Real life multiplayer

Screenshot from Neverwinter Online

Everyone can probably guess that playing MMOs is not something that goes well with having a newborn in the house. Especially if said newborn is being breastfed exclusively.

However yesterday I thought I would try my luck anyway with the newly released Neverwinter Online. And in my naive optimism I thought, "hey maybe I can even do a dungeon and try that out". I mean I had just spent a couple of hours interacting with my daugther. Her diaper was new and clean plus she had fed for 35 minutes and were soundly a sleep in her moses basket.

Yay a bit of time for myself! And what better way to spend quality alone time than to group up with a bunch of strangers in an MMORPG?

Anyways lets not discuss my weird habbit of self inflicted punishment and instead return to my story.

I had probably played for about 10 minutes. Just long enough to sit in the queue for the instance, get the invite and kill the first 3 packs of monsters, when my daughter started crying.

My partner, who is awesome, got up checked her diaper, tried calming her down and to his credit did his very best to buy me enough time to finish the instance.

My daughter however wouldn't have any of it. Apparently my daughter like a platypus is capable of consuming her own weight in food on a daily basis and like her mother she gets very cranky when she's hungry. So she wants to eat often, but preferably when I have:
A. Just poured warm food onto a plate (wont be warm when I get to eat it HAH!).
B. Just laid down on the bed in hopes of a bit of sleep.
C. As was the case yesterday, just for once loaded a game that requires more than 1 hand.

Now I am not a bad player, in fact I like to think myself above average, I mean I raided in the 2. best guild on my server in TBC *flex virtual nerd muscles*, but even my level of skill can not handle feeding a squirming, displeased baby while doing a dungeon run. And this is where my partners pure awesomeness really shines.

"You handle the mouse I will deal with the number keys and awsd based on your commands" he said. So for the next 15 minutes I shouted "3" "e" "r" "double tab s" etc. while feeding my baby and stearing the point of view with my mouse.

Did I top the damage meter? No. Would it have worked in a hardcore raid instance? No.

But I got to finish my instance and half an hour of as good as uniterrupted gaming.
No loot dropped for my class though damned RNG!





The moral of my story? Well I guess if there has to be one it is that my real life has gone from being a single player experience with a lot of interesting side characters to full multiplayer mode with forced grouping. And frankly that is quite awesome even if somehow slightly frustrating. :)

How to get a beta invite for SimCity 2013

I have been following the new SimCity with excitement as I have always been a fan of the older SimCity games.

Not that I was ever very good at them. In fact it seems that most of my SimCity games ended up with my town imploding in a cesspoll of crime, lack of electricity and abundance of pollution.

Still there is something incredibly cool about being the master of an entire little society and I have been looking forward to getting a new chance at this with SimCity 2013.

There was much rejoicing then as I checked the official SimCity website today and saw a shiny new button added with the wording "Beta".

So how do you then get to be chosen to have beta access?

Well for now it seems that all you have to do is sign up and keep your fingers crossed while waiting for the mail that will hopefully come.

To register you will need to login with an origin account so if you do not have one, you will need to create one first and if you are one of those people who refuse to have anything to do with EA and Origin, well then I guess you are out of luck. (Especially since SimCity 2013 is bound to require an Origin account to play as well).

But if you are like me and you only have the "I hate EA, they are the devil in disguise and I will never ever pay a cent for any of their games as I would be helping them build their evil empire" opinion until they launch a truly awesome game, then I would advice you to get on the site and sign up for beta. Hopefully access to testing out the game will allow me to carry through until the release in March!

Good luck to everyone out there hoping to geth into the SimCity beta program. :)

Mistborn video game and movie adaptation

Not only is today awesome because it is Saturday and weekend. No! I managed to stumble onto something that got me very, very excited.

You guys hopefully know Brandon Sanderson? If not, then it is time to start reading some proper fantasy novels! Not only is he the guy who was asked to finish Robert Jordans Wheel of Time series, but he has also written some amazing books on his own.

The Mistborn Trilogy is one of the most innovative and intersting fantasy books I have read. The universe is quite unique and the characters interesting and believable. I highly recommend grabbing these if you have room in your busy schedule for some proper fantasy litterature.

