So yesterday the mini-prequel for Dead Rising 2 went on sale for $5.00. At least I think that’s what 400 points equates to. I hate MS Points, but that’s a rant for another day.

I’ve heard people criticize this game as being a paid demo and you can certainly look at it that way (though curiously enough, there’s a trial version… which would be a demo of a demo) but I guess their intent was to deliver you some unique content that would get you psyched for the game. At $5 that seemed ok and I liked the idea that I wouldn’t have to replay this content in the full version. And after an hour or so of playing I felt like I had a really good idea of what the full game would be like (though since I played a bit of the first Dead Rising, I had a good idea anyway).

So maybe this is brilliant marketing. They get a few bucks out of us, we get a fun experience and excited about the game. And it was fun, though I felt the rather heavy storyline (your 6-7 year old daughter has been bitten and you need to keep her from turning into a zombie) kind of jarred against the campy fun of jamming a traffic cone over a zombie’s head and then bludgeoning it with a purse. The voice acting of the little girl is what made the difference I guess..she sounded really cute, though the Dead Rising engine can’t actually make anything or anyone LOOK cute.

Still, I had fun and don’t regret the purchase at all. So, marketing thumbs up!

But then there’s the flip side. Dead Rising is kind of a 1-trick pony. You kill zombies with any and everything available while playing what’s essentially an adventure game of sorts. Find hidden items, escort people. There’s a bit of level-up goodness, too.

For me, Dead Rising 2: Day 0 really scratched that zombie obliterating itch. I liked it! But I felt like it was enough and that I really didn’t need to run out and spend $60 for more of the same in the full game. Admittedly I wasn’t 100% convinced to buy before I tried Day 0, but it was within the realm of possibility. Now it isn’t. Dead Rising 2 is now on my “grab it on sale for $20-$40 sometime in the future” list.

I guess you could point at a demo and argue that it is the same double-edged sword, but Day 0 has to be a bit longer and more engaging than a typical demo in order for them to justify the $5 cost.

I’m just wondering if Capcom will generate more, or fewer, sales by putting this out there. I guess we’ll never know for sure.

So there’s a certain MMO launching soon. It recently left closed beta and was intended to start open beta tomorrow (though that’s been delayed).

I was able to squirm my way into closed beta for the last weekend it was open. I only spent 3-4 hours playing (had I realized the beta was about to close I would’ve concentrated on playing more) and that was enough to cause me to pre-order the full game.

In fact I’m not sure I want to play open beta very much. I want the game to be ‘fresh’ when it launches. I really liked what I saw; it felt very story-driven and of my 3-4 hours I spent about 20 minutes fighting things and all the rest of the time exploring and talking to NPCs about the world and what’s going on.

Now that feeling might evaporate in hour 5…who knows? But I was enchanted by the little bit I played and I’m looking forward to playing more.

That said… the nerd rage against this game is going to be through the roof. Heck, it’s already pretty loud due to a certain system that’s been talked about. And that’s before people find out how thin the questing is, how manual the process of finding Point B from Point A, realizing that the few quest givers that are around don’t have ! marks over their heads. And how brutal the game is on your PC. My fans go into overdrive and stay on overdrive the whole time I’m playing.

Many of the ‘convenience’ factors of mainstream MMOs won’t be found here (unless things change…they might).

It feels really old school to me. It feels really story driven. I don’t plan to play with anyone else; I just want to explore the world and read everything the NPCs have to tell me. I don’t expect it’ll be a game I play for more than a month or two, but while I am playing I’m going to want to shut out the world.

But I’m always drawn to controversy, particularly when I’m on the underdog side of things. Assuming I continue to like the game I suspect I’m going to be in a minority. It’s going to be a real challenge keeping clear of threads that are warning people away from the game.

I know there are other narrative-driven gamers out there with the patience to play a game that spools out story the way this one does. But the ‘typical’ MMO player is going to be clicking through text looking for the big action component, not finding it, and ranting online about how awful the game is.

I’m not sure where/how to find like-minded gamers in a case like this.

So I was reading a gaming site this morning and a game journalist mentioned that he hadn’t gotten an advance copy of a game so he had been playing the game basically non-stop so that he could get a review ready for the readers.

What does everyone think of this?

While I admire the person’s work ethic, I’m not sure how fair it is to the game. Imagine someone forcing you to play a game for 18 hours straight whether you wanted to or not. How likely is it that you’d come away with a warm and fuzzy feeling about that game?

I’m not faulting the reviewer; don’t get me wrong. S/he doing the best job s/he can in this “Publish first or don’t bother” environment we operate in.

And this is me picking at problems without offering any solutions.

Here’s another example. Deathspank. Now I love Deathspank! Jeff Gerstmann doesn’t. But here’s the thing… I play Deathspank for an hour here, an hour there, sometimes I get on a real roll and I’ll play for a few hours straight but after I do, I’ll leave it alone for weeks after. Gerstmann, according to what he said on the Giant Bomb podcast, sat down one morning and played it straight through, finishing sometime later in the evening.

If I’d played Deathspank like that, I’d probably give it a 3/5 star review too. The jokes would run together and lose their humor, the game play would start to feel really repetitive and I just don’t think the game would be as fun.

