Yearly Archives: 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]

MMOon on a stick.

I was reading an article over at Kinless’ blog about areas of meaningful activity, where they ask at the end:


Do any of you have more ideas about “meaningful activity” that could be incorporated into the game to get people out of Shattrath and back into the world?

As pitiable as it may sound, I quite enjoyed the photography element in Bioshock. For those of you who haven’t played that game, the photography element was a mini-game where you took photos of enemies and, once you had collected enough shots of a particular enemy, it earned you a ‘research’ bonus which granted you various character improvements, such as extra damage, for example.

I think that a mini-game along the same lines within an MMO could be quite a lot of fun. It would have players searching out locations, flora and fauna and taking pictures of them to earn bonuses or vanity items. For example, take a picture of all the various species of tiger in WoW and get yourself a mini tiger vanity pet to run around after you. It could well have players visiting old areas to find various mobs and locations. If mobs or items were deep inside some of the old-world dungeons then you could even get people running those dungeons again to get to the photo bonus objects.

What better than photography to make one open their eyes again, focus on more than the mundaneness of their immediate surroundings and see the vast expanse of the world anew.

Runnin’ numbers too

After turning on some analysis-type-stat-counter-thingy a while back, this seems like a good opportunity to root through some logs for a bit of crazy statistical hit-counting fun.

World of Warcraft demonstrates its crushing dominance in the most popular post charts; leading the way is The Draenei with no name, almost exclusively from people searching Google for “Draenei name” (and probably going away disappointed; maybe I should append a list of suggested Draenei names to the end of it, starting with “Neville”, “Geoff” and “Steve”), and hot on its heels is The Pickup Tourist’s Guide to Arathi Basin, mostly coming from Scoot’s blog, where people presumably land after searching for an Arathi basin strategy guide. I hope a couple of people have taken away the idea of defending nodes with them, or failing that at least put on a decent interpretive dance version of The Brothers Karamazov. Rounding out the top three, a fair way behind, it’s Are You Ready For That Terrible Swift Sword?, which people usually stumble across when searching for one of the specific swords named therein (either “people”, or one particular person with terrible memory who keeps landing on that post).

Enough of the dull stuff, though, onto that perennial blog-o-favourite: responding to some of the keyword searches that somehow landed up here.

“captain zep theme tune”
Captain Zep, Captain Zep! (ooo eeee ooo)
Super space detective!
Captain Zep, Captain Zep! (ooo eeee ooo)
Super space detective!

There’s something about tyrants falling as well, but basically he’s Captain Zep, and he’s a super space detective.

blackheart the inciter benny hill music
No, no, no, Ambassador Hellmaw plays the Benny Hill music when he fears you. Actually, come to think of it, Blackheart the Inciter should play it too. Note to Blizzard: just play Yakkety Sax constantly in the Shadow Labyrinth.

blackheart the inciter worst boss ever
Only if you’re not playing the Benny Hill music

da na na na na na na na na big chubby checker
That’s not Chubby Checker, that’s I’m In The Mood For Dancing by the Nolan Sisters!

nolan sisters blogspot
See, told you so! (If that was someone looking for the official blog of the Nolan Sisters, I’m afraid you got to the wrong place.)

daaaaaaaamn graphics
Dammit twice round the car park and back in for a chaser of hellblast, Peter, what’s wrong with the graphics? I’ll wager Marjorie is behind it somehow…

hat fetish
It’s a fair cop, guv.

hey how u get duel blade city of heroes
Hey! yourself, not nearly enough people take the time to greet Google as they search. Dual Blades are a new powerset in Issue 11, so get rolling a new character to make use of them.

how sweet would it be to be an idiot
Very.

i like the look of vindicator’s brand
Really? It’s a bit purple for me…

mmmmmmf pic
Stop mumbling, I can’t make out a word you’re saying.

muahahahahahahahaha
Ha! Ho!

stepmania duck billed platypus download
I’m not entirely sure you can download a duck billed platypus, and if you do manage it I really don’t think it’s going to be very good at Stepmania…

wow alliance suck incompetent afk
Good day in the battlegrounds there?

