Month: April 2013

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Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

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[WS] Opening Up on a Closed Beta

The Wildstar is now in full-on closed beta. I am not part of this lucky/unlucky group who are seeing the upcoming MMO in true beta form. Hopefully I can sneak my way in to a more open beta with a rogue email or a pre-order pass.

To be honest, I guess I kind of exhausted my thoughts on the game coming from Arkship. I just now realized in writing this post that my Wildstar feed did not seem to make my transition away from Google Reader. I have Wildstar Radio… and that’s it. Weird, I wonder what else didn’t make the jump. Seems I have a lot to catch up on. Continue reading [WS] Opening Up on a Closed Beta

Almost Getting It

Current internet culture is strongly supportive of sending almost any string of text as long as you place it on an image. The standard Facebook unit seems to be the e-card, which puts your words by a faux-Edwardian image and, BAM, they are now worth sharing and liking. By long-standing internet tradition, the highest form of this art involves images of cats.

See here referenced a project to elevate the dialogue by placing poems on cat pictures, because people seem more likely to read and enjoy words when accompanied by cats. This keen grasp of the medium then immediately fails:

VIII. If you want to share a copy of this image, please ask first.

While a perfectly reasonable approach to intellectual property, you cannot productively harness lolcats to pull your wagon while locking them in crates. At best, you can hope for a happy medium between “too few requests to make it worthwhile” and “too many requests to read and respond.” I have this mental image of Facebook using this model and sending George Takei 250,000 messages a day, “John Smith wants to share your image, do you approve?”

: Zubon

I Get Mail

We frequently receive search engine optimization spam. I presume everyone who runs or writes for a website does. They can help us increase our ad revenue! Okay, so they have never looked at the site. They heard about us from our current ads, but did not click and increase our ad costs! Okay, so they are just blatantly lying from the first sentence to the last.

Replying to spam is generally a bad idea, but I am tempted to have a Popehat pony e-mail exchange sometimes. What do you think of our current KTR ads? By what percent do you think we could increase our revenue? Would it be enough to buy a pony?

: Zubon

Quantum Leap

I am still playing Dawn of the Dragons, despite the standard social media game mechanics. Something about the energy bars and the false sense of achievement is compelling.

Mission zone 10 is an expansion pack gear reset sort of experience. Players quickly acquire zone 9 gear due to the multiplayer mechanics, and then better from leveling up while wearing it. Along the way, nothing except zone 9 raids do much damage to you. Bosses deal trivial damage, and random encounters deal exactly 1 per attack. And then you hit zone 10. Continue reading Quantum Leap

[GW2] Funding Flame and Frost

As always, the Guild Wars 2 gem store additions have caused controversy and counter-controversy across a variety of mediums. I feel that this month’s Flame and Frost update went aggressive in terms of getting players to bolster the gem/gold exchange rate or simply spend some cash. It is interesting though because at the same time there was a competing interest in game with the Super Adventure Box. ArenaNet keeps on presenting ways to spend money and time in different ways, which is both exciting and tiring.

Fused Weapons

Might as well start with the most controversial piece, in my opinion (not the unbreakable pick, but we’ll get there). The Black Lion Chests, the bit of the gem store everybody loves to hate, has “for a limited time” a Fused Weapon Claim Ticket. This is a rare chance, but people seem to be attacking the chests with fervor. The rarity and the random-number generation (“RNG”) involved seem to be making sure some players open dozens and dozens of Black Lion Chests to receive no fiery, golden ticket. Of course those few blessed that opened one or two chests and received one or two Tickets have a valuable thing they can’t trade away. Continue reading [GW2] Funding Flame and Frost

Checklists

The endless, procedurally generated gameplay of A Valley Without Wind can sink into “what’s the point?” If you like Metroidvania a lot more than I do, having an endless stream with minor variations might be bliss, the way I could happily play Settlers of Catan every day. For me, it is one among many and not the best.

I started by jumping right in and exploring. Continue reading Checklists

Differing Visions

This New Yorker article is a pleasant contrast between SimCity and Dwarf Fortress, using a classic version of SimCity rather than the recent debacle. (Fun note: “SimCity debacle” gets 36,000 hits on Google and 126,000 if you remove the quotes.) Representative quote about Dwarf Fortress:

(For a while, the melting point for the fat layer of the dwarves’ skin was set too low, resulting in instant death for any creature that got damp and then entered a warm room—baroque and violent bugs like this are very much in the spirit of the game).

I was once interested in trying Dwarf Fortress but the learning curve was more than I was willing to invest to overcome.

: Zubon

[GW2] Super Achievements

My goal this month in Guild Wars 2 was to get a Super Adventure Box skin. The most relaxing way, I felt, to do so was to run through the first three zones on about 9 days. Each zone gets me 2 bauble bubbles, of which I would need 50 to get my virtual tourist t-shirt. My “daily” was a nice refreshing jaunt through the first world.

Along the way I started to consider the achievements for Super Adventure Box. I had already read Jeromai’s pleasure and pain of completing some, and to be honest it didn’t sound like fun. But, I needed help finding where to buy upgrades, and I noticed that the dedicated Guild Wars 2 wikites had been super thorough with producing a guide for each zone. I did not feel up to using hours of my time to find all the baubles or shops in a zone myself. I was more than happy to follow a guide. Continue reading [GW2] Super Achievements

Minecraft, The Return

I am not sure how I got sucked back in to Minecraft. I think it was hearing somewhere along the lines about Mystcraft. Mystcraft is one of many fine mods where players can write in books to create ages, warp to those ages, and profit or die. One simple mod completely changes how the game is played.

I got seriously, seriously sucked in. Modding has come a long way since I really played Minecraft. The big pre-official mod API seems to be Minecraft Forge because it allows mods to be used on multiplayer servers quite well. I think everybody is hoping for an official mod API for Minecraft 1.6, but Mojang seems to be tight-lipped about when it could be ready. Either way having Forge raised the water level quite a bit, in my opinion because mods didn’t have to be coded differently to handle multiplayer.

The other thing that raised the water level (again, in my opinion) was Feed the Beast (FTB). Feed the Beast is one of the best modpacks just overflowing with toys. Modpacks are still tricky-ish to make because all the mods don’t necessarily talk nice to one another. FTB made sure a huge swath of excellent mods could talk to one another. This meant that Mystcraft could run with Buildcraft and automated mines could be created in the Age of Diamond Tendrils. Dark thaumaturgic rituals in Thaumcraft could modify how bees pollinate trees in Forestry. This was a whole new game, and I sometimes find it hard to go back to vanilla in lieu of FTB.

I felt like I was graduating from Basic Lego to Technic Pirate Ninjago City with Mindstorms attachment. Continue reading Minecraft, The Return