I recently bought the Archive Edition of ComicBase. It’s a really powerful comic book inventory database program that is tied in with Comic Buyers Guide prices and has weekly updates (example of a weekly update here) of prices and new comics. The 1 long box, 2 short boxes and handful of graphic novels I brought with me to Australia have grown into 1 long box, 8 short boxes and over 200 graphic novels. In comparison I have 20ish long boxes and an unknown number of graphic novels in storage back in Vegas.
ComicBase is way and above the other inventory programs out there. Some of the other ones I’ve looked at aren’t much better than the one I wrote in basic on my Commodore 64 back in the 80’s. I called it CIA for Comic Inventory Assistant. Cool, huh?
I bought the Archive Edition of ComicBase, the most expensive of multiple flavors of the program, because God forbid I not spend forty bucks when I could spend three hundred. The Archive Edition comes with over 150,000 cover scans so you can see pictures of the issues in the program. It also allows me lots of cool options for the Windows slide show screensaver. I really wish the slide show screensaver didn’t suck so badly though, if the Megabucks Slot Machines used the same type of randomizer we’d all be multi-millionaires.
I also sprung for the handheld bar code reader which allows me to jump to and batch add comics just by scanning their bar code; provided they are new enough to have bar codes and that they were entered when the issue was added. This version of the program allows you to submit new or corrected data so I’m doing my part by entering and sending in the ones I have that it doesn’t. I would love to say I’m doing it out of a generous nature and desire to share with others, but honestly I just like playing with the bar code reader. Bleep!
I do have a problem with the program though. It is very ridged on what it will report. I was expecting to be able to build detailed, custom queries and reports. It allows me a number of custom fields and check boxes but I can’t build reports based on them. It also doesn’t allow me to build reports based on many of the fields it has built in nor does it let me alter the report format.
For example I want to print a wish list. It allows me to easily build an “Issues I am missing” list by taking the list of titles where I own at least one issue the series of and printing the issues I am missing. The problem is that I have a lot of comics from a lot of titles where I am not interested in the issues I am missing. I can easily print a report based on titles in my collection and then not select those titles, but besides the hassle of going through several hundred titles to do that I also have a good number of comics on my wish list where I don’t own any comics in that title series.
What I want to do is to be able to mark comics as being on my wish list and then to print just a list of those marked issues. To do that under the current system I have to use the provided “marked” check box which is fine, but then I have to print a title report of EVERY comic in the database and tell it to only print marked issues. At least I think that is what I have to do because it’s been a few hours and its still “preparing report.” I'll let it run overnite before giving it up.
I’m thinking at this point, at least for the wish list functionality, I’m better severed by the pocket-sized notebook I carry around.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Monday, August 07, 2006
Fury-Sanctuary Interview
Fury-Sanctuary just posted an interview I did with them last week. In the interview I paraphrased some quotes and then challenged them to find out where they are from. Cameron has been sitting in the IRC channel this morning and says that they arn't having any luck so far. I quote Kriuq "The internet is failing me".I also signed up for some News Alerter service at MMORPG.COM which tells me they are kicking off their brand new series of exclusive screenshots. They say I should check back every Monday for 2 new images from Fury, the new MMORPG in production at Auran. Currently they have 2 shots of the School of Life. I'm pretty sure those are the first shots of that area. They are okay, its just doesn't look as cool frozen in a screenshot after you are used to seeing it while running around and animating.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Console Modding Versus Region Coding
Ozymandias is a Microsoft employee with a blog. I tried rewording that several times so that it didn’t sound like I was saying something I wasn’t. But it kept coming out sounding like, well like “Tommy is a 3 year old, a 3 year old with a gun!” But that isn’t what I’m saying at all. He is a blogger and he works for Microsoft, that’s all I’m saying.
Oh, and he wrote a bit entitled: The Problem with Modchips where he shares his thoughts and opinions on Modding. Modding being the purchasing and installing of special chips into your console game system; which in turn allows for playing of import games, creating your own custom content, and piracy. You all knew that unless you’re my mother reading my blog again. Everyone say hello to my mother.
So of those three in reverse order:
3) Piracy
Piracy is wrong. They are stealing. I too am a game developer and you are taking money out of my pocket. I don’t care if you wouldn’t have bought the game anyway. If you are playing it you should be paying for it.
2)Custom Content
Bah. He goes into the business model of the console systems and explains why you shouldn’t be doing what you want with your own hardware, making your own games but instead should be buying official games.
You know I don’t really see this as being a problem. I think the very few hardcore people that are making and sharing their own content are buying just as many games, if not more, than the rest of us. Plus they are gaining experience and are better positioned to get a job in the industry.
1) Import Games
Okay this is where he really looses me. Let me quote him:
Lets go through Ozymandias’ lame reasons and see if we can find any downside:
Time & Cost of Localization
The Company didn’t take the time nor did they pay the cost of localization and yet they made an extra sale of the game can’t really see the downside here.
