I love Guitar Hero - really the only console game that can drag me away from my Oblivion/MMO-of-the-day PC. The game also teaches two essential lessons that translate directly into real musical performance - KEEP THE TEMPO and GET OVER YOUR MISTAKES. Plus, it's just plain fun.
I always enjoy Zonk's games posts. Games and gaming are a passion for so many of us.
The article was well-written and fun to read. I've never played the game, nor do I own a Nintendo DS, but I enjoy reading creative stories about people who enjoy playing a game.
Most pieces on games spend half their time telling you why it rots, or in the case of MMOs, that's all they tell you. This article told of enjoyment playing a game, and what the game might say about its players.
That is so wrong. Every piece of code I have ever written is obsolete; gone. My skills formed writing DOS programs, writing FlexO/S, GEM drivers, all that stuff at Digital Research, everything I did at Symantec, everything I did contracting at Apple, are all gone.
And every one of those projects was closed. So people can't even resurrect them for their own use, giving me some salable expertise, instead of a long list of wasted development effort.
I might as well have spent twenty years digging holes and filling them up again.
Open the software. Open it all. The ONLY code that survives from my entire career as a software engineer? A battleship game that I think ships with OpenBSD now, and a 1986 Obfuscated 'C' contest winner. Both open source.
If you paid, say, $4.95/month, but all the songs were cheaper - perhaps between $0.25 and $0.75 - the low subscription fee would deter you from paying any other subscription fee, make you prefer to use their service, and the songs would be cheaper individually, while in most cases the company would make more money than by charging more for individual songs without any subscription fee.
The film, Advent Children, is really short. They introduce the characters, and then they resolve the storyline, and then it is over. There isn't much to the movie, and if you have played FFVII, nothing much is going to surprise you.
Tifa is the real star here. Her battle in the garden is simply amazing - and the cell phone ringtone afterward is a real laugh-out-loud moment.
And I did like how they used Materia.
It's a movie for fans. I can't imagine how they could ever get a real theatrical release from it; there's not enough there for non-fans.
One is, stop talking after a couple of minutes, no matter what.
Second is, try to remember what it is the person wanted to know before I started talking to them about whatever I was thinking about when they started talking.
That's a tough one for me. I have to go back and try to remember why they are there. I need a lot more time to shift gears than people are generally willing to allow.
In the link to the discussion of the original law, it explains that game systems that are powered by a removable DC power supply were not covered under the law, though the power supply itself was.
I'm on Kirin Tor; I live in California; and I work. I don't have a huge amount of time to play each night. I am in the top Horde guild on the server, and most of the time, the three hour time difference means I miss the weekday raids. It's really frustrating.
Blizzard didn't tell me, when I bought the game in October and created my first character, that there were "time zone" servers. EQ didn't have 'em.
Turns out all the PST RP servers are totally full and lag cities. I went to some of their server forums and asked how things were with the server, and to a one, they complained about horrible lag, bad queues, and horrible BG disconnections.
I haven't played WoW in weeks now. Very little to do at 60 I haven't done a hundred times over anyway.
I see moral Republican fundamentalists on television urging us to assassinate political figures and claiming God struck down a major world figure because he was trying to work toward peace with a long-time enemy.
I was in WoW closed beta, and was so bored by that game, in beta, that I went with EQ2 at release. I loved it, but eventually finding groups or stable guilds became too tedious and I eventually returned to EQ1.
Now, a year later, I have done WoW retail - 0-60 in three months and now what? Total boredom with running the same few instances night after night. And so a few weeks ago, I returned to EQ2.
And I am LOVING the game as it is now. I'm having a blast. I started over so I could get used to the changes a little at a time, and also to be a more useful class than a troubador (the "no, no, please don't group me" class when I left originally).
The game plays wonderfully. I am having fun just making stuff for my characters - necessary, since I can't afford anything on the brokers - and playing the game casually. Fun evaporates with the pressures of a raiding guild. It just seems more a world and more open to possibilities than WoW.
Even given EQ2s improvements, I still think Vanguard will decimate both this game and World of Warcraft. So many people in WoW are bored and looking for a challenge. It was a few people in my WoW guild deciding to check out EQ2 that led to my own return.
They have EQ1 and EQ2 for adult players, MXO for the Matrix fan, and SW:G for the people who loved community and crafting.
What did they have for the kids? Nothing! So SW:G and its 'sandbox' became SWG:G-NGE, perfect for porting to Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 and Nintendo Revolution, and the kids could be Luke or Leia or Obiwan or whatever.
