Monthly Archives: January 2009

Palm lives… again!

From buying a Handspring Visor almost ten years ago until recently replacing a Tapwave Zodiac with a Nokia N810, I’d been a devotee of Palm OS-powered handheld devices. Unfortunately Palm seemed to go a bit bonkers in 2002, dividing up into software (PalmSource) and hardware (palmOne) companies; shades of Psion, though, unlike Symbian, PalmSource developed a new operating system that nobody (including palmOne) ended up using. palmOne eventually realised that, as stupid company names go, “palmOne” was rivalled only by whatever drivel contestants on The Apprentice come up with after several bottles of gin and half an hour’s shouting, and re-de-branded back to Palm, Inc. after a couple of years, but had lost momentum by then and seemed destined to fade away as Just Another Smartphone Company with their Treo line running either the increasingly dated Palm OS or *gasp* Windows Mobile. A Palm device running Microsoft software, was the blood we shed in the Palm OS vs PocketPC wars for nothing? (I say “wars”, it was more inter-newsgroup flamewars than actual military action, so the amount of blood spilled was pretty limited. Maybe the odd blister after some especially furious typing, and that’s serum rather than proper blood anyway, but I digress.) In hindsight the Palm Foleo could’ve been a herald of the netbook revolution, but whether it was the wrong product, the wrong time, the wrong company, the wrong price or the wrong trousers (Grommet, and they’ve gone wrong!) it never made it to launch, and just looked like another nail in the coffin.

Turns out Palm isn’t dead, though, they were just resting. You turn your back for five minutes, it nuzzles up to the bars, bends them apart, and VOOM! The Palm Pre (proving the Stupid Name Department haven’t all left), running Palm webOS.

The hardware of the Pre looks fairly nice if unspectacular, 480×320 screen, sliding keyboard, camera, the usual gubbins, it’s the webOS that catches the eye. It uses a “card” metaphor that sounds really rather interesting, an example from the ars technica piece being: “Instead of having multiple communications apps on the phone, any of which you can use to carry on a conversation via multiple services, you just open up a single chat card with that user. That chat card hosts a continuous stream of conversation that combines SMS messages and IM in a single, seamless interface and chat experience.” No sense in getting too excited just yet, though, the initial release will be a US EVDO model, fingers crossed it makes it to the UK before too long.

With the Pre (and maybe more webOS devices), the promise of more Android devices to join the G1 and of course the iPhone, I’m really hoping mobile providers in the UK might start to acknowledge that handheld-‘net-connected-computer-things aren’t (just) bloody phones and start offering plans where data isn’t an afterthought. O2’s “Web & Wi-Fi Bolt On” on Pay & Go, f’rexample, more options like that would be most appreciated.

And I will stand the hazard of the die.

I am the Lord of the Ring said he,
And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I’ll lead you all to your DOOM, said he.

As Sydney Carter might have composed had he been ruminating on the ominous calling of the Dark Lord of Mordor rather than The One Lord™. Still, I have indeed been ruminating on rings, and the lords of them, mainly impelled by my continued enjoyment of adventuring in the lands of Middle Earth, having returned recently for another look at Lord of the Rings Online, on the recommendation of many people.

I’ll avoid any verbal Karate Kid impersonations by not waxing lyrical on the joys of goblin hewing (wax on), or the simple pleasure there is to be found in hats when there is an outfit option in the character pane which is designed purely for the joy of creating one’s own outfit out of assorted parts, with no need to take heed of item stats (wax off); for certain, LotRO’s customisation is the poor distant cousin twice removed of the City of Heroes character creator, but compared to World of Warcraft its standing on the character customisation social ladder can be considered as that of the Earl of Wessex compared to a small snail on social benefits.

What I’d like to talk about today, and what I am in fact going to talk about today, is my horse. More specifically my lack thereof. Traveling around Middle Earth when one is a fresh eared, wet behind the face adventurer taking their first steps into a wide and wonderfully deadly world is, to be blunt, expensive. And to be not so blunt, it’s hideously expensive, not so much injurious to one’s wallet as a ganking, corpse run, corpse-camped-reganking and tea bagging of it. Painful in ways that is hard to describe or imagine, like being blindfolded and having a loaded mousetrap pressed to a bare nipple, only the mouse trap is switched for a bear trap when you aren’t looking.

