Crab Toss – Skill Overview

Southsun Cove basically got “relaunched” and for a few weeks, we can enjoy the mini game “Crab Toss”. Unfortunately, this is just a temporary addition to the game. Either way, it’s there now for us to play. In order to enter, you speak with the NPC “Karlotta” on the small island north of “Sawtooth Bay” who will explain to you what the game is about. As seems to be typical for ArenaNet, this is just a very basic explanation with no way to see the skills you will get before entering the game arena. What I knew from others was that it’s a game where you need to carry a crab. That crab will be in the arena-like place you see next to Karlotta and it’s played against other human players. When you enter, you get tossed in an arena with other players randomly and it’s “free for all”. You can and need to steal the crab from whoever’s carrying it. The longer you carry the crab, the more points you achieve. After a certain amount of time, the player with the most points is chosen as the winner.

When I first entered, I just stood there doing nothing while reading the skill descriptions. Then I thought I was good to go… until I had a crab. I clicked something not knowing that my skills had changed and I tossed the crab to another player. Bah. It got really difficult once I saw the crates and the resulting extra items.

That was when I decided to take pictures of the different skills and read about them while sipping on a cup of coffee without playing the game, so I would not have to worry about reading, understanding, memorizing, and playing at the same time.

Regular skills

First, there are the four what I call “regular skills” that you have when the game begins and when you’re not carrying a crab or using an item found in the barrels and/or on the ground.

Skill number	Skill name	Skill description	Other information
1	Swipe	Swipe at a competitor, and steal whatever they are carrying.	Range: 150 Cast time: 1/2 second Cooldown: 4 seconds
2	Find Rock	Pick up a rock.	Range: 150 Cast time: 1/2 second Cooldown: 5 seconds
3	Dash	Dash at foes. Hold down to increase the length of the dash.	Evade: 3 1/4 seconds Cast time: 2 seconds Cooldown: 8 seconds
4	Punch	Punch a competitor, dazing them and causing them to drop the crab.	Range: 150 Cast time: 1/4 second Cooldown: 4 seconds

After using skill no. 2 “Find Rock”, you have a rock and can throw that one. The rock replaces “Swipe”. Skills 3 and 4 remain the same.

Skill number	Skill name	Skill description	Other information
1	Rock Toss	Toss a rock, dazing your target.	Range: 600 Cast time: 1/4 second

Skills when carrying the crab – Skills 3 and 4 are identical with the regular skills

The first two skills change when you can grab a crab. This is what confused me when I had first gotten the crab as I accidentally tossed it right to another player. Yeah, smart move. ;)

Skill number	Skill name	Skill description	Other information
1	Crab Crack	Smash a competitor with the crab’s hard shell, knocking them down.	Range: 150 Cast time: 1/2 second Cooldown: 2 seconds
2	Crab Toss	Toss the crab to another player.	Range: 1000 Cast time: 3/4 seconds Cooldown: 1 second

Skills from crate-items

At some point, crates will be thrown into the arena. The content will be random and I’m not sure I’ve found every item so far – so this part may be incomplete. For your convenience, I will edit it as soon as I find new items. :)

Southsun Punch – Skills 1 to 4 are identical to the regular skills.

Skill number	Skill name	Skill description	Other information
5	Drink Southsun Punch	Drink a refreshing bottle of Southsun Punch to restore your health and endurance	Cast time: 1 second Cooldown: 4 seconds

Plank – Skills 1 and 2 are different from the regular skills

Skill number	Skill name	Skill description	Other information
1	Plank Smash	Leap at a competitor, causing knockdown on impact. Breaks plank.	Range: 600 Cast time: 3/4 seconds Cooldown: 6 seconds
2	Swing Plank	Swing a plank at a competitor, causing a blowout on impact. Breaks plank.	Range: 150 Cast time: 3/4 seconds Cooldown: 4 seconds

Karka Egg – Skills 1 and 2 are different from the regular skills

Skill number	Skill name	Skill description	Other information
1	Throw Egg	Throw your egg at the target area, immobilizing any foe within the blast radius.	Range: 1000 Cast time: 1/2 second
2	Deploy Egg Trap	Deploy your egg like a trap. Immobilizes targets	Cast time: 1/2 second

Conch – Skills 1 – 4 are identical to the regular skills

Skill number	Skill name	Skill description	Other information
5	Blow Conch	Blow the conch, causing the competitors to flee in fear.	Range: 400 Cast time: 1/2 second Cooldown: 6 seconds

Fishing pole – replaces the first skill, no second skill. Skills 3 and 4 are identical to the regular skills.

