Virtual Adept

What the hell is wrong with Nintendo? Go Nintendo Has just published a list of features in the upcoming Wii game Mario Party 8. And… where the hell is internet play?! WTF Nintendo?! This is a game screaming out for internet play. You guys just suck. Seriously. Why does Nintendo make the same damn mistakes over and over again? Oh, well, guess I’ll have to go with Fuzion Frenzy 2 for my online party-game needs.

Had a really good time this weekend playing EverQuest 2 that I got in the SOE Station Access Collection. Lyndal and I got it at the same time to try out. For one thing we have been using Xfire and/or Teamspeak to do voice chat during the game and that just makes it a heck of a lot more fun. So we got some evil characters up to around level 9 or so in EQ2. Here are some random thoughts about the game.

First, leveling up is way faster than EQ was, but maybe it will slow down a lot later. I think it’s even faster than wow up to 9. Secondly, the game has some very decent quests. Way better than the quests from EQ1. About on par with WoW, really. I enjoyed the quests, especially the one where you have to go murder this guy’s ex girlfriend because since they are for opposing factions he can’t have her so he’d rather her be dead. There were other choice ones, like poisoning a loud mouth dark elf, and of course the standard go kill N mobs, or collect X widgets. But I did enjoy them overall.

The graphics to me are not as good as World of Warcraft. Sure, technically they are fairly impressive, but artistically I just think WoW is heads and shoulders above EQ2 and pretty much every other MMORPG. I also think the animations in WoW are much smoother and nicer looking than EQ2’s. Also the environments are nowhere near as compelling as WoW’s, at least not so far as I’ve seen. I was able to get EQ2 to run in a window much like the way WoW works so that was nice, I like being able to access Firefox or whatever while playing. EQ2 didn’t want to play nice with Xfire though, so I had to disable that.

The bottom line… would I pay $15 a month to play EQ2? Well, in a world without World of Warcraft, for sure, no problem. But I think I still prefer WoW over EQ2. I can see myself getting a toon or two up into the mid teens or early twenties in EQ2, though, because it is pretty fun. I will say that EQ2 is so far the best MMORPG I’ve played besides World of Warcraft, even better than City of Heroes which I liked a lot. So if you don’t like WoW for some reason and still want a fantasy MMORPG, check it out.

Leveled up my mage Xashi on Argent Dawn from 22 to 24 today. I’m really just killing time until Melingko levels up to 42 or 43 or so, so that he can adventure with Ami, my 43 NE Hunter. I really need someone to come join me in WoW. If you are on Argent Dawn or want to be on Argent Dawn, a fantastic RP server, then shoot me a comment so we can hook up. Pick up groups can really be a pain sometimes.

I recently resubscribed to World of Warcraft in anticipation of the imminent release of the expansion pack, The Burning Crusade. Well now Blizzard has decided to delay the expansion until January. Bummer. On the plus side, this means I’ll probably actually be able to log into the game over the holidays.

Apparently Congress is starting an investigation about whether or not and how to tax the economies in online games like World of Warcraft and Second Life. This sucks so bad I can’t even begin to describe how bad it sucks. How is Congress supposed to know whether or not the person playing the game is even a US citizen or not? Are we going to be required to register our MMO identities with the IRS now? Why should I have to pay taxes on my gaming characters? That’s just insane. This sounds like a good way for the government to ruin my gaming time more than anything else.

Quoting YouNEWB about EA’s latest online shooter, Battlefield 2142:

When you open the box, a big slip of paper falls out first, preceeding any discs or manuals. The slip of paper says, essentially, that 2142 includes monitoring software which runs while your computer is online, and records “anonymous” information like your IP address, surfing habits (probably via cookie scans), and other “computing habits” in order to report this information back to ad companies and ad servers, which generates in-game ads.

This is an outrage. I can’t believe anyone will sit down for this. I hope this game tanks and tanks badly, sending a message to those asshats that we’re not putting up with this shit. This makes me want to start a bonfire and toss every EA game I ever bought into it. I feel ashamed of having bought Burnout Revenge recently.

Oh well, now is the time to change. I won’t be buying any more EA games until they remove this from Battlefield 2142 and make a public apology, and make a public promise never to use spyware in any of their products ever again. I doubt that will happen, considering how little EA respect’s gamer’s privacy on Xbox Live. Gamers, do not give up your rights. You can live without this game, there is no way one game is worth handing over your life’s details to EA.