Blognaversary

Happy birthday to meeeee, happy birthday to meeeeeeeee, happy birthday dear Musings… Yes, it’s exactly one of your earth years since I started this “blogging” business, and my, how times have changed. Why, to think when this blog started the Berlin Wall was still standing, the EU was still the EEC, Patrick Troughton was still playing Doctor Who and nobody had even thought of this “fire” business, let alone the wheel. It’s been an eventful twelve months and no mistake.

But what have I been doing? An excellent question, and thankfully part of answer appears to be “keeping a blog”, which I can flip back through and go “Ahh, good/bad times, delete as applicable”. Exactly a year ago, I was on my second stint of World of Warcraft, picking up the Rogue I’d got to level 60 in the first stint; November through January was largely taken up with running the old end game instances as a team of four and the FREE EPIX!!1! fever of battlegrounds while waiting for the Burning Crusade. Mid-January, I packed up along with the rest of the world (of Warcraft) and headed to the Outlands, and spent three months (punctuated by a few days in Second Life to see what all the fuss was about) happily wandering around the instances, battlegrounds n’ stuff found therein (well, I say “happily”, going strictly by the blog posts it actually seems I spent three months whining that I hadn’t got any “phat” “lewt”, WAAAAH, but I remember it as a much happier time than that, especially as the withered husk of the original guild I’d joined the game with was rejuvenated by a few returning players and some new blood as other guilds disbanded). May and June brought Lord of the Rings Online, which only just made it into a second month of playing, and a new issue of City of Heroes, the only game I’ve remained subscribed to for the whole year. Peace was shattered for a couple of weeks of July by some extreme Guitar Hero rocking, and a free trial of Star Wars Galaxies, then in August I bought my first ever console in the form of a Wii (and I’d just like to congratulate myself on my uncanny prescience in predicting Wii shortages later in the year, even though the cause turned out not to be giant Wii-eating badgers). A few holidays and a dead PC processor later, the gaming highlight of September was Bioshock (the Tabula Rasa beta not really inspiring), October brought the rather splendid Orange Box, and here we are in November, with my hands oddly cramped from over-Guitar Hero IIIing and another issue of City of Heroes due to go live today. There was a chance for a poetic “cycle is complete”-type return to the start, as honeyed words of short queues and well-matched WoW battlegrounds reach my ears (apparently daily quests there have made battlegrounds as popular as they were about a year ago after the revised honour patch) and tempt me back to Arathi Basin, but the combination of Issue 11 of City of Heroes and the extreme rocking of Guitar Hero III have been enough to stop me reaching for that subscription button.

Astute readers may notice a trend, of the games becoming less Massively Multiplayer and more Offlinely Singleplayer over the year, I’m not sure if that’s more to do with me, or the wave of MMOG delays and cancellations that’s postponed the most likely looking next MMOG candidates to 2008. Let’s hope it’s the latter, or I really will need to change the title. Anyway, here’s to the next year of blogging, and whatever games that holds!

Thought for the day.

I was reading a thread on Usenet about pornography recently and it got me thinking. Firstly I was marvelling at the improbability of finding a thread about porn on the Internet, I mean, what are the chances? Shockingly, however, the discussion was at least attempting a sane and rational look at pornography and erotica, especially with respect to the strangeness that is sex as a fully-fledged industry. Admittedly it became progressively stranger, as Usenet threads are wont to do, until it veered wildly into considering what aliens would make of our sex industry if they visited the little pit of abasement at the end of the universe that we happen to call Earth. At such a point one can only surmise that the topic of tentacle porn would shortly follow, which is as good a Godwin’s Law for porn threads as one is going to get, and hence your humble narrator left forthwith.

It did however, as I have already related, trigger a train of thought.

