Daily Blogroll Oct 19: Time enough to learn to swim edition

If you were given six months to live, you wouldn’t spend it leveling up a new character in some MMORPG. You’d want to do something that gave your life meaning. Six months at the end of your life isn’t more valuable than six months right now. In fact, six months right now is way better. Truth is, your friends and family don’t care that you leveled a character. They care about the time you spent with them. (Fact is, it’s almost certain nobody in the world cares about your achievements in video games, and in a couple of years, neither will you).

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Mythos is back! Kinda!

A couple of years ago, you could have sold a Mythos beta key on eBay for a hundred bucks, easy. Now that it’s finally out — in Europe, anyway — the reaction is a little more muted. What’s happened to the Diablo 2-inspired action MMO in the intervening time? Hellgate: London devs Flagship Studios, so … Read more

Daily Blogroll 1/12 — Snow Job edition


A whole weekend lost in a Rift, but I think what I’ll remember most about this last weekend was this jerk in General chat — named, ironically, Karana — who was going on and on about how the quests and everything else about the game was a copy of WoW.
Well, heck, I didn’t know Thomas Edison was resurrected just to offer his genius insights. But some people just can’t see past their own experiences with WoW. Like, the people complaining that every one of the classes will have a 50/16/0 point spec, as if the class-defining abilities of each ‘soul’ only happen once 50 points are spent on it, similar to WoW’s talent trees. ACTUALLY, the class-defining skill is usually given for free, at zero points. Smart players will have a synergistic three soul mix. Anyway, already went on about that, and though I’m loving Rift and have applied to a guild, I’m really tired of reading about it.
Well, let’s see if there’s some stories from the weekend that aren’t about Rift, shall we?

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Daily Blogroll 1/7 – Better than Life edition


If there could be a greater revolution in online gaming than Microsoft’s upcoming Avatar Kinect, I’m not really sure what it could be. Avatar Kinect uses its popular new peripheral to track your gestures, mouth movements and even your eyebrows and use this data to create a lifelike puppet of you in an online chat room. The traditional problems of the Kinect remain; your avatar won’t be spending much time walking from place to place, but it is certainly worlds better than having to clean house to have friends over.
On to the blogroll.

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Daily Blogroll 1/6: Fair and Balanced edition


Soooo…. how about that Massively article? Did it make you mad as hell?
Meh. I had a look at my site analytics today, just to see if people were coming here to read about the so-called controversy and you know? More people came to read my view of Velious through frost-covered glasses. That reinforces what I’ve always known about MMO fans. We just want to get online and PLAY GOOD GAMES.
The article did spark a lot of good discussions about Rift itself and the general desire (or lack of desire) for games that follow the World of Warcraft model vs those that are more original. You’d think those people hungering for originality would have appreciated Star Trek Online more… but oh yes, they did.
2011 will bring a fair amount of non-WoW-like MMOs (Mythos, APB Reloaded, TERA Online) and a few WoW-like MMOs (Rift, Star Wars: The Old Republic). (well, maybe not Mythos). Time will tell which people prefer.
On to the blogroll.

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