Again, not faulting Gerstmann; he had a review to finish and he was getting it done. And for people who tend to marathon-play every game, his review was absolutely valid. If your plan is to wring every achievement point out of Deathspank over the course of a day, you’re going to come away feeling pretty sick of the game.

For that matter, I like cotton candy. About 2 bites of it. If I ate 2 bites of cotton candy I’d give it a big thumbs up. If someone brought me 10 wads/spindles/whatever-you-call-them of cotton candy and I had to eat them all at once, I’d probably tell you cotton candy was the most awful, wretched food ever invented.

I just wonder if we need reviewers to offer more disclosure over *how* they played the game. Something like “Play time 10 hours, played over a weekend”. I just think the experience of spending 10 hours in 1 day with a game might be much different than the experience of spending 10 hours with a game over the course of the week. Some titles are just not meant to be gorged on.

Or maybe the easiest solution is just to ignore professional reviews and go by what friends think of games. Actually, that’s probably the best plan.

I just was asked to take a survey about my experience with digital comics from the PlayStation Network (currently for reading on the PSP). Reading between the lines, so to speak, it sounds like Sony is judging user interest towards accessing their digital comics on other hardware besides the PSP. Specifically mentioned were a PC, the PS3, and the iPad/tablet computers.

There’re already several digital comics sellers who’ve set up house on the iPad so it might be a tough nut for Sony to crack, but I’d love to be able to buy a digital comic and read it on my PSP or my iPad, depending on what was handy.

Again, this was just a survey so there’s no telling how seriously they’re considering the idea. I just found it interesting that they’d even think about jumping to Apple hardware.

So a little set up. Stardock Software’s Elemental game launched on Tuesday. That was the official launch date, anyway. But some retailers started selling it early. Stardock proved the old adage “No good deed goes unpunished.” by deciding to let anyone who’d pre-ordered the game download a late beta copy and start playing it at the same time.

It was probably a misguided idea, because you only have one opportunity to make a first impression and beta software won’t do that for you.

Anyway, that’s kind of neither here nor there. Elemental is out, for good or bad. I’ve had fun with it, other people call it unplayable. So who knows.

PC Gamer’s Tom Francis had bad luck and wrote a post entitled Elemental’s disastrous launch: stay well away in which he basically said the game doesn’t work and you shouldn’t buy it. Fair enough so far: he reported his experience with the software. His experience was *vastly* different from mine, but whatever. The game didn’t run on his two systems and it ought to run for everyone, so his criticism of the game was valid, assuming he was running the final version and not that pre-release version (which I suspect he was, but again, I’ll leave that be).

Had he stopped there, I wouldn’t have reason to complain, but he used his criticisms of the game as a launch pad to attack Stardock’s Brad Wardell, twisting words and taking quotes out of context. Now, my sense is that Brad Wardell is not a person I’d want to sit around having a beer with. He’s shared some views over the years that I don’t really agree with. Not, y’know, Orson Card level stuff, but just things that gave me the sense that he’s a difficult guy to be around.

But I’m playing a game that he and a bunch of people made…I’m not dating the guy and I don’t think his personality is relevant when talking about a game.

Francis says:

They’re not even apologetic: CEO Brad Wardell says on the game’s site that they’re “definitely glad” people played the pre-patch version because of all the useful crash reports they got.

What Wardell said was:

As some of you know, some retailers broke the street date and to make sure our beta testers and pre-order customers didn’t get the short end of the stick, we released an interim build of Elemental (internally called Gold Edition++).

It turns out that this was a blessing in disguise because we have gotten a tremendous amount of useful feedback from those of you who got the game before release. The results of this comes in two parts.

…

The day 0 version, as most of you know, is the version that was originally expected to be the first version most people would ever play. We’re definitely glad, however, that people got to play the pre-day 0 builds because we got a lot of very useful feedback and some crash reports that were not known about.

In context is sounds quite different, doesn’t it? No, they aren’t apologetic…they’re grateful that fans d/led the early version and helped them identify some bucks that they could squash for the launch day patch.

But Francis didn’t stop there. Oh no! Instead he went to a 3rd party forum (quartertothree.com) where Wardell hangs out, singled out 1 post from a long and heated thread and used it to back up his attack on Wardell. Wardell has 2,272 posts on that site…clearly it’s his hang-out spot. It’s a damned shame that a game developer can’t use his real name on online forums without fearing someone using anything he says against him.

So the reaction to this post was pretty much the same reaction you’d get by throwing bloody chum into shark-infested waters. Stardock has now displaced Activision as The Ultimate Evil of Gaming and people are saying they’ll never buy another Stardock game because of Wardell’s attitude.

So great, everyone who works for Stardock loses because Francis has a stick up his ass about Brad Wardell. Oh, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun jumped in on the action too, doing what they could to fan the flames.

Now Wardell’s outburst on QuarterToThree wasn’t the smartest thing a person has ever done. But he did man up to it and issued an apology. I’m not sure what more you can ask of a person than that they apologize publicly, in a case like this.

