As I get older, I have less time to play games, and my attention span has gotten shorter as well.

I still play a ton of games, but I probably play as much casual and indie games — like niche titles like Sequence and Runespell Overture — than triple-A PC titles.

However, I still keep an eye out for triple-A titles that I am interested in. 2012 is a bumper year for some highly anticipated titles for me, and below is a list of the top five PC games I’ll definitely try out this year.

5. Bioshock Infinite

The Bioshock series is made by Irrational Games, a games studio that I had my eye on after my sublime experience with System Shock 2. If you have not heard of this decade-old 1999 classic, check it out.

Bioshock, like System Shock 2, is a mix of great gameplay with atmospheric storytelling. The environment design, varied mobs, RPG-like leveling character development, varied paths to victory,
and an intriguing backstory made the game a huge hit.

And with Bioshock Infinite being designed as the true sequel to Bioshock (not Bioshock 2, which fans derided as a money-spinner), I’m cautiously optimistic about this game. The cinematic trailer and gameplay videos look gorgeous.

4. Diablo 3

Diablo needs no introduction.

This classic game by Blizzard is the spiritual grandfather of almost every game in the action roleplaying genre.

That alone, would make Diablo 3 worth recommending. Check out the beta review Techgoondu did of Diablo 3 last year.

I’m certain Blizzard will deliver on peerless quality before they release the damn game, which has been in the making for four years since they announced it in 2008. In the meantime, fans of the genre can check out Torchlight or Bastion to get their fix.

And I’ll bet that Torchlight 2 will be released before Diablo 3, given Blizzard’s well-known tardiness in the industry. No matter, as fans of the game will patiently wait for it anyway.

3. Mass Effect 3

Mass Effect, when it debuted in 2007, was a great shooter and RPG-lite mashup.

It had all the elements of a classic, grand space opera of intergalactic war.

A brilliant score, evocative voice acting, and tight storytelling papered over the slight gameplay flaws, like the horrible Mako driving sequences and essentially extremely linear gameplay.

The second installment Mass Effect 2 in 2010 made the game even better. The gameplay was refined, and the story of Shepard’s quest to find out the threat posed by the Reapers was even better than the first.

I remember the storyline fondly, and thus Effect 3 is definitely on my “must try” list.

A caveat and rabid note from a fanboy, though, to Bioware: If you screw up Mass Effect 3, like what you did with Dragon Age 2, you will lose a customer forever. (I tried playing Hawke in Dragon Age 2 for half hour before I gave up in disgust). Please do not screw ME3 up.

2. Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm

There is probably no other game I played in 2011 more than Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty.

Blizzard has produced yet another “must try” game for my personal list. Beyond the single-player campaign that tells an epic story of love, war and betrayal, the main reason why I come back to this game again and again is because the multiplayer gameplay is sublime.

My aging reflexes are not as good as they once used to be, but I really enjoy the seamless multiplayer RTS that is Starcraft 2.

30 minute quick match-ups meld into hours as you get lost in the rhythmic flow of zealots and zerglings waging war on each in the network ether.

And with Kerrigan, the queen of blades, taking the spotlight in the second installment of Starcraft 2, this is a game that is a must buy for me.

1. Guildwars 2

I’ve practically stopped playing MMORPGs.

Yeah, I’ve fond nostalgic memories of being the main healer in my World of Warcraft Alliance group, participated in mass brawls in Warhammer Online, and even wandered around for a bit as a travelling cleric in war-torn Rift.

Somehow, coordinating yet another loot run through some dungeon isn’t as fun when you’ve seen the dungeon countless times.

The skills are different, the environments and settings are different, but don’t let that fool you: Most MMORPGs are grindy timesinks, as you grind to get better loot to defeat harder bosses.

After a while, this type of gameplay simply becomes stale. Nevermind the stunning graphics or pleasant musical scores, quest structures of the “kill A to get B” variety simply lose their luster.

Guildwars is the only MMORPG that has really kept me coming back because it is so different from traditional MMORPGs. I spent a ton of time playing arenas for the heck of it — because it was fun and not for some reward.

Throw in the requisite gorgeous graphics, haunting score, distinctive painterly-style artwork, and make it free to play forever, and you have a monster hit on your hands.

In fact, over the Christmas holiday period I logged in to my old account and had a blast playing my main Mesmer character in some quick matches in the random arenas. How many can say that of a game that is almost seven years old now?

ArenaNet has promised that Guildwars 2 will be similar and yet break new ground. No tank, heal, or DPS classes. Players can move in out of frontline and backline roles, depending on positioning and skillsets brought to the fight.

