Pronounced My-Key-On: by Michael Quach

Never knew that Demigod could be such a hostile game. Me, Nayrhyno, and a random get a 3 vs 3 going on. The random claims it’s too laggy for him and quits in the first 5 minutes so Nay and I were left with just the AI. Apparently, two other players on the enemy team were new to the game and didn’t know what to do. Their teammate, Casper, raged hard on them in the public chat. I don’t know what he said in their team chat but I no doubt he was quite acidic.

I guess the Unclean Beast player just got pissed at being yelled at all the time and just spent the game running into us to die. He even killed himself with ooze and no health regen to keep him alive.

Another fail on their part as they don’t notice the uncapped celerity flag.

Games like this just makes me crack up.

This is what makes Demigod fun. In his all pubber game I joined, my team of 2 Sednas and 1 Erebus were pushed back to our Citadel by their Erebus, Torchbearer and Queen of Thorns. For the majority of the time, we could not put a dent into them and they would always chase us away from the flags.

Eventually, we got pushed back, both our portals capped with locks, most of our towers dead, minotaurs, archers, priests, angels, and catapults coming out from all sides and not one of us with any Area of Effect damage attacks. All seemed lost but the enemy Demigods fell victim one by one at the front steps of our citadel as we ganged up on each one. Our citadel constantly bombarded but we were able to hold off the waves long enough that each time the health went down to 10,000, we were able to push back to get some warscore.

Eventually while the enemy were all respawning, we pushed all the way to their portals and our giants took care of the rest. The biggest folly I see in the enemy’s gameplay was that they never upgraded their towers or creeps so it was relatively easy to push back and hold off the creeps while our creeps had two levels of upgrades in armor and damage. Most of the time, games of Demigod just starts steamrolling so comebacks or stalls are very rare, but when it happens, boy is it fun.

For much of July and August so far, I’ve been playing mostly Demigod and Arma 2. With so many people in the game-central.org community now owning Demigod, the games I’ve been playing is no longer limited to just computer stompage. We get real live humans and competition going against each other where tactics and skills of the players become the deciding factor.

It’s just so much fun being able to coordinate with other players and shouting out locations of enemy Demigods and who to gank or who needs help over ventrillo. With the public, I’ve tried doing the same with chat but it the games usually just turn into a do your own thing and then get overwhelmed by the other side which is made up of a premade group who are using voice chat. Along with skill and communication, synergy between allied demigods is also vital to the success of the team. If you have all demigods just focused on getting kills for themselves and not buying upgrades for the team, eventually the other side might be able to do a comeback and defeat you.

With Arma 2, despite all the bugs, the fun comes from the cooperative nature of the game and playing around trying to do objectives. I’ve even made some videos of the gameplay from the past few days. The videos can be found on my youtube page here.

I love this casual game. Available for $9.99 on Steam and published by PopCap Games. Plants vs Zombies reminds me a bit of the Defend your Stronghold flash game. You have waves of zombies attacking your home and you must build up defenses to stop them. To build, you need an currency and the currency in this game is, Sunshine. Sunshine falls down naturally but to really rack up your economy, you’re gonna have to build Sunflowers. As the game progresses you have to start thinking, “Should I build sunflowers here, or should I build my offensive plant?” There is limited placement area and strategy comes into play in deciding what to place where and at what time.

Only 3 levels in so far but loving it and the soundtrack. Here is the link to the composer’s blog and she even has links up for her hit song “Zombies on your Lawn”
http://shigi.wordpress.com/

Here is a link to her story of the song
http://shigi.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/sunflower/

Eat that, survivors.

I love those crazy Sand Canyon MADs.

Gasp! Greetings and welcome to my website. Nothing much here future content will include editorials, reviews, and general thoughts of the day.

Now onto the title of this blog, “Pronounced My-Kee-On.” Quite an odd title isn’t it? Well the alias I’ve been using for since 1998 in the online world is “mikeon.” I was a kid at the time, trying to think up a name for a multi user dungeon (MUD) game called Arcane Nites. I wanted an RPG sounding them and “mikeon” sounded RPGy at the time and thus, “mikeon” was born.

It wasn’t until I started playing in games where voice communication started to emerge that I began to realize “hey, everyone is pronouncing my name wrong! They’re calling me “mike ON” instead of “my-kee-on!” It never really bothered me though and I just went with whatever people would call me. When asked how to pronounce the name, I would reply the correct way. Although, I have to admin, I have no idea what kind of tonal sign I should but on top of the name to make it easier to tell it’s not “mike ON”

Perhaps with this blog, things may change.