Anyways, what made me so excited on this January Saturday?  I was thrawling the Internet and came across an article mentioning Mistborn: Birthright. Yup, that is right, they are making a game that is supposed to follow the Mistborn novels.

There is very little information out on the game yet, but I am hoping it will be amazing!

That is not all though, while browsing around for more information about the Mistborn game I came across this blogpost by Mr Sanderson himself, talking about a potential Mistborn movie.

Now I don't think there is any novel or universe out there I would rather see make it to the big screen so I was a bit disappointed to read that they are still looking for a studio willing to back the project. However, they have made a mood video (made by editing clips from other movies together in order to show the feel of the movie they would like to make) which you can watch below and I figure that if we can make some noise about this project and share it enough, it might grab the attention of some of the studios out there.



My only fear is that it will end up as badly done as Eragon, however if that is the case, there is still the game right?

The Repopulation - A light at the end of the tunnel for MMORPG crafting fanatics?

I woke up this morning wanting to write a rant about the sad state of crafting and player driven economy in MMORPGs today.
While doing research for my blog post I stumbled upon a gem of a game that I have somehow managed to overlook.
The Repopulation is a scifi MMORPG that market itself on being build on the same principles as UO, Vanguard and more importantly Star Wars Galaxies.

People who know me, know that I loved SWG. It was the first MMORPG I really got into and it was the first one I actually payed for. I was a Weaponsmith, the best on my server (at least if you ask me ;)) and I was for some time the Weaponsmith Correspondant as well. The reason I was dedicating so much time to SWG was because it allowed you to stand out. If you dedicated yourself to a profession, if you spent time building up your business, you could become famous. Years after I quit the game due to Sonys rewamp of the basic game mechanics I still found people mentioning me and my weapons on the official forum. And I loved it!

 Anyways, The Repopulation promises to give you the same opportunity to first of all just be a crafter as your main role and also that you can specialise yourself in a certain niche, making you the go to crafter for those particular items. The game is currently in the Alpha stage, but it still looks as polished as many big titles out there and much, much more interesting. The Repopulation will be free to play, but with the option to buy the game and with an item store.
You can currently support the development team financially in order to get a headstart when the game launches. I advice everyone to check out the crafting video and other gameplay videos from the game and join me in the OMG, OMG, OMG SWG has been resurrected dance.

 

The games that define our age

I had a conversation today with a colleague who is 10 years my junior. We were discussing games and as the conversation progressed I started feeling increasingly old.

Many of the games I mentioned he had never played, let alone heard of. It got me thinking, what are the games that define my age?

Games like Mario and Zelda might have been around since my childhood, but they do not define my age as the many seequels have made them belong to several generations of gamers.

PacMan isn't a good example either as it, along with Space Invaders and Pong is such an iconic game that no gamer generation can really lay claim to it.

What then? Which games can I mention that I played as a budding gamer in the making that shaped me into the geek I am today?

With the risk of losing readers already I have to say that from my very early childhood the first game that comes to mind is the Commadore 64 Donald Ducks Playground. A Disney game created to inspire learning in children. This of cause was not why I played it, I just loved the mini games and building my Playground. I do remember continously getting run over by the train when trying to cross the tracks to get to my playground, but still I absolutely loved the game as a young child.

Another classic from my youth is Commander Keen, mention this to anyone younger than 25 and you will see their eyes glaze over with lack of comprehension, but the rest of us remember pogo sticks, weird snails and a pixelated guy with a yellow helmet.

But what really defines my video gaming age are games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein (which I played with my cousin taking turns of 5 minutes at a time, strictly meassured by my aunts egg clock), the original Settlers by Bluebyte before they were affiliated with Ubisoft and their incredibly annoying DRM and Warlords, Baldurs Gate and Diablo I.

These are the games that I can talk to my long time gamer friends that share not only my love for gaming, but also my age and nostalgia.

These are games that you pitch at younger gamers, urge them to try because you don't want them to miss out and then get met with objections about the graphics, the difficulty and other such ridiculous complaints.

Anyways, these are the games I look back at with fondness and that I believe shaped the type of gamer I am today. I know if I mention these games to anyone who has been around for as long as I have in the gaming world, they will nod knowingly and we will have hours of nostalgic topics to cover.

Which games define your age?