How to fix your crashing XBox 360

The pattern is all too familiar: New console comes out, people queue over night to get hold of one, supply problems are reported, and a few days later the hype is over and people are complaining that there are crashes and that the new machine isn't quite as wonderful as the hype suggested.

For the XBox 360 one of the major problems reported was frequent crashes, with different error messages and in different games. But the mysterious problem seems to be related to the power supply, which overheats, not to the console itself. And The Inquirer reports that one gamer has found out how to fix the XBox 360 crash: Use a piece of string to lift up the power supply, so it gets cooled from all sides. All sides? You mean like 360°? Now I understand where the 360 in the console's name comes from! :)

XBox 360° cooling for the win!

Fortunately I didn't buy one. Which has nothing to do with the quality of the console, but everything to do with the initial line-up of games. Of the 18 XBox 360 games currently available, 11 are sports titles, and the rest are shooters and other forms of action games. Number of role-playing games or strategy games: Zero.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:43 PM Permanent Link  (4) comments

 
Dragon Quest VIII in Europe?

I stumbled upon a review of the newly released Dragon Quest VIII : Journey of the Cursed King for the PS2, which sounds as if this would be a game I'd like to play. So I surf over to Amazon.co.uk to order it, and find they don't have it. Turns out the game was released only in the United States for now. Europe might get it in "Spring 2006", or it might not, at least there is no place you can already pre-order it.

This is annoying. I can't buy the US version, because the US Playstation 2 games are not compatible to my European PS2, in spite of my TV being able to display NTSC. And I can't see why there is no simultaneous release for US and Euro versions of games, at least for the English language version. As it is, I feel like living in the third world, game-wise, after Japan and the USA.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:50 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Resources with stats

The news on Star Wars Galaxies are bad: While completely changing your game system from virtual world to twitchy shooter game is already a bad idea, the developers in addition managed to botch the implementation. SWG at release was a bug-infested mess. SWG after the NGE changes is said to be worse. Ouch! Far from reviving the game, it seems SWG is headed for a fall of a cliff.

So thinking back to the time when I played it, I wondered what exactly I liked in SWG. And the answer curiously is "resources with stats". Let me explain that with a comparison with World of Warcraft:

If in World of Warcraft you mine copper, you get copper ore, plus rough stones and the occasional low-level gem. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, which you could do to alter the result. Your level, your mining skill, nothing has any effect on mining, everybody in the game will get exactly the same quantity and quality of copper ore. If you move to tin, iron, mithril, and so on, the story is the same. You will need to be of higher level to mine them, because of the more dangerous monsters around the ore spots, but as long as you have the minimum skill and make it to the ore spot alive, your level and skill make no difference to the quality and quantity of the ore mined.

In Star Wars Galaxies, every week the location of all resources would change, and you would use your surveying skill while traveling over large areas to find locations for resources with high stats. Finding a mediocre spot with mediocre quality resources is easy, finding a spot with a high yield of some rare resource with good stats is hard, and requires both player and avatar skills. Finding resources in SWG was a game, in WoW it is just work.

That has a profound influence on crafting and the player economy. In SWG resources sold at different prices, according to quality. You bought or collected low quality stuff for items where quality didn't matter, and used high quality stuff for crafting the best possible armor and weapons, which would sell for high amounts of money. In WoW the market price of copper is only depending on supply and demand, and is easy to manipulate. Some people buy cheap resources and resell them at higher price. And regular crafters who want to buy resources don't get any choice: If your recipe says you need copper, then there is nothing else in the game that you could use. You can't make your crafted item cheaper by using lower quality resources, or craft a high-quality master piece.

The crafting system in SWG had lots of flaws, I remember grinding 1,650 Mabari chest plates to achieve Master Armorsmith status. But collecting good resources and making master armor was fun. The WoW resource gathering and crafting system is downright primitive in comparison. I do hope that one day another MMORPG will make resources have stats. I really would like to play a master crafter again, who's quality of goods depend on his skills, and not on having found rare recipes and rare resources on a dungeon crawl.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:01 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Gamersinfo Auto Assault preview

There is a site named Gamersinfo, which is regularly sending me a newsletter with links to their latest articles. The only problem is that I never subscribed to that newsletter, and there is no unsubscribe function in either the letter or on the site. The technically the newsletter is spam, I'm on a distribution list together with several other gaming sites. Well, nowadays one has to count oneself lucky if one gets spam which is about something that interests you, so I'm not making a fuzz about it. And, as obviously is their intention, I'll link to them if they have something good.

This weeks goody is a preview of the upcoming MMORPG Auto Assault, from NCSoft. That is a game I will certainly want to try out, because it is so different from everything else. Although you do have a human or humanoid avatar, your *real* avatar in the game is an armed car. You solve missions by driving and shooting, and the equipment you find is armor and weapons for your car. I remember an old board game named Car Wars from Steve Jackson Games, so the concept isn't totally new, but this is the first MMORPG incarnation of it.

I just hope I can get into a beta or public stress test before buying the game, although I have already pre-ordered it. There is a significant chance that I will be unable to really play it, and it would be nice to find that out early. I suck at both racing and shooter games, with only a few exceptions (GTA Vice City I managed and liked), so there is a very real risk that Auto Assault is too twitchy for me. On the other hand, MMORPG tend to be not too twitchy, because you can't punish somebody for reacting a split second late if he has a couple of hundred milliseconds of lag. I will have to wait and see.

Auto Assault's official website doesn't have any information on the release date, but rumors are pointing towards Spring 2006. You can already pre-order the game, but the retailer websites on offer list different release dates from end of January to end of April.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:23 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
An investment opportunity

I'm a sucker for get-rich-quick schemes, usually devised by myself. Fortunately that is limited to virtual worlds with virtual money, so you Nigerian dictators can stop sending me spam about partnerships to get millions of dollars out of the country. In real life I invest sensible, in bonds and index fonds. But in the World of Warcraft I just spent 150 gold on a recipe of Transmute Undeath to Water, more than half of my wealth.

The idea is simple. I already made good money with my Transmute Water to Air recipe, which transmute Essence of Water into Essence of Air. I used to be able to buy Essence of Water for less than 7 gold, and sell the Essence of Air for twice that. But recently the price of Essence of Water has gone up to 11 to 12 gold. And the patch note for v1.9 say that the drop rate for Essence of Air will increase, further eroding that profit margin.

I tried farming the Essence of Water, because Thottbot said it had a 7% drop rate from Toxic Horrors in Felwood. Unfortunately that is not true, because it seems that Thottbot is only counting the cases which have *any* loot. With more than half of the Toxic Horrors not dropping anything, you need to kill about 30 of them to find an Essence of Water. And as lots of other people are farming that place, landing the first hit on 30 of the Toxic Horrors takes quite some time. Furthermore farming the same mob over and over gets boring pretty quickly, and of course I'd prefer to get rich without work.

So now I'm buying Essence of Undeath for up to 3 gold, and transmute them into Essence of Water. If the Essence of Water price is high, I sell them. If it is low, I can still transmute further into Essence of Air, hoping that the prices of that will remain high. And the beauty of it is that while I can only do it once per day, the whole transmuting, putting on auction, and getting the money from the mailbox just takes 5 minutes. And with the undeath transmutation recipe being so rare, I don't have much competition.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:37 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
Puzzle Pirates review revisited

Last year I wrote a review of Puzzle Pirates. Now that I restarted playing that game and found it evolved, I re-read my review, and found that it needs some annotations.

First of all: Thanks to the anonymous commenter who already added a comment explaining some of the changes to the original article. As he explained, your money doesn't get burried on a lonely island if you log out away from home, which makes a casual play schedule a lot easier. On the Doubloon oceans the banks are now used to exchange Doubloons against Pieces of Eight and vice versa.

And yes, the number of puzzles has grown. Besides distilling, now ship-building and alchemy got their own puzzles. There are also more games in the inns, two card games, Hearts and Spades, and a coin-throwing game for two players which I particularly like (although I usually lose). If that isn't enough for you, the inn also has links to puzzle games from another provider on a website, which is a nice touch.

My principal problem with Puzzle Pirate a year ago was that everybody wanted to be a captain, and nobody wanted to be the simple sailor, who has access to less puzzles and less game activities for the same subscription price. And I guess that remains the same on the standard monthly fee subscription oceans (servers are called oceans in this game). But on the Doubloon oceans that problem is fixed as well. Playing a jobber or cabin boy costs nothing at all. Playing a full crew member pirate costs 1 Doubloon (about 25 cents) per month. Playing a captain costs 20 Doubloons. So now I finally saw big crews with 30 or more pirates on board of the same ship, because when being captain costs you $5 per month, there is less interest in that job.

I spent some time doing puzzles and exploring the new features. If I can find somebody who lets me train the navigation puzzle on his ship, I could probably reach the requirements for becoming captain soon. And $5 per month wouldn't really be a problem. But I'm not sure whether I will do it, for the same reason that I avoid becoming guild leader in a classical MMORPG: You have a certain responsability towards the members of your crew / guild, and end up feeling forced to play. In Puzzle Pirates you can be captain without a crew, you will get just a minimum crew of NPC pirates to help you sail your ship, but that isn't really efficient, as NPC pirates tend to be rather mediocre at everything they do. I did that for a while last year, but didn't really get anywhere. It only makes sense if you also open a shop, and use the ship to transport goods to your shop. But then again you need to log on often to keep your shop running, and it soon feels more like work than like play. That is the principle of virtual worlds, getting somewhere needs a certain dedication, and if you just want to play casually you need to limit your ambitions.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:17 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
Sony rootkit summary

BBC News has an excellent summary of the history and implications of the Sony rootkit. Sony went one step too far in trying to copy-protect their music CDs, and installed potentially harmful software which is hard to remove on half a million user's computers.

The interesting thing is that this has lead to a recall of the CDs and two major lawsuits against Sony. Which means that record companies, and hopefully software companies as well, will be more careful about what kind of software they use to protect copyright. And the courts will help to find some guidelines for that.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:08 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
End of adventure

The dragon of bureaucracy is slain, it's armor of stupid computer systems and uncaring customer service representatives is pierced. My adventure with the double computer of Dell is over, they acknowledged that they got the second computer which they accidentally sent me back, and they don't insist on me paying it any more. As foreseen that cost me couple of phone calls and some time, but in the end I got it all settled. I was lucky to find one nice customer service person.

The only thing that remains is a doubt about the usefulness of my 1-year guarantee, because using that guarantee would mean to send the computer back to them. Now that I know how difficult that is, I might prefer to get the computer repaired locally at my own cost, instead of invoking the guarantee. On the other hand, the computer shows no sign of wanting to break down in the next 10 months, running perfectly for two months now, so this might be a non-issue. I'm happy I took the minimum guarantee, the standard guarantee would have cost me another $150 for 3 years of protection.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:49 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
Alternative payment systems

I left Puzzle Pirates some time ago. That is a game which is fun for a while, but not something to play every day. And if you don't play a MMORPG often enough, paying a monthly subscription is a bit stupid. Enter alternative payment methods, recently introduced into Puzzle Pirates in the form of Doubloons. Doubloons are basically credits which you buy from Three Rings, the game company. And for some purchases in game, like new clothing, new weapons, or a ship, you have to spend these Doubloons in parallel with the normal game currency, Pieces of Eight. You also need Doubloons to pay for 30-day "badges" which enable you to play certain puzzles at any time, while many of these puzzles are free on certain days. Thus the more active you are in the game, and the more you want to do in the game, the more Doubloons you pay, and the more dollars it costs you. On the other hand, if you only want to do the occasional puzzle, and not start a big pirate career, you don't spend many Doubloons, there is no monthly fee, and your total monthly cost is lower than usual.

Of course critics will say that this is just a disguised form of RMT. And in fact you can exchange Doubloons for Pieces of Eight at a special exchange with other players, thus paying dollars for virtual currency. But in Puzzle Pirates there are no levels, and your clothing just looks good, and doesn't give any bonuses to the game. Your success in Puzzle Pirates is based on your personal skill in the different puzzles, and if you suck at the Tetris-like swordfighting puzzle, no amount of money can make you win, whatever you paid for your shiny sword. In a way Puzzle Pirates is a lot fairer than other MMORPG, because it really measures skill, not just time or money spent.

Well, I created a character on the "Sage" Ocean, bought 90 Doubloons for $20, and expect them to last me for quite some time. As an alternative payment system, "micro-payment" for MMORPG, I find the Doubloons system well done. Recommended.

Of course that made me think about my only other current MMORPG subscription, for WoW. I'm still paying, but I play a lot less than usual. I found a favorite spot for doing a bit of farming with my level 60, killing water elementals for essence of water, then using my alchemy skills to transmute them into essence of air, which sell for around 15 gold. And sometimes I log on my level 39 priest, and do quests with him, but only as long as his rest xp bonus lasts. I'm not playing WoW every day. So I was thinking about a hypothetical alternative WoW payment system, where you buy a number of credits, at lets say $1 per credit, and every day you play (no matter how long) costs you 1 credit. If you play every day, that system would cost twice as much as the current one, and the monthly subscription would be a better alternative. But if you only play once in a while, it would be fair to let you pay less for playing less, and you wouldn't be tempted to unsubscribe while waiting for the expansion set or anything.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:00 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments

 
DDO to integrate voice chat

Turbine announced that their upcoming Dungeons & Dragons Online game would have integrated voice chat. Kudos for being the first, but in a way that was an inevitable development. MMORPG are getting faster, so typed chat is getting too slow a form of communication for most people. Most activities which involve groups can benefit a lot from voice chat, so much that I actually consider a PvP fight between one group using voice chat and another group not using it to be unfair and unbalanced, a kind of cheating.

Setting up a Teamspeak server for your guild is easy enough, but voice chat in a pickup group is next to impossible in the current MMORPG. You can't assume everybody has the software, and then you need to communicate the IP address, passwords, and so on to everybody. Just takes too long for most people to bother with. Once the voice chat is integrated in the game, and a chat channel for your current group is automatically created, chatting gets a lot easier.

Unfortunately I dislike wearing headsets, although I already bought the most comfortable one. Also by wearing a headset and talking into a microphone, you are one step more removed from the real world, shutting it out even more. I might go for a switch-activated desktop microphone instead, if voice chat really becomes necessary for playing MMORPG.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:09 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments

 
Why doesn't GM sell crack?

When I'm not busy playing games, I often read and think about what happens in the real world. And like many other people, I'm a bit worried about where the world is heading. One of the chief worriers is Michael Moore. I don't like him very much, I think much of what he does is over the top, sometimes just plain unfair, just to get an effect. Nevertheless I think he is an intelligent person, and among all the crap he says, there are sometimes things worth thinking about. One of these is an essay of him called "Why doesn't GM sell crack?".

In summary the essay asks a provocative question to make a valid point: Companies can't do everything which is profitable, because some very profitable activities (like selling crack) are illegal. So the benefit of the population as a whole, expressed in laws, beats the wish of companies to make profits. Moving away from the stupid drug example, a more valid example would be child labor, sweatshops, and so on. Society has a right to stop companies from exploiting people, even if that exploiting would obviously be profitable.

That is a very important thing to keep in mind in the current situation, where the so-called "anglo-saxon capitalism" is on the rise. Because companies are exerting pressure on governments to "reform" laws that have been made to protect society from exploiters. Now some of these laws might be bad, and it is certainly the right of businessmen as part of the society to participate in the discussion of where the right compromise between protection and profit lies. But unfortunately business representatives often use "globalisation" as blackmail to get their point of view through: "Reform, or we move all our factories to China".