Suffice it to say that it’s quite expensive, though I may have exaggerated somewhat.

Where was I? Nipples! No, wait! Horses! Basically LotRO implements your standard ‘jump on to the back of an improbably well-trained animal’, which will then without question and not so much as a ‘giddyup’ carry you along a predefined route that it somehow has been programmed with as though it were a car navigation unit. Thankfully it isn’t actually like a car navigation unit, otherwise far too many adventurers would end up being dropped off at the Black Gate of Mordor when they actually wanted the Prancing Pony in Bree (use the postcode, you fools!). We take these sentient taxi cabs for granted in our fantasy travels, but they really are probably the most marvelous and inexplicable magic there is to be found in any kingdom. Just pray that they never decide to go on strike, or worse work for some malignant power intent on taking over the world

“You know, I don’t remember the trip to Celondim ever running quite so close to the edge of this clif…”

Considering these marvels of the magical age, I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise or an issue that it would cost a lot to make use of the service, but it is. LotRO implements a dual travel system, where you can ‘fast travel’ to certain locations for very little money (say one silver) but you are stuck going to that location only, or you can travel in real time for vast amounts more (about fifteen silver) but are able to dismount at any point between where you start and your destination. Essentially you pay through the nipple for the option of being able to get to a destination somewhere along the route post haste. The problem comes from the fact that one rarely wants to jump off mid journey, they actually want to get to the destination itself and would be very happy with the inflexible swift travel option if it meant that they only had to pay one silver to get there.

In the dwarf starting zone (after the tutorial zone) there is a quest that makes my head hurt from the sheer mind-numbing stupidity of the traveling required and which unless your character has won the Gondor Lottery, or has a very rich albeit slightly creepy uncle, who likes to spend too much time brushing your hair but nevertheless gives you lots of pocket money at the weekend, you won’t be able to afford to pay the extortionate travel costs even if you wanted to. Trying to avoid describing the entire ordeal in detail, the quest starts with Bavor in Thorin’s Hall, who needs you to find a number of gears for a mechanism he’s discovered and is trying to repair. The first gear is a short trot away, and little problem to recover. The second gear is a fair old distance away, but there are no towns between Thorin’s Hall and the location that the gear resides, so there’s nothing for it but to stretch the ol’ legs again. There and back again, indeed. The third gear is miles away, and although the town of Gondamon is fairly close, the price to ride from Thorin’s Hall is five silver. If you have five silver to fritter away on travel at the point you’re asked to do this quest, then you’re doing rather well for yourself. Or your hair is really, really well brushed. The fourth gear is further on from Gondamon still. So again you run yourself ragged on your ‘quest’ for it, and then you have to run all the way back (assuming your map of recall is on cooldown) to hand it to Bavor. Bavor then asks you to get the fifth and final gear which, oh yes he just remembered this, is in a small ruins RIGHT NEXT TO WHERE THE FOURTH GEAR WAS.

I never bothered getting the fifth gear because I wasn’t going to be able to recover the first to fourth gears again from where they resided in Bavor’s backside.

It’s difficult to judge where to draw the line with travel in the virtual worlds we wander. In World of Warcraft flight routes are prevalent and although not instantaneous like LotRO’s swift travel, still require no input from the player, and therefore are a perfect opportunity to go and make a nice cup of tea, or play an exciting game of something or other. This means that although travel still takes time in WoW, it’s time that needn’t be endured, and therefore Azeroth quickly becomes a series of compartmentalised theme park zones that one hacks and slashes their way through before jumping on to a trained taxi and moving on to the next zone. LotRO feels more like a coherent concurrent world, but this is at the expensive of having to trudge your way across landscapes that, once you’ve seen them a few times, becomes like driving to work day after day along the same route, and it quickly saps the sense of awe and wonder, instead clobbering you with the branch of antipathy.

As you can imagine, I’m quite keen to get my mount in LotRO, but a mount is still many levels away, and besides, mounts are most certainly the topic for another post.

