Item: Vanguard comes out tomorrow.
My Take: I’m gonna play it. Seriously. If anyone else is interested, or any Vanny guilds need someone who doesn’t know what the hell is going on, let me know.
Item: Curt Schilling isn’t going to retire after 2007.
My Take: This may limit his ability to weed through resumes.
Item: LOTRO announces their pricing plan for early subscribers.
My Take: Ten bucks a month is a good move – it should help their launch day numbers, and it’s crucial for an online game to ramp up their initial numbers as high as possible. That being said, one wonders how many people will sign up for the $200 lifetime option. I don’t know what I’m playing next Wednesday, much less two years from now.
Item: Tyra Banks is willing to ween your man off the WoW juice.
My Take: The guy’s look in the second video, as Tyra is shredding his WoW disks, is priceless. It says, “These idiots don’t realize that I don’t need the disks anymore after install.
Bonus Take: I don’t have this problem. My wife let me play 360 games all weekend so she could use my machine to level her Paladin.
Bonus bonus take: Both my wife and I really want one of those shredder things.
Item: Physics are fun (video from GDC 2006). Physics involving Jello are more fun (see near the end).
My take: I love good physics in game, but they bring up issues. Physics that are too realistic can make it easy for a player to accidentally screw up their gameplay experience (by blocking an exit, for example). Also, Physics have some uncanny valley issues that have to be recognized. Gears of War, for example, had corpses that would move around in an utterly unrealistic fashion when you bumped into them. Still, this video is too cool for words.
Item: This guy says that Second Life could surpass WoW in population in just a couple of years.
My take: Note to everyone who asks why the ‘haters’ come out to rag on Second Life all the time – it’s due to bizarre pronouncements like this. Barring an explosion in furry fandom, it’s not going to happen. The game still gets 22K users a night, for christ’s sake, roughly equal to about 7 full WoW servers. Maybe they should concentrate on catching up to Eve first.
Item: Germany is considering banning the killing of ‘human or human-like’ characters in computer games.
My take: A ban on showing cartoons of penii is claimed by a pioneer of Hentai a key reason why he helped popularize tentacle porn. Which is to say, if this passes, expect German games to get wierd.
Item: Penny Arcade on the WoW expansion.
My Take: I, as well, have no desire to play an older character after I’ve let it sit for a while. I also can’t finish a Civilization game to save my life – there’s just something so nice about starting clean. It’s a sickness.
Update: I linked the wrong Second Life article (it’s easy to get all of the hyperbole confused). Here’s a ‘metaverse evangelist’ who says, “In two years I think Second Life will be huge, probably as large as the entire gaming community is today.”
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