After catching up on the Champions comic series, I took a bit of a vacation from MMOs over the weekend. I’m not burned out, but I was much more interested in playing some Minecraft and doing some reading.
Speaking of Minecraft, I was catching up in the Mojang Twitter list I caught this impressive piece of news from Notch:
2.5 million sales! That’s as much as Diablo 1 and FarCry, according to Wikipedia.
Pretty incredible for a game that’s not even finished yet.
LotRO – I caught an exciting bit of news yesterday: phasing is coming to LotRO. Why this wasn’t mentioned at all in the Isengard announcement I can’t imagine. Possibly it’s not marketable enough or a common enough term, but I kind of doubt that given WoW’s popularization of it. These are the kinds of details that I mentioned I was going to wait for yesterday, but I hadn’t expected them to come out so quickly.
E3 Sidenote: That’s it? Seems like the E3 news really faded quickly this year. I didn’t see anything else in the news feeds yesterday that caught my attention. That could be a good thing I guess, it’s not like I don’t have a stack of games I want to play already.
Nintendo – I haven’t played a Nintendo game since the NES, so yesterday’s E3 held very little of interest for me as far as the big console announcements. I did keep an eye on Twitter though and caught a couple of articles. While I’m impressed that Nintendo is finally paying some attention to graphics, I’m not sold on their new controller. It looks too large to hold comfortably for any length of time.
LotRO – Turbine announced Rise of Isengard and released a cool trailer. Unfortunately there’s not much real information yet. The level cap is going up to 75 (which we already knew) and they’re adding one new raid and three new regions: Dunland, Gap of Rohan, and Isengard. The biggest news is that you can pre-order and get an in-game mount and some cosmetics now.
My first instinct was to get the Legendary version. Then I thought about it a bit. I haven’t played in months, aside from some quick logins to make sure my housing maintenance was paid up. So, since I have until September 26th, I am going to wait a bit and see what additional information comes out. As good as the cosmetics look, I’m curious how my points the expansion would cost. Is it possible I could get it for free using my accumulated lifetime stipend? Do I really want to pay $10 extra for three colors instead of $40 for just one? I may end up spending the money, but not yet.
Want to see me talk about MMOs? I’m on Episode 49 of This Week in MMO on Gamebreaker.tv.
If you haven’t heard of it before, the Gamebreaker network is hosted by Gary Gannon (one of the founders of GAX Online) and TWIMMO is their weekly MMO news show.
While I’ve done guest spots on a couple of podcasts, they were all audio only. Doing a video show was new, exciting, and a bit scary for me. There’s a big difference between being able to talk and not worry about people seeing your reactions or fidgets, than being on camera. Plus this was the first time I’d done a show with a live chat room.
I ended up having a really good time. It’s always surprising to me how fast an hour goes when recording a show.
I’m not at E3 and I didn’t watch any of the live streams, but I’ve been catching up on the news of the day.
SW:TOR – Yet another movie. It’s a geat movie and it breaks my heart how much better it is than Episodes 1 and 2 (I gave up and never saw 3), but this is a game not a movie. I want to see more gameplay video.
Batman: Arkham City – I caught this inteview and gameplay demo on RPS, and man does this game look great.
Minecraft – It’s cool that Minecraft is coming to XBLA. I’m not interested in Kinect integration though and I’m not sure I’ll bother to buy the Xbox version. Half of the fun of Minecraft is modding it after all.
Mass Effect 3 – I’m surprised how much they’re showing of the game. I expected Bioware to be pretty quiet about it since it was pushed back. I’m honestly struggling a little bit with what I’m seeing in the many videos. It looks like the pace of combat has sped up considerable, which is great if you’re an FPS fan but I’m not. Still, I’m keeping in mind the lessons from ME2 where the marketing gave me a lot of bad vibes that turned out to be completely false.
Kinect Sidenote: All of the Kinect tie-ins worry me a bit. I’m really hoping Microsoft doesn’t manage to figure out something cool enough that’ll make me want to buy one. It’s not that I hate the Kinect or anything, but my Xbox is in my office which is a small fourth bedroom in my house, and there just isn’t room to set one up and stand 8 feet away from it. Well not without remodeling.
Sony Update: I’m adding this a day late since I didn’t watch it live or stay up to see the post-conference news about it. I was impressed with Tretton’s apology, but I think Sony would’ve done itself a world of good to do that earlier though. Not being a PS3 owner, more of the news I didn’t care about but there were two things I wanted to mention.
PS Vita – That is not a good name, but that’s nitpicking. As cool as the technology sounds, the only thing I thought about when reading about the new portable was that I have a PSP that’s in a box in my closet and I haven’t played with it in more than a year. Even when I was using it, it was basically a Lumines machine. They did get the price right at least.
Dust 514 – Being an exclusive is a mistake. Yes, I’m sure there were business/technical issues with Microsoft but I don’t care. CCP’s new shooter is going to be competing with a lot of established brands and limiting sales to just one console is not a good idea. I’m under the impression that the game is not coming to PC, but hopefully I’m wrong about that. Then again even if it does, I have to wonder if PC players and PS3 players will be able to play together. They can’t in DCUO.
When Portal 2’s co-op mode was originally announced, I didn’t expect to actually play it. But when I mentioned the game a few weeks ago, MMOGC pointed out the amazing deal Amazon was running and we ended up planning to do the co-op portion.
The co-op game took us about five or six hours to finish, across three nights. I ended up as Blue (naturally) and GC played Orange. Organized as five courses, with eight puzzles in each, there’s nearly as much humor and story in the co-op mode as there is in the single-player game. Check out GC’s review here.
