Ganked versus Pwned 2

After rereading my previous post just now; I should have been more careful writing it. The key element that differentiates being ganked and being pwned is expectation.

Just because you are a 3rd level character and you are killed by a 75th level character doesn’t mean you were ganked.

If you walked up and smacked the 75th level character and he turned around and killed you just by raising his eyebrow, you were pwned. If you were wandering around in an area of the game mean for characters of that level and one of them popped your head off as he rode by, you were pwned. You should know better in these cases. You deserved to get beaten. You brought it on yourself. Did you really expect thing to happen differently?

-Now for my answers to the 5 situation questions:

1. You have a group of high level players hiding out at the crossroads and along comes a lower level player picking flowers. Your “gank” group leaps out and starts smacking him around when suddenly his allies who were just using him as bait teleport in and kill you and your team.

You’re expectation was that there would be a fight. You instigated the fight, you just didn’t realize they were not only expecting it as well, they were also better prepared. You were pwned.

An even more complicated example of that situation happened to me in WoW last month. I was on an alternate low level character grinding through some quest mobs when a character of my level that was flagged for PvP kept trying to steal my mobs. Because we are on a PvE server he can’t attack me because I am not flagged for PvP until I attack him.

Now, I’m not a complete idiot and I knew he was just doing it to bait me into attacking him. And eventually when I was finished I thought I would toss a fireball his way before running off. I didn’t want to waste time fighting him, just wanted to have the last word so to speak. As soon as that fireball hit him his friend, the high level rogue, popped out of hiding and sends me to the graveyard.

Now I felt like I was ganked. He was definitely baiting me. But it was my fault. I knew he was baiting me, I knew that the way he was baiting me was specifically against the rules but I took the bait and I got pwned.

2. You sneak into the other team’s tower and go to grab their flag when 6 opponents who were hiding behind the door fill you full of holes.

You are in the other team’s tower. Again your expectation is that there is going to be a fight. You may have hopped to avoid it by sneaking in, but you failed. You were pwned.

3. You are tooling around in the game when you wife walks by wearing that skimpy outfit she wore on the honeymoon. You chase her off into the bedroom and return to the keyboard 3 minutes later to find you were killed.

You weren’t at the computer. Your expectations have much more to do with the bird and bees than with the game. This one is a very grey area. Because you left the computer with your character in a place where he could be attacked and killed, your expectation should have been that you could be in for a fight. But I am going to say you were ganked but you deserved it.

4. You are dueling another player when suddenly he does something that causes the game to bug out and kill you.

This one may seem like a grey area. Obviously your expectation is for a fight by the fact that you are dueling. But taking advantage of a bug is an exploit and not only completely unfair but should get the other player suspended or banned from the game. Exploits are outside of your expectation of the game. You were ganked.

5. A game master is in the game doing a story event of some sort. You decide to attack him with your meteor showers of instant death. But it doesn’t have any effect on his character and he turns and kills you with a developer command.

What did you think would happen? You attacked a GM. You were attempting to disrupt an in game event. You expectation should have been that you were going to get pwned and you were.

Ganked versus Pwned

After last E3 it became clear to me that way to many people don’t know the difference between being “ganked” and being “pwned.” These are two completely different ways of getting your butt kicked online, they do not mean the same thing.

For example in my upcoming game Fury, we advertise there is no “ganking.” But that doesn’t mean you aren’t going to get “pwned.” So let’s see if we can straighten this out.

First off let me preface this by say that for the purpose of this discussion I don’t care about the origin of the terms, who is credited with first coining them or what other uses they have besides how they are applied to gaming. I just want to stop them from blurring together and becoming synonymous when applied to being defeated.

That being said lets look at ganked and pwned on Urban Dictionary. You can kind of see the difference in the two words but there is way to much signal to noise on that site.

So now let’s try Wikipedia where we find ganked and pwned. Those are much better definitions.

Do you see the difference?

“Ganking” is when a player or players use a massive and unfair advantage to defeat another player. The defeated player wasn’t expecting to be in a fight and didn’t really stand a chance.

“Pwned” is soundly defeating a prepared opponent. The loser may have been caught by a surprise tactic, he may not really have stood a chance against the better player that defeated him, but he knew he would be in for a fight and got beat bad.

Examples of being Ganked: (Edited after I put up next post)
• You are jumped and killed and killed by a much more powerful character in a place where you thought you were safe from PvP.
• You are defeated while AFK (edit: very grey area, if you left your character somewhere he was vulnerable and that means you don't have the 'unexpected' excuse. But killing somebody who is AFK is pretty lame so I'll go ahead and say you were ganked. You deserved it though.)
• You opponent takes advantage of a exploit to defeat you
• You are attacked by surprise and caught completely unprepared and are defeated before you even knew what was going on
• You are tricked into performing what the game thinks is a hostile action in an area where NPCs will kill you if you do hostile actions
• You are attacked while you are already fighting another player or NPC and defeated

Examples of being Pwned:
• You duel somebody and they defeat you without taking much damage
• You jump out of the bushes in an attempt to gank a lower level player and he kills you instead
• You do something really stupid and your opponent defeats you.
• You talk a lot of smack about how you are going to defeat your opponent and he beats you

I guess it is important to mention some examples that are neither ganked or pwned. These are just cases where you won and dancing around saying pwned them will just make you look stupid and if he starts whining that you ganked him makes him an idiot:
• You are dueling somebody and beat them but not by a lot nor by any superior playing on your part
• You are fighting another player and defeat him by accident caused by some advantage that neither of you was aware of
• You defeat a more powerful opponent who was already just about dead from another fight

Now let’s have a quiz.

1. You have a group of high level players hiding out at the crossroads and along comes a lower level player picking flowers. Your “gank” group leaps out and starts smacking him around when suddenly his allies who were just using him as bait teleport in and kill you and your team. Were you ganked or pwned?

2. You sneak into the other team’s tower and go to grab their flag when 6 opponents who were hiding behind the door fill you full of holes. Were you ganked or pwned?

3. You are tooling around in the game when you wife walks by wearing that skimpy outfit she wore on the honeymoon. You chase her off into the bedroom and return to the keyboard 3 minutes later to find you were killed. Were you ganked or pwned?

4. You are dueling another player when suddenly he does something that causes the game to bug out and kill you. Were you ganked or pwned?

5. A game master is in the game doing a story event of some sort. You decide to attack him with your meteor showers of instant death. But it doesn’t have any effect on his character and he turns and kills you with a developer command. Were you ganked or pwned?

Post your answers in the comments.

Various Stuff

The Warcry Network has a video interview with our lead designer, Adam Carpenter. It was done in the very tiny and cramped office we had at our booth at E3 and the audio is really bad with the loud clamor of E3 in the background.

I hung out yesterday with Anthony Costoro, aka Sunsword, who’s blog “Sunsword’s Edge" is linked over there on the right. Got to talk a lot about things going on in the industry and the people we know in common.

We also went and saw Superman Returns. FYI: Superman's costume is bullet proof but not Kryponite proof. Thumbs up though, I liked it.

George Hincapie took the yellow jersey after stage 1 yesterday so I am wearing my Team Discovery Channel bike team jersey to work today. People always give me funny looks when I wear bike team jerseys but people wear football (rugby or AFL downunder) jerseys and they all think that is fine! Well the Team Discovery Channel jersey isn’t as odd looking as the U.S. Postal Team’s Jersey. Having that big U.S. Postal logo on the front is kind of odd. When I bought my Trek 5200 I had the option of buying it as the Lance Armstrong special edition but I just couldn’t get over having all those U.S. Postal logos on it. It made me think I should be delivering the mail.

2006 Tour de France

I just found out I had missed the prologue of the Tour de France. I had checked up on the Tour website last week but completely forgot that it started yesterday. I’m watching stage 1 live as I write this.

In years past I was able to listen to the previous stages audio at work but last year the Outdoor Life Network (the US cable TV station that broadcasts the Tour) didn’t offer it. I’ll have to do some web surfing tomorrow to see if somebody is offering it this year.

Lance Armstrong isn’t racing anymore but I am going to stick with Team Discovery Channel, formerly the US Postal team. They were running a bunch of humorous commercials and webisodes of “The Race to Replace Lance” that lead up to their announcing the team makeup for this year’s race. George Hincapie who is an American and former main Lance Armstrong teammate is my favorite this year. He came in second in the prologue stage by .73 seconds. I like the idea that US riders have been doing so well in the tour.

The Tour website is offering a Tour De France video game. You play the part of team manager. I’d buy it if I thought I had any time to actually play it.

