Crimz posted on our forums regarding an upcoming Korean MMO called Blade and Soul, which just totally catches our breath and balls. Featuring 4 races and 8 classes, coped with extremely titating graphics, insane action base gameplay and a very oriental character design.

When I first saw the character art for it, I’d swear they were from Manga Carta. The game engine is based on the Unreal Engine 3, delivering the same kind of quality that top end PS3 games have delivered.

‘Blade&Soul’ is an Oriental Martial Arts MMORPG that breaks the traditional confined and monotonous game plays, providing the gamers a completely new experience. It is expected to open a new dimension of MMORPG through ‘game environment alteration,’ ‘expansion of tasks that a character can carry out within the game.’

The Oriental world portrayed by its unique graphics, diverse stories embedded in Oriental fantasy tales, and maximized action that has never been witnessed in online games until now will lead gamers to a completely new experience.

Product Information
Publisher: NCsoft
Developer: NCsoft
Genre: Oriental Martial Arts MMORPG
Website: –
Release date: N/A

Main Characteristics

• Oriental Martial Arts Action: It is full of symbolic and well known Oriental martial art elements such as ‘Energy Ball’, ‘Inner Energy’, ‘Swift jump,’ etc. The important themes of Oriental martial art fantasies such as justice and chivalry are richly spread throughout the game by means of martial art.

• Oriental-features: Breaking away from the traditional medieval fantasy world, it takes an Oriental mysticism as the background environment. The basic world-view is based on the Korean myth ‘Song of Genesis,’ and the factions within the game are also modeled after Korean mythological characters

• Constantly Changing Environment: Within ‘Blade&Soul,’ many conditions change according to the play of the gamer, on the other hand, the environment creates diverse situations for the gamers. This system will provide the gamers with a new experience that has not been witnessed until now.

• Powerful Action: The main motto of battles within ‘Blade&Soul’ is ‘super powerful action’ that can distinguish itself from existing games. Players can knock back opponents and use diverse fancy skills according to the condition the gamers are posed in. The game aspires to provide battles that are enjoyable even by just watching them. Everyone can enjoy the battles of ‘Blade&Soul’ through simple comtrol.

The video of the game speaks for itself. The latter half of the video will make you come buckets, guranteed. But hold on to your guns. This game is far from reaches the shores of the Korean community, much less the English community.

But this sort of destroys a lot of MMO out there, rendering rather bland looking eh?

The Atlantica team recently released a couple of screenshots and a video of the latest v2.0 update. The update includes new continents, new npcs, new weapons, new monsters, the ability to ride mounts, and more.

This is pretty unnerving considering the fact they have yet to announce when exactly in Aug does the next beta start. If you ask me, the game is pretty polished already in CBT. There were barely any badly translated text, with an exception of a few mangled quest.

Anyway, here’s some of the screenies released.

Alright, so you’ve heard about me talking about Altantica Online. What’s so great about this game other than its gigantic 2.15gb file size to download? Firstly, if you’re tired of the same old hack and slash, nuke and grind MMOs out there, and you’re looking for something new, then you’re in luck.

Altantica Online is a crossbreed between Final Fantasy Tactics, Luminary and a dash of Silkroad Online. It’s a turn-based MMO where you control up to 9 recruitable characters. Finally a game that requires you to think a little before you act. Your character lineup and their position is vital to your survival. Put a Gunner out in the front and she will get mowed down faster than you can say Bang. Recruit an army of 9 melee characters and discover how they can’t hit Flying type monsters (which appear very frequently late in the game).

Atlantica Online also offers Luminary’s in-dept economy and town management systems. Aside from managing your characters and their growth, the game offers you to take control of game market. Almost everything can be bought from the market. Most items have a fixed market price and this helps controls insane inflations that many MMOs have (ie, Granado Espada). Players would usually sell under the market price and this helps newer players purchase what they need and continuously simulating the economy.

Refining in this game is painless, all items have 100% success rates all the way to +10. All you need is the equipment and an equilivant equipment and the enchantment stone. Weapon and Armor loots comes in Equipments boxes that you random for. Keep what you need, and sell what you don’t need.

People who love crafting will be pleased to know that this game is very crafting-centric; basic needs like potions and food all the way to weapons and equipments to even scrolls and bullets can be crafted. Crafting levels also can be taught from player to player (provided the learning player has the experience), and the teaching player recieves exp for doing so.