Hours later, PC Gamer did add, without comment, a link to Wardell’s apology post. Rocket, Paper, Shotgun couldn’t be bothered, apparently.

Y’know what? Gaming is a fucked up industry. Francis’s post is irresponsible and unfair, in my opinion (again, not talking about his criticism of the GAME here). But what’s sadder is how many gamers, or at least commenters, jump right into the mayhem without pausing to try to learn the whole story. How quickly the mob turns. How fickle we are.

The whole issue has been incredible disappointing to me.

But I guess this is what gamers want. The other day on Twitter someone accused gaming journalists of just being there to provide free marketing to game companies. I tell you what, if the other option is this kind of hatchet job against individuals, I’ll take marketing. At least it focuses on the games.

Also check out Darren’s take on the situation at Common Sense Gamer.

Update: Looks like Rock, Paper, Shotgun finally caught up with events. Not that it’ll undo the damage they’ve already done.

So it looks like RealTime Worlds is going belly up. And everyone seems so sad about it. I’m sad about it. I really had fun playing APB and was looking forward to playing it some more once they got a few patches into it.

Sure, the game wasn’t perfect…what game is? But it was fun, which at the end of the day is all that matters to me.

Of course when it launched, gamers and gaming journalists were gleefully taking all kinds of dumps on it, treating it like some kind of Daikatana-style train wreck. Gamers, as a breed (there are of course exceptions) take an immense amount of joy from tearing a game apart, spreading it’s entrails all over the internet, then posting pics of the mayhem to Facebook.

So that’s cool and all. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, even if it’s a horribly uninformed opinion. Like all the people who bitched about the payment model without stopping to think about it. How many games do you spend $50-$60 dollars on and then play for 15-20 hours? APB gave you 50 game-play hours with the box. That’s not time spent socializing, that’s essentially time in combat. Imaging what your WoW character’s /played time would be if you didn’t count time spent traveling to quest locations, fiddling at the bank, searching the auction house, talking to your guildies, waiting for a raid to form… 50 hours of actual combat is probably 200 hours of playtime. The fact is, most users would never hit that 50 hour limit in APB. It never was a game you were going to play as a replacement for your MMO of choice. It was just a game, not a lifestyle.

Anyway I digress, but that’s an important point. So many people reviled the game, without even trying it, due to the payment model…it just seemed unfair to me.

“So yay! APB sucks! RealTime Worlds can’t make a game that isn’t total crap! We’ve hardly even played it but we know it sucks, and if someone tells you they had any fun playing, it’s just because there [sic] a noob who doesn’t know what’s good! Let’s kick its corpse all over the internet!”

And now RealTime Worlds is going under and what do we hear?

“Oh, what a shame!” “I feel bad for those affected.” “Hope those guys land of their feet!” “Wow, the gaming business sure is brutal!”

When the same person that was ‘piling on’ to the flaws in APB turns around and tries to act all sympathetic about these guys losing their jobs… wow, I just find it an unbelievable display of hypocrisy.

People need to learn that their words have consequences. If you hated APB that much then you should be glad these people won’t be making another game; you should be happy they’ll now get a chance to go into a line of work they’re better at.

Now if you tried APB and didn’t enjoy it and said as much, while listing real reasons that you didn’t like it… I’m not talking about you! Quite the opposite…constructive negative criticism can help a development team get better. You gave the game a fair shot, didn’t like it and moved on. I totally respect that and again, I’m not talking about you in this post!!

I’m talking about the people who played for 10-15 minutes, didn’t take any time to learn what was going on, and then used their influence with their friends, or worse, with their readers/listening audience, to trash the game to an extent that the people they have influence over were never going to even take a look at APB.

All I’m asking is for people to stand behind their words, and stop being so wishy-washy. When a developer has 1 current game out, trashing the game is trashing the developer. You helped put RTW where they are today. At least take ownership of that fact.

So we switched ISP & TV providers today, going from Comcast to FIOS. Now a lot of people hate Comcast, but I don’t. Our service has been very reliable over the years. We switched to save money, and for better internet speed.

We had an appointment window of 8 am – noon today. At about 11 we got a call saying the tech was running late and he’d be here by 1. He got here about 1:20. Installation took until just about 5 pm. The tech was friendly and pretty helpful. In fact he was a little too helpful in some ways.

We still have Comcast service active and stuff on our Comcast DVR we wanted to watch. The FIOS tech disconnected the Comcast set-top box and tucked the Comcast cables inside the wall. This makes sense, really, but I wish he’d let me know he was going to do it. When the Comcast set-top box loses power for a length of time it sort of resets. When I hooked it back up, it didn’t have a signal back to the Comcast mothership and so couldn’t re-initialize the DVR features. So we lost all the stuff we had on the DVR (unless I want to remove the wall plate and fish around in there for the Comcast cable and drag it out). That was a bummer.

Anyway I’ll take all the stuff back to Comcast’s offices tomorrow and have them shut down my service immediately, I guess.

On the internet side, the FIOS Actiontec router replaced the Comcast cable modem and my LinkSys router. The technician dutifully transferred all the ethernet cables to the FIOS router, including an uplink to a hub I have. He pulled out all the now-superfluous equipment, leaving things neater than when he arrived.

