See above.

So, I just got home and my plans to jump right into Aion: Tower of Eternity have been temporarily put on hold while I wait in a queue to get into my chosen server. Right now the wait time is sitting at 22 minutes, but it said something similar about 10 minutes ago, and when the number changes it's not always moving in the right direction. Anyhow, since I can't play just yet I figured I'd post an early impressions-style reviews blog entry about the game. And, since I'm having some trouble accessing the reviews blog right now, it's gonna end up here instead - at least for the moment.

In case you're unfamiliar with Aion, it's a new MMO from NCSoft that's been available in Korea for a while, but which officially goes live here in North America tomorrow. I preordered the game several weeks ago, so I was able to get in on the "headstart" launch that went live at noon yesterday. After seven or eight hours of play I'm still only level 12, but I'm starting to get a good feel for where the game is headed I think, and so far I'm liking it a lot. And here's why, in an easily-digestible bullet point format:

• Character Creation
  Aion's character creation tools are extremely powerful - like, EA Sports powerful. Sure, you can just pick a head, a body, and a hairstyle if you don't really care for this stuff, but if you want to recreate Pygar from the movie Barbarella, you have the option to tinker with just about every facial feature imaginable. The flipside of the character editor is that it gives you the freedom to make unrealistically proportioned characters with, for example, heads that are far too small for their bodies, or with tree-trunk arms and legs bolted onto a puny torso. Save for some presumably PVP-minded players opting for the tiniest character they can come up with, though, most people appear to be opting for something that at least resembles a human being.
• The Launch
  Perhaps it's not surprising given that the game is already out in Korea, but queues aside, Aion's launch has been an incredibly smooth one thus far. I was able to get into the game around 10 minutes after the announced midday start time, and although I was disconnected about 10 minutes later, I've experienced no problems since. With new players descending on the starter areas like a swarm of hungry locusts, content was getting devoured quicker than it could respawn, but getting quests completed was rarely a problem.
• Combat
  So far the assassin that I've spent most of my time playing as is a lot of fun - somewhat similar to a rogue in World of Warcraft, but with less emphasis on stealth. There doesn't appear to be a combo system as such, at least not in the WoW-rogue sense, but you can chain attacks together and, rather than having to map every move to a different button, every move in a chain is mapped to the same button. So, for example, after I perform my "Swift Edge" attack, I then use the same button to perform a "Soul Slash" and, when I reach level 22, I'll be able to press it a third time for a Rune Slash. It's been done before, but after sinking so much time into WoW and into organizing dozens of different buttons, it's a feature that I very much appreciate.
• The Visuals
  Even if I end up posting a dozen of these blogs before I'm ready to write a full review of Aion, I think I'll find it tricky to ever do so without mentioning how great it looks. The aesthetic is somewhat similar to that of Guild Wars, but with superior animation and the CryEngine under the hood. I posted some new screenshots, taken on my relatively modest home PC, to the gamespace today - definitely worth checking out.
• Flying
  Perhaps the most unique thing about Aion is that, from level 10 onwards, your character has angel-like wings that you can use to fly. Initially, you can only sustain flight for one minute, but my understanding is that increases as you level up. Also, you can only fly in certain zones, which seems a little odd, but is necessary so that you don't just bypass enemies and stuff completely.
• Gathering & Crafting
  Although I've trained as a weaponsmith, I've yet to spend much time crafting - there are a lot of materials that need to be purchased in order to work with metals it seems, and I came close to bankrupting myself long before I was able to craft a simple steel dagger. Gathering is interesting in that, rather than having to train in order to learn how to pick things up off the ground, everyone can do it. So, providing you take the time to pick flowers and fruit early on, you'll find that you're able to mine iron and gather other higher-level resources later on. Bag space is an ever-present concern, of course, but these things seemingly stack in massive numbers (I have 110 of one resource right now), you get big bags (known as "cubes" in-game), and there's a bank/warehouse system with both character-specific slots and account slots that can be accessed by all of your characters on the same server. I'm a pack-rat by nature, so bag space is always a "thing" for me, but right now it's not taking up nearly as much of my time in Aion as it always has in WoW.

