Tagged along for a little raid earlier today and recorded the whole thing. In the end I had two hours of recordings and it took my HD space down to 80mb. Enjoy it or don't, just sharing.
I've been having to run out to the store pretty regularly for food and things the baby needs to survive. While I was there I noticed two things, the first being the new Star Wars action figure line from Hasbro and the second being the 25th anniversary G.I. Joe figures. I bought one of the Star Wars figures and it fueled my nerdlust. Now every time I go to the store I end up picking one up. Here is what I have so far:
My wife is also awesome and got me a new cellphone, but not just another generic flip phone, this time she got me a Sidekick Slide. It's badass, I check Dtoid from it, my emails, I'm on AIM, and I even have a badass little Transformers theme for it that plays the transforming sound effect when I slide it open.
Finally I went on Amazon and ordered a copy of Legend of The Syndicate, which is about this big guild that started before Ultima Online was released and continues still. Being an old UO addict I had heard of them and so I wanted to check out their story. Perhaps it will give me some tips in starting up and running a guild in WoW named Hogger Has A Posse... who knows.
The other night my wife and I had to run part of Deadmines by ourselves so she could get a quest item as a Paladin. I made this little video of it mostly for our enjoyment, but figured I would post it here so everyone will know I'm still alive.
As I mentioned in a previous blog I've been mostly just playing around with WoW again lately. This time I've played a lot with my wife, but because of her work schedule I've had to basically grind her characters up with mine. We've both gotten to level 19 and now I'm falling back into the old trap of spending most of my time doing battlegrounds. It's fun but I need to continue leveling.
One cool thing that happened was that while I was level 17 running around Westfall two level 70's ran up and gave me a bunch of items. I said thanks and then they took off, a few minutes later they came back and asked if I wanted them to run me through Deadmines. So they took me through the instance, letting me loot everything and when my bags were full they looted stuff for me and mailed it to me later.
After that they took off, then once again, ran back up to me a few minutes later and asked if I had the Burning Crusade expansion, when I said yes they opened a portal and took me to Shat, where I made my hearthstone set to. Then they had my wife get on her character and they did the same thing for her.
Basically they were the nicest people I think I've ever met in an MMO... well except for that one guy in UO who gave me a bunch of stuff but I think he was trying to get me to gay cyber with him or something.
So my wife had her hours at works shifted around, the result is that I'm barely concious most of the day while dealing with the baby boy.
During my "off time" I've been fiddling around with World of Warcraft. Not taking it too seriously, but just grinding up a few characters here and there. It's easy to do while holding a fussy baby seeing as I can map pretty much every ability I need to my mouse buttons.
I've also gotten my hands on a Gamecube and have been playing with that. Working my way through Double Dash and Melee. Nintendo knows how to appeal to my obsessive "must complete everything" tendencies. All I really have to say about that is fuck Rainbow Road in it's ass.
Right now I'm watching Stand By Me with director commentary on and I'm about to hop on IRC.
Almost every time a discussion begins about the supposed "decline" of the PC gaming industry people point their fingers at pirates. It's not just the average Joe who is guilty of saying that the widespread use of torrents is one of the major factors involved in the "low sales" of PC games. We've often heard industry figures say that due to piracy they are beginning to wonder if it's worth it to publish games for the PC market. What annoys me is that anyone who looks at the history of PC gaming through practical eyes knows this isn't the case.
That's where Brad Wardell, the CEO of Stardock, comes into the picture. While listening to the latest episode the GFW podcast he got into a discussion about how piracy is effecting the industry and it was great to finally hear someone who is at the head of a successful PC game company say that it's not the problem. He didn't really say anything new, but perhaps the fact that the statements he makes are coming from a person who makes their living publishing PC games said them people will finally listen.
He points out the fact that PC game sales have not actually changed much over the years. If the use of torrents were really such a factor than the amount of copies sold by a "successful" title would dramatically decrease, when in reality successful games have continued to have the same sales numbers. It was really great to hear a game publisher say that the idea of each pirated copy being a "lost sale" is not accurate, as the people who pirate a game are not usually the ones who would have bought it anyway. Pointing to the fact that Adobe photoshop is widely pirated, yet Adobe is still a successful company, he suggests that perhaps companies should be more like them and not "sweat the 17 or 18 year old" who pirates their product.
It's really a great listen if you're at all into PC gaming or the subject of PC piracy. I recommend you take a listen, you can check it out HERE. Skip ahead to 1:11:56 and you'll hear "let's talk about piracy". It goes on from there.
I should have known better, I really should have. When the free 30 day trial if Final Fantasy Online was offered to me I should have punched the clerk in the face for setting my home and my PC up for such fail. I didn't though. Like so many times before with so many different drugs and drunken women, my curiosity got the best of me and I took him up on the offer.
The installation was enough to make me hate this "game". Then I got to the registration process which was so cryptic that my feelings of "fuck this, shut it off" were over shadowed by my confrontationist leanings. I couldn't let this game defeat me before I had even played it. I suffered through screen after screen of randomized login ID's and registration codes until finally I was able to log into the game.
