It’s been posted everywhere else but just for the sake of completeness I may as well say it too.
Microsoft has made official the price drop on the 20 gig XBox 360, which will sell for $299 while supplies last. A new, 60 gig SKU will hit store shelves in August, going for $349. From what I’m reading its identical to the 20 gig except for, y’know, 40 more gigs. This means the Elite remains the only 360 with an HDMI port.
Voodoo Extreme has a pretty convincing post up saying that [Flagship Studios’ Closure Confirmed, All Staff Fired, All I.P. Lost] Flagship Studios is dead. Nothing official yet, but apparently (now-former) Flagship employees are updating their Linked-In accounts to indicate the end of their employment (fodder for another post, that).
And I’m going to go against the grain and say its a damned shame. Yes, Hellgate: London shipped half-broken and never seems to have really become what it could have become (I say that as a lifetime subscriber). It certainly got better than it was at launch, but overcoming so much bad will is nigh on impossible.
But I grieve for Mythos (and, of course, for the employees). It was a darned fun game, and I was really surprised they held it in beta for so long. Hindsight is always 20-20, but I wonder if things might have turned out differently if they’d launched the game rather then starting the ‘overworld’ retrofit. It was a fine “Diablo-clone” with its instanced combat fields and massively MP towns and I think it could’ve generated some revenue.
Now (according to the Voodoo Extreme article) Korean developer HanbitSoft owns the rights to the game. Maybe they’ll save it, but color me skeptical that they’ll do so in any kind of way the really resonates with Western audiences. I’d love to be proven wrong.
A sad day for both gamers and Flagship employees. It’s easy to hate on the company for Hellgate, but if you never got a chance to try Mythos, trust me. You’ve just missed out on a fun hack & slash RPG.
The other day I bought Square-Enix’s Song Summoner: The Unsung Heroes, for the iPod (not the Touch or iPhone, the standard iPod). Mostly I was curious about how it would play. If you’re curious too, this post is for you.
Note this is NOT a review in any way, shape or form. I’ve only put 10-15 minutes into the game. This post is just about how to use the iPod input buttons to control a grid-based, turn-based, strategyRPG game.
Basically, everything boils down to spinning the outer wheel and pressing the center select button.
So to move a character into position and attack:
It all works pretty well aside from the actual picking a square to move to, which is a wee bit cumbersome. I’m not sure how they could’ve done it better, though.
I have fat thumbs and constantly move that outer wheel 1 ‘click’ when I hit the center button. I have this problem when selecting music, and have it when playing this game, so I get frustrated pretty quickly at the moment. Maybe with practice I’ll get better at it.
The premise is kind of fun. You create generate troops based on songs on your iPod through some mysterious algorithm (like the old Monster Rancher games that generated a creature based on a cd). As long as these troops are in your active party, they gain experience whenever you play the song they’re based on.
Unfortunately I almost never use my iPod to listen to music. I use it for podcasts mostly, and you can’t generate a troop from a podcast.
I personally don’t see myself playing this one much, but from a ‘gee whiz’ point of view, I find it pretty impressive that Square Enix could cram this much game into an iPod.
I’d love to hear from someone who both listens to a lot of music on their iPod, and who is playing this game seriously. I’d love to know how the gameplay holds up over time.
Last night I finally canceled my Age of Conan subscription. I’ve been on the verge of doing so since mid-June, but I kept waiting, hoping something would change. And the only thing that really changed was I found myself playing for shorter and less-frequent sessions. A pattern became evident. I’d boot the game, have fun for a while, then get bored and quit to go do something else. And as the days past, that “a while” period grew smaller and smaller.
I finally realized what was missing from my enjoyment of Age of Conan: a sense of progress. The gear my character was wearing looked pretty much the same at level 30 as it did at level 5. The stats on that gear were essentially meaningless (+0.2 defense, woot!). So getting better gear didn’t make any difference to either immersion (the visuals) or gameplay (the stats).
At level 1 I was fighting men and beasts such as crocodiles, which at the time seemed like a great idea. Too many MMOs have you fighting small snakes and insects at low levels. But at level 30, I was still fighting men and crocodiles (and bears and wolves) with very few ‘monstrous’ foes. Sure they were higher level, but so was I, so the fights felt about the same.
From level 1-20 I fought in jungles, on desert islands and in ancient crypts. Since then I’ve fought in…jungles and ancient crypts. While there are 3 zones to hit after you leave Tortage, they don’t really feel all that much different.
It boils down to the fact that whether I played a character that was level 32 (the max I got to, and to be fair that isn’t even half-way to cap, maybe things get better if you push past these doldrums) and then switched to a character that was level 12, the game didn’t really feel any different. So what’s the point of playing an rpg with progression levels if the levels all feel the same?
What’s worse, there are no ‘extras’ to help prop up the gameplay. I do enjoy crafting in these games, but here you have to be level 20 to start harvesting, level 40 to start crafting, and level 50 to harvest tier 2 materials. So you spend 20 levels gathering ore and wood to either donate to your guild (which will quickly bypass the need for low-tier materials) or try to sell them on the broker. Yawn.
There are guild cities, but no personal housing. The guild buildings just kind of sit there. Eventually they’re supposed to give buffs but those aren’t in the game yet. I guess right now they’re just good for bragging rights. There are no ‘hobby’ activities like fishing, or gambling mini-games, or any of the other little ‘time-waster’ things to do that make a world feel more real.
