Title: Been busy lately... Slug: been-busy-lately Date: 2008-08-17 11:04:00 Tags: MMORPG,World of Warcraft,Warhammer 40000,DnD,Comic Book

I've been quite busy lately, with my change of job, some "hardware work" on my house and having small holidays. But now that everything is getting normal again, I hope to be back posting frecuently.

This past weeks I've been reading a lot of comic books, some old ones I already had, some bought either in comic stores or in my small trip to Barcelona.

The three most interesting comic books I've read are this:

Mouse Guard: Fall 1152

A world in which mouses live in a medieval society in hidden cities, guarded from cats and other dangers. A group of guardians, seeking trails of a traitor. A DnD-like adventure, with beautiful drawings.

It was a bit short but I liked it anyway.

Warhammer 40.000: Damnation Crusade

My first introduction to Warhammer 40k novels, in this case a graphic novel. It narrates some battles of the Dark Templars Space Marine Chapter against Orcs and Chaos (mostly, few other races appear).

Drawings are ok (but not incredible), but it reminded me of my childhood painting my Dark Angels miniatures. Narrative is "a-la-Warhammer 40k", super-humans blindly fighting for the Emperor with unbreakable faith and courage.

I Am Legend

Comic book adaptation of the great novel. I was impressed of how exact text were. Drawings are in black&white but not bad, and help to transmit the fear and hopeless atmosphere of the story.

Recommended if you liked the novel.

Also, this weekend I took from my mother's house my old Gameboy and all the games I had with it. Among them, was one RPG I started but never finished, The Sword of Hope.

The game is a typical turn based, static screen RPG, with battles like Final Fantasy games. Story is typical, enemies are typical and battles are (typically) a bit too often and boring; You either die almost 100% sure or crush the enemies, depending on your level.

The interesting part is, being as limited as the original gameboy was, how developers put on the game a full RPG. I'm finishing it to see how big it is, but right now this are my thoughts:

Combat is too simple: Attack or use spells (each level you gain more, usually more powerfull ones), or use healing items.
Enemies are dumb: Sometimes they fight each other, sometimes they even hit themselves with spells, and there is few variety of them.
Inventory is quite limited too: Just a maximum of 7 of each item (3 bits of data ;), just 255 gold (8 bits of data ;), you can only buy better armor (and I hope swords too later...), and you usually carry at most 2 or 3 special items.
Level cap is 31 from what I've seen in the www, and you only have dex., stam. hits, mana and resistance points/variables.

Here are some screenshots:

As I said, the game is a bit limited, but excepting the tiring leveling up, fun to play.

Extra: Just released, the Wow Talent Calculator for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion