You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October, 2006.
8 days from now, on November 7th, Guitar Hero 2 will be released. I am sad that I will not be rocking out on this guitar that day. It’s not that the extra five buttons have any gameplay effect, but it is simply cool to choke up on the neck to play solos. That said, I do wonder if the smaller buttons will make playing actually harder.
This is pretty interesting. GamingPays!, a website designed to help people become more efficient gold and item farmers in MMORPGs, is being threatened by Jagex (Runescape’s developer/publisher) for publishing information on how to farm in Runescape. From one of Jagex’s initial letters signed by Mohammed Khan (good name), who appears to be a random person within their Community Management team:
The file has information regarding how players can make money from RuneScape. This breaks copyright laws as RuneScape as well as everything within it is the intellectual property of Jagex. Therefore trading someone else’s property without their permission, or advising people on how to do so, is against the law.
I do, I love it. Imperian just trivially (it’s a very simple system) put tobacco growing in, with the ability to then smoke that tobacco. It has no effects, and is much less potentially offensive than the highly-addictive gleam, one of the drugs in Achaea, but it still excites me when our games are able to stick in features that the EAs and hypocritical Wal-marts of the world would probably frown upon (while permitting ample amounts of violence of course). I’ve got less freedom when designing Earth Eternal, but EE it’s self-imposed insofar as the target audience is younger than our text MUDs and one doesn’t want to upset the bill-paying parents.
I’ve 
been loudly predicting since the late 90s that virtual asset sales in MMORPGs were going to be a major part of the landscape, and while my predictions have certainly borne out in the East, the West has been a bit slow to pick up on them. Now, however, the largest MMORPG in world is adding to the roster of virtual items that it sells, though Blizzard is, characteristically, trying to disguise the fact that it’s doing it.
The way the scheme works is that you buy the items that Blizzard is selling by purchasing packs of their collectible playing cards. Each pack comes with a card worth 100 “points.” When you get enough points, you can trade in those points for some in-game items like a re-usable trinket that sets off fireworks, or the ability to look like an ogre (pictured at right).
How much do you think they might be selling these items for? Try ~$950. You need to spend about ~$950 on packs of cards to get the ability to look like an Ogre.
Read the rest of this entry »
This month-old small news article on Pacific Epoch caught my eye. Apparently, Beijing, one of the Chinese cities where it is hardest to get permanent resident status, is going to offer an expedited track to such status specifically for online game and animation talent. I just think that’s cool.
That’s all. Sorry for the short post.
50
years ago today, on October 23rd, 1956, ordinary Hungarian students and workers marched in protest against the illegitimate Soviet Union’s rule over their country via the viciously authoritarian leadership of a Soviet proxy named Matyas Rakosi. Quickly, those same ordinary Hungarians became insurgents, and a revolution was born.
My father was one of those revolutionaries, at age 17, and today, I, and many others, remember and honour those heroes. Although they won a a short-lived victory, forcing the Soviets to pull back, it quickly became apparent that the help the Americans promised to the freedom fighters via Radio Free Europe was a lie, and the Soviets brought the tanks back in with a vengeance. 2500 Hungarians and 700 Communist soldiers died in the short period of fighting, and though the revolutionaries lost (my father and many others had to flee the country permanently), Hungary never forgot the spirit of ‘56. In 1989, Hungary became the first country to rip down the Iron Curtain. I’ll never forget those images.
Thanks, Dad. Fighting for your people’s freedom against a domineering and abusive occupying superpower (and thus against ridiculous odds) is one of the noblest things I can imagine, and I’m grateful for the example that you and people like you set for humanity. There aren’t that many uncomplicated black-and-white/good-and-evil divisions to be made in history, but I think a good case can be made that your revolution was one of them.
“October 23, 1956, is a day that will live forever in the annals of free men and nations. It was a day of courage, conscience and triumph. No other day since history began has shown more clearly man’s eternally unquenchable desire to be free, whatever the odds against success, whatever the sacrifice required.” – Senator (not yet President) John F. Kennedy
Anyone know of good Settlers rule variations that can speed up a 5-6 man game a bit? Five of us had a board games night last night at my house, and had intended to play a game of Settlers w/ Knights & Cities expansion and then a game of Puerto Rico, but the Settlers game took seven hours to finish. It was fun, but most of us agreed at the end that that’s simply too long for a single game. I know there are a lot of various rules variations for Catan, but can anyone point me to one specifically designed to speed the game up a bit without employing timed turns?