The article points out that, in licensed properties, the player can at best only be a bit player in the story of the world, since whenever they and a licensed character are in the same spot, it's not hard to win at "pick the spear carrier". So why not make a game where you play Luke, Vader or whatever, just with a different name, and let the kids act out their fantasies.
Since I am blissfully unaware of anything SOE plans, I fully expect a console-based version of SW:G when PS3 launches.
I have found a decent way to avoid getting caught up in MMO addiction is to play them casually. Play for a month or two, then move on. Sure, you'll never be at the top of the game, but you'll never have to choose between real life and logging in to raid, either.
I am enjoying MMOs a lot more since I started going between WoW, EQ1 and EQ2 based on what I feel like playing. If my current EQ2 character has taken a couple of months to get to level 13, so what? I have fun every time I log on.
Control MMOs, and you'll find they are the most enjoyable kind of games made. Let them control you, and you'll end up posting bitter farewell messages on the community message boards and calling the last six months of your life a total waste.
A farmer takes up the sword and shield, gathers companions and heads off to defeat ultimate evil? What's NOT to like!?
This movie has SO MUCH POTENTIAL!
WATCH as our hero gets STUCK BEHIND A ROCK!
THRILL as the adventurers are forced to walk an extra mile BECAUSE THEY CAN'T CLIMB A ONE FOOT RISE!
SCHEME with our hero after he dismisses a much-loved friend because he just met someone with BETTER STATS!
GASP as the group spends tense hours REARRANGING THE MULE'S PACKS!
And as a special bonuses, preview audiences will get a mannequin that watches the movie for you while you GO DO SOMETHING ELSE! (DS1 pretty much played itself...)
Games on the Cable Model
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MMOGs Branch Out
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· Score: 3, Insightful
EverQuest is still chugging along seven years after launch, still making money, still releasing expansions and enhancing the game. In what universe could you ever call SOE and by extension, EQ a failure. It's been an unqualified success.
In six more years, then you can compare WoW and EQ.
I play WoW. I sit in long queues every night. I get random disconnects. Farmers own places I would like to solo (they even try to sell people stuff in BGs). Some things are severely broken. The endgame is deathly dull and repetitive.
It's hardly the end-all, be-all of games.
I agree with you, though... the subscription model still seems like a wild success. But wouldn't it be even nicer if one subscription let you play any of a dozen games? And by that I mean real games, not a big game and ten you would never ever play.
Sort of like the cable service. 500 games. One fee.
New type of player is going to ruin their world
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MMOGs Branch Out
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· Score: 1
If you pay a monthly fee, you will feel more obligated to pay. So you will put more time into advancing your character. You don't want to think all your time spent advancing your character is all for nothing, so you play for another month, and another month...
Playing for free, well, you can play an hour, set it aside for a month, then play for a night or two. This is not building the sort of brand loyalty that is going to make Blizzard or Sony rich. And without those big bucks coming in, they won't be spending big bucks making new features or opening new servers. Bucks in, bucks out.
So they try to get you hooked and keep you hooked.
This isn't going to work for long, because there is a middle course. There are those of us who love MMOs, but no longer have much loyalty. We have characters in LOTS of games. Sure, I play WoW now, but I could always pick FFXI up again, or CoH, or SWG (I guess), or dive back into EQ, or just give them all up and start playing Vanguard.
Loyalty works when you don't have many choices. But now, there are lots of choices, and more every month. Soon, people will be quitting games on a whim, knowing that the publishers of those games will keep those servers chugging away and their characters saved in case they someday return.
Actually, bards and troubadours could be either faction, as could wardens and furies. I was a Freeport-aligned inquisitor and troubadour (both halflings; in the end I betrayed Antonica three times to play evil halflings! (the last was a defiler)).
All classes in EQ2 currently belong to one of four archetypes - fighter, priest, scout or mage. These branch out at level 10 to classes (like, cleric, druid and shaman for priests), and again at 20 (inquisitor, templar, warden, fury, defiler and mystic as the final subclasses for the priest archetype). At every step, each is supposed to be the equal at their primary role as anyone else (healing in this case).
In actuality... There are clear choices as to which is best. Clerics have the best direct heals and have powerful single target and group reactive heals, so they are still the best healers by far. Templars have better heals than Inquisitors, and Inquisitors have better debuffs - but in EQ2, it is the rare fight that is hard enough to need Inq. debuffs and also not require that cleric to spend their time healing. And of course, who wants debuff aggro.