However, in initializing the router he had to use my computer, and while doing so he installed some Verizon software without telling me what he was doing. I later had to reboot and had a EULA for this software pop-up when my system started. I declined to accept the EULA and removed the Verizon software. So far that doesn’t seem to have hurt anything.

I asked for the admin password for the router. The Tech was willing to give it to me, but we couldn’t get it to work. He called FIOS HQ and even with their help, the ‘correct’ password wouldn’t work. In the end he did a hard reset of the router and we logged in with the default admin password of password1 (in case you have a FIOS router, that’s how you get in… do a hard reset and use admin/password1).

I started asking him about changing the SSID and going from WEP to WPA and he pretty much admitted I was now talking over his head. He left me to “knock myself out” in setting up the router the way I wished, and headed to his next job. Yeah, he was going off to start a new install at 5 pm!

The ActionTec router has a clunky UI. I changed the password, switched the security to WPA, changed the SSID and started adding MAC address filters. Every time I added a new MAC address to the filters, it seemed to turn off security. Happily I noticed this and could turn it back on but had I not, I would’ve left the wireless network totally open.

The FIOS TV Guide/DVR is a horror show. I really hate it. Everything feels like it’s 5 menu options deep. The search kind of sucks and they overload you with information. When I’m looking for a show, I just want to know when it’s on and what channel, I don’t need a link to search on everyone who is a cast member.

But what really puzzles me is that the tv guide seems to be showing me information from last week. So the episodes of Eureka and Haven that are on tomorrow night have the descriptions from the episodes that were on last week over on Comcast! Maybe the guide just needs time to update.

With the Comcast DVR now dead and nothing on the FIOS DVR yet, I fired up the Roku…but it wasn’t getting an internet connection. Hmm. Tried the PS3 and again got an error. Oddly it was getting an IP address but having DNS issues. After some fiddling around I just ran through the network connection wizards on both devices, essentially setting them up like they were new. That seemed to clear up the problem on both of them. But it was weird.

In the end we turned to Hulu Plus on the PS3 for some dinner TV watching. The first attempt, the Hulu+ feed started jerky and then just slowed down until we were getting an update about every 5 seconds. I exited the application, re-entered it and had better luck. I never saw this problem with Comcast, FWIW.

After dinner I decided to fire up OnLive to see how well that worked with my supposed 25/25 FIOS internet service. OnLive ended up giving me a warning that my network connection was dropping frequently and my experience might be sub-par. I went ahead anyway, started playing. Gameplay was jerkier and laggier than I’ve ever seen it while using Comcast, and eventually OnLive just gave up. It told me my internet connection wasn’t good enough to support OnLive and dumped to desktop.

I rebooted my PC (which was when I saw that EULA and subsequently removed the Verizon software) and tried OnLive again. It was better, but still didn’t feel as solid as it did on Comcast.

That’s how far I’ve gotten. Compared to Comcast, FIOS has an uglier user guide and less reliable internet, at least so far. InternetFrog says I’m getting 22 Mbps down and 8 Mbps up as I type this at 10 pm. So sheer download bandwidth seems fine but it seems like packets are dropping somewhere when using Hulu+ and OnLive. And 8 Mbps up? When I’m paying for 25? That’s pretty bad.

I probably won’t be truly happy with FIOS until I get the first bill and save money over Comcast. Right now it just feels like we’ve undergone a lot of headache for no real benefit. So far, I’m not a fan of FIOS. I’m hoping that changes.

So I’m a gamer, right? You’re probably a gamer too if you’re reading this blog. We’re used to spending $60 for a new console game, maybe $50 for a new PC game. Every so often Steam has a big sale and we all start buying games just because they’re marked down to $10: “I’ll probably never play it, but at $10 I couldn’t NOT buy it!”

Enter the iPad (you could sub in iPhone or to a certain extend, an Android phone). Suddenly our sense of values get thrown all out of whack.

Angry Birds is all the rage on the iPhone and iPad these days. I finally got around to downloading the Lite (ie, free/demo) version. It’s basically Boom Blox without the Wii controls. In other words, it’s a hell of a lot of fun, very addicting, with irreverently cute characters (you use a slingshot to project the titular birds at pigs who’re protected inside structures of varying degrees of flimsiness. Why? Because the pigs stole, and presumably ate, your eggs).

The Lite version is only available for the iPhone. Of course it runs on the iPad, either at actual size or blown up 2 times to match the size of the iPad. Because the graphics are pretty simple it looks fine at 2X.

Anyway I decide this is enough fun that I want the full game. At least I’m pretty sure I do. I think a lot over whether its worth investing in the full game. Will I really play it enough? Once I decide I will, I have another decision. The iPhone version is $1 while the iPad version is $5. I’ve heard that the iPad version is identical to the iPhone version, just with crisper graphics.

Hmm, is it worth paying FIVE TIMES as much just for slightly better graphics? I spend a lot of time thinking about this while I sip an iced coffee and munch on a donut. Total cost of the snack I’m consuming while I ponder? About $5.