As a result, globalisation, which is in principle a quite beneficial process, got a very bad name (and China as well, often undeservedly), and there is a big anti-globalisation movement. When in fact the people are just justifyably worried about becoming victim to unrestricted capitalism, and the enemy is much closer home than "globalisation" or "China".

Reviewing laws that restrict business and provide welfare is a good thing. But the goal of that exercise has to be maximizing benefit for the society as a whole, not just for the business sub-group of society. Classical economic theory defines that all wealth is created from three factors: land, capital, and labor. The big problem is that often different people supply these three factors of production, and afterwards you have to distribute the added wealth between them. Nowhere in economic theory does it say that it is capital who must control this wealth distribution, paying a minimum for land and labor, and keeping the major part for itself. It is only the fact that globalisation has made capital more flexible, while land and labor is often less mobile, which gives capital the upper hand at the moment. It is the job of governments to resist this pressure, do reasonable laws that benefit all, and keep in mind the benefit of the other "stakeholders", not only the shareholders.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:54 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
The Movies Review

For being a multi-billion dollar business, the world of video games has relatively few stars. One of these stars is Peter Molineux, of Lionhead Studios, who just released his latest game, called “The Movies”. The Movies lets you run a Hollywood movie studio from the 1920s on, making films, dealing with stars, and managing the business.

At first The Movies plays pretty much like any other “Tycoon” game. You place buildings on your studio grounds, hire stars and several types of other employees, try to increase their skills, and make money with movies. You need to layout the buildings intelligently, to shorten the ways, and you need to place paths. You need to place ornaments to make the place pretty. And you need to do research, which opens up new buildings which you can place and new movie-making technologies.

Where The Movies “claim to fame” kicks in, is when you pretty early in the game you get the building which enables you to script your own movies. That opens up a tool which enables you to let your creativity go wild, and create your own movies. There are dozens of pre-scripted short sequences, which you can put together to form a whole movie of a couple of minutes length. You can modify these sequences, cut them, put sub-titles, music, speech bits, and you can even record your own sound-bites and add them. You can spend hours in creating a perfect movie and then publish it on the The Movies website, for other people to see. As a creativity tool this movie maker is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and on the website you can see some really great mechanime films created with it.

Unfortunately the tool has no influence whatsoever on the management part of the game. Your movies are hits or flops based on the experience scores of the director, actors, and crew, and on the novelty value of the technology and scenery used. Whether you let the movie be written by an automated NPC scriptwriter or spend several hours carefully assembling an artistic masterpiece doesn’t change anything. The computer is unable to recognize art, and even unable to recognize content. Hacking together a movie with all the latest backdrops and props, even if the story doesn’t make any sense at all, will give you the best financial success. You could say this adds realism to the game, there is no money in art. So the movie maker part for the average player remains a toy to fool around with sometimes, an optional part which doesn’t advance the game. For the mechanime fan, the best solution is to find a cheat that opens up all backdrops and props, and then forget about the game, and just use the creativity tool.

The management game part of The Movies isn’t bad, although I find it a bit on the hard side. Even if you hire all the unemployed people applying at your studio, you will often be short of employees, and be forced to let the litter rest on the floor and use your janitor as minor actor in your movie. That gets especially bad when at one point in the game suddenly every one of your stars insists that he needs an “entourage”, a gofer running errands for him. The game doesn’t have any way to encourage more people to apply for jobs with you by offering better pay, the number of unemployed people showing up only depends on the success rating of your studio. So you get caught in a viscous cycle where you can’t increase your success because you lack people, and you can’t get more people because you don’t have success.

Fortunately the money part of the game is a lot easier. If you don’t mind being rated mediocre, and missing out at all the Oscar award ceremonies, at least you won’t go broke. The graphics are modern, and watching your stars acting out movies in the sets and seeing the filmed results is fun enough. There is nothing really innovative in the management part of the game, but if you liked games like Rollercoaster Tycoon, you will like The Movies as well.

It is the movie maker tool which makes The Movies unique, but this tool is kind of detached from the game, and has to be judged independently. Whether you like management game, and whether you like creating your own movies are two very different pairs of shoes. In “Tycoon” games, The Movie is just one of many. As a creativity tool it is unique, and well worth Peter Molineux’s star status.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:39 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Free trial of the new Star Wars Galaxies

A major file distribution site that I'm getting tired to mention is offering a free 10-day trial of Star Wars Galaxies. Good opportunity to have a look at the major changes the combat system underwent. Unfortunately I'm not really tempted right now.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:08 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
MMORPGs of 2005?

Okay, so I spent most of this year in a cave called World of Warcraft and didn't have much time to look for other games. But now that I crawled out of that cave and am looking around, I'm a bit disappointed. Where are the MMORPGs of 2005? Is it just me, or aren't there many of them? The only major new MMORPG I can think of is Guild Wars. There were some expansion sets, and a sequel/expansion in City of Villains. But most of the new games seem to be expected only for next year.

Is that the "giant sucking sound" of World of Warcraft attracting all the players, with all the other game companies lying low until WoW has run its course? The right time to release a new game would be now, that WoW is a year old and the expansion set is still far away, so you can get the christmas sales.

Well, there will be lots of new games next year. And it will be interesting to see whether these can profit from World of Warcraft having expanded the market, or whether they will troubles fighting for a spot in the sun.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:10 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments

 
Raph Koster

Raph Koster is a MMORPG designer with a philosophical streak, and a talent for writing. So reading his blog is well worth the time. I must admit I haven't read his book on the Theory of Fun. But with Raph being to some extent responsible for Star Wars Galaxies, I wasn't quite sure if he was perfectly qualified to tell me what fun is. Of course the kinder explanation for SWG is that Raph knows what fun is, but wasn't quite able to implement it in that game. Nevertheless, I usually like what Raph is writing on different gaming forums, he was kind of a regular at the now defunct Grimwell Online, and good to discuss with. So his blog might be a good place to be.

One nice example of his writing is his parable on why there are so few games designed for women, called Blue World.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:48 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Vanguard Saga of Heroes

There are some very informative posts on the gameplay of Vanguard SoH to be found here. I like the idea of being able to see what the enemy is going to do next, and thus being able to react, for example blocking the most powerful attacks.

Unfortunately I'm still a bit sceptical due to earlier comments by the Vanguard developers who seemed to like lots of downtime and very slow character advancement to keep people playing. But in the end all this is just feature lists, and feature lists can never describe how a game actually plays, and whether it is fun. We will have to wait and see.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:21 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Dungeons and Dragons Online - Stormreach

Just a late reminder that this week there is a Dungeons and Dragons Online Stress Test going on, available as usual via Fileplanet. Sorry, the stress test has an NDA and I can't talk about it.

If I mention Fileplanet a lot, it is because they nowadays are my primary method of getting into beta tests. Sure, it costs $50 per year to subscribe and be eligible for those beta tests. But that gives you not only several more or less exclusive beta tests, but also high-speed download access for all sorts of game demos, trailers, and other files. So I can justify the cost by the savings I achieve from testing games before I buy them.

The only thing I hate about Fileplanet is that they often send me invites to a beta, or advertising for a downloadable game, and then when I click on it, it turns out to be for North Americans only. I think game companies need to wake up to the realities of the 21st century and think a lot more global. There are lots of people speaking English all around the globe, and several English-speaking countries outside of North America. Limiting your potential customers to North America only just doesn't make sense, especially if your product is something that can be downloaded via the Internet.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:45 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments

 
More black marks for Dell

I'm still very satisfied with both of my Dell computers. But their customer service is so abysmally bad, it is unbelievable. I already told the story how I ordered one computer from Dell, they sent me two computers by mistake, and then it took me 6 weeks before I could get their logistics department to take the second computer back. And what happens now? You guessed it, Dell is sending me a reminder for the invoice for the second computer, which I have sent back over 2 weeks ago. So while before I had 2 computers and 1 invoice, now I have 1 computer and 2 invoices. Well, one invoice is paid, and I'm obviously not going to pay the second one. But I guess it'll take me another long series of e-mails and phone calls to get that mess sorted out. *Grrrrr*
- posted by Tobold @ 5:36 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Free World of Warcraft

For North Americans only (why does everybody treat me like a second class earth citizen?), Fileplanet is now offering a free trial of World of Warcraft. If you belong to the exclusive 3 hermits who haven't played WoW yet, this is your chance to try it out for free.

