The obligatory intro?!

03.07.2009

Da tested, mother approved.

Dan tested, mother approved.

I’m sure a few of you have seen a few comments I have left on various topics here. Here’s a little bit of information on who I am….somewhat! I thought it’d be a good idea to talk a little about who I am* before people read about any articles I will be posting here.

*More than half of this is in my profile, so I shamelessly cut and pasted a lot here!

Gamer since ’83 (God bless the Commodore 64 and Coleco Vision), I can play just about any genre as long as the games are fun. I have gone from early “programming” of games (C64 with Compute Gazette’s section of inputting text information to build the game), to past obsessions with MMORPG’s (6+ years of Everquest, 2 years of Everquest 2, 6 months of City of Heroes, 3 months of Vanguard, 1 month of FFXI, 1 week with Star Wars Galaxies, 8 hours of that horrible ‘hold my hand’ MMO World of Warcrap) to reoccurring obsessions (nearly 10 years playing Street Fighter 3: 3rd Strike and going from Alex to Remy to Dudley to everyone at once to now Ken) right into new obsessions (Street Fighter IV).

Click here to see me playing Everquest circa 2005 — Vishimtar the Fallen wipe out (to the tune of Mudvayne – Just)

I love to piss people off whenever I can, in whatever non hateful but more playful ways when I’m playing games, but ultimately I do things for the love of the game. I’m probably a lot nicer than I should be IRL, but karma was proven to me early last year, so things never go unrewarded for me. I like keeping my business private, so if I ever tell anyone something about myself that I never really share, be proud! Or something.

I used to do gaming reviews back around roughly 1998 – 2000 at GameSages (at the time, the largest video game cheat database on the internet, affiliated with IGN and later purchased by them and changed to codes.ign.com) under the name Tyrant. I miss getting such gems as Superman 64 for free to review.

Getting a game free to review is cool....getting Superman 64 free to review was not!

Getting a game free to review is cool....getting Superman 64 free to review was not!

Since I’ve always had a strong and open opinion of gaming, I thought I’d try to rekindle the old passion of game reviews every so often at Chocolate Lemon, with other oddities thrown in here and there. I enjoy things ranging from debating why Suikoden was the best PS1 RPG and Final Fantasy VII was not close to Suikoden in some key areas, or showing appreciation for obscure games that totally reek of awesomeness (Culdcept Saga on the 360).

That’s enough about me. I can ramble worse than a drunk old man outside an OTB, so I’ll stop here. Hopefully I get a few pieces done soon for people to read about and see what everyone else thinks about the subject at hand. My contact stuff is in my profile, from MSN to MySpace (not that any of that matters right now!) Until then….

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Jason V.

Jason Velez has been reviewing video games off and on for the last 14 years, including his time with GameSages, a then IGN affiliated video game code database that's now owned by IGN. He is a huge gaming enthusiast, has an old school soul, is a somewhat collector, and is just an overall geek. Follow him on twitter @Jas0nVelez

http://www.twitter.com/Jas0nVelez


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  • Master ∅

    Welcome to the CL family!

    Finally someone who shares my views on MMOs and WoW. I look forward seeing your future work, and we should definitely get together online for some games.

  • http://clgamer.com Panthro

    Welcome! Good article. Look forward to more,

  • Brett824

    To view WoW as a “hold my hand” MMO is pretty uninformed IMO. While it may be incredibly Fisher Price and comparatively simple, most things can seem pretty simple when you only play 8 hours of them. I can’t be completely unbiased, but WoW is one of the developing top prize-per-capita PC Gaming E-Sports. Considering WoW as an MMO for casual play, sure it’s “too casual”, but if you play for over 100 days /played (like I have wasted my life doing) and get involved with end game Arena, you realize how deep and viable of a competitive game WoW is. As a WoW E-sports enthusiast, I can only be disappointed with the way my sport is viewed by the general gamer.

  • http://www.myspace.com/galarian Jason V.

    I can definitely tell you my view is a bit skewed when talking about WoW. To be fair, it was more like 12 hours, but I wasn’t counting! My biggest issues when I played came down to it being too easy, boring and too fast to level (hence the hand holding comment). An untrained chimp missing 9 fingers can go from 1 to max in a day or two. Maybe cause it really is geared towards a casual audience, one that I should have been in for years, instead of neck deep like I was for all the MMO’s I played more than 3 months.

    One other thing that annoyed me were the “WoW kiddies”. Seems like “B-net kiddy” transfers and other kids that shouldn’t be playing a game like this, all flock to this game. Playing EQ as long as I did, I ran into a good number of kids, but they acted and carried themselves a lot better and more respectfully than WoW kiddies. A community can really help mold an experience as well, and I was probably spoiled with an excellent one.

    I can also be the first to tell you that EQ was always too demanding of a game for way too many years. I remember raids starting at 6pm and ending at 8am (okay, that was three times ever, and those were some awesome times with a game). But all in all, it was a complicated game with too much downtime. But then again, the people I would be around nightly, drove my desire to keep playing, no matter how broken Plane of Mischief was in versions 1-4, or how many times it took to finally kill Ventani the Warder. Oh damn, I’m having a nerd attack!