And suddenly I realize how weird it is that I’ll spend $60 on a console game that I know lasts 8 hours or so, but I’m agonizing over spending $5 on an iPad game. If a console game drops to $40 that’s cheap as heck, but an iPad game at $5 feels expensive. But will the console game over you 8 (or 12, at full price) times the enjoyment? Who knows? Enjoyment is really hard to quantify.

In the end, I splashed out the big bucks for the $5 iPad version of Angry Birds and the crisper visuals are well worth the extra money in my opinion. But after all was said in done I just felt bewildered by my own behavior. Why was I stressing out over a $4 difference in price? What is it about the iPad that the perceived value of games is so much lower than the perceived value of games on the PC or consoles?

So here’s another side of EQ2 (yeah, I’m on a bit of a kick). Last night, after a crappy day at work, I was able to get job #2 done pretty early and by 9 pm I was ready for some relaxing gaming. And when I say relaxing, I mean just that… I wasn’t in the mood for stress or excitement.

It was the last day of TinkerFest in EQ2 and I had an incomplete quest, so I logged in to finish it up. All I needed to do was collect some gnome grease and then craft a battle-bot, so no fighting. Finished the quest (my bot lost ) and then wandered around GnomeLand Security picking up quests and taking the time to read the quest text (or listen to the NPCs) as I did so. There’s some amusing stuff there if you take the time to appreciate it.

Then we had a surprise visit from a GM in the guise of a semi-broken tinkered robot named Firstaidomatic. It was attempting to repair itself and needed spare parts. I hesitate to call this encounter a quest, but it was a fun diversion and after we satisfied the robot’s needs we each got a personal light and some level 100 food and drink for our troubles. One of the strengths of EQ2 is that they do a lot of these micro-events where a GM controlled character just appears at a focus point (ie, the last day of TinkerFest, at the hub of all TinkerFestivities) to interact with the players.

Having finished with TinkerFest for this year, I headed to Kelethin for the City Festival, and took a quest to harvest ingredients for the troll that was running things. Remember how I’d been intending to level up harvesting the other day? Yeah, I was getting back to that. I spent the next hour and a half or so just roaming around the outskirts of Greater Faydark. Everything was quiet; I never saw another player out there. But that was ok. I just kind of flowed into the world, letting real world stress drain away as I fished and chopped wood and got really good looks at the creatures that I’d always had to fight during prior visits. It’s amazing the detail you have time to notice when you aren’t swinging a sword. And the ambient sounds out there just kind of drew me in. It was all very soothing, and I got all my harvesting skills up to where I can go harvest Tier 3 next, as well as completing the harvesting quest a few times and getting tokens for Kelethin City Festival goods.

I played until midnight, never drew a weapon in anger, though I was tempted after a Fae played a practical joke on me in the guise of teaching me her language. I didn’t do any serious crafting. Basically I just roamed around while my real self unwound.

I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop and for me to ‘go off’ EQ2 again. I always do eventually. But for right now I’m really enjoying the game a lot (again). I’m taking care to only do things that are fun and to not pressure myself. For instance Angela asked me if I wanted help in doing all the TinkerFest quests I hadn’t done, since it was the last night of the Festival until next summer. My first instinct was to say yes, not wanting to miss out on anything. But then I caught myself because I knew I wasn’t in the mood for trying to pound through quests, and just let that content go until next year. Basically the way I look at it is this: I have two real jobs. I don’t need my games to become a 3rd. Everything comes ’round again eventually, right? And if not… well there’s more than enough content to keep me happy for years at the pace I play.

When New Halas hit the EQ2 servers I rolled a new character just to check out the starter area. I chose a Fury because I’ve never really played a healer in all my years of MMOing (or if I have, I’ve forgotten about it). He quickly sped to level 20 and finished the New Halas zone (Frostfang Sea) and moved to Butcherblock and kept going.

Somewhere around level 30 I realized this was no longer a throw-away character and he was here to stay. I decided he would be my Transmuter (a skill that turns magic items into raw materials to be used in Adornments) but in order to get his skill up I needed a lot of low-level magic items to practice on. Also I’d more or less ignored his harvesting skills since I’d been playing him like a disposable character.

Enter EQ2′s ChronoMagic. I set his level back to 5 and ran him through the Timorous Deep newbie zone, working on his harvesting and transmuting all his quest rewards. About halfway through I went to level 15 with him and eventually the Sarnacs also sent him on to Butcherblock. Most of my quests there I’d already done, of course, but there were a few faction-specific ones waiting.

So that’s where things stood Saturday night. I had some new level 22 quests I want to knock out but I’m level 35. Back to the Chronomage to be set back to level 25. But one of the quests is a harvesting quest and my lumberjacking skills weren’t quite up to snuff. I headed to the area of Greater Faydark near Crushbone to increase those skills, but soon wandered into Crushbone itself. The orcs there were easy prey for me and killing the odd orc broke up the constant hunt for harvesting nodes.

Then I saw an Orc with a quest feather. Turns out he had a job that needed to be done inside Crushbone Keep, a place I’ve never been. I went in there, found an elf who needed help too. The orcs near the entrance weren’t too bad but I knew this was a group zone and I’d need more firepower eventually.