Apart from the "North America only" bit, I am much in favor of free trials for MMORPG. More companies should offer them, and *worldwide*. Although I've heard that if Europe is second class, people in Australia are often even more discriminated against, as they are often bundled with the rest of Asia. It is time that marketing people in game companies learned to distinguish first world countries from third world countries, to correctly judge where there might be problems with copyright and credit card fraud.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:18 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Civilization IV

I played half of a game of Civilization at the lowest difficulty level, found it was to easy, and started another one at a medium difficulty. Something like 12 hours later I won that game, with a diplomatic victory. So here are my thoughts on the new version of this classic game:

Civilization IV is a very good game, mainly because it didn't stray too far from the successful predecessors. It is still a turn-based game, where you start in 4000 B.C. with a settler, found your first city, and build an empire of many cities over the ages. In a standard game there are 6 other civilizations competing against you, all played by the computer. At the core of the game are your cities. These grow, produce buildings, produce units with which you can explore or conquer the map, and they produce gold and research. With research you move along a tech tree from inventing the wheel to inventing space flight, thus moving your civilization through history.

What is interesting in Civilization IV is that you have a wide range of options how you want to run your empire. If you want, and don't mind very long games, you can micro-manage every tiny bit. But if you dislike micro-management, you can set most things on automatic, and concentrate on whatever your favorite occupation is, e.g. waging war against your neighbors. The AI of the automated tasks isn't bad, but not perfect, so for the highest difficulty levels you would probably need to micro-manage to succeed. I really like the fact that with 9 different difficulty levels, and numerous other options at the game creation screens you can tailor the game to your liking.

There are 6 different victory conditions, which again shows you how you can approach the game in many different ways. You can win by having the highest score in 2050, by eliminating all other civilizations, by controlling most of the map and population, by having three cities with legendary cultural status, by building a space ship to alpha centauri, or by winning a diplomatic victory through an election by the United Nations.

The major resources of each city, food and production, are not tradeable. There is no way to feed a starving city from another city in abundance next to it, which feels a bit strange sometimes. But Civ4 has come a long way in making your empire feel more like a connected whole, and not just the sum of the cities. This is done with resources, which are distributed all over the map, some of them hidden until you discover the appropriate technology. If you want to build for example a spearman in a city, you need access to iron or copper. For that the city must either have the iron or copper in its own city radius, or be connected to it with roads. And there must be a mine on the resource. So connecting your cities with a road network is very important.

What is new in Civ4 is the concept of culture. Previously the number of inhabitants of your cities determined its zone of control. Now each city is pushing the borders of your empire forward (and against those of other civilizations) with a value called culture. You can increase the culture of your city with buildings like theatre, the city culture then slowly accumulates, and at certain values your cultural influence radius grows. You can even drop "culture bombs", by using a "great artist" in a city to give it a sizeable culture boost, which is nice for controlling borders.

Likewise new is a choice of different religions. There are 7 religions in the game, which to be totally politically correct are all totally identical. The first civilization to discover certain technologies founds the religion related to it, and from there it can spread automatically or with you building missionaries. It is generally a good idea to have the same religion in all of your cities, declare that religion as "state religion", and receive certain bonuses. Neighboring civilizations with the same religion are more friendly to each other, but converting them is rather difficult.

The last major improvement is that instead of having simple state forms like monarchy or democracy, you now can mix and match your own state form from 25 civics, sorted in 5 trees of 5 choices. These civics give different advantages, but also cost different amounts of upkeep.

Beyond simply playing Civilization IV, you can also spend a lot of time developing maps and "mods" for it. There is a world builder editor, you can modify data files in XML, and there is a simple script language named Python. The official website still doesn't offer much in the way of mods and maps, but sites like Apolyton or Civfanatics do.

I really do like Civilization IV. The only worry I have is about replayability. While the huge number of options is nice, the tech tree and general development of each civilization is always the same. And the game flow is very similar to how the previous games played, which makes it more likely that you tire from it earlier. But this is definitely a game I want to have in my game library to play occasionally.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:20 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Impatience is no virtue

Although I live in Belgium, I buy most of my computer games and books from Amazon in the UK. The reason for that is language, I want the English versions. Computer games in Belgium come in two flavors: French game with French manual, or English game with Dutch manual (the poor Dutch aren't numerous enough for somebody to translate the game as well).

So I ordered Civ4 from Amazon UK, together with a couple of other games and books. I usually bundle several things in one order to minimize shipping cost. Although Amazon is supposed to wait until they have everything on hand and send it to me in one big bundle, sometimes they split my order up into several parcels, at no extra cost for me, for reasons of their internal logistics. And while I was desperately waiting for Civ4 to arrive, I get several parcels with all the other games and books from my order, but not Civ4. Grrrrr. According to their e-mail, two parcels, one with another game and one with Civ4, have been sent to me over a week ago. I received the other one already last Friday, but not the Civ4.

The sensible thing to do would have been to wait another week, and then contact Amazon to make them either find the lost parcel or to replace it. But I'm leaving on a business trip on Sunday, and I really wanted to have Civ4 on my laptop for that. I was just running out of patience, and couldn't wait. So when I passed by a shopping center yesterday, I bought the Dutch version of Civ4 here. The game is in English, and nobody reads the manual anyway. :) Actually I ended up downloading the Civ4 manual in pdf format from ReplacementDocs, and the Civ4 tech tree poster from the official site. The in-game Civilopedia is worse than previous versions, because it doesn't have a search function. When one of my cities revolted, I was unable to find information on "revolt" in the Civilopedia, but searching for it in the pdf manual worked quite well, and much better than searching for it in a paper manual.

I started playing Civ4 with the tutorial, which is well done. Not that I really would have needed it, most concepts are still the same as in the previous games. But Civilization is a complicated game, and the tutorial should go a long way to make it accessible to people who haven't played the prequels. I had to laugh at a virtual Sid Meier trying to explain me the concept of a "turn-based" game, obviously targeted at people who had only played real-time games before.

After the tutorial I started my first real game, and played until well into the night. I like Civ4, it is both similar enough to the old games to have the same magic, and new enough to be interesting. The area a city controls is not any more depending on its population, but on a new stat called culture. You can even occasionally get special units which are able to boost the culture of a city by a large amount, effectively dropping a "culture bomb" which pushes forward the borders of your empire. Talk about cultural imperialism. There is also a new concept of religions, you can now discover new religions on the tech tree, and create missionary units to convert cities to your favorite religion. I still need to read up on the details of this, right now I have some cities with several religions, and I'm not sure whether that is good or bad.

I haven't encountered any bugs yet, and the new graphics are nice. So Civ4 is pretty much what I expected and hoped for. Life will probably punish me for my impatience by putting the parcel from Amazon in my letter box today. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 8:34 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Trying to play Fable

I have a teenage nephew, who owns a XBox. Feeling particularly generous on my last visit, he let me play Fable on his XBox for half an hour or so. I liked it, and so I bought the PC version, Fable : The Lost Chapters. I connect my USB dual-stick gamepad to my PC, check that it's recognized okay by Windows, install Fable, and start the game. Doh! In spite of being definitively designed to be played with a gamepad on the XBox, using a gamepad on the PC is not an option. How stupid!

