Yeah, I’ve been MIA for a couple weeks now. Work time is creeping into home time. It’s so cold when I get home that I find myself cuddling up with blankets and a cat on the couch, watching Netflix (tonight: the Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows”, season 1). I’m not wild about this “winter” thing in general. I haven’t been able to get on the bicycle for a few weeks now, and it’s really making me antsy. ...
We’re way behind on our latest project at work, so I’ spent most of Friday working. I did take a break, though, to log on and participate in the final Beta 3 invasion event this afternoon. I’d spent all night (until 4:30AM) leveling my cleric from 12 to 20, and though I didn’t get a chance to visit the Iron Tombs, I did want to help keep Freemarch free. I’d leveled from 16 to 18 in a raid group at one of Thursday’s invasions. That also earned me nearly enough planar currency to get some nice epic items. I logged on, joined in, and earned enough to get some “purple” leggings. Good stuff. ...
Yes, we’re back to the Daily Blogroll. Another allergy attack has left me asleep by 9PM, which really shortens the nights for me. Is Aion too derivative to be successful? Tobold thinks so. In fact he wonders why people would pay full price (US$15/month) for a WoW-like like Aion when they can get the real thing for the same price, or a free WoW-like in Runes of Magic. He also doesn’t hold out much hope for Fallen Earth, calling it too much like failed MMO Tabula Rasa “just working less well, being less fun, and having less good graphics”. So that’s that. ...
I was thinking this morning about Norman Spinrad’s “Bug Jack Barron”, where a treatment can make you immortal, but a child has to die (this btw is a massive spoiler if you have not read the book). In MMOs, we are immortal, but at some point we’ve done everything or it just gets boring and we move on to the next game. If we had immortality in our real lives, how long would we live before we were just desperate to have it end so we could move on? ...
My new computer is due to be delivered today! I’ll be at work, of course, but maybe I can finally find their delivery center and pick it up afterward. My hope and fervent dream is that this will be the computer powerful enough to run Lord of the Rings Online…. Anyway. A couple of weeks ago, Paragon Studios introduced the Make Your Own Farm Mission (aka Architect) system, where players could find a badge they wanted to gain, and find the perfect mission among the thousands created for this purpose to gain that badge, or that level, or whatever they liked. Experience with similar level creators in such obscure games as Diablo, Diablo II and LittleBig Planet wasn’t clue enough that many players would use their new powers to create and play custom missions to benefit their characters. ...
Penny Arcade starts off Freeday Friday with a little bit of snark about the Chronicles of Spellborn payment plan. While it’s true that you can now use a credit card like for every other game… I think trying to figure out their Coins-based plan is a fun game all on its own, don’t you? Reported everywhere is Lord of the Rings Online’s second anniversary promotion. Free to try again, 25% experience bonus on kills that stacks with all other bonuses, tokens you can trade in for cool stuff, etc etc. The xp boost is very nice, anyway. I haven’t seen what the tokens trade in for, but I have my suspicions I have a lot of Blueberry Tart recipes in my future. ...
NCSoft’s first quarter report came out, and they don’t want to talk about their space marine-fps-mmo, Tabula Rasa, except to say they are fairly disappointed bu its performance. I should refer to it by its full name, Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa. Richard Garriott, if you don’t know of him, is “the legendary video game programmer and designer, noted as one of the PC Gamer’s “Game Gods”. I found this little tidbit on a vanity web site called “Richard in Space”, where you can meet Richard Garriott as he prepares for his space tourist flight to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. ...
… and then the Bane came and those of us who escaped could only take what we could carry. And most of that was left in piles outside the alien wormholes that brought us to the front lines in a war we could never understand, never win. Each day we fight is another day we live, and we go on, somehow. Lishian has been raving about Tabula Rasa at work for a couple of weeks now, and hey, he’s a big guy, so when he raves, you want to listen. (Note: working with gamers is fun. Lish always has some new spin on PvP to talk about, and the guy who sits right across from me was the one who got me to try Portal…) ...