Wizard101

Even though you no longer have to do the Celestia pre-quest in order to eventually head to that undersea expansion when it arrives later this year, why wouldn’t you want to, right? The pre-quest has you fighting bosses in Krokotopia, Mooshu and Dragonspyre in order to assemble a Rosetta stone that will allow the deciphering of a mysterious message. The message is from a lost Marleybone expedition into lost Celestia in search of the truth to rumors about Astral Magic. ...

I dunno how much longer I can take this dribbling and drabbling of Celestia information. I’ve done the pre-quests (well, on Test, anyway), met one of the Celestia generals face to claw and learned of the evil reign of Queen Umbra…. Time to wand up and take the battle to the evil queen and rescue those poor Marleybone explorers. But … not quite yet. Wands down, wizards. ...

The sunken world of Celestia moved a step closer to reconnecting with the Spiral in Wizard101 yesterday when KingsIsle added a teaser pre-quest to the Test server and, we hope, very soon to the live servers. We don’t get to go to Celestia YET… but we do find out quite a bit of the circumstances behind its loss, long ago. It comes as no surprise that there are elements both in the Spiral and in Celestia itself that don’t want to see wizards swimming with the sharks; but we defeated Malistaire. Nobody tells us what we can’t do. ...

Wizard101 recently announced their ten millionth player, a not-inconsiderable achievement for a non-free to play game. Even given second or third accounts, millions of people have spent some bit of their lives enjoying the mystic worlds of the Spiral. Tara Windwalker wrote me today to share the sad but somehow joyful story of Emma Elizabeth Bradford, one of those ten million. Yesterday, I was doing a search of online posts featuring current news about Wizard101 and found an obituary for Emma Elizabeth Bradford, a 7 year old girl, who was a Wizard101 fan. Emma’s obituary is one of the most beautiful that I have ever read. I don’t know if I ever saw or met Emma in the Wizard101 game but we probably share(d) the joy that Wizard101 adds to our lives through its humor and wonderful graphics. ...

Amazon.com panicked; they’d let me download the “Symphonic” Les Mis soundtrack before they tried to charge my debit card. The debit card, it was dead. Bank of America, fearing a leak of card information, had revoked their debit cards and sent new ones out; mine was in an envelope on my desk. But unless I informed Amazon and every other outfit which had my debit card information about the new number, all my recurring subscriptions and everything else would, as they tried and, like Amazon, failed to remove money from my account, remove me from their rolls. ...

The contest is over! Professor Drake is NOT a fair person, and in fact, had constructed his puzzle such that only his favorite student, Bailey, could win. No amount of cheating by Daniel, who was stuck outside the classroom; or Cedric, staring at a wall, could help them with the colors of their own hats. Abigail simply didn’t have enough information to make more than a random guess at the color of her own hat. ...

Another week, another truckload of gaming press releases. Bioware announces their new downloadable content for their Dragon Age RPG, “The Darkspawn Chronicles”. Meant as an alternate story – one where your character from Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening dies during the Grey Warden initiation – here you command the forces of the Darkspawn against the remnants of the forces of Light, led by the man who wouldn’t be king, Alistair. ...

In Dungeons & Dragons Online, Kasul and I finished our trip through all the Korthos Island instances on Elite mode, giving each of us the maximum amount of favor you can get from those quests. Misery Peak, the one where you don’t kill the dragon, was its usual platforming mini game of jumping around a multilevel maze looking for levers and fighting ice spiders. Since it was his first time, Kasul didn’t know you were supposed to pretend you were actually killing the dragon for uber screenshots. Next time. ...

MMO devs fire broadside press releases at my inbox, and I inflict them on others. We’ll suffer together or not at all. Actually, let’s start off with a non-MMO offer. The Humble Indie Bundle from Wolfire Games collects five acclaimed Indie games (including the addictive building game World of Goo, underwater fantasy Aquaria, innovative platformer Gish, rabbit beat’m’up Lugaru, and horror adventure game Penumbra Overture. Until Monday, you can get all of these games AND donate to Electronic Freedom Foundation AND Child’s Play … at any price you want, divided between charities and the developers any way you want. This is a can’t lose deal – I was up till 2AM last night playing World of Goo… on my Linux box. ...

Students and faculty alike were shocked this afternoon when Merle Ambrose, Headmaster of Wizard City’s prestigious Ravenwood Academy, left the Spiral and led police on a merry chase through the streets of Austin. He left behind a cryptic recording. Close friends Gamma and Bartleby have refused to comment. Austin commuters report a second person in the car with the headmaster; descriptions match that of villain Malistaire Drake’s long dead wife, Sylvia. If the reports are correct, Sylvia Drake’s death may have been faked. ...