Instead you move your character with WASD keys (or you can chose arrow keys if you are left-handed), and the camera with the mouse. Now I wouldn't mind that, if the camera followed my character, but no: If you turn, the camera doesn't turn with you, and you need to move the mouse at the same time to keep it behind your character. Even worse, that sort of camera control makes the camera move all over the place, and after a short while I get the famous video game nausea. I fiddled with the options and turned down the camera sensitivity, but I'm not sure I will be able to play this at all.

Meanwhile X3 Reunion gains some sympathy points by automatically recognizing my gamepad, and allowing me to control my space ship with the pad. I might need to reconfigure the buttons, the fire button is not where I would want it to be, but otherwise the controls of X3 are just fine. I just need to take the time to learn them, there are about a million different buttons to press.

In the MMORPG department, both FFXI and City of Heroes/Villains can be controlled with a gamepad. Actually FFXI is so gamepad-centric that playing it with a keyboard will drive you crazy. Unfortunately not many other games can be controlled with a gamepad, even if it would make sense. I do like moving with the left stick and controlling the camera with the right stick. In addition to the two sticks, my gamepad has a D-pad for menu navigation, and 12 buttons. Would be perfect to control a game like World of Warcraft, but WoW can't be controlled with a joystick or gamepad.

Okay, there are lots of people that don't like gamepads and who prefer keyboard / mouse control. No problem, I don't demand that keyboard / mouse control should be abandoned. I just would like more games to offer the *option* to use a gamepad. Because often it would make sense, gamepads are designed to control games, keyboards and mouses are designed to do serious office work. And especially games which have been designed to run with a gamepad on a console should offer the same option on the PC, it would be a lot easier.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:41 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments

 
Capitalism MMORPG

Mark Wallace wrote a brilliant article in The Escapist, describing a fictional MMORPG in which each player plays a nation and can chose different forms of government and economic systems, and then see how the interaction with the other countries works out.

The article is so well written, that I actually would have liked to play that game, even if it doesn't really exist, and the fictional player of the game in the story loses his job over it. And it made me wonder why there are so few games nowadays in which you play a country. There are lots of games where you play an individual, still many where you play a group, and some where you play a complete galactic empire. The few games where you play a country are about conquering other countries with an army, and ending up with an empire.

The answer is probably that there aren't many people around who like both economics and games. Europe, especially Germany, produces more economic simulation games than the rest of the world together. But the majority of players in the world prefer managing guns and armies to managing tariffs and tax rates.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:06 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
More spying please!

Some people are rather paranoid about all sorts of software which is used to "spy" on you, spyware, cookies, and so on. I don't know what these people imagine that this software does. Most of it is created to send you better targeted advertising, and I can only support that. The alternative to targeted advertising is untargeted advertising, and not "no advertising" as you might think. I really wish that internet advertising would get more targeted, not less.

For example it should be trivial to determine from my IP address which country I live in, and thus stop advertising products to me that I can't have access to. The last ad I clicked on was for a Direct2Drive download of Civ4. Hey, great, I'm a big fan of this form of software distribution. I could have cancelled my Amazon order, and saved myself the wait by downloading the game. No such luck, when I click on the ad it directs me to a page on which above the product description it is clearly stated that this game can only be sold and downloaded in the USA, Canada, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. So why send advertising about it to people living in the other 189 countries of the world? I also regularly see ads for TV shows that run only on US TV channels, and which I simply couldn't watch even if I wanted to.

As the name suggests, the internet is international. But many advertised products are not. I'd be in favor of lifting some stupid artificial restrictions, for example on somebody from Europe legally downloading software from the US. But for some products the restrictions aren't artificial, a pizza delivery service requires that you live in the geographical vicinity of the deliverer. If by "spying" on me the internet advertisers managed to send me only ads for products which I could really buy if I wanted, they would be welcome to do it.

(Disclaimer: Obviously spyware which is made to steal your identity, credit card details, or passwords, is *not* welcome. I'm only talking about legal spyware, not about hackers.)
- posted by Tobold @ 12:07 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Repaying for Replaying

If I want to read again a bestseller book from 1991, like Tom Clancy's Sum of All Fears, provided I still have the book, it is still perfectly useable. If I want to play again a 1991 bestselling computer game, like Sid Meier's Civilization (the first one), I'm in trouble. My latest computer doesn't even have a 3.5" disk drive any more. And if I get the data transferred to it somehow, it isn't sure that this old DOS game will run without problems under Windows XP. And if I manage to overcome all these problems, I will find that the graphics are so horrible as to make the game virtually unplayable. Compare this screenshot of Civ1 (DOS) with this screenshot of Civ4 (Win XP)



Obviously a lot has happened in computer graphics in the last 14 years. And even people like me who say that gameplay is more important than graphics, have problems going back that far in technology. Some time ago I found back old disks from one of my favorite games, Master of Magic (1994), and managed to install it. But the game I remembered as being so great turns out to have units looking like this: (this is a halfling, in case you didn't recognize it). At a resolution of 320x240 with 256 colors it just looks awful, because we got used to much better looking games.

I'm still waiting for Civ4 to arrive in my mailbox. But I was already thinking that even if Civ4 is very much like Civ1, Civ2, and Civ3, I wouldn't be disappointed. I'm basically paying for a "major patch", an "update", which brings a classic game I loved graphically into the year 2005, and does some minor gameplay improvements. And if somebody made a 2005 graphics version of Master of Magic, I'd buy it as well (there are only some freeware clones with the old graphics around).

Paying for a new version of Civilization every 5 years is somewhat similar to paying a monthly fee for a MMORPG. If I came back to an old MMORPG like Ultima Online or Everquest, I would find them much changed over the last 5 years. But EQ in 2005, in spite of graphical improvements, still doesn't look half a pretty as a modern game. Making a sequel has the advantage that you can start with a fresh graphics engine, and throw overboard some old legacy stuff. You just need to be careful to not change too much, otherwise your "sequel" becomes a totally new game, which doesn't have enough in common with the old classic to build on its success. Everquest 2 strayed maybe a bit too much from the original, and the upcoming Vanguard Saga of Heroes risks to be closer to the original EQ than SOE's own sequel.

I have no idea what improvements the next couple of years will bring. But I doubt that the development will stop. I guess in 2010 Civ4 will look old-fashioned to me, and I will buy Civ5.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:52 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
Now playing ... what?

I finished Paper Mario : The Thousand-Year Door this weekend, after 40 hours of gameplay. Brilliant game, lots of fun, but zero replay value. You can't restart the game with a different character or play in a different way, there is only a linear story from beginning to end, a few side-quests, and that is it. Paper Mario also made me think about accessibility of games: I found it easy enough, but there are some jump-and-run sequences which require you to press the right buttons at exactly the right time, and even in combat you can deal more damage and receive less if you time a button press just right. So my wife (who is still happily playing WoW) just had a look and decided it wasn't the game for her. She simply will not play any twitchy game at all, because they make her too nervous. And I guess there are many people out there who don't play certain games because they just don't have the reflexes and manual skills with a controller for it. Even me, after 25 years of gaming, can't play first-person-shooters or racing games, they are simply too fast for me. I just hope game companies take the growing average age of their customers into account.

Then while looking what to play next after Paper Mario, I stumbled upon another nice example for lack of accessibility: X3 Reunion. This *should* be the game for me, having space trade as a major component. But when I install it and start the game, I look for a tutorial, and find none. You have to read the thick manual which badly explains the many, many buttons and keys which control your ship. If you haven't played X2, getting into X3 is hard. Not really a game accessible for the casual gamer.

So I put the project of playing X3 on ice until I have the time to occupy myself with it with the necessary attention. Amazon wrote me that my copy of Civ4 is in the mail, and that game A) has a tutorial, and B) I played all the prequels and know pretty much what it is about. I hope to find it in my mailbox this evening or tomorrow. I have no idea how long Civ4 will occupy me, given that I already spent so much time playing the different Civilization games (including Call to Power and Alpha Centauri). But it is a great classic that is always worth to get back to for some time, and it being dragged into the age of modern computer graphics could help.

