Back from the dead.

I've been away from blogging for several weeks now due to work, health, and severe "overgaming" issues. Never thought I'd say this, but I found out I DO need sleep from time to time.

Anyway, to start this off, even if the buzz is over, I'm gonna talk about it.
Hellgate:London. Looking past the bugs, the errors that make random people yell "EXTREEEEEEEEEEME" in vent from time to time, and the fact that until monday(?), nightmare difficulty was almost impossible to complete thanks to the all the final mobs being level 70 something, I find the game to be fun as hell. Fast paced, highly customizable characters, a good variety of mechanics, quests, and all kinds of side thingies to keep you entertained; also, some of the NPC's had me in tears with laughter with the offbeat, blunt, tongue-in-cheek humor. (314?)

Moving over, Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth. The game's a little "old", but I finally got around to playing it, and I enjoyed it quiet a bit.
It uses the C& C Generals engine, so If you've played that title you will find a lot of similarities. BFME takes it one step further though, having not only Hero units, but regular units react to events happening around them; armies will jeer at each other, infantry will will act reluctantly and even start backing up if faced by a troll, armies will cheer as the Heroes ride by or join them in battle. This really has little effect on actual gameplay, but helps to add atmosphere and life to the world, which a majority of the time, RTS titles tend to lack. The sound is also very impressive, even using the actors from the movies.
The base building and resource management is very simplistic. You can only build in fixed locations, which doesn't let you fortify specific points of your choice around the battle map, and resource gathering has been reduced to simply building the necessary structures. There is only one type of resource, which you get from different buildings. These buildings though, have bonuses in and of themselves, such as farms lowering cost of certain units and blacksmiths lowering costs up upgrades depending on how many you have.
It's simplicity, in my opinion, is what makes this game really fun. Not really having to split your attention between your base and your army, allows for hands on control of the battle 100% of the time, and even though the numbers don't grow as large as the massive battles from the films, the game can still cast the illusion of large scale battles, which in all honesty, are fun to watch. Character movement and actions are very detailed, and exploring the synergy of different types of units is always entertaining.
Of course, not everything is perfect... there is such a thing as too simple, even more so in the RTS genre. The lacks a few little things, that might not seem to important at first, but would have any veteran player scrambling through menus and manuals to try to find.
The main one? Stats. There is no display of base stats for characters. Specifically armor.
There's also hero units becoming unstoppable death machines once you level them up a few times. (I've won entire maps on hard with a Gandalf/Faramir combination).
Then, there's powers. Past the flashy stuff some of your heroes can do, there's sort of "global" powers you can get. You get points from doing several things. From completing objectives to leveling up units, and you can spend these points going down a power tree collecting several interesting powers. While this sounds fine, evil and good don't get the same powers, or even anything similar. Good has heal powers, summon elven/rohirim/eagles/ent allies, and summon an army of the dead, and other fancy stuff that buffs your heroes even more, evil mostly gets resource and unit production buffs, and some area buffs for your units, that don't last all that long and aren't all that great. This is a problem, because once you reach the command point cap (how many units you can have) which is easy to do with either side, 75% of the evil side powers become worthless; so there's a big balance issue there.
Overall? I like it. Might not satisfy the veteran min-maxing "I must have control of every little grain of sand that makes up my empire", super strategist guy, but it's a solid, fun, and graphically beautiful RTS tittle. What's more fun than telling an Ent to smash Pippin with a boulder?

There are several other games I've gotten my hands on in the past few weeks, but I'll leave that for another day.
There is one last thing I want to talk about: 2.3.2 mage changes. This is from a PvE standpoint ONLY- I FREAKING LOVE THEM
Icy Veins, if it works the same as bloodlust/heroism, and according to data mining, the mechanic it uses is the same, will show a 3% or so increase overall DPS for deep fire (2/47/11+1) and arcane (50/0/11 and variants), as well as a huge 5% increase for frost.
Trainable Iceblock sounds purty. (Little things like Rage Winterchill's Icebolt, Naj'entus' tidal shield popping, and such effects), and the mana gem change is fantastic.

I think I'm done for today. Gonna go get something to eat and then probably going to crash. Later!
~desu