So for now, I’ll forgo the rather expensive chauffeur service and instead stick to running from place to place. I just wish my dwarf legs weren’t so short; I’m wasted on all this cross country travel, we dwarves are natural sprinters! Very dangerous over short distances.

Admittedly that’s because that’s usually the distance from the bar to the toilet.

Where we WiiWare

Back when I first got the Wii I bought the browser for 500 Wii points (having annoyingly missed out on it being given away free) to tinker about with various streaming media options, and because you never know when you might need another web browser (what would I do if my internet tablet was stolen, the PC exploded and the laptop battery was flat and couldn’t be charged for some improbable reason I can’t be bothered to make up?) As Wii points are sold in multiples of 1000 I’ve had 500 points kicking around for a while, with nothing on the Virtual Console or, more recently, WiiWare really demanding to be bought.

Guitar Hero World Tour finally gave me the opportunity to spend some of those points, downloadable songs costing 200 points each, so I bought a couple last year. Then there was a free Reggae Rock Pack released over Christmas that I finally got around to downloading the other day, and while in the music store browsing around the wide selection of available songs I was tempted by a bit of Nirvana or maybe the Eagles, only having 100 points left meant I’d need to go and buy some more. Switching to the Wii Shop, it struck me that I had no idea what the £/Wii Point exchange rate actually was, I was assuming somewhere around 1p/point as anything more than a couple of quid for a song would be pushing it. Turns out 1000 points are £7, so a song for £1.40 isn’t too bad. Having to leave Guitar Hero to go to the Wii Shop and buy points was a bit of a faff, but then while I was there I remembered World of Goo! The original plan had been for World of Goo to be released as a retail box for the Wii in Europe instead of via WiiWare, so I was going to wait for that, then sometime during the Great Gaming Glut at the end of last year that changed; a quick poke around the WiiWare section of the shop revealed it was indeed there for 1500 Wii points, a swift point buying spree and a bit of a download and I was ready to get Goo-y (with the added bonus of enough spare points for a few more Guitar Hero tracks).

Not much I can add to the Eurogamer review of World of Goo, really, it’s a wonderful game. One of the main reasons I was waiting for the Wii release rather than getting the PC version was to play it with my wife, and initial skepticism (“Eh?”) rapidly turned into advice (“Put another one on the left! No, below that, you’ve overbalanced it now!”) and then involvement, as simply firing up a second Wiimote activates a second cursor for co-operative Goo-ing, with only minor side effects (“get off, that’s *my* goo!”). If you haven’t done so, BUY IT NOW! And then drink your weak lemon drink.

Time to move out of the city?

Windows popped up a little message the other day, as it’s wont to do, tutting at the state of my desktop: “how can you live like this, it’s such a mess, look at all these icons, what’s this? A demo of ‘Boarding Now’, when was the last time you played that, you can’t need all this stuff…” OK, so I dramatise for comic effect, it was just the usual clear off old icons thing that turns up now and again, and things were getting a bit cluttered. After deleting assorted demos and utilities that presumptuously put themselves on the desktop, I ran down the column of MMOs: Hellgate, don’t really need that now; Guild Wars, always an option; WoW, you never know, might resubscribe sometime; City of Heroes…

Oh, City of Heroes. My first MMOG, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned enough times before, that I’ve been subscribed to since 2004, a fantastic game. A costume creator still without peer (maybe Champions or APB this year could finally rival it?), some of the best grouping options around for easily getting together with friends and fighting appropriately scaled opponents, so much good stuff, and yet… I’ve barely logged in this year. OK, not surprising, that’s only about a week so far, but hardly last year either. I’d almost forgotten it until happening across the icon, at which point I had a sudden wave of happiness, and nostalgia, almost yearning, but… I didn’t fire it up and log in. I hovered the mouse over the icon, and thought… What would I do? Roll a new character, do the tutorial again, pick up an existing character and run some missions? Didn’t really appeal. There are a few of the newer zones I haven’t done to death, but by and large it’s pretty much the same content.

