Category: General

[Katamari Damacy] Start with one red paper clip and work your way up to a house!

1. I love Katamari Damacy.
2. Would you trade a year’s rent for a daylong lap dance?

There are two links above. Each will shed light on one of these two points.

: Zubon

HT: Marginal Revolution

I thought I had finally fixed my video corruption/crash problem with a new power supply, but my video went out again tonight. I am so sick of this. Can’t play anything for more than 30 minutes. I really don’t want to spend any more money, but this is getting old. Stupid computers.

Right now I just want to quit gaming forever. Bah…

– Ethic

Hmm, we seem to be quiet here. We are still awaiting Issue 7 over at City of Heroes, and I have not been playing much this week. I did read something interesting, though, so I’ll toss you a link. Will Wright is guest-editing Wired for April, and this is something he wrote for it, entitled “Dream Machines.”

Two preview bits:

Imagine that all you knew about movies was gleaned through observing the audience in a theater – but that you had never watched a film. You would conclude that movies induce lethargy and junk-food binges. That may be true, but you’re missing the big picture.

By moving away from the idea that media is something devel­oped by the few (movie and TV studios, book publishers, game companies) and consumed in a one-size-fits-all form, we open up a world of possibilities. Instead of leaving player creativity at the door, we are inviting it back to help build, design, and populate our digital worlds.

ATSRTWT

: Zubon

[Face of Mankind] In 2001 Duplex Systems was founded to pursue and develop products in the MMO space. The Berlin based studio is focused on intelligent and unique game play styles where the player ‘lives the story’. Last month they launched their first title; Face of Mankind. So the question holds; does it stand up to the PR or is it just another bag of sullen dreams?

Continue reading Face of Mankind

[My Little Pony RPG] Sadly, it will not be an MMO, but my wife is really looking forward to the My Little Pony RPG. With any luck, it will do well enough PnP to be licensed as a virtual world. Could this be the game to dethrone Virtual Horse Ranch?

: Zubon

We have a Hamidon raid scheduled for 11pm tonight. About 100 people plan to spend Saturday night pretending to beat up a jello monster, in the hopes of marginal improvement to a character who probably spends most of its online life at or waiting for a Hamidon raid.

A gamer’s spouse must put up with many things, but doubts about fidelity are not amongst them. Unless she, too, is a gamer and thinks he is spending a bit too much time with that other guild…

: Zubon

Ok, you have a reasonable budget and a pretty decent team of programmers and artists. Everything is waiting on YOU to work all the design out.

What I want to know, is what you feel is missing from MMORPGs, or what do you think could have been designed much better in current titles. Does fishing for 36 hours straight to get to level 2 fisher really piss you off? How would you do it differently? Think all magic systems are horrible? (fireball1, fireball2, fireball3 gets old after a while doesn’t it?) How would you do things differently?

I’m not looking for story ideas here, I just want to see what everyone thinks is missing or could be done better from a gameplay and mechanics perspective. Any interesting ideas out there?

Sound off…

[City of Villains] To recover from that last point, let us talk about a time when you can usefully stand there doing nothing. Let us talk about Masterminds and some Defenders.

To put this in other-game terms: don’t you hate it when your healer is running around whacking things with his stick instead of getting back mana to heal you? Don’t you wish he would sit there and do nothing between times when he would be useful? On my DAoC Theurgist, I used to spend every few battles sitting down with my bladeturn chant going, so that I could keep that going, buff everyone, and cast one AE CC spell per pull. Same idea here, only more so.

Continue reading Don’t Just Do Something! Stand There!

[City of Villains] I may have mentioned this before, but you are required to do the basic function of your class. I think I referred to a Mastermind or three who would not summon their pets?

Today, I was on a team with a Stalker who did not use Hide. A Regen Stalker, she also did not use Integration. Or any toggles at all, in fact.

There are two defining powers for a Stalker: Hide and your Assassin Strike. Using the second requires the first, without which you are just a low damage class with caster hit points and no defenses to speak of. Regeneration is about healing yourself. If you do not turn on your healing power, you die; also, it has all of your protection against crowd control.

You may not be surprised to hear that she did not, in fact, die. You can still hide in lowercase, in the sense of running to the back of the group if the enemy looks scary.

If you can see the Stalker on your team, kick her from the group.

: Zubon