onlinegamers.org

So over on Corp I wrote a little bit about my current gaming interests. I figured I’d expound a bit more here, since it’s more of a personal nature.

I’m sick of fantasy games. Completely, totally and actually sick of them. I’ve played them to death. I’m a late bloomer, because I didn’t start on UO until T2A. I’ll admit it, I wasn’t around for the Dread Lord days. As much as I harp that I love open PvP, I didn’t start playing the model zone/open PvP game until the reds and notos were long gone. It didn’t keep me from loving duelling with my dexmonkey bard and his DP’d Kryss. I still had to keep magic-trapped bags to release paralyze and all the other trappings we’ve come to miss.

I always looked down on EQ as some sort of positive reinforcement/operant conditioning kind of deal. Then again, Curt Schilling loved EQ. He’s started his own company, for the love of Raph, and actually has a decent idea of what a lot of us are looking for:

Q-What game mechanic concept has really psyched you up in the past that you have yet to see in an MMORPG?

A-A true, immersive, incredibly well thought out and interactive story, that doesn’t feel like it’s being pushed on you. A story that doesn’t force you to do things that aren’t fun.

More power to Schill if he can pull it off. I’ll give that to him. He also comments that he’s the most hyped for Warhammer Online, so he’s clearly not on the same page as I am with regards to genre.

I spend more time playing my 360 and my PS2. I don’t know whether it’s that I’ve just outgrown MMOs or I just have a different focus right now. There’s some really great narrative that I’m dipping into with my consoles. Laugh if you will. I’m very into Gears of War, and I just happened to pick up the first God of War for PS2 and that’s got me pretty engaged. Who knows? Maybe my next game will be a console MMO. Bleh.

What-ho, ho-down? Been doing a lot of work lately. It doesn’t stop me from dreaming up gaming rigs for people that ask “What the heck should I buy if I don’t want to spend too much?”

It boils down to a list like this, and about $900.

The video card is bang-for-the-buck, RAM and hard drives don’t count for much anymore…the nice bit is the Core 2 Duo. Always go for the 1GHz front side bus, you know. Faster FSB the better.

So Lummo the Magnificent linked up this article that my old cohort Joe Blancato wrote for The Escapist.

It’s all about how CCP, magnificent overlords of Excel Online, not only had their own little GM Darwin problem, though to a slightly lesser degree. Only slightly, because it can’t be proved that there was anything more going on than in-game bonuses being given to his friends and cohorts.

The problem being that apparently the person responsible for everything, t20, hasn’t been fired. He actually posted his first and only dev blog, helpfully titled On Recent Allegations. In it, he admits that the only allegation that is true is that he handed over original blueprints to the Flameburst Precision Light Missile, the Phalanx Rage Rocket, the Havoc Fury Heavy Missile, the Bloodclaw Fury Light Missile and blueprints for what appear to be two ship chassis, the Spike L and the Sabre.
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That figures. I come back from my honeymoon and I find that I’ve been meme-tagged.

Something about “he needs to update this thing more.” Funny how it works. So…five things that most people don’t know about me:
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My older, slightly hairier clone Raph Koster put up his 10 Commandments of Online Worlds. Number 6 gets me, because he doesn’t want PvP in his game worlds. World games. Whatnot.

But even funnier is the exchange over on Broken Toys wherein he and I debate cleaning and haircare and he admits that he is a heretic of the highest order because he’s used bar soap on his hair.

Freakin’ heathen.

There’s this piece over on Gamasutra, a good one. It’s an interview with Chris Crawford where the first thing he really says is:

Well basically, new ideas don’t go anywhere. So the industry is just rehashing the same stuff over and over. During the 80s there was a lot of experimentation, a lot of new ideas being tried (many of them really bad) but there was at least experimentation. Now we don’t see any experimentation whatsoever.

At first, I thought “right on, Chris! Give ‘em hell!” because after all, what is EA but The Place That Madden Made? They built a massive company on releasing roster updates for fifty bucks a shot every year. The more I read the interview, though, it sounded more and more like a crotchety old man shouting at the kids to get off his damned lawn.

Trust me, it’s hard to disagree with the man who made Eastern Front, but when he says that Nintendo is “…just sort of reshuffling the existing set of ideas” and then goes on to say that his company is doing “interactive storytelling.”

