Stingite over at the amazingly wonderful Wizard 101 blog, The Friendly Necromancer, has made an INCREDIBLE dance video from Katzenstein’s Lab. Makes me want to run right there and invite some friends for a party of my own :)
2008 has been an absolutely amazing year for MMOs, and my personal progress through them. Last year at this time, I’d just found the absolutely most perfect EQ2 guild – they were great raiders, loved grouping, and were fantastic people besides. With Clan of Shadows, I managed to do every flagging raid for Ruins of Kunark and was ready to step in and do my best to help the guild as they conquered Veeshan’s Peak. It wasn’t to be; I didn’t make the full membership vote. It wasn’t even close. That disappointment, along with other things to fill my evenings, eventually led to the end of raiding. Without raiding, though, I didn’t have much incentive to log in anymore. I tried to make things work with another guild, Delusions of Grandeur, but it just wasn’t CoS. I guess if I couldn’t make it in CoS, I didn’t want to settle for a lesser guild. ...
High level players gathered at the duel masters Wizard 101’s surprise announcement of a full PvP Arena system to accompany the PvE-focused excitement of the next world, Dragonspyre, early next year shocked and electrified the community. It’s one thing to beat easy and predictable computer opponents in the W101 game of magical cards. Battling human players is a whole different story. You can’t truly say you’re a master wizard until you can beat human opponents. ...
Given a games company founded by the developers of the PvP-centric MMO Shadowbane, and the fragfest shooters DOOM and Wolfenstein 3D, making a game centered around a bloodless card game where kids could battle monsters with funny monsters of their own must have been a little tough. Stingite over at The Friendly Necromancer says that that’s all about to change. Just in time for Christmas, the small dueling arena (picture on top) is being entirely revamped. There will be leader boards, ladder, arena ranking, matches, betting, special PvP loot… This is all sounding so incredibly familiar. ...
Christmas has come to Wizard City and Felix Navidad is selling Santa suits in Olde Town for real cash. Someone please explain the sense of selling appearance clothing, like Santa suits, when you don’t have appearance slots? Pi Story sells appearance armor – has appearance slots. Dream of Mirror Online – sells appearance armor, has appearance slots. Every game that has statless appearance armor for sale for real cash, has APPEARANCE SLOTS so you can still wear your regular gear and not have to swap out all the time. ...
There’s nothing as sad as seeing any empty quest journal. Er, assignment book. We are, after all, all wizards at Ravenwood, and in between saving all the worlds of the Spiral from the renegade Death professor, Malistaire, we’re meant to be getting in our assignments on time and are graded on neatness! I’ve done all the assignments, been to every alley of Wizard City, every monument in Krokotopia, every rooftop in Marleybone and every temple in Moo Shu. ...
Halloween is gone from Wizard City at last, and hot on the heels of Spooky Bob comes Harvest Hannah with a whole new inventory of crown gear to sell you. Don’t have any crowns? She also brings a way to earn crowns without paying for them, and she says she has placed Harvest Festival treasures on various boss mobs around the world. That’s all well and good. But I find it kind of ironic that the wizards and witches of Wizard City would want to dress in pilgrim gear after all of those Salem witch trials. That’s a lot like deciding to wear a Nazi SS outfit in the streets of Tel Aviv, isn’t it? Just not a real good idea? ...
No, really. Since I learned that the Master’s Tower, one of the three towers in that floating castle, dropped an extremely rare pet, I’ve had just one goal in Wizard 101: Continually run that tower in the hopes of getting that rare pet. I even made an alt to help run that tower. I don’t know how many times I ran the tower, never got the pet. I definitely would have liked to have gotten the pet, but recently, I was really resenting those STUPID FIRE MOBS with those STUPID FIRE DOTS. Hate them SO MUCH. ...
I was going to title this, “Friends don’t let friends play Wizard 101” because it’s so addictive, but I couldn’t. I really, really enjoyed playing my current crush with friends this weekend. I have this dream… that someday, I will fight through the Master’s Tower in Ravenwood and at the end of the battles, when I meet the final boss, Pumpkin Head, he will look at me in his terror, and just before I play that final card that will call down a centaur from the heavenly plains upon which he runs to split the villain’s vegetable head with a fierce arrow, he will say… Pumpkin Head will say… ...
Wizard 101, why can’t I quit you? I spent most of the night last night working on my LittleBigPlanet level. Well, almost. I spent most of last night feeling like an idiot. A frustrated idiot. Since LittleBigPlanet is based around a physics engine, everything you make there has to actually work to some degree. I started working on a sorta free-floating player system as is used in the hugely popular Gradius level, and got it kinda working, but I didn’t like it. Then I decided to make a game set not in space, but underwater, and the space ship becomes a submarine – or a bathysphere, really, since the thing has to be connected by chains to a hidden, remote-controlled trolley which handles the mechanism of bringing the bathysphere through the level. ...