Gaming
Gaming topics that interest me.
Melissa has been grooving on the jewelry thing for a couple of years now. It’s an activity she enjoys, both the design/layout/planning and the actual act of putting it all together. Which is a good thing, even though it removes an entire category of things I can safely buy for her.
Well, she now has more than any single non-rap “singer” can reasonably wear in a lifetime so instead of despair and waste, she has begun offering her skill to the masses. Or to discerning individuals at any rate. You can view her shop at Etsy, Rogue Impressions, if you want...
This post is the result of a school assignment Teleri had. The original assignment was to write a "letter to the editor". She modified the assignment to be a blog post. The topic, position, and composition are her own. I really hate it when I hear someone argue that certain video games should be banned because they are EEEEVIL. Okay, they don’t use that word, but that’s what it comes down to. They might say “kids who play video games are more violent” or “video games make kids more likely to shoot someone.” Or...
Two developments in two different life aspects both went live today. On a personal level, an article by a friend of mine in an online gaming magazine mentions me by name. Also, I’m the one with the post-digested d6, though I think it was my sister and not daughter who did the not-quite-digesting. I say "I think" because my memory is truly terrible and I’m never sure about anything that happened that long ago (even the interesting stuff). Second, on a professional level, I recently joined a jolly band of rogue developers on a relatively new group blog called The...
I don't know why I'm sharing this, except that I like talking about cool things I've discovered. I risk shutting down a pretty consistent influence generator here by doing so, though. Although it's true that very few people read this blog, it is also true that a dozen or so of those who do will be on Champion server where I play—so spreading this information risks killing ye ole cash cow.
Still, for what it's worth, here's how I pull down around a million influence in roughly an hour every now and then in City of Heroes by purchasing enhancements at...
I've played City of Heroes for a good long time now, so it is always interesting when I notice some "new" effect or subtlety. Today's example is the occasional death mask that appears in the smoke from a Circle of Thorns sacrifice ritual. You can just barely make it out in the screen capture below. Technorati tags: City of Heroes, Effects, Circle of Thorns
You'll often find two powers in City of Heroes to be mutually exclusive such that turning one of them on will turn the other off. My favorite example of this is Super Jump and Combat Jumping in the Jumping travel power set. Since Combat Jumping is a useful defensive power, my characters that use jumping to travel pretty much always have one or the other active at all times. As useful as they are, however, it is a pain to have both of them in your action bar at the same time. You only have ten assignable "hotkeys" active at...
My last couple of posts have been pretty City of Heroes centric and I'm afraid that this one isn't going to be any different. I'm going to pick on some poor schmuck this time, though, so at least I'm trying to give you some variety.
The group I usually play with are all semi-casual players. We do have a Ventrilo voice chat server and we all have microphones, so we're well setup relatively speaking. We typically have a full team (8 people) on Tuesday nights (our regular night), but we also have a minor team going on other nights of...
This is simple tip for City of Heroes. This one is pretty trivial and more in lines of "stuff I think about that nobody else would." In City of Heroes, your mission map can do more than just tell you where you've been. The way things are set up, it can also tell you how much further you have to go and in what general direction. This is most useful on those map types that don't have elevators (caves and warehouses etc.). Those missions with elevators breaking the map up only really give away information for the current "floor". The key...
One of the problems with City of Heroes is that there is so much utility hidden from casual use. I understand about keeping the defaults simple to avoid confusing players, but sometimes they make it harder than it should be to find that you could have so much more. The best example of this is the team list. Here's what the team list looks like by default. Note the little blue arrow on the right side (I circled it just to make it obvious). That sucker is easy to miss and it's a shame if you do. Here's what it...
I've noticed that most people don't tend to use their inspirations much in City of Heroes. That's too bad, really, because those boosts, while temporary, are quite handy. I've developed a technique that I use with my inspirations that makes this much less of a problem. It's simple, really, I just make sure that I leave one slot open at all times. Yeah, I'll keep a couple of the "good ones" in stock because when you need them, you really need them. If you fill up all your slots, though, the end effect is that you don't really use...
Our regular gaming group has recently decided to pick up City of Heroes for our regular Tuesday night games mostly because grouping requirements in D&D Online are simply too unwieldy. I had canceled my DDO account relatively early so I haven't been in the Tuesday night games for a while. Well, City of Heroes is another matter entirely and I foresee being a regular attendant.
Yay! CoH!
Now, you have to understand that City of Heroes is one of my favorite MMOGs and one I only stopped playing because I lacked a decent super group to play with. It's also one of...
For many significant events in my life, I remember when they occurred by where my family was living at the time. We were in an un-air-conditioned house in Phoenix, Arizona in the summer I first read the Lord of the Rings. I clearly recall both the library and the corner I'd sit in at home while I read it. I devoured the whole trilogy in a couple of days and I remember that it as a friend in an area where I had none.
It'll come as no surprise, then, that I jumped at the chance to play the new MMOG,...
Good friend and Indie game developer Jay Barnson has just taken game development in a new direction: Developing in Public. He sounds a little nervous about it, which makes sense. Unlike those who have previously attempted this feat, though, I think Jay stands a good chance of pulling it off, and with good style.
There are two things that are likely to make this interesting. First, Jay's about ready to release his second indie game, Apocalypse Cow—So we're likely to see this through all the way to a completed game. Second, he's an honest and engaging writer.
It's that second that...
I like game systems and always have. They fascinate me. It started out with my generation's standard: D&D. I bought my first game manual in 1981 and haven't looked back since. This fascination manifests itself in a masochistic desire to explore new MMOGs when they come out. If a game claims to innovate away from the standard mob-hunt, monster bash level progression, I'm particularly interested. So when I read that Vanguard has three separate spheres for character advancement and that you didn't need to advance at all in the "Adventure" sphere (i.e. killing stuff) to advance in the others, I...
I just ran into what has to be the buggiest piece of software... ever. Bear in mind that I predate DOS games and have had experience getting games to run in Win 3.1 and even Win ME--some of them games that push the limit of the "Minimum Recommended System Requirements". Maybe time has softened old wounds, but nothing in my memory comes even close to the horror that is Dark and Light. Seriously. Couple all those bugs with the worst "support" I can remember and you get an experience that is simply best forgotten. Or better, best never begun.
I mean, I've been...
Jack Thompson (unhinged anti-gaming activist attorney) shows that his capacity for self-parody is boundless. Here's his fax to the makers of Bully, a game scheduled for release shortly: Take-Two has until five o’clock p.m., Eastern time, Monday, August 14, 2006, to inform me in writing that it will forthwith provide me with a copy of Bully so that I and others can analyze it to determine whether it still poses a threat of copycat violence in our schools (See Miami-Dade School Board’s unanimous Resolution), or the following will occur: I shall file a lawsuit against your respective companies...
Some busy-body is trying to create a new mental disorder of "Game Addiction." Now, there may be those who play games too much. They may even need professional help. but I have a couple of problems with this Dr. Orzack and what she is trying to do. Obvious Self-Interest My first issue is the same one I had back in 1998 and 1999 with the wide-spread Y2K hysteria. Talking with experts who have an obvious self-interest in an issue is problematic (at best). The first tip-off that this is a problem in the analysis is her "estimation" that some 40%...