Skill number	Skill name	Skill description	Other information
1	Go Fish	Cast a line at your target, pulling it toward you.	Range: 1200 Cast time: 1 second Cooldown: 2 seconds

Anchor – replaces the first skill, no second skill. Skills 3 and 4 are identical to the regular skills.

Skill number	Skill name	Skill description	Other information
1	Anchor Fling	Throw your anchor high in the air. Knocks down your target when it returns to the ground.	Range: 5000 Cast time: 1/2 second

Last but not least, don’t forget to avoid the big veteran karkas. If they roll over you, you lose all your health and will be unable to play for a few seconds. When you’ve got a debuff from the karka hatchlings (the kind of debuff that doesn’t wear off after a few seconds – see screenshot below), dodge to remove it. When your life would reach 0, you get stunned for a few seconds before getting your life back to 1000 which enables you to continue playing.

Karka Hatchlings Debuff

There can also be more than one crab at the same time, apparently. So choose wisely which player to follow when that happens. Maybe a crab-carrier is right behind you and it’d be a waste to follow the other one instead.

Once the time has run out, the player with the most points wins. This opens a score board right in the middle of the screen. Don’t forget to close this and walk to the middle of the arena because there will be a chest waiting for you to open it! :o) So far, I have only gotten green and blue items from it, but who knows what else can be in there.

The 10/10 project: Dark Age of Camelot (Day 4)

I chose Dark Age of Camelot which was released in 2001 to be the 4th game I would play for the 10/10 project. I played Warhammer Online for a full year when it got released and I’d heard so many good things about Dark Age of Camelot from WAR players. I guess just as much as current Guild Wars 2 players hear about Guild Wars. Warhammer was thought to be DAoC’s successor, at least in spirit. But WAR only has 2 realms whereas DAoC has three. Well, there are many differences between those two games, but the debate of 3 factions vs. 2 factions was and still is pretty popular. I think it’s better with three factions, but unfortunately, a lot of game designers prefer two factions. But well, this isn’t about the question how many factions a game should have, after all. This is about DAoC and that game has three.

Even though it’s a very old game, DAoC still has a sub. You can sign up for the 14 day trial which I did to try out the game. I knew from the beginning that no matter how good the game is, I would not sub to it in the end. There are so many other good games out there where I don’t need to pay every month if I don’t want to, so it’d be a waste of my money.

The installation process was fast and smooth. There were no issues at all. After launching the game, the first thing I did was rejoice that it lets me play in windowed mode. I use two monitors and alt-tabbing out and in is annoying. I like to use the second monitor for chatting with friends who don’t happen to be playing the same games (or any games) at the same time. Unfortunately, I soon realized that the window was tiiiiny. And no matter what I tried, I couldn’t resize the window to the size of my screen. I’m going to go ahead a bit and tell you that this is only a problem for the very beginning until you’re finished with character creation. Once you log in with your character, the window changes and had the size of my screen. If I had known that before, it would have saved me 10 minutes of playing around and googling. ;)

The character creation is nice. The graphics show the age of the game, of course. There are lots of races (who belong to three different realms: Albion, Hibernia and Midgard) and classes to choose from. As the game has female dwarves, that’s what I tried out. I just can’t resist. ;)

Within less than 10 minutes of playing, I had encountered a few bugs and problems and that’s when I decided to quit playing. The tutorial is good enough to get you started, but something about the controls and movement was weird. I am not a key-turner and prefer turning with the mouse. Unfortunately, when I tried to do so, I kept looking at one direction and moving to another. At one point, my character got stuck and I couldn’t move at all, no matter what I did. I don’t remember how it got fixed… I think I relogged, but I’m not sure.It was weird, though, as it just happened without me doing anything or moving somewhere and it’s never good if that happens to a player within the first few minutes after starting the game.

