Robert Jordan

… went and died before finishing that train-wreck of a 900 book series he started. What a jerk.

Guilds!

Ive been thinking on the whole guilds thing. It’s hard to them.

17 whole views!

 Yeah, my blog is ALMOST legal.

Maybe I need some nudey pictures, everyone loves boobies….

I cheated and I lost

Right!  So I’ve been playing BioShock and I love it.  It’s a very very good game, but somewhere along the way I decided I am more interested in the story of Rapture than I am actually fighting things, or trying not to die- so I cheated.   I figured it’s a lot simpler to find those audio recordings and such if I am invincible. so I did that,   well turns out the game doesn’t think that’s very funny.    To avoid giving away any spoilers (because I hate that shit)   I managed to edit the wrong memory location and apparently any item I picked up  got it’s maximum value  punched in.  So If  I picked up a quest item that I needed to find more than one of,  well, it was at max value after the first pick up so the second pick-up is like ” nuh-uh, you no pick me up! bad!”   Which sucks, cause I can’t progress in the game.  So I lost like literally 5 or 6 hours of game play because I got dishonest.   The lesson here?  Always be honest!  I suppose the other lesson here could be that if you are going to be dishonest always be careful with which memory addresses you are going to fiddle with.

Good games?!

 I  am sad in my heart.   I want a good sandbox MMO like  UO was back in the day, or even an acceptable substitute was SWG.  Don’t get me wrong, SWG was a mess – it had so many problem I will have to do a whole blog entry on why it sucked.   Meanwhile it was a sandbox and I desperately miss those.  I heard once that there are two kinds of MMOs, sandboxes and  theme parks.  Themeparks being something like WoW or  LOTRO, the main point of the themepark is to do certain things like… grind quests or monsters to gain levels so you can wave a magical yellow sword around instead of a magical pink sword.

Sandboxes however are pointless.  They are what you make of them Like UO or Eve.   There really is no point to it, which turns a lot of people off, but it gives you the freedom to do anything you want to do, which I love.

Since there really are no good  original   MMO ideas floating around, well, ok, there is one…  POTBS.   I don’t know how hip to that I am.  To me it seems like theres not a whole lot to it.  They’ve already pretty much stated that theres classes, certain classes get certain boats, etc, etc.  It sounds like WoW with boats to me.  I don’t know how long it would be fun for me to   sail around and shoot cannons at other boats.   Maybe a long long time, maybe not. Just doesn’t seem like a lot of variety to me, but I am watching it to see.

Since there are no original MMO ideas floating around I am hereby submitting some that would be fun to me – for  people to steal and turn into fun games.

1)  Zombies!   A   horror survival MMO would be so mind bogglingly awsome I dont know where to begin.  Mind you not Resident Evil online, I mean a full on sandboxed   build a   makeshift  fortification with your friends and enemies to try and survive a  full blown zombie outbreak.

Things you could do in this game.   You could be into the “crafting” or engineering  side of things and work on  building/improving some sort of a shelter against zombies – since this is like.. end of the world as we know it stuff there will not be much in the way of creating ” new” things, more of it would somehow be   settled around fixing things and using things for new purposes.  So you could maybe steal some sort of a large vehicle and use that vehicle to   shove smaller ones around and make a rough circle , then  you could gather scrap metal and such and      bake this  thing even sturdier , you could  fashion swords from car bumpers or   fix guns, or    make improvised  flame throwers to mount on this   city you are building.  Something like that, it’d be about improvisation and   scavenging, not ” mine ore, make ore into stuff”.

Combat classes:   You would secure the area   in tandem with your friends so that engineers could fortify it.  Youd go on   raids into the surrounding area and   get food and medicine and raw materials for  use,  you’d fight off attacks by   other people and by the zombies,   you could explore and look for that long lost military depot of … whatever.

I think a zombie game would be fun, survive the zombies survive your friends!

2)   Politics!    What if there was a game where  you were a politician?   You had to   build up a support base and get yourself elected to some position, from there you attempted   to gain higher and higher  posts until you eventually became president/dictator/whatever,  this gameprobly wouldnt be that great  unless it was built into another game somehow.

3)  Space exploration!   You are all   settlers and explorers in   the early stages of mans   outward surge to the stars,  explore, investigate and maybe settle new worlds!  There would be very little in the way of fighting in this game but I  don’t think a game has to have it.  Look at some of the franchises that have THRIVED with lack of ” pew pew” – SimCity, the Sims, all the Tycoon games… there are loads of them.  I think space exploration would be fun.  It’d work like this:   You create a character- he could be a pilot or a botanist or a chemist or , some combination or these traits.   You get a starship – you  look at a big map(it’ll be really interactive with plots of where people are going, where they’ve been,   long range scans o stuff, very elaborate) and pick a destination.  Then you     pack up yourself and whoever else is going and  take off to this far away planet, on the way you could have mechanical problems, or   meteors hit your ship and such and you have to deal with this, eventually you have to land on this planet  (or are you  somehow  knocked off coarse and land on the wrong planet?) and    explore it, figure out what resources it has, what its ecosystem is like if it has one – all manner of scientific things I can’t speculate on – and then if its good then you can   get settlers to come, and  try and start a colony and depending on how you   set it up  it could survive or fail.   Once you have a good colony going you can choose to go colonize another planet, or just hang around and see how far you can take it.

4) Think Spore – only as an MMO.   Yeah,  who do I write the check out to?

I think there is a lot of room to do things games that aren’t necessarily ” shoot at stuff” centric.  Hell, the first   “shooter” didn’t come out until the 90’s.  Whatever happened to adventure games or   puzzle games?    I know people like these things, why do I always have to want to kill things?   I dunno.

Bob, DangerBob. ::sips from his canteen of river water::

Lately I have become a tremendous fan of EQ2. I played it back at launch and hated it, but thanks to a recommendation from a buddy of mine I tried it again and I am loving it. I am not sure exactly what about EQ2 makes it a desirable game to me, but I know I have a house filled with modest trophies of my exploits, I run faster than a horse mostly because I can’t afford one, and I usually level out of a quest range before I’ve managed to do all the quests. This is enough for me, a simple traveling Monk.

I mostly game with a friend of mine, we tend to get into the same game and duo up and try and and make our impression on the game, we’ve played together for years now so we work well together and as a bonus, our personalities draw us to differing yet almost always very compatible roles in the group. Tonight we attempted to make out impression on Crushbone Keep.

We could smell the keep long before we could see it, the stench was visible, a translucent beacon rising over the horizon like the closing notes of WoodStock. Baz came riding up on her mare to find Bob casually leaning against the outer keep walls picking the rocks from between the pads in his feet. “Who’s this guy?” Baz asks, with a slight jerk of her head in the direction of a very dim but rather cheerful Orc guard. “Oh, thats Throg, he’s alright, he thinks we are here to visit our dad on the second floor for parent sibling day in the Keep.” “Is there such a thing as Parent sibling day?” ” Bugger if I know, but he bought it didn’t he. We need to get in there without the guards raising Kain about you, me, or that stupid Golem of yours.”

With that the trio boldly entered into the keep, their mission clear as charged by Whino, the drunken yet bitter Dwarven emissary for the god of Brell, Duke of the UnderWorld. Charged with a quest of vital importance to the interests of the Duke these 3 heroes where prepared for anything as they entered into the keep, anything except for the thunderous shout of ” Happy Birthday!” and the sight of a room full of Orcs adorned with party hats.

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode ” CAKE OR DEATH!”

Post 1 – This is a test, blah blah blah.

These are my very inadequate placeholder words until I can retrieve some more  profound ones from my behind.   Please be patient.