Month: March 2010

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Guild Wars – Bad, Bad Mr. Mantle

The Guild Wars viral campaign leading up to… something is creating a playful rift in the community.  Playful, so far, I should say.  As soon as the links to the White Mantle and the Shining Blade, two NPC organizations in Guild Wars, people started using hashtags to proclaim allegiance to a certain side.  I bet ArenaNet was absolutely gleeful at the response considering all they did at that point was put up a poster for each adversarial organization.  It was pretty fun, but what is most amazing to me is that people are actually siding with the White Mantle.

Let me put this into perspective.  You go to a Super Bowl or World Cup party.  There are too many available members of the opposite sex to really watch the game (even though you want to) so you flirt, eat, and talk while the game runs in the background.  You leave to go home, without having watched much of the game at all, but you do catch the final score.  Your team gets pummeled.  So what do you do?  You go home to where you recorded the game, sit down with a fresh pint and some nachos, and start cheering for your team like some madman who believes that by yelling at the TV you are actually giving your team energy.  This is what it’s like to be proclaiming allegiance to the White Mantle right now.

Continue reading Guild Wars – Bad, Bad Mr. Mantle

Character Gender

In my experience, and I think the research agrees, male players are more likely to play female characters than vice versa. There is fun speculation about why that is.

The usual in-game reason is a perceived ease in getting assistance, attention, or gifts. A favorite sociological explanation is that our culture treats maleness as the norm, so women already know how all that works but men have this whole alien, Other realm to explore. My wife sticks with female characters because they have more pretty options, while many male options are intentionally and aggressively ugly. Many (heterosexual male) hardcore gamers have decided that, if they are going to be staring at someone’s backside for 40+ hours a week, it might as well be a shapely female backside. And then there’s this guy I know who is a mostly male-oriented bisexual and is married to a woman; his Second Life avatar is female so he can have virtual sex with men and relieve real life pressure.

Personally, I tend to have a balanced stable of characters. Continue reading Character Gender

Guild Transcendent

One of my favorite MMO related quotes from the sage Raph Koster discussing online tribalization where he says that people have a moment of clarity where they see they are part of things. They say in that moment “Oh, here’s my real community.”  For most of us social homo sapiens (and the few papio hamadryas that pop in here occasionally) a community is a necessary thing.  Yet, as the internet, the MMO genre, and even gaming platforms like Steam evolve the sense of community as a finite thing gives way to a mass of thoughts and people that ebb and flow with tides of activity.  The most basic of these units comprising the mass of community is of course the small, focused social club we call a guild.

Continue reading Guild Transcendent

The Final Countdown

A lot of times, developers get a lot more out of their advertising buck if they don’t tell us what the heck they are advertising. The Cloverfield movie trailer originally didn’t give us any clue as to the title of the movie it was advertising. All the speculation outside the movie theater actually lead to more word-of-mouth buzz than if they had just told us, “This is a trailer for a blair-witch like monster movie with a funny name”.

Bioware has once again decided to make use of the power of mystery with a countdown timer that appears on every Bioware website you can think of, except for TOR. Is the exclusion of the timer on the Old Republic’s site an indication that TOR fans shouldn’t care about the timer? Or is it an insidious plan to throw us off the trail of a big Star Wars announcement?

Well, I suppose we’re supposed to speculate until the countdown reaches zero, on Monday morning.

EDIT: Turned out it was a competition to win stuff like computers, t-shirts and other swag. My heart always yearns for a TOR announcement. /Sigh.

The Quiet Before the sTORm

Hi.

You may not know me, but I go by the name Ethic. I used to play MMOs and write about them here. Somewhere along the line, I found myself with just enough time to play games for a few hours a week with nothing much to say afterwards. Same old same old, know what I mean? Thankfully, some other folks keep things going around here when I’m not feeling “wordy”.

Over the years, I have seen my interests flit about from here to there and back. TV has taken up more of my free time with Lost, Fringe, 24, Castle, Big Bang Theory, Justified and my Farscape complete series DVDs. There are some really enjoyable TV shows out there lately. After I get caught up with my shows on the DVR, I turn my attention to the PC.

Continue reading The Quiet Before the sTORm

Shadow of the Colossus MMO

No, one has not been announced, but I have long been wondering why there are so few games of the “it’s all boss fights” style. I can get the notion of having “trash mobs” like matting around a picture, but you probably should not want trash in your game. Grinds keep players subscribed, blah blah, killing 10,000 rats in your new game is not going to be any better than killing 10,000 rats in WoW, so that’s not going to be a huge draw for you. The only place I’ve seen where killing 10,000 rats is different is City of Heroes, where things get to be wacky fun in the late levels with massive AE buffs and attacks while you fight 20+ enemies at once.

Can we skip the crap and get to the interesting part?

: Zubon

Profile of an addict

I”m beginning to wonder if I’m too addicted to mmorpgs. Whether I’m addicted or not, is not really up for questioning, it’s just a matter of how badly I’m addicted. I stumbled upon my old Everquest 2 profile. I noticed that I logged an average of about 40 hours per week on my main character even though I know I was working full-time during that time period.

Continue reading Profile of an addict

Tamagotchi Craze

KTReuters – Teh Internet 1996

Today Bandai of Japan has released their flagship digital pet they call the Tamagotchi.  A spokesperson for the company said that they believe that most schoolchildren will be playing with the small handheld game by Christmas.  The game itself allows the player to interact with a virtual pet that the player can grow, feed, and teach.  The controls and game are simple, but can allow for hours of fun according to the creator Akihiro Yokoi.  Bandai stocks went through the roof with the projection that 70,000,000 Tamagotchi products will be sold in just over ten years.

This caused somber news throughout the handheld game industry.  Nintendo, the company known for its popular Gameboy system declined official statement.  However, a businessman speaking on condition of anonymity said that if the Gameboy could sell even a fraction of the amount of Tamagotchi’s sales it would make money hand over fist.  The businessman refused to discuss whether the rumors of Nintendo planning on ditching its Gameboy line for a Tamagotchi-esque product were true.

This reporter, during the time traveling session, noted that in the reporter’s classroom of 26 students nearly two thirds of the students owned a Tamagotchi game or a similar knockoff.  Only 4 students owned Gameboys.  With reports like these coming from the children who will shape the future, it is clear that the future of handheld gaming is Tamagotchi.  Now back to your regularly scheduled time.

–Ravious
plutonium is available in every corner drug store