I also wanted to move the different parts of the UI around on my screen and ended up with every single window at the same place – right next to my character at the center of the screen (see the screenshot on the left for an early stage with lots of windows stuck there while I tried to figure out what’s wrong). It took me quite a while and I even installed the game on bookahnerk’s PC to test what’s wrong. We finally figured out the source of the problems. I am a left-hander and I have the Razer DeathAdder left-hand edition. This is an ergonomic mouse for left-hander which, unfortunately, comes with the left and right mouse buttons switched. While I do need to use the mouse with my left hand (trying to use it with my right hand results in very slow movements and a headache plus concentration problems), I do not want to have the buttons switched. I grab a mouse, move it from the right side of the keyboard to the left and use it with my left hand. But that’s about the only thing I change when I’m using the PC of a right-hander.

Now in order to do that with the DeathAdder, I have to use the Windows controls to switch the left and right buttons back. Confusing? Yeah. ;) Most of the games do not have any issues with that. League of Legends is one that blatantly ignores the Windows settings which means that my mouse buttons stay switched. I think Torchlight 2 does that as well. Games like Warhammer Online, Guild Wars 2, Lord of the Rings Online don’t do it and just go along with the settings I chose in Windows. That means that the mouse is in my left hand. I use the physical left button with my middle finger to left-click and the physical right button to right-click with my index finger.

DAoC is special. Most of the controls, movements, etc. listen to the Windows settings (like right-clicking an NPC to talk to them), some ignore it (like moving the camera view with the mouse) and… the UI windows apparently listen to both. I left-click and I can kind of move the window but instead of… moving it, it gets repositioned at the center of the screen as the second command it listens to is “hide the cursor in the middle of the screen and look around with the camera”. – That’s probably a very bad explanation. Bookahnerk explained it a lot better to me once he had realized what went wrong. The bottom line, however, is that whenever I accidentally click on a window, it gets repositioned to the center of the screen and the only way to reliably get it away from there again is to go to the Windows controls, switch the mouse buttons, move the window away again, switch the mouse buttons back and continue playing.

That’s a very long-winded and, as I said, probably confusing explanation for: No, thank you. ;)

The good news about this game is that the starter zone wasn’t empty at all. So it seems that there are still people playing the game (you never know with such old games). But the monthly fee as well as the issues with my mouse mean that I am not interested in this game.

The 10/10 project: Pirate101 (Day 3)

I have played (well, tried out, rather) Wizard101 before and expected Pirate101 to be more or less the same just in a pirate setting instead of the wizarding school. I was mostly right, it seems. The graphics reminded me a bit of Torchlight 2 – and of Wizard101, of course.

My first impression of the game was: “Awww, that’s cute!” It does give you the impression of being a game that’s primarily aimed at young gamers, though, especially with the security settings. You cannot create a character and give it any name you like. You get three parts and a wheel of choices for each part. My character’s name is “Practical Sonia W…something”. I forgot the last part. And that’s the bad thing about a naming system like that: I just chose anything because what I would have loved to create was a “Paeroka”, but that wasn’t possible. So there’s very little attachment to the name on my side. On the other hand, it also means that you won’t see any ridiculous or offensive names.

No free naming and the option to disallow chat are two things that I’ve seen in Pirate101 which probably only exist to make it a kid-friendly game. I’ve seen both in Wizard101 as well. When the chat option is active, you cannot chat and you cannot see anybody else chatting. You can use preset text like “Thanks”, etc. Others see a chat bubble that’s striked through next to your character’s name, so they know you can’t converse with them. As I’ve told bookahnerk, I could see myself play this game with a young sibling, my kid, etc. – if I had any. ;)

In general, I like the pirate setting. It’s definitely different from the usual fantasy stuff, but not that different in the end. You can only play as a human, but the game world has lots of races like froggies, foxes, and so on. So there’s definitely fantasy in there. The story was interesting enough, nothing too special or ground-breaking, but solid I’d say. At least, I did actually read what it’s all about. They mentioned “when you get your own ship” a few times. I haven’t gotten one yet, but I assume sooner or later, that would be the case. And the shop clearly shows items for your ship. Yes, it’s a free to play game with an item shop and the possibility to pay for a monthly sub. There are also weapons, etc. in the shop, but I’ve no idea if it’s “pay to win” or just “pay to avoid the item-grind”. What the shop website shows you is the there are regions/extra content you can unlock (a bit like they do it in Lord of the Rings Online, I guess, where you buy regions with their quests) or you can buy a membership starting at $9.95 a month. The good news is that after playing the game for the limited time that I have, I did not see one single advertisement for or nudging towards the shop. Yes, the shop icon is there and I did click on it to see what they have. But I did not notice any tooltip informing me of something like “this is restricted for free players, please subscribe or buy X unlock to use this”.

