Just like pretty much everyone else, I bought Sims 3 and played it for awhile yesterday. I started off in a full family with two kids, a husband and me, and it didn’t go so well. I restarted living single and had plenty of time to myself, lots of chances to learn and have fun and relax, and never once felt hurried, and in all ways my life was better without a family. But at least I didn’t make my family the cast of Joss Whedon’s Firefly. Yet. ...
Wow, June already. The year seems to be flying by so quickly. I saw “Up” over the weekend, kind of dark for a Disney/Pixar film, but I liked it quite a lot. Gaming-wise, it was largely Free Realms along with some trips into EVE and Vanguard. I hope to make it to Antonia Bayle’s Festival of Unity sometime this week. Kasul at Shattered was at the opening ceremonies to the Festival of Unity, conveniently held at a place where evil characters would be slaughtered by good-aligned guards oops. Okay. For 2010, a Festival of Dis-unity, to be kicked off in the Crossroads in the Commonlands, okay? Naturally, this one would have to be held on the Lucan D’Lere server…. ...
Welcome to another Friday! Got plans for the weekend? I’m planning to take a short break from EVE Online and get caught up on a beta, Mabinogi, Wizard 101 and will reinstall EQ2 to see if that fixes the problems I’m having with it freezing on launch. Spinks starts us off with a long and detailed look at the power of story in MMOs, specifically, the plight of the Forsaken as they meet their maker in World of Warcraft’s Howling Fjord. Those Forsaken aren’t dead, they’re just pining for the fjords! ...
I’ve been staying away from talking about Darkfall and Free Realms lately because, what’s more to say about it? Well, Darkfall is about to launch in the US, and we can only hope that makes more waves than Spellborn’s rather uneventful splash when it did the same a couple months back. Keen thinks Darkfall’s NA launch will give the game a chance to launch in the shape it should have been from the start. It’s kind of odd, really. Is Europe becoming a kind of live beta for US players? Spellborn, Runes of Magic, now Darkfall – the Europeans pay to make the game better for us. ...
Working on a first impressions piece about Mabinogi. Will keep the self-flagellation to a minimum but really, I only do it because it feels good when I stop. On to the blogs! Are persistent henchmen the new groups? Syp thinks they might be. Star Wars: The Old Republic will have them (echoing the party you gathered in Knights of the Old Republic). Guild Wars has their henchmen. EverQuest has their mecenaries. Star Trek Online has their bridge crew. Have MMOs truly come full circle back to their single player, you+your crew of helpers, roots? Is it truly not worth the trouble anymore to be part of a group that includes other living people? ...
Long weekend for us in the US, Memorial Day weekend. Though meant to honor Americans who have died in wars, I remember it mainly as the beginning of school’s summer session – those last few weeks of school where the teachers pretty much relaxed and let you do whatever you liked. As a trumpet player in the school band, I always had the hope that I would be selected to be the lone trumpet that stood apart in the cemetery that also ended the Memorial Day parade and play taps as we all stood silent in prayer. ...
So I just applied to a corp in EVE Online. I have so many questions they can help me answer! Like, what’s the command to hearth back to the inn? And, are there like space question marks so you know which stations have the quests? And, how do you switch between specs? And, can some high level space dude run me through a couple newbie space dungeons for phat lewts? Hey, did you know that Chuck Norris never uses warp? He just whistles and solar systems come to HIM! ...
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? ...
One of the nice things about doing the Daily Blogroll is that it takes the pressure off trying to do something fun every night. Tuesday night, Kasul and I were playing LotRO, running around doing quests in the Lone Lands, and I realized I was bored senseless by the tedium of LotRO’s quest grind. Last night was all W101; a friend and I did a couple Moo Shu Onis and then farmed Baron Greebly for cool stuff, and we let each other see our homes. I was playing with a good friend each time, but LotRO’s soul-crushing quest grind couldn’t be saved. I suspect LotRO won’t be on my hard drive much longer. I love the players, but the game is just a grind in pretty clothes. ...
When I’m running around the mean streets of the Rogue Isles in City of Heroes, you know what I hate the most? Nah, not the dons of the Family. Not even Longbow. It’s those damn tourists from Paragon City. And NOW I find that the heroes themselves are thinking about slumming their dark sides on my turf? Sente hopes the expansion adds more depth to the Mission Architect, allowing real choices instead of “if it moves, kill it. If it doesn’t move, harvest it.” gameplay so common in CoX missions. Syp sees this as a necessary move to separate the game from Champions Online and DC Universe Online. Spinks wonders why it took so long for such a basic premise as heroes and villains swapping sides to make it into the game. Hudson hopes the expansion will deal with City of Heroes’ boredom factor. ...