So here I am, artificially level 25 and needing help. Chronomagic to the rescue again. Angela had a level 35 Berserker. She Chronomaged down to level 25 and we set out to conquer the Keep. As we delved deeper and deeper into the Keep it was clear we were getting in over hour heads. So we both canceled our chronomagic, leaving us at 35 & 38. 38 was high enough that our quests were gray, but then I mentored back down to 35; now we had a duo that was high enough to finish the Keep, but low enough that the quests didn’t go gray. And finish it we did.

But early on in the conquest of Crushbone I saw the flaw in my play style. I was gaining levels while doing lower-level content, which was going to leave my “unaltered” level quests going gray on me, which in turn would force me to chronomage back down again, setting up a viscous cycle. Then Angela let me on to a tip… you can choose to divert your combat experience to AA points rather than leveling.

So that’s what I did and instead of gaining levels I was earning AA points that let’s me tweak my character class to be something ‘just right’ for me. Sweet!

By this time it was late afternoon Sunday and we’d been playing all day, so we quit, but honestly I was left wanting more. I love all the options available in EQ2 between the parallel quest lines, using chronomagic and mentoring, and now my new favorite toy, deciding where you want to put your experience points to work. I loved that I’d logged in to do a level 22 harvesting quest and wound up going through a lowbie dungeon that I’d never seen before. That’s the kind of unexpected adventure that brings me back to a game time after time. I loved that we could tweak the difficulty to suit us doing it as a duo rather than having to wait for a guild member of appropriate level to log in, or turning our group into a PUG.

I’m definitely a game grazer and rotate through MMOs on a pretty constant basis, but everytime I re-visit EQ2 I find something new and fun to do. I never stay around very long, but I’m not sure that’s the game’s fault. It’s the one MMO I play where I’m in an active guild and I can only sustain that social aspect of my game playing for so long before I drift off to another MMO where I’ll solo for a while.

I’m not sure if EQ2 Extended is a good idea, but I hope it at least gets more people to try the game out. 5 years of additions and expansions and system tweaks has left a rather massive, wonderful game that’s overlooked by most MMO players.

Warning: Much pondering and thinking out loud ahead.

So for the past week or so I’ve been playing Frontierville on Facebook, and for part of that time Tipa of West Karana has been my neighbor. She reviewed the game today and I urge you to read what she had to say.

I don’t disagree with her at all, and yet I think I like the game more than she does, and I was going to post a comment explaining why when I realized I couldn’t exactly say why. So I’ve been pondering that, and then Scopique talked about crafting and process and minigames and that kind of got stirred into my thought process.

I’ve always loved crafting in MMOs. I remember when Ultima Online was the reigning king, some upstart (I think it was EQ but don’t quote me that) ran an ad campaign where they kind of jeered at UO saying, “Would you rather craft a chair or kill an orc.” And I was all like “RAWR! KILL THE ORC! KILL THE ORC!”

At least, that’s what I thought I wanted. But crafting in EQ was really frustrating and not a huge part of the game (at least back then) and I missed UO’s crafting system. I still miss it to an extent. There’re only a handful of MMOs with really rich crafting systems. UO, SWG, Vanguard… maybe I’ve missed some.

But the idea of harvesting materials and using them to make something is really appealing to me. Back when I lived in a rural area I had an interest in woodworking and gardening and constructing things, but that all sort of dropped away when I became an urban/suburban apartment dweller. Crafting scratches that construction itch, in some small way.

There are many, many games about Destruction (at the very simplest level…killing opponents) but not as many about Construction. Or at least I’m not familiar with as many. City-building games (and 4X games scratch both itches… you build up your empire and tear down the enemy’s). Most Construction in games is either in a kind of software toy (ie The Sims) or it means actually building assets for the game (Little Big Planet, or any game with a level editor).

Tipa says of Frontierville: “As a GAME game, well, there’s really no point to the game.” and she’s right. Zynga’s #1 goal is that you never “finish” the game and stop paying for items, right?

But what I get from Frontierville is that same UO construction itch scratched. I take some odd satisfaction out of clearing the land (and in so doing harvesting wood for buildings) and then bringing order to my little plot. Technically I guess this is Destruction: I’m destroying trees and such. Maybe I should be using “increasing/decreasing entropy” rather than construction/destruction.

It’s true my options are limited, but they’re not fixed. I can start to build whatever building I feel the urge to build (though as you gain levels you gain more options) but then I have to rely on “Neighbors” for supplies.

Neighbors, though… they’re kind of important to me. Remember back when I talked about We Rule on the iPad? I didn’t have much good to say about it, but guess what? I still play it.

But Construction gaming is always more fun when you can show it off. No one really sees my We Rule kingdom anymore, but in Frontierville I have evidence of who has come to visit. Granted they don’t come to see what I’ve done…they come to get bonuses and materials…for gameplay reasons. But I know when I go visiting I make note of what my friends are up to. This one is all about function, that one is chaotic, and this third one has spent a lot of real $$ on special items…what a surprise. I feel like I get tiny glimpses into the personalities and minds of the players.

Going back to UO, once you built your house and furnished it, what was the next logical step? Throwing a party, of course. Have people come over to see what you’ve made.