Marketing Plans
Let’s not let the tail wag the dog here. Marketing plans are things to which the company does in order to get people to buy the game. Somebody bought the game, job well done have a cookie. It doesn’t spoil any marketing plan if somebody buys the game early.
“Oh my God! Somebody bought the game before our TV commercial came out! Our marketing plan is ruined! What ever will we do?”
Actually somebody buying the game early is a marketing plan itself. It is like when movie studios do sneak peeks before the movie is released in order to generate a buzz about the movie. I can’t see a problem here unless the game really sucks and they are afraid that the early purchaser is going to tell everybody it is turd in a box before their marketing plan can trick more people into wasting their money on it.
Ad Buys
WTF? He doesn’t have a lot of good reasons so he tried to fake another one but it this is more “Marketing Plan” crap. Seriously somebody bought the game without having to have witnessed some marketing spin; again I can’t see the downside.
Cultural Considerations
Like what? I think what he really means is that if the company doesn't think the game is the kind of game that would sell well in that country. I completely understand that a game company might think this due to the country's prevailing culture. That is a perfectly reasonable justification for not having released the game in that region. I do not expect a company to spend all the money it would take to sell a game in a region if they don’t think anybody there is going to buy it… but somebody did buy it! We are talking import purchases here remember. Somebody is buying the game even though the company didn’t release it in their region. That’s and extra sale!
I am not even trying to use any of this as a reason to say the company should have released the game in some other country. I know that just because some people imported the game doesn’t mean there would be enough people who would buy it to justify the expense of releasing it in that country. I am only saying that this isn’t a reason to be against somebody going through the extra effort of buying and importing it. Somebody bought the game that otherwise wouldn’t. Once more there is no downside.
Impact of Piracy in the Region
Okay this is the KEY POINT deserving of capital letters. If they are against modding of console systems for the very understandable reason of possible software piracy then why keep with the practice of region coding and restricting of consoles and games? It is companies like Microsoft that are region restricting the damn things in the first place! If people didn’t have to mod their console in order to play a game they imported from another region they wouldn’t also be able to play pirated games. Would some people still mod their consoles to play pirated games, sure. But modding wouldn’t be going more and more main stream with each console generation and in turn increasing the market for pirated games! (slam your fist down on the table when you read that, it helps with the effect.)
I do not currently own a modded console. But I do own a region 1 (United States region) Microsoft XBox, Sony Playstation 2, and Nintendo Game Cube each of which I bought the week they were released while I was in the United States. As you should know I moved to and am currently living in Australia now. Australia is region 4. I can not go down to my local game store and purchase games to play on any of those three systems because they only play region 1 games and aren’t modded to play region 4 games. My only choice is to import them from the United States which is a big pain in the ass so I haven’t been doing it.
In the past I have always bought all console systems that have come out right when they were released. I have yet to buy an XBox 360 and I probably won’t be buying a Sony PS/3 or Nintendo Wii right when they are released because I don’t want to buy a console that is restricted to region 4 because I will most likly be be going back to the US sometime in the future. Now I will admit I am not even sure if any of these systems are region restricted but I haven’t read anything to the contrary.
Game companies have not gained any new console video game sales from me in the last 2.5 years and they are losing out on selling me their new expensive console systems all because of region coding. The only way they will regain me as a customer is if I move back to the United States or if I am willing to start modding. Well either that or Microsoft can ship me a region 4 XBox and copy of every region 1 XBox game I own and then be willing to swap them all back plus any new one's I've bought while in Australia for region 1 versions if I go back to the United States. Somehow I'm sure they will have some detailed buisness model rational on why that isn't a good idea even though the current buisness model that I just spelled out doesn't have me doing any actual buisness with them.
Doing localized language versions is understandable, doing different packaging for each reason makes marketing sense, doing NTSC and PAL version is still unfortunately necessary even if just about all new PAL TVs support NTSC signals. But adding the region coding requires additional coding, packaging and versions without adding any real benefit in return. I’ve heard some song in dance in the past about how it’s done because retailers are demanding it, but since they are the ones selling and shipping the games to people ordering them outside their own region I do not believe it.
Oh, and he wrote a bit entitled: The Problem with Modchips where he shares his thoughts and opinions on Modding. Modding being the purchasing and installing of special chips into your console game system; which in turn allows for playing of import games, creating your own custom content, and piracy. You all knew that unless you’re my mother reading my blog again. Everyone say hello to my mother.
So of those three in reverse order:
3) Piracy
Piracy is wrong. They are stealing. I too am a game developer and you are taking money out of my pocket. I don’t care if you wouldn’t have bought the game anyway. If you are playing it you should be paying for it.
2)Custom Content
Bah. He goes into the business model of the console systems and explains why you shouldn’t be doing what you want with your own hardware, making your own games but instead should be buying official games.
You know I don’t really see this as being a problem. I think the very few hardcore people that are making and sharing their own content are buying just as many games, if not more, than the rest of us. Plus they are gaining experience and are better positioned to get a job in the industry.
1) Import Games
Okay this is where he really looses me. Let me quote him:
The desire to play import games is at least a reason I can rationally understand, but cannot condone. Sure, there are games you might want to play that are either released earlier or, quite possibly, not released at all in your region. But sometimes companies have good reasons to either not release a title into a region or release it at different dates. It may be because of the time and cost of localization, marketing plans, ad buys, cultural considerations, or perhaps even because of the impact of piracy in the region. Whatever the case, it’s safe to assume the publisher has thought about it. The good news is that most publishers are developing with multiple platforms, regions, and languages in mind up front, so this is becoming less and less of an argument. (After all, it’s in the publisher’s best interest to sell as many copies as possible, right?)What a load of bull$#!+ (remember my mother may be reading this so nobody tell her how to translate those symbols.) They might be valid reasons why the company didn’t release the game in that region, but none of those reasons are valid about why people that are actually paying above and beyond the cost of the game should be allowed to enjoy the game. They are spending their hard earned (well I assume its hard earned, but lets not judge) cash for the game. This is yet another sale for the publisher. On top of that they are also paying for the shipping cost of the game from what ever other region they are buying it from. Plus they paid for the mod chip and maybe even paid to have it installed. All of that so they could get a copy of a game that isn’t available in their own region.
Lets go through Ozymandias’ lame reasons and see if we can find any downside:
Time & Cost of Localization
The Company didn’t take the time nor did they pay the cost of localization and yet they made an extra sale of the game can’t really see the downside here.
Marketing Plans
Let’s not let the tail wag the dog here. Marketing plans are things to which the company does in order to get people to buy the game. Somebody bought the game, job well done have a cookie. It doesn’t spoil any marketing plan if somebody buys the game early.
“Oh my God! Somebody bought the game before our TV commercial came out! Our marketing plan is ruined! What ever will we do?”
Actually somebody buying the game early is a marketing plan itself. It is like when movie studios do sneak peeks before the movie is released in order to generate a buzz about the movie. I can’t see a problem here unless the game really sucks and they are afraid that the early purchaser is going to tell everybody it is turd in a box before their marketing plan can trick more people into wasting their money on it.
Ad Buys
WTF? He doesn’t have a lot of good reasons so he tried to fake another one but it this is more “Marketing Plan” crap. Seriously somebody bought the game without having to have witnessed some marketing spin; again I can’t see the downside.
Cultural Considerations
Like what? I think what he really means is that if the company doesn't think the game is the kind of game that would sell well in that country. I completely understand that a game company might think this due to the country's prevailing culture. That is a perfectly reasonable justification for not having released the game in that region. I do not expect a company to spend all the money it would take to sell a game in a region if they don’t think anybody there is going to buy it… but somebody did buy it! We are talking import purchases here remember. Somebody is buying the game even though the company didn’t release it in their region. That’s and extra sale!
I am not even trying to use any of this as a reason to say the company should have released the game in some other country. I know that just because some people imported the game doesn’t mean there would be enough people who would buy it to justify the expense of releasing it in that country. I am only saying that this isn’t a reason to be against somebody going through the extra effort of buying and importing it. Somebody bought the game that otherwise wouldn’t. Once more there is no downside.
Impact of Piracy in the Region
Okay this is the KEY POINT deserving of capital letters. If they are against modding of console systems for the very understandable reason of possible software piracy then why keep with the practice of region coding and restricting of consoles and games? It is companies like Microsoft that are region restricting the damn things in the first place! If people didn’t have to mod their console in order to play a game they imported from another region they wouldn’t also be able to play pirated games. Would some people still mod their consoles to play pirated games, sure. But modding wouldn’t be going more and more main stream with each console generation and in turn increasing the market for pirated games! (slam your fist down on the table when you read that, it helps with the effect.)
I do not currently own a modded console. But I do own a region 1 (United States region) Microsoft XBox, Sony Playstation 2, and Nintendo Game Cube each of which I bought the week they were released while I was in the United States. As you should know I moved to and am currently living in Australia now. Australia is region 4. I can not go down to my local game store and purchase games to play on any of those three systems because they only play region 1 games and aren’t modded to play region 4 games. My only choice is to import them from the United States which is a big pain in the ass so I haven’t been doing it.
In the past I have always bought all console systems that have come out right when they were released. I have yet to buy an XBox 360 and I probably won’t be buying a Sony PS/3 or Nintendo Wii right when they are released because I don’t want to buy a console that is restricted to region 4 because I will most likly be be going back to the US sometime in the future. Now I will admit I am not even sure if any of these systems are region restricted but I haven’t read anything to the contrary.
Game companies have not gained any new console video game sales from me in the last 2.5 years and they are losing out on selling me their new expensive console systems all because of region coding. The only way they will regain me as a customer is if I move back to the United States or if I am willing to start modding. Well either that or Microsoft can ship me a region 4 XBox and copy of every region 1 XBox game I own and then be willing to swap them all back plus any new one's I've bought while in Australia for region 1 versions if I go back to the United States. Somehow I'm sure they will have some detailed buisness model rational on why that isn't a good idea even though the current buisness model that I just spelled out doesn't have me doing any actual buisness with them.
Doing localized language versions is understandable, doing different packaging for each reason makes marketing sense, doing NTSC and PAL version is still unfortunately necessary even if just about all new PAL TVs support NTSC signals. But adding the region coding requires additional coding, packaging and versions without adding any real benefit in return. I’ve heard some song in dance in the past about how it’s done because retailers are demanding it, but since they are the ones selling and shipping the games to people ordering them outside their own region I do not believe it.
Papercraft Video Game Models
I really love vintage video game artsy stuff. I stumbled on this paper art site that has "papercraft" models from the Advanced Wars series, Legend of Zelda, Tomb Raider and others. The site offers template downloads of all the models with full instructions on how to assemble them so you can make your own.I of course rushed to down load and print out copies of my own that I can now leave sitting on my desk, unassembled, for the next few years because who has that kinda time?
Monday, July 31, 2006
Fury Fan Videos
Online Welten has posted two videos of Fury that he took during E3. The first one above shows a few minutes of Vortex combat and the second video is just them watching the slow motion promo video that has been out for awhile.
Sunday, July 30, 2006
E3 Cancled?
Next-Gen.Biz is reporting that the major video game industry convention, in its present form, has been cancelled for next year and the foreseeable future. READ MOREIt's still Sunday in the rest of the world so they story doesn't seem to have spread much yet but I am sure we will see a lot more of this on all the news sites by tomorrow. The last I had heard was that the show had gotten so big they were planning on moving it to the Las Vegas Convention Center in 2008.
Personally I thought that the event was a bit of a money sink for a lot of reasons. But it did serve one really good purpose which was to put a lot of industry people together. It allowed industry people looking for jobs to get a lot of interviews with developers, it allowed developers to meet and show their products to a lot of publishers, etc. Just having been there as a developer looking for a publisher I got to experience a lot of that first hand. I loved going to the show before that just to see it all and I know a lot of people here at Auran who had never been before were just awestruck at how big and exciting it was. It was even great now that my former Westwood Studios co-workers are spread to the four winds to get a chance to run into a few of them.
If this story is true I'll be very disappointed.
Friday, July 28, 2006
Audio Books
I have been listening to unabridged audio books for many many years now. I was a big customer of Books-On-Tape and Recorded Books Inc. which were mail order rental companies plus I had a huge collection of well over 200 or so titles. For example I haven’t read a single Harry Potter book but instead own them all unabridged on CD. I also own the entire Lord of the Rings set including The Hobbit and the Silmarillion unabridged on CD.
Before I left the states I sold most of my collection to a used book store. I only kept ones that I thought I would be really listen to many more times such as my unabridged Douglas Adams collection which includes all 5 (1, 2, 3, 4 & 5) books in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhikers Guide trilogy (plus 1-4 abridged which were my first audio books and were out long before the unabridged books were available), Last Chance to See, the 2 Dirk Gently books(1 & 2). (also a copy of the first one abridged which again came out before unabridged version), Douglas Adams at the BBC and Salmon of Doubt. The problem with these is all but the last two are on cassette not CD. Last time I listened to them I noticed that they are starting to exhibit some wear, really bad wear as they are about 18 years old. When my last cassette player gave out on me I figured I would get a new cassette player and then convert them to MP3 files so I would always have them to listen to before they completely disintegrated on me. Well you might not have noticed but you can’t easily buy a cassette player anymore.
Then I noticed several books on iTunes that I would like; most notably George R.R. Martin’s New York Times best-selling series: A Song of Ice and Fire. I already own and have read books 1 through 3 in the series. Let me expand on that because it kind of plays into my point later on. I already own the books 1 through 4 in hard cover and have 2 copies of books 1 through 3 in paper back. I also own two copies of the unabridged audio version on CD of book 4, though the second copy was given as a gift by my brother in-law who didn’t know I had already bought it for myself.
I bought books 1 and 2 in the series from iTunes. I would buy book 3 but although they have book 4, they don’t offer book 3. I wrote them email about it, no answer.
Here is the list of unabridged audio books I have purchased from iTunes since I bought my iPod:
• A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin for $52
• A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin for $27
• Evermore by Sean Williams for $8
• The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett for $35
• The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett for $35
• Elric of Melniboné by Michael Moorcock for $19
• Heir Apparent by Vivian Vande Velde for $26
That is over $200 dollars in not a long period of time. Actually the last 5 of those were in the last 2 weeks. Point I am trying to make is I am the target hardcore customer of unabridged audio books.
I am really dying for the 3rd book in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. I tried listening to the 4th book on CD when I first bought it back in December but it has been so long since I had read the first 3 that I was lost. Yes, I actually READ them! Just because I listen to audio books doesn't mean that I don't also read books. Normally I have two books going at once, one that I'm listening to and one that I'm readying before going to sleep at night. Anyway I started re-reading the series but I was slogging through them very slowly and kept having days pass by where I would read something else at night. That is why I jumped at them on iTunes.
