News News News!

City of Heroes Freedom is now LIVE! http://www.ology.com/technology/city-heroes-freedom-now-live
Lord of the Rings Isengard is now LIVE! http://www.ripten.com/2011/09/27/lotro-rise-of-isengard-expansion-now-live/
Non-violent MMO glitch is now LIVE!http://www.glitch.com/

Ever feel spoiled for choice? I do.

--Please continue on down to read Anton's great article about League of Legends new Arathi Basin type map. :)

First Look at League of Legends: Dominion

Now that League of Legends offers a shorter, 20-minute mode, I will need at LEAST 5 hours to play every night.

The map:

The Crystal Scar consists of 5 capture the flag points. The map is circular, with the 5 capture points positioned where the tips of a star would touch the edge of the circle. The bottom-right and bottom-left capture points are located very near to each of the two 5-man teams' respawn/starting base.

Strategy:

Starting out, teams capture the two capture points on their side, and also compete for first capture of the top-most point. They can split into two groups, 1 or 2 should go to the bottom-most point and defend that position, then the other 3-4 should rush to the top of the map and try to get the point there first. One player should grab the other point on the way.

From this point, it is a matter of working your way clockwise and counter-clockwise towards adjacent capture points from the ones you control. Focus on defense and push minions, kind of like normal tower protection in Summoner's Rift and Twisted Treeline.

The goal is to degrade the 500 hit points of the enemy's crystal, which will count down slowly if you have 3 capture points or more.

There are no neutral monsters, but minions spawn from your controlled capture points. Capture points have towers that will attack enemies, but will stop if the tower starts getting neutralized.

Also, there are power-up spaces for speed boosts and healing.

Many items are not sold that you are used to.

Mana regenerates quickly, xp and gold increment very quickly in this map.

Impressions:

I played 5 games, and was not greeted well by people who'd been playing for 2 days before I got a chance to try. Somehow they already expect you to know what's going on. The 3rd game, I joined friends, and it went great, but we got matched with harder opponents and lost the 5th game. It's a fast-paced, hyper-charged version of the game where you can hit max level 18 in 10-15 minutes. Just be sure to go to bed at night.

Portal 1 free through the 20th on Steam

Go get Portal on Steam for free, one of the best, most concise gaming experiences of all time, through the 20th of Sept. 2011.

It appears to be tied to this educational promotion:
http://www.learnwithportals.com/

Lotro failed to launch in China due to CDC's ineptitude

I try to report relevant news here and make insightful comments on it. So, sorry citizens of the "people's republic" of China. No Lotro for you.

"In September 2006, CDC Games licensed the exclusive rights to distribute, in China, Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar (LOTRO), a MMORPG based upon the Lord of the Rings trilogy. For the past several years, CDC Games has experienced significant delays in the continued development and launch of this game. Since initially licensing this game, CDC Games has invested approximately $10.0 million in licensing, development and other costs related to it, including a $4.0 million initial non-refundable license fee."


After all that investment, they failed to launch the product. A product somebody else had made and their only real job was to translate it into Chinese. I'm surprised anybody gives money to them anymore. I feel bad for the Chinese consumers, who's only real quality MMO on offer is WoW. This is not only a huge loss for Turbine monetarily and a setback for MMO companies in penetrating the Chinese market, but its also a good example of how outsourcing doesn't always work. In fact more and more people are insourcing instead of outsourcing since outsourcing often produces poorer quality due to communication difficulties and control/qa problems.

source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/cdc-corporation-reports-results-for-six-months-ended-june-30-2011-2011-09-02?reflink=MW_news_stmp

New way to get Adobe products!

Just got a new tablet pc, so I needed software. By checking adobe.com, I noticed a new pay feature...You can now pay monthly. Even where I work, other artists were not aware so I'm sharing the discovery.

The monthly payment lets you subscribe to Adobe products. Any of their collections or individual pieces of software can be paid for monthly. If you commit to a year's subscription, the fee is about 30% less than a single month.

I will be using Flash primarily, and Photoshop, with Illustrator occasionally. So I subscribed for 1 year to the Web Premium edition for $95/month vs the $1800 it would have cost to buy.

I get the latest version, CS 5.5 and after a year I may just purchase CS 6 when it comes out. This was a great way to spread out the spending, especially since I also just bought the pc.

If I ever needed to use After Effects for a project, I could subscribe for a month or 2. I'm really excited about the new subscription offer.

STO going FTP!

This December maybe I will be going where everyone else in the blogosphere has gone before. Star Trek Online is going Free to Play, which means I will definitely be trying it out. Anton's adventures in the game have of course already perked my interest but I also need to mention that while I was bed ridden for a week or two last Winter with an auto-immune illness called Guillien Berre' syndrome, I watched all of the Next Generation seasons :) (as well as Xmen the animated series)

My wife and I are now big Star Trek fans, and will be possibly making some small donations of time and money to this game soon. I am chomping at the bit for City of Heroes to come out. Can't wait!