Hello everyone,
In this entry I'll be giving you my opinion on The Old Republic. I'm a huge Star Wars fan and I love RPG's, so you'd expect this would be a match made in heaven... and you'd be wrong. I was a huge fan of Knights of the Old Republic and the second part and I probably would've loved part three as well if they hadn't decided to make it a MMO. I still like it, but it's not what I hoped it would be. Pretty much the only thing it has going for it, besides the whole Star Wars theme, is the story. Bioware has put a lot of effort into these storylines with everything being fully voice acted. Herein lies the problem. The stories just aren't all that interesting. The main storylines are all fine and dandy (I'm not that impressed with the Jedi Knights storyline actually, but it's not bad), but the sidequests are still those boring "Gather X of Y" quests which plague all MMO's. A necessary evil perhaps, but in The Old Republic there's just a too large amount of these quests. And while the main story is alright, the story on these sidequests always revolve around "Hey, the empire/republic has attacked. Can you fix this/gather that?" or "Hey, we are about to attack the empire/republic. Can you go do this?". There are some interesting storylines, but I'm afraid there are far too many which aren't. Also, for a guy like me who's more into singleplayer RPG's there's just not all that much this game offers. The PvP is enjoyable, but highly unbalanced. Which is to be expected from a recently released game, but still. The space combat is, well, not all that great. It's fine for a small break every now and then, but I don't see myself playing it often. The storylines are unique for each class, which adds replayability, but all the sidequests are the same for all classes. (Empire does have other quests than republic of course) So the sidequests are boring and you need to level up in order to do the more interesting main story quests. Which basically means that you'll be spending a huge amount of time on doing boring sidequests in order to get to the good stuff. Hell, I've already decided that my second character will only do class quests, flashpoints (which are enjoyable) and PvP in order to level. The rest of my PvP team won't be happy with that, but as long as they don't add level brackets or other ways of leveling I can't really be bothered by what they think. My first character is currently level forty and I've started on my second character because it was just getting so bloody boring to do all those quests and have the experience bar barely rising at all. Basically the only point that makes The Old Republic stick out from the rest is also one of it's downsides. I'm afraid these kind of MMO's are just not my thing. I don't care for doing raids and things like that, so all that leaves me is the leveling process, story and PvP. All of which The Old Republic doesn't do all that well. I think I would enjoy a more open MMO like Eve Online quite a lot, but I just don't have the time to
truly play it. Oh well, I'll be playing some more Star Wars in the coming weeks. I just don't think I'll be sticking with it for a huge amount of time.
To The Moon is the most gripping non-game videogame you've never heard of. To The Moon is an Indie title developed by Freebird Games. The game is basically a interactive story and for some reason the developer decided to throw highly unnecessary puzzles on top of it. Without those the game might be no longer considered a game by most, mind you it's still hard to call it a game right now, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Interactive stories are just fine without tacked on puzzles all over the place. It's not that I think the gameplay is ruining the rest of the game, they just don't really fit and I'm uncertain as to why the developer decided to add them. So by now you might be wondering why I'm even discussing this game, but I actually consider this little non-game the best Indie game of the year and one of the best games of the year in general. To The Moons story is so incredibly good and it tells its story so well, which is even more amazing if you consider it's made in RPG maker, that it doesn't matter that the gameplay is tacked on. The story is heartbreaking and heartwarming and one of the best game stories ever written. I'm not even going into the premise of the story, just GO and buy it, recommend it to everyone including non-gamers and buy a couple extra copies just for the heck of it. It is that good. 