An ambitious objective, to be sure. But with ArenaNet’s pedigree, and given how much I loved the original Guildwars and expansions, this is the one MMORPG game that I’m dying to play.

This, in theory, shouldn’t work.

But with Runespell Oveture by Mystic Box, it does.

This oddball game melds Yahtzee-style poker (an interesting variant called Mystic Poker) with a good old fantasy RPG story set in the Nordic eras. As the story progresses, you “level-up” by unlocking collectible spells and allies, which help you in battle.

And how do you battle? By playing poker, of course.

Gameplay should be intuitive enough for anyone remotely familiar with poker rules. You create five-card hands — straights, flushes, three-of-a-kind — from a pool of cards. Each turn you typically only have three actions, which means you can only grab a limited number of cards per turn to form your hands before your opponent takes his turn.

Once such a hand is created, you can “attack” the opponent for damage. The more difficult the hand is to assemble, the more damage it does. For example, a royal flush does 50 damage, but a full-house is only worth 15 damage.

There are more nuances to this base poker variant, like to unveil more cards to pick from, you have to pick the topmost single cards from your available columns to form your hands. Or, you can “steal” the topmost cards from your opponents pool, which also has the same amount of cards like you.

What makes it truly “Mythic Poker” is, of course all the abilities you can use during the course of forming hands to attack the opponent. Cast a haste spell and avail yourself of six more actions this turn. Toss a fireball at your opponent, or regenerate your health every turn.

Spells and abilities are powered by mana, which is gained whenever you damage the opponent. And all these spells and abilities are unlocked as you progress through the story.

And speaking of the role-playing aspect of the game, you adventure on a small overland map that is represented by waypoints of interest connected to each other (in geek parlance a graph of nodes).

Whenever there is a battle encounter, it is represented on the map as an icon, and you can choose to fight the battle or go back to camp to choose which abilities to take (you can only have seven with you at any one time).

Don’t expect much open-endedness or choice though; the story is tightly scripted and follows a set path. Your first time playthrough will not take you roughly about ten hours even if you complete most of the side quests.

For me, the fact that the game is short is not a minus factor. In fact, it is just right, as I feel that the poker-style battles will run out of depth if the game drags out for too long. Yes, the main battle mechanic can feel gimmicky and sometimes you will end up cursing the swingy battles, but I found the game pretty fun.

The story is serviceable to the gameplay, and didn’t particularly stand out for me. It’s the usual fare of the amnesiac hero finding out that his purpose is to challenge some higher power. I liked the setting of the game though — our real-life Earth often isn’t the setting for fantasy RPGs.

The game retails for US$9.99 on Steam. It is not the cheapest indie game out there, and it is pretty short, but it won’t break your wallet either.

I picked mine up during a Steam sale for less than five bucks (mainly because the mechanics of this game intrigued me), and it was a good, fun distraction. It’s worth a second look if you enjoy playing indie games with interesting mechanics.

The Nintendo 3DS not the handheld gaming console of your choice?  Take heart, for Sony’s newest handheld PlayStation Vita will be heading over to our sunny shores on February 22, in less than 2 months’ time.

Retailing at S$399 for the WiFi-only version, the PS Vita will be accompanied by 27 launch titles, including Uncharted: Golden Abyss and FIFA Soccer.  However, the connectivity-junkie will have to wait longer for the 3G version, as there is no word on when that will be released.

The price is definitely quite surprising, given the challenges that the 3DS faced at a similar price point. But unlike the 3DS – which is too similar to its predecessors to generate a high-level of excitement – the PS Vita is a completely different beast that previous PlayStation Portables.

For one, the device has a 5-inch OLED touchscreen (960 x 544), a touchpad round the back, and an accelerometer. This combination should open up new possibilities for gaming. It also has front and rear cameras for augmented reality use.

In addition, the PS Vita has features that make it come close to a small tablet, including a web browser and social networking features like Facebook and Skype.

There’s plenty of power under the hood. The PS Vita is powered by a quad-core ARM Cortex A9 processor, a PowerVR GPU with 128MB of VRAM, and 512MB of memory. All this horsepower means that the battery better be huge, but the non-removable battery is only rated at 3 to 6 hours which is, quite frankly, terrible.

Another downside: inexplicably, the Vita uses a brand new proprietary memory card for content storage, and the lack of any built-in storage means that you’ll probably have to buy additional cards if you also want to chuck in your movies and music.

But there’s no denying the excitement and potential the PS Vita brings. It is quite a significant update to the older PSP models, and having been in the business for years, Sony understands the market well enough to offer gamers what they want.

