One of the parties that I attended at this years E3 was hosted by Riot Games to show off their new online multiplayer action RPG, League of Legends: Clash of Fates.  Here you play as Summoners with an avatar tied to the player’s account that will advance and level up over time.  You can play as over 40 champions as well as choose from hundreds of items for your avatar.  What is great is that there are no monthly subscription fees so you can play online as  well as get frequent updates for the game.

Riot Games is a Los Angeles based game developer and publisher made up of about 40 employees, many of them veteran game developers.  They set out to create this MMO PvP title and have introduced some fun and unique characters like Nunu, the Yeti Rider – who looks like a little boy riding on the back of an intimidating yeti and throws snowballs at his enemies; Twisted Fate, the Cardmaster – who leaves fate to a deck of cards; and my personal favorite, Annie, the Dark Child who can summon a ferocious, humongous teddy bear to wreak havoc and destruction to her foes.  Hell yah!

I got a chance to play the game with other people at the party, so with my Red Bull and vodka in had, I sat down to play this PC MMO.  It took a little while to get everyone all set up – it was a party in a bowling alley, so some delay is only natural.  I chose my summoner – Annie, the Dark Child, of course – and we were divided into two teams.  I jumped right into the in game chat and said hello to my fellow gamers.  The objective of our game was to protect our base while taking over the opponents base.  You have minions that basically do your combat for you so you want to make sure that you follow them so that the can take the brunt of the initial wave of combat damage. You will constantly be leveling up so you need to pay attention so that you can level up your skills which will affect the power of your spells and how much mana will be used.  You can even warp back to your home base to heal up or to go to the store to buy and upgrade your weapons and equipment.  To move, you simply click the left click on the mouse and your character will move to your mouse pointer’s location.  To attack, you left click the mouse and you will start to attack using whichever spell you have selected. If you build enough power, you can use your special attack which in my case was the ability to summon my bad ass freakishly scary awesome teddy bear!  I can’t tell you how many time I summoned him….because how awesome is it to wipe out an army of minions with a teddy bear?!?

As a gamer that sticks mostly to consoles, I needed a few minutes to get used to the control – you know, W A S D and using the mouse.  Once I got that, it was onto learning the mechanics of the game which I think will be easy for anyone to pick up in just one to two games.

The game was a lot of fun and my team ended up winning which was even cooler – can you say ferocious teddy bear.  So awesome. 

The game will launch in September 2009 and I may have to load Windows on my Mac so that I can play it.  It looks like it will be fun and addicting and with the play being free, what more can you ask for?