If I’m not playing, why subscribe? It’s not like it would take more than a couple of minutes to reactivate the account if I wanted to at some point in the future. Playing on the US servers, and paying in dollars, the price has effectively gone up too as the exchange rate has fallen, and I really thought about cancelling the subscription, more seriously than ever. It ought to be a no-brainer, but thinking about pressing that “cancel” button makes me come over all maudlin, like finally saying “goodbye” to an old friend you haven’t seen for a while.

One option would be to cancel the US subscription and take out an EU one instead; there’s a splendid bunch of people playing there, it would give much more of an incentive to log on and play with them, but after giving it a go a while back, something nagged at me. Mechanically it’s exactly the same game, but without my old characters and their accumulated levels and badges and associated gubbins, like veteran rewards (both useful, such as extra weapons that round out attack chains at lower levels before you pick up all your powers, and “fluff” like costume parts (I keep working bits on Samurai armour into costumes, even for cyborgs)), something just didn’t *quite* feel right. There’s somehow more to the game than mechanics, a weight of history if you will (if that doesn’t sound too pretentious, which it does, but never mind).

So there’s a suggestion for anyone looking to make a healthy profit from an MMO, simply target irrationally sentimental people who’ll keep giving you money without even logging in and consuming server resources. I dunno; maybe it’s because nothing’s *really* succeeded it in terms of superhero MMOGs, and when (if?) Champions or DCUO come along I’ll be able to make a clean break, but until then, seems like I’ll stay subscribed to CoH.

No, no I won’t, it’s crazy, I’m unsubscribing. Canc…

… nope, still can’t bring myself to do it.

GT eh?

There’s an annoying… feature, shall we say, in GTA IV, which also happens in previous GTA games that I’ve played, if I recall correctly. You take your shiny sports car on a little cruise around the block, stopping off along the way at the local supermarket to slaughter some innocent geriatric trying to select a zucchini from the vegetable counter.

As you do.

Why your Russian crime lord boss, owner of half of downtown pseudo-New York, wants you to kill an incontinent old man with a penchant for squashes, I’ll never know, but we in the hired gun trade shoot first and ask questions later.

Questions like: “Can I get zucchini and blood stains out of my suit at 40 degrees?” and “Where the hell has my car gone?”

Because every time I take a shiny car to a mission in GTA IV it’s never there when I come out at the completion of said mission. Gone. Not a trace to be found. It’s as if someone stole it! There I am, standing in the middle of the street like a complete lemon, looking up and down and wondering how the hell I’m going to get home. Strips of zucchini dangling from my forehead. I’m gutted, I feel violated. Robbed.

It took me bloody ages to steal that car.

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.

So what with hitting the level cap in World of Warcraft with my shaman and not feeling the Love of the Lich King enough to want to do the whole thing over again with my level seventy druid or paladin, I was left somewhat hanging by my fingertips from a small shrub atop the cliff of MMO ambivalence, a glance down past my dangling feet showed the jagged rocks of end-level reputation grind, around which was wrapped the angry endless repetitive wash of the Sea of Raids.

Luckily for me there were many hands on, uh, hand, to reach down to my precarious position and lift me up and back onto the enduring yet precarious path of MMO enthusiasm that we brave adventurers wend our way carefully along as we negotiate said cliff of MMO ambivalence; sometimes we step from the path and the sharp drop into ennui awaits, but there are always stalwart folk who can be relied upon to reach out to us and pull us free from our gloom, to once more tread the endless enjoyable path of MMO experience.

Such a time was this, and this time to mbp and Khan who encouraged me some time ago before I even realised I was veering from the path, and more recently to blog commenter unwise, I offer thanks for the encouragement to try Lord of the Rings Online again, because I’ve been following the path for a week or so now, and I’m very much enjoying its winding and meandering ups and downs.

Also thanks to Van Hemlock, Jon, Shuttler, Teppo and the others of that collective whose constant tweets, blog posts and podcast musings were as a siren song guiding me away from treacherous MMO time-sinks and towards safer terrain.

And also thanks to anyone whom I may have forgotten. And sorry. And hello, how have you been?

