Mythos

My blog gets its share of people looking for llama sex videos and stuff, but most of the people who come here seem to be looking to have specific questions answered. So, I’ll do my best. Playing Rock Band on Xbox Live I assume you already have an Xbox Live account, and can connect to it. Rock Band has many, many ways to play online. The one you’ll want to try first is the one where you form a band with people all over the world. From the main menu, choose Multiplayer > Quick Match and then log in with your instrument. The person whose Xbox Live account it is must log in first, then any other people locally, then you may invite friends over Xbox Live, and finally search for more players over Xbox Live. If a band is looking for the instruments you have in your band, you may be pulled into someone else’s band. Regardless, only one person will be able to select the songs, and everyone must have the downloadable songs before they will be selectable from the menu. All instruments for the Xbox 360 version of Rock Band support the headset, so make sure you’re wearing it, especially for the full band mode, so you can discuss which songs you’d like to play. I personally prefer doing random ranked Tug of War or Score Duels with people. Rock Band by yourself is only half a game. ...

If you’ve been wanting to try Flagship Studios’ Diablo II-like MMO Mythos and somehow have managed to avoid getting a beta key, well, your wait may be over. Flagship has given every beta tester two keys to give away, and I already had one so that’s three old-school MMO fans who could be playing All I need is your email address – so post a comment here, make sure you use a real email address in the field where you put it, I’ll send the first three beta invites. Don’t post your email address in the comment itself unless you like getting spam. Trust me, this blog gets harvested by spam bots several times a day (as do all web sites, I imagine). ...

2007 opened with me splitting my time between EQ1 and EQ2. Through brief flings with LotRO, Dungeon Runners and Mythos, and even briefer flings with a half dozen more I played just once, I ended the year in pretty much the same place – playing EQ2 exclusively. There’s these incredibly massive hype/PR machines and all they want to do is build up expectations for their ground-breaking, world-shaking title, or book, or movie, and then when it finally arrives, you go “meh” and wait for the next big thing. And the hype machine worked overtime this year. Burning Crusade, Vanguard, Warhammer, Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Hellgate: London, Tabula Rasa; all have (or had) the hype machine promissing so much that almost anything that came (or will come) can only disappoint. ...

2007 has been an amazingly full year, considering some of the major games we were hoping to play (Gods & Heroes, Age of Conan) were canceled or delayed. In January, I was still living in San Diego, still hoping that Sigil or SOE would finally read one of my resumes… on the 8th, the company in Carlsbad where I worked downsized their IT department from two people to one, and I was on the street. I found nearly immediately that spammers have taken over the job search websites as well as everything else on the Internet, and learned some hard lessons about telling real opportunities from spam opportunities (which aren’t opportunities at all, of course). Gaming suffered, since I had to spend all my time preparing cover letters, arranging interviews and so on. I was very much getting into the Star Trek Online community, and looking forward to Lord of the Rings Online, which I had pre-ordered. ...

There’s been a lot of topics going around the blogosphere, and I’ve been holding off on them because, well, I don’t really have anything groundbreaking to say about them. But, what the heck. eBook Readers First up is a non-MMO one, but something I’ve covered extensively in this blog – eBook readers. “Ask Slashdot” fielded a question from a reader who asked Which eBook Reader is Best? The comments fell predictably into the camps that felt nothing could come close to the experience of reading an actual book; PDAs, cell phones and laptop computers were more appropriate for the task; Sony’s Reader comes from Sony and nothing more needs to be said (these are people angry less for the SWG NGE than for Sony’s rootkit adventures and their role as a quarter of the allegedly evil* RIAA). I use my Sony Reader every day, and daily rediscover old friends – yesterday brought Fred Saberhagen’s “First Book of Swords” and Julian May’s “The Many-Colored Land” onto my Reader. I didn’t comment on Slashdot, though, because… well, commenting on Slashdot on matters of opinion is pretty pointless. I doubt many would be sympathetic to my “I use a Reader because it looks good and is REALLY EASY TO READ” stance anyway. ...

Still looking for a Mythos Beta invite? Taylor Balbi, Community Manager for Mythos, has given a bunch of new invites to a couple of people and all you have to do is go to their IRC channel and ask! Hey guys! Well, you don’t have to WAIT for an invite. You can head over to our IRC channel where we have given two of the long time fans a bunch of invites. The server: irc.forthegamers.org ...

I don’t know whether to thank JoBildo or not for sending me a Mythos beta key just when I’d resubscribed to Dungeon Runners. Both are point-and-click kill fests, but where Dungeon Runners takes the Diablo 2 formula a little toward the MMO world, Mythos unashamedly brings the legendary dungeon hack to the present day. I haven’t run DR once since I installed Mythos… With Hellgate: London (by the developers of Mythos, Flagship Studios) in beta, and Tabula Rasa providing another take on the formula, 2008 could well be the year the Action RPG comes back. While World of Warcraft is still rampaging around the MMORPG world, playing in a different genre just makes sense. ...