobs who teleport.

Example of the UI in game and flight system (click to see full screen)

Things I hated (Cons)

1. If you pick the wrong class you are screwed. My 1st character got to level 11 and was getting my arse handing on a plate to more than 1 mob at a time. It costs the earth to respec, so you have to start from level 1 and create a character all over again. Its so easy to pick the wrong spells as you have lots of choice. I had to buy a guide from Killer Guides which really helped me pick the right spec and what to spend my talent points / spells on. It changed the game and turned me into a power hero, taking on more than 4 mobs at a time. Definitely recommend this one or research on the forums before building, as you will regret playing if you pick wrongly.
2. No real tutorial in game helping you pick the right career or trade skill, you learn from your mistakes and get punished deeply.
3. Auction house sucks ass, honestly this is so bad so don’t even look for it. It made me cancel my subscription it was that bad. However the developers have posted on the forums regarding the Auction house and will be updating it very soon. Lets just wait and see. Its that bad I don’t want to go into more information on it
4. This sounds like a whine, but in PvP people exploit the teleport flight power. Imagine, your in the arena kicking ass and your opponent disappears and thats it. You spent nearly a minute getting him down to 10% health and *pow* he has gone. So your left with 50% health to jump to the other opponents and *pow* they do the same. You start wondering is it worth it. Then a minute later you see the same teleport junkies with 100% health to finish you off. It isnt fun as they just do it over and over. Its like having god mode on.

Suggestions to improve the game

1. Allow you to change your specs free of charge until level 10, this way you can try and change specs and decide your heroes path.
2. In PvP put a cool down of 5 minutes on any flight power. This will stop the teleport fuck wits.

Conclusion

Well 2 days ago I canceled my subscription, I’m not coming back for at least 6 months. This is only due to some buggy elements, auction house and economy. I think I will be a solid player once these have been fixed, its a truly awesome game, I would pick this game up just to create your new hero. Try it you will have fun until you start to take the game seriously, but future promises from the developers at Cyptic is a great sign. Plus your getting a free expansion in October to celebrate Halloween. This game is definitely not to replace World of Warcraft, in reality nothing is at this moment.