But now that quad-core Android tablets with the ability to handle 3D gaming are just on the horizon, a portable gaming handheld could be in for the fight of its life.

It’s that time of the year again.

Christmas is a time of giving and receiving, and every year at Techgoondu we want world peace and justice. This year I want to add to the list a fairer society, better public transport, and affordable public housing.

And in case those big dreams fall a little short of our lofty naive ideals, well, there’s always geek toys and gizmos that we can console ourselves with. And still keep dreaming big dreams — they are worth fighting for, aren’t they?

In the meantime, here’s what the goondus would like this Christmas:

Raymond wants:

Wait a minute, Raymond already had an entire article’s worth of tech stuff he wanted to buy. Check it out.

Alfred is dreaming of:

Oppo BDP-95 Blu-ray player

I know we’re going into an age of lossless tracks and HD video downloads, but if you are looking for a universal player that plays back your Blu-ray discs, SACDs and regular CDs, there is only one that every AV geek is talking about right now – the Oppo BDP-95.

At US$999, it looks expensive compared to the US$90 Blu-ray player at electronics stores, but this Oppo player is packed to the gills with the most high-end features (like streaming and 3D support) and also audiophile-grade goodies, like two, yes, two, separate top-notch Sabre32 DACs to handle both movies and music.

Oppo players are so solidly built – yet relatively inexpensive, considering all the stuff thrown in – that they have been cloned and repackaged with more expensive-looking chassis and sold for several times more!

B&W 802 Diamond speakers

I heard these speakers at the showroom once and the sound has never left my mind. A live performance is what you’d expect to hear – you sense the scale of an orchestra, the sound is so airy and real, and bass is impossibly extended and deep. Even movies sound amazing – yes, the showroom also used them for a Blu-ray movie.

But what do you expect of speakers so big that the average Singapore apartment can never accommodate because of their size and their power? Even if you had more than 20-grand (Singapore dollars), these B&W 802 Diamonds won’t sound good in most homes here, unless you have a big listening room, so this is definitely a “dream-worthy” item. Maybe it’s time to upgrade the house first!

Aaron is drooling over:

Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9

I’ve never fancied lugging around a 10-inch screen wherever I go. So when Samsung unveiled the 8.9-inch Galaxy Tab, I knew it was going to be the top on my Christmas wish list. It’s more portable than the iPad and shares the same features as the larger Galaxy Tab 10.1 including the latest Android Honeycomb OS.

Compared with a 7-inch tablet, the 8.9-inch Galaxy Tab packs more screen estate for displaying both e-books and webpages in their full glory without excessive scrolling. At just under $250 for the 16GB version with a data plan, this slate is a steal too!

Asus Zenbook UX31

This skinny ultrabook will give Apple’s Macbook Air a run for its money. Measuring just 3mm thick at its slimmest, the Zenbook is a head-turner endowed with a gorgeous metallic design, a 1600×900 pixel display and a solid-state drive for top-notch computing performance. The exceptionally well-crafted machine feels more solid than the Macbook Air and boasts of Bang and Olufsen’s ICEpower audio technology.

In some ways, the advent of ultrabooks such as the Zenbook represents the coming out party for PC makers who have shown that they too have what it takes to deliver great industrial design.

Lester craves:

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Game of the year? Quite possibly. Skyrim has been released to rave reviews across the board, and dedicated gamers have ratcheted sales beyond expectations.

Dragons are popping up all over the land of Skyrim, and you- as the Dragonborn- are the only one with the power and skill to stop them. Adventure across a staggering open-ended world and do just about anything you like. Take a long hike across the landscape that starts off as a forest that peters into vast snow fields. Embark on sidequests, slay dragons, raze entire towns, or help anyone that asks for it- the choice is yours.

Skyrim’s wide-open gameplay brings something to everyone. The graphics alone are enough to halt even non-gamers and to intrigue them into playing. Skyrim will provide hours of fun- actually, that’s more of a caveat than a statement, because Skyrim is so open, so wide, it’s easy to get sucked into gaming for hours to come.

Google Galaxy Nexus

Yes, it’s due to be out only in January 2012, but Google’s Galaxy Nexus is already generating mobile tech-lust for this user. Google’s latest Nexus iteration brings the Android experience mobile users have come to love and expect in a gorgeous form factor that’s packed with incredible top-end smartphone specs.

Being the model phone for Android 4.0, the Galaxy Nexus will no doubt be the phone for Android fans that want the pure Android experience. Improved Gmail integration, enhanced text-to-speech and smoother multitasking are welcome features, and the Galaxy Nexus won’t disappoint.

