Welcome to DeathDuel.com, home of Hanse! I'm a game designer and have worked on numerous titles. Here's a list of the games I've helped create at Electronic Arts (EA)!
Ultima Online - Starting in 2000, I helped wrap up the UO: Renaissance title. I worked on this game until 2005 through over 30 publishes to the live game. Boxed games I worked on:
Ultima Online: Third Dawn (2001)
Ultima Online: Lord Blackthorn's Revenge (2002)
Ultima Online: Age of Shadows (2003)
Ultima Online: 7th Anniversary Collector's Edition (2004)
Ultima Online: Samurai Empire (2004)
Ultima Online 2.0 (not the first UO2 attempted, although the project was cancelled and resulted in me being laid off, but I stayed with EA for another game...)
After leaving Ultima Online, I worked on The Godfather as a programmer making designer tools (blow stuff up!).
The Godfather: The Game (2006)
I am currently working at Sony Online Entertainment on Star Wars Galaxies. I've been responsible for putting out profession trees (which ends up being a total class revamp) for the Jedi, Smugglers and Commandos.
Of course, I've been in gaming since the late 70's. I've played just about every genre there is to play. My most played genres are fantasy role playing games, real time strategy, and first person shooters. I began programming on games in the 7th grade (11-12 years old) and made my first adventure game in 1983 (Blackbeard's Revenge) on an Apple //e. Later, I helped build libraries for LPMuds and made zones for over 20 Muds. Once Diablo 1 came out, I was hooked and decided that I must become a game programmer and designer.
This is a one page site listing the games that are battling for my attention and sometimes a few thoughts on games and the industry.
Eventually, games will die off on this list, thus ending the strife I must go through when choosing games to play.
These lists are sorted by favorite or date of death.
| The duel list: | Character: | Notes: |
| Crysis | Main char | Interesting, but I think the suits and effects should be a little more over-the-top. The dialog is nothing new. The storyline has a twist, but not enough. The graphics are amazing, though. |
| Sins of a Solar Empire | A sinner | The tech trees are too small. I'm not much of a fan of warp lanes, but this game has a neat warp lane mechanic. I'll probably stop playing it soon, as it is not very replayable due to being able to research everything too quickly. |
| World of Warcraft | Ruy | PvP'ing it up... |
| Assassin's Creed | The Assassin | Repetitive and pretty... Interesting storyline. |
| Super Mario Galaxy | Mario | I'm roughly 40% through the game or so. I can only take so much before it gives me vertigo. :( |
| Supreme Commander and Supreme Commander: Fragile Alliance | Any side | While Company of Heroes is micromanaged and small, Supreme Commander is massive. It is definitely an evolution of real time strategy, with its many interface improvements. It ranks as one of my favorite games of 2007, so far. The expansion is riddled with bugs, though. |
| Half-Life Counterstrike: Source Engine & Team Fortress 2 | Hanse | I play on random servers. Mostly, tfc_2fort for TF2 and dust maps for CS. |
| Recent Deaths: | Date: | Notes: |
| Stronghold: Legends | 1/25/2008 | I've finished all the maps... Random maps do not look all that appealing. |
| Eve Online | 1/20/2008 | Dies a second time... I can't stand games that absolutely force you to always group or suffer permadeath for high-end content. |
| Dungeon Runners | Late 2007 | A mindless hack and slash game with an item generation system similar to one I made in the 80's. I'll explore its content and dump it in a week or two. |
| Prince of Persia: Rival Swords | Late 2007 | An okay game... Some of the rooms are tough due to unintuitive controls. I'll slog through it eventually. |
| Zelda: Twilight Princess | Late 2007 | The controls are frustrating due to them sometimes being unresponsive. The camera angle drives me nuts, sometimes. The gameplay keeps me going, though. I don't think it's as fun as Windwaker, yet, but I haven't gone very far in the game. |
| Bioshock | Late 2007 | I am babysitting and playing, sporadically. I like the game, but I'm not much of a fan of very linear FPS maps. It has nice skill trees and choices for your power-ups and weapons, but not large-scale maps that you can wander around in. |
| Second Life | Mid 2007 | I played in beta, but much has changed since then. There's no land tax, no charge for individual prims, and folks have been battling it out over who makes the best what for so long that many items are very refined. Casinos seem to be the huge cash cows in the game. I'm in it to test out 3D scripting skills and have a reason to practice my painting in Photoshop for textures. |
| Company of Heroes | 02/30/2007 | This game is definitely worthy of a Game of the Year title. Its Metacritic is very high (around 96). If you like real time strategy and WW2 games, then you must check this one out. I consider it the #1 RTS title of 2006. Online play is not so good, but if you go to GameFaqs there are tips to using a LAN simulation software to get around having to use Relic's buggy online game gateway. I attempted to play through their gateway, but just got dropped every time I tried to play. Their latest version is 1.4, which cleared up some graphics and audio problems my computer had with version 1.0. |
| Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion | 12/18/2006 | This is a buggy, but enjoyable game. It crashes to the desktop frequently on my machine, so save often. The AI sucks, the animations are goofy, but the world is pretty to look at. I ran around with conjuring at 100% at level 4 just relying solely on my massive summons that could swat monsters with one hit. I've graduated up to level 8 and have done quite a bit of the storyline. I don't like the auto-leveling aspect to the game. I prefer there are places I just can't go because they're too difficult to attempt. Without difficult areas, the game seemed too open to me and gave me very little reward to leveling up. |