Speaking of the story, a nice little feature I saw was that after logging back into the game, I got a short recap of the quest chain’s story so far. That was neat. All in all, the tutorial (I assume it’s still part of the tutorial) has a nice flow. You’re told everything you need to know to get around in the game as it comes and you slowly get in touch with all the game’s features. I don’t like games that overwhelm you with information within the first few minutes on the game and that doesn’t happen here. On the other hand, it also doesn’t feel too slow. You’re playing the game, you’re advancing in your story and little by little, you get more information on how everything works.

The combat in the game is not your usual combat. You freeze in place and the camera moves until a game board appears with you and your companions on them as well as any other players and their companions who may walk into the combat area. Then you choose which field you move onto or, if you’re close enough, which foe to attack. The fighting scenes are animated, but you have no control over what happens. It makes it quite strategic. You also have a special ability (only one in the beginning, but it looks like there’ll be more when you level up higher) that you can use once during such a fight. Your companions also have special abilities and you can also tell them to use them once in a fight. Each fighting round, there’s a timer counting down. You need to decide for your moves while the timer counts down. If you haven’t done so in the end, the combat moves into the next round and you’re just not doing anything at all. That happened once when I got distracted and forgot that there’s a timer. The foes, however, still attack you in that round. ;)

You can level up your own character as well as your companions. You can decide for those special combat abilities as well as choose them for your companions (I think). And then you need to choose which of your companions is “first mate” which means that this companion is the one you see walking by your side through the game world. This companion will also be the one who fights by your side in every combat. Sometimes, you get more than one companion, though. I’ve only had two so far, so I don’t know how many you can have by your side. In my case, it was obviously a maximum of two. ;)

When you’ve lost hit points during a fight, you do not just regenerate health afterwards. There are flying red thingies (are they supposed to be fruit?) that you walk into and they regenerate a bit of your health. They’re around everywhere but they’re not so common that you can just mindlessly walk anywhere without a worry. And during a combat, you don’t regenerate health. But the fox companion has a heal that you can use once during a fight. That’s saved me before. ;)

The game’s refreshingly different, but a tad too kid-like for my taste. That is just my first impression, though, and a lot of things hint at the game being more complex. I’ve enjoyed my time in the game, but at the same time, I’m not too sad to move on. Maybe I’ll have a look at it again later on, maybe not. If I did, I probably wouldn’t bother with the membership fee and just play the game for free.

This was the third game for this project. The fourth is already installed and calling for me: Dark Age of Camelot! :)

Edit: Syp has written about Pirate101 as well now. Hop over there if you want to read about his experiences in the game.

The 10/10 Project: Everquest (Day 2)

Everquest is the second game for Syp’s 10/10 project. This will not be a long post, however. As you can probably guess from this, I did not play it long.

But let me tell you a bit more about what I did. The installation was easy enough thanks to Steam. I don’t know if ProSiebenSat1 has already taken over Everquest as well or not, but I logged on with my SOE-account and had no issues doing so. I also don’t follow that whole deal closely enough, so I’m not sure if we have to use P7S1 or not or if we can just stay with SOE. During the last few months, I’ve read several different information and it seemed to change faster than the weather. ;)

Either way, SOE it was. I rolled dice when it came to deciding for a race and class. 16 races and 16 classes – that’s a lot! The results gave me a gnome necromancer. Having played a little bit of Everquest 2, I guess I’ve set my “anchor” at EQ2 as basis for the graphics. The characters looked so similar to EQ2, that I was constantly reminded of EQ2 and the graphics just look much better in that game. So, compared to that, EQ just looked bland and boring.

Yeah, I didn’t get much further than that…

The main problem was that I felt I really needed to read all the tutorials. You need to type an answer to an NPC in order to advance in a quest. Don’t get me wrong, I am not criticizing the fact that you need to do it. I actually like the idea. But that does not make it easy to get settled into the game and start playing. The tutorials come as quests with lots of quest text. I worked through a few, but then realized that I would have to spend the gaming hours I had set aside for Everquest reading through the tutorials only. At that point, I decided to give up and left the game.