For those who can’t wait, and require a suitable stocking-stuffer, the Motorola Droid Razr is a comparable model. Already touted to be one of this year’s best Android smartphone, the newest, sharpest Razr shows that a sleek, fashionable smartphone can exist alongside powerful hardware. Just wait for the Android 4.0 update to the released, and it’ll be a lean, mean mobile beast.

Chi-Loong desires:

Guild Wars 2

If Lester can get away for wanting the Google Galaxy Nexus that isn’t out yet, I can certainly get away with craving a game that is due next year that I’ve been awaiting as a patient fanboi for the longest time.

No, it’s not Diablo 3 or Starcraft 2:Heart of the Swarm (though that is high on my list), it’s Guild Wars 2.

For MMOs, I’ve played World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, and Rift, but nothing kept me as enthralled as the original Guild Wars, which I’m almost ashamed to say I sunk in almost 1700+ hours over a five year span. I plead guilty that I was a major addict of the game at one point.

I’ve really fond memories of the game, and I’ve high hopes for ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2.

Now if only I could invent a time machine to take me into the future to get a copy of this game now…

Games for Change

What would a Techgoondu Christmas wishlist be if it didn’t have an interesting entry that tied back to our tongue-in-cheek introduction of wanting, you know, good things for the world?

What if you could marry my one big vice, gaming, with something I really believe in, like changing the world to become a better place?

And this is how I became a fan of Games for Change, a global non-profit organization dedicated to using games to serve as tools in humanitarian or educational efforts.

It’s how I got to know about indie games such as Fate of the World (available on Steam) and We Topia. Watch:

Food for thought, certainly.

And on that note, we here at Techgoondu wish all our readers a very merry Christmas.

But fret not. Here’s a list of stuff that this Goondu will be elated to find under his metaphorical tree, and hopefully, it will inspire you to find that perfect gift for your special someone.

Nikon Coolpix P7100

Canon aficionados can swear by their G12, but the Nikon P7100 comes out tops for me, due largely to its longer zoom range: 7.1x (28-200mm) on the P7100 vs. 5x (28-140mm) on the G12. It’s also got a superior LCD screen which is both bigger than the G12’s and has a higher resolution.

The P7100 also gives you very long exposures of up to 60s, an above-average battery life of up to 350 shots, lets you go as close as 2cm for macro shots, and has enough buttons and dials to make any manual photographer happy. The vari-angle LCD screen is also a handy addition.

If you already own a DSLR (especially with Nikon accessories), and are looking for a travel-friendly camera with more advanced features, then the P7100 is an excellent choice.

HTC Titan

Windows Phone 7 has come a long way since its inception, and its latest update is now a solid mobile operating system that is starting to catch the attention of many consumers (see our review). I’ve been eagerly waiting for Nokia’s entry, but the Lumia 800, while a beautiful device, failed to impress with a lot of features missing, including a front-facing camera and an NFC chip.

The king of Windows Phone is still the HTC Titan, with its massive 4.7-inch Super LCD screen (which has also been “Androidified” in the form of the HTC Sensation XL) and zippy 1.5GHz processor while maintaining excellent battery life. The 8-megapixel camera with its backside illuminated sensor and f/2.2 lens is a great upgrade, offering decent shots even in low-light conditions.

Unfortunately, it isn’t available on any of our local telcos, and it costs a pretty penny without a contract.

Xbox 360 with Kinect

I have no doubt more Kinect units will be flying off the shelves this holiday season, especially with a bevy of new games unveiled in October. This little gadget is incredibly fun to play with, whether alone or with a group of family or friends, and will be perfect for that party you’re planning. And it’s great for working off the fats earned from those holiday feasts.

Put the Kinect aside and an entire world of more hardcore games open up, from first person shooters like Gears of War 3 to role-playing games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. What more can a geek ask for?

Kobo Touch

As someone who reads a lot but hate lugging books around, an e-reader would be a perfect companion. Unfortunately, the Kindle isn’t friendly to this region: 3G doesn’t work, and buying books through Amazon requires a painful workaround.

Enter Kobo, the underdog in the e-reader world. The Kobo Touch is more expensive than the Kindle, but packs in several nicer features. The quilted back design, for one, looks fantastic. Storage can also be expanded via a microSD card slot, letting you hold up to a nice 30,000 books in a light package.

Buying books is also a much smoother experience, as Kobo is more international friendly. Most importantly, the Kobo Touch supports the ePub format – the official standard of the International Digital Publishing Forum – while the Kindle does not.

Jawbone Jambox

I reviewed the Jambox back in March, and thought it was a fantastic little speaker. It has a top-notch build, sounds significantly bigger than its size, and even handles calls with built-in noise cancelling microphones.

