World of Goo, Secret of Mana too, and my 100th post

So umm, this is my 100th post. Already. Wow that was fast. Maybe when I hit my thousandth one we should celebrate. In the meantime you can celebrate by sending my char (Thallian) a gold or a pony, how about a gold pony!

World of Goo looks neat for us creative types. If fishes were wishes I'd have it in my catalog and enough time to play it. Incidentally I played Crystal Chronicles for Wiiware the other day and its still fun. Sheesh I'm sure getting bang for my buck with that one. Lastly, the very best game ever to launch on Super Nintendo is back for all of us to enjoy on Wii: Secret of Mana!

(Ok, Mario Kart is a close contender, but anyways)

..p.s. Street Fighter 2 launches this week also on there, the greatest button mashing, quarter stealing Arcade Game ever other than Golden Axe :P

p.p.s. was only kidding about the pony. Ty all for reading our blog and contributing with comments, and special thanks to Anton for sharing ownership with me. If you do end up sending a pony we'll split it.. or maybe you could send two to prevent animal cruelty. ;)

Turbine expands, launching a new west coast studio

Turbine has expanded development with a new west coast studio in Redwood City

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/lord-of-the-rings-online-shadows-of-angmar/919215p1.html

Ensue thou rumors.

In other news, I can't seem to get to any of the robot bosses in Mega Man 9. Is this cuz I suck or is this game too hard? Prolly the first one, since Anton told me he has downed three of them.

How to win my Vote for Obama (by Kurt Williamsen)

Here's a great article on the complexities of voting for a president in this country. It always seems to me like a choice between two or three evils. By the way even though I occasionally blog about political or religious things on rare occasion, this is not a political or religious blog. Feel free to give me voting advice in comments though because I just got my absentee ballot. And I encourage everyone to vote and to think outside of just what you've been told to think. Just don't waste too much time on the "who's gonna be the next president" thingy because really, since I live in California, whether I like it or not I'm voting for Obama. I wish we had a popular election instead of an electoral college. Now which state assembly people should I vote for?

Since I broached politics I may as well broach the economy too. Invest in Cash (the under your sofa kind (jk), in a reliable bank is fine), possibly bonds, though those (bonds) are not doing great either. Don't invest in political candidates. :P

And lastly religion, or rather a religious issue: Prop 8. Think about it outside discrimination terms and also include the rights of children to have a father and a mother. Even from a scientific researched standpoint (very secular) this makes sense. Children do better when they have a father and a mother. And that is the weakest argument I could put forth, but the one most people are likely to agree to. The stronger arguments involve the loss of rights of the majority to save the rights of the minority. Do we really want to take away the right to get marry people from all the religions in the US except a small handful which capitulate on this issue? Sheesh.

What was the other No-no issue you should never bring up in the office? Race? I don't have any race issues, but if you have any let me know. I love all people, I just don't always love their actions.

Ok I promise the next ten posts will be about MMO stuff and/or the game we're making. Sorry for the side track to reality. :P

Mines of Moria launches Nov 18th.. oh yeah and I'm in the beta

Mines of Moria (Lotro's expansion) launches to stores Nov 18th. (They announced it officially today) Plus I got a notification that I'm in the closed beta (even though I can't remember if I actually applied, maybe Turbine just likes me) so I downloaded the 8 gig beta client yesterday. I am assuming its 8 gigs of extra info. Anyways since its closed beta I wont be providing much other info. Phooey. Still, will be neat to try out the new classes and such.

In other news I have gotten a harvest horse upgrade for just about every one of mine and my brother's characters because it looks cool and also takes more hits before you fall off. And I got Thallian to rank 9 in Warhammer.. and I got Rumples the Ironbreaker to rank 13 on Praag (OpenRVR) and I helped some friends with the Plaguebearer of the North quest in Lotro which has been made a lot harder.. a freaking army comes after you if you attack her. I'm always in favor of more realistic AI events like this though. If you haven't already tried the assaults quests in Angmar with a trusty group I'd encourage you to do so, they are fun and difficult.

Spore has unseated WAR (of all things)

So in a surprising turn of events, Spore has already unseated WAR as the top sold game in the US. I don't need to mention that this is an astonishing turn of events for us who were hoping WAR would rival WoW. Hopefully it continues in second place for a while at least though and garners enough support to make WoW nervous. As a point of reference. WoW was the number 1 selling game (and still sells well) for a long long time after it launched.

