Possible Blog

I originally was going to post something about Dead Space 2 but I decided against it, instead I will talking about a possible new blog that I will be working on along side Singularity.

Singularity will primarily remain my personal blog but I also want to do another blog that will be more for entertainment purposes, but at the same time require minimal effort to maintain so I can focus on my attentions on getting Singularity more out there as well as improving my skills as a writer. In any case, I will possibly be releasing the blog soon after revising a few details about it, and it will have a link from here of course.

List of Spoiler Warnings

Spoilers ruin games, that's the bottom line that I believe, however at the same time, many things that can be considered spoilers also make interesting things to converse and read about. So to that end, I will be talking about things that can be considered spoilers, but I will also give enough warning for people to turn away if they don't want to see a spoiler.

I will be categorizing spoilers into one of three groups :

Light Spoilers – This will be a majority of reviews, and other topics that briefly mention things such as a game's general story, length of the game, or vaguely introducing a noteworthy character who is unmissable (either by player choice, or plotlines) , or are the main character themselves. Topics with Light Spoilers will not be marked.

Moderate Spoilers – This type of spoiler is somewhat more of drastic than light but not as severe as heavy spoilers, the types of spoilers this category would consist of are light mentions of a character or subject that isn't immediately or nearly immediately introduced to the player.

Heavy Spoilers – These are the story ruining spoilers which can be a number of things such as a character's death, event that takes place on a certain level, the revelation of a character that is intentionally hidden, or any sort of specific character developments that occur.

Trial of the Endless Trial - Part Two

Promises of power, and more is a reoccuring theme in the Chaos quests, which is what I spent most of today doing with WAR for about an hour, or more specifically more public quests.

When I logged in today I decided to turn in a quest that I had completed yesterday, but on the way using WAR's fairly confusing-at-first but very comprehensive and soon easy to use map, I spotted another public quest area. Still eager from yesterday's experience with it I quickly ran to it and joined the fray.

This time the quest involved a lot more killing, 3 phases of killing to be precise; first up was 50 militiamen men which fell easily before me and the rest of the forces of destruction, and then things got harder. Duelists appeared afterward, all of which were “champion” ranks so they were super hard to solo, luckily most of the players around me were willing to lend a hand, but in all honestly I mostly just looked around for people to assist rather than killing on my own, and with good reason too, the duelists softened up a lot of players, including myself, and as I haven't really found any sort of regenerative out of combat food so far, it's impact on performance was noticeable. Finally the third phase was something else, a hero ranked defender came out and joined the fray, and as expected he was much much stronger than any of the duelists. My first experience of him was pulling aggro and him laying waste to me fairly quickly, luckily the only real penalty for dying was a 15 minute debuff that lowered my stats for abit, however I also died enough repeating the quest in consecutive attempts that I found out that it stacks to 5. At 5 stacks I was super weak, but still able to fight, a lot easier than death penalties I found in other MMOs that I've played at least (Lord of the Rings Online, and of course World of Warcraft).

As I still really enjoyed the public quest, I kept on waiting for the next session to start. The wait was somewhat longer this time however it was hardly noticeable as well, since normal enemies spawn in the area in the meantime, allowing for some quality grinding time for a few minutes before the real thing started. I ended up doing the public quest about 3-4 times mainly to fill up my influence bar, and then I decided it was time to move on. I headed back to the main camp to find the rally master, and received a few new upgrades from the influence points, and the loot bags I received during the public quest itself. A lot of these items had talisman slots, so I did some looking around at the nearby trade skill trainers, and I was definitely surprised not to find the standard ones such as blacksmith, or mining. However I also didn't really look into all of the trade skills in depth; from what I gather there is Scavenging which takes additional items from dead bodies, Salvaging which allows you to break down items into magical components, Cultivation which I was curious about but ended up not taking, I don't entirely know how that works, and finally there is Butchering, which is probably the most standard, but it still is a new take on “skinning” animals. There is also of course still trades that let you make items, although these seem to be fairly minimal as well. Apothecaries make potions and work hand in hand with Cultivation, and Butchering. While Talisman making creates magical talismans and gets supplies from Salvaging, and Scavenging . I ended up taking Talisman Making mainly because it was the first thing I chose at random, and Salvaging with it, I ended up really liking my decision because a few pieces of the new items I got had talisman slots on them, and I was able to fill those in with “weak” on the talisman “power meter” that displays while you create talismans, but way better than the normal quest reward talismans.