One thing that is notable about the EQ2 healers is that they tend to work well together; a druid and a cleric in the same group is worth far more than two clerics. I believe it is this meshing of roles that Sigil is attempting with Vanguard.
The article made an excellent point about tanks. In EQ2, if you wanted to be a main tank, you were a Guardian. The Players That Be decided that damage mitigation and superior taunting ability were all that mattered with fighters, and so that's what they chose (and too bad for all the monks, berserkers and knights...)
Vanguard will have to find ways of making the classes mesh. A knight class could so cripple a monster that its melee damage would be decreased as much as a pure fighter's mitigation provided. Who knows....
When I was playing EQ2, everyone was acutely aware where their class stood in the desirability list. As an inquisitor, I was right after templars, but ahead of druids. And as my troubadour, I was behind all the other scout classes once people figured out how little difference bard songs really made in a battle.
It's worth pointing out that EQ2 is revamping the whole archetype/class/subclass thing.
44 years old. Once was making 100K consulting. Now I am making $15/hr programming in PHP and Javascript, maintaining computers, doing backups and data entry as half of this company's IT department. I can't afford to live where I live with my son in Southern California.
It's all downhill from here. Get out of programming/IT while you can. Find something - ANYTHING - else to do. Seriously. Programmers with whom I worked are in real estate, marketing, or writing brain-dead Visual BASIC programs. I don't know any of them, over 40 all, who are still able to make a living programming cutting-edge stuff.
This isn't an interesting question. This perpetuates stereotypes. I know several normal, married couples who play MMORPGs, sometimes with their kids. My daughter ended up marrying someone she met on EverQuest.
Normal people play MMORPGs. It is... a normal thing to do, these days.
Doing anything to obsession, whether it is MMORPGs, watching TV, partying, or even working, is probably unhealthy. But maybe it's just a normal thing people do. I don't see any difference in relaxing after a long day of work by playing a MMORPG, than vegging in front of the tube. Well, except that MMORPGs are social activities you don't have to dress up for.
Slashdot Mirror
I love Guitar Hero - really the only console game that can drag me away from my Oblivion/MMO-of-the-day PC. The game also teaches two essential lessons that translate directly into real musical performance - KEEP THE TEMPO and GET OVER YOUR MISTAKES. Plus, it's just plain fun.
I always enjoy Zonk's games posts. Games and gaming are a passion for so many of us.
The article was well-written and fun to read. I've never played the game, nor do I own a Nintendo DS, but I enjoy reading creative stories about people who enjoy playing a game.
Most pieces on games spend half their time telling you why it rots, or in the case of MMOs, that's all they tell you. This article told of enjoyment playing a game, and what the game might say about its players.
Thumbs Up from me!
That is so wrong. Every piece of code I have ever written is obsolete; gone. My skills formed writing DOS programs, writing FlexO/S, GEM drivers, all that stuff at Digital Research, everything I did at Symantec, everything I did contracting at Apple, are all gone.
And every one of those projects was closed. So people can't even resurrect them for their own use, giving me some salable expertise, instead of a long list of wasted development effort.
I might as well have spent twenty years digging holes and filling them up again.
Open the software. Open it all. The ONLY code that survives from my entire career as a software engineer? A battleship game that I think ships with OpenBSD now, and a 1986 Obfuscated 'C' contest winner. Both open source.
Wish everything I had written was.
Could be worse. On Digg, the title would be "All Humans Will Walk With Bionic Legs By 2007!!!!"
If you paid, say, $4.95/month, but all the songs were cheaper - perhaps between $0.25 and $0.75 - the low subscription fee would deter you from paying any other subscription fee, make you prefer to use their service, and the songs would be cheaper individually, while in most cases the company would make more money than by charging more for individual songs without any subscription fee.
The Japanese DVD has English subs. They're okay.
The film, Advent Children, is really short. They introduce the characters, and then they resolve the storyline, and then it is over. There isn't much to the movie, and if you have played FFVII, nothing much is going to surprise you.
Tifa is the real star here. Her battle in the garden is simply amazing - and the cell phone ringtone afterward is a real laugh-out-loud moment.
And I did like how they used Materia.
It's a movie for fans. I can't imagine how they could ever get a real theatrical release from it; there's not enough there for non-fans.
I have two things I do:
One is, stop talking after a couple of minutes, no matter what.
Second is, try to remember what it is the person wanted to know before I started talking to them about whatever I was thinking about when they started talking.