Unfortunately, the price is north of S$300, a little too high. But it has a great size for travel, and its microphone makes it perfect for a home office or a conference room where you can hook it up to a service like Skype.

Nintendo 3DS

The last handheld I owned was the GameBoy Advance, and many hours were spent training Pokemon to unrivalled heights. Now that the price of the 3DS has been slashed, there’s no better time to buy it.

Despite a lukewarm reception at launch and a disappointing range of titles in its early days, the platform has moved on nicely and is now a decent device. And with the PlayStation Vita first available in Japan and rolled out gradually elsewhere, the GameBoy Advance is definitely the gaming handheld to get this holiday season.

If you’re a fan of Dell’s Alienware range of “bling-in-on” gaming desktops, you’d be happy to hear that the PCs now come with Intel’s top-end Core i7-3960X or Core i7 3930K six-core CPUs in Singapore.

On the new Alienware Aurora R4 desktop, the LGA2011-based CPUs are water-cooled, and factory-overclocked to between 3.9GHz and 4.1GHz as well, which seem alright, unless you’re the type who regularly pour liquid nitrogen into your PC for extreme speed. 

Among other goodies, the geeked out chassis packs in a motherboard with the enthusiast X79 chipset and up to 32GB of quad-channel DDR3 RAM.

Of course, we know graphics are the main thing for games such as Battlefield 3, so this Alienware lets you add on some of the most powerful options. Think of an Nvidia GTX 590 card, or two of AMD’s 6950s in tandem, pumping out the high-res eye candy on screen.

What we’d like, of course, is an option for a single AMD 6990 or two AMD 6970s in there as well. But for that, you’d have to build your own rig, instead of ordering Dell’s 20kg behemoth, because Dell Singapore doesn’t offer them as an option when we checked.

And prices? The basic S$3,499 version comes with an overclocked Core i7-3930K CPU, 4GB RAM (you’ll want more, really!), 1TB hard drive and an AMD 6870 graphics card.

We know you can get more horsepower for that price if you build your own geeked out rig from components at Sim Lim Square, but hey, not every gamer’s a builder these days.

Plus, you won’t get the bling, which comes in one of six impossible-to-miss colours. Or the trademark ALX chassis with an alien head at the front and “breathable vents” that open up.

What we really want is this particular model with the mirror finish (below), but somehow Dell’s website doesn’t have an option on this. We’ll check back and update this once we find out from Dell.

For example, Sequence by Irridium Games, a crazy mash-up lovechild between a finger-pounding rhythm game with an old-school hard core RPG.

Surprisingly, it works well for the most part, and with a price tag of US$4.99 on Steam — I got mine for US$2.49 on Black Friday sales last month — it is a steal.

Sure, this indie game is not perfect and some kinks could be ironed-out, but for the price point and fun I had, I’m not complaining.

The heart of Sequence are the rhythm gameplay segments, where you have to mash keys in tandem with the beat of a song. Anybody who has played similar games in the genre like Guitar hero or Elite Beat Agent will find the mechanic very similar.

What makes Sequence different though is that the rhythm game is wrapped around a RPG shell. Each rhythm segment is a battle with monsters as you cast spells to slash their hitpoints to zero. Win the battle, and you get experience, loot and improve in stats, like in a RPG.

Battle, music, fight!

So how do you fight? Each battle screen has three panes — the monster field (red), the spell field (green) and the mana field (blue).

Monsters try to reduce your hitpoints to zero, and this is represented by falling beats in the red field that you have to try to hit with the right button. Miss a beat, and you take damage.

Have your hitpoints reach zero, or if the song times out before you defeat the monster, and you lose the battle.There is no penalty to losing the battle, and you can retry battles after switching inventory or spell slots (of which you have a limited number).

You kill monsters by casting spells, which is also represented by hitting the right beats, but in the green field instead. Lastly, you need mana to power the spells, which is represented by blue field. Strike the right notes on this field, and you gain mana. Missing a beat has no penalty on this field.

At any one time it is likely that at least two fields will have falling beats, and every battle is a frenzied fast-paced affair as you decide whether to take damage, do damage, or regain mana.

It sounds complicated, and at times you will curse the game’s difficulty, but the mechanic plays well and is overall well thought out.

Storyline and RPG elements

The RPG portion of the game is the weaker part of the mash-up. It is essentially linear, and parts of it are frustratingly repetitive as you fight the same mob over and over again to get a particular item drop so that you can progress.