    Sure, my WoW experience was pretty short and one sided, but from everything I saw and tried, and everything friends tell me, it’s sometimes simple to a fault, too easy to get levels, too many kiddies and looks like an N64 game. WoW helped mainstream MMO’s, and that’s probably what is killing the MMO market now imo. Turning something quite niche into something mainstream is not always a good thing. Ask Ashlee Simpson! She was cute, not annoying and enjoyed by a few people (family). She goes on SNL and lip syncs the wrong song, and she becomes a mainstream disaster!

    You have commercials with guys like Mr. T and William Shatner promoting the game, and it makes me sad that MMO’s have come to this — hiring people who’ve probably never touched a computer once (outside Shatner) and promoting their ‘character’ for a game. It annoys me seeing that, not cause WoW is successful, but it just invites more dimwits that shouldn’t be playing such games.

    At least Shatner and Ozzy are working better than better than /pizza ever did.

    I’ve wanted to try again, but I can never bring myself to installing that game on my HDD again. Hell, I tried Star Wars Galaxies recently, and man, that went from fun to brutally repetitive. I don’t even think I’d have the time or brain power (or lack thereof sometimes with MMO’s) to seriously sit down with WoW and give it a chance if I wanted to.

    I’m glad people do enjoy it regardless. I can probably contribute a large portion of dislike towards WoW from being somewhat ‘old school’ as well as just not liking it in general. I had well over 350 days played on one character and tons more on other peoples accounts and characters, plus months worth of total playtime in other MMO’s. So I am a sad soul, I mean I feel somewhat ‘old school’ and have played a variety of them. WoW just never worked for me for so man different ways. There’s still millions that do play it though.

    Thanks for the response! I hope I explained enough of why I feel the way I do when it comes to WoW and a little history around why as well. Also, I ramble too much, even still.

  • Brett824

    Honestly, people become extremely angry at WoW because of it’s immense popularity and outrageous advertising. If I were to mirror that for like.. Street Fighter, just take a look. Street Fighter has had a million games, spin offs, movies, etc, adored by many as a childhood game and played by many competitively. The only difference is the positive spin on Street Fighter the average gamer gives BECAUSE of that beloved “childhood” aspect of it. People don’t know about 5 hour WoW progression nights, 4 hour full clears of weekly raids, 8 hours for 3 days straight of bootcamping for the Gladiator grind at the end of the season.

  • Brett824

    (err, cut off my last comment by accident)

    People view WoW a lot too much as a casual leveling game. Tbh, I spent maybe 15 days /played leveling. The intense gameplay comes from the endgame. PvE endgame near the end of an expansion becomes an incredibly intense race for firsts while learning encounters and farming for best in slot items. Top end WoW raiding before the current expansion WAS incredibly difficult and time consuming. It was also very accessible and easily playable with friends, which the “hardcore” gamer viewed as a negative thing.

    WoW is without a doubt a PvP game, and CERTAINLY has the most in depth PvP in any MMO in the form of Arena. I’d encourage anyone to read about high end WoW arena and watch a view VoDs on youtube or something. It’s a fast pace, communication driven e-sport that people overlook. But either way, I don’t expect everyone (Especially the hardcore) to like WoW. But the Casualizing of MMOs is the BEST thing for MMOs, because it allows them the growth and expansion as a genre. Soon they will be complex endgame PvE and PvP games, not Maplestory retarded grind-fests.

  • http://www.myspace.com/galarian Jason V.

    I have to agree with how PVP is the deepest through WoW. There’s a lot to do with different rewards and whatnot. Definitely cannot knock that at all. I really do want to take invest some time into WoW for a ‘second chance’ or sorts, with this temporary wealth of free time. Maybe if I do, I could do a little write up of my experience on ChocolateLemon. Something for me to think about perhaps.

  • Master ∅

    >WoW is one of the developing top prize-per-capita PC Gaming E-Sports.

    No it isn’t. If you look at the Arena circuit MLG is running (the only one available in the United States ATM), first prize is only $10,000. The German circuit isn’t that much better either. Korean Programmers laugh at that kind of money.

    Starcraft is an E-sport.

    Counterstrike is an E-sport.

    Heck, even DOTA is more of an E-sport than WoW.

    If you’re talking strictly MMO E-sports, then yeah WoW is probably the top of it’s game. But compared to general gaming E-sports, WoW’s PVP is a complete joke. It’s extreamly unbalanced, and it’s gearing curve is just outrageous. And the top ranked players have the same loadout classes (I forget, it’s probably Deathknight and Paladin now). Class match ups are such a huge factor that it pretty much is completely skewed.

    WoW made it’s fame through easily accessible PvE and level grinding. It was BUILT as a PvE game, with Battlegrounds and Arena tacked on much, MUCH later. Even though there has been PvP since it’s beginning, in it’s original conception WoW was meant to be a PvE experience, and I can guarantee you over 90% of it’s player base plays it in that way.

