I won a free copy of WoW:Cataclysm from Unicorn City!

I have seen not one, but TWO documentaries about LARPing. I have long held an ambition to one day develop a Fiction film or Video game based on LARPing.

Someone beat me to it.



Unicorn City is a new movie about a guy who wants to get a job...To get leadership experience for his resume, he invents a Utopia of his own that he will rule...a LARPing community.

Who will sabotage his attempt to rule Unicorn City? His girlfriend, who would really prefer he didn't move away to the new job? The rival player who decides his character wants to be the new ruler of Unicorn City? Or the cops, who just don't understand these people the way we do?

Unicorn City is a completely finished film that has already appeared at Sundance Film Festival and others. The producers are pushing hard for a theatrical release. Go show them support on the facebook fan page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Unicorn-City/113276488683455#!/UnicornCity?v=wall

and link everything you can to their website:

http://www.unicorncity.com/

They need all the support they can get to put this movie to theaters, and as for me...I really would love to see this in theaters!

They just held a drawing through their Facebook page and I won a free copy of Cataclysm! I was not planning on purchasing Cataclysm because of the price, and I still haven't gotten a character to level 80 (I just started up a new character to play with some work friends). I'm so excited I will now get to enjoy the new game features I would not have otherwise gotten to try out.

New Elves and Dwarves intro is much better

Last night I did a friend and favor and rolled him an elf guardian through the newbie land tutorial instances of Lotro. I did not expect to enjoy it as much as I did though. What I got instead of drudgery was completely revamped areas, quests, ominous plot buildups, a ton less running around for no reason, and an exciting finale where try to escape a collapsing tomb. They actually went through and added new 3D mob designs for the dourhand dwarves which look much more interesting and grouchy. They changed the countryside and added a dwarven stair shortcut, a dourhand mine, changed the silver deep to more obviously be the source of geodes which are used every year in the dwarven winter festival, and obviously used some of the things they learned from building Moria as well. All in all I give them a gold star for improving it, though at the very beginning there was a bit of talking. They also changed the layout of the text windows so that quest backlog is on one side and requirements are in yellow on the other making it easier for the many many people who don't care to read to just glance at what they need to do to advance while us more literate players can enjoy unadulterated text instead.

And that's just the intro, I wonder what else has changed....

Pummeling Foes in WoW as a team. Also, Dueling.

I play WoW with 2 work friends now.
I'm a holy paladin, they are Mage and Tank Warrior.
We are unstoppable!
Typically in solo play, I would have to run to an enemy, use all my cool abilities, wait for them to recharge, then use them at least a second time to finish it off. Not so here!
In a party of 3 like ours, we would all charge in together, all fire off our abilities at once, and foes would drop almost instantly. It's really exciting to be in an unstoppable team like ours!

Next time, we're trying our first instance, Ragefire Chasm. We might try 3-manning it at level 16/17 each.

Also, I was challenged to my first duel by a random Blood Elf Warrior, he was the same level as me, if not +- 1.
The duel was pretty fun, my first pvp in WoW since 2 years back when I played before. As holy, I healed myself 2-3 times. The Warrior burned a potion, but I didn't mind. It got down to whether or not my next attack would charge next or his, so I spammed my Holy Shock button until the charge was ready, watching our life bars drop...both of us to a sliver! SHOCK! Got him! Pretty exciting. We both laughed after, at just how close that was.

WoW Cataclysm...Tricked me to play again, ha

With a free 7-days of WoW offer in my mailbox, I ended up connecting with work friends and did in fact re-subscribe after 2 years of avoiding it to save money.

Anyways, Cataclysm is here...Half of Stormwind is gone and there's a Tauren settlement squeezed into the back of Orgrimmar. It's definitely a new world! Dalaran in Northrend no longer has portals to the other parts of the world. A few mages were making a killing in gold offereing portals, I happy traded 5 gold to go see the changes in Stormwind.