The storyline, however, was a blast to play through. Every line of dialogue is voiced, and the voice acting is excellent — a surprise for such an indie game that was put together by such a small team.

The hand-drawn visuals are colourful and serve to flesh out the story of our protagonist who woke up in a strange tower with no memory of what he was doing before. Standard RPG fare, but the story was good enough that I actually found myself caring about how the game would end when I neared the last few levels.

The final ending, though, threw me for a loop, but I won’t spoil it for people who haven’t played the game.

Last words

The game is short — which is perfect in this case — and I completed in about 13 hours. Don’t expect it to be easy though, and some of the rhythm segments are just brutal, even on normal difficulty. For example, having to hit 150-note combos in order to learn certain spells can make you tear your hair out.

If you like rhythm games and RPGs, or you want to try something fresh and different, then definitely check this one out.

I’ll also be doing more reviews of indie games over the holiday period; stay tuned!

I’ve been a long-time fan of turn-based strategy games in the fantasy genre.

I have played the original King’s Bounty, Heroes of Might and Magic (HOMM) 1 through 6, Disciples 1 to 3, and the new King’s Bounty series by Katauri Interactive.

Some clunkers in the series I barely bothered to play more than a few hours, like HOMM 4 and Disciples 3, but some were well beloved, like HOMM3 and 5 (which was basically a reboot of 3).

It is with this context as an old school gamer that I can say that HOMM 6 gets two thumbs up from me. It keeps to the flavour of the HOMM series whilst making enough big changes to the gameplay that the game feels like a fresh breath of air.

That being said, there are two big glaring issues that might make or break HOMM6 for you.

If you hate bugs and are not the patient sort where you wait for patches, give this game a miss.

When it was launched in mid-October, it was full of graphic glitches and gameplay bugs. Almost two months later, with a few patches under the belt, the game feels more stable with less crashes to the desktop.

However, there are still noticeable graphical and gameplay bugs. Nothing huge, but the lack of detailed documentation is frustrating.

The second big issue is that if you don’t have a stable broadband connection, forget about this game.

Even if you play this game solely for the single player campaign, Ubisoft forces you to authenticate online every single time to play the game. Otherwise, you play with a gimped version of the game, with powered-down heroes and equipment.

More on this later. First let’s talk about the good stuff.

Streamlined gameplay

Gamers who are have played and are used to the HOMM series will find that the gameplay has been simplied and/or reworked in many ways.

For example, there are far less resources to worry about. Besides the basic wood, ore and gold, the only advanced resource is blood crystal.

There are less factions, and every town has no town screen, but a simplified build menu.

The skills tech-tree has been totally reworked into a shorter list of skills and spells. You no longer learn spells at a town’s magic guild, but instead have to spend points when you level up to learn them.

Some skills you can only learn after you’ve gotten a certain reputation in either the “blood” (aggressive tactics) or “tears” (defensive tactics) gauge, which slowly fills up depending on the skills you buy and use.

But it turned out that I didn’t mind these changes at all, and came to regard most of them as good ones.

Sure, more factions than the five offered in HOMM 6 — Haven, Necropolis, Sanctuary, Inferno and Stronghold — would have been nice. Perhaps we have been spoilt by HOMM 5, which offered us eight factions.

But each faction in HOMM 6 is well designed and fleshed-out.

Every unit serves a purpose — like basic ranged shooter, basic ground troop and elite tank –and there are no units that are filler choices where you won’t even recruit them.
Less resources and skills overall doesn’t mean that the game is dumbed down. There is just less needless complexity.

HOMM 6 still feels satisfyingly deep. In addition, it also offers a tighter, more streamlined play experience as much of the gameplay was tweaked and simplified.

For example, all heroes can use the town portal spell and can teleport to any fort or town you control as long as the right town structure is built.

When you recruit heroes in town, they don’t start out at level one, but is pegged to a few levels behind your highest leveled hero.

All towns now share army pools so you don’t have to visit each town to recruit the units there. When you capture a town or fort, you can convert that town or fort, changing all units to your faction’s type.

The result of all this is more strategic gameplay. It obsoletes needless busy work like hiring secondary “runner” heroes just to collect units to pass to your main one.

Another oft-talked about change is that you can’t capture mines permanently unless you capture the nearby fort or town which controls that mine. Do so, and all the mines in the fort or town’s area of influence instantly becomes yours.

This obsoletes the strategy of avoiding the enemy and constantly harrasing enemy mines. No more chasing enemy heroes on their dance across the map, which wasn’t fun gameplay. Now you have to fight enemies legitimately to control territory.

Campaign and story

And you will appreciate all of this game streamlining when you get to play the campaigns, because the campaign maps are huge and sprawling. Literally.