And, with that it looks like I'm ready to get back into the game. Be sure to go and check out those screenshots, and expect more Aion coverage from me in the near future.

Cheers

For serious.

The GameSpot UK Podcast has gone weekly in 2009, and we're constantly trying to think of new things we can add to the show. To this end, we'll now be uploading our show notes to the site alongside the podcast itself every Thursday.

As always, let us know what you think and whether you'd like to see anything else on the show! Here are the notes for this week's show.

Its Biz Time.

I thought I would wait, before telling people, to see if I would actually keep updating it... and so far I've found I have a lot to say.

Like all my dear former GameSpot friends, I have started posting on a blog elsewhere. It's not for lack of love for this site, it's just because I'm interested in beginning new memories.

I will always be reading, and I will pop in from time to time (as I have here), but I hope to frequently update my blog there, if you are so inclined to read it:

Doubt The Stars

So far it's been about things related to video games, of course, it's about some things that are personal, and it's about working in game development, above all.

...to you, until we meet again (and I'm sure we will). Just a quick note to say this Friday will be my last day at GameSpot.

I hate long goodbyes, so this will be quick. Believe it or not, GameSpot has been paying my bills for well over eight years now, first as a freelancer, then an intern, then a freelancer again, then finally an editor, at which point I packed my bags and headed from North Carolina out to the left coast to work in the office fulltime. I'm learning that leaving a job after so many years feels more like a breakup than a simple professional transition, but it's time for a break all the same.

The hardest part will be leaving all my coworkers behind, whom I admire and will miss each in their own way. You wouldn't believe the number of talented and inspiring people I've been lucky enough to cross paths with--and in some cases, truly befriend--in my years here. Pretty humbling, really. Keep on keepin' on, y'all.

As has become the fashion, I've set up a blog if you want to keep up with my exploits:

http://verbocracy.blogspot.com/

I've had a blast busting out content for you guys and gals all these years. Catch you on the flipside.

http://www.giantbomb.com/

Update your files accordingly.

With the last of the Time Trotters riding off to the welcoming sunset of unemployment, I'm doing my best to stay ahead of the trend. On Monday I'll be starting up at my new gig, months of Call of Duty-filled joblessness finally coming to a close.

And while I will always remember the fall of 2007 as an enjoyable old mess of new video games, Boston life, and a roller coaster of job hunting, 2008 is looking to be pretty sweet.

Where will I be working, you ask? As a quick attempt at cross-site promotion, I encourage everybody to visit my internet blournal, DoofyCrap.com. Tomorrow I'll write about my rad new place of business over there. A quick hint: it perfectly combines so many of my interests it's scary. Not too many suspects to pick from, I bet some of you can figure it out in a hurry.

Best of luck to Ryan, and see you all at Doofy HQ!

- Rich

PS: If somebody at GameSpot Live wouldn't mind publishing the ol' Time Trotters to the site, I would greatly appreciate it. Too much of too many people's hard work in that baby to see it hidden away forever! I'm not asking for fanfare or anything, just put it up all sly-like to the Shaolin Style gamespace. My extended family (and of course the GameSpot faithful) would love to see it, thanks!

...goodbye.

Boy, that would have been awfully obtuse, wouldn't it?

I'm going to do my best to avoid turning this into a massive weep session. I've already started and scrapped writing this message more times than I can count, so instead of putting endless thought into this, I'm just going to say what I feel and leave it at that.

The five years I've spent at GameSpot are arguably the most important years I've spent in my life. Prior to this gig, I'd never had much of a real job. When Jeff and Greg and the rest of the crew back in 03 gave me--some skinny, 21 year old punkass who'd never done anything but freelance for a few scattered sites--a legitimate chance, I'd never envisioned that this would turn to be the job that defined me, that gave me a place and a career. I had no idea that I'd actually make some semblance of a name for myself here. That anyone would actually give a crap about what I did or what I wrote. I still find the notion kind of unbelievable, actually. Reading all the messages people have been sending me since the word got out has been utterly mind-blowing. It's one thing to enjoy what you do, but it's quite another to know that others enjoy what you do. It's gratifying, and I'm thankful for it.