I noticed that they are provided to iTunes by a company called Audible.com. Heading over to their web site looking for the 3rd book, I found they sell the audio books but you can’t browse their collection unless you join. You can browse their categories and see about 8 titles in each, but that is all they will show you. At the lowest level plan you pay $9.95 for a re-occurring yearly membership where you can download 1 audio book. But I want to see their selection before I give them money. As with all shopping on the internet I’m a bit suspicious of anything that wants my money and the fact that they won’t even let me see what they are selling before taking my money makes me think they are hiding something.
I know they are a legit company. It would even appear they are selling downloads recorded by both Recorded Books Inc. and Books-On-Tape. A few of the books I have bought through iTunes are labled "Recorded by: Recorded Books Inc. Offered by: Audible.com" But still I hesitate and if I, their core customer type, hesitate; how many new customers are they scaring away? What hoops and hidden dangers luck inside Audible.com? What, dear reader, will our hero do?
Before I left the states I sold most of my collection to a used book store. I only kept ones that I thought I would be really listen to many more times such as my unabridged Douglas Adams collection which includes all 5 (1, 2, 3, 4 & 5) books in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhikers Guide trilogy (plus 1-4 abridged which were my first audio books and were out long before the unabridged books were available), Last Chance to See, the 2 Dirk Gently books(1 & 2). (also a copy of the first one abridged which again came out before unabridged version), Douglas Adams at the BBC and Salmon of Doubt. The problem with these is all but the last two are on cassette not CD. Last time I listened to them I noticed that they are starting to exhibit some wear, really bad wear as they are about 18 years old. When my last cassette player gave out on me I figured I would get a new cassette player and then convert them to MP3 files so I would always have them to listen to before they completely disintegrated on me. Well you might not have noticed but you can’t easily buy a cassette player anymore.
Then I noticed several books on iTunes that I would like; most notably George R.R. Martin’s New York Times best-selling series: A Song of Ice and Fire. I already own and have read books 1 through 3 in the series. Let me expand on that because it kind of plays into my point later on. I already own the books 1 through 4 in hard cover and have 2 copies of books 1 through 3 in paper back. I also own two copies of the unabridged audio version on CD of book 4, though the second copy was given as a gift by my brother in-law who didn’t know I had already bought it for myself.
I bought books 1 and 2 in the series from iTunes. I would buy book 3 but although they have book 4, they don’t offer book 3. I wrote them email about it, no answer.
Here is the list of unabridged audio books I have purchased from iTunes since I bought my iPod:
• A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin for $52
• A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin for $27
• Evermore by Sean Williams for $8
• The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett for $35
• The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett for $35
• Elric of Melniboné by Michael Moorcock for $19
• Heir Apparent by Vivian Vande Velde for $26
That is over $200 dollars in not a long period of time. Actually the last 5 of those were in the last 2 weeks. Point I am trying to make is I am the target hardcore customer of unabridged audio books.
I am really dying for the 3rd book in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. I tried listening to the 4th book on CD when I first bought it back in December but it has been so long since I had read the first 3 that I was lost. Yes, I actually READ them! Just because I listen to audio books doesn't mean that I don't also read books. Normally I have two books going at once, one that I'm listening to and one that I'm readying before going to sleep at night. Anyway I started re-reading the series but I was slogging through them very slowly and kept having days pass by where I would read something else at night. That is why I jumped at them on iTunes.
I noticed that they are provided to iTunes by a company called Audible.com. Heading over to their web site looking for the 3rd book, I found they sell the audio books but you can’t browse their collection unless you join. You can browse their categories and see about 8 titles in each, but that is all they will show you. At the lowest level plan you pay $9.95 for a re-occurring yearly membership where you can download 1 audio book. But I want to see their selection before I give them money. As with all shopping on the internet I’m a bit suspicious of anything that wants my money and the fact that they won’t even let me see what they are selling before taking my money makes me think they are hiding something.
I know they are a legit company. It would even appear they are selling downloads recorded by both Recorded Books Inc. and Books-On-Tape. A few of the books I have bought through iTunes are labled "Recorded by: Recorded Books Inc. Offered by: Audible.com" But still I hesitate and if I, their core customer type, hesitate; how many new customers are they scaring away? What hoops and hidden dangers luck inside Audible.com? What, dear reader, will our hero do?
Monday, July 24, 2006
2 new Fury Interviews
I have an interview up at MMORPG.com. You can tell it’s actually me who wrote the answers because of all the spelling mistakes. For example I wrote “sneak peak” instead of “sneak peek”. There really is a message written as I’ve described it in the last question. It is one of two references to one of my favorite book series that I snuck in there.
Cameron, who sits next to me and is one of two designers who recently shaved his head, also has an interview up over at Fury-Sanctuary. He doesn’t get a cool header graphic though.
Sunday, July 23, 2006
Half-life Portals
The Half-life Portals video has been going around and if you haven’t seen it you should give it a look-see. It shows off the puzzle type game play that I expected to find in Prey but didn’t. The portals in Prey weren’t used to any real effect except to A) to get you to a new place in much the same way a newly unlocked door can and B) allow mobs to spawn out of nowhere which is nothing new. Prey also had the gravity stuff which I liked but wasn’t used for nearly as much puzzles as it could have been.