For example, in the Necromancer campaign, which only had four maps, it took me roughly 30+ hours to beat. Of course, me being a masochistic perfectionist — I played on the hardest difficulty and explored every map throughly — might have something to do with this.

Still, the campaigns are long, and challenging enough that it scratched the tactician itch in me. The computer AI is by no means perfect, and they scale up the difficulty more by throwing huge numbers of mobs at you rather than by smarter gameplay, but by and large the game is fun.

One departure from the previous HOMM series is that the campaigns this time around has far more immersive storylines. Cutscenes abound, and every line of text by the main protagaonists is voiced.

The colorful 3D character unit models, lushly designed landscape visuals, well-written storylines and excellent music (there are separate themes per faction) all serve to make playing the campaigns a pleasure.

Ubisoft’s online DRM

And now we come to the absolutely ugly part.

If you play this game offline instead of authenticating with Ubisoft’s server online every time you play (default choice), you will not have access to parts of the single player game.

Sure, you can play the game as per normal, but you will not get to access the game’s Dynasty system, which will allow you to equip certain artifacts and use certain perks.

The edge given by these extras are not game breaking, but it surely seems draconian of Ubisoft to impose this just to ensure that gamers adhere to their DRM, even if you’re playing only the single player campaign.

Even worse is the fact that your save games are pegged to their Ubisoft cloud service. If you started the campaign in “online mode”, you lose the ability to load your previous saved games from the cloud unless you’re connected to their Ubisoft servers.

Play in”offline mode” and the saves are stored locally, but you lose content as you don’t get to access the Dynasty system.

As long as your internet connection is stable, this is not an issue. However, there was once where I couldn’t load any of my saves because I couldn’t connect to the Ubisoft servers.

My ISP’s internet connection seemed fine (a traceroute confirmed this), which meant as a gamer I was punished for Ubisoft’s authentication server being down.

Luckily the disruption was short enough that it didn’t really matter. Online DRM might be better than stealth malware installed on your PC, but not by much.

If HOMM 6 has any major flaws that is game breaking, it is the DRM issue. The bug issue will eventually be sorted by patches. If you can live with these two issues, then HOMM 6 is defintiely worth checking out.

I finally got around to writing my review of the beta about a month after the Diablo III beta was released.

If you’re a Blizzard fanboi, you know you will play this game. No matter how much you rail and complain about the cost or the extended wait, you will buy and play this game.

For example, I capitulated and ended up buying Starcraft 2 a month after it was released even after I screamed about the cost. Figures.

In any case, Diablo is a game that inspired a whole generation of clones in the action role-playing genre, and that alone makes it worthy to check out.

Familiar, yet different

So how is the Diablo 3 beta?

Dark brooding atmosphere? Check.

Lots and lots of loot? Check.

Fast paced action and frenetic mouse clicking? Check.

Dozens of skills? Check.

Sprawling tech tree? Check…nope, not so fast mister.

Gone are the detailed skill trees, where you had to spend points to level up to get skills and improve them.

Here, you automatically get skills as you level up, and they all improve as you rise with experience.

You would think that this would make it super boring as everybody in the same class will, well, be exactly the same. Diablo 3 has five classes: barbarian, demon hunter, monk, witch hunter and wizard.

Not true. The catch is that although you know many skills, you can only use a certain number of skills as the hotkeys given to you are limited.

For example, by the end of Act I, I only had two hotkeys and two mouse buttons buttons to bind skills to, though my Wizard had over 12 abilities to choose from.

This allows you to switch to different play styles as you need on the fly, and not having to worry about “spec-cing” wrongly when you build your character.

It rewards experimentation and trial-and-error. Though initially unused to this mechanic, I give it two thumbs up after playing the Diablo beta for about six hours.

A more streamlined play experience

Blizzard also added tweaks that streamline play.

For one, there is no more forgetting to load up on town portal scrolls. There is now one permanent summoning hearth stone (WoW fans will recognize this reference!) that you can use at all times.

Gone is also the need to load up on identify scrolls. Most items come identified, except for the rarest of them all.

Then there is the Cauldron of Jordan, a permanent item in your inventory that allows you to transmute any item into gold at any time, which saves you trips back to town to divest yourself of the lots of loot that you get.

Diablo 2′s Horadric Cube gets replaced by the Nephalem Cube, which, instead of combining items, breaks them down instead into basic parts like leather scraps and iron bits. These can be used to craft items back in town.

Pets can be acquired for short durations, which will automatically pick up items and gold instead of you having to click on them.

