Updated! Links to information about the new spells at the end of the post. Whoa! Celestia’s finally on the Test server! I’ve been playing on it a few hours, just long enough to learn the mystical incantation which allows wizards to survive underwater and to start investigating the Crab Realm. The crabs, you see, have been attacking the underwater city constructed by the Marleybone explorers, who traveled across the Spiral by balloon. ...
There’s a gulf between the MMOs I WANT to be playing – such as EverQuest, where I currently have a max-level rogue – and the MMOs I ACTUALLY play – which, these days, are Dungeons & Dragons Online and Star Trek Online. (Wizard101 is on the back burner as we wait for the expansion). EverQuest is famous for being a social, more ‘sandbox’ open world where reputation matters and the things you do have consequence. Well, not so much anymore; SOE has fully bought into the instanced adventure scheme and now, nothing anybody does has any effect on the world. But ONCE UPON A TIME, it did. The point being, though, was it WAS a virtual world, where you could just hang out in places and chat, role play, run events or do whatever you wanted – and even occasionally pull on the heavy boots and wade into dungeons and battle for treasure. ...
I’ve been wanting to write more blog posts, but every time I sit down to write about Minecraft, I end up playing Minecraft, and then it’s suddenly midnight. If you’ve managed to avoid all the Minecraft hype over the past few weeks, I hope it’s warm and cozy under your rock. The basic premise is, you’re plopped with nothing into the middle of a world that is fully moldable and destructible. At night, The Monsters Come. You must first build some sort of shelter and hide before the sun goes down. ...
I could while away the watches, Berating Ensign Hodges But that would cause a scene Oh I’d be the pride of Starfleet – Among captains, I’d be elite If I only had a Breen…. Oh, I could tell you why we ejected the warp cores, We wanted an extra week on Risa’s sunny shores And so we beamed straight down for more I might find at my court martial, that I will serve a partial ...
Sure, Wizard101 is free… for certain values of free. I guess I’m just going to have to fall back on definitions, here. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to talk to KingsIsle’s VP of Marketing, Fred Howard, today! Thrilled and a little surprised. What about yesterday’s Wizard101 post, I wondered, could have caught his attention? The gentle fun being poked at the humorously irrelevant Facebook sidebar ads? ...
I know this Selena Gomez promotion KingsIsle is doing isn’t MEANT for me. But we adult W101 players get pulled in anyway, because, hey, we want to play Celestia, and if playing Celestia TODAY means we have to do it while KI lends itself to the Disney megacorp publicity machine, then I guess I’ll play. So my characters, having battled the thousands of other players to FINALLY get their Tower Captains last night, managed to get their Selena Gomez fan kit – statue and poster – and had to come up with a place to put the things. And that became a little contest. ...
I’ve just been informed that Episode 5 of the Breen arc will be called “Cold Cream”. You heard it here first, folks. The Breen take off their masks and it is finally shown, for the very first time, that the Breen hide their faces because they have very dry skin. This episode is very similar to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Chase”, where Picard & crew went looking for genetic markers throughout known space in order to find and decode a message from an enigmatic race that were the progenitors of humanoid life throughout the galaxy, in this one, the good guys race the Breen to discover a message left behind by the Preservers, another enigmatic race responsible for shepherding the cultural evolution of younger races. ...
Seriously, KingsIsle? You’re blatantly shilling teen actor/singer/Disney creation Selena Gomez’s new CD in the game? It’s the one that’s driving all the amphibians and crustaceans in the Spiral MAD! Talking fish can’t get enough of her intoxicating beauty! The indescribable sweetness of her music! She MUST become queen of Crab Alley! Except that her parents would freak that she, like, disappeared. The same way all the parents of every other wizard in the game (all presumably separated from their families back on Earth) don’t. ...
Lt. Commander Krontar commanding the IKS Van’tek, to the High Council: Qapla’! I, Krontar, report as commanded. I ask once again to be allowed honorable death by Mauk-to’Vor instead of this shameful sentence as a flat-headed victim of the augment virus. This more human appearance is a disgraceful punishment for the crime of allowing a human ship to leave the field of battle. Nevertheless, I obey. ...
Lord of the Rings Online launched as a free-to-play game today. No, wait. The gates that had been shut beyond the memory of Man groaned open on hinges made of dwarven stone, mithril-inlaid runes pulsing a message nobody living could read…. BE FREE…. No, no, no. In Evendim, did Lysistra, a Capitan of Men, foresee A day of future memory when Eriador would be free ...