Fury's First Fan Site

Sorry to keep posting mostly Fury press stuff but honestly nothing much else is happening. Being the middle of Summer down under it is freezing and I spend most of my time shivering while wrapped in blankets and wishing my computers generated more heat.

RPGVault has a small post with a video of our game: Fury. The video shows two in game characters slugging it out. It really overly impressive as they are just standing there dishing out damage, but it shows off some of the effects in the game.

Firing Squad has an interview with Paul Whipp our producer.

I was reading through the comments on the MMORPG interview with our Lead Designer Adam Carpenter that I posted last week and found out that we have our first fan site: The Fury Sanctuary.

Magic the Gathering Online Crap

Warning!!! Long Rambling Post!!! Warning!!!

So I decided to check out Magic the Gathering Online. They had their booth next to ours at E3 and were giving away copies of their retail box but by the time I was able to get over there they were all gone.

I found that I could just download the game from their site and didn’t need the box. Normally I like having a box because if I am going to shell out money I want something I can hold in my hands in return. But I’m slowly getting over that. It was the beginning of a lesson in how not to set up your game service.

Before I begin here is how their game works as far as money goes. You pay $9.99 for the account and then you can play for free but you have to buy the cards online. I believe once you are in the game you can buy the booster packs and pre-made decks from inside the client but since I haven’t gotten into the game I don’t know that for sure.

I also have to ask what kind of sign up system they were after when they designed this. I imagine what they wanted is a system where they can easily grab a casual player who is curious about the game and then hope to hook him into continue playing, pretty standard stuff. But what they have set up has way too many hoops. They aren’t really difficult hoops and you can’t expect a hoop free system, although that is possible if you design it right, but this one has annoyed me enough that I’ve decided to ramble on complaining about it. I hope your not bored enough to actually read this. Just so you know I probably won't be proof reading it either. You were warned...

First I downloaded the self extracting zip file. No problem there. I execute it and it unzips itself into its default directory and then launches the game. Now I don’t know what was in that zip file which was only 39mb in size but it wasn’t enough. The game spent over an hour patching. OVER AN HOUR!!! It might have even been two hours I didn't really pay attention to when I started.

Okay so now it has finally finished patching and the log in screen pops up. It does have an option for a free trial but I decide to just shell out the $9.99 and get an account. Now here is another big hoop: their online store. It isn’t built into the client it is a web page store. Now this is just a little thing, but remember we are trying to “grab a casual player”. I have to figure out what I’m buying which is the Magic the Gathering Account. Its kind of an esoteric concept that might lose Timmy’s dad who just bought little Timmy the game for his birthday.

But that isn’t it. I HAVE to fill out their little survey before I am allowed to buy this item. I am thinking okay this data is important to them I guess… but obviously not since it looks to have been several years since they update it. One of the final questions asks me what other online MMO games I play and none of the options are any game that has come out in the last two years. World of Warcraft isn’t mentioned, No Everquest II, etc.

Now I have bought an account. I don’t remember the exact steps here but I believe it sent me the account email at that point where I get my password. I am not sure though because when I look back at the text that I saved from the store it says:

Congratulations, you are now a registered player of Magic: The Gathering Online. Launch your Magic Online program, enter the user name and password you created at the beginning of this process and click "Log In" to begin playing!

I didn’t create a password at the beginning of the process. The password was sent to me in the email"

Thank you for requesting an account at the Magic Online Store. With
thousands of creatures, ever-evolving strategies, and 24/7 access to
opponents, Magic Online is the ultimate online competition.

Now that your Login Name and Password are created, we need to complete your account setup. Listed below is your Login name and a system-generated password. For full, step-by-step instructions on account creation, please visit

http://magiconlinestore.wizards.com/help/start.asp.

System generated password, not password I created. And do you see any problem with that link? The period is part of the link which brings you to a page not found.

Somewhere in the activation process I also had to detail how I got my account as either from a retail box, the online store purchase, or something else. I’m not sure why.

What ever it was I figured it out and tried to login to the game.

Cannot establish a connection to the server. Either the server is offline or you have lost your connection to the internet. If the server is offline, try again in a few minutes.

My internet connection is fine. But I am wondering if the server is down or it needs me to open a port on my router. Now there isn’t a help or website link on their launcher. So I navigate back through their maze of Wizard of the Coasts website to the Magic the Gathering Online site not to be confused with the Magic the Gathering normal website. I find their forum and see a sticky thread on the top of the general forum list. Here is the first post by the Moderator WizO Jabberwock who uses a picture of Chuck Noris as his avatar:

Title: The “Is the Server Up?” Status Thread

In an effort to help with the boards slow down and searching we have closed the old thread and starting a new one.
This thread is a running list to check and see if the server seems to be up or down.

Please remember that there is usually a planned downtime every Thursday and the server will be unavailable for a period of time.
Check the announcements forum for details on the planned downtimes.

Check this thread, usually the last couple of pages, and the dates of the posts to see if there are connection problems to the game server.

Edit:
Also note that the online status checker on the Magic Online page seems to be contradictory in many cases. This is likely caused because it reports whether the server itself is up. Even if the server itself is up, it may not be accepting user logins. So rule of thumb:
The status thing says down = down for everyone
The status thing says up = may be up but you can't log in, give it time

You get that? There was another thread, one that I gather had somewhere around 4000 posts was closed and this new one was started. I don’t know how many posts this one has but it is up to 27 pages already. Notice too that their “online status checker” is often wrong. I’d say what’s the point of having one then but since I can’t find any such thing on their page I guess it’s a moot point. If you find it please feel free to tell me where it is.

So then there is a this post in the announcement forum which I probably should have gone to first.

It basically says there is a one hour downtime on Thursday at 8 AM PDT. It is Thursday for me… but I’m way ahead of PDT and I don’t’ think its 8 AM yet. It also said it would last only and hour and I have been trying to log in for several hours.

I did get another email from them giving me a $9.99 credit in their store that can be used to buy cards.

Okay so now here is the how I would do it differently part.

The zip file should be updated. As long as it is under 1 gig that is fine for somebody who wants to download it. It would really piss me off if I had started to download before going to bed or something thinking when I got back to it I could just install and run it only to have to wait another 2 hours for it to update.

At best I would build the purchase of the account into the client at worse I would at least remove it from the web store. It could still be a web store behind the scenes but hide that part from the user. Just have a special page where he can enter his billing information and click for the one time purchase of the account. The selecting of the item to buy from the store and being force to take useless survey are just hurdles to them getting my money and getting me addicted to the game. Remember currently you can play the trial game without buying an account so having it set up so that I can be playing the trial and instantly click the "buy a full account" link inside the client would be the easist for the user.

When I create my account, THAT is when you send me the survey in email and tell me that if I fill it out you will give me the store credit.

The launcher needs lots of work. First you need a link to your website which should have an actual working server status display right there on the main page. Second a “help” link that takes you to the customer service web page. It should also have a little news announcement section that has links to the latest news and happenings. These are all the standard things you find on the current MMO launchers.

I would also update their title and launcher artwork as it is looking a little early 90’s.

Okay I am done rambling. Its 11:30 and I still can’t log into the game… well let me try… nope still can’t get in.

IGN Part 2

Part 2 of the IGN interview is up.

Aw crap, found a typo in one of mine!

Another Interview and some footage from our Both at E3

RPG Vault has part 1 of an interview with Adam Carpenter, Paul Whipp and myself. It has been up for a few days now and I expect part 2 to follow pretty soon.

Warcry.com has 4 videos of our both from E3. They show lots of FURY game-play footage, our booth babes, and an occasional shot of me from behind or on the very edge of the frame. The first two are just general shorts and the next two are the 4 versus 4 finals and then the 1 versus 1 Grand Championship of the Show!

Australian Gamer

Just got back from my hair stylist (little trim fixing up those roots) and found another sneak-peak review of Fury over at Australian Gamer. It even has some shots of the Auran offices.

I mention the offices because Auran's lease is up at the end of the year. There has been some discussion about possibly moving. I know the people that own the building would probably love for us to go so they can convert the top floor into luxury apartments. The pictures on the site don't do the office the injustice it deserves. The place is old, dirty and impossible to heat or cool. However the location is great and a lot of people, me included, live within walking distance. I would like to see them move into new digs, but only if it is close by. Right now I live too close. Walking to work isn’t really a walk; it is shorter than the walk Bellagio hotel employees have to walk from the employee parking lot to various departments inside the casino. I wouldn’t mind a distance that would make riding my bike in worth it.