This game also promotes guild activities. There are many features of the game only available to players with guilds such as guild quests, town control, usage of the training centres, town quests, collecting taxes from players who use your town’s facilities as well as NPC residents living in your town. Towns in this game by the way, are named after actual countries (Which is why some guilds fight so hard to get Tokyo, lol).

Guild members grind guild quests to earn guild points which in turn allows guild leaders to bid control for towns around Atlantica Online. The winning guild gets to control the town for 1 year (game time) and as they farm more town quests to improve the towns, they get to increase taxes for all the facilities available in the town. Highly populated towns by players = more taxes gained = more money earned. NPC residents pay taxes monthly (game time), which officers can draw to pay their salaries. Money making in this game is easy.

Atlantica Online also offers players the opportunity to bet on AI-controlled battles in Arenas to earn money everyday (10am Singapore time). The payout is very lucrative. PVP Tournaments based on level brackets are also held daily together with the Arena and prize monies are very attractive. All of these events are part of the game and not engineered by the GMs, which means you don’t have to wait for GMs to get their lazy asses off to organize one.

The learning curve in Atlantica Online however, is steep but not difficult to master. The interface takes some time to get used to, but as soon as you get use to it, this game is almost perfect. Graphics in this game is suprisingly good for a tactics game.

If you’re looking for a game that will last you for a while, this is the game. We’ll be here for a long while, from the way I see it. Join Yakisoba if you want a closely knitted guild when the next beta starts!

We here at Yakisoba’s very excited about resurecting our blog once again to fill it up with more posts about ourselves and the games that have caught our eyes. A couple of members will join me in writing articles, while the rest will churn out ideas and news on our forums.

I took a trip down memory lane, reading our old Granado Espada posts, and I have to admit, we are pretty damn awesome. Hahaha. But what’s more awesome is how this guild has bonded us like no other experience. A plate of fried Japanese noodles is all it took.

Today, our active members stands at around 15. A far cry from the original 100-ish members, but nevertheless continuing to keep the flames alive, and moving from one game to another game whenever time permits. Sadly, we no longer are able to keep up to our “insane hardcore grinding” title.

But we’ve decided for now to move to Altantica Online to play. As soon as the next OB starts, we’ll be there and we hope people out there will join us. I’ll talk more about the game in post to come.

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Team Fortress 2

• Fixed team switches on Attack/Defense maps spamming the console
• Fixed the Kritzkrieg not working on servers with crits turned off
• Fixed some clipped localized strings in various in-game dialogs
• Fixed several cases where files were synchronously loaded while the game was running
• Fixed a shutdown crash in the material system
• Cached rendering of item model panels to improve performance, in particular while weapon selection was visible
• Added a gear symbol behind the health bar for Engineer buildings, in both target IDs and freeze panels
• Players killing themselves will now give a kill credit to the last enemy who damaged them
• Fixed grenades, rockets, and flamethrower being able to fire through grates at round starts
• Fixed players being killed and creating ragdolls during team switches
• Fixed various exploits and performance problems in CP_Badlands, CP_Well, and CP_Fastlane
• Removed health bonus from the Backburner

I’m saddened by the removal of the health bonus. I admit it makes the Pyros a little imbalanced, but hell it made suicide charging into a Heavy more fun.

Hi all. It’s been an awfully long time since I posted here, and well I’m finally back to breath life into this blog. We will be updating this blog more frequently, so do check back often. Just for the outside community as well as former members information, Yakisoba is still very much alive and kicking. We are all holed up in our private forums, slowly plotting to dominate another game. Haha, okay maybe not. Most of us have pretty much moved on to higher education, work and such. Myself for example have been very fortunately to graduate and work for Eric Khoo, a local filmmaker.

A handful of us are still keeping the yakisoba forums alive with updates on the latest games and personal lives with occassional ghosts returning to drop a link to another game before disappearing. Just to show how deep the yakisoba bond runs among us, two of our members recently got attached and we all wish them the very best in their relationship.

Currently myself and a few other members are playing Atlantica Online, a turn-based MMO where you can control up to 9 players. If you think Granado Espada was already hard with 3, then this game will blow you away. Hahah. Atlantica Online also comes with a very complex economical system and we love it a lot here. It’s currently in CBT now, and they are wiping soon. But we’ll definitely be returning to this game.

