Monthly Archives: December 2007

I’ve tried running but there’s no escape

I thought it was finished, over. Finished with. Over. Finished and done with. Over. Completely finished over. But then… the Steinbeck file. It was like Aylesbury all over again…

Well, not Aylesbury so much as World of Warcraft. Daily battleground quests… Season 1 arena items available for honour points… an inquiry about Rogues that sent me over to talent calculators…

With Christmas coming up, time off work, relatives around (making impromptu Guitar Hero concerts in the lounge slightly less popular), it could be fun to run a few instances, head back to the battlegrounds, so I dropped a couple of hints, and there’s a scroll of resurrection beckoning to me at the moment…

Time will tell just who fell

So, I’ve been playing Guitar Hero 3 during every spare moment for the last week or so, much to the consternation of assorted neighbours and a hamster (I don’t know if the songs themselves the hamster objects to, or my butchering of them on Expert level, but either way she starts chucking stuff around the cage when the rock kicks in). I’m 92% through the Hard career (just One (tricky solos!) and Raining Blood (tricky… all of it!) to go), 54% through Expert (the introduction of Holiday in Cambodia is doing my nut in).

In other news, after my amazing futurologism in predicting a Wii shortage, obviously the only conclusion that can be drawn after the Activision/Blizzard merger is that they’re working on my genius MMOGPR (Massively Multi-instrumental Online Guitar Playing Romp).

In moments between plastic-guitar-button-pressing, I’ve also been playing a bit of the new issue of City of Heroes, starting a new dual blade wielding Brute (being able to select each weapon individually, on top of all the usual options, meant I spent so long in the costume creator I only actually played enough to get to level 3), and travelling back in time with my level 50 Blaster to help the Ourororororobous put right what once went wrong. My first mission saw me leaping into the body of a struggling soul singer in Memphis in the late 60s… no, wait, that was something else entirely… my first mission saw me tangling with the good old 5th Column, then the second was quite a fun take on the tutorial, sending you back to the same map, at level 1, only this time the mobs had taken the helpful-hint dispensing NPCs hostage! Better still, it meant I could finally get the Isolator badge, though it took a while with only one attack (thank heavens for veteran reward powers). The only slight hitch was a later mission, when I got sent against an Elite Boss at level 25 or 26, which meant I lost all my useful Ancillary Pool Powers and defences and ended up with a travel power, Stamina and a handful of attacks. Still, a quick bit of assistance from a kleptosockomaniac sorted that out, so history turns out OK after all. Or will turn out OK. Or had already turned out OK. Confusing stuff, this time travel.

In the news.

I’m sure you’ve all heard the big merger news, but in case you hadn’t:

It seems that Virgin Interactive Entertainment, Gamecock Media and Zoo Digital Publishing are set to join forces to form a game industry behemoth.

Look for Interactive Virgin Zoocock games in store near you soon!

(Mercy, the search terms that are going to hit this site now…)

Thought for the day.

Regarding Warhamer Online’s Tome of Knowledge:


But above all, I think what makes the Tome of Knowledge so special is that it’s your story. We are simply making a vessel to show you how you play Warhammer Online, and we expect people’s Tomes to express their different play styles and methodologies. While we are making one Tome, we are also making many. We are making your Tome. It’s waiting for you, and we can’t wait for you to come and check it out.

It’s a wonderful, powerful feature, which could potentially be the enabler for players to really identify with their characters and take pride in them. The WAR folks are always talking about realm pride, but they seem to be investing equally great an effort into developing a sense of character pride. Yes, there’s definitely an element of the age old e-peen mindset about it, but the fact that the Tome also seems geared to tell the story of your character through many factors, not just those related to having hit other players over the head the hardest, means that it’s not necessarily ‘all about the epix baby’.

My thought though: if the Tome of Knowledge is indeed a complete scrapbook of one’s character’s adventuring life and not merely a few stats and titles, then please for the love of all that is holy, provide the ability to export the Tome into a document format that can be read outside of the game, pdf perhaps, or maybe XHTML based.

Blogs are a wonderful way to record the adventures of our characters, but if you have a feature within your game that already automates part of this – recording the basic history of a character – then exporting it would allow players to write around those raw facts and concentrate on fleshing out the spirit and feel of the game more, something which a data collection tool such as the Tome probably won’t be able to capture.

If nothing else, I envisage myself in my eighties sitting in a rocking chair beside an open roaring fireplace, blanket across my legs and grandchildren all sat around my feet, and then relishing the groans and the looks of ‘do we have to?’ directed towards their parents, as grandad blows the dust off of his e-book, opens up his Tome of Knowledge, and begins to regale them all with the adventure of Gunberk the Dwarf vs the Dragon Ogres for the hundredth time. [crazy old man cackle]