Well that’s just breaking all sorts of new ground there, Chris, isn’t it? “You’re the hero…and you let the story go” applies to quite a few things out there, not the least of which is Oblivion. Going forward, it’s even more odd because, well…it sounds like he’s just building a MUD. When asked if players would be creating their own content in his system, which he refers to by the groundbreaking name of “Storyworld,” he replies:

We can’t let the player create his own verbs because the verbs are the heart of the game. And in a sense they are the rules. However, we can have… I differentiate between designers (who we call Storybuilders) and players. The designers create the rules within the systems, and then the players get the palette of verbs to play with.

Sounds a whole hell of a lot like a MUD to me. Worse, it sounds like a man who’s going that we as modern gamers can’t appreciate what came before. He used to program in Assembly, folks. On stumps. They didn’t even have fingers back then.

Dang-nabbit.

It’s a red-letter day for consoles.

First off we have Phil Harrison spouting off at German mag Der Spiegel with the following statements:

We believe that the PS3 will be the place where our users play games, watch films, browse the Web, and use other computer functions. The PlayStation 3 is a computer. We do not need the PC … In a certain way, I understand why people would say such things [about the similarity of the PS3 controller to the Wii's], but it is stupid, if you’ll forgive me saying so. We have already worked on it a long time, and Nintendo almost certainly has done likewise with something similar. It is perfectly naturally for two companies to work on identical devices. It’s like that with technology.

Shits and giggles all around in the Sony camp I figure. There’s got to be something in the water there for them to think that not only is the PS3 priced accurately for what it’s worth, but that it’s probably too cheap for what we’d get. After all, we should be thankful that they’re even allowing us to have the opportunity to buy the PS3, because they have hordes of loyal customers waiting to buy them all out.

This on top of the rush job these guys had to do after Sony sprang the “new” Dualshake controller on them, which some have referred to as having merely tacked the ability onto their old controllers.

On the other side of the next-generation camp, Microsoft VP of Gaming Peter Moore told Kikizo games that nobody gives a crap about backwards compatibility on the 360.

Nobody is concerned anymore about backwards compatibility. We under promised and over delivered on that. It’s a very complicated thing… very complex work. I’m just stunned that we have hundreds of games that are backwards compatible … more are coming, but at some point, you just go, there’s enough, let’s move on, or people aren’t as worried about a game being backwards compatible - and I like to think we’ve upheld our end of the bargain in making at least two or maybe three hundred games backwards compatible.

Here’s the list. Notably missing are Project Gotham 2, Blitz: The League, The Warriors or any of the 2K Sports series except World Series 2K3. On the bright side, all of the die-hard gamers that were clamoring for Barbie™ Horse Adventures™ Wild Horse Rescue™ have been satisfied.

We should all be more thankful that the console companies know us much better than we do.

Vaporware darlings Infinium Labs, progenitors of the Phantom, have an announcement to make. Instead of closing up shop and admitting their box is truly vapor, they’re changing their name to the Phantom Gaming Service and to…heh. Hahheehoohohoholollerskates++!

To double the amount of stock currently available to the public from 600 million shares to 1.2 billion.

I’m wiping tears of laughter from my eyes from reading that, I really am.

What’s more:

Our loss from operations for the quarter ended March 31, 2006 was $2,752,327. Our loss from operations for the year ended December 31, 2005 was $29,814,606. At March 31, 2006, we had a working capital deficit of $11,523,869 and accumulated losses since inception of $69,331,794. In their report on our audited financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2005, our independent auditors expressed substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern.

All I know is I’d like to be allowed to spend almost $70 million of other peoples’ money to come up with a keyboard and a mouse. It’d get me into E3 as an exhibitor, wouldn’t it? Hell, it’d be almost worth it! MONEY HATS FOR ALL!

That said, I don’t know how the hell a strategic alliance between Infi…er, Phantom Gaming Service and Itron Technologies is going to benefit anyone. I mean, sure, the lapboard/mouse combo is about the only solid thing they came up with and actually demoed, but doubling their stock offering isn’t going to raise any more money, what with last pump and dump scam that they came up with.

You gotta love it, though. It’s like, “What if Red Dragon Software was REAL?”

Hm.

Actually I suppose that would be Dark and Light. Ah, well. Carry on.

Bruce is still at it over on the Vanguard forums.

He’s trumpeting his usual battlecry of “I’m important, I’m important” and as per usual, he’s getting all sorts of backlash.

Popcorn, anyone?

When a pompous blowhard meets a down-on-his luck developer, you know wacky sparks are going to fly!!

The new reality sitcom, “Bruce n’ Brad” coming to you this summer season, from CBS! CATCH THE FEVER!!

There’s always something about Bruce talking in the third person that makes me laugh.