Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

... comes an unexpurgated stream of excrementally puerile drivel, at least it would so appear in games. My Guild Wars appetite has not been sated by completion of the Nightfall campaign but I don't really feel like going over the same missions again in hard mode or in pursuit of skills or titles. Therefore I have instead started a brand new assassin character in Factions. After a brief tutorial I was set loose in the starter town of Shing Jea Monastery. Having spent the last few weeks in the sparsely populated end game regions of the Nighfall campaign it was at first heartening to see a lively stream of banter in the local chat channel. Heartening at least until I made the mistake of trying to read some of that lively banter and discovered just how nauseatingly puerile that banter was. The general timbre of the conversation may be judged from the topics covered in a the few brief minutes that I observed. The most commonly applied epithet was to call someone or something "gay...

I have just finished the main pve campaign of Nightfall for the first time. Viewed simply as a single player RPG I found it very entertaining with a good story line and challenging quests. I did get bored in the middle of the Kourna section of the game and and put it aside for two years but once I restarted and got over that bit the game went from strength to strength. The big bad fellow in the picture about is an evil god you must slay to complete the campaign. The difficulty certainly ramps up a bit in the last few missions set in the netherworld known as the Realm of Torment but I never found it as challenging as the latter missions of the original Guild Wars Prophecies Campaign. I suspect this had much to do with the availability of heroes in Nightfall plus the fact that the Paragon is a rather more robust character than the Mesmer I took through Prophecies. Where to next for my gaming? I don't feel the need to repeat any of the Nightfall content in Hard mod but I do still have...

Guild Wars Nightfall remains my main gaming habit at the moment and I am delighted to report that the game gets better and better. I have just completed the Gates of Desolation mission which lets you ride inside one of these brutes. They are called Junundu and you can not only ride them you can direct them into battle. As might be expected they are ridiculously powerful. Too powerful in fact. Every worm has a skill called Junundu Wail which resurrects all fallen colleagues with full health and energy. It's a kind of I win button. In the screenshot above my worms (greenie black fellows) are being attacked by a wild worm (brown guy). He loses. There is one elite skill on the worms bar I haven't unlocked yet. I can't imagine what would qualify as elite for a worm given how powerful the normal skills are.

Despite my occasional rant about the immorality of stealing digital content I do realise that our current understanding of copyright is probably incapable of surviving the new digital reality. I stumbled across a terrific blog article this morning dealing with that very issue. Clay Shirky 's piece deals specifically with journalsm and the newspaper industry but just about everything he says applies to media publishing in general. Its a long piece but some of the key things I got out of it are: The "positive returns to scale" which gave rise to the growth of large scale publishing have been destroyed by the internet. Therefore the publishing industry has become irrelevant. Attempts to preserve existing structures with DRM, new payment models and through aggressive legal action are doomed to failure because a revolution has come and the industry they are trying to preserve is "visibly going away". The society of the future won't need publishers but it will...

I am aware that the the death penalty in Runes of Magic gives you an Experience Point debt but I don't really know the details. The forums are down in preparation for launch so I can't find out more but I am hoping that some helpful passing reader can enlighten me. What I have been able to scrape together is that the debt applies to both experience and talent points. I have also seen reference to a kind of corpse run which reduces some of your death penalty. Do the penalties for multiple deaths stack up? How severe is the penalty and how long does it typically take to work off in game? Can you actually lose levels and skills or does the debt simply prevent you form advancing further? How does the corpse run work and what happens if you die in an instance? How do players treat the death penalty? Does it make for very conservative play where people are afraid to risk dying? Having an experience point death would appear to shift Runes of magic towards the hard core end of the M...

Via Slashdot I came across two interesting articles with sales figures for indie game developers one for PC and one for Iphone. The PC game was developed by an experienced indie developer. It took a team of people about a year to make and has racked up sales of about $110k after two years which they reckon is just about break even. The Iphone game was a one man effort which took about six months but it has only achieved sales of about €535 after a month despite good reviews. It looks like this game will never generate a decent return to the programmer for his time. What really struck me about these articles is that both games were cracked almost immediately at launch. You can sense the developers' bitterness that many people may be playing their games without paying a cent. I also know that there is no proof that that piracy resulted in a single lost sale of either game. Perhaps the games were crap. Perhaps a few folks who pirated the game even went out and bought a copy after try...

Despite my earlier grand plans for a shared Runes of Magic gaming experience I had pretty much decided not to even bother asking my wife to play. A few hours messing with the game left me with a sinking realisation that it is too rough around the edges, too combat focused and not cutesy enough to hold her attention. Then, last night she came over and asked me to show her the game. This isn't really the strange thing by the way. She did it because she knew I want to play games with her. She did it because she knew I had spent a few hours over the last few days setting up the game on two computers and testing things out. She did it because she loves me. This isn't really the strange thing but it was still very nice though. She chose to play a Mage, partly because she fancies the idea of controlling elemental magic and partly because it is the only female starting character who covers her knickers. The 60 seconds (seriously) tutorial was enough to teach her the basics of movement...