May 2006 Entries
It's RL moving day tomorrow, and the usual arseing about with ISPs, so its all going a bit quiet here for a week or two. There's plenty of hot sidebar action to fill in for me in the meantime though - I know how fickle you all are, and many of those links are at least as good as me!
I shall mostly be trying to stay sane with everyone's favourite MMO 'Nicotine Patches', Oblivion and Morrowind, with a light dusting of Tron 2.0 if needs be. I've also never actually gotten around to installing the two Neverwinter Nights expansions, and...
You know you’re getting old when you have to start looking up what all the cool kids are calling the not-so-cool kids in the playground on Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary. Internet memes move too damn fast these days. In my day, they’d just bellow ‘FAG!’ on the zonewide ooc chat and be done with it. Everyone knew where they stood, which more often than not was in a state of impotent disgust, and just reach for the Ignore List. Some of the more witty and debonair types would extemporise and mix it up with a ‘ghey’ here and there, (note...
Is this thing on? Well, that was quite a weekend, and I'm not even talking about the Monsters of Eurovision Rock Festival either. Much as I enjoyed seeing Lordi run roughshod over traditional European Musical Values, I had problems of my own over the weekend, in the form of a particularly vicious 'Spam Ragnarok' on the old comment threads, here in my inner sanctum itself!
At one point, the poor blogging difference engine was being hit once every six seconds by some poisonous server in linking to a drug resale site registered some place in South America, and in the end,...
Here's some news:
MMORPG.COM: Shadowbane New Home: Stray Bullet Games
Looks like Shadowbane gets a second chance, at the last minute. Four days after it's scheduled demolition, it seems that most of Wolfpack Studios have been rehired/reformed as this new 'Stray Bullet Games' outfit, and Shadowbane lives on to fight anther day.
As the press release explains, it is now an Independent title, freed from Ubisoft, who clearly didn't think highly of the thing in the first place. It's a mixed blessing - on the one hand, the team now have total creative and financial control over the game, which can only be...
It’s not all explosions and glory in our little corp, and part of my job is housekeeping.
Being a Typhoon and Raven combo, we tend to get through a horrendous amount of Heavy and Cruise missiles, and while these are plentiful on the local markets, I tend to regard buying in ammo as a sort of failure. However, our primary business – pro-active salvage – does tend to generate a huge amount of, for want of a better term, space junk. Whole bits of Gurista spaceship, conveniently self-packaged into floating barrels, and me with the kind of obsessive compulsive disorder...
Well, that’s E3 all done again I guess. I didn’t get invited, again, but pretty much all of the links to the left have something to say about the thing. My personal recommendations for E3 coverage:
Aggro Me
Kill Ten Rats
Grimwell Online
And an excellent humorous anecdote about bodyguards and shouting at:
Broken Toys
It seems few of ‘our people’ were really impressed by the event, which by all counts seemed mostly about Consoles, less about PCs, and even less about PC MMORPG.
Highlights included the WoW Alliance race revealed at last. The ‘Draenei’, who bear no resemblance to the mudhut-dwelling mobs of the same...
It’s not an easy life, being contract mercenaries working for the Caldari Navy. The hours are long, the work is dangerous and the dental plan is decidedly sub-par. But the pay is good, and the looting plentiful, so our little corp tends to spend most of it’s time doing their missions. Most of the time, the jobs that come up are pretty routine – fly out here, explode all these spaceships, and sometimes we even remember to come back with the hostages, stolen documents, confiscated contraband or exotic dancers, as appropriate.
It is a mistake to think that one’s Agent is...
Oh, go on then:
Slashdot Games: Sigil Drops Microsoft
And our little bit of the internet goes berserk again as one of the most messianic promised lands for the hardcore MMO gamer bounces from one of the most conspiracy ridden corporate names in computing, to one of the most reviled names in the MMO industry.
To be honest, I’ve not really been following Vanguard as closely as I ought to, being of that age now where the idea of a bloody tooth-and-nail struggle for progress and self-worth looks less and less attractive as a way of wasting my remaining spare time. Easy mode...
Has it really been a year?
Buttonmashing.com: 14th Carnival of Gamers
Carnival time again, and this time it's back to where it all began, with Tony's original idea and inaurgural organisation at Buttonmashing, a year ago. The caravans return once more to the very first site, and the show is as strong as ever, with 21 offerings, in diverse categories, from the thought-provoking, to the ridiculous, (that would be me, then...).
Head on over and take a pick, and here's to another year of continued success!
After my disheartening excursion with a typical EVE Online corp, I’ve taken refuge back in my old corp, a modest affair from over two years ago which exists purely so that I can more easily share piles of junk-loot with an RL friend. He’s currently playing again, and both having long-since reach the point of well-rounded and competent Battleship operation, (as opposed to just having raced directly to ‘[Race] Battleship I’ in a short a time as possible), we’re giving Agent IV combat missions a go, and they’re turning out to be both tremendous fun, and extremely lucrative.
Although some badasses...
Van Hemlock Associated Examining Board
MMO Proficiency Basic Certification – Theory Paper
This examination will make up 50% of your final grade and should accompany a two-hour practical examination in a live internet environment to make up the final grade. Calculators may be used, but full working out should be shown. The paper consists of 20 multiple choice questions in four sections, all of which must be answered. Time allowed for the paper: 30 minutes.
You may turn over now.
Section I – Language
Define each of the following commonly used MMO terms:
1) “aggro”
a) A citizen of the nation of Aggronia
b) To gain the attention...