Sunday, March 28

Thursday, March 25

Yay!

The first in-game look into the Secret World. That was plenty of F5 pressing today for me.

Saturday, March 20

Confirming stereotypes

So here we are.
Mom wanted to go away for a weekend with her children and their spouse (that's my brother's, I have the complete SG-1 series. No spouse) in a bungalow in a bungalow park.

For some reason we got a bungalow with Internet access. Also for some reason I was the only one not to notice that or birng a laptop to the bungalow.
Naturally I was the one who ended up at the reception buying a UTP cable and thereby re-enforcing the image of the computer nerd who can't go without Internet for a weekend to the girls behind the counter, because no-one thought to consider that the permium Internet service might not be Wifi given that non-networked cabins are intermixed with networked ones.

I just hate it when I'm being non-nerdy and somehow end up being the nerd who solves all the problems for the non-nerds, like a Morlock serving the Eloi.
Then again, I am the only one here who has a blog to vent their frustration on...

Monday, March 15

Must see

A must see:



I managed to miss it in theater, so will have to hunt down the DVD.
I'm a big a huge Sendak fanboi since before I could read :-)

Friday, March 12

A Friday classic

Always good to make fun of America every once in a while

Sunday, March 7

Prying loose the nail

Hmmmm, since when is there a 4096 character limit to comments? That's barely enough to set up your argument structure!

They way I look at MMO's is similar yet subtly different at the moment. Maybe because I don't have an Old Faithful like Cuppycake and Phè.

When I look at the wide selections of MMO's available now and in the future, nothing cathces my eye really. I foresaw Star Trek Online being the bitter disappointment it is to most people interested in it, but I couldn't get up the energy to blog about it. Part of that is my new life/schedule which in a complete inversion of my old style has me more socializing and doing other stuff I neglected for the most part during those days at a cost to my online gaming and socializing.
The other reason is that I couldn't be bothered STO was making the same mistake every MMO maker does when trying to bank on their first prior IP so far has made. They're made with Hollywood Blockbuster checklists. Of course since tons of people per-order these games, sometimes multiple times, before the bad news gets out, these games do well on opening weekend which is another check on the Hollywood checklist. It's financially sound, just not a good MMO.

It happened with DDO, Matrix Online, WAR, CHampions Online and now STO. Turbine learned something from DDO I think and did better with LoTRO, Cryptic didn't learn from Champions or it was too late to change anything. Age of Conan was a bit different maybe, or it felt that way to me. It wasn't just exploiting the IP. There was genuine love for the IP, the MMMO genre and a desire to make a 'good game' rather than just big bucks.

I'm still hoping to find another MMO sometime which I feel I can sink my teeth in again. My main worry is that with the wide spread of flavours these days we've become jaded. Meaning that where when viable the options were 3-4 fantasy MMO's and 1-2 Sci-Fi ones it was easier to get in an MMO with your friends than it's now with over a score of Fantasy MMO's to pick from and even a handfull of Sci-Fi ones. It's so easy to get disheartened with an MMO which is unpolished in one area or another. But because we're all different, no current day MMO can ever satisfy us all. Odds of getting into an MMO that everyone likes (everyone being a group of friends betwen 5-20 with the latter being a persistent guild I guess) are slim.

The Old Faithfull MMO is like a well worn shoe. It's comfortable, and you've learned to walk so that the rough bits don't chafe anymore. No new MMO will ever give you that comfy feeling. Despite that we all keep claymoring for NEW and INNOVATION. This has developpers trying to do that for us. Resulting in games that do a few things well and a lot of things poorly to barely adequate. Somehting else the "Great MMO's of yore" did was do a few core things very well and added additional things as they became good enough. Even WOW did that and didn't nearly have the sleuth of polished features it has now. Unfortunately a new MMO needs to compete with that, or manage to tap into that "Artistic vein" that'll allow them to do the Few Things Very Well, add more later. I think two MMO's managed to capture that in recent years. Darkfall and Fallen Earth. Both do their core gameplay well, and in such a way there's no-one complaining within 2 weeks that they "finished" the game and there's no end-game. They're adding additional stuff after launch and their subscribers are for the most part patient with them and happy with the additions.

Of course, both games are what we'd call Niche Games today and don't appeal to a wide variety of players.

One difference between Cuppy and Phè I noticed:
Whereas Phè foresees having to socialize in RL rother than virtually, Cuppy is shifting towards the genre of "Social Network gaming and Twitting". I'm personally not interested at all in the 45 second attention-span crowd or the games built to further diminish their ability to delay reward. I wonder though if Phè or Cuppy's reaction is the more common reaction to the situation?

Thursday, March 4

Cuppytalk hit it on the nail again

Well, sort of. Read her post WoW, I heart you. Also, end of an era. A month or two ago she figured out she had this pile of single player games lying she never gets to play since her usual MMO is demanding all her time. That MMO that should be boring by now, but we keep playing. Oops, I switched from 'she' to 'we'. It is just too close to my own opinion. Today she figured out any MMO (apart from the usual one) is boring. There is no real joy anymore in stepping in a new virtual world and struggle to kil those 10 rats. What is the use? And more important, what is there for us to write about? No wonder there are hardly any posts anymore. Another era is really ending? What does that really mean for us? The end of being virtually social maybe. The days of living behind the screen is over, and we another form of entertainment takes over. Maybe I'll be more often in the pub now. Hmm, not a bad idea actually.