Someone on my forums referred to a type of gamer they called a Decorator and I thought that was a very good term. It was in a discussion about “What is a real game” and he (I know him only as Bognor) said:

There is a class of gamer called a “collector” and another called a “decorator”. Farmville and its ilk appeals to these classes because they have opportunities to acquire “rares” and to build esthetically pleasing farm layouts. There exist choices in this context, and competition within these classes. To those of use who are not collectors or decorators, there is not much appeal in Farmville.

That made a ton of sense to me. That collector part of me, I’ve always known about, but the decorator is a new self-discovery. My We Rule kingdom is now laid out like a “real” kingdom would be, with the road to the castle literally paved in gold and surrounded by statuary and sparkly trees. Why? There’s no gameplay reason for it, but it was pleasing to me to do… although it took me weeks and weeks of playing before I started doing it.

I’m not an artist, although I’ve always wished I had some artistic talent. In some way these not-games like We Rule, Frontierville, or MMOs with rich crafting systems let me pretend to be an artist for a little while.

Does my Frontierville plot look unique? Honestly no…there isn’t that much variability between plots. But it is still mine, laid out as I wanted to lay it out. I’m pretty anal about pulling weeds that sprout up in cleared areas…I guess in some tiny sense I take some pride in my space. And I suspect when I get to the point where all the forest has been cleared and all the land tamed, I’ll probably lose interest (if not before).

My next project might be actually working on my character’s inn room in EQ2. I see the crazy things people build and while I’m impressed by them, I also find the range of options a bit daunting. Again, with these simple not-games, the limited choices are almost a blessing. There’s nothing intimidating about arranging your barn and cabin and apple trees in Frontierville, y’know?

I don’t know if I have a point here. Like I said at the top of the post, this is more stream-of-consciousness thinking about *why* I’m enjoying a game that is hardly a game (and which draws such ire from a large population of ‘core gamers’).

I’m sure you’ve seen this, but on the off chance you haven’t…

Now don’t go grumping at me in the comments. I fully realize a trailer like this has next to nothing to do with how the game will play; it just sets up the lore. But just forget there’s a game for a few minutes and enjoy some pretty great CGI mini-movie super-hero-ality.

I’m embedding it but I urge you to click through and watch it in HD.

Riffing on a quick back and forth I had on Twitter, I thought I’d wax nostalgic a little bit about my WoW phase.

When I played WoW, I lived alone. I was unemployed and in-between job interviews and freelance gigs I’d spend 20, 30 or even more hours playing each week. These days if I spend 10 hours gaming in a week, it’s a big gaming week.

Because I spent so much time playing, I was in an active guild and knew everyone else in it. We’d be on Vent with open mikes, laughing, talking, cursing, and laughing some more. I knew my guildie’s spouses and kids (tho as often as not, said spouses and kids were in the guild anyway). I knew when person X walked the dog at night, and what time person Y got home from work. These people were my social circle at the time. We weren’t big enough to be a raiding guild but back then doing 5 & 10 man instances had enough of an end-game feel that they felt very satisfying.

When I wasn’t doing something with the guild, I’d hang out in Stormwind. There was a strong role-play community at the time and I spent hours just sitting around in the taverns in Stormwind, chatting with people while drinking real beer in the real world. Not having a job to go to, I didn’t have to go to bed at a reasonable hour and so got to enjoy “late night WoW” which, at the time, was a period starting at 1 or 2 am and stretching until dawn when a lot of the ‘noise’ of the server went away and the people left felt like a real community. We’d chat until all hours. Azeroth became, effectively, my local bar to hang out in. With so much time to play, I never felt pressured to hurry through anything.

Then life changed. I got a job, got a girl, we all were sort of feeling like we’d done everything we could in-game and people started trying other titles. I didn’t have time to keep up. The guild kind of drifted apart and I left the game.

I’ve tried to go back a few times since, but it’s like going back to the places you spent your evenings-out at as a young person. There’re still people there, but you don’t know who they are, and the music they’re playing is different, and the decor is different, and the guy behind the bar sure doesn’t know you…he was probably in diapers that last time you hung out there. You just don’t fit in any longer and it just feels kind of depressing.

And yet today I bought Wrath of the Lich King and now I really don’t know why. I know I’ll log in, feel incredibly lonely because my old friends are no longer there, and log out again. Maybe Cataclysm will change things up enough that WoW will feel like a new place to me.

I’ve been having problems with my arm lately (friends will remember I went through this last fall…it’s a recurring RSI/pinched nerve/something thing that hits my left shoulder every so often) which means traditional gaming was more or less off the table this weekend. A bit of Deathspanking but that was about it.

So I’m mindlessly clicking around the internet (my mouse arm is fine) and I find myself on Facebook and decide to try Frontierville again. And this time I got hooked. I’ve been playing it off and on all weekend; I feel like I ought to be ashamed of that fact but the truth is, I was having fun.