I'm currently focusing on a new character, now level 13, a blood elf named Alida on Azjol-Nerub, along with two work friends, we're going to play through the early content and see what's new!

Playing RPG's with your kids

A few weeks back I started my son on Zelda games. He watched me play through the 2nd quest of Zelda, then I even got him to play for an evening on his own.

Soon when we were outside, he just wanted to run around and pretend to fight Ganon with his toy sword. Random things outdoors became secret passages, and monsters were everywhere, just swing around your toy weapon.

I decided next to get him Zelda: A Link to the Past (Super NES Zelda), one of my all-time favorites, and closer to the original Zelda than any other since. He watched me play through that game the 2 weeks that followed.

We finished Zelda: A Link to the Past, and I had to find what we could play next. On a visit to a used game store I found Gameboy Advance-Gamecube connector cables at a great price. I had Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles in my collection, but hadn't really played it much. To play 2-4 players, you have to have the connector cables.

So I brought those home on Saturday, and my son and I finally played a 2-player rpg together for the first time. This was a pretty amazing experience.

He has just enough experience with games now, that if I tell him a few times to go left and point my hand, he can usually go the way I ask. I can even tell him to follow my character on the screen and he does pretty good with that, too.

Playing with my 3-year-old boy is also an amazingly challenging and satisfying game experience...He has enough coordination to walk and fight, while I handle Cure and Life Spells to keep him running. We walked through the first level of the game, and I hardly used any attack powers period.

It's pretty exciting to see a little baby grow three years, and finally become a playmate sophisticated enough to play games that even I enjoy right alongside me.

When we get to the boss (He knows alllll about bosses now), he gets excited, and sometimes jumps and screams. The frantic fighting that ensues is rather intense for both of us, and at the end, I get a big hug and an "I love you, daddy." True gamer father-son bonding right there.

WoW for a week

I just got an email from Blizzard, inviting me to play 7 days of WoW before Cataclysm comes out...I'm actually excited about this because I was only recently in another lull of missing WoW but not having spending money available for additional games. Yay for free game time!

It seems like a really good marketing ploy to hand out free game time to people whose accounts have been inactive for long periods of time. Smart thinking, Blizzard...I'm somewhat tempted to keep playing, though I would need spending money again...we'll see!

Lesson in Big Bang Development

Warning: the below content is astonishingly obvious stuff that could change the video game industry but just won't unless they gain a truly amazing perception of the obvious.

Here's a software development lesson for you that I thought up while stuck in traffic on the way home today: There are two ways to develop software. Big Bang, and Pay As You Go.

Big Bang involves coding a bunch of stuff and then testing i to see if it works. If it doesn't work, you try and figure out what went wrong, someplace back on line 546 or perhaps line 1234 of your code. Shoot, now I need to change the combination on my luggage... This can apply to coding but it also applies to politics, (making bills for healthcare that are too large for anybody to understand), music (Beethoven wrote and rewrote his works line by line I'm sure) and anything else created that's worthwhile.

Pay As You Go involves lots more testing, testing every step of the way. Seasoned good developers do this all the time. I am sure that, in the code sense, developers in every company do this because its the only way to get done in a reasonable amount of time because if something goes wrong, you know exactly where it is because you JUST wrote it.

Where am I going with this thought? Why is this significant if everyone already does it? Well the thing is, NOBODY does this with testing with consumers (except for perhaps Minecraft which has let everyone buy its alpha product) Now there have been (ahem.. lame. ahem...) reasons for this over the years. But most of it boils down to being steeped in tradition and coddled in safety. Video game companies sell things in huge installments because they want good reviews from the content locusts. If they sold them in small, incremental chunks and adapted to customer feedback, kind of like a service, it would make a lot more sense. (Here comes my tinfoil hat) You would see a lot more success and better funner games in the MMO sphere and a lot less plunking out of what people don't want. Untested, stale, grindy content. I call for a revolution in making games, a common sense revolution. Unless we want most of our MMO's to be like fireworks. Bright for an instant then burn out.