Fury Press

Two more sneak peak reviews of our upcoming Massively Multiplayer Online game FURY have popped up. A small one at Gamespy (on page two) and a more detailed one at MMORPG.COM.

Fury also got a really nice review in this month's PC PowerPlay. Though it is also the issue where they list the Top 100 PC games that you could boot up and play today. I mention this with sour derision as there are a few titles they should be shot for not including. Where is Eye of the Beholder? Where is The Secret of Monkey Island?

Share and enjoy.

Bob Saget Renaissance

I just saw a hilarious hardcore rap video about Bob Saget (NSFW). Yes that’s right, Mr. Bob – American’s Funniest Home Videos & Full House – Saget.

A few weeks ago I caught his guest appearance on the Showtime show Huff where he played an actor who is famous for being the Dad on American’s most loved family sitcom, only off the show he is a cokes up wacko who likes midget hookers. I say I caught it a few weeks ago as in I saw it here in Australia as part of their late night television and I have no idea how far that episode is behind the actual show on Showtime.

I also hear his version of ‘the joke’ in the movie The Aristocrats was great, but I haven’t seen it. If you haven’t heard of this movie, the set up is one hundred comedians tell the same very, VERY dirty, filthy joke--one shared privately by comedians since Vaudeville. I’m told it’s a standard joke told backstage as a warm up before comedians go on with the game being to drag it out as far as you can while making it as dirty as you can. Bob's version is supposedly not only the funniest but also the longest and dirtiest in the movie.

He had a small but shocking bit in the movie Half Baked where his line "I used to suck dick for coke" has become legendary.

He is also writing and directing a parody of March of the Penquins titled: Farce of the Penquins. It is the story of "one penguin's search for love while on a 70-mile (112-km) trek with his libidinous buddies on their way to a hedonistic mating ritual." The tag line being "What happens in Antarctica…stays in Antarctica"

Bob Saget started out in L.A.'s world famous Groundlings improv troupe! I am told his original stand-up routines were pretty hardcore and has never been the straight arrow those two shows painted him as. I don’t mean that in any sort of negative way. I’m just picturing what a rut he must have gotten into after those shows, though I'm sure the money was pretty good especially with them in syndication.

I don’t what’s going on now, if this sudden resurgence is some slick Hollywood PR firm doing an image make-over of he is just doing this on his own. I hope it works for him. I think there might be some really good entertainment in Saget that I would like to see.

Bob Saget - Wikipedia entry

HTML Tinkering

It may have looked like I’ve been slacking and not doing anything with the blog, but the truth is I’ve been tinkering with the HTML. Thanks to the help of my friend Cameron if you view the blog in 1024x768 or smaller the content won’t be printed on top of the blue left border anymore.

There was a bit of a fight getting it to work in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. It looked like a fight we had lost but it would appear that we were just testing on an older version of IE at work because it all seems just fine from every other machine I’ve looked at it on.

The only thing still funky is that if you squish the window the “Working As Designed” logo shows that it is drawn on a white square. I think I can live with that since making it a .GIF file with a transparent background would limit the number of colors which in turn would make the subtle shading and drop shadow on the letters look like crap.

Game Informer Leaks More Wii News

I started to title this "Game Informer leaks Wii" but it is amazing how quickly the Wii jokes are getting old.

Digital Battle is reporting that a leaked article from an upcoming issue of Game Informer details that the Nintendo Wii will include a Camera, Physics Processor, and Headset.

It goes on to mention that the built in camera is to allow you to take snapshots of yourself so you can put your own face on character models in the game. This is supported by a previous interview Shigeru Miyamoto did with MTV.

I am involved in the "Wii Sports" series. Although these really aren't new characters so to speak, the "Wii Sports" series features these little models which you can put your own faces on ... and then you may start to see those characters, with faces you've created, appearing in different games on the Wii system.

The post is only 4 paragraphs but does mention some other specs of the machine. I am not sure where the actual leaked article was posted but it would seem that it has been taken down.

Oh God Won't It Ever Stop?

I am sure you, my host of imaginary readers, are quite tired of nothing but post after post of Fury press links, but here are some more:

RPG Vault has their E3 First Impression of Fury and they should be doing a full write up very soon.

We have a two page spread in the Australian game magazine PC PowerPlay #127. Though I am going to have to have a little talk with them about their list of the 100 games that make gamers. They have a few odd choices, some that are obviously in the wrong spot, and some glaring omissions!

But the big scoop is Multi-Player Online Game List (MPOGL.COM) who got an interview with yours truly. Some of these other links I’ve posted where based on interviews with me, but they were just written as normal write-ups where this is the first that is done as an actual interview.

Would you believe... even more Fury links!

I have a few more E3 reviews about Fury:

The first is from The Game Feed which I believe is one of the interviews I personally did. I was really just working the floor and only did a few actual sit down interviews.

Gamebunny has a recap of various MMO’s (including Fury) at E3 though I believe Fury is rated the lowest in the list.

Warcry just has a little blurb, but it’s very tasty.

Society of Gamers has a good write up.

Somebody started a thread on the Beyond Unreal forum that talks about Fury. There are a number of harsh comments some of which may have merit but some are based on ignorance.

More FURY press

Going into E3, you are always wondering what will be the game that no one is hearing or talking about, but once you play it, all you can do is gasp at this hidden gem in front of you. Lo’ and behold, we found such a game when visiting Australian developer, Auran, for a look at their newest project in Fury.

Thats from a nice little write up over at OMGN.

Here is a link to an interview with our producer Paul Whipp at My Gamer where you can harvest some more details about the game and see a few new screenshots.

There is also a little snippet over at MMOSite where our boss details what our goals were for E3, not really that interesting except there is a picture of Bob doing caricatures of two hot booth babes. Bob was incredible, he was working non-stop all three days, did an estimated 400 caricatures (some of which were duel caricatures, two people on one sheet) and went through 12 black markers.

I see now that we have updated the News page on the FURY site and that picture of Bob is there as well as a few more pictures of our booth (yes that is our booth babe Crystal playing the game, she also plays a warrior in WoW) and a team shot that we took after sneaking into the Conan booth.

You know one think I've noticed about the press this E3, they weren’t on top of it doing the minute by minute, blow by blow stuff this year like they had in previous years. I remember last year you could go to almost any of the big sites and get huge updates and reviews every hour during the show and big round-up posts after the show. This year a lot of the site's daily updates did nothing but tell us about all the great reviews they were going to post later and they are still trickling in over a week later and their nightly round-up posts did little more than tell us how tired they were from the show and how much their co-workers drank at the various parties. Was the big bang stuff just not generating enough traffic? I'm not complaining too much because having a few new things to read everyday does feel better than having it all shot-gunned at me at once.

I only bring it up because I am waiting on a few interviews that I did for various sites. These interviews went on for a decent amount of time, they grilled me with a host of questions about the game and they took copious amounts notes and yet nothing has appeared on their sites. What gives?

A Fury over Wonder Woman's Rear End

Another review of FURY from E3 has popped up over at Gamers Info and Worth Playing has put a number of new screenshots. The interface shown in some of them are from the pre-E3 version of the game. They do however show some areas that wern't shown on the floor at E3.

On the pure entertainment side Ten Ton Hammer has an article about Wonder Woman being removed from the convention floor by E3 Security for showing too much ass. It is a hilarious must read.

MMORPG.COM's E3 2006 Awards

MMORPG.com has their E3 2006 Awards up. Fury got the award for “Most Surprising” game of the show.

This category wasn't even close. If any game came out of left field to grab us, it was Auran's Fury. They're off to a good start.

Fury also got honorable mention for “Best Graphics” though I can see why we didn't win if they are using that horrible screenshot. Our faces look much better than that now.

We also got honorable mention for “Best of Show” with this quote:

It just looks fun. There is no other way to describe it. Auran's entry at E3 2006 looks like a blast. It's visually appealing and further along then anyone expected. Auran may have a darkhorse hit on their hands here.

Not too bad for a last minute show version thrown together for a game that is still over a year out.

iScrewed

My problem began when I realized the Australian version of the iTunes store sucks. It just doesn’t have the content that I want and can find at the American store. I had already downloaded two audio books by the time I figured out that the American store has a whole lot more of what I am looking for. For example the only George R. R. Martin book I can purchase is Skin Trade at the Australian store. Skin Trade is a short story published in Night Vision Vol. 5. While at the American store I can also get A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings, the first two books in his series “A Song of Ice and Fire.”

