The Lazy Geek

E3 2010: Nintendo Press Conference Recap

By the end of Nintendo press conferences, I’m usually either really happy with what they showed off or extremely disappointed (I’m looking at you, 2008!). Luckily, this year was pretty damn good and Nintendo came out swinging, so here’s a recap of Nintendo’s E3 2010 press conference. Read the rest of this entry »

E3 2010: Microsoft Press Conference Recap

E3 is here, and, well, has been for a couple of days, and gamers have some new toys and games to be pretty excited about. But what about Microsoft’s plate of offerings? Well, here’s a quick recap of what I think were the hits and misses for Microsoft’s Press Conference this year. Read the rest of this entry »

Guild Wars 2 Combat Articles: Traits

This week saw the release of more enticing information for Guild Wars 2 in the form of Ben Miller, a game designer for GW2, talking about traits and their role in the upcoming sequel to ArenaNet’s hit MMO, Guild Wars. “What are traits?” you might ask. Well, according to Ben, “At a basic level, traits make you better at what you choose to do. You slot traits in order to modify skills and attributes. Once you have mastered a handful of traits they become a key component in creating your overall build.”

Now, I hate to compare, but this sounds similar to World of Warcraft’s glyph system, except more elaborate because that’s just what Anet does.

According to Ben, there will be 100 or so traits for each profession to master, which as you may guess, leaves a lot of room open for different trait-builds, and each profession will focus on different activities to learn such traits, so, for example, a warrior would train physically while an elementalist would study ancient arcane tomes. This will help to make each profession feel even more unique, which sounds fantastic to me.

Combine the trait system with the new skill system in Guild Wars 2, and I’m starting to see how players will be rewarded more for experimenting or even running unorthodox builds, which I’m already accustomed to. Ask anyone in my alliance about the guy who runs crazy builds that don’t work half of the time.

You can read the full article on the main Guild Wars 2 website and I suggest you do as I barely cover the article and it’ll help you get more excited for the release of GW2!

P.S. Guild Wars 2 will be at PAX Prime

End of the Week Notes, WWDC Has Ended

That’s right, today is the final day of Apple’s Wordlwide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco and it seems to have a pretty big hype, especially for the new (but not new) iPhone 4 which will bring some pretty cool features, like a 720p HD video recorder and a front-facing camera. I wish I could get one, but I guess I don’t have enough friends to warrant buying one. There were some other things that might interest everyone, but chances are you’ve already read up on it so we’ll leave it at that. you can tell I’m not a big apple guy.

On the gaming side, this past Thursday was to be the the beginning of the ‘Key to the City’ event for everyone who pre-ordered All Points Bulletin, but it seems that has been put on hold for…actually I don’t really know.

We’ve worked tirelessly to bring the service online, installing and configuring a massive amount of new hardware in our data-centres, to help meet the high demand and bring you the best experience we can. As we’re sure you’ll appreciate, this is a huge undertaking and unfortunately on this occasion, we’ve hit a number of installation delays.

Oh, okay, I guess that makes sense. So while I’m waiting for Saturday to roll around, the War in Kryta in Guild Wars is still raging on with new quests and bounties being given out, and there’s some more info on GW2 that I’ll go into more detail about in a later post!

Have a fun weekend, everyone!

P.S. I’m going to PAX Prime this September. Which is cool I guess.

Google to Release Chrome OS This Fall, With a Netbook?

Earlier this week, it was announced that Google would release its Chrome OS this autumn for free.

“We are working on bringing the device later this fall,” said Google vice president of product management Sundar Pichai at CompuTex Taipei, Asia’s biggest IT trade show. “It’s something which we are very excited by … We expect it to reach millions of users on day one,” he said. Read the rest of this entry »