Last item is a personal one, and not a problem with the game per se. Apparently the crux of the high-end game play is guild vs guild PVP, besieging player-built battle keeps and so forth. Which sounds fun, but which really require a fairly substantial guild. I’m generally the kind of MMO player that joins a small, intimate guild, or no guild at all. This time I joined a huge guild (400 characters, I think at one point 135 or so players). This meant we got to build a guild city really quickly and all that but…I never really got to know anyone in it. It was such a large guild that the chat channel might as well have been a public channel. My contributions to the guild city consisted of handing over materials and gold to someone who handed them up the chain to someone who did the actual building. Essentially I was just a cog in the wheel. And ya know, I’m a cog in the wheel in the real world. When I’m playing a game I want to matter.
And yet a small guild won’t have the resources to do all the fun PVP stuff that is supposed to exist in the end game. This is a design decision on the part of Funcom and it isn’t wrong, its just wrong for me. I know other folk that love being part of something huge like this.
So, farewell Age of Conan. I’ll probably come back to visit now and then, because I had a blast for the first few weeks. I’m sure I’ll have a blast for another few weeks after I give the game 6 months to ‘rest’ and the combat stops feeling so familiar.
The guild stuff, though…now I’m worried about Warhammer Online, which seems to be equally large-guild oriented. Hmmm….
For quite some time we’ve heard rumors that Google was working on some kind of virtual world project.
Today, they launched Lively (I’m still trying to figure out if there’s any relation between this project and Sun’s Lively Kernel project, but I think not), a web-based virtual world product that, frankly, I’m still trying to figure out.
Of course they didn’t stop me from creating a Room. It’s quite fancy, don’t you think? /sarcasm
[EDIT: Well it seems like you can’t create new content at this point, just drag and drop stuff others have made. Which makes the whole exercise a lot less interesting to me at this point.]
Presumably, you’ll need to install Lively before you can see anything.
The strange and fascinating case of Hans Reiser continues, though it seems things are drawing to a close. He’d been convicted of murdering his estranged wife, Nina, but maintained that he was innocent and had nothing to do with her appearance. Then, two days before sentencing, he led authorities to a body (not yet confirmed to be her) buried in a shallow grave a mile from where Nina was last seen. Details: Convicted husband leads authorities to body
I’m not sure why this case has grabbed my attention. It’s a sad fact that people are murdered all the time. I guess it’s because Reiser is such a geek. I have this weird mental image of us geeks as basically good and non-violent people for some reason. Totally naive of me, of course.
Anyway if you haven’t heard about the case, Wired has a lengthy and pretty interesting story on it from a while back. It was written before the trial and, as I remember it, paints Reiser in a somewhat sympathetic light while still remaining objective. I’ll admit its been a while since I read it though.
Turbine Entertainment is looking for new headquarters in the Boston area (they’re currently south of Boston in Westwood, MA) and is adding staff. Among the jobs listed:
To the best of my knowledge, they don’t have any ‘officially announced’ console games at this point. Maybe we’ll hear something at E3?
In an attempt to get folks to return to their two Everquest games, Sony has re-enabled all old accounts for six weeks or so, ending at the end of July. I’ve played Everquest 2 on and off since it launched in the fall of 2004 (I think?) but irregularly enough that my highest level character is still in his 30’s (cap is currently at 80). But I figured I’d give it another go. Angela is a long time fan of the game and is always trying to get me to come back anyway, so why not do it while the free-clock is running.
So I’ve been following my usual lackadaisical pattern of puttering around and not really accomplishing much up until last night. That’s when Angela and a couple of old friends who I’ve been gaming on and off with since Ultima Online broke out their low-level alts and dragged me off on an adventure. And what fun we had!! I was rusty as hell and got us killed more times that I’d care to recount, but the gang was ever-patient and gave me tips as we went along and I slowly got the hang of things. We started at, oh, 7:30 pm or so, and it was 11:30 before the demands of my belly (we still hadn’t had dinner!) and the need for serious equipment repairs, forced us to retire for the night.
I’m generally awfully antisocial in MMOs, oddly enough. I have a weird combination of personality traits, shyness and impatience, that make it really difficult to do well in any kind of a group. But last night really reminded me of how great these games can be when you’re with friends. I haven’t had so much fun since my days with the Blood Ravens of Kirin Tor in WOW.
I might just have to extend my Everquest 2 sub past the free time period now!
So we got a couple of copies of the retail version of Dungeon Runners today. One of the perks of the retail version (you can download and play the game for free if you wish) is that you get 6 months of “Premium” gameplay, and a Bling Gnome. Price is $20, and Premium access is generally $5/month, so its a good deal.
I’d played Dungeon Runners before and liked it well enough. It’s a semi-MMO. Towns are communal but dungeons hold only your party. It’s very hack and slashy, with tons of loot, each bit of which is rife with prefixes and suffixes. The whole tone is extremely tongue-in-cheek. Since I last played, the humor has gotten even more sophomoric, with fart jokes all over the place.
As to the Bling Gnome… well, he’s this nasty little creature that follows you around and picks up all the piles of gold coins that drop from creatures, which is pretty convenient and streamlines gameplay a good bit. He also has an ‘active skill’ that will cause him to pick up trash loot, eat it, and excrete gold coins, which he’ll then pick up for you. Every time he does this, there’s a chance he’ll excrete a nice loot item. The game play mechanic here is great, but honestly his little animation, complete with clouds of noxious green vapor, gets old pretty quickly. Since you target mobs by clicking on them, the gnome can get in the way, too.
I wouldn’t say the Bling Gnome is worth running out and buying the game for, but if you download the free client and like it, it’s very much worth the $20 for full access to the game (so called “Rainbow” items…the best loot, is only usable by paid accounts) for six months, and the Gnome is a decent convenience feature once you learn to ignore his antics.