I purchased A Game of Thrones from the American store for $51.95 USD. Looking up the book on Amazon.com I see the cassette unabridged* audio version lists for $54.95 USD but they are offering it for $34.62 USD plus shipping. Shipping, even shipping to Australia isn’t going to make this cost more than $50 bucks!

Now according to iTunes I am only purchasing the ability to download the book once and I can only authorize a maximum of 5 computers to play it. When I bought and downloaded the book I was using my laptop in a hotel in LA after signing up for another account using a credit card with a US billing address. Now let’s suppose something happened to my laptop between there and home, tough cookies. Granted if I had bought the book either in paperback ($3.99 USD from Amazon btw) or the cassette/CD audio version and had it stolen out of my suitcase (as was the case with CD audio version of Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman my previous trip) I would also be screwed.

So what am I paying that extra money for then? Downloading the audio version of a book cost the publisher much less money than either the print or physical recording of the audio version.

Let’s break it down:

All versions of the story have the same basic costs to the publisher: producing, editing, author’s cut, etc. Once that is done you have a collection of words that make up this story. There is also the basic cost of paying an artist to do a cover and what ever money you spend on marketing. Again no mater what version of the story you are talking about these things are exactly the same.

The print version has the cost of actually printing it; ink, paper, binding and what ever cost are incurred by running the printing press itself.

Now for the Audio version of the book there is the additional cost of recording the reader. Money paid to the voice actor, recording studio, producer, and audio technicians. I am not so naive to think that you would get anywhere near the same quality by just having your friend read the book into a mic. There is a good deal of money to be spent doing that right, but that is a one time cost. Once that part is paid for it is done. No mater how many versions of the audio version you sell you never have to pay any of that again.

For the cassette and CD version you have to get the masters to a duplication company. I don’t know the difference between how much it costs to burn a CD, record and audio tape versus a printer. I do know that burning a CD is quicker and cost a hell of lot less than making cassette versions. Somewhere in here you do have to have a printer make your package and then assemble it with the CDs or cassettes.

Then there is the real costly part, shipping. The product is shipped from the printer/package assembler to the distributor and from there to all the stores across the world. Paper books are heavy and therefore cost more to ship than either CD or cassette version. Once at the store there is a slight mark up so that the store actually makes some money. Remember they have to pay rent for the store space, pay employees to stock the shelves, man the cash register, etc. I do believe that most of the cost of the paper version of the book is taken up by how much it has cost the publisher to get it from the printer to the store.

In general the CD or cassette audio version costs more than the print version because they sell more versions of the print version. Less profit per item more profit via volume. The publisher cannot afford to take as big a risk with the audio version and I understand that. If the publisher produces 1 million copies of the story on CD and sells only several thousand he is screwed. This will change if the audio versions increase in popularity.

But now let’s compare that to the download version of the story. Download version has no printing/duplication cost. Download version has no shipping cost. The two biggest chunks of the pie have been removed. Granted there is bandwidth cost which is hardly anything per download. All that cost has been removed and yet no reduction in cost has been made. That is just plain greed on the part of the publisher. I’m not against greed. I am a capitalist. But I can’t help but wonder if all the problems the music industry is having now isn’t all related to the bad karma they generated when they started selling CDs. They charged more for CDs even through records and cassettes cost more to produce.

So back to the audio book download. As the final consumer I am paying MORE for the digital download from iTunes than I would pay for the same audio version on cassette from Amazon including shipping which cost more to make than the same audio version on CD AND I have to put up with their terms on how I am allowed to listen to the story AND I can only play it on their iTunes or iPod player AND I have nothing physical to show for my purchase nor any guarantee that if something were to happen to my computer that they wouldn’t let me re-download it. They suggest I burn my own copy onto CD for backup which I wouldn’t mind so much if they didn’t have their own proprietary audio format and convoluted directory structure that prevents me from just copy files back and forth into the iTunes directory.

I bought the collector’s edition of the PC game Halflife 2. I got the book, the crappy tshirt and a physical CD. Now I have separate issues about how I have to have the CD in the drive as well as log into Steam to play the damn game, but I do have something physical in my hands. If their company goes away I still have the CD.

If Apples goes away how would I authorize another computer to play the stuff I have downloaded from them? What if the computer I want to authorize doesn’t have net access? What if I just said fuck you Apple and went to all the hack sites out there and did what I want with the items I have purchased.

This is all brought on by the fact that I wrote an email to iTunes customer support. I don’t want to have to keep my Australian iTunes account just to be able to play the two things I purchased from Australian store. Both those items are offered from the American store. I asked to have the authorization of those two items transferred to my American store account. The nicely copy and pasted response was more than happy to point me toward the web site with their terms of service. I disagree, I paid for it and I will do with it what I like which incidentally does not include letting other people copy it because I feel that is wrong.

*You can assume I am always talking about the unabridged version of audio books unless I say otherwise.

G4's Hottest Booth Babe Poll

The G4 site has a poll for hottest booth babes. Unfortunately the picture of the FURY girls is pretty plain so I don’t expect we will get many votes from people who didn’t see them in person. You should feel free to head over there and unleash your own fury.

Put Down by 1UP

I found another review on 1UP.com today. The reviewer gave it a “fair” rating and saying, “An MMO... minus almost everything we like about MMOs.” He also titled the article “Less Fury than minor discontent.” But there is very little indication in his article that he took any time to actually find out anything about the game besides the fact that we had 4 versus 4 tournaments going on at the show.

Well I called him on it and posted one of my famous novel length replies which you can read for yourself if you head over there. Unfortunately I pasted my post directly from MS:Word and it turned all the apostrophes into little squares. So basically Notepad > 1UP.com’s text input. At the moment their site seems to be having some problems and it won’t let me fix it.

Oh and Jackson if you’ve come over here to find out who the hell just ragged on your review, I have a question for you. Looking at your collection of games in your profile I was just wondering if you played anything besides Final Fantasy?

More Small Online Press Reviews

Tyler Willis which besides the very good and detailed review of FURY at the very bottom has another section in the middle of this long 2nd day diary posting that talks about the game and our booth babes. In his 3rd day diary posting he gives out his awards with FURY scoring “Hottest Booth Babes.”

OnRPG who says we are his “underdog hit of the show.” Ten Ton Hammer also has a decent write up of the game. Now I can't leave out MeriStation which has a review up in Spanish. Here is Google’s horrible and somewhat amusing attempt to translate from Spanish to English.

FireSquad and Stratics both have small somewhat mixed reviews of the game, but with some interesting user comments.

You will notice all of these are more indie-news sites. I have found most of the big sites that have posted anything so far just have our own marketing stuff parroted back almost word for word. I'll let you in on an industry secret, that’s how it works for a lot of the magazines too. Lots of companies basically get to write their own reviews. I don't think it has anything to do with money under the table or buying advertising space, I think its more about just not having the man power to write all that stuff themselves. It could also be a little laziness on the part of the journalist too. In our case it could have a lot to do with being a relativly unknown company (last big hit being Dark Reign) with a game that is still at least a year out.

There is a site, or at least was because I can't seem to find it now, that was supposed to collect video game media reviews that were just obvious bias pieces of crap in an attempt to take the media to task. I did find this site while looking though, Video Game Media Watch which is pretty interesting. If anybody knows where I can find that other site, please pass along the URL, thanks.

Anyway, back to FURY here are two Australian newspaper's online sites with mention of the game:
Courier Mail which also has some TV video interviews with Tony our boss and the Herald Sun which has a general article on Australian Game Development and E3 with one line about Fury at bottom.

Here is a link to the full sized FURY trailer on File Planet. This is the same, but now compressed and much smaller trailer that was put up pre-E3. The person who uploaded it assumed they would compress it into what ever format they thought best but that wasn't the case. Sorry to the 500ish people who downloaded that gigantic file.

And here is another picture of our great booth babes at the "Babes and Booths of E3 3006" feature from GameSpy.com.

None of the reviews have mentioned our two DJ's who were awesome. I was skeptical about the idea at first, but they did a great job at drawing people in and keeping the 4 versus 4 tournaments going non-stop.

You will notice some confusing in a lot of the reviews about what the name of our game actually is. The game is called "FURY" but is often mistakenly referred to as "Unleash the Fury" which is our tag line. The reason for this is because in a fit of unchecked last minute marketing fury the actual name of the game wasn't really displayed anywhere. We had the "F" logo and the tagline on everything, but only the character name plates on the monitors and Bob's caricature papers displayed the game's title in a way that made it clear that was the title.