So that was, in my usual rambling way, an introduction to the fact that I have returned to Turbine’s take on Tolkien’s lands of legend, and that I have been enjoying it a great deal. Having a level twenty six dwarf Guardian and a level twenty four dwarf Minstrel I did, naturally, roll an entirely new character for my return to the middle of the earth! Wait, wrong adventure; a new character for my return to Middle Earth! Having rolled a couple of support classes previously, and having nobody to support in my surreptitious return to Lord of the Rings Online, I decided to roll a DPS class, specifically one that could a) do a little bit of many things, and b) shock horror, be a dwarf. The obvious choice, and what I plumped for fairly quickly, was the Champion, a class which can dual wield; use a bow, albeit for nothing more than pulling duty, or perhaps finishing off a running, low health straggler; wield two-handed weapons; wear heavy armour and use heavy shields and thus, at a push, off-tank in groups. In short, they can do a little bit of everything, but one thing they do very well is damage. Lots and lots of damage.

Attentive readers of the blog will know from previous posts that I’m a healer at heart, I love undertaking that role of doing the job that many others don’t like, combined with the fact that I’m keeping people going, being a team player, and a shoulder for others to stand upon to attain greater heights. Listeners of the podcast will know that I sang a great deal when playing Guitar Hero World Tour with Zoso, Elf and our other mutual friend, not because I like singing particularly, and certainly not because I’m good at it, but because it’s something I can do well enough to allow others to take on the front line roles. It’s possibly altruism, a learned perversity as opposed to genuine generosity of character, but it makes me happy and allows others to be happy, and so I don’t fret over the fact too much.

However, when going solo, do as the soloers do. Roll a DPS machine.

My Champion is level seventeen at the moment; I’ve covered old ground, but it was fresh enough that although I knew where to go and what to do it was anything but dull. The class is new, and that keeps things interesting, and I’ve taken a more active interest in crafting, although it’s still not really my thing. Last but by no means least, I’m soaking up the formidable atmosphere whilst enjoying the many tweaks and titbits that Turbine have added since I was last here.

I’ll be sure to report on the ups and downs as I go, hopefully with some comparison to my recent levelling experience in Blizzard’s latest offering. As to what I’m doing in World of Warcraft – and to be sure I’m still poking and picking at the scab that has formed over the wound that is WoW’s idea of end-game content – I’ll save that for another time, and perhaps another format…

Keg End Ends

After a couple of weeks of heavy drinking, it’s time for festivities to cease as everyone gets back to the daily grind. And in Warhammer too (ahhhh!) The Keg End festival in WAR is coming to an end, and I’m back at work in real life, t’ch.

Keg End was something of a mixed bag. Like the previous event, Heavy Metal, there was a nice long list of activities you could participate in for event influence. Visiting pubs in Altdorf was easy enough (*hic*), and the addition of new “boast” and “toast” emotes set up a couple of fun tasks, /boast-ing to 20 dead enemy players and /boast or /toast-ing a member of each career (easy enough, once you could find a Blackguard in Tier 4). The other tasks revolved around spawns of new mobs added around the place for the event, and unfortunately tended a bit towards the grind of Witching Night. On the plus side, there were plenty of the improbably titled Brew-Thirsty Ogres and Drunken Gnoblars around the place, several spawns in every zone, and although the Explosive Snotlings did explode (the clue’s in the name I s’pose), they at least hung around a bit longer than the Witching spirits. Killing 50 of each of them was a bit dull, but you could break it up, do a few groups here and there as you rode around the world; I got a fair number in the process of questing up to level 40 (handy extra XP as well), and after hitting level 40 I spent a while going back to lower level zones for tome unlocks, and nuking the odd Keg End spawn on the way (a couple of times I tried to nuke goblin players, mistaking them for snotlings or gnoblars, but fortunately they weren’t PvP flagged at the time, saving me from en-chickening). Fireworks dropped from the mobs often enough to make collecting them for another three tasks pretty easy, but beer kegs seemed to drop at a similar rate; ten fireworks, no problem, one hundred beer kegs… Hrm. The final task was to kill 20 hero class Massive Ogre Tyrants, who hung around the RvR lakes, and that didn’t really make much sense to me. I’m fairly sure the usual warband/party tagging rules applied, wherein only one party of a warband gets kill credit, so if you were thundering around attacking objectives and keeps and stomped an Ogre or two on the way it was a lottery as to whether you got any credit. More to the point, when thundering around the RvR lakes in a warband, everyone was usually far too busy heading for the next objective to even bother stomping the Ogres on the way, leaving them about as busy as a fruit seller standing next to a dual carriageway with a couple of manky-looking punnets of strawberries. I’d managed all of zero kills by last night, but fortuitously a guildmate needed a few to complete the task so I tagged along with him and another guild member, then we bumped into three more Ogre hunters and merged groups, and everyone was kind enough to stick around as we ran between two spawn points in Praag to rack up the full twenty I needed. I don’t really get the point of sticking PvE encounters in the middle of RvR lakes; if you’re there for PvP you’re probably not going bother with them, and if you’re just there for a PvE objective, with nine T4 zones, of which six will be locked at any given time, it would take an incredibly busy server not to find a nice quiet place to go Ogre hunting untroubled by the other side. As the Ogres are hero level and need a party it’s not even like a Witch Elf/Hunter could hide near a spawn for a few cheap kills. Still, ale’s well that ends well. Cheers!

