During the beta for Final Fantasy XI, we felt the exquisite new pleasures that had been designed by SquareSoft. Yes, it's pretty much an MMORPG, no, aside from fantastic art direction there isn't all that much to distinguish it, but as I said in a related post I play these games basically as a way to hang out. Once I learned that

your starting server is completely random,

that people must earn money in game to bring friends to their server by buying a World Pass,

that the amount of money you need to earn depends on how populated your server is,

that they aren't opening any new servers for the US launch which will inflate the price across the board,

and that even once you do get a World Pass from a friend it doesn't let you bring an existing character, you have to create a new one who won't be of comparable level to the person that brought you over there in the first fucking place,

the whole thing is stupid and I'm not their accountant, they can come up with some other way to load balance their servers if we're going to pay thirteen dollars a month for the privilege of frustration.

The US release apparently allows you to bring five people over instead of the original one, which doesn't really fix the problem - it just downgrades it from "absolutely insane" to "pretty ridiculous." In our rage, we even produced a comic on the subject. If I wanted to play with myself, I have a game that doesn't cost anything.

The thing is, at this very moment and realistically up until next year I don't have to put up with decisions like that. Have you looked at the Goddamn release list for the next seven days? The new Tony Hawk hits, kill.switch, Gladius, Top Spin, Rainbow Six 3, um... Quidditch, Call of Duty, Thief III, Fire Emblem, and God knows what else. I don't have to tolerate things like World Passes if I don't want to. I can simply amuse myself with the eruption of holiday titles and someone else can maintain the price of SquareEnix stock.

I was up pretty late playing Rainbow Six 3 last night, I'll post what I have here so far and then immediately start writing about R6.

(CW)TB out.

cookies are all spies

Rainbow Six 3 - that's the Xbox, non "Raven Shield" version - does something I think is interesting.

Any Xbox Live account comes with a microphone headset, that much you probably know, and a couple games are starting to use it. There's a SWAT game I read about where you can yell at guys, for example. "Put down those Goddamn muffins!" or something to that effect. In R6, you can use it to give almost any command to your squad - Move, Secure Hostage, even up to the Mack Daddy of all voice commands, "Open Flash And Clear On Zulu." We haven't had many problems with the recognition that Proper English Pronunciation couldn't solve. Voice commands are cool, but they made a decision about how they work that someone should be promoted for.

When you receive a mission briefing - or one of your team members speaks to you - all of that comes through the headset, with the characteristic radio clicks intact. As a person who is always seeking a greater degree of translation into the game world, having props like this is more than just novelty. It's remarkable. The combination of issuing voice commands and having them responded to via the headset as you move through hostile terrain is significant. Anyway, so yeah.

We played through Raven Shield in its entirety on co-op, so while we're already familiar with the names of each of map they have typically made sweeping changes to the layouts. So while we probably had an advantage in the game we were able to find last night, there are certainly a couple of surprises. I said "game we were able to find" because like all "launch days," very little launching actually occurred. I was already investing my evenings in Crimson Skies, in the space of a couple weeks Live has begun to look like a very good time investment.

(CW)TB

About this time last year we had a survey, and now we need to do a new one because the old one is... well, it's old. If you have a moment, could I trouble you to fill it out?

(CW)TB

Greg's been putting some time into FFXI strips over there, and I heard that he was able to earn enough gil for a World Pass in about seven hours during the beta. I still think the whole concept is stupid, but if you have a crazy friend like I do who is willing to put in that time up front and get you into his server, it isn't something you need to worry about yourself.

It seems like a couple US servers would essentially resolve every issue. They aren't populated, so everybody gets into them first. On top of that, it's a fresh start for the population on the server - there aren't already established guilds and whatnot. I don't know. These decisions must make sense to somebody.

(CW)TB