As my post about Second Life seemed to attract some resentment from Second Life fans, I wanted to clarify something: Second Life is an excellent platform for user self-expression. Its utility to anyone but Linden Labs is, as far as I can see, creative self-expression, which is great. Creative self-expression is highly entertaining to many people, though of course so is leveling up in World of Warcraft. My issue with Second Life is that Linden grossly and willfully misrepresents it, from trumpeting near-meaningless registration numbers, to leading users to believe they have some sort of enforceable ownership within Second Life, to the scale of the opportunity for engaging in real-world commerce using Second Life as a platform.
Sure, there are statistical outliers like Ansche Chung (SL real-estate baron), but for the most part, there isn’t much indication that Second Life is particularly good as a platform for anything but entertainment/socialization (I don’t see a big difference). That’s not any kind of slam. My games are definitely not good, in the main, for anything but entertainment/socialization, and the most-used virtual worlds are all very consciously about the same (World of Warcraft, Runescape, the big Asian virtual worlds, etc).
So yeah, I do apologize to SL users who felt that I was diminishing the value of their self-expression in Second Life. I’m not. Second Life clearly enables self-expression to a greater degree than most (if not all) virtual worlds. Linden, however, is like the geek who suddenly becomes cool and ditches his old friends. It doesn’t want to talk about what actually goes on in Second Life, because it’s aware that furries, as one example, don’t paint the image for itself that it wants. (Furries are one of, and perhaps the, largest special-interest group in Second Life. See here, for instance.) Linden is turning its back on the bulk of its own users in order to cater to the next press release, and I’m not going to apologize for pointing that out, however caustically.
Gamasutra has a piece on responses to a question they posed to games industry professionals regarding whether they buy new or used games. I’m not sure why they didn’t include renting games in there, but I’m including it in my question here.
S
econd Life, that nefarious den of copyright infringement, nerds having chatsex, and the neverending search for the next trivial public relations opportunity, saw hasn’t-been-hot-for-years musician Ben Folds attend a “launch party” for his new album recently. Almost two dozen people attended. That’s right, two dozen. Just think of the impact! Why, if only half of them buy his album, he’ll have sold twelve albums!
What a joke. I make no secret of the fact that I think Second Life is the single most over-rated virtual world in the history of virtual worlds. It appears to be little more than a constant search for the next press release, presumably in the hopes that the fluffy media attention will someday cause a large, clueless media conglomerate to buy them before it becomes clear to everybody that there is no actual utility in Second Life for anyone who isn’t there for the sake of feeling as if they’re on some sort of cutting edge (or who are among the 10 people or so who manage to make some decent money via the virtual world by selling custom dildos and virtual prostitution services.)
Ian Bogost, 
an associate professor at the George Institute of Technology, has released a new “serious game” entitled Oil God. I have to say, I have never had much interest in what some people like to call “serious games” and my lord does this game ever do a good job of reinforcing that lack of interest.
Go ahead and click on the Oil God link above. Play the game. I discovered that I didn’t know what the goal of the game was, didn’t know how to tell if I was achieving that goal, and had no idea what the moves I was making did. If total confusion was the point of the game, consider it a masterpiece. A friend tried it out as well and had the same experience except that he somehow ‘won,’ much to his bewilderment. Oh, and for the privilege of this experience, you have to sit through a commercial before playing it.
You know what a serious game is to me? World of Warcraft. 7 million players and hundreds of jobs. That’s serious. Another serious game? Go. Very deep. Very serious. Fun, as well, which I don’t think is asking too much from a game.
Anyway, if you play Oil God and stick with it long enough to discover that there’s actually a decent game there, let me know.
I love food. More to the point, I love good food. I was raised in rural Wisconsin in a very food-oriented household and though I didn’t appreciate it at the time (I pretty much just wanted burgers and PB&Js), my parents’ focus on exposing me to quality eating stood in stark contrast to the quantity-over-quality food culture that dominates most of the Midwest. We used to drive an hour and a half to Milwaukee to dine somewhere decent, and occasionally made the 3.5 hour drive to Chicago to eat at a really top-notch restaurant. My dad owned a food service provider (to colleges, etc), and was even named to the Restaurant Hospitality’s “Rising Stars” in 1986, alongside people who are now legends, like Alfred Portale of the Gotham Grill in NYC. Emeril Lagasse was on the list in 1987.
There’s a long-standing debate within the virtual world developer/fan community over whether players own (in a legal sense) anything in a virtual world. I fall strongly on the “the players do not own anything” for sheer practicality reasons. What would ownership over a virtual sword actually mean? A developer could give you the binary 1s and 0s that make up the data structure that represents the sword, but you couldn’t do anything with it. It’d be utterly and completely valueless unless you enjoy staring at some binary code that is meaningless outside of the context of the game the sword came from.
There’s a pretty good article over on Gamasutra on two pioneers in the virtual world space - Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar. They were the lead guys on Lucasarts’ Habitat, an important 2d virtual world back in the mid-80s. Check it out.