I could probably spend the next several hours giving individual thanks to everyone who has helped me along the way, but most of them know who they are and have been thanked in more personal fashion, so I'll skip the acceptance speech from hell. Instead, a general thank you to the staff (both former and present) for letting me be a part of the dream that is/was GameSpot. Also, thanks to you, the reader. I'd be nothing if you folks didn't come back time and time again to read the junk I put out, and I can't tell you how thankful I am that you did.

Leaving completely sucks, and believe me when I say I'm in no way joyful about my departure. Well, OK, that's not entirely true. There is a certain sense of...freedom that I'm feeling now as I envision an endless string of pantsless weekdays. Still, if I'd had my druthers, I'd have probably rather stayed precisely where I was, doing what I was doing. But circumstances don't always work out the way you'd prefer, and things change, often not for the better. My time here was finished. I was conflicted about that notion going into the holiday break, and that notion turned into fact with startling clarity as soon as I came back from break. It was a frightening and painful experience to let it go, but I had to. If you love something, set it free, and all that junk. I don't think this one's ever coming back, though.

Of course, I'm not going to disappear into obscurity--at least, not without a fight. You'll probably start seeing my name start appearing on bylines relatively soon. I'm not doing anything full time just yet, but we'll see where the wind takes me. In the meantime, if you need to get in contact with me for any reason, my new e-mail address is alexiconofscars@hotmail.com, and if you want to read my assorted ramblings about whatever, I am keeping a personal blog at The Head Of Alfredo Garcia. Stop by sometime if you want to read about what I think of practically everything except games. I'll give you a hint: I hate all of it.

And lastly, let me just make one thing as crystal clear as possible. I hold no ill will, issue no blame, take no umbrage with any of my former co-workers on the edit team. These guys are some of the hardest working, upstanding, straight up cool mother****ers I've ever met in my life, and as long as they're around doing their thing, GS will continue to live and breathe--there will still be a soul there, underneath whatever ridiculousness might be on the surface these days. There is no GS without those guys. The GS content crew is a family, and no one can change that.

Before I duck out, a few stats to chew on from my time here:

Number of reviews written: 733

Number of video reviews produced: Somewhere around 100

Number of video features appeared in: Dozens

Controllers broken: 7

Debug consoles broken: At least two that I can remember (sorry Ricardo!)

Number of console launches experienced: 5 (not including N-Gage and Gizmondo, which absolutely, positively don't count)

Number of weekend birthdays spent at the office: 2 (thanks PlayStation 3, Wii and Rock Band launches!)

Number of E3s covered: 5

Number of hours of sleep lost while covering said E3s: 280

Number of delicious sandwiches consumed during work hours: Too many to count

Pounds gained over the last five years: 45

Favorite review ever written: It's sort of like choosing your children, but I'd have to say that Super Mario Galaxy was probably the piece of writing I was most proud of just for clarity and overall quality. For pure comedy, while Big Rigs is obviously the fan favorite, I think my Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green review was my favorite, mostly for the opening paragraph, but there are some good chuckles elsewhere, too. My only regret with that one was that it was published before I'd learned the skill of brevity.

Favorite video piece: Regarding Robocop. Tim Tracy took my hours of ridiculous footage and turned that thing into something magical.

Worst review ever written: Read any of the first five to ten reviews I did for the site. They're as boring as they are barely informative. I was still learning the craft at that point. I think I've gotten a touch better.

Review that caught me the most flack: Probably Advent Rising. I will still never understand what anyone saw in that game. It was like retarded Star Wars with a broken frame rate. Now there's a box quote for ya!

Biggest editorial regret: Never giving Burning Questions proper closure. What can I say? I snapped.

Biggest non-editorial regret: Lack of travelling, specifically to Japan. Would have loved to have gotten one TGS trip in.

