Month: May 2012

“guild wars 2 guilds”
Yes, it takes you to the page you want on the wiki. Even “guild wars 2 guild” gets you the desired link on the first page of results. That is, if the page you want is how guild mechanics will work in GW2. If you wanted a list of Guild Wars 2 guilds, I don’t think that really exists yet.

: Zubon

I’m a big advocate for awesome tutorials, because you’d better spend some time on the part of the game that every single player will see. I picked up Prototype on sale some while ago, booted it up recently, and found myself distressingly uninterested in an opening that went with too much awesome per unit of grounding. It either needs less grounding, so that awesome/grounding approaches infinity, or I need a reason to care about what is going on.

If you haven’t played, Prototype starts in medias res. This is apparently a month after the start of the game, to which you will flash back in a moment. This is a nice version of a common approach: show the player the things this character will be able to do by the late game, then take them away so that you can have an early game. Some games have you de-powered, robbed, etc.; Prototype instead has its opening at the end of the story, like the Odyssey or Twilight. This creates a gameplay problem and a story problem.

The gameplay problem is that you can already do everything and have massive powers that the game helpfully switches for you and explains. As the player, you are basically in a visual novel where you click to slaughter people and crush tanks. You do not know enough to have strategy or tactics, so you follow the indicators, watch things explode as you click them, and maybe eat some people. As a player, I am not invested in “click to advance.” Alex Mercer apparently just needs me to provide some motive power for his killing spree.

The story problem is that there is enough to imply that the game wants you to care but not enough to actually make you care. Hey, tutorial, very first introduction, I get that. But you are sent to murder dozens of people before being given much reason to except that they are cartoonishly evil (and shooting at you). There is a conflict here, but the role I have been handed is that of a mass-murderer who is attacking the military and may get bonuses for picking off civilians as collateral damage. Some games address this by using monsters and robots so that you are not murdering innocent people as a form of character introduction; Prototype goes with giving the humans faceless masks and having a cut scene where they murder the innocent, too. Must be a local custom. Other games take the opposite tack: do not even pretend to have a plot, just go straight to the bloodshed. No context, no moral standing, just mindless violence. Completely amoral works much better than poorly sketched black and very dark gray morality. Part of black and grey morality is that you must make the villains worse than the protagonist; if the player quickly pulls ahead of the villains in terms of pointless bloodshed, you really have created a murder simulator.

Of course, that seems to be the point of Prototype.

: Zubon

It was not easy to narrow down to a group of 20 finalists for the M.M.O. 7 Gaming Mouse Giveaway, but I managed. For the record, these are the top 20 I selected: Adam, atx, Teer, Syl, Jasen, Bloodchild, Amarok, Daniel, Masael255, Cody, mbp, Sg McManus, Robbie, Kemica, James, CrashBomber, Brian J, Defarious, Alex Goresch and Chris.

I will now roll my twenty-sided polyhedral die and the winner is…

Continue reading M.M.O. 7 Gaming Mouse Winner

Syp at BioBreak is doing the Good Work, and not just in real life. He is working hard on a project called the Newbie Blogger Initative to support would-be bloggers find their legs all the quicker. It’s no secret that good intentions drive people to create blogs every day… a few posts later, and the blog is as good as dead. Most are lucky to have a dozen hits before death.

There’s a lot of questions, and the good veterans of the ‘sphere have already put forth a huge amount of thoughts on the subject. I want to start at the origin. Well not really, the answer to “Why blog?” should just be “to write”. Yet, there are a lot of questions as to whether we are journalists. One idiotic court has already decided mostly we aren’t, and are therefore less protected by the First Amendment than some paycheck’d writer-brethren. I don’t know whether we count as journalists, but I do know this…

We are goddamn cowboys.

Continue reading Newbie Blogger Initiative – Cowboy Up