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.
.Guild Wars 2 has vistas and jumping puzzles as Explorer content. And then, because zone design is hard, Guild Wars 2 has invisible walls. There are places where you can sprint up 60+ degree cliffs and places where you cannot reach despite seeing your character jump high enough to get to next platform. “I’ll just hop up this gentle slope. Or I can slide down the cliff and start over, that’s fun too.”
: Zubon
This is a good story at Penny Arcade Report, so I’m just linking you off to it.
“The final box will be 24†× 20†× 5.75†and will weigh 24 pounds. It will have five huge maps and more than 1,000 counters, many of them 3-D constructible Ogres and buildings. It will probably never be equaled in sheer size and awesomeness,†Jackson said.
: Zubon
And now gamer-linguist nerd crossover content that may not be for everyone. You are warned.
A discussion of the word for “nerd” in Chinese included a note about Chinese usage of the term “PK,” which is comparable to English “pwn” or “versus.” (I hope that usage converges, otherwise you need strong context to tell whether the word implies simply opposition or also the result of that opposition.) Excerpt:
5. As so often happens when words cross from one language to another language, it does not mean exactly the same thing in Chinese (“to thoroughly dominate; to beat” [in one-on-one or multiple competition]) that it means in English (“player killer”).
I note that the English usage is also ambiguous. In our MMO context, I am most familiar with “PK” as an abbreviation for any sort of PvP player, but my usage arises from starting MMOs with Asheron’s Call, where characters had a PK flag that indicated whether they were participating in PvP. Victor Mair suggests that Counter-Strike players use “PK” where I would use “TK” (“team killer”) or perhaps “griefer,” someone who intentionally shoots people on his/her own team rather than the enemy. Feel free to contribute from your own idiolect in the comments.
The researchers Victor Mair mentions in his post (Matt Smith and Brendan O’Kane) have graciously forwarded me their notes with permission to use them for posting. They track the term back to MUDs. This is your chance to be on the cutting edge of Chinese gamer linguistics and potentially contribute to research in its advancement. Are you excited? I’m excited.. Continue reading PK
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
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
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
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
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 (“RNGâ€) 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
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
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