The Portals video shows that it is much more a puzzle game, a 3D first person puzzle game, which is what I was looking for and failed to find in Prey. Half-life Portals is based on and being done by the team that did Narbacular Drop which I just downloaded. Expect that site to be down a lot as everybody and their giant robotic dog pet is heading over there to check it out since the Portal video has been released.
...actually its been a few days now, I started writing this post last Wednesday or Thursday and am just now getting around to finishing it. I forgot about it in all honestly and only just remember when uninstalling iTunes and now have to reboot. It’s a big pain involving copying all these Audio Books from my iPod to my home computer. What a pain in the ass.
The Portals video shows that it is much more a puzzle game, a 3D first person puzzle game, which is what I was looking for and failed to find in Prey. Half-life Portals is based on and being done by the team that did Narbacular Drop which I just downloaded. Expect that site to be down a lot as everybody and their giant robotic dog pet is heading over there to check it out since the Portal video has been released.
...actually its been a few days now, I started writing this post last Wednesday or Thursday and am just now getting around to finishing it. I forgot about it in all honestly and only just remember when uninstalling iTunes and now have to reboot. It’s a big pain involving copying all these Audio Books from my iPod to my home computer. What a pain in the ass.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
I Told Them "No Archery"
Did you ever read an interview with a game developer and suddenly realize that he isn’t really answering any of the questions? I mean he is answering them by spouting off marketing points that don’t really say anything you didn’t already know or could guess. Take for example this question and answer regarding the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean MMO game that I found on Worthplaying:
The point of this was that he didn’t really answer the question because none of those things differentiates that from other pirate games. Hell the pirate game I worked on, Pirates the Legend of Black Kat, had all those things. Here are some more screenshots from my old resume site.
He doesn’t really answer the question, just rattles off some stuff in his game. But you know what he wanted to say don’t you? He wanted to say, “The thing that is going to differentiates Pirates of the Caribbean MMO from other games is that mine is gonna be really great!” But he can’t say that. He would also probably love to go on about some really cool features that putting in but he can’t do that either because until those features are in the game, working, and balanced they are likely to change or get cut. People reading interviews tend to carve words in stone. Then if ANY part of those features changes, they like to drag those stones out, tie them to your legs and send you for a long walk off a short pier.
Another thing that developers are afraid to do is say that something isn’t in the game. For example if somebody were to ask me if we were going to have player housing in Fury I would be afraid to just say, “No. we aren’t.” But that is what I would want to say. And as soon as somebody opened their mouth to complain I would calmly explain to them that there is no player housing in Battlefield 2. There is no player housing in Command & Conquer! There is no player housing features in checkers! And then, when they pointed out that those are different kind of games I would beat them senseless with my keyboard while screaming, “Exactly my point” over and over.
So all that leads up to the fact that Weezer_blue posted about bows and archery in Fury over on the Fury-Sanctuary forums. I watched the thread for a little bit and then decided to bit the bullet and just come right out and say that there is no archery in Fury. It was a big risk. I think I might have actually pulled it off. Check it out its pretty good. Here are some quoted responses:
Q: What differentiates this game from other MMOs and pirate games?My first thought that this must be some new use of the word “unique” of which I was previously unaware. I mean aren’t defending your ship from sea monsters, fighting skeleton pirates, and casting voodoo spells pretty standard? Did this guy not play Secret of Monkey Island? Here is a posting from Ron Gilber, Designer of the Secret of Monkey Island, on his blog Grumpy Gamer which mentions the similarities and inside jokes that exist in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies that relate to The Secret of Monkey Island.
The biggest difference between this game and other MMOs is that the pirate-themed world we are designing will feature some supernatural elements that are unique to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise: defending your ship from sea monsters, fighting skeleton pirates, and casting voodoo spells. We will also include the classic pirate activities: epic sea battles, searching for buried treasure, playing dice and cards, and carousing in towns.
The point of this was that he didn’t really answer the question because none of those things differentiates that from other pirate games. Hell the pirate game I worked on, Pirates the Legend of Black Kat, had all those things. Here are some more screenshots from my old resume site.
He doesn’t really answer the question, just rattles off some stuff in his game. But you know what he wanted to say don’t you? He wanted to say, “The thing that is going to differentiates Pirates of the Caribbean MMO from other games is that mine is gonna be really great!” But he can’t say that. He would also probably love to go on about some really cool features that putting in but he can’t do that either because until those features are in the game, working, and balanced they are likely to change or get cut. People reading interviews tend to carve words in stone. Then if ANY part of those features changes, they like to drag those stones out, tie them to your legs and send you for a long walk off a short pier.