While I didn't do much today, that concludes the second day of WAR; to be honest it was a much more positive experience than the first day for some reason, and I'm even more eager to jump into it tomorrow.

The Game Review Criteria of Singularity

The goal of my scoring criteria is to award a game for it's technical merits, rather than it's entertainment value. The reason for this is because what people think of entertainment, including myself, are greatly different from one another, and simply saying a good game is “fun” is usually not sufficient enough to get people to want to play it. Furthermore, I am unable to get games as easily as normal companies that specialize in reviews, and in general, reviews are not Singularity's specialty. It is however something I would like to have mainly to give certain praise to games that deserve the praise.

With that said, here's how my scoring system will work out :

Concept – The rating of how well a game's main concept is implemented, concepts are not genres such as action RPG, but rather single ideas that a game wants to get to the audience above everything else, this of course means concepts can range from simplistic and broad things to something very specific, such as the shooting in Halo, against the feel of being an assassin in Assassin's Creed.

One more note about concepts, this part relies on the game to make it's concept clear, if the game's concept is not clear, or the developers of the game state the game's concept themselves, then these factors will also change what the Concept is rated on.

Game Play – This score is based on how the game handles all of it's main controls, and features such as shooting, movement, dialog, and more, all of which are dependent on the game itself.

Presentation – Storyline coherency, tutorials, and other things such as noticeable bugs, all of which would affect the overall appearance and flow of the game.

Graphics – The quality of graphics in their own style. For example Persona 3 Portable on the PSP would get the same score as God of War, as they both have different art styles but they both produce fantastic graphics for their styles, on the opposing side ; dynasty warriors 6 would get a average score as the models are good but everything else is fairly bland, even though dynasty warriors keeps it's own style.

Sound/Music – This score deducts the quality, and placement of various sounds, and musical elements of the game.

Scoring System : All of the scores (per catagory) are based on poor (1) to great (5), all of them adding to a total overall score with the total possible of 25 points.

Overall Scores :

1-5 Poor

5-10 Below Average

10-15 Average

15-20 Good

20-24 Great

25 Exceptional

Introduction to Singularity

My name is Alyssa Rizzo, and I'm happy to welcome you to my blog, Singularity. This blog's aims are not to be a premier source of gaming news, reviews, or any sort of subject that websites with more man power and more talent are able to do much easier. Instead, Singularity strives to be more of a hole of generalities in gaming, from news to thoughts, to reviews, and possibly even just lists; my goal is to provide my personal view point on many things that the gaming industry talks about, or has created.

About Myself

Speaking honestly, I don't have much professional writing experience, most of what I do have was done through wiki editing, and some articles I wrote for the Examiner, and at the same time I don't have any professional game industry experience at all. I do however believe I would be able to write interesting posts about various aspects of gaming many people don't think about very often, and at the very least I would like to provide a unique (maybe not always accurate) view on gaming.

What Makes Singularity Unique?

Well like I said before, I aim to provide my own personal opinion on a aspect of gaming that I believe would be interesting to read about. I have also tried my hand at creating a Review Criteria that focuses more on rewarding a game for it's technical merits rather than the level of entertainment it provides. Furthermore I have added a special feature on each review that provides a ratio of the game's Single Player gameplay value against the Multiplayer gameplay value, I understand that this value is probably the most opinionated part of the review, so in return the value itself has no effect on the game's overall score.

Site Classifications

I will be using different types of headings to classify what sort of post is what, as well as having “clever” titles for the said headings.

A Singular Thought – Rantings, Random information, ect.

More will be added as I further expand the things I write about.

What's in the works?

I will mainly add things based off comments, however if the blog becomes popular enough I plan on having a future blog specifically for posts related to Star Wars : The Old Republic, depending on how devoted I am towards the game.

Thank you again for taking the time to look at my blog, and I hope to see you around again soon.