Now this could have been worse. You could have been Gameloft who is doing a cell phone game called Paris Hilton's Jewel Jam. You see Paris showed up at E3 to promote the game and said, "I'm really excited to have my new video game, Diamond Quest. Thank you all for coming and you can download the game."

And let me add this little story: When Paris showed up at the Gameloft booth they had a huge line of people gather to see her. Security blocked off some of the isles and entrance/exits from the hall to accommodate this. This also had the effect of almost completely cutting off the Eve Online booth which was in the corner next to Gameloft.

To get to the Eve Online booth you had to enter the hall somewhere to the right of the Gameloft booth, go past them, then cut all the way back to the left circling back up along the far left wall. If I was the Eve Online guys I would have demanded my booth space money back for the day.

Early Press and Banner Ads

I just got back from E3 a few hours ago. I didn't bring my wireless card with me figuring I would just use my eithernet cable to connect my laptop to the internet in the hotel room. The hotel unfortunately only had wireless internet. I found out later that I could get a eithernet to wireless hub from the front desk but that was already my last night and I only had time to download an audio book from iTunes before I had to get some sleep.

I just did a quick Google search and found two reviews of the game already up at MMORPG.COM and OMGN. Warcry has a banner ad up... well at it did. I am trying to see it again and all I'm getting as I keep refreshing the site is one for The Legend of Ares and an occasionally one for Dungeons & Dragons Online. Oh wait there it is. There are 3 banner ads, two normal horizontal ones, and a vertical one.

I will try and put the banners up here in a minute, just want to fix the site so that the posts aren’t over in the blue sidebar if you are viewing the blog in 1024x768 screen size.

I am completely exhausted but am going to try and stay awake till my normal bed time so I can get my body back on Australian time.

SoE Working to Co-Publish Vangard with Sigil.

Sigil Games Online and Sony Online Entertainment announced that Sigil is working with Microsoft Game Studios on an arrangement to acquire the rights Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. These efforts have resulted in a tentative agreement for Vanguard to be co-published by both Sigil Games Online and SOE. All three companies will be showing the game at the upcoming Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) as they work closely together for a successful transition.

You can read the full press release here.

Microsoft Unexciting

John Dvorak has an opinion column up talking about general malaise of Microsoft and how the company is losing its direction and is dead in the water at the moment. I have to say I pretty much agree with his points. I bring this up because of several discussions I’ve had with friends in the past about why I wasn’t worried about the Microsoft take over of the world. This is what always happens. Company grows and grows; it takes over its competition by either destroying them or just buying them up. It starts to look like that company is going to be unstoppable. But then it reaches critical mass and can’t sustain its own gigantic weight and starts to fall apart.

Most people I’ve talked to generally agree that does always seem to be what happens. But some of said they are worried about that one company that will make it over the line. In this dooms day scenario the company does turn into the semi-incompetent behemoth, but they have already destroyed the industry, crushed all competition and we become stuck with them.

I can never see that happening. There will always be cracks in such a mammoth company and in those cracks new and wonderful things will take root, grow, and crack open that rock. Remember Microsoft itself was just such a weed that grew out of poor business decision made by then giant IBM.

FURY Website is Now LIVE!!!

The FURY teaser site is now live! Not much there at the moment as it is just a teaser site but more will be added next week during E3. I know we have some really really cool in-game movies to put up.

The game will be playable at booth #2240 in the West Hall. That is "playable" as in we are letting people play it, not just showing movies or only letting you watch while we play it.

Hope to see you there so I can kick your butt in game and keep checking www.unleashthefury.com for more info!

Legal Trouble

I have found several conflicting stories about a court case in Korea involving Lineage 2 accounts having been hacked awhile back. It turned out that NCSoft, the game’s developer, had forgotten to encrypt the database log file that contained user names and passwords.

Some of the news stories out there seem to be blurring another story of Lineage I accounts having been hacked and yet another story about how stolen identity information was used to create a large number of Lineage accounts.

The issue I wanted to talk about is the resulting Korean court verdict last week that has ordered NCSoft to pay an equivalent of $530 to 5 players who have sued NCSoft over the issue. NCSoft will probably appeal the verdict and you can read about at the Korea Times.

They mention how it is a lose – lose situation for NCSoft. If they go along with the verdict it just opens the door for other players to sue over the same issue. Some of the confusion that blurred multiple stories together implies that 8500 accounts were hacked! But in the linked story you find out that no, it just made your account information data vulnerable on the any machine you played on between May 11th and May 16th. So if you were a Korean player who logged into the game using an internet café (which is very common in Korea) you user name and password were stored in an unencrypted file on that computer.

NCSoft has pointed out that the 5 players who won their case did not prove any practical damage. Now that could mean several things. It could mean that nobody got a hold of their account information and they are just suing because it was vulnerable during that time period. It could also mean that yes, their accounts were accessed by somebody else who stole in-game items and/or cash from their characters but they can’t prove it. I don’t know what kind of logs NCSoft keeps that could track player character transactions in the game, but the players would have no way of presenting any sort of evidence to prove what items they may have acquired or what has since happened to them.

But this court case does set a precedence. MMO game developers are worried that the law may eventually recognize a real world value for virtual items. This is why game companies frown on buy and selling of in-game items and character for real world money. If those in-game items are worth money, player could then sue the developer when anything happens to those items. For example lets say the developers think that SwordX is overpowered and tune it down, or nerf it as we say, then the player would have a argument for suing the developer.

“SwordX sold for $50 dollars and now it only sells for $10 because you nerfed it! You owe me $40 plus compensation for my time that I spend acquiring it!”

Or how about when an item duping bug is discovered that has had a negative effect on the game’s economy? The entire player base now has grounds to sue you for the resulting economic depression caused by the faulty game code and design that allowed it to happen.

If you don’t think it’s a serious issue on the horizon take a careful lock at the State of Play site. At first glance it appears involve social issues in MMO games, and their news blog sister site Terra Nova is place where a lot of actual game creators hang out and discuss game issues. But notice who sponsors the State of Play conference and listen to some of the past talks. It’s sponsored by several law schools and the issues they are talking about are player’s rights… make that player’s legal rights in MMO games.

I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that. I kind of like the stuff being debated at the State of Play conferences because it may make these virtual worlds we play in better places. But it is a dangerous path ahead for developers. There are many players who would be willing to cut off their own nose to get a pocket full of money. A lot of people wouldn’t care that they may not only be causing the developer of the particular game they are playing to have to close the game down but that other developers may not make new games of that type for fear of falling into the same legal pit.

I have a few thoughts on some possible future scenarios for MMO games in this regard that I may jot down in the future but I think that is enough rambling for now.

I Work With These People

Things Tom Said is a blog somebody, probably one of the artists, here at Auran put up. It is all true. These are the people I work with.

Nintendo's Wii

The Nintendo Revolution has a new official name and it’s “Wii” which is pronounced “we.” This isn’t a joke. Check out the official Nintendo home page: http://revolution.nintendo.com/. They even have a little flash animation to introduce it where a few “i”’s jump and play around.

Their Official Press Release:

“Introducing... Wii.

As in "we."

While the code-name "Revolution" expressed our direction, Wii represents the answer.

Wii will break down that wall that separates video game players from everybody else.

Wii will put people more in touch with their games ... and each other. But you're probably asking: What does the name mean?

Wii sounds like "we," which emphasizes this console is for everyone.

Wii can easily be remembered by people around the world, no matter what language they speak. No confusion. No need to abbreviate. Just Wii.


Wii has a distinctive "ii" spelling that symbolizes both the unique controllers and the image of people gathering to play.

And Wii, as a name and a console, brings something revolutionary to the world of video games that sets it apart from the crowd.

So that's Wii. But now Nintendo needs you.

Because, it's really not about you or me.

It's about Wii.

And together, Wii will change everything.”

So expect the jokes to start rolling in about how we are all going to start playing with our Wii.

I wonder if they will rethink this poor choice after E3 when everybody, and I do mean everybody, comes up to their booth to make Wii jokes. “Hey, I’m from suchandsuch magazine and I’ve come to check out your Wii, oh and show me your new game system too.”

Unleash the Fury!

Auran had a booth at the convention where we were actually showing off FURY which is the game I’ve been working on. I am told the teaser web site should be up real soon with the official site up once the game is announced at E3.