The interface and quest logs are very clearly labeled, with good automapping functions, so in this essentially linear game — at least for the first Act of Diablo 3′s beta — it is impossible to get lost.

Diablo 3, a game forever in the making

Had I not played and loved the hell out of Torchlight, I would be more impressed by the gameplay tweaks that were made to Diablo 3.

Pets that pick up loot, easy ways to sell items whilst in dungeons, well-designed waypoint systems all made Torchlight a streamlined blast to play. This indie game was also sold at a nice inexpensive price — under US$15 I believe — on the Steam store.

Torchlight came out in late 2009 whilst fans were patiently waiting for Diablo 3. It is now late 2011 and Diablo 3 won’t even be released till in early 2012.

As I played the Diablo 3 beta campaign, which only allows you to finish Act I, I wondered if Diablo 3 feels well, a little old and stale compared to similar genre titles like Torchlight, Sacred 2 and the recently released and brilliant Bastion.

That was until I tried Diablo 3′s multi-player.

Brilliant multi-player

One thing I like was that you can easily get a pick-up group of random folks to play chapters in any Act.

Either join an existing group or create one yourself. You don’t even have to wait as players will come in and out of the group game, and the mobs will scale in difficulty depending on the group.

Players can get to each other easily (there’s a teleport to player function in town). The game scales and plays fluidly as players enter and leave, and sometimes you don’t even notice, which is the hallmark of a good backend architecture.

Here’s also where the tech-treeless system of Diablo 3 really shines.

Stuck in a group with three wizards using similar skills? Mash it up with different skills on the fly and the entire play experience still feels different.

The player vs. player function is not available on the beta yet and I couldn’t test this, but the campaign multi-player mode was something that stood out.

Diablo 3 had better not take too long though.

The main thing that Torchlight was criticized for was the lack of multiplayer. This will be rectified in Torchlight 2, which will be out by the end of this year, before Diablo 3 comes out.

One thing is sure though: Diablo 3 is a game that come hell or high water, Blizzard fanbois will try.

This holiday season, get ready to flail your arms around in front of a TV, as Microsoft releases several new titles for its wildly popular console accessory Kinect.

Well, some of them are not exactly new.

Like game makers are wont to do, two of the new games are basically old games slapped with a new number behind it with some additional features. Not that we’re complaining, some of these additions are quite noteworthy.

Take Kinect Sports: Season 2 (S$59.90, available 25 October), for example. The game features 6 new sports – tennis, golf, American football, baseball, skiing and darts – and varies between team-based and individual sports. Plus, some games make use of the in-built microphone in the Kinect, such as calling an “audible” in American football.

On the other hand, we’re not sure if anyone outside of the US actually cares about American football.

The weirdness of not actually holding on to any balls, golf clubs, darts and other sporting equipment quickly fades as the games are rather immersive. Team play is particularly enjoyable, and the game will no doubt be a hit at parties.

Also joining the “Version 2” club is Dance Central 2 (S$59.90, available 21 October), the hit dancing game which gives us geeks some tips on grooving before hitting the night clubs. A new twist in Dance Battle mode lets players “Free-4-All” – quickly performing lots of moves worth tones of points so they can jump ahead in the game.

Also making its debut in Dance Central 2 is an in-game Music Store which lets users buy and download more songs to dance to. But you’ll need Xbox Live membership to access the store. Some of your favourite songs still stuck in the first Dance Central? No problem, Microsoft will let you import your library, but you’ll have to pay for that convenience.

If you’re hankering for some new games, you’ll be happy to hear about Forza Motorsport 4 (S$59.90, available 11 October). It’s quite a unique racing game which lets players walk around cars in a virtual showroom, crouch down to look at the details, or open doors and hood using gestures.

But if you think racing using invisible steering wheels sounds stupid, you can buy a Wireless Speed Wheel accessory to play with. There’s even a limited edition (S$84.90) with more goodies if you have the extra cash.

Last but not least, Microsoft has tied up with Disneyland for Kinect: Disneyland adventures (S$59.90, available 15 November), an interactive game which lets children explore a virtual Disneyland theme park. If your kids are clamouring to go to Disneyland, this should be enough to keep them quiet for the next few months!

Players can run around the park and step into various minigames based on real-life attractions. Hug a virtual princess, high-five a virtual Mickey Mouse, collect autographs, and accept quests!

These quests are actually pretty fun. One, for instance, has you explore Neverland at Peter Pan’s side and take up your sword to fight Captain Hook. If you prefer adult pirates, you can also battle your way through Pirates of the Carribean.

Time to sweat it out before hitting that Christmas turkey!