Kiasacast Episode 1

In what we believe is an unprecedented move, we at Killed in a Smiling Accident thought it might be interesting to try and send our voices through the internet in what we’re calling a “podcast”, combining the everyday words of “cast” from “broadcast” with “pod” from “podophyllin”, a brown bitter gum extracted from the rootstalk of the May apple (Podophyllum peltatum), so, encoded using fruit extract, it’s episode one of the Kiasacast!

In this episode, we take a look back at the events of 2008, or “flip back through the blog and talk about a few posts”. It’s our first time, as it were, so it’s a little shaky, but we get into the swing of things.

Subjects covered include:

  • Hellgate
  • Subscription numbers
  • The recurring cycles of MMOG blogging
  • Lack of giant robot MMOGs
  • Bonekickers!
  • The reason Age of Conan and Warhammer haven’t done too well
  • Guitar Heroism

Intro music: Galaforce for the BBC B microcomputer
Outro music: Galaforce remix by Heartcore

We’re not sure if it’ll become a regular thing, if nothing else watch (or indeed listen) out for a review of 2009 in a year or so!

Download Kiasacast Episode One

2009 Predictions

With the New Year upon us, I’m given to understand that predictions of what the forthcoming year may hold are the done thing, so here we go:

  • The combination of ever-increasing subscriber base and world economic collapse will lead to the World of Warcraft becoming the richest nation in the world, with the dollar and Euro being pegged against the Azerothian gold piece. Primal speculation will replace hedge funds, but the next expansion will trigger hyperinflation as new daily quests offer ever increasing rewards, sparking riots, ore hoarding and armed mobs besieging Blizzard headquarters. CSRs will describe it as “not as bad as that time Warlocks got nerfed”.
  • In related news, CCCP will take over Iceland, which will do very well for a while until it comes out that the massive increase in herring exports were due to a dupe exploit.
  • Richard Garriot’s Richard Garriot(tm) will announce a new MMOG, in which the entire player base will be launched into space, servers being stationed on the moon. This will turn out to be a Sontaran plot to recruit super-warriors based on a somewhat literal interpretation of the game forums, and the players will do rather less well in hand-to-hand combat with Rutans than hoped.
  • Having exhausted the possibilities of fantasy, and with the superhero and sci-fi genres getting crowded, companies will look to new settings for MMOGs. Cyberpunk and steampunk are both tempting options, but I think the the breakthrough genre will be insurancepunk. Actuarial work with an edge.
  • The industry will get bored of RMT and move on to a new revenue source, SMT: Surreal Money Trading. You’ll be able to equip your character with a vague sense of underwear in exchange for purple.
  • Finally, I’m really going out on a limb with this one: a new game will be released. Some bloggers will like it. Some bloggers won’t. Some bloggers will be cross at the bloggers who like it. Other bloggers will be cross at the bloggers who don’t like it. Other bloggers still will be cross at all the cross bloggers. The game will both succeed and fail, depending on which measures of success are used.