Australian Gamer had a little review of Supernova where they visit our both and talk about Fury. Its on page 2 but here is the relevant section:

Next stop was the Auran booth, where another good friend of ous, Andrew, was excited to show us the first video footage of their new MMORPG game, Fury. It’s not what we expected. Although it was only a video showing the in-game graphics and gameplay, it looked like it would definitely be the kind of game to push your graphics cards to the max if you wanted. A lot of people were using the words World of Warcraft, and given that we’d heard it was a MMORPG the comparison was pretty much unavoidable. But really,it was actually nothing like WoW at all. There are no quests or gathering or vast expansive worlds to explore. All character development is done through battle, win or lose. It was much more of a Battlegrounds PvP style game, with some interesting twists. There were no classes. You choose your skills, abilities and magic before the game starts, so that any game you play you are never locked into the same character class. We are slightly concerned that there might be a fairly limited scope for fun compared to something like WoW, but we’ll find out.

Hopefully we will get into the Beta testing for the game and let you know more, although they will be revealing the game in full at E3.

I should point out that various sites have posted leaked news about the game saying it was a full MMORPG set to take on World of Warcraft. It isn’t, it is a MMO style, team-based, Arena, Player versus Player, Combat Game. A big long description that just dares you to make an acronym out of it (MMOSTBAPVPCG) that really just describes that single focused vision of the game. Want to do PvP combat MMO style without having to waste ANY time this is the game for you. No leveling up your character by doing quests, crafting pie tins, or grinding out experience for hours on boring NPC mobs. Just go in and get right to the PvP. It is even designed so that you can get all the fun of having multiple characters without having to level up multiple characters.

But more on that after E3.

Supanova Pop Culture Expo

Over the weekend I was on a panel at the Supanova convention, or “pop culture expo” as they call it.

I did a trivia contest both days where it was a number of developers versus a selection of audience members. First one person from each team would face off in a thrilling round of Mario Kart 64 on the Nintendo 64, then the winner having scored a point would get to pick the category of questions. The winning team got a bonus question worth one point and then the two teams would take turns answer 4 more questions. The categories were things like Multiple Choice, Screen Grab (screen shots of classic games with only a small square showing and you had to guess the game), Box Art (same as Screen Grab but with box covers instead of screen shots), general knowledge, and another that I can’t remember. The developers won both days, but just barely. I got beat in Mario Kart by a girl on the second day, oh the shame.

I also sat on a panel about game design. The questions from the audience were the basic “how can I get into the industry” type stuff. I gave a little speech that talked about what a game designer does. I have found that most people really don't have any clue as to what the 'meat' of game design really entails. Their pre-conceptions usually fall along the lines of what a writer or creative director does. That and then spend the rest of the time building levels. I pointed out that I have NEVER worked on a game that I had come up with the idea for. I have never even been asked to come up with a new game idea. I also haven’t built a level for a game in about 4 years.

My best (and new) example of what a designer does involves a bit I recently designed for our game where one group challenges another group to an arena match The interface is just picking a game and map type and yet that alone, just the interface for the challenge with nothing to do with the game play, came out to over 15 pages when documented. I explained briefly what about that simple task took 15 pages of work. I’m thinking maybe I’ll do a whole post about that in the near future.

I got a Serenity movie poster and comic signed by Summer Glau. Bruce Spence (Revenge of the Sith & Mad Max/Road Warrior), Patrick Kane (The Chronicles of Narnia) and John Schneider (Dukes of Hazzard and Smallville) were also there. The Summer Glau autographs were $30 bucks a piece.

Summer also hosted a screening of Serenity at “The Globe” one of the local dive theatres in the valley. The notice has said the screening was at 8:00, but what that really meant was the doors would be unlocked at 8 and then they would take over an hour to let people in, check your name off on the pre-purchased ticket list, and pack the place. Then Summer got up and did her intro. I asked what she was working on now and she said she was about to start filming a movie called “The Initiation of Sarah.” Though looking it up now I see that it is a remake of a 1978 horror movie and is being remade by the "ABC Family" cable channel.

The Summer left and they showed a 15 minute preview of a new sci-fi animated movie coming out called Renaissance. It is all black and white, black and white as in no shades of grey. Looks like it might be okay, I’d be willing to shell out a few bucks to see it.

Then they announced there would be a 30 minute intermission before the film and that their fully stocked bar was open. I think a lot of people complained that it was now about 10:00 for a movie that was supposed to have started at 8. I think some people went up and asked for their money back at this point. A few minutes later the manager came on and said they were starting the movie. I do have to say that seeing the movie with a room full of browncoats (Firefly/Serenity fans) is just awesome. I had seen the movie once before as a sneak peak before it was released with fans it was awesome then too.

Command & Conquer 3

I just heard that EA is going ahead with “Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars.” We were told back before they shut down Westwood Studios that their marketing department had concluded that “Tiberium Twilight” wasn’t a good name in case you were wondering why it changed.

Here is a link to scans from the upcoming PC Gamer with more pictures.

First off I don’t remember Mark Scaggs ever being the “Guiding Light” behind the C&C franchise. Brett Sperry, Adam Isgreen and Joe Bostic were the Guiding Light behind the series. You can tell as C&C Generals was the first product in the C&C line that neither worked on and it suffered. It was kind of boring and just wasn’t that much fun. Adam was working at EA but is now over at Petroglyph with Joe Bostic having just finished Star Wars: Empire at War.

The article also points out that the Red Alert universe and the C&C universe are different. Not completely true either. The Red Alert universe is the alternate past where Einstein invented a time machine and stopped Hitler (and the rest of Germany) from rising to power and instead Russia became the enemy of World War II. This alternate past leads to the alternate future of the C&C universe.

And don’t you just love all the heaped on BS talk about “re-imagining the universe and take it to a level you don’t usually see with a game property”?

No mention of the Aliens. You have learned by now that is what is going on haven’t you? Tiberium is how the aliens are terraforming earth to suit them. The third game was supposed to be the final battle when the aliens show up in force to clean up the planets pesky infestation. I also notice the other player in the game isn’t mentioned, C.A.B.A.L. the evil AI that has taken over Nod in the last C&C expansion pack. C.A.B.A.L. was my favorite.

With EA at the helm of the franchise now the world will never see C&C: Continuum, the FPS-ish MMORPG set in the C&C universe. But after what they twisted Earth & Beyond into that is probably a good thing.

I Hate Not Being Uber

I gave up on PvP in WoW. I reached a platau of how high I can go on rank based on my play times. Because I live in Australia I get home about midnight server time on weekdays. If I am lucky I can get into a battleground, sometimes two. Most nights it’s none. I get a few on the weekend but it just isn’t enough for me to get any higher in rank.

The weekends are really my only shot at raiding as well. I just feel like such a damn gimp in the game. All my guildmates are decked out in high end gear and I got crap. Back in Everquest I was one of the top 10 equipped rogues across ALL SERVERS, in WoW I suck. Both my characters suck. I switched to the priest to even have a shot at getting groups which has actually worked, but it doesn’t get me raiding end-game content which is where all the loot and fun is.

I got into a raid the other night where after an hour and a half of prep, we spend another hour taking 3 tried to finally kill a mob my guild regularly kills with their twink characters. The one time I was in this zone with my guild we cleared the whole zone in less than the time it took for this raid to kill one boss.

I was grouped with three guildmates and two pick-ups tonight in Stratholm on a Baron run. One of the two pick-ups said, “Afterlife? Isn’t that an uber guild?”

I gave my, “I live in Australia and can’t raid” excuse. The hunter pointed out that he was a member of GTOAL (Ghetto Twinks of Afterlife) and it was his main rogue that was uber. And the warrior noted that he just started playing again after a long absence.

Now I can’t say we let the guild down because they didn’t. It was entirely my fault. First I accidentally aggro’ed a bunch of mobs as we came out of one of the ziggurats. I sat down on the steps to drink, they moved forward, I got up to go heal them and somehow had aggro from behind. It caused us to wipe.

Then I let myself die twice more because I wasn’t paying attention to my own hit points. I am so used to just paying attention to CT_Raid group boxes which shows my character down with the other people in the various groups that I am not used to having to look up at my portrait to watch my own health. Luckily one of the pick-ups was a paladin who could res me.

We still killed the baron and such but it just seemed like we took forever and we certainly weren’t uber about it.

Audio Books on Itunes

I am downloading my first purchase from Itunes right now. It’s the audio version of V for Vendetta. I am curious how close it is to Alan Moore’s original graphic novel verses the movie which I still haven’t seen. I heard from a lot of people that it stuck very close to the source material. I also heard that Alan Moore, who is no fan of the movie industry (and who would be after what they did to “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”?) has criticized them for dumbing it down. Supposedly he talked about it on a BBC show, but I haven’t been able to find it on the internet. The BBC site won’t let you view it outside of the UK and the source I heard it from had it up on YourTube but it now says the movie was taken down by the poster.

