Until something comes out that will wrest us from WoW and Battlefield, games industry, I warn you- it's baked treats from here on out. Unless of course you want to see an illuminating meditation on pies. Because the chances of that are really very high.

I suppose that since Gabe and Kara raid every night, and I play it whenever I possibly can, they can probably have their Game of The Year award back. It was never a physical object to begin with, and honestly the awards are themselves a kind of joke, but if it would please them to imagine they are holding it aloft before the attendant throng they may do so with our authorization. There are a legitimate complaints about the game, some of which were gone over in a recent Geek Fu podcast, but what type of game it is actually changes as you ascend in levels, so it makes perfect sense to me if you were in for the infatuation period but perhaps not in for the hard work of making a marriage last.

And, let me state clearly, there is a work phase, and if you never access an account again after fifty, or forty, I won't skip stones on a placid lake for an hour or two thinking about why. I'm willing to say that up until 20 or so, indeed, up until your first real instance, World of Warcraft is a game that could be enjoyed fairly universally - certainly to a greater extent than many of its contemporaries. Ultimately, it ceases being a game that you can play by yourself or in twos or threes. It stops being the game you were playing and becomes something else. And, once you get a mount, Blizzard feels quite comfortable making you run your ass off for an hour a night.

By that time, though, you'll almost certainly want your own reasons to keep playing. You've sunk God only knows how many hours in by this point. You'll practically need a guild - and if you don't have one, if you don't often see the "green text" associated with the speech of comrades, I'm surprised you've stuck with it. I'm on Teamspeak the whole time with Guildies as well. This "social" game ameliorates the travel time to a terrific degree, and there is a lattice of shared needs that is surprisingly compelling at that level. It's good, and I'm glad I have it, but I would not be entirely honest with you if I didn't mention that I'm in now to research fanfiction. I'm only telling you this because we tight. I trust you'll see the news isn't circulated.

Stormy continues to hybridize nerds and traditional masculinity with his latest Hook-Up, though I have warned him that forging a new kind of gender identity is backbreaking work, the kind of thing that (speaking only for myself) gets you beat up in gym. He just looked at me with his one good eye, pulled down a pair of goggles, and bored straight through an inch of plate steel with his penis. So, maybe he's onto something.

(CW)TB out.

inside plays a lullaby

You really have to play this game. I've never seen anything quite like it.

(CW)TB

Like Tycho said the game really does change as you progress. Since we hit level 60 Kara and I have started no less than five alts and are playing back through the game with new characters and having a blast. The problem we ran into at 60 is that our adventures became more like a trip through some sort of fantasy casino. At 60 we’re no longer gaining XP so what that means is that now we’re after loot. Like pretty much every other Rogue I’m hungry for the Shadowcraft armor and Kara like any good Druid is hunting down her Wildheart set. So every other night we jump into a ten man raid group and we run through one of the three instances that hold these rare treasures. Like a trip to Vegas this involves a lot of finger crossing and dice rolling. Every time no matter what group we fall in with it’s exactly the same. The most effective paths through each of these dungeons has been plotted out long ago and like a ride a Disney Land we simply latch the bar and follow the rails. The same mobs are pulled in the same order and through the same rooms while the same spells are cast for roughly two or three hours.

On my desk is a list of all the equipment that we’d like to obtain. Along with the boss that drops it, where they live and the percentage chance that they’ll actually drop what I’m looking for. Now the first time I did one of these raids I made the mistake of going along with another Rogue. Of course my first time through a piece of Shadowcraft armor drops and I’m out rolled by this other guy. It was at this point that I realized it’s silly to do this with another person of the same class. Why waste two hours of your life fighting through an instance praying that a boss who only has a 3% chance to drop what you’re looking for will actually drop it and then face the chance of being out rolled for the item by someone else after the same thing. So the next time we go through I make it clear that I’m not taking any other Rogues. However the group of guys I fall in with tells me they know a Rogue who already has the entire set and he’d like to come along and help. So I invite him in and sure enough I see that he’s sporting the Shadowcraft gear. Halfway through the instance we beat a boss who drops the boots I need. JOY! Then I see this other Rogue roll on them. Is this some kind of joke, he has the entire set. I take a closer look at him. He’s got the entire set except for the BOOTS! Of course I am out rolled again. I feel true rage perhaps for the first time in my life.

So we continue to blow through these instances and since those first two raids none of our gear has dropped. We keep going back though and I guess that’s why Casinos make so much money. The siren song of that elusive jackpot is hard to deny. The frustrating part is that even if I hit that jackpot and I am able to obtain my Shadowcraft set, what then? I’m doing all this and after it’s all done I’ll look just like every other level 60 Rogue. Sure there are the guys that raid Molten Core every night and are decked out with Nightslayer gear or the crazy kids that spend their lives in Battlegrounds running around with the Warlords armor of Jesus Christ or whatever. For the most part I’m going to end up looking just like every other Rogue. Honestly I think that’s a huge problem

Of course I have a bunch of ideas for what I’d like to see Blizzard do to fix this but honestly none of them matter. There are a million other back seat MMO designers bitching at them in their forums every day. What it boils down to is that I trust them. I trust that the game I love will continue to get better and better with each new patch. I’ve been playing their game since early beta and I’m still hooked. I’m very happy to see Tycho return their Game of the Year award as I certainly think they deserve it. Whatever I say about their endgame the fact is tonight I’ll be in Scholomance with my fingers crossed praying for those bracers to drop.

-Gabe out :o:

(To maintain the prior analogy, "alts" can be considered children. Of course, if you're on an RP server, that's probably true both ways. Nerd.)

(CW)TB

Kiko (a.k.a. "Keeks LaRue") let me know that he's currently rocking two new garments: not only timely Leroy Jenkins attire, but a hoodified version of an earlier classic.

(CW)TB

I keep trying to find the truth of the matter regarding the "enhanced" video capabilities of the 2.0 PSP firmware, and I'm not sure the fullness of it actually grokked by English speakers at this time.

IGN has a pretty good article up on the somewhat nebulous state of things currently, detailing how Sony is delivering 320x240 video which is somehow widescreen - it's got a couple samples from P-TV as well, the Japanese service Sony is launching for downloadable shows. They might want to consider subtitling some of those prorgrams for an English audience, actually - I think they'd be surprised how successful it could be over here.

The long and the short of it is that it's not exactly the native resolution/holy grail we were hoping for, but it would be cynical to say that progress hadn't occurred at all. It may be that homebrew is still the only viable route to full res video, which makes me mad, but I doubt that even registers on their equipment.

I saw a thread over at PSPVideo9 where somebody had grabbed the new Image Converter 2 Plus from Japan which encodes to the new format, and they seem to imply it can do better than we thought? Maybe? Who knows.

(CW)TB

Gabe just finished the cover for this year's PAX guide, and I thought it looked cool:

(CW)TB