Day 2 of the Wizard 101 Name the Turtles contest! My site stats show that well over a THOUSAND wizards have come to this site to choose a name for the Marleybone turtle.
I think we all know the turtles are going to end up being named Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Donatello and Master Splinter.
Soon-to-be-shuttered, PvP-centric MMO Shadowbane is Wizard 101’s ancestor in spirit. MMO Gamer has the story of how the Wizard 101 devs went from designing a no-holds-barred, kill-or-be-killed MMO to the kid friendly, brightly colored MMO of wands and wizards we play today.
Undoubtedly swayed by his deep and passionate love for turtles, Caliga of MMO Gamers tried Wizard 101, and came away with “it’s fun and addictive and it makes for a nice distraction from your more serious MMO.”
Razakius wonders why modern MMOs don’t have more social networking features, like Twitter integration, or an open API that would let you make a custom page for your character listing your accomplishments.
Ten Ton Hammer’s lengthy article on the history and impact of beta testing was a boulder thrown into the still waters of the MMO blogarena. New dad Syp at Bio Break has a more cynical take on betas. Moorgard from Mobhunter (and 38 Studios) puts a more positive spin on things with his recent experience with the soon-to-come-to-America MMO Aion, and some further insights into the ups and downs of betas.
Potshot takes the now infamous survey that asks you to detail for researchers exactly to what degree your pathological MMO addiction is ruining your life, and wonders how the questions would sound if they were about work, enjoying life, or wearing funny hats.
Beau at Spouse Aggro looks at how MMOs are catering to disabled players, especially in F2P MMO Mabinogi which has made special efforts to cater to all their players. Fascinating article, and very relevant to me as someone whose poor eyesight is making it impossible for me to do things I used to enjoy, like reading books or comics without having a very bright high contrast monitor displaying the text (which works fine, thankfully!)
You may soon be able to watch yourself be killed, stomped, decapitated, run through, torn apart, burned, diced, shredded, flayed, dismembered and cooked in Age of Conan, now that you can you put YOUR REAL face on your character. The opportunity to see a top heavy, nude woman with the face of a teenage boy? SIGN ME UP!
Spinks at Welcome to Spinksville wonders if any MMO could ever beat WoW at its own game (short answer: no) in 2 games that could be WoW-beaters. She does suggest that Free Realms and Diablo III could give the venerable gaming behemoth a run for its money.
Easy Peasy 1.1, the latest netbook remix of Ubuntu 8.04, was released a couple of days ago. I love my Asus Eee 900. I bought a gaming laptop (which I’m using right now to write this), but it was so heavy, hot and power-hungry that I never actually bring it anywhere. The Eee is what I should have bought to actually bring places, and now that I have it, it goes with my everywhere. The vanilla Ubuntu Linux I use on it isn’t that well-suited to a tiny screen and a trackpad. Easy Peasy is made for small netbooks, and best of all, it’s one of the many totally legit files you can download from The Pirate Bay. Which I did, legit. And much faster than downloading from the developer’s site!
Well, that brings us to the end of another daily web log! Tonight, I’m making a promise to myself to NOT play Free Realms and to play something I can actually WRITE ABOUT.
7 thoughts on “Web Log 4/22 — Earth Day edition”
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Good luck with that promise to yourself! So addictive…
Congratulations on all the wizards coming in to name the turtle as well! That’s fantastic!
> Razakius wonders why modern MMOs don’t have more social networking features, like Twitter integration,
> or an open API that would let you make a custom page for your character listing your accomplishments.
I’ve just started playing EQ2 with a trial account, and I have to say I love the in-game browser. Even if games didn’t support Twitter or whatever the flavour of the month social network is when they launch, an in-game browser is a great addition. I’d love the EQ2 browser so much more if it did tabs and bookmarks, though.
The WoW Armory is the best out-of-game character page I’ve seen, though I understand this is something EQ does as well (as a paid extra?). It doesn’t have an open API per se, but the pages are served as XML if the user-agent is set to something that supports rendering XML with a stylesheet; this makes it very easy to grab character and item details from the Armory with something like CURL and play around with it.
Ally and I think the turtle looks like Yoshi. I think a good name for him is Speedy. I asked Matt “What should we name the turtle?” and he said quietly… “no”.
Ally says to name it Mr. T
Mai says “Aroooroorooooorooooo!!!”
Ebony says “…”
Nino says “Merow”
Arthas (our kitten, named after the Lich King) says “mew!”
Jaina (our snake, named after Jaina Proudmoore) says “ssth”
@Sean — you need a WoW-tervention.
No wow-tervention necessary. Lost interest in it about a month ago and haven’t played longer than 10 minutes in the past month.
Star Ocean: The Last Hope is a fun JRPG that’s been keeping me busy kay?
Stupid Lymle has me saying Kay all the time.
They say that World of Warcraft, once it has its hooks in you, will never let you go. Nobody can ever be an “ex-WoW player”. The best you can hope for is, “I haven’t played WoW in several days.”