I haven’t downloaded anything before because I like having a physical, tangible item that I can actually hold in my hands. But I am not able to get any unabridged audio books here in Australia. They do sell them they are just hideously expensive.

One thing that really annoyed me is when I went to create my account it has me enter all my personal information and then at the end when I’m entering my credit card’s billing address I find that it is defaulted to the US. So I click the “out side the US link” and pick Australia and it resets the whole thing! I’m back at the Itunes home page. I can understand that the Australian home page is different from the US home page, prices are probably different, etc. But why do I now have start over with the whole account creation thing? And even if there is some really good reason why it couldn’t keep the information I had already entered before passing me to the Australian site, which I don’t believe couldn’t be worked out if they were willing to do the work and code it, WHY THE HELL DIDN’T THEY ASK ME WHAT COUNTRY I WAS IN TO START WITH!!!

Hey! It’s almost done. Bye!

Poking Around

So just about an hour poking around in the blog's template. I managed to shrink the blank edges, delete the lines around the title and around pictures in the posts. All very obvious once I figured out where to look.

I also created a graphic for the left edge. Actually I created two. I'm not going to use either. I am going to go back to my original idea but all the pieces of that are saved on my hard drive at work.

Cuz I'm a Blonde Yah Yah Yaah

Well here it is, me as a blonde. The curl still isn't all the way back and obviously its still withing the goofy length range. I'm also smiling, something somewhat rare in a picture of me. Completly ruins my dark and mysterious image.

I actually appear to be having a 'blonde moment'. I have put up a new image over on the right but it is still showing the old one. I've never had it saved as the normal Blogger profile picture because it messes up the drop shadow. I don’t remember how it messed it up, just that it does… yeah blonde.

Anyway, I have the new picture as part of my profile. Now if I look at my profile it shows the new picture but not when where it displays that part of my profile over on the right. I could just overwrite the old file with the new picture, but that leads me to my second problem. My website where I host my pictures keeps going down. I am just going to mess with it for a few more minutes. If the new picture isn't over there, I gave up and went to bed.

Oblivion Topless Mod

Well forget about paying a few dollars for a new horse model in Oblivion that I brought up a few days ago. We now have the inevitable, user created, free to download, Oblivion Topless Mod! I don’t have the game myself so I can’t try it out and haven’t found any screenshots, though that could be because I haven’t actually looked. Not to say I won’t look, just haven’t done so yet…

The comment thread was interesting the way it quickly dissolved into a froth of 12 year old name calling.

Anyway I have to run, I have to go alert Jack Thompson.

Rambling about E3, My Hair, and WoW

I found out this morning that I will indeed be part of the team going to E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) next month. E3 is the place where all the big companies make all their really big announcements and where we will be showing off our game to the press for the first time. We should have a web site up in the next couple of weeks.

The story behind all that is pretty cool. Since we still haven’t signed a publisher we haven’t made the final milestone payment to Epic for use of the Unreal3 engine. Until we do that we weren’t allowed to show any screenshots to the press. But at the Game Developer’s Conference last month the Epic guys came and had a look at the game where we were showing it behind closed doors. They were very impressed. They especially like the fact that it is something different than what everybody else is doing with their engine, in other words not another First-Person Shooter. They asked why we weren’t showing it off more. We told them because in their contract they said we weren’t allowed to. So they told us they would wave that stipulation and to go ahead and show it off as much as we want.

I will also be doing some panel stuff for the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) at the Supanova pop culture expo (sci-fi and comic book convention) later this month. I’ve gone the previous two years and it’s pretty small. After you’ve been to the San Diego Comic Con everything else pales in comparison. It does look like they have a couple of cool guests this year, like Summer Glau aka River from Firefly & Serenity.

The reactions I’ve been getting to the new blonde hair at work have been all over the board. Just when I think the initial shock is over I run into somebody who just hasn’t happened to see me yet and I get to go through it again. I wore it back in a pony tail today and although it looked really good from the font, it still isn’t long enough to be pulled back. The top hair doesn’t quite reach and the rest of it is only long enough to stick straight out from the back of my head. The odd thing is I suddenly seem to be in the ‘the secret female hair club.’ I keep getting into these intimate conversations with women about secret hair stuff and stylist gossip. Now remember I used to have hair down to my waist but I never was privy to this club before. I’m a little scared actually.

I started to try and take a few pictures and found out that my new expensive digital camera doesn’t have any sort of timer function. I also realized I hadn’t charged the thing since I went off on vacation to Brampton Island back in late October. It had just enough power to copy off all the pictures of that vacation and my trip to San Diego and home to Vegas over Christmas.

I was bored out of my skull tonight in WoW with nothing to do but run laps around Iron Forge while waiting in the queue for one of the battlegrounds. I get so depressed looking at all the cool gear my friends in the guild have and hearing about all the things they are doing. Hardly anybody I know is online by the time I get home or has gone over and is playing horde now.

I did get to go to Zul’Grub with a friend, but only to kill one boss and then they went to kill one of the outdoor dragons which I can’t do because the mob is still worth DKP to my guild. We aren’t allowed to participate in events worth DKP outside the guild.

N3VRF41L Publishing

Auran is in the news with the upcoming launch of N3VRF41L Publishing at next month’s E3. Neverfail was the name of an Auran Executive’s bottled water company, the first such company in Australia. Why ‘leet speak’? I think we’ve all been afraid to ask.

The article is in regards to the Australian government’s lackluster and sluggish response to the needs of the Australian game industry. They make a lot of comparison to the large incentives (tax concessions and other handouts) given to the poorly performing Australian film industry and saying the well performing Australian game industry should be given just as much.

Instead the eroding Australian dollar, excessive taxes, and heavy competition from overseas is turning the Australian game industry into “digital sweatshops” with uncertain cash flow, no intellectual property and narrow margins. The last few months have seen several product cancellations, once prominent Australian developers close their doors and a few more studios that are on the chopping block after having been acquired by larger multinationals.

Then there is this bit:

One exception to that rule is N3VRF41L Publishing, a new operation to be launched next month at the E3 games show in Los Angeles. Backed by Auran Games boss Tony Hilliam, it plans to create its own intellectual property and distribute online.

You can read the full article here.

Mario as Art

I stumbled onto this backwards and the actual site which I’ll link at the bottom of this has the last part first, one of the drawbacks of the ‘top to bottom’ format.

The story in order is that an artist who goes by the name of Poster Child believes that public spaces (sidewalks, parks, etc) have been taken over by ads, and so he battles this creeping loss of public spaces by placing his art in similar situations. He came up with the idea of making the Question Boxes from the Mario games and placing them around town. Some of them they filled with power-ups, cardboard cuts of the coins, flowers and mushrooms from the games.

It looks like the idea started to catch on and other people started doing the same. There are some wonderful pictures of the boxes hanging from light poles, trees, and other places. These are pictures from various places in the United States, Canada and even the United Kingdom.

Then things went bad. Five high school girls put up about 17 Question Blocks around the downtown area of Ravenna Ohio. Somebody called the police about a “suspicious package” on the steps of the Immaculate Conception Church and while the sheriff's department was investigating a few other calls came in about similar packages. Then the Hazardous Material Unit and the Bomb Squad were called in. The girls are facing possible criminal charges.

Here is the link which has links to the news story as well.

I love the whole retro 8-bit Mario as art thing. Here is an older link to some students who made Mario murals on the windows of the E2 building at UCSC using Post-It notes last year.

On a musical front here is a link to a cappella performance of various Nintendo themes. When this went around our office last year I found the name of the group performing it and unfortunately I can’t find it now. I think it’s really crappy that all these sites that I’ve found that host the video don’t list who they are. While searching for the name of the group I did find Maria & Zelda: Big Band Live.

I would love some of these Mario toys. The audio keychain and fridge magnets are especially cool. I’ve seen the little dioramas at one of the local comic shops but unless I got it wrong they were asking that price for one, where on J-List that is the price for the set.

Oblivion

There has been a lot of talk about the latest game in the Elder Scrolls series: Oblivion. I don’t really have any desire to play it myself. I played a bit of the previous game, Marrowind and it just felt too lonely. This was back when I was really into Everquest. I thought the game was just crying out to be multi-player and I was really surprised to see that Oblivion wasn’t. Connie says she played Daggerfall, the one before Marrowind, and played it forever and ever and ever, but she had the same reaction to Marrowind that I did. She was also into Everquest by that time.