That's a tough one for me. I have to go back and try to remember why they are there. I need a lot more time to shift gears than people are generally willing to allow.
In the link to the discussion of the original law, it explains that game systems that are powered by a removable DC power supply were not covered under the law, though the power supply itself was.
And who says there isn't any future in the milk-moving-by-hand industry...
I'm on Kirin Tor; I live in California; and I work. I don't have a huge amount of time to play each night. I am in the top Horde guild on the server, and most of the time, the three hour time difference means I miss the weekday raids. It's really frustrating.
Blizzard didn't tell me, when I bought the game in October and created my first character, that there were "time zone" servers. EQ didn't have 'em.
Turns out all the PST RP servers are totally full and lag cities. I went to some of their server forums and asked how things were with the server, and to a one, they complained about horrible lag, bad queues, and horrible BG disconnections.
I haven't played WoW in weeks now. Very little to do at 60 I haven't done a hundred times over anyway.
He didn't have a preceding '$' before the third use of the '$that' variable.
Yeah, I caught it, too. The guy must be mortified. Where was the QA?
Filthy open-source automated news article summaries.
And a player named Yams added, "Yams yams yams yams yams yams yams yams".
May I see the study that shows this?
I see moral Republican fundamentalists on television urging us to assassinate political figures and claiming God struck down a major world figure because he was trying to work toward peace with a long-time enemy.
Now, a year later, I have done WoW retail - 0-60 in three months and now what? Total boredom with running the same few instances night after night. And so a few weeks ago, I returned to EQ2.
And I am LOVING the game as it is now. I'm having a blast. I started over so I could get used to the changes a little at a time, and also to be a more useful class than a troubador (the "no, no, please don't group me" class when I left originally).
The game plays wonderfully. I am having fun just making stuff for my characters - necessary, since I can't afford anything on the brokers - and playing the game casually. Fun evaporates with the pressures of a raiding guild. It just seems more a world and more open to possibilities than WoW.
Even given EQ2s improvements, I still think Vanguard will decimate both this game and World of Warcraft. So many people in WoW are bored and looking for a challenge. It was a few people in my WoW guild deciding to check out EQ2 that led to my own return.
I have some pictures from the recent Fanguard (Vanguard Fan Fair). It looks really nice.
They have EQ1 and EQ2 for adult players, MXO for the Matrix fan, and SW:G for the people who loved community and crafting.
What did they have for the kids? Nothing! So SW:G and its 'sandbox' became SWG:G-NGE, perfect for porting to Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 and Nintendo Revolution, and the kids could be Luke or Leia or Obiwan or whatever.
The article points out that, in licensed properties, the player can at best only be a bit player in the story of the world, since whenever they and a licensed character are in the same spot, it's not hard to win at "pick the spear carrier". So why not make a game where you play Luke, Vader or whatever, just with a different name, and let the kids act out their fantasies.
Since I am blissfully unaware of anything SOE plans, I fully expect a console-based version of SW:G when PS3 launches.
I have found a decent way to avoid getting caught up in MMO addiction is to play them casually. Play for a month or two, then move on. Sure, you'll never be at the top of the game, but you'll never have to choose between real life and logging in to raid, either.
I am enjoying MMOs a lot more since I started going between WoW, EQ1 and EQ2 based on what I feel like playing. If my current EQ2 character has taken a couple of months to get to level 13, so what? I have fun every time I log on.
Control MMOs, and you'll find they are the most enjoyable kind of games made. Let them control you, and you'll end up posting bitter farewell messages on the community message boards and calling the last six months of your life a total waste.
Yuo just described Eve Online...
A farmer takes up the sword and shield, gathers companions and heads off to defeat ultimate evil? What's NOT to like!?
This movie has SO MUCH POTENTIAL!
WATCH as our hero gets STUCK BEHIND A ROCK!
THRILL as the adventurers are forced to walk an extra mile BECAUSE THEY CAN'T CLIMB A ONE FOOT RISE!
SCHEME with our hero after he dismisses a much-loved friend because he just met someone with BETTER STATS!
GASP as the group spends tense hours REARRANGING THE MULE'S PACKS!
And as a special bonuses, preview audiences will get a mannequin that watches the movie for you while you GO DO SOMETHING ELSE! (DS1 pretty much played itself...)
EverQuest is still chugging along seven years after launch, still making money, still releasing expansions and enhancing the game. In what universe could you ever call SOE and by extension, EQ a failure. It's been an unqualified success.
In six more years, then you can compare WoW and EQ.