In other news, people are whining about something or another (levelling from PVE is slow IMO, dps levels faster than other classes, chat sucks, but has gotten better by a small margin, etc etc) but all in all still enjoying WAR.

I enjoy WAR on my newish pc, but I can't even play it on my older pc's which will run games with better graphics than WAR, there's something goofy going on here... If they really want to sell well they need to make it run good (no CTD's) on old machines. (ones that meet the minimum reqs) Stat!

WAR and Lotro musings

Fun War article:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2008/10/06/play-logs-week-seven-of-warhammer-online-pc

Fun Lotro articles:
http://www.warcry.com/articles/view/previews/5333-LotRO-Mines-of-Moria-Play-Session
http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/45334

And a Balrog video just to top off the tanks: (must view!)
http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/45291

Lastly, my own rambling commentary:

First of all the Balrog looks freaking awesome. Nuff said, go listen to him tell you how grumpy his bunions have made him from sitting there waiting to be let out.

Second: Mines of Moria is starting to get me excited.

Third: WAR already has me excited to explore it, although there at lots and lots and lots of issues with it, I still love exploring and I love besieging stuff. I just wonder how long WAR will hold its appeal. The T4 content is as yet untested and fallow for the most part, although a group did manage to break through to Altdork on Karak Ten Peaks, they didn't finish the PQ's there (lazy sluggards) and hence didn't get to sack anything. They were defeated by the PVE. How pathetic. They give Destruction a bad name. Hopefully City burnings and churnings will become common soon and then Mythic in the burning death that ensues will come to their senses and change something somewhere.

Naturally they fixed the keep door bug and other easy things right away but they really need to do something in addition because once Destruction owns the whole map, Order will be hard pressed to take it back from a side that is dying for them to try it.

Fourth: Tier 1 Openrvr = broken and wasted content. I hear Tier 2 is better though. I have something to say about this. They really really should have not done it this way. It is important to make an impression fast and you want to play your trump cards quick in an MMO. In all honesty, I think it would have been the best decision for them to have keep sieges, awesome ones, in ALL tiers of content. They may yet fix this, but it has seriously weakened the only thing that many players will see before they quit until they do fix it.

Fifth: Scenarios are great. They may even be too great. I need to get into some Open world RVR soon somewhere before I decide that this game would have been better as a TeamFortress style client with no PVE :P. The PQ's range from "gaming theory success" to "mindless but pleasing solo grind with a long reset" depending on who's around. All in all I'm not sure if I like them and their long term effects or not.

The PVE quests are too much more of the same and you don't level fast enough anymore. They had it right in beta and then slowed it down too much. WoW had more variety. Lotro had more variety. Why can't WAR have more variety? At least there are some caverns and stuff to explore though. I miss WoW's ladder dungeons.

Final rant: Pushing through people. This is dumb. You shouldn't be able to push through the enemy. Nuff said. Fun tip to tanks: Slowly slowly back up and the extra clever ones will keep trying to push through you and wont be able to cuz it keeps resetting. Pushing through friends is fine though.

Final positive thing to end on a positive note: WAR is fun. You should definitely try it. You might even enjoy it. DPS and ironbreakers and black orcs and archmages/shamans ftw.

WAR is free style

Over at "Mystic Worlds" the blogger there put into words something I have been thinking about for a while. Read the article about free style here.

This is an interesting concept. Frankly I have sought freedom at every turn instead of elitism. Vanguard promised it but didn't really quite deliver. Runescape and many other games promised a freedom to do things your way instead of their way but then tricked you into questign becaus ethat was the optimal path for advancement. How does WAR do in this regard? Well its almost fre-style. You can rvr and get gear and exp, you can do scenarios and get teh best exp and ok gear, or you can do Public Quests and get some of the best gear and not so great exp, or you can do quests and get junk gear but decent exp.

Eventually the best gear is supposed to come from RVR which makes me wonder how free style it will remain, since you need people to let you into their group for that. But most people seem willing to group so I'm not worried.



p.s. I am however worried about realm balance (order versus destruction) what do you think? will Destruction be better geared than Order since the best gear comes from RVR and Destruction pwns at rvr so far?