Another thing that developers are afraid to do is say that something isn’t in the game. For example if somebody were to ask me if we were going to have player housing in Fury I would be afraid to just say, “No. we aren’t.” But that is what I would want to say. And as soon as somebody opened their mouth to complain I would calmly explain to them that there is no player housing in Battlefield 2. There is no player housing in Command & Conquer! There is no player housing features in checkers! And then, when they pointed out that those are different kind of games I would beat them senseless with my keyboard while screaming, “Exactly my point” over and over.
So all that leads up to the fact that Weezer_blue posted about bows and archery in Fury over on the Fury-Sanctuary forums. I watched the thread for a little bit and then decided to bit the bullet and just come right out and say that there is no archery in Fury. It was a big risk. I think I might have actually pulled it off. Check it out its pretty good. Here are some quoted responses:
I must admit that this is certainly the best reply I have seen from a dev saying NO! to his fans.
-Tchakra
Well said.
-goku19123
Best answer from a Dev, ever...
-Bladen Skull
Best Answer from a dev or PR person ever...
- Lissar
That's easily the best response from a Dev I've read in a while, even if I don't particularly like the news.
- Weezer_blue
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Another Fury Fan Site and Another Fury Interview
Recently Library of Rage went online as Fury's second fan site.
MMOsite.com has also posted an interview with our Lead Designer, Adam Carpenter.
Auran will be showing Fury at PAX, thats the Penny Arcade Expo, next month. Unfortunately I won't be attending. I did however do an interview that should be up on MMORPG.com next week.
MMOsite.com has also posted an interview with our Lead Designer, Adam Carpenter.
Auran will be showing Fury at PAX, thats the Penny Arcade Expo, next month. Unfortunately I won't be attending. I did however do an interview that should be up on MMORPG.com next week.
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Prey
I bought Prey PC DVD Saturday afternoon at about 4ish in the afternoon. I had played the demo and thought the puzzle aspects of the portals and gravity changing stuff might have potential. I’ve always wanted to design a tesseract into a FPS. I used to use them in my AD&D campaigns after reading about how it work in an issue of Dragon Magazine back in the early 80's. I even managed to work one into my old live action game. There isn't one in Prey, but with their engine there could be one. So anyway sometime just about midnight I finished the game. One night that was it. I’m going to see if somebody at works wants to buy the very slightly used copy off me.
I don’t really fault the game for being short. I remember a good number of years ago when everybody was raving about the first Max Pain game saying it’s only flaw was that you could finish it over a weekend. I thought that was a good thing because a weekend is really the only time had between work and (at the time) raiding in Everquest.
It is why Prey is short that bugs me. I really feel that the designers dropped the ball on the game. I think the biggest problem was that you can’t die. Well you die but then you go to the spirit world, shoot some ghosts that fly around you, and then you are resurrected right back where you left off. This means there is no point trying to figure out how to get through a difficult level because you just blast away until you die, you resurrect, continue, rinse and repeat.
Because of this “no dying” thing the designers were allowed to get away with building some really bad boss encounters. I cannot believe they designed those encounters without expecting you to die, die a few times, to get through them. I’m sure if some really good, twitch-master, 14-year old FPS video game ultra-expert sat down he could do it, but me… I died a few times. There was a little thinking involved with finding the ‘trick’ to killing some of the bosses but nothing that stumped me for more than half a second.
I can almost see the designers doing a little creative thinking and coming up with some cool ideas for bosses… and then just putting them in as is with little follow up or additional tweaking. I’m just speculating here but I really didn’t get the feeling they spent much time on how the player is supposed to fight the boss. They didn’t seem to put in other things in the area that the player can use to avoid the boss when he charges, or shoots his barrage of missiles, or whatever. Most boss fights felt like you were just supposed to go toe to toe with the mob, die, shoot some ghosts with your spirit boy, resurrected and continue where you left off.
Another problem with Prey is the horrible script and voice acting. I certainly didn’t feel like the main was a Cherokee warrior reconnecting with his cultural heritage. I thought he was a doofus, a complete dork. I can certainly see why Jen, his girlfriend, didn’t want to leave the reservation with him. Starting back at the beginning: He is disillusioned with the whole reservation thing, doesn’t believe in any of that spiritual nonsense, and wants to leave and start a new life. Okay, I get that. But then Aliens abduct him (notice I don’t associate myself, the player, as being the main character), his girlfriend and the grandfather. The aliens kill his grandfather in front of him and then when he should have died in a fall to his death suddenly finds himself in the spirit world where he meets his grandfather again, gets the spirit of his childhood hawk pet as a companion, and learns to separate his body from go spirit walking. You would think by this point he would be open to new things, start to sit up and pay attention to what the old (dead) guy is saying. But no, next time he goes back to the spirit world he is the same stupid doofus.
I love lines like, “I have to find Jen! She has to be close by!”
Does she? Does she really HAVE to be close by? She wasn’t by the way.
The back-story, the story germ itself was okay. It just failed in its execution. Getting Art Bell for the radio bits was cool though.
