November 2008 Entries
Now I've had time to simmer a bit, I have somewhat mixed feelings about the big Tabula Rasa news. Kneejerk for me was a kind of cynical low-grade rage; I liked that game! How dare you! I'm not playing it at the moment, but that's not the point! On reflection, with a slightly cooler head, I begin to see that perhaps that is precisely the point; I'm not playing it at the moment, and neither are a large number of other ex-customers, for one reason or another. It doesn't help much though, and instead I find myself...
Round we go again, and this time, I'm back in City of Heroes. While I've been playing the game on and off for a good few months, a recent change in the wind has seen me move over the Forces of Justice, and City of Heroes proper, on the Union server and whole new gang of rather unconventional superheroes. I'd tried Heroside a bit, quite a while back, but a combination of The Hollows Hazard Zone and the hellish Positron Task Force, and a general nagging worry that really, Heroes ought not to pummel first and ask questions...
Bit of a special guild outing this week, as the Tuesday Noob Club hit Nightfall's Treasure Trail. We alternate PvP and PvE nights of a Tuesdays, and as a leader of sorts, I'm always on the look out for interesting and novel things to do each week. The basic game is interesting enough of course, the very episodic nature of the main storylines providing any number of mini events. A typical GW Mission can take from fifteen minutes to an hour or more, and all have a very set define task, along with extra bonus objectives to carry...
Thanks to a breakthrough in the Van Hemlock Acoustic Labs we've finally got with the program, and have managed to plug the right wires into the right sockets, and got a Guest on the show! This week, Voice of America, Michael Zenke joins us to have a good old natter about recently announced Bioware MMO; Star Wars: The Old Republic. Van Hemlock: Republic (Ep27); In which two ill-informed hacks are, er, informed! Join us for Sith, Stormtroopers, and Storytelling! Varied and Assorted ruminations about what a new Star Wars MMO might mean for us...
Found myself quite inspired by Zubon's challenge, over at Kill Ten Rats. Expressing some dissatisfaction with an awful lot of Wheel Reinventing in recent years, he's asking we, the Citizens of Blogsville, to try our hand at reviewing a game from before 2003, and in particular, one that has seen no updates since that time.
I thought about it a bit; EVE Online almost qualifies on the first, dating from 2003, but what with its monstrous ongoing free expansion schedule crashing on with Quantum Rise pretty much as I type, it fails on the second criteria. Anarchy Online, Ultima...
I must admit to mixed feelings about A Tale in the Desert at this point. It's clearly a work of genius, on many levels, but I'm increasingly wondering if I'm good enough for it, which is an odd place to find myself.
One of the other Hemlock Beach residents came up with a quite astute theory, as we were chatting over the brick racks. ATitD attracts two sorts of people, the Gamers, and the Simers. I suppose we might identify those as Achievers and Socialisers, in Bartlespeak.
When the Telling starts, both come to have a go at it all....
War never changes, and all that. Yes, this week MMO Gaming nearly ceased altogether as the pair of us became completely obsessed with Fallout 3. There's the basic obsession with what is a very fine game indeed, of course, but also the more brutal obsession of Who Is Best?, as judged by the Xbox 360 Live gamer tag thingey, which M'Cohost bullied me into signing up for. It's a bit of a one-sided fight frankly, as I have only one game that is supported by the scheme, and at last count, he's winning by 23,099 "G's" to my paltry...
Despite a rather up and down schedule over the last few weeks, I've still been managing to turn up most week for the Tuesday N00b Club, which is very much still alive and well. Well, alive in the 'Ongoing Week to Week Interest' sense of the word, rather than the moment to moment 'All Aboard the -60%DP Express' sense. We do well most of the time, but aren't so veteran that we can't be steamrollered by the occasional end stage maps and challenges. Part of this is the simple business of having a team full of people, and...
As well as Jumpgate Evolution, there was a lot else to see and do at the Eurogamer Expo 2008, and while I was obsessing on one particular PC MMO in the far corner, m'Producer was wandering the floor with his Suspicious Looking Recording Device. High point of the day for me was a spectacularly poorly organised raid encounter on a not-that-near-at-all-actually pub, for lunch, and of course, the gratuitous 'Press' queue jumping! Van Hemlock & Jon's Big Day Out (Ep25): In which all manner of Gaming Luminaries shout at each other in firstly a noisy ex-brewery,...