When I saw the first episode of The Guild I was tickled but wary… it was very, very funny and I’m scared to say I could relate to it almost too well. But was it a flash in the pan? Well Episode 2 is out, and it’s just as funny.
You can go to YouTube to watch them but I’m going to tempt you here and now…
Episode 1
Episode 2
I picked up Enchanted Arms for the XBox 360 today. Put about an hour into it. What follows are my initial ‘gut level’ reactions. Warning: some spoilers for the very early parts of the game:
OK here’s my 1 Hour Review of Enchanted Arms.
First, let’s get this out of the way. You start with 3 classmates. Atsuma is the protagonist, and he’s kind of a slacker type. Toya is the smart, suave one. And Makota is the fretful one. Makota is also gay and totally in love with Toya. It isn’t clear if Toya returns the feeling yet. With the English voices on, I found Makota *extremely* annoying. He has a really over-blown ‘queen’ accent, if you know what I mean. Like a sleazy stand-up comic doing a gay guy. I quickly switched to the Japanese voices (with English subtitles) and find them much better. The English Atsuma played the character pretty ‘serious’, and the Japanese Atsuma is pretty over-the-top and crazy. Odd that I can say that, not knowing a word of Japanese, but you really pick up on it.
The game has a pretty slow start. If you talk to everyone, and you enjoy anime, then you’ll have fun. If you just do what you need to do, it’ll just seem weird. You start in class. Then you have to go to the cafeteria. Then you have to buy your lunch. Then you have to go feed your dog. Then you need to get out of the school. Dull. But add talking to people and you’ll meet the diet girl who is in despair over whether she should buy the cheap fattening lunch, or the expensive healthy lunch, given her low funds. You’ll meet girls in love with Toya and get to hear Makota try to defend his turf. You’ll meet a club (The Anti-Atsuma Alliance, or 3A’s) devoted to keeping tabs on Atsuma to protect the rest of the school from his slackerly ways, and so forth. I found this all amusing, and since I was reading the english subtitles I could click through it all really fast.
Continue reading “Enchanted Arms 1 Hour Review”
There’s a post over at Terra Nova entitled WoW-nnui where the author discusses his lack of interest in World Of Warcraft after, presumably, playing for quite some time.
His main point, admittedly, is to ask what happens to the MMO market as more and more of the 6 million plus WoW players hit this point. But once again, people are treating WoW as some new thing. What happened to the DAOC players when they got bored? What happened to the Everquest players? This isn’t a new phenomenon, after all. Some players will move to a new game, some will realize that their time is better spent in the real world. Same as it ever was.
Don’t get me wrong, I love WoW. But I just get tired of people acting as though it was the first MMO. The scale is different, to be sure. But we’ve been down this road before.
Warrior Woman is an interesting read over at Primotech. A young gamer decided to introduce his 53 year old mom to his XBox 360 to try and test Peter Moore’s assertion that “even your mom will be playing games here.”
What really makes the article is that the test subject is an articulate and thoughtful woman, and that she was willing to take the topic seriously. She didn’t play these games for half an hour…she spent a few weeks playing them. Anyway, well worth a read.
I just finished listening to the podcast version of Cory Doctorow’s Anda’s Game (and yes, its a deliberate play on Ender’s Game). You can get it at Doctorow’s site or as part of Voices: New Media Fiction at Podiobooks.com.
I highly recommend the story, and particularly to gamers. Its all about a MMORPG and a young girl’s adventures in it. She’s a good player…good enough that there are people willing to pay her real cash to do in-game missions. The intersection of real-world and in-game economies is a fascinating topic to me, and that’s all I’m going to say about the plot, because I don’t want to spoil anything.
Its read by Alice Taylor who is charmingly real. She stumbles here and there, not enough to be distracting but enough that it feels like honest story-telling.
If audiobooks aren’t your thing, the story is also in text form at Salon.
If you’ve ever been a MMO player, watch this.
If you haven’t played you definitely won’t get it. But I can’t imagine what went through this person’s mind as he did this, and then later when the reality of what he did struck home.
I’m back to playing World of Warcraft again, and as usual I’m totally caught up in this world that Blizzard has created. They’ve crafted such a rich history, but we only get glimpses of it. I have to cop to buying the paper & pencil RPG sourcebooks just to get more backstory. Yup, I’m a serious geek.
Which brings us to Cycle of Hatred by Keith R.A. DeCandido. Here is a novel set in the Warcraft world, and specifically it takes place between the end of The Frozen Throne (the last Warcraft strategy game) and the start of World of Warcraft (the MMRPG). Somewhere during that time the alliance between humans and orcs broke down, and I hoped from the title that maybe this book would describe what happened.
This isn’t my first Warcraft novel. I’ve read three others, and they varied between pretty good, and pretty bad. So my expectations were pretty low. And still I was disappointed. The book is totally without substance. What scraps of plot it has are routine, the characters are all cardboard cutouts and the only reason the world feels the least bit alive is through the Warcraft tie-in. It does nothing to add to the mythos of the world, or fill in any gaps in the history that Blizzard has crafted. The only thing this book has going for it is mention of places and people that Warcraft players “know” via the games.
Avoid at all costs.
Three Men and a Graphics Engine-Q&A with Project Offset Co-Founder/Artist Travis Stringer
This is an interesting project and a good interview. I hope these guys find a publisher because I really want to play this game. 🙂
Nintendogs Teach Us New Tricks
I have a Nintendog. This article is spot on.
This is just a temporary post. I’m in the midst of compiling a list of sites that I’d like to visit from my PSP…