I’ll stop here for now, don’t want to burn out by starting with a TLDR post.

Aye, I must admit we are a little slow this time round, only because everyone’s not exactly very free (with the exception of our dear PES E Jiren aka Renji (GE), who is now the leader.

But it’s great in the sense that 17 former members (and more to come) have all returned together to play Cabal. That itself is quite a feat since the former yakisoba spirit already exist within the guild. We’re still deciding whether we should go active competitively, so we aren’t exactly going to mass recruit people.

But if you’re still interested to join us, and is quite a grinder, pm Tsuu. And I can’t believe someone actually stole the Tsubaki name and made it into a mule character. Sonofabitch.

Oh, we are all now playing on Chan 24. Catch us there.

Hello everyone! It’s been a while since this dead blog has been updated, but fret not. It will be updated more often now, since that we have decided to move to Cabal Online (SEA). That’s right, the Yakisoba that you see in Cabal Online is the official Yakisoba guild. As usual, we’re moving towards competitive gameplay once again and interestingly, the early stages of this game have seem to already spark to rival factions (reminding me of the good ol’ Dominion vs Yakisoba saga).

Just a couple of changes in the leadership, Tsubaki will not be the leader in Cabal, instead, Lun4r aka Testarossa (GE) aka Feito (TF2) (omfg, you should just stick to one damn nick bitch) will be helming the guild. Tsubaki will be incharge of recruitments and updates of the blog as usual.

Our recruitment notice can be found here on the community forum (which Tsubaki can’t post because his account hasn’t been accepted by moderators).

And here’s our list of members

I daresay we have quite a large number of the high level players around. While this is just the CBT, we believe it’s always good to grab your people when it’s early =)

We’ll see you guys in OBT.

Alright, quite a number of us have moved to Team Fortress 2, and we’re hoping more of you will pick up TF2 because it’s just mind blowing fun. Here’s more details for those who want to pick a copy up.

How to get it
You can purchase the Orange Box set from either Steam which you will immediately be allowed to download and play. You get 5 games (HL2, HL2 ep1, HL2 ep2, Portal and TF2 for the price of SGD$66.

or

Purchase just the standalone Team Fortress 2 game from Steam for SGD$44.

or

Buy the Orange box set from retail outlets. SGD$79 plus minus

In my opinion, buying the Orange Box is better even though you may not like to play HL2. However, Portal is amazingly fun and it’s pretty much worth getting. HL2 itself, is a pretty good game and when you want a different environment and pacing, that’s one game you can play.

Who has it
Yakisoba’s Steamcommunity site: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/yakisoba

Tsubaki – http://steamcommunity.com/id/tsubaki
SilverCrimz – http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197992954287
Huang – http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197965072009
Testarossa – http://steamcommunity.com/id/Feito
SEVEN – http://steamcommunity.com/id/xealph

And also, our RakiChanneru allies
ebil.fox – http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197992976133
madman – http://steamcommunity.com/id/teh_madman
fullmetalneko – http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197993190526
Jayfactor – http://steamcommunity.com/id/JayFactor
Strifemare – http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197993094892

Recommended servers
SG servers have the best ping obviously, but the worst players. Me and testa always play on the JP servers because it’s much better there, and plus the ping for those in the West and Asia is acceptable (100ish ping). Here are some of the JP servers

Team Fortresss 2 Beginner’s Server [JP]: 219.117.192.15:27015
[JP] 100Yen Server: 121.3.92.215:27015
[JP] 200Yen Server: 121.3.92.215:27016
[JP] Hanage Japan TF2: 222.13.114.39:27015
[JP] W.K.T.K. TeamFortress2: 219.121.89.11:27015

That’s right. A couple of us have moved/will be moving to the newly launched Team Fortress 2, which is incredibly fun and addictive. The gameplay is just pure insanity, lots of killings, capturing point or flags and a lot of laughter. The graphics are pretty awesome too, it’s like the original Team Fortress Classic meets Pixar Animation. Voice acting in this game is uber hilarious, especially when you taunt people.

We have also formed up Yakisoba on the Steamcommunity, membership is now open to those who want to join us over at Team Fortress 2.

For those who want to know more about Team Fortress 2, read on for screenies and commentary below! And go watch the game trailers here!
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