I thought having a co-op review for a co-op game would be fun, and GC agreed to do a little question an answer with me (this section is on GC’s blog as well)…
BlueKae: I had expected the co-op game to be fun, but it turned out to be a lot more fun than I realized. Challenging in different ways than the single player, and somehow easier too. What surprised you about playing co-op?
MMOGamerChick: From the start, I knew co-op was going to be about playing together, but what I didn’t expect to see was how often we were put into situations where we had to work together…but separately. Initially, I think I was picturing something akin to a two-player platformer, where you and your partner would go everywhere together, do everything together. There were some puzzles like that, but I’d say most of them involved each person doing very different things, sometimes in different parts of the room. It made things more interesting, in my opinion. It’s still very much about the teamwork because our chances of success still depended on both people accomplishing their respective tasks, but that meant trust was also very important — especially when we couldn’t see what the other person was doing and had to rely on coordination and communication.
Okay, my turn to ask a question. What did you find was most challenging about co-op?
BK: Remembering that I was playing with someone. I mean we were chatting the whole time so I knew you were there and all, but after playing through on single player I was so used to running into a new puzzle and starting to throw portals around that it was an adjustment to remember I was playing with someone. I know there were a few times when I wiped a portal of yours out with one of mine because I wasn’t thinking.
I very much agree with your surprise about how the co-op worked. I assumed that our portals would link up instead of being separate. It was definitely more about communicating, coordinating, and trust. The spike maze comes to mind. 🙂
The best part was having a second person to help figure out how to solve the puzzles. I wasn’t tempted to go look at Youtube once. If/when there’s a Portal 3 are you looking forward more to single player or more co-op?
MMOGC: Both. I mean, obviously the co-op is a huge draw, but single player has its moments. And both portions were filled with humorous moments, GLaDOS doing her thing. That’s what made the whole game, I think. It would be difficult for me to say which I prefer or look forward to more.
And I totally agree with you about remembering that I was playing with someone. Though with regards to wiping out each other’s portals, I just like to think of it more as both of us being on the same page. Great minds think alike and all that!
BK: True! I think the single player had a bit more personality, maybe that’s because it stretched across two games. Did it seem to you like the single player was more about how to solve a puzzle and the co-op was more about actually doing the solution?
MMOGC: Oh yeah, definitely. I approached single-player and co-op very differently. In co-op (and I think you might have noticed this too), the first thing both of us did with a new puzzle was run in there and start exploring, playing with whatever buttons or stuff we found. I found myself “working backwards†in co-op more than I did in single-player. First find the exit, then “do†the solution.
BK: I wasn’t quite that organized about it. Mostly I was just trying to make sure that when we picked a solution that it was using all of the different parts in the puzzle.
MMOGC: Let me ask you another thing. Were you stressed at any point? ‘Cause I know I was. I kept thinking, “Oh crap oh crap oh crap, I’m going to let Blue Kae down and he’s going to think I’m an idiot.†I’m not the best when it comes to coordination and reflexes. There were several times that I botched a jump or a portal and I just felt terrible.
BK: A couple of times, definitely. I worried about getting you killed on a couple of puzzles where there was timing involved. But most of the time it was so easy to run back in, that I didn’t worry much. I can’t remember getting frustrated at all though.
MMOGC: Well, it was definitely much more enjoyable to play with a friend.
BK: I totally agree. The frustrating parts for me in the single player game were figuring out what to do next. Having someone to talk with and point out things I missed made the game much much more fun.
MMOGC: I totally carried you. Haha, just kidding.
BK: There were definitely puzzles that you just got right off that I didn’t and vice versa. There was only one puzzle, I remember, that stumped us both for a bit.
MMOGC: That part really was cool. I saw where my own weaknesses were, and was grateful when you figured stuff out that I couldn’t. I was really happy that we were able to figure everything out between us without going to outside help.
BK: Yeah, I ended up hitting Youtube twice for puzzles in the singleplayer game when it stopped being fun.
MMOGC: And fun is what it’s all about.
I decided to check out Terraria recently. It’s a 2D game similar to Minecraft that everyone has been excited about. I’ve only put about five hours into the game, and I’ve had fun but I haven’t gotten sucked into the game in the same way I did with Minecraft.
Both games have a pixellated art-style. Both games focus heavily on exploration and building, but Terraria has more of an adventure game side to it. You have more health than you do in Minecraft, and there’s a lot more combat in the game both in the daytime and the nighttime. Ironically, I never felt like I was in as much danger in Terraria as I have in Minecraft. Because it’s a 2D side-scrolling world, zombies can’t sneak up on you, and even if one get’s the drop on you, you can live much longer even without armor.
For me, the 3d perspective is just more engaging. In Minecraft, I feel it when I stand on top of a cliff and look down. When I’m mining run across a cavern, the yawning black space is much scarier and more exciting than coming across a cavern in 2D.
I’m planning to continue playing Terraria occasionally, but it scratches a different itch than Minecraft does.
I’ve watched this trailer more than a dozen times today and I’m still not sick of it yet.
Ironically, I haven’t actually finished Arkham Asylum yet even though I keep planning to. Maybe this’ll provide the missing incentive?
When Catwoman was originally announced I didn’t really care. She’s an interesting side character but Batman is always the main attraction of Gotham City. The gameplay footage in this trailer looks amazing though, it almost seems like she could carry the whole game. Almost.
I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like platformers and I have especially bad childhood memories of the Mario games. When I was a kid, playing Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo usually involved half an hour of rapidly increasing frustration culminating in shutting of the console and going to my room to read or outside to play (so technically playing Mario was good for me I suppose).
I wanted to provide a little background to emphasize how cool this is, and if you like that check out the rest of Jack’s Youtube channel as well as his band Pomplamoose. It’s good stuff.