In conclusion I thought the game was just okay. Great technical aspects and good artwork but the design let me down. Multi-player might be really good but I have World of Warcraft and Battlefield 2 taking up that time. I also downloaded The Ship from Steam last night too. At $20 bucks I figured it was worth a shot. I only got to play the offline version for 10 minutes today before we went out so I still don't know if it is any good or not.
Oh if you do spend a evening playing Prey, watch through to the end of the credits for a short sequel set-up. It’s nothing great but you might as well squeeze the last drop out of the game.
I don’t really fault the game for being short. I remember a good number of years ago when everybody was raving about the first Max Pain game saying it’s only flaw was that you could finish it over a weekend. I thought that was a good thing because a weekend is really the only time had between work and (at the time) raiding in Everquest.
It is why Prey is short that bugs me. I really feel that the designers dropped the ball on the game. I think the biggest problem was that you can’t die. Well you die but then you go to the spirit world, shoot some ghosts that fly around you, and then you are resurrected right back where you left off. This means there is no point trying to figure out how to get through a difficult level because you just blast away until you die, you resurrect, continue, rinse and repeat.
Because of this “no dying” thing the designers were allowed to get away with building some really bad boss encounters. I cannot believe they designed those encounters without expecting you to die, die a few times, to get through them. I’m sure if some really good, twitch-master, 14-year old FPS video game ultra-expert sat down he could do it, but me… I died a few times. There was a little thinking involved with finding the ‘trick’ to killing some of the bosses but nothing that stumped me for more than half a second.
I can almost see the designers doing a little creative thinking and coming up with some cool ideas for bosses… and then just putting them in as is with little follow up or additional tweaking. I’m just speculating here but I really didn’t get the feeling they spent much time on how the player is supposed to fight the boss. They didn’t seem to put in other things in the area that the player can use to avoid the boss when he charges, or shoots his barrage of missiles, or whatever. Most boss fights felt like you were just supposed to go toe to toe with the mob, die, shoot some ghosts with your spirit boy, resurrected and continue where you left off.
Another problem with Prey is the horrible script and voice acting. I certainly didn’t feel like the main was a Cherokee warrior reconnecting with his cultural heritage. I thought he was a doofus, a complete dork. I can certainly see why Jen, his girlfriend, didn’t want to leave the reservation with him. Starting back at the beginning: He is disillusioned with the whole reservation thing, doesn’t believe in any of that spiritual nonsense, and wants to leave and start a new life. Okay, I get that. But then Aliens abduct him (notice I don’t associate myself, the player, as being the main character), his girlfriend and the grandfather. The aliens kill his grandfather in front of him and then when he should have died in a fall to his death suddenly finds himself in the spirit world where he meets his grandfather again, gets the spirit of his childhood hawk pet as a companion, and learns to separate his body from go spirit walking. You would think by this point he would be open to new things, start to sit up and pay attention to what the old (dead) guy is saying. But no, next time he goes back to the spirit world he is the same stupid doofus.
I love lines like, “I have to find Jen! She has to be close by!”
Does she? Does she really HAVE to be close by? She wasn’t by the way.
The back-story, the story germ itself was okay. It just failed in its execution. Getting Art Bell for the radio bits was cool though.
In conclusion I thought the game was just okay. Great technical aspects and good artwork but the design let me down. Multi-player might be really good but I have World of Warcraft and Battlefield 2 taking up that time. I also downloaded The Ship from Steam last night too. At $20 bucks I figured it was worth a shot. I only got to play the offline version for 10 minutes today before we went out so I still don't know if it is any good or not.
Oh if you do spend a evening playing Prey, watch through to the end of the credits for a short sequel set-up. It’s nothing great but you might as well squeeze the last drop out of the game.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Lords of the Dead
Lords of the Dead is a very old guild having gotten started in SSI’s Dark Sun Online in 1995. They were a powerful PK guild on the Baja server in Ultima Online and have also had a presence in Asheron’s Call, Dark Age of Camelog, Everquest, Guild Wars, Shadowbane and Star Wars Galaxies.
They added FURY to their list of upcoming games they were interested in at the beginning of the month and have just now wrangled a very good set of Questions and Answers from our lead Designer. Both of those two links are hosted in their forums so you can read the reaction posts of their community as well.
They added FURY to their list of upcoming games they were interested in at the beginning of the month and have just now wrangled a very good set of Questions and Answers from our lead Designer. Both of those two links are hosted in their forums so you can read the reaction posts of their community as well.
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
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.
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.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.
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.
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.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
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.
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.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
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.
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.
Thursday, June 29, 2006
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.
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.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
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:
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.
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.
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. WithSystem 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.
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.
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 ThreadYou 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.
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
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.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
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!
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!
Friday, June 16, 2006
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.
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.
Thursday, June 15, 2006
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
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
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
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
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.
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.
Monday, May 29, 2006
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.
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.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
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?
Thursday, May 18, 2006
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
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.
We also got honorable mention for “Best of Show” with this quote:
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
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?
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?
Monday, May 15, 2006
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.
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.
Saturday, May 13, 2006
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.
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.
Saturday, May 06, 2006
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.
You can read the full press release here.
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
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.
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