Then came the opening cinematics. Now before I begin playing any game I like to watch the opening sequence. It normally gives me a frame of reference and some sort of interest in the world I'm about to enter. This just bored me. I was shown face after face of crypto-Asian characters engaging in some battle with monstrous beings, then two small children running for safety only to have one be consumed by the beasts, to which I said "good, she was annoying". Most games keep the opening scenes short enough to keep your attention, but this being Final Fantasy and all they decided against that. This movie crept along for what seemed like half of an hour before I was able to make my character.
My character options were two be expected. Several options of nearly indistinguishable sexes of several races, all except the giant beast people of which would only let me be a male. With such few options for customization the process was rather speedy and I was finally entered into the kingdom of some random Final Fantasy named place... only to be greeted by another real time cinematic.
As the camera slowly flew over and through the town I was starting in the white text appeared at the bottom of the screen giving me even more of a back story that I didn't care about. The worst part was that I couldn't cancel it, I had to wait it out. Then I was shown my character and thought I could finally go play... wrong. An NPC began talking to me and I spent five minutes clicking the text away until he gave me some item I didn't give a damn about.
When I had completed that portion I decided to move outside the city walls and fight some things. Now why would a computer game use the standard WASD configuration for character movement? That would make too much sense that's why. I had to hold and click my mouse in the direction I wanted to go, except I kept running in half circles because the controls were so wonky.
Finally I was outside. I should also note that I did not see a single other player during my five minute run, which should have been my first clue that this game should have been vaporware. I saw a rabbit and decided to fight it. I walked up, fumbled through the poorly designed command menu and clicked "attack". Another five minutes later the rabbit was dead.
The most challenging part of this game proved to be exiting it. I tried standard commands of the escape key, looking through the menus, typing /quit. Nothing worked. I had to resort to alt+tabbing, bringing up task manager and shutting it down. Uninstalling it was more fun that anything else I had experienced involving this game.
A good portion of my day is spent looking at various gaming websites. A lot of them have more features than Destructoid, yet I always end up back here. I began to ask myself why that is, what is it about this site that keeps my attention. I think I've narrowed it down to the fact that this is one of the few places where I feel like the staff aren't full of shit.
It's not that the "journalists" on other sites are bad writers. It's just a feeling a get when I read their articles. It's this feeling that they aren't really "gamers". A feeling that they are just people who until a short time ago didn't have more than a passing interest in video gaming but now that there is a niche market for them to achieve some small level of fame and employment they've latched on to the title of "gamer".
It comes across as though they use the childhood memories of playing video games that nearly EVERYONE in my generation has and uses them as some sort of "street cred" for how long they've been a gamer. What about those years between the time that they turned 12 years old and finally got their liberal arts degree? How much gaming did they do then? Were they talking about how awesome the SNES was five years ago? I get a feeling that they weren't.
This isn't me saying that I'm so much more hardcore or old school than these people. It's seriously just the feeling that I get from them, that they are a group of opportunistic mother fuckers clinging to an identity that they never had or once rejected simply for the sake of getting something published.
I'm not really a fan of South Park. I haven't seen many episodes but tonight I saw one that cracked me up. See my friend IMed me and told me to turn it on and when I did I witnessed a hilarious homage to the white trash classic Heavy Metal. If you've ever seen that piece of animation genius just follow this link and check out the clip. It's pretty fucking win. The whole episode of is full of this stuff which is great, I'm actually going to watch the full movie after this is over.
I was personally excited about the release of this game but as time has gone on I've been less and less so. As a long time Conan fan I thought this concept was a great idea when I first heard about it. Who wouldn't love something that spawned from the mind of a madman?
I think there will be a huge market of current and former WoW players who are looking for some other type of MMO experience, but sadly I think that due to some sort of Blizzard conditioning they'll end up quitting. I've seen many people (myself included) fall victim to the MMO thirst. It's the compulsive urge to try re-capturing the wonderment that was unleashed upon first playing games like Ultima Online or Everquest.
Since the early days the MMO audience seems to have split into three groups. The first are the quest junkies. The people who get into a games background story, enjoy questing, all that. Then there are the casual "this is what everyone is talking about" players. They try the new ones, possibly get sucked in for awhile, but you can count on them never getting a character to end game. Finally we have the PvPers, which are a throw back to the old days. These are the people who play MMO's primarily to kill other people, something that many recent games have limited.
Now the world of Conan has enough mythology that it could capture the interest of the quest junkies, but I could easily see the developers fucking up by trying to make it too... "rawr CONAN!"... I guess. WoW seems to have perfected the universal quest appeal factor. The casual folks will probably try it out, some will stay, but for the most part I can't see a random part-time gamer picking up this game and getting addicted to it, unless his office buddies are. That leaves the PvPers, who have been left hungry after each promising release. If it can live up to expectations the game will gain a small but loyal following.
Personally I don't think we'll see a "WoW killer" within the next ten years. There just really isn't a franchise nor a development company with the resources or experience to take on the juggernaught that is Blizzard. Only when we go into the next generation of PC gaming and the art style of WoW will no longer draw the attention of the gamer off the street will there be an opening.
I'm an amatuer sociologist. What that means is that I study groups of people, learn their ways, their customs, and their traditions. I then use this information to make fun of them.