Thing I'll miss least about GS: Apart from the current unpleasantness, I'll say the commute. Nothing sucks more than driving an hour through traffic to work every day, especially when you're accustomed to carpooling and then suddenly end up having to do it all by your lonesome. *cough*

Thing I'll miss most about GS: The dozens and dozens of awesome people who have come and fled over the years that helped make GS a terrific place to work during their time. You know who you are.

And with that, I bid you all a fond adieu. It's been real.

--A

Hello there! For reasons that are probably obvious to most of you, I'm not going to continue posting to this blog. If you'd like to keep up with me, I can be found at the following address:

http://blog.jeffgerstmann.net/

If you are after things like "what Jeff thinks about games or music or movies or gas prices" or "points-related video," it will appear on this new personal site for now.

Go Here from now on.

They say that life's a carousel
Spinning fast, you gotta ride it well
The world is full of Kings and Queens
Who blind your eyes and steal your dreams
It's Heaven and Hell, oh well

And they'll tell you black is really white
The moon is just the sun at night
And when you walk in golden halls
You get to keep the gold that falls
It's Heaven and Hell

See you over there! \m/

I originally hadthis post about the HotSpot, and this one about Jeff mushed together, buteach needs to be its own separate thing.

I wanted to say a few words about Jeff. For about the last year or so that I worked at GameSpot, just before I left for Blizzard, Jeff was my boss.I worked primarily as a reviews editor for him in that final year at GS. Most of you know Jeff as that funny off-the-wall guy who charismatically carried On The Spot with Rich, and also my own podcast, the HotSpot. And he is that guy. The side you might not know is the Jeff who wouldn't hesitate to go to bat for his people. I wrote quite a number of reviews while working for Jeff--not all of them were particularly flattering of course. And once in a while some angry marketing flack, or on occasion, producer would contact me, irate over my lambasting their game. All I ever had to do was forward them to Jeff, and he'd bite the bullet for me--he'd deal with their angry tirade and shield me and all the other reviews editors from all that nonsense.

So what you say? That's his job as head of the reviews department, right? Well here's the thing. He stood by me even when I was in the wrong. Some of you may remember the gaffe I made on a certain high-profile review, regarding certain online features of the game. That was totally my fault, and my oversight on a high profile game. Even though it was a relatively innocuous thing that didn't materially affect the rating, it turned into quite a fuss, primarily because fanboys of a certain major game company think the review scale for that company's games should run from 9 to 10 instead of 1 to 10. And if a review dare drop below 9, the facts and assertions in that review better be bulletproof, lest you incur their eternal ire. In this case, it was not.

So it was scandalous and embarrassing for GameSpot to deal with that mistake. And Jeff could have easily thrown me under the bus. But he didn't. We had a discussion about what went wrong and how I missed it. I told him what happened, and that I was terribly embarrassed by the whole thing. He and I then sat down together and tested the specific features I missed. He agreed with me that they were immaterial to the score, and then we added the amendment to the review. There was no yelling, no threatening, no passive aggressive bullsh*t. He treated me like a professional, worked together with me to make it right, and discussed how to avoid making that mistake again. If there was any fallout or angry phone call from the publisher on that issue, I never heard or knew about it--he or one of the other senior editors handled it, because they always believed it was important forthe reviews staff to be independent and not worry about outside pressures.From start to finish, he stood by me and my work even in the rare case that it wasn't up to GameSpot's high standards. And I always appreciated that.

It's what makes it extra sad to me that Jeff was dismissed. Apparently there was no one above Jeff in the GameSpot hierarchywho would do the same thing for him that he did for me -- stand by him and the work he did.

Today is my last day at GameSpot. I've worked here for more than three years, so I am sad to leave. It's time for me to take on a new challenge, but I'll always be a fan and reader of GameSpot. I visited this site long before I ever got a job here, and I will continue to do so long after I move on. I've had experiences here that I know I'll never forget, like trips to E3, Leipzig, and Barcelona, late night arguements about Game of the Year awards, and the always insane holiday rush. I've had a great time here, learned a lot, and met some incredibly skilled, funny, and intelligent people. So thanks to GameSpot and to all of you, it's been fun.

-Greg (M)