The best way I can find to describe Frontierville is that it’s like Harvest Moon turned into a social game. You still have the real time energy accumulation of social gaming so you can only play in fits and starts, but otherwise it’s very Harvest Moon-like. Clearing land, planting crops, raising animals, and meeting goals to progress the storyline (such that it is…to a great extent the storyline happens in your own head). For instance right now I’m working on the requirements to get my bride-to-be to move out West with me. It isn’t as in-depth as Harvest Moon; you’re not choosing a townsperson to woo or anything. But it’s still pretty fun.

On the other hand, figuring out how to play as much as possible adds a kind of meta-game layer to the real game. I’d accumulated tons of gift offers (turns out I have a lot of Facebook friends who’re playing) and that carried me through most of the weekend. Eating meals gets you energy and lots of people had sent me meals. You can also get an energy boost by visiting friends’ homesteads.

You do have to do some trading with friends, or spend money, in order to play. I’ve been doing the former. And there are goals built around visiting your friends’ lands, so playing solo would strip out a good chunk of activities.

I used to hate how these games spammed my Facebook wall, but since I don’t use Facebook (except now, for playing games), and since Facebook now stacks the spam (so you see one event with a “see 40 other Frontierville notifications” link below it), and allows you to block notifications from a given app, I decided not to worry about it anymore. If people who don’t game on Facebook unfriended me, I probably wouldn’t even notice.

Swept up in the moment, I tried a bunch of other games but only two sorta stuck: My Empire (which reminds me a tiny bit of the old Ceasar games, if Ceasar had no military component and was just city building) and My Tribes, which is a Facebook-ized version of the Virtual Villagers casual game. Neither of these really grabbed me powerfully yet but we’ll see.

I must be mellowing in my old age or something. Playing Facebook games. What’s next? Sunday afternoons at the Bingo parlor? I even *almost* spent money on Frontierville, too! There’s an item you can buy that increases the amount of Energy you can store up. It would’ve cost me $5.00 to buy enough “Horseshoes” to buy it. I came damned close…

Anyone else have a good Facebook game to recommend? Something that feels like a real game? I prefer some kind of map/gameboard… stuff like Mafia Wars or Castle Age that are more or less text-based don’t really grab me. And I don’t want anything that I have to log into every 2 hours. Any suggestions?

So I’ve been playing Deathspank, the hack & slash rpg-lite game from Ron Gilbert and Hothead Games. You can find it on PSN or XBLA for $15, or whatever arcane equivalent that is in Microsoft Points.

It plays basically like a Diablo or Torchlight, though it’s stripped down somewhat. Still, I’m really enjoying it but there’re reviews all over the place. So I’m not going to review it but I do want to tell you a story.

The other night I was on a quest to rescue a lost orphan. I have a special orphan sack in my inventory so I can carry lots of orphans, you see. I’ve heard one of these little tykes is in the Demon Mine. So off I go. The fighting is challenging but not impossibly so. I’m level 12 and the demons are 12-14. I can do this thing. I follow the signs to the Orphan Storage Area and finally I come face to face with the Demon Nanny, who is responsible for taking care of the captured orphans.

And I find that this Demon Nanny is a lot tougher than her Demon colleagues. I die. And die again. And again. And finally decide that I’ve bit off more than I can chew and that it’s time to head back above ground to take on easier tasks until I level up a bit. But it’s nearly midnight so I save my game and quit for the night.

So tonight I fire up Deathspank again and start making my way out of the Demon Mines. But all the baddies I killed on the way in have respawned. No worries, I killed them once, I can kill them again, and I need the exp. Then I run out of food. Uh-oh. As far as I can see, in Deathspank you don’t regain health automagically (if you do, it’s very, very slowly). You need to eat or drink potions to heal. Eating takes time and combat ‘breaks’ the process, and potions are instant regens. When you die, your drop a bunch of coins and respawn with about 1/3rd health at the Outhouse you most recently passed by.

So I was trapped. A horde of demons between myself and the exit, and me with no way to heal myself. The only thing I could do was whittle away at the baddies: kill one or two, die, respawn, kill another couple, respawn. Sometimes I wouldn’t even kill a single demon. Other times I’d get through three of four. I did find a couple of mushrooms (food items) in my pack which I used very judiciously.

It was *awesome* to be stuck in this position. It took me back to my days of playing Diablo when death meant dropping all your gear on your corpse and hoping you had backup stuff in town. Sometimes you’d died a second time and lose even more gear. Sometimes you’d start doing naked corpse runs… run through the monsters frantically clicking on gear and picking up a few bits before you died (you’d drop equipped gear but not stuff in your backpack, and clicking on fallen gear put it in your backpack). We’d curse up a storm in these situations and wind up playing much too late into the night and when finally we had all our stuff back it was *so* satisfying.

Kill-die-respawn. Kill-die-respawn. Slowly, painfully, I made it through the dungeon and finally saw the light of day once again. Deathspank was saved! He immediately ran back to town to gorge on pizza and fries.

It was the most fun I’ve had gaming in quite a while. And I’m sure most of today’s gamers, in that situation, would be complaining about how the game was broken, or too grindy, or something.

So here’s a salute to Ron Gilbert and Hothead Games for building something that can tickle the fancy of us old-timers who remember when games sometimes stacked the odds against you. Sometimes its good to be a punching bag.