    Trust me on that.

    Now, trying to turn the game into an Arena PvP game… well, that’s several years worth of PvE design to work around. In essence, turning WoW, a fundementally PvE game, in to a fair and competitive PvP game, is just not possible. And with the addition of a the Deathknight in WotLK…well, class balance has just been thrown into the wind once again.

    If you want to make a PvP game, you have to build it from the ground up to that objective. Retro-fitting does work, but nowhere near as good as having one custom-built to that objective.

    Even MMO’s like EVE Online and a few others have comparable balance and depth in their PvP experiences, without nearly the same amount of “carebear” elements and hand holding that Jason mentioned, even though they don’t consider their tournaments “E-sport”. I realize WoW’s Arena has a sizable audience, but then couldn’t I say SSBB has a sizable audience? And even THAT game’s PvP has more balance than fucking WoW.

    Also on the topic of casualising MMO’s, long story short: this is NOT a good thing. Not by a longshot. Only a deluded WoW fanboy would think otherwise. The primary reason Everquest veterans like Jason V. scorn at the thought of WoW is because of how Blizzard has pioneered the dumbing down of in-game mechanics and streamlining of player progress, rewards, quest grinding, and things of that nature.

    At the end of the day, WoW’s level progression is still pretty much either fetch quests or “keel seex snow moose” for XP, until you reach the end game where you can either raid(epic grinding) over and over and over in hopes for rolling high for that “epic” (note that I put epic in quotations) gear with a 1% drop rate, or deal with the incredibly droll Battlegrounds PvP. Rewarding players for little effort won’t create growth and expansion within the Genre, and in fact it hasn’t. The entire Genre has become completely stagnant thanks to WoW, with offerings that are either crappy Korean Maplestory-clone grindfests, or games that have completely ripped off or adopted WoW’s mechanics and interface while trying to capitalize off Blizzard’s success with their MMO model. In essence, becoming WoW clones.

    Now what we’re left with? “Here’s WoW, now in Star Wars flavor! Have some more WoW, now in Superhero flavor! Oh, you want a Warhammer MMO? Guess what flavor you’re getting it in. That’s right, MORE WoW!”

    In fact, Star Wars Galaxies is a shining example of this, as soon as SOE updated SW to a more WoW-like experience, the entire game was completely ruined, and became unplayable to this day.

  • http://www.myspace.com/galarian Jason V.

    What turned me off to SWG was the constant “go to A to kill X number of B, and return to A to get C, which is the same thing as A, but traveling father”. If that made sense. I loved the Star Wars universe, and it was pretty damn sweet running missions for Jabba the Hutt, Watto and even Han Solo in the beginning. But once I got to 35 or so, and it seemed like all there was to do was “kill X number” and “kill A – F in this tight corridor bunker” I gave up. Never got my dual bladed light saber either :( I wish I played SWG during its heydays. Stupid EQ.

    It makes me think about a lot of MMO’s in general, and how potential was squandered away. If FFXI didn’t take so long leveling, along with killing so many sheep during that time. Oh lord, the sheep. That’s still enjoying enough success to put out expansions years after it’s launch.

    Then there’s Vanguard. Looked great, but it was so boring. The lore wasn’t intriguing enough, and it wasn’t really finished either. You really did need a good rig to run it right.

    City of Heroes has a killer creation system, very fun group play, but mindless, repetitive and no real end game in there at all. Augments are not a substitute for actual loot. You can get away with loot in a game like that and I think Champions Online is doing just that.

    EQ2 was a bit….dry at launch. Raid content was broke or incomplete. Hell I solo cleared Deathfist Citadel at then max lvl of 50, and took Emperor Fyst to like 95%. All solo, all without potions and nothing but the now nerfed HO healing. Nowadays, it’s really caught on with people from what I’m told.

    Original EQ though….nothing has ever come close to how awesome of an experience it was, demanding or no. Of course, the people drove it all for me mostly. Ahh, but being a warrior was so killer.

    Let me turn my nostalgia meter down a bit. Now I feel like resubbing to something! If only EQ were as fun as it were 2000 – 2003 and 2005 – 2006.

    I just want to edit it that it’s nice to have a discussion about MMO’s and not feel like a nerd or an outcast :)

  • Master ∅

    >“go to A to kill X number of B, and return to A to get C, which is the same thing as A, but traveling father”

    >“kill X number” and “kill A – F in this tight corridor bunker”

    Sound familiar? Gee, I wonder which MMO popularized these progression systems and made them mainstream in the Genre?

    As for FFXI, I’ll refer you and everyone else to a short history lesson in MMORPGS.

    In short, the Japanese can’t make a decent MMO for shit. They should just stick to making linear story-driven RPGs, Fighters, arcade games, and h-games.

    Inb4 Capcom hobknobers. Yes, we all know they make some of the greatest games outside of these genres. It’s just too bad that they’re a diamond in the rough, a gem in a sea of shitty developers of today’s era.