| X3 | 12/18/2006 | Somewhat buggy at the beginning, but patch 1.4 has solved some of those bugs (still crashes, once and a while). The new station clustering is awesome. I've got stations spread out all over the place and I'm closing in on getting my first large transporter (spent a lot of my cash on more stations...17 million is so tempting to spend on more stations). |
| Port Royale 2 | 12/18/2006 | Playing a merchant for Spain and England. I pirate Holland and France shipping lanes and have landed armies to take over Holland cities for Spain. Quite a fun pirate/tradesman game. :) |
| Guild Wars | 12/18/2006 | Playing a Fire Elementalist/Mesmer combination. Although, I am not really concentrating on Mesmer abilities. I should have gone Fire Elementalist/Monk. |
| GTA: San Andreas | 12/18/2006 | Ridin' around in a low rider. |
| Space Rangers 2: Rise of the Dominators | 12/18/2006 | This game rocks. It is an A+ game. I checked out the review on GameSpot. I'm playing the shit out of it. You can buy it on Direct2Drive for 20$. |
| World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Beta | 11/31/2006 | I got hooked up by one of my friends over at Blizzard for the beta (Mr Oaks - for those folks that remember him on UO). I just wanted to check it out and play a little. It led me to stopping raids with my guild as some of the green magic item drops are INSANE (found a +60 stamina axe! wee!). |
| Stronghold: Legends | 11/19/2006 | I enjoyed this game. I might keep playing it in solo scenarios, but I enjoyed building rather than assaulting. I'd turn on easy mode for assaults and medium mode for building. I may go back and play only in hard mode for building, but it was a neat little game. I just wish there was more variety in towers and units. |
| Battlefield 2142 Beta | 10/30/2006 | Ugh, this game is horrible. It's a step backwards in Battlefield games. I've played them all and I absolutely hate this version. I'm a tank fan, but the tanks in this game are worse in handling and weaponry than BF1942. :( |
| X2 | Some time ago | Hello? If you haven't played this game and you are a fan of space simulations, please play this game. X2 is what online games for space sims should be like. Eve Online and Earth and Beyond would be monsters if they had this type of design. X3 went gold on October 17th! Purchased, but not playing it yet... |
| The Ur-Quan Masters | 12/14/2005 | For nastalgia's sake, I decided to play The Ur-Quan Masters. It's a good port of Star Control 2 from the 3D0. I even downloaded and peeked at the source code for giggles. I stopped playing, due to remembering how convoluted and slightly obscure the storyline is. I guess I'm just spoiled by in-game logs and information about what you should do next. From professional experience, most US citizens who have not played adventure games without in-game logs and tips will not play this sort of game anymore. |
| Battlefield 2 | 09/20/2005 | Bad server stability and slow load times lead me to quit. I also feel that the interface is missing key elements that are common to almost every shooter out there (and buggy, besides). Oh well, Counterstrike has a few seconds of load time... Can't wait for next Unreal Tournament, either! |
| Street Fighter CVSNK EO | 09/15/05 | I spent a few years playing this side-fighter. It's still my favorite, but I must move on... |
| Halo 2 | 08/01/2005 | I'm not crazy about FPS on consoles. The controls are much less accurate than you can tune a mouse for. I'm playing Halo 2 due to the hype and interest in what makes folks so crazy about the game. |
| Knights of the Old Republic 2 | 6/30/2005 | Sadly, the novelty of the game was ruined by the first. I didn't find this version as appealing. The missions weren't laid out very well, either. I didn't bother to finish it. |
| Battlefield 1942 | 06/21/2005 | I haven't uninstalled it yet, but I'm running BF2 and will probably not play BF1942 again. Another newer version pushing this one out the window... |
| Ultima Online | 05/01/2005 | Recently retired Game designer for Ultima Online. I have regular characters, but many folks know me as a UO Game Designer (EA) that made many pieces of this ground-breaking game. Jane's Poem |
| Diablo 2 | 11/01/2004 | Diablo 2 lost its interest to me once World of Warcraft came out. I let my characters lapse into the bit oblivion and I will not return. It's one of the best games I've ever played. Rap |
| Half-Life 2 | Released: 11/16/04 Completed: 11/17/04 | Total time to finish: 17 hours. Much shorter than Half-Life 1. Lower amount of weapons than the first one, too. *Spoiler* With all the level design in the tower, they could have done more with it. They needed more boss monsters, too. |
| Half-Life Counterstrike | 11/15/04 | Out with the old and in with the new! I play the newer version of this game, now. |
| World of Warcraft Beta! | 10/25/04 | You know I'm a sucker for MMO's... So, I'm playing the newer version. |
| The Sims 2 | 10/15/04 | A fun game! I played it simply to check out the AI and the effects. I didn't find it very replayable for my playstyle (I'm more of a FPS person). |
| Fable | 10/10/04 | Lionhead studios makes an interesting game! Although, I solved it in only 11 hours. :( |
| City of Heroes | 08/01/2004 | I let my account lapse. I want the option to play solo and not be forced to always play in a party. |
| Splinter Cell | 07/19/2004 |
Did not complete. I am simply not a single player person (no multiplayer available). Fun at first, over the shoulder camera, lots of skulking and assassinating. |