But a lot of people are talking about how much they like Oblivion and not minding that it isn’t multi-player. The funny thing is they won’t stop talking about it to each other. My friend’s World of Warcraft guild has a vent channel dedicated to it so that they can talk to each other while they are playing Oblivion. It’s almost like that once you have experienced the ‘shared experience’ you can’t go back to just doing it all alone regardless of how they deny the fact.

I am really curious to know if WoW’s online numbers were effected by the games release. To see if all those people who are complaining in the forums about the end game stopped playing WoW for Oblivion. I also wonder how long Oblivion would satisfy those people before they came back to WoW? How many people find Oblivion too lonely the way I did with Marrowind?

All the above used to be a lot longer and way more detailed. I went into the other types of games I played, talking about what type of commitment some games require, comparing game experiences, etc. But when I read it all back to myself I could see that it would need a good deal of editing and cleaning up to read worth a damn. And I didn’t feel like doing that so I just cut it down.

Oh, I also dyed my hair blonde this weekend. It took two treatments and my the coloring to do it and my scalp feels like it has been sunburned. So far everybody that has seen it thinks it should be a bit warmer, more gold. There has been some mention that I look a bit like Lucius Malfoy, Draco’s Dad in the Harry Potter movies. I think that’s just because the ‘treatment’ straightened out my hair quite a bit and it will take a few days before my natural curls comes back. I’ll take and post pictures then.

Visa its like DKP!

Mazezine has a “News from the Future” (as in it doesn’t exist) posting about credit card companies offering virtual in-game rewards for purchases.

It's not a matter of if, just when - credit card companies, Pay Pal, Amazon, eBay and the individual "gaming" companies eventually bridge the real and virtual currencies with loyalty programs and private label credit cards - there's too much money out there to -not- to do this. This "demographic" is the battleground. The more you spend, the more you earn, sorta. Virtual $ isn't a crappy electronics doo-dad, it's just a number in a computer. Maybe you'll get some discounted airline tickets when you hit level 60 too, you deserve it! Earn your way to a new graphics card, why not.

Hell, I’d just like the credit card with the game art on it to show off what a complete gaming nerd I am. Reward points as well? Bonus!

SoE and SWG

SoE and Lucas Arts have come out to say that the rumor of Lucas Arts pulling the Star Wars Galaxies licesne from Sony Online Entertainment are false.

The part about Raph Koster leaving SoE is true.

Pimp My Bicycle

Over at Instructables I found the SpokePOV: LED Bike Wheel Images project.

How cool is that?

Kevin Smith's Superman

Kevin Smith (Clerk’s, Mall Rats, Jay & Silent Bob & Chasing Amy) at a convention is asked by a fan to tell the story behind the Superman movie script he wrote back in the mid-90’s. This is a awsome.

Scrambled Hax

My friend Bill posted this link at work today. It’s a video sample from a guy who has written a program called Scrambled Hax. It is a music video audio sampler for DJs. I see it as an Audio mosaic program. You know those Photomosaic where they take a huge data base of pictures and then the program makes one of the pictures out of tiny little versions of the other pictures? It’s the same thing only with music videos. The application he built is meant for live performances with DJs using it on the fly complete with snips of the music video that the source was cut from. So he can beat box into the microphone and have the program convert it on the fly and play the result. If you’ve clicked the link you know what I’m talking about.

Several people responded to the thread that it was like audio masturbation and the whole topic went off into left field about what is or isn’t music. It sounded very much like the “what is art” argument and got just about as far. Disparaging comments about M.C. Hammer were in abundance.

Personally I didn’t like any of the “music” that what created the video clip but then again I'm not really into the whole "live DJ mix" thing. I was really just looking at the program which I thought was pretty damn cool. I can see some really good stuff being made out of this in the hands of some creative and talented people. It would also be really cool if they built it into those home karaoke machines.

Updates

I just added the new title picture to replace the standard text and added a link to the Video Game Voter's Network at the bottom of the sidebar.

I have a version of the title picture where the sub-title is written in a graffiti-like sprawl. I spend a lot of time on it interchanging letters from two different graffiti-like fonts, using upper and lower case and slightly increasing or decreasing the size so it looked really random. In the end it looked too random and had a hand-drawn quality to it that I didn’t like even though I thought that was what I was going for.

I’ll screw around with more art type changes in the near future.

I also tried to get perma-links displayed for each posting but some things are just not meant to be understood in the nebulous morning hours.

This Just In

Kotaku has a rumor up that Raph Koster has left Sony Online Entertainment to start his own game studio and that Lucan Arts will not be extending the Star Wars Galaxies contract with SOE.

IGN, reporting on that story, is implying that SWG will go instead to Bioware who will be relaunching it. They note that Bioware has recently opened an Austin Texas office but have not announced what it will be working on.

My two cents… I like Raph. I like his ideas; he is a great top level designer. He just needs somebody else to make sure there is more meat in his sandwich and somebody to make sure the people making the sandwich know what they are doing and aren’t making a mess.

Star Wars Galaxies had some great sandbox concepts but not enough tool and toys to play with. Sandboxes are a lot of fun when you have a bucket, shovel, some action figures, matchbox cars and other stuff. Without any of that you are just sitting in the dirt.

SWG also suffered from exactly the same type of mess that Ultima Online faced. For example at one point they announced in SWG that they were going to be placing new restrictions on players in an effort to reduce the number of objects in the world because they didn’t realize how much players would turn into pack rats. They claimed their item database was overloaded. This was the exact same thing they did over and over in Ultima Online which suffered from all the same problems. Why didn’t anybody learn?

Anyway Kotaku’s mole at SoE also suggests that the days are numbered for John Smedley, SoE’s president. I’ve spoken or was spoken at by Smedley a good number of times in my 8 months at SoE and I liked him too. I always was of the opinion that if Smedley was involved more in the day to day workings of what was going on at SoE things would be a lot better. He appears to know what he is talking about and when it takes the time to seriously look into what is going on in a project, he expertly nails what the problems are that need to be addressed.

The same thing happened at Westwood though, the more our two founders got involved with running the company the less time they had for what was going on in the company. You can’t have somebody show up for a meeting every three weeks, throw out a bunch of mandates and vanishes again leaving chaos and confusion in their wake. The games that were the result of these things suffered for it greatly and lead to the closing of the studio.

Gaming Skill Finally Paying Off!

Wired has news post: You Play World of Warcraft? You’re Hired! Though once again I have to point out how I was here first.

You’ll notice the following on my own resume:

Related Interest
In depth involvement with current on-line persistent state role playing games. Current member of Afterlife, formerly one of the top guilds in EverQuest and now an active raiding guild in World of Warcraft. Former member of Knights of Glory and Beer [KGB], a large guild in Ultima Online.

I wonder if I should add "created the Thottbot logo"?

Speaking of being a Guild Leader, The Daedalus Project has a posting entitled Life as a Guild Leader, which is a write up using the results of a survy taken of Guild Leaders in MMO games. Some noteable quotes:

When you are the leader of a guild of 50 players, gaming can become more stressful than your daytime job.

God damn, people don't listen. I hated it. They are so whiny and expect you to do exactly what they say and give them what they want. Balancing the needs of 50 people suck... I won't do it again. I don't even want to be an officer. Takes all the fun out of the game.

A guild leader has to be den mother and bitch goddess in one.

The most valuable lesson I learned from being a guild leader is that if you give someone an inch they will take a mile. The experience drove me much farther to the political right.

Then and Now

Fosfor Gadgets has a few pictures of video games of today compared to similar games of the 80’s. My long time readers (which I believe is a grand total of nobody) will remember I posted a picture of Adventure on the Atari 2600 (the very first graphic adventure game) versus one from World of Warcraft myself back in June of 2005. One of these days i'll put the code in for perma-links, in the mean time you'll have to click on that link and then scroll down to the Saturday, June 11th post title "Trip Down Memory Game."

The only thing I don’t like about Fosfor's pictures are that the modern ones don’t show any of the interfaces or are actually marketing shots. Yeah they show how cool the graphics of today are but it rings of the before and after shots you see of people in magazines who have had some procedure done. You know where the “after” picture has the person smiling with professionally applied make-up, hair styling, and lighting.

Latest Links

Here are the latest links going around so you too can know what the hell everybody is laughing about and be in on all the inside jokes:

Onyxia 50 DKP minus (NSFW)

Ragnaros (NSFW)

Razorgor (NSFW)

Onyxia 50 DKP minus sound clips for you own raid

MC Raiders Song

Macgyver Saves the Server

*NSFW = Not Safe For Work