Pornography has been with us for quite some time, but it would seem safe to say that it is only in mankind’s recent history that a true industry has sprung up around the luxuriant idea of sex as relief through performance and art. The basic premise is this: as mankind has advanced, sex has become less of a basic fundamental need for survival and more of an indulgence. With indulgence comes over-indulgence, and with over-indulgence comes abstinence and a desire to attain a more seemingly healthy balance. And here is where the porn industry steps in, for the desire is still there within many people although they do not wish to carry out their desires themselves, and thus they live out their fantasies through others, while they remain safely ensconced behind the protection of a glass screen and an ‘off’ button.

The thing is, it’s not just related to the porn industry, and this is where I hope to drag this discourse, kicking and screaming, back on to the topic of MMOs. Firstly though, let’s look at the food industry. Again, as mankind has advanced (and obviously this outlook is taken from a western world perspective) food has become less of a basic fundamental need for survival due to its abundance, and therefore has become more of an indulgence in certain areas of society. As the obvious signs of over-indulgence set in, with obesity and heart disease becoming far more prevalent than these societies could hope to counter, people start to enter the abstinence cycle and eat less, and more healthily. Here is where industry steps in, and what we have now is essentially porn for food lovers, with TV shows abounding with luxuriant foods, celebrity chefs travelling the world to indulge themselves in an orgy of gastronomic gangbangs, and adverts with hot, steamy puddings, naked from the oven and just begging to be covered in cream.

So what does this have to do with MMOs? Well, in recent times there have been numerous concerns relating to the amount of time indulged in MMOs. Many players themselves are starting to realise that the sheer scale of time that they devote to nothing more than a pixelated spreadsheet simulator is possibly unhealthy, perhaps bordering on clinical obsession. Is it long, therefore, before we enter the cycle of abstinence with respect to MMOs? Has it already begun? I believe it has. MMO porn thy name is Raids.

“Oh yeah, show me the epix baby, show me the epix.”

The similarities are stark: bold, brash starlets are presented to the viewer, prostrating themselves on the bed of raid content as they display their epic assets, but peer behind the facade and more often than not one will glimpse the unhappiness, insecurity or personal sacrifice of the superstar raider. The top raiders are the porn stars of the MMO world, gazed upon with the hungering eyes of players who, despite desiring the epic image that these starlets portray, are secretly happy that they have not had to suffer the trials and degradation that these raiders have gone through to thrust themselves into the public eye. Instead, the average player will observe, sate their epic-itemed desires, and then return to the comfort and safety of an ordinary adventuring life.

So the next time that you see an MMO raider standing at the post-box in a major town, with their purple bits proffered for all to see, just remember that raiders, like porn stars, are people too.

Rock this joint

Guitar Hero 3 was finally released in the UK on Friday, so this weekend featured a not inconsiderable amount of rocking, at least until my hands cramped into twisted claws at which point they weren’t much use for anything except raking leaves up in the garden.

The wireless Les Paul controller is most splendid, the song list is generally pretty good, the stuff I didn’t know is mostly decent, even the cheesy 80s anthems are quite fun to play (now and again, when nobody’s looking). Disappointingly, a couple of the songs I was most looking forward to (Sabotage and Reptilia) only show up in the co-op career, so I had to use the “unlock all songs” cheat to get to them. I could also live without the boss battles, at least against the CPU; another human might convey the idea of duelling guitars better, the computerised Slash and Tom Morello are just implacable automata who hit every note precisely until you happen to “attack” them.

I also hooked up the Wii guitar to Frets On Fire on the PC (as per a previous post, plus a handy GlovePIE script I found on HonkeyKong). The bluetooth connection can be a bit temperamental, and something somewhere along the line randomly beeps on the PC speaker, but that hardly matters when the volume’s up to 11. With a little tweaking, that GlovePIE script could be used for inputs to other games too… Hmm; Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, with strum up and down as the running buttons and one of the frets for jumping hurdles etc… In fact someone should write a new version, Daley Thompson’s Guitar Decathlon, with different coloured hurdles corresponding to the different frets, and your athletic avatar on screen playing crazy riffs as they sprint…