Monthly Archives: April 2005

I Could Be Wrong

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I used to say “don’t make a movie about an amusement park ride unless you enjoy failing in a very public way.”

I used to say “don’t make an online massively (!) multiplayer game about a movie unless you enjoy failing in a very public way.”

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl proved me wrong on the first point, could they prove me wrong on the second?

Sticks and stones, love.

Listen, it could happen, but when the world is narrowed to an episode (read: movie), you need console gaming. Linear, solo gameplay is the choice here, not player-created, persistent, immerse me in my own societal filth-type gaming where I’m paying the bill each month.

Now if they said: “It’s pirates! And it’s in the Caribbean!”, I might buy into this. Pirates could be a vast world. (avast. heh) It might involve being a ninja. We NEED a solid pirate MMOG. And more ninjas.

Slapping a franchise onto a virtual map does not an online game make.

But thanks for whoring out what was otherwise an enjoyable movie. (Matrix Online, I’m looking in your direction here.)

Guild Wars: Day One — A Noob is Born

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One of us is born every minute. (and two to take us!)

I had tried out Guild Wars a few months ago, at their first Beta event. Damn, maybe that was almost a year ago. (It was almost a year ago, I just looked it up. The blog never lies.)

We, meaning the guildmates we, discovered one of the best guild pranks EVER within the first few minutes. For the cheap seats, almost everything is instanced in GW. To do quests or travel in the countryside even, you portal into an instance, and can later portal back into a common or public area.

If you’re grouped with someone, they portal with you and, from our subsequent experiments, it looks like the group portals with you from wherever they are. Well, you can see the beauty here.

Guy’s talking to his trainer in town, groupmember portals out into Lakeshire, errr LakeSIDE in GW, the group is zapped over into the instance. The ultimate in gaming narcissism.

Well, *I* didn’t need to talk to anyone in town. *I* needed to talk to the guy in Lakeshire, err Lakeside. Whatever the fuck.

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What Girls Want

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Maybe you’ve seen this list already: Top Ten Girlfriend-friendly Games.

If you have a girlfriend, wife, or other significant woman in your life, I really can’t recommend shoving this list in their face. You like to live, don’t you?

(Bejeweled for crissakes!! We play that at work when we have a few hours to kill.)

Why is it such a mystery what games the fems like? They like the same things other people (read: not women) like, they just seem to like other things too … like maybe ponies, I dunno.

Honestly, gaming girls aren’t so rare like it was five years ago. It’s been a full infiltration.

Those message boards post in every goddamn online game about: “I’m a girl, I play WoW, are there any others out there lol?” It’s damn tiresome. Ya, there’s lots out there. You want a prize for having a vagina? Get in line, there’s at least a couple hundred ahead of you.

Women like to shoot, they like to kill, they like to craft, they like to group, they like to solo, they like to solve quests, they like to get the uber, (and this one is puzzling) they like to help others … kinda like everyone else, except that helping part. What the fuck is that all about?

When I first read that list this week, I sent the link to one of the gaming women I know and asked what she thought about it. (I didn’t dare bait the hook with: maybe she’d like to try one of those instead of the upcoming Guild Wars. heh, I like to live.)

And I quote: “ya, very funny.” But it didn’t sound like she found it funny, not even funny ironic.

I was scared.