I play WoW. I sit in long queues every night. I get random disconnects. Farmers own places I would like to solo (they even try to sell people stuff in BGs). Some things are severely broken. The endgame is deathly dull and repetitive.
It's hardly the end-all, be-all of games.
I agree with you, though... the subscription model still seems like a wild success. But wouldn't it be even nicer if one subscription let you play any of a dozen games? And by that I mean real games, not a big game and ten you would never ever play.
Sort of like the cable service. 500 games. One fee.
If you pay a monthly fee, you will feel more obligated to pay. So you will put more time into advancing your character. You don't want to think all your time spent advancing your character is all for nothing, so you play for another month, and another month...
Playing for free, well, you can play an hour, set it aside for a month, then play for a night or two. This is not building the sort of brand loyalty that is going to make Blizzard or Sony rich. And without those big bucks coming in, they won't be spending big bucks making new features or opening new servers. Bucks in, bucks out.
So they try to get you hooked and keep you hooked.
This isn't going to work for long, because there is a middle course. There are those of us who love MMOs, but no longer have much loyalty. We have characters in LOTS of games. Sure, I play WoW now, but I could always pick FFXI up again, or CoH, or SWG (I guess), or dive back into EQ, or just give them all up and start playing Vanguard.
Loyalty works when you don't have many choices. But now, there are lots of choices, and more every month. Soon, people will be quitting games on a whim, knowing that the publishers of those games will keep those servers chugging away and their characters saved in case they someday return.
And that's going to cost them money.
Actually, bards and troubadours could be either faction, as could wardens and furies. I was a Freeport-aligned inquisitor and troubadour (both halflings; in the end I betrayed Antonica three times to play evil halflings! (the last was a defiler)).
All classes in EQ2 currently belong to one of four archetypes - fighter, priest, scout or mage. These branch out at level 10 to classes (like, cleric, druid and shaman for priests), and again at 20 (inquisitor, templar, warden, fury, defiler and mystic as the final subclasses for the priest archetype). At every step, each is supposed to be the equal at their primary role as anyone else (healing in this case).
In actuality... There are clear choices as to which is best. Clerics have the best direct heals and have powerful single target and group reactive heals, so they are still the best healers by far. Templars have better heals than Inquisitors, and Inquisitors have better debuffs - but in EQ2, it is the rare fight that is hard enough to need Inq. debuffs and also not require that cleric to spend their time healing. And of course, who wants debuff aggro.
One thing that is notable about the EQ2 healers is that they tend to work well together; a druid and a cleric in the same group is worth far more than two clerics. I believe it is this meshing of roles that Sigil is attempting with Vanguard.
The article made an excellent point about tanks. In EQ2, if you wanted to be a main tank, you were a Guardian. The Players That Be decided that damage mitigation and superior taunting ability were all that mattered with fighters, and so that's what they chose (and too bad for all the monks, berserkers and knights...)
Vanguard will have to find ways of making the classes mesh. A knight class could so cripple a monster that its melee damage would be decreased as much as a pure fighter's mitigation provided. Who knows....
When I was playing EQ2, everyone was acutely aware where their class stood in the desirability list. As an inquisitor, I was right after templars, but ahead of druids. And as my troubadour, I was behind all the other scout classes once people figured out how little difference bard songs really made in a battle.
It's worth pointing out that EQ2 is revamping the whole archetype/class/subclass thing.
44 years old. Once was making 100K consulting. Now I am making $15/hr programming in PHP and Javascript, maintaining computers, doing backups and data entry as half of this company's IT department. I can't afford to live where I live with my son in Southern California.
It's all downhill from here. Get out of programming/IT while you can. Find something - ANYTHING - else to do. Seriously. Programmers with whom I worked are in real estate, marketing, or writing brain-dead Visual BASIC programs. I don't know any of them, over 40 all, who are still able to make a living programming cutting-edge stuff.
I hope to God you're older than me, then.
This isn't an interesting question. This perpetuates stereotypes. I know several normal, married couples who play MMORPGs, sometimes with their kids. My daughter ended up marrying someone she met on EverQuest.
Normal people play MMORPGs. It is... a normal thing to do, these days.
Doing anything to obsession, whether it is MMORPGs, watching TV, partying, or even working, is probably unhealthy. But maybe it's just a normal thing people do. I don't see any difference in relaxing after a long day of work by playing a MMORPG, than vegging in front of the tube. Well, except that MMORPGs are social activities you don't have to dress up for.