Hello Kitty Online

Someone needs to tell the truth about MMOs. I guess it falls to me to explain to parents about the games their children are playing online with people whose idea of a good conversation opener is “I AM SO HIGH.” **World of Warcraft: Cataclysm by Activision Blizzard.[ ](https://chasingdings.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/worgen_1280x1024.jpg)** In the original World of Warcraft, children could take the role of a virtuous human fighting on the side of the Church against the evil Horde. The Burning Crusade expansion revealed that the enemy Horde came from Hell itself, and the humans took the fight against the villainous Orcs and other demons to the lower realms. ...

While developing a game to an established IP may bring the potential of thousands of players eager to live in the world they have come to know, the property may also be a straight-jacket. Clever developers have found ways around these problems, though. Game: Dragon Oath IP: “Tian Long Ba Bu” by Jin Yong In 1963, Jin Yong began serializing his epic novel Tian Long Ba Bu, or “The Heavenly Dragon and the Eight Sections”, in newspapers in Hong Kong and Singapore. Four years later, he finished. Over 230 characters make their way through TLBB’s grand plot of warring sects, intrigue, love, betrayal, blinding, death, demigods and dragons. He was the Robert Jordan of his day – if Robert Jordan had written a chapter of his books every day for four years. TLBB has spawned four films and five movies. After reading about TLBB on Wikipedia, I don’t understand why we haven’t seen a Western adaptation yet. A whole fake CITY was built in order to film one of the series (and is now a tourist destination). ...

That’s like Galaxy Express 999, NOT the Futurama ship. That’s Planet Express. Ever, like, DIE in a game, and your pet begins dancing around your decaying corpse, singing about what a great day it is? Thanks, Hello Kitty Online! Leveling has slowed quite a lot in that game. My pet is having a super time, though. If you spend several hundred hours in your game of choice, the LAST thing you really want is someone coming up and telling you that you’re wasting your time, because Game B is SO much better than your Game A – insert any two games in those slots. Super Mario World vs Legend of Zelda. Cribbage vs Bridge. WoW vs…. well, any other game that is not WoW. ...

I’ve gotten a bunch of emails telling about updates et al to a lot of games. Rather than write an article about each one, or ignoring them entirely, I thought I’d just combine them into a single post. Windstorm Studios, brainchild of ex-Age of Empires and Halo Wars dev Dusty Monk, has just released two bits of concept art from his unannounced evil giant super death robot massacre game, Citizen Kabuto. Just kidding. The cries on everyone’s lips, where is Ultraman? … still just kidding. Check out the awesome art and bug him for more info! ...

Either the thought of playing in the world of Hello Kitty! makes you really excited, or you couldn’t care less. Nothing in this “first look” is going to change your mind. Still here? Then you’re a Hello Kitty! fan, and just want to know what the game that you’ve already decided to play is like. Worried that you’re too old to enjoy Hello Kitty? Worry not. Last night, the youngest person who admitted to their age was 20. Most were older – one person joked that everyone seemed to be 40 or over. HKO is a social game, more than anything else. A kaffeeklatsch for fans of a bobble-headed kitten from Japan. ...

(Shhh! Hello Kitty Online’s closed beta started yesterday! Expect a HKO First Look once I’ve found my way around). Massively reports that EVE Online’s next expansion, Dominion, has just been announced. Dominion brings a new focus on planets, undoubtedly setting the scene for EVE’s planetbound companion FPS MMO, Dust 514. EVE is also adding social media functionality to the game, and I have no idea what that means. Tweet every mission? No clue. Lastly, the walking around in stations expansion is given a name, Incarna, so I guess we’re stuck in our pods for at least another few months. ...

City of Heroes is currently running their Valentine event, the one time in the year when heroes and villains can come together and luuuurve each other. Visit Pocket D, the rockin’ night club presided over by the hip DJ Zero, his power vendors Chill and Dram, and somewhat alarmed mission-giver and part time DJ Scratch to find out how you can save the Rogue Isles AND Paragon City from an onslaught of super-powered war bots. There’s also some more information about the secretive Architect project, the future of interactive entertainment within City of Heroes. The Architect company will allow you to set the parameters, NPCs and goals for short missions of your own creation. It doesn’t seem like you’ll be able to actually build your own levels; you’ll select a setting and probably a size, where the NPCs should be and what they say and do, and off you go. Not quite the game creator I was hoping for, but looks like a good time nonetheless. ...

As a Founding Member of Hello Kitty Online (you may now be seated), I was hoping to install it last night with the hopes that I would have better experiences with it now, than I did in closed beta. In closed beta, I could not patch the game – at all. Only when HKO would release each patch as a separate download that I could run locally could I get into the game. ...

It’s really, really hard to write about Hello Kitty Online without irony. But I have to come clean. I was a huge Hello Kitty fan back about fifteen years ago. Well, DUH, in an ironic way. Because that’s the only way an adult can really enjoy Hello Kitty. Back this spring, Hello Kitty Online had a closed beta which I was fortunate enough to be part of. It wasn’t a great experience. I could hardly even play the game, because the patcher didn’t work for any of my computers. They began publishing their patches as separate downloads so it became possible to at least play. The game itself was an exceedingly grindy Asian import – you don’t just get quests to kill things, you have to kill FIFTY of them. That’s like one of the very first quests. ...

Do that Hello Kitty Online! video. My idea with this is to have a car driving along and the world around it being taken over by Hello Kitty. Houses, pasted on other cars, and so on. I have no idea how I’m going to do it. I’ll probably get Andy to help, but Windows Movie Maker is entirely unable to do the job. Maybe, since I won’t be getting source video from Fraps, I’ll be able to use some Linux tools like Cinellara to do it. I think if I can get a compositing layer there, I can just do the Hello Kitty overlays in POVRay. I have lots of JPop music to use (because I love J-culture, proving I am white, apparently) as the background, but I think Hello Kitty is Chinese. I don’t know if I have any Chinese pop. Maybe some of the Fushigi Yuugi stuff, which was set in China. Although, since I am an American gamer, it should probably be some really loud metal. Symphony X. Oh, Miranda Sex Garden! It’s not KMFDM, but it’ll do. ...