Poor Everquest. I’m sure it was great – and maybe even still is, this is not for me to judge – but I couldn’t get into it. I’ll leave the game to those that have or still do enjoy it and will instead rather listen to them when they share the great stories about their adventures. But if I ever feel the “Everquest itch” again, I will log into Everquest 2 instead.

Everquest is one of three “classic MMOs” on my list, by the way. I’m curious what the other two will be like, but they’re not the next ones on my list. ;)

The 10/10 Project: The Missing Ink (Day 1)

The first of the 10 MMOs that I’ll be playing for the 10/10 project was “The Missing Ink”.

All in all, I had 30 games on my list and went through them to see what they’re all about. Some were removed immediately, others immediately went to my “to play”-list. My first impression after seeing this game’s website was to delete the game from my list. I don’t want to dismiss a game just because I think the graphics are “too weird”. So I decided to have a look at their Kickstarter page. I like getting the gist of what a game is about in a relatively short text or an introduction video and usually, Kickstarter pages are great for that. Unfortunately, that video made me want to delete the game from my list even more. Those paper-cut avatars aren’t the game’s strongest suit if you ask me. But the word “sandbox” had still caught my attention and the word “ridiculous” (at 0:39) made me continue watching the video… and then I saw the build-mode. Now it wasn’t just on my list, it moved to no. 1 because I was really curious and wanted to see what that game was about. It’s currently in open beta for PC and Mac which means that you just sign up and you’re ready to play. Literally, as it’s browser-based (a bit like Glitch in more than just this aspect).

The background idea is charming and weird at the same time: All stories (fairy tales, etc.) are real, but they got corrupted somehow. So you will be working at the Ministry of Defending Stories in order to set the stories right again.

When I first got into the game, I probably got lost somehow. Maybe I should have clicked on the left button instead of “enter your blurb”, but I found myself in the building mode and the book that popped up with all the tutorial information didn’t help at all. It told me to click on my hero icon but that one was grayed out, etc. I finally found my way to the MODs headquarters (kind of like a city hub, maybe?) where I got tutorial quests. I could also customize my avatar a little bit. The game then told me how to move, how to fight, how to use teleports, etc.

The combat is – not very challenging at the moment. Some weapons come with skills that then automatically appear in your hotbar. I got a wand that gives me two spells, for example.You right-click a mob, auto-attack it and use spells or special attacks whenever they’re ready. At least, that’s what I did with the combat dummies in the tutorial quest. ;) I returned to my blurb as soon as possible. I don’t know what the blurb is about. When you first enter your own blurb, it’s just a huge empty space. I started construction mode (or “constructifying”, I should say) and added a ground (it was plain white at first which wasn’t too pretty) and a simple house. I couldn’t get the roof right, so it’s without one for now. Hey, at least there’s a bed, chairs and a table. That should be enough for now. I guess you can get really creative with that blurb, especially as you can buy more stuff for it with the in game’s currency – and probably with real currency, too, I assume. There is a shop and it looks like it’ll primarily be about buying stuff to make your avatar stand out from the crowd, buying additional inventory slots or teleport tokens. I have no idea if you can’t teleport without those tokens. That would be awkward as the movement speed is relatively slow. The blurb can also be used for the Evil Genius Competition at the moment: Design your own raid zone. This is actually quite cool.

Speaking of “raid”: I did not do much fighting, but from what I saw, it felt very much like a regular MMO. You decide if that’s a good thing or not. ;) For me, it was distracting to see those paper-cut characters with fitting animations when I’m used to playing games like Guild Wars 2.

I also saw a tab for “crafting”, but it’s not in the game yet. Other than that, everything seemed to be working and, most importantly, I did not encounter any bugs or issues.

My conclusion: I could imagine that Glitch fans may like it – depending on how the combat turns out and if you like combat. But the fighting seems ok and easy enough, I guess. ^^ Other than that, the “raid zone” seems to suggest that the game is not just intended for light-hearted casual “I’ll play once every other week” gameplay, but I did not investigate that further. The building mode was the most interesting thing for me personally, but it did not manage to draw me in enough to keep playing. Still, it doesn’t get a bad review from me, because me not liking the style does not mean the game is bad. It just means “not for me”. :)