I
s Habbo Hotel making a run at MySpace, at least in the younger teen market, by taking more of a Cyworld-esque approach? Habbo has recently rolled out user home pages for its users, but only on the Finnish Habbo for now. You can see the page describing the system (in Finnish) at http://www.habbo.fi/home
An example of one of the more developed home pages at this point that I found is here. There’s a translation of the main content area of the page below, but I wanted to comment first.
A
fter six months of putting it down, picking it up, putting it down, picking it up, I finally finished book five (the Fires of Heaven) of The Wheel of Time series. I don’t know how many books I read in the meantime, but all of them were more pleasant to than the Fires of Heaven. I got as far as mid-way through book six (Lord of Chaos) in the late 90s before giving up in frustration over the pacing. I started over sometime in 2005 and made it through the first four books pretty quickly, but the fifth started to really drag.
I’m not sure why I bother, actually, except that my favorite thing about fantasy is the epic worlds/mythos/cultures associated with them, and Jordan’s world is very cool. Not Tolkien-cool, of course, but very cool. It’s just that his writing style makes Tolkien’s look concise.
My big fear are books 7-10. I’ve been told that they take the “nothing happens for half the book” approach to whole new levels. My big fear is that I’ll push past the tediousness, get to book 11, and read onwards towards a satisfying conclusion, but as Jim Rigney has amyloidosis (Robert Jordan is his pen name), there’s unfortunately a chance that none of us will see a conclusion to the Wheel of Time, or at least, a conclusion written by Mr. Rigney.
Hang on Jim. The Light knows, I’ve invested too much time reading your ridiculous 800 page tomes for you to stop now!
I hadn’t heard of the OGDC, which was announced at the end of August, until today. I wonder whether CMP acquiring Austin Games Conference strengthens or weakens the appeal of OGDC. I tell you one thing I like about what I’m seeing from OGDC so far though: Reasonable pricing. Early bird pass is only $195. You can submit an application to speak here. I’m not sure if I will or not. I’m a speaker at GDC again this year (meaning free admission), but that’s local for me and doesn’t come with the cost of a plane ticket and hotel rooms attached to speaking. On the other hand, I’ve actually never been to Seattle and this might be a good excuse (not that one gets to actually see much of a city when one is there for a conference) to go.
As reported by Gamasutra, 
CMP, owners/operators of conferences like the Game Developer’s Conference and owners of Gamasutra and Game Developer magazine, has acquired The Game Initiative, operator of the Austin Games Conference. It’s too early to say what the impact is going to be, but I am sure I speak for a ton of developers when I plead that the AGC attendance fees NOT be made competitive (ie very high priced) with the GDC fees, which are prohibitive for many indies (thank god speakers get free passes, as I don’t know if I’d shell out $900 to go otherwise, and I’m local!).
Gamespot has a feature on the latest build of Guitar Hero 2, due out November 7th in the US, today. (Subscription required I believe.) They have a bunch of gameplay videos from the build as well, confirming songs like:
* Sweet Child O’ Mine (we already knew that of course…I was disappointed, however, to hear that the singer covering Axl is not all that convincing.)
* Jessica - Allman Brothers
* Surrendur - Cheap Trick
* John the Fisherman - Primus (using the master track from the song, meaning actually Primus, not a cover)
* You Really Got Me - Van Halen
* XYZ - Rush
* Freebird - L.S.
News that got me excited from this feature was that Harmonix doesn’t even have the song list finalized yet because they’re trying to cram songs in up to the last minute. Apparently there are also multiple songs for which they obtained permission to use the masters.
November 7th will be a day of joy at Casa de Matt, with much competitive and cooperative rocking out in place of working.
L
ast night, I broke out the Dreamcast for some old-school gaming with my friend Rodney. More specifically, we played our perennial favorite multiplayer game, Toy Commander. I can’t even describe how much I love this game. The single player game was quite good - a series of wonderfully imaginative mini-games played with toys. All the levels are in the house of the child Andy (you) who is the Toy Commander, and you control a wide variety of vehicles, depending on the mission, from fighter jets to tanks to firetrucks to an alien vessel, etc. All miniatures flying/driving around inside a furnished house, which makes for some very cool level design.
There’s an article over on Terranova this morning talking about whether Second Life should be discussed more on Terranova or not. The article’s author, Greg Lastowka, points out numerous bits of pseudo-mainstream press coverage like the Economist and Wired, wondering whether the media coverage alone warrants more discussion of Second Life. Leaving aside the fact that Linden Labs is presumably paying their PR firm - Flashpoint - to help generate, and to place, these stories in the media, my answer is no. Media coverage doesn’t mean something is actually worth talking about. Just turn on American TV news to see what I mean.