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Good news offline

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.

Plagueworlds

According to the BBC, scientists are suggesting that the outbreak of a deadly virtual disease might give an insight into the outbreak of epidemics in the real world. In particular, they are invesitgating player reactions to the “Corrupted Blood” plague that took place a couple of years ago.

Researcher Professor Nina Fefferman, from Tufts University School of Medicine, said: “Human behaviour has a big impact on disease spread. And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behaviour. The players seemed to really feel they were at risk and took the threat of infection seriously, even though it was only a game.”

So, next time your partner/parent/child/employer asks how you can be spending so much time playing a stupid game, tell them you’re taking part in a medical experiment.

Three-Sentence Game Reviews

If I am not playing City of Heroes, what have I been playing? A variety of games that each provide a few hours of entertainment. They are not necessarily bad games, just small ones. They might have a neat mechanic, a good idea, or interesting graphics.

The downside of them is usually the pricing issue. A free demo provides about an hour of entertainment, or you can buy all three hours of entertainment for $20. Given the competition, that is not a great pricing model. You can, of course, trade with your friends after you have had your fill.

So let’s flip through some games.

Continue reading Three-Sentence Game Reviews

Everybody dies

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.

Let Us Play, Blizzard!

Yesterday I talked about how some friends and I on different servers who wanted to PvP together have had to level characters to 19 on a new server to do so. What’s more, we’re unlikely to ever level together far enough to play AV or Arena.

I suspect I’m not the first person to make the following suggestions. I suspect I’m probably more like the (hundred?) thousandth. But humor me… can someone explain to me why Blizzard erects such huge barriers to PvP participation?

If it were up to me, I’d tweak WoW PvP as follows:

Continue reading Let Us Play, Blizzard!

Heard in Game

Someone was explaining that his new “$5k lol” computer had “duel video cards and cpu.” Comment in global chat: “someone who can’t spell dual properly doesn’t deserve a friggen $5000 PC.”

Response: “hah it was actually spelled properly just not in the right context”
Also: “since when did mmo become grammer class”

The discussion went downhill from there. Being an MMO, people were more irritated with the grammar police than the mostly literate.

: Zubon

If You Crush Your Enemy’s Skull and Nobody is Around to Hear It, Does It Make a Sound?

Some friends and I recently decided to do some battlegrounds together. Not being on the same servers, we had to create newbies and do the grind to 19. We’ll probably be stuck with WSG, and AV (much less Arena) is pretty much out of the question for us.

Anyway, this drove me to try out the Fury beta recently. Fury is getting a fair dose of hype as an upcoming fantasy MMO focusing exclusively on PvP. You’ve got standard PvP scenarios — free-for-all, team deathmatch, and CTF, with third-person WoW-style fantasy combat. There is not a persistent world, but there is persistent character advancement with skill trees you advance in to customize your character. Battleground-style PvP without the grind! Sounds great, right?

I was surprised that I got bored of it fairly quickly, and it wasn’t until I was writing this that I realized why: Fury isn’t an MMO at all.

Continue reading If You Crush Your Enemy’s Skull and Nobody is Around to Hear It, Does It Make a Sound?

Parting Shot on Issue 10

What is with having the Clockwork King in a level 50 task force? The Clockwork go away at level 20, when you defeat the Clockwork King at the end of Synapse’s task force. It makes perfect sense for him to come for Penny, but not as a level 50.

The Psychic Clockwork King everyone knows and loves is from another dimension where he realized his full potential. That is not our Clockwork King; he lost. I think someone missed that when writing the task force. Also, if he achieves his full potential, he conquers the world and wipes out the human race. I guess we can look forward to that.

They play with portals a lot in the task force, but that explanation does not work because this is not a trans-dimensional Clockwork King entering via portal. This is our Clockwork King, and he kicks in the door. After having leveled 30 times while no one was looking.

Maybe he paid for powerleveling.

: Zubon