It is not that I'm lacking games, I still have a couple of games which are still in their cellophane wrapping, or which I just tested shortly and didn't find the time for. Plus I downloaded a couple of game demos from Fileplanet, to avoid buying even more games I end up not playing (which then justifies the annual fee for Fileplanet). But deciding between games isn't always easy. Sometimes you just need to be in the right mood for a certain game or genre of games. The game which would be perfect for a relaxed holiday is not necessarily the game which you want to play in the evening after coming home from work.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:38 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments

 
Digging a hole with a lightsaber

Gamergod has news on the SWG revamp revamp. Yeah, thats right, the recently revamped SWG is undergoing major changes *again*. And if I say major, I mean *MAJOR*, completely changing the way how classes, xp, and combat works.

Now everybody knows that SWG is in a hole. But it seems that SOE isn't aware of the first rule of holes being to stop digging. If you completely change the way your game works every year, you drive away all of your old customers. And your chances to attract new customers with an old game are slim. The much better solution would be to create a sequel, SWG2, and gain lots of new customers.

Would I play a game which had the quality and accessibility of WoW, but played in the Star Wars universe? You bet I would! But no amount of tweaking, major or not, is going to turn the old SWG into such a game. There simply isn't enough of a game in SWG, and patching one in seems pretty much impossible to me. You can't turn a "world" MMORPG into a "game" MMORPG with a patch. Better use your license to make two Star Wars MMORPGs, one a game, the other a world sandbox.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:04 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Poor helpless gods with absolute power

Another game conference, another panel of game developers, moaning and wringing their hands about being helpless to stop real-money trade (RMT), people buying and selling game currency and virtual items for real money. Wait a minute! Aren't game developers by definition the gods of their virtual worlds? Shouldn't they be able, if they really wanted, to stop RMT?

Now I have no strong opinions for or against RMT. I did occasionally buy virtual stuff, like a house in UO or currency here and there, when it was impossible or too tedious to acquire in game. But if developers came up with a game which made RMT impossible, I wouldn't miss it much, I'd still play that game.

The thing that is going on my nerves is the endless discussion and claim of game developers that RMT is other people trying to ruin their games. No, it's not. It's other people circumventing bad game design with the help of cash. And if the developers wanted to stop it, they could do that easily. Hey, I'll even provide them with a list of ideas:

1) For existing games, changing major game mechanisms is obviously difficult. And removing a handful of EBay auctions and banning a few players, which is the currently widespread strategy against RMT, obviously doesn't work. And why doesn't it work? Because game companies only ever go after the small guys, and they leave the big sellers alone. Just have a look at the frontpage of IGE.com. It obviously sells virtual currency from a range of games in which such trade is prohibited. So why does no game company sue IGE? It makes you think that RMT isn't that bad, that game companies aren't really interested in stopping it, and that their legal grounds on which they claim to be able to prohibit it are shaky. If game companies wanted to stop RMT, they would have to go for the big sellers first. Easy enough to find with Google.

2) For a new game, totally stopping RMT would be very easy. Just don't put any mailboxes and direct trade windows in. If players can't send each other money, or trade virtual items directly, there is no RMT. What about the player run economy? No problem, that could still exist. You still could have auction houses, they just need to be set up in a way that one player can't sell a piece of worthless stone for 100 gold to another player. Final Fantasy XI had such an auction house, where a buyer couldn't select whose item to buy, but would automatically buy the cheapest on offer. Of course if you remove all direct trade and asymmetric transfers, you also remove twinking and monetary help from guild mates. But that might not be such a bad thing. If one of the arguments against RMT is that it gives a character access to means he didn't earn in game, the same argument is true against twinking.

3) A compromise, if you still want people to be able to send money and stuff to their alts and friends, would be to create an economy which wasn't based on levels. The main reason RMT works is that high-level characters in existing games earn so much more money than low-level characters. What the buyer is actually buying when he pays real dollars for virtual gold is the time it would have taken him to gather that gold. But as the buyer is often of a lower level than the seller, the buyer buys an amount of gold which would take him lets say 10 hours to gather, while the same amount has been gathered by the high-level seller in just 1 hour. If the economy wasn't level based, if killing a level 1 mob would yield exactly the same amount of money as killing a level 50 mob, the seller would need 10 times more to farm the gold worth 10 hours to the buyer, thus would need to charge 10 times more dollars for it, and the buyer wouldn't be that interested.

Making the economy not level based is easy, the current system is artificial and stupid. Right now, at higher levels you earn more virtual money per kill, but at the same time all the money sinks (training, buying equipment, repairing) become more expensive too. World of Warcraft is a prime example where if you just quest and kill monsters, every two levels you occur training costs which are pretty much exactly what you earned over the last two levels minus expenses. If the training and repair costs wouldn't go up with level, then there would be no need to have the gold drops go up with level. The whole "earn more at high level" concept is a relic from Everquest, where items didn't have level restrictions, and getting access to more money meant you could equip yourself with high-level gear. Now that all games have level-restrictions on gear, the level 1 sword is as valuable to the level 1 warrior as the level 50 sword is to the level 50 warrior, and there is no reason why they couldn't cost the same, as long as both characters earned the same amount of gold per hour.

4) Another solution to prevent farming and people buying money from farmers would be to make earning money more interesting and complicated. If earning money was more of a game and didn't involve mindlessly killing lots of uninteresting low level mobs, people who needed money wouldn't mind gathering it themselves. And while making it more interesting to the regular player, it would also become more complicated and thus less interesting to the gold farmer. For example if there were two types of quests, easily visibly distinguished, one type giving more experience and gear as reward, the other type more money, then people short of cash would just do more money quests instead of running to a gold seller. And I'm still dreaming of a fantasy themed MMORPG in which you can make money by transporting goods on a mule from one place to another, on a dangerous journey, with teleports restricted to people without trade goods and mules.

All these proposals should make it obvious that RMT is a consequence of game design. Of course you *can* design a game where RMT is highly attractive, and then cash in on it yourself. But you could also design a game where RMT is either impossible or so unattractive as to not be worth a gold farmers time. It is the current situation, in which games are designed RMT-friendly, but the game developers just sit there and lament how IGE is making money from them which is kind of stupid.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:53 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
Age of Empires 3

I don't generally like real-time strategy (RTS) games, they tend to be too hectic and confusing. But I tried the demo of Age of Empires 3 from Microsoft anyway, you can download it directly from the game site.

Even as non-expert for RTS, I was able to recognize some improvements and innovations to the genre. For example there is now a resource called "experience", which you gather by building, fighting, or trading. This experience can be used on a special home city screen to buy reinforcement coming from home: Units, resources, even special skills for your heros. You can even improve your home city during the campaign, offering you more options for things to send to the front.

Graphics are pretty, but unfortunately not very useful. Buildings look all very similar, which is only realistic because they are all made from the same wood, but that makes finding the right building in a hurry not very easy. There is something to be said for Warcraft cartoonish graphics, which look less realistic, but are easier to recognize. Gameplay has remained mainly identical to most RTS, you send settlers to gather resources, then buy military units with the resources, and then you fight.

The game leads you through 3 ages of conquest of the Americas, from the renaissance to the age of the railroad. There is a huge campaign that spans all these ages, telling the rather strange story of a family through several generations fighting against a secret organization for control of the fountain of youth, or something. It just serves as an excuse to liven up the game with different mission objectives, like building a railroad, escorting people, defending forts, and so on.

If you are a fan of RTS games, you will probably like this, and testing a free demo can't hurt. Me, I just found my prejudices confirmed, the game was too hectic and confusing for me. Not having the manual and thus not knowing how to select units that I didn't see wasn't helping (hitting TAB or SPACE didn't work). I prefer turn-based strategy. (Civ4 is still in the mail)
- posted by Tobold @ 12:20 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
A ticking bomb

There is a totally unremarkable article in USAToday on virtual jobs, about people earning money designing stuff in Second Life, or gold farming in World of Warcraft. Nothing in there you haven't seen before. Thanks to articles like this one, more and more people are now aware not only that virtual worlds exist, but also that money is made in them. And I can hear a bomb ticking somewhere in there.

