Charlie's Blog

I'll admit that I have a subconscious habit of being consistently on the fringes of hype. I have never played WOW. Bioshock is sitting on my shelf still holding passionately to its plastic-wrap virginity. I played Portal only after it was given to me. I played BF2 religiously but I didn't start until after BF2142 was released. (I still like BF2 waaaaay better than 2142 BTW) and I never played BF1942. I could go on but you get the picture.

Recently, amid the frenzied chaos that was the launch of Age of Conan, some friends decided that we should pick up the new release from EA: "Hellgate London". Taking my aforementioned tendencies into account you would be accurate to assume that I accepted with only mild trepidation....

Now, try to understand that this is my first foray into the Most Shameful of Internet Addictions and this is exactly what I expected. Hellgate London is pretty much your quintessential dungeon-crawling game in which you play a character in a post-apocalyptic world where the last remnants of humanity are involved in some sort of guerrilla-warfare to protect what is left of society. "Why England?" you ask... Well it sounds a lot better than: "Hellgate: Compton" Although I assume that would make a dashing sequel, or at least a disappointing expansion. But I digress... After booting up my gaming pc, and installing the game I realized it was too late and all my friends had gone to bed. "Oh well" I thought to myself, I'll play by myself and level up a bit so I will be super-badass when we all play. I clicked multiplayer and it started the updating that you would expect from a mmorpg. After an hour--okay I exaggerated a little, more like 58 1/2 minutes--the game rebooted and told me I had to download the patch to play online... ok... So, what was it doing that whole time? So I went to the hellgate website to download the *400 MEGABYTE* patch. I then decided to play single-player while waiting for the gargantuan download with the assumption that my character could go between the multiplayer and singleplayer games. That is not the case. My fault for not checking but regardless, that development was a little disappointing.

Some other issues are small annoyances. One of which is the known bug where if you take a particularly hard hit the game screen will go black-and-white until you die or sometimes until you close the game and restart. I only had this happen to me once but one of my friends has it happen almost every time he plays. Needless to say it's pretty annoying.

One other thing is, in my opinion, kind of a big deal: Hellgate, much like Diablo, and WOW (I've heard) depends on quests that have you kill x number of a certain creature in a certain place or collect a certain number of things that drop from certain characters. This is fine but there have been several times where I have killed/picked-up 9 out of 10 things I needed for the quest and spent hours just combing the entire area looking for one last creature that apparently didn't spawn or didn't register the kill or didn't drop the item I needed. Seriously guys, if you're gonna have problems like this SPAWN EXTRAS! It's simple! put some code in there to keep people from picking up too many or stop counting kills after the right number are slain. I've never programmed a game but something like that can't be that hard!

I realize that I am coming down a little hard on the game. The things I mentioned are me being nitpicky, cynical, and cruel, and were in no way meant to dissuade anyone who is thinking about buying it. By all means, go out, spend $30 on it. It will give you countless hours of enjoyment. If you do, look me up. My character is named "SkittishYittish".