Web Log 4/21

As near as I can tell, nearly 900 people came to this blog yesterday just to name the Marleybone builder turtle in Wizard 101. That’s fantastic! There’s still a bunch of time left, and as long as the contest is going, there’s going to be a big button over there on the right leading to the post since, this being a blog, stuff scrolls off the front page almost immediately, and the Name the Turtles contest is already buried under THIS post, and a long, long comic about two hobbits discussing how cool a X Files MMO would totally be.
If you play Wizard 101 and haven’t yet suggested a name nor for just the Marleybone turtle, but ALL of them, well, click the button and get naming! 🙂

In a shot heard ’round the Twitterverse, Free Realms dev Laralyn confirmed what I thought I’d heard before but now know for sure — all the “velvet rope” content in Free Realms that is reserved for members — many cool professions, quests, and minigames — will be available for no extra cost to Station Access members. Just when I was wondering if the $30/month was worth it just so I could make comics in EQ2, SOE brings me back.
Syncaine has another exciting story from the Darkfall trenches. I love reading about the epic battles in both Darkfall and Eve Online. The stories I read from Warhammer Online just don’t seem as gripping.
Todd Klein marvels at how far his screed against the Comic Sans MS font has gone since he wrote it. Who knew people cared so strongly about a font? Emily Steel of the Wall Street Journal digs even deeper with all you could ever want to know about the history of the font everyone loves to hate.
Indie game developer Cliff Harris is developing a game that will feed our ever-expanding need to see gloriously gratuitous space battles with a game called, appropriately, Gratuitous Space Battles. Day by day, he takes us through his development process and how he takes a game from concept to 60 fps, 200 unit strong, space battles.
Via io9, a MSNBC interview with the developers of the upcoming MMO, Star Trek Online. It’s like they hypnotized me, made me tell them everything I wanted to see in a Star Trek MMO, and then put it straight into the design document. I just hope they can pull this off.
Potshot is off exploring the hidden parts of the Eve Online universe with the newly discovered scanning technology. You never know what you’ll find at the far end of a wormhole, and even a Sleeper base surrounded by clouds of Fullerene can be a lucrative, if dangerous, surprise.
Saylah at Mystic Worlds respecs her Wizard 101 Balance wizard with Death as a secondary school and Ice as tertiary… which is pretty much exactly what I did when I respecced. Are we approaching the perfect killer training point build? We might be.
Speaking of Wizard 101, Damion at Zen of Design points to an article about a company that has developed semi-automated tools to monitor chats in kid oriented MMOs. Commenter Bryce points out that such monitoring software might make parents feel they don’t have to pay as much attention to what their kids are doing online.
Sente at A Ding World writes about the repercussions of Paragon Studios’ decision to allow the players to create their own missions in City of Heroes’ Architect system.
And that’s it for the Tuesday edition of Web Log!