Author: Julian

(hot damn, I so love sensationalist titles)

I look at many of the upcoming titles, and what do I see?

Age of Conan: Mostly PvP
Warhammer Online: Mostly PvP
Pirates of the Burning Sea: Mostly PvP
GW:EN / GW2: Mostly PvP

And so on. What the hell, people? Have we given up on PvE? Have we collectively accepted that there’s no way around WoW’s raid-centric PvE (almost universally maligned, yet at the same time almost universally played), so we don’t bother anymore? What’s a progress-minded soloist PvEr to do? Do I have to write a manifesto? Would it have readers, or would they all be busy killing each other?

Do I have to start letterbombing some offices? No! I can’t! That would be PvP! Aaaaargh!

To me, at least, but I suppose it’s also very good news to a few other crazy gamers like me out there.

Apparently, Mafia II is being made. By the same guys, even. Which is pretty much the gaming equivalent of Scorsese waking up one day and saying “Hey, you know what? I think ‘Goodfellas’ needs a part two”. The first one was a superb game, with incredibly yummy storytelling and ambiance. So if you haven’t played it, you can pick it up on the cheap nowadays and it’ll end up right up there in your list of best gaming dollars spent.

I’m a grown gamer, one that handles screenshots with a lot of care, but I’ll be damned if they don’t look good.

If you haven’t played DEFCON yet, you probably should. Can’t go wrong with a 60 megs demo and it’s tons of fun. Well, if you’re into genocide it’s fun (and who isn’t?). It’s from Introversion, the kind folks that made the also quite delicious Uplink a few years back.

If you like it, send them a few bucks. Support basement programming, save the whales, all that.

I’m as happy as a clam can be before being plucked off the sea and put in a soup with other fellow clam carcasses. I have found a new metric.

See, it was about time. The last metric I had adopted was TTC (Time To Crate), and this was years ago. Sure, I still use it. It’s a good one. But it’s been years! I needed a new one, so lo and behold, I found this baby casually skimming the LOTRO boards.

Say hello to my little friend: TTSHF (Time To Start Having Fun) – or, as I renamed it, simply TTF : Time To Fun.

Continue reading My Newest Elusive Metric

Yeah, some of you may know this one, some others won’t. Still, I inflict this WMD upon ye: Murloc RPG

And that’s all she wrote.

Yup, avatars: Your character model. The representation of your character(s) in the game world. How important are avatars to you?

Continue reading Avatars

Did I get your attention? Good.

Unfortunately, you’ve been had. This isn’t about sex. Or rather, this is not all about sex – I’m not that Freudian. This is about raising the discourse, in a way. Improving these games we play. Enriching the narrative.

The question is simple: Why is it that the vast majority of the games we play, and have played, are so thematically shallow? It seems to me that, sure, of course, games must have a clear mandate to entertain. There’s no escaping that, and it’s as it should be. But, should that be all? Here we have this medium, one of the most versatile ever created, but somehow we can’t seem to be able to look past its mere entertainment value. We do nothing else with it. What can we do with this, and why are we not doing it?

Continue reading Sex!

(*mumbles* I knew the book wasn’t for free after all)

Well, hello everyone. Julian here. Grandmaster farmer, exceptional dancer, friend to the animals. Also a gamer when real life doesn’t intersect too much. Ethic was kind enough to give me the chance to pour some musings here, in between all the rat killing, so I decided to take his generous offer. Or was it “crazy enough”? Well, I can’t tell the difference anyway.

I’ve been playing all kinds of games for as long as I can remember. Started on a ZX-81. 8K RAM (16K with the expansion, mind you), membrane keyboard, black and white: The world was an oyster. Ever since then, I won’t say I played them all, but I did play most. Good ones and bad ones alike. Like others here, I’m a relative newcomer to MMOs having only played them for about four years. Alas, also like most others, soon enough I was captivated by the genre.

I absolutely adore talking about games and game design, mechanics and also the more social, surrounding aspects of this ordeal of ours we like to call ‘gaming’. So that’s about it, and the kind of things you can expect to read from me. For the moment, stay tuned. If statistics are to be believed, I’m bound to write something worth reading at some point in the future. And if not, well, I’ll write it anyway because it all comes from the heart.

/wave