Where there is money, there are taxes, there is legal issues of property, there is crime, there is the whole bunch of real world complications that people tried to escape from into a virtual world in the first place.

If 100 gold in World of Warcraft are worth $15, and over the year you "earned" 10,000 gold in WoW, without selling them, do you have to pay income tax on $1500 of additional income? And if you sell them, do you have to pay sales tax in addition to income tax? If a bug in WoW erases your 10,000 gold, is Blizzard liable for the $1500? If one day Blizzard decides to shut down WoW, and all players on all servers together own 1 billion gold pieces, is Blizzard liable for $150 million? If a player dupes WoW gold, can he be prosecuted for counterfeiting? If he dupes a million gold and sells it to many different players, has Blizzard the right to delete the duped gold? Who exactly commited what crime in this situation, and who is liable for what damages?

There are a million questions like this that spring up as soon as you assume that virtual items have value and you can earn real money with them. And sooner or later the bomb will blow up, because the current situation where game companies pretend that virtual property has no value, even if they trade it themselves, can not last.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:44 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
Battle of the Spywares

Blizzard's World of Warcraft has a small spyware-like program running in the background, named "Warden", which checks whether you are running cheating programs. If you play a Sony BMG music CD with their digital rights management (DRM) system, the CD secretly installs a "rootkit", a type of trojan which hides the digital rights management software, so it can't easily be circumvented. In a hilarious piece of news it was revealed that Sony's trojan beats Blizzard's spyware: You just need to play a Sony music CD on your computer first, then add the prefix $sys$ to the filename of your cheating software, and Blizzard's Warden can't detect it any more.

I fully support the right of Blizzard to prevent cheating, and the right of Sony to prevent pirating. But interactions like these make it obvious that their technical solutions are dubious, relying pretty much on the same techniques that hackers would use against your computer. And even worse than that, their software doesn't work against people with a minimum of technical knowledge. For example the DRM software on all sorts of music CDs can famously be turned off with a black permanent marker pen by simply painting a line over the outer track containing the software, which doesn't affect the inner tracks containing the music.

If you legally buy CDs and games from different companies, and play all of them on your computer, you end up with a dozen different programs secretly installed on it. When you remove the CD or uninstall the game, the hidden software often remains. Sooner or later there is some sort of bad interaction. That is funny if one software prevents the other software from spying on you, but a lot less funny if you find that you can't play certain CDs or certain games on your computer any more without reinstalling Windows, or if the whole system slows down or crashes due to all of that software secretly installed.

I don't pirate music or games, but it is kind of sad that I have to go to sites like GameCopyWorld to find a NoCD crack solution which allows me to play a legally bought game on my computer without having to search for the CD every time. I have a 250 GB hard disk, but if I don't use these cracks from hackers, I need to run every game from its CD, which is pretty much how I played games on my Amiga 20 years ago. And while I as legally paying customer suffer from the copy protection system, any teenage hacker knows how to bypass it and make copies for all his friends.

Companies have to come up with something better to fight cheaters and pirates, something that doesn't force their paying customers to jump through all sorts of technical hoops, and that doesn't infect their computers with some hidden software. I can live with programs like Warden, which only send hash codes and thus respect my privacy, and which only run when World of Warcraft is running. But most copy protection software is unacceptable, because it does a lot of nasty things, and fails to do what it is supposed to do: protect the copyright.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:55 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Does porn drive technology?

Just after I mention doubts that porn will drive PSP sales, I read news that a company named Guba wants to get rich with video-IPod porn. So is porn driving technology? Do I just need to put porn on a new platform to make it beat the competition? I don't think so.

Imagine two rival systems to project video on the side of your house, enabling you to turn your garden or yard into an open-air cinema. Just a hypothetical case, but it is easy to see how the availability of porn on one of these systems wouldn't make a difference. Nobody would want to project porn clearly visible to his neighbors.

Porn is said to have won the war for VHS against Betamax, and to have played a major part in the adaption of the internet and broadband access. That is probably true, but not just because these technologies make porn more available. They also make porn more private. Instead of risking to be seen while entering a porn cinema, porn video cassettes can be watched in the living room, where the neighbors don't see you. The internet moves porn from the living room, which is still a dangerous place due to your parents/spouse/children seeing you watching porn, to your room. Software can remove all traces on your computer of you ever having watched porn, even if somebody in your household is internet-savy enough to find out otherwise.

A mobile gaming console or IPod are selling because they make activities like playing computer games or listening to music more portable. You can see people with the characteristic white IPod cables in their ears jogging in the park, or sitting in the subway. I somehow have problems picturing these people watching porn on their IPods. In public places it would be hard to prevent other people from glimpsing what is going on on the screen, and earphones aren't always sound-tight. So if you would only watch porn in a private place like your room, why would you want to do it on a portable device with a tiny screen?

There are certainly technology areas which will profit from porn content. Streaming "video on demand" is arguably more useful for porn, which you don't necessarily want to have on your harddrive, than for regular movies, which you probably would rather like to be able to archive and see again. With classic broadband access technologies like ADSL being fast enough for just about anything else, it could be streaming porn at higher resolution which could drive higher-speed broadband technologies like VDSL.

Playing Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door I was nearly falling of my chair laughing when I heard the the crows in Twilight Town discussing high-speed internet being driven by "feather-loss websites". But common crow wisdom as this might be, not every technology which can display images is automatically better off when somebody starts offering porn for it.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:55 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Mobile gaming and handhelds

I have two business trips lined up this month, each of which will have me staying 3 nights in some hotel room. So obviously I'm thinking of mobile gaming. :) What should I take with me to pass the time?

First obvious candidate is my laptop. That one has been proven to be useful for mobile entertainment in many ways: playing games online and offline, playing music CDs, and even playing DVDs. Additional advantage is that lugging a laptop around makes you look a lot more professional than being seen with a handheld gaming console. :) The only negative point is that the laptop is big and heavy, but as long as you just play in a hotel room, it is a good solution. I just need to think ahead and install the games I want to play. Amazon just sent me an e-mail that my copy of Civ4 is in the mail, and that one is an obvious candidate for playing on a laptop. I will also receive X3, but that one I suspect to be difficult to control on a laptop, and it will maybe run too slow on it. Sid Meier's Pirates! is already installed on the laptop, and I bought an external numblock to control it better. So I'm all set.

The existing alternative to mobile gaming is my only handheld console, a Nintendo Gameboy Advance SP. With its silver color and clamshell design it looks faintly like a PDA, but I'm afraid that once I'm playing on it, it becomes far too obvious what it really is. Not something you want to be seen with during a serious scientific conference, thus it would also be banned to the hotel room. I got a range of games to play on the Gameboy: Advance Wars, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, Pokemon, Harvest Moon, and more. But while this is the type of game I like to play, it isn't really the optimal type of game for mobile gaming. It is really hard to play a game like that for some hours, then let it rest for weeks because you are back home, and then restart on your next business trip. So I just ordered two more games for the Gameboy, classic arcade games that have been ported to the handheld: Rampage, and Gauntlet. As arcade games these are easy to pick up anytime, there is no long-term involvement.

When they came out, I thought about buying one of the other handheld gaming consoles, but then decided against it. If somebody lends me his Nintendo DS, I'd really like to play Nintendogs for half an hour, but only to see what makes this such a smash hit. Tamagotchi type games never hold my attention for very long, once I've learned how they work they become uninteresting to me. And I just don't see me yelling "sit" into a handheld console microphone to make a virtual puppy obey me, I'd feel somewhat silly.