Had an opportunity to play World of Warcraft again for the first time in a long time. I played one of Lyndal’s characters while we tried out Xfire and Teamspeak with WoW with mixed results. Teamspeak worked well, Xfire not so well. It looks like I may decide to just did resubscribe to WoW. WoW looked great on my new computer, which I didn’t have when I quit WoW some 16 months ago. It really brought back memories. I even remembered the quests, heh. I guess it really impacted me in a major way, it’s a powerful game that can do that. Looking forward to Burning Crusade!

I have characters on Thunderhorn and Argent Dawn. Thunderhorn I’m horde and AD I’m alliance.

Last week there was a frickin’ hilarious episode on South Park about World of Warcraft. Google it. Watch it. It really is hilarious.

Aapparently the WoW fan(atic?)s have compiled a list of all the errors that South Park made with regard to WoW. Check out the list on Joystiq and laugh. If you knew more than five of these already, you officially have no life.

Apparently Nielsen has done a study that suggests that 64% of online gamers are women (via Slashdot). The study does not distinguish between games like Halo 2 or World of Warcraft and online card games like the kind you find at casual gamer sites like pogo.com. This is not really all that suprising when you take that kind of gaming into account. What’s more surprising is that they claim 117 million americans are online gamers. Considering the population of the USA is just over 300 million, I find it somewhat incredible that over a third of the population play online games. Even if you count online card games.

I’m proud to be an American, in the Land of the Free! I thought we learned something from the 1920’s Prohibition but apparently not. This is so stupid on so many levels I don’t even know where to begin. How exactly are they going to enforce a law like this? Seems to me it just hurts the bigger, safer companies in the industry. Americans will find a way to keep playing, on that you can bet good money on.

 

Joystiq posted up a plea to kill off the demo disk. Here’s the relative quote:

As a medium of distribution, it’s time for physical media to die and never come back. Internet users have for years now been downloading game demos from myriad websites, and console gamers are now getting the chance to do the same. With the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo “Revolution” all promising digital downloads, isn’t it time we did away with ecologically disastrous demo disks for good? And once we’ve ditched demo disks, let’s work on tossing those dastardly CDs, UMDs, MDs, DVDs, HD-DVDs, and Blu-Ray disks too, like so many cookies after a rough ride at the amusement park.

Everytime I read something like this I just laugh and wonder how the writer could be so short sighted. Yes, being able to download demos is nice, but it is certainly no replacement for having demos on a physical media. Broadband penetration in the US is only at around 60%, and there’s a LOT of gamers that live in remote, rural areas that can’t get it even if they want it. Even then, a lot of so-called broadband connections are crappy 128k connections that are fine for web surfing but painfully slow for downloading 300mb demos. On top of that, the hard drives in consoles aren’t all that large (esp. the 360), and unless people are happy with downloading, playing right then, and deleting, there’s going to be a demand for a more permanent storage.

And as for full fledge games, we’re nowhere NEAR ready for digital-delivery only. Not even on the PC, where hard drives are large and cheap. With games regularly being 5gb+, that’s just too big, even for fast broadband, to put up with when buying a DVD is so much quicker, more convenient, and above all, permanent. Sure, you’ll always have people who like digital downloads, and that’s fine, but there’s a LOT of people not ready for that yet who prefer a physical media.

Even in the music world, where songs/albums are relatively painless and quick downloads, there’s still a demand for physical media. In conclusion, we’re not there yet, and we won’t be for quite a while. Broadband is going to have to get much faster, storage capacity on our devices bigger, and even then there’s still advantages to a permanent physical media.

What do you think? Tell me in comments.

If there was ever any doubt that the EA actually stands for Evil Asshats instead of Electronic Arts, I think this news from TechDirt removes all doubt.

From TechDirt:

If you decide to play [Fight Night Round 3 for PSP] online, it asks you to go through a registration process, and after that tells you that if you don’t want the company to send your info to ESPN and other marketers, you need to pay $2. EA basically is saying that the online version costs $2, but that ESPN will pay that subscription fee for you… if you turn over your info to them.

That’s pretty fucking weak. If I had a PSP (I don’t), and if I were interested in Fight Night 3 (I’m not), I’d definitely use fake info. I wonder how good their info is going to be? What total tossers.