Gen Con 2007

Hello, first of all let me introduce myself, I am Tranziq the newest contributor to WrathofGod's blog. I have known WoG for a little over 10 years now. We have very similar gaming interests and we are both Jesus Freaks. I hope you like my first post.

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend Gen Con this year. I usually steer clear of GenCon due to me spending WAY too much money on figurines, games, swords, knives, and other sharp things. This year I told myself, "Hmm, E3 got nerfed and these guys said last year they wanted to pick up the slack that E3 had left in its dust." So I started doing some research on who would be there. The first one that cought my eye was Blizzard. I knew that Blizzard would be there due to their Trading Card Game and for World of Warcraft. What I didn't know was they were going to showcase the latest expansion Wrath of the Lich King.

Well being one that just quit playing WoW this did not have me as interested as I thought it would be. But I was proved wrong. This is still VERY Pre beta. None of the talents are done, no lvl 80 powers are done, none of the character improvements are there, and the death night does not apparently have a dance emote yet. He just stands there and laughs at you. The death night is still a work in progress of course so the rune system was not there yet nor was any of his high level skills. The spectral sabre mount was pretty cool tho. I got to play a bit in Northrend. There is a big ship that leaves Darnassus that takes you to one of the sides of Northrend. In the Press release they stated that it would have Nordic tendencies. Infact just think of traveling to Norway and you pretty much have Northrend. Everything is Green and lush. they definatly are learning how to use thier dated graphics engine to the fullest now. for example, a burning forest! Yes they actually had trees on fire and it looked really good. I only played for about 20 minutes and was just exploring Northrend. It looks like the map is done, but the balance mechanics and spells are far from done. Just remember boys and girls. It is still WoW. It is sill a rep grinding game.

Next on my list was a game I did not expect to be there, Starcraft II. This is the game that got me into true multiplayer gaming. I got to play as Terran and let me tell you. ZOMG. I was truly amazed. If you have ever played starcraft before you will feel right at home. I hopped in and started playing without issue. This game has got to be close to being done because it is hella stable and is looking really really clean. Heck even the bunkers look pretty. To be honest it is starcraft with a graphic update and a LOT more options on troops. but you will never have enough vespene gas!

Next on the list was another surprise. Eye of Judgement. This game is the launch game for the new PS3 Eyetoy. It is a Trading card game that interacts with your PS3.

The Eyetoy will recognize what card is played and do all the dice rolling and fighting on the overhead screen. All you old school PC gamers remember Battlechess? you take over your opponents square and the two cards duke it out. The goal of the game is to be able to hold 5 of the 9 squares. There is a lot of strategy involved and it seems like the first TCG I could actually get into. For an indepth interview on the game click here (Gametrailers.com)

Next... Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning blew my socks off! This game is absolutely amazing. This game is made by EA Mythic. For those of you who don't know Mythic, they made Dark age of Camelot. DaOC was a big PvP heavy game with siege weapons and capturable cities. The same with Warhammer. the Realm vs Realm is amazing. RvR is actually Faction vs Faction. kinda like Horde vs Alliance. Warhammer is very PvP heavy and has a TON of humor built in. for example some of the skills say for a Black orc are as follows. Da Choppa, Kick to the Jibblies, Git ovr Here, and so on. I was laughing all the time while playing. This game is a must have.

Last but not least is Crysis. We were playing on Dell XPS's and Alienware computers and yes it still could max them out. They were running it on Windows XP and Vista so you could see the difference between DX9 and 10. Bottom line Crysis is the revolution FPS needed for PC's . Multiplayer is solid, Single player has a rich interesting story. Now I must say this had to be an early build because Glitches were EVERYWHERE! floating guns in cut scenes, alot of texture bugs. I think I drove thru a cliff as well