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!

Yes, I am still playing video games..

And no, I'm not dead yet!

Sorry for the dearth of blog posts. I haven't really had much to blog about lately. I've tried a number of free MMO's, none of which was worth writing about. I have tried to solo in Champions Online since I can't get two computers working so that at the least my wife can join me but the classes I choose (mind and glacier) just aren't so great at soloing. And when you are out of stars(you lose a star every time you die and it affects your ability ot do damage and take damage), it starts to feel like a hopeless cause. I need to get our home computer fixed so that the universe will be right again.

I am really enjoying Rune Factory Frontier. It launched in winter of 2009 and is a fun little game which has a marriage, dungeon and farming system as well as fishing, forging, cooking, and more. It has festivals, lumberjacking, mining, etc.. Very similar to harvest moon. Just more dungeon stuff added in. And more mysterious events, so its a little less peaceful.

I am also really enjoying Fire Emblem. I just borrowed the new Fire Emblem for the Wii from my dad (Radiant Dawn) which continues the story. More on that later. I'm really looking forward to trying out the following MMOs: City of Heroes free to play, and Dragon's Nest sometimes in August (I don't play beta's anymore so I'm waiting for official launches...)

Aaaand back to Neverwinter Nights...

With summer arrived, some old friends urged me to come back to play Neverwinter Nights with them. So I did. And now I'm hooked just like I was 2 years ago.

I have slept little this week. I might just have to limit myself a little better next week! But it's been so fuun...

I stopped playing League of Legends to fit this in. I was killing my team at the higher levels anyways by not being quite as skilled as most people who get that far. It's probably better that way.

City of Heroes is going Free to Play!

Finally, something to be excited about! One of my favorite old games is going free to play. OK, now that I think about it, this may be exciting for me, but for those who haven't played the game yet, it is less so. Still, Once it does go free-to-play this fall, you (the reader) should try it out. Here's some reasons why:

City of Heroes pioneered:

Auto-Scaling dungeons,
Free form archetypes with chained progression,
Having a primary and secondary archetype,
Travel that isn't SLOW,
Grouping that is fun all the time for everyone involved,
Quick recovery from death in teams, (Most people have a res move they can use)
Sidekicking (raising a friend temporarily to your level, and the opposite, lower your friend to one level above you too)
and more!