Nor was I really convinced about the PSP. I see it as a typical example of how designers go for more speed and better graphics, instead of good gameplay. Most of the PSP games are twitchy games, half of the lineup seems to consist of different racing games. Watching movies on UMD discs that cost a fortune and run on no other device wasn't my thing either. The PSP might be the only handheld that allows you to watch porn, either on UMD or on an expensive large memory stick, but I wonder if that is really driving sales all that much.

I think I'll survive with the laptop and Gameboy. There are a few games on each of the new handhelds that I would have liked to try, for example Metal Gear Acid for the PSP sounds interesting. But not interesting enough to justify spending €300 on the console plus game.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:10 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Top ten games for Windows

I read the "Exploring Windows" newsletter from Microsoft, because it sometimes has interesting tidbits. In the last edition I discovered that Microsoft is running a page on their website listint the top ten games for Windows sales chart of three weeks ago. With links to the game's and the publisher's websites. Handy!

Of course that makes sense for them, even if they end up promoting other companies products over those from Microsoft Games. They even have a game advisor in cooperation with Futuremark, which tries to find games which actually run on your machine, if you don't have the latest hardware. Microsoft is mainly in the business of selling Windows, and an operating system is only as useful as the applications running under it. It is perfectly possible that the long-held claim of Mac owners to have the superior operating system is true. But few people buy Macs, because PCs with Windows just have so much more software running on them, especially if you consider games. Amazon lists 6869 PC games and 942 Mac games, and in Europe the ratio is even worse (5206 PC vs. 277 Mac on Amazon.co.uk). So by promoting games, Microsoft is automatically promoting Windows.

The top 10 list on my newsletter lists an astounding 4 MMORPG in the top 10 for the last week of September: Expansions for Everquest and Everquest II, plus World of Warcraft and Guild Wars. The website is two weeks further advanced, and mid-October there are only WoW and Guild Wars left in the top ten. Expansion sell quickly, it seems. World of Warcraft being on rank 3 in both tables shows how well Blizzard managed to stay on top. Lots of people are leaving WoW, but lots of new players are arriving at the same time, so there is not visible drop in subscriptions. Guild Wars is slightly less well placed, ranks 6 and 8 respectively, but still quite good for a game several months old. People leaving WoW, and not actively playing Guild Wars any more, form a pool of potential customers for expansion sets of these games. I think expansion sets for both games will sell rather well. I just wonder why Blizzard needs 2 years to get the first WoW expansion out, surely hiring more people to get one expansion out per year would have been both financially better and more popular with the players.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:12 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Casual player mission statement

Back in the time when Everquest was the game of choice of most MMORPG players, it was easy to see who was a power gamer, and who was a casual gamer: The power gamer had one or more characters who were of the highest possible level, and went on raids. The casual player only had lower level characters, and didn't go on raids. And I was clearly in the casual gamer camp, never having gone higher than level 42, and never having participated in a raid.

With World of Warcraft, things are getting more complicated. A much larger percentage of people reach level 60, because it is only a matter of time, and the game is now old enough to have given enough time even to casual players. And once at level 60, even casual gamers are at least occasionally trying to get into a raid, because there isn't much else to do. So with me having a warrior at level 60, having killed Lucifron in Molten Core, and having played 30 hours per week for the last year, I have the outer appearance of a power gamer. But looking into my soul, I rather think of myself as a casual gamer. So what makes me casual? I think it is mainly a question of intent, what I am trying to get out of a game. So here is my casual players mission statement:

• I am a casual player, I want games to entertain me. I do not want a game to become "work". I do not play to "achieve" anything.
  
• Leveling up, and improving my equipment, are part of the fun. But they are not the only purpose of the game.
  
• I do have a life in the real world, and to me that Real Life ® is more important than my virtual life. My Real Life ® determines how much time I can spend in my virtual life, not the other way round.
  
• I accept that power gamers will level faster than me. I accept that somebody half my age can beat me easily in a twitchy game, just as the average 6-year old can beat me in playing Memory. Nevertheless I do not believe that somebody is somehow a superior human being, just because his level is higher, or because he just kicked my ass in some game. I consider "leet" to be an insult.
  
• I want to be part of a friendly guild, where everybody knows my (virtual) name. I want to chat with my guild mates, go adventuring with them, exchange experiences with them, because shared fun is multiplied fun. I do not want my guild to be a military organization where people are forced to show up at certain times and play for certain hours, just because some stupid game mechanism requires 40 high-level people for a raid.
  
• I want to explore the virtual word, and experience as much of it as reasonably possible. When I have seen everything, and a new game beckons me with a new world to explore, I am willing to quit one game and start the next one. I might stay with one game longer than with another, but I'm never permanently bound to one game.
  
• If a game offers several character classes which are sufficiently different, I want to try all of them. I'd rather have a bunch of alts at medium level than just one character at high level.
  
• If leveling to higher levels feels like a treadmill, I simply refuse to do it. I can play alts, I can quit the game, I do not feel that I "failed" in any way if I never make it to the top.
  

I don't know if that is a complete definition of "casual player", but I think it covers a good part of the casual attitude. Anything essential I forgot?
- posted by Tobold @ 2:00 PM Permanent Link  (4) comments

 
Guild lifecycle

My World of Warcraft guild is further falling apart, with lots of people leaving for bigger guilds. It's a bit sad, but not unexpected, it follows a classical guild lifecycle, which happens to most guilds in most games.

The basic problem is that in a guild you automatically get a feeling of being part of a special group, "us", to which all the other players out there, "them", don't belong. As soon as a guild has a reasonable size, sufficient for its purposes, it stops recruiting, or makes recruiting very difficult. Surf a couple of guild sites, and you'll find lots of nearly identical guild charts with complicated rules for letting in new members. Sometimes you even have total recruitment stops.

But when you don't keep recruiting all the time, especially recruiting low level players, the guild automatically becomes top-heavy with lots of high-level characters. And then suddenly everybody is just interested in organizing raids, leading to a lack of guild activities for lower level guild members, and even less interest in recruiting anybody with a lower level.

So for some time you have a high-level raiding guild, being more or less successful, depending on numbers and organization. But sooner or later the normal attrition occurs. Some people leave the game, some people fall out with the guild and leave the guild, all very natural. But as there is little or no replacement for the people who leave, the negative network effect kicks in, and the guild becomes less interesting for the people who love raids, because it is less and less able to organize raids. So more people leave for other, bigger raid guilds, and more people get frustrated because their friends left, and stop playing. In the end the guild either dissolves, or there remains just a small group of people who don't want to join a big raid guild.

The only way to keep a guild alive for a prolonged time is to create a living structure, where there is constant active recruitment of lower level players, and guild activities for all levels. You still lose about the same number of people due to natural attrition, but there is constant replacement. For every high level player who burns out and quits, there is a lower level player finally reaching the high level, and the numbers don't drop off.

World of Warcraft is a particularly viscous trap for guilds, as the gameplay changes so dramatically at level 60. As people usually can solo well enough from level 1 to 60, guilds don't feel the need to recruit lower level characters, and also don't feel the need to do much in the way of guild events for them. I call that a trap, because if you don't recruit people early, and help them along during their career, they won't feel much loyalty towards the guild. In WoW you got lots of guilds which are just based on the fact that for the high-end content of the game you need large groups of 40 level 60 players. The ties to the other players in such a guild are automatically much weaker, those are just the guys you need to visit Molten Core, not necessarily your friends.

I'm counting myself lucky that I started on the very first day of the Euro servers with a guild, and thus was able to level up together with the guild. I visited every dungeon in WoW with a guild group. Somebody starting the game now, would find it nearly impossible to do that, as there are no guilds offering lower level dungeon excursions on most servers. The best you could hope for would be a level 60 running you quickly through a lower level dungeon, allowing you to do all the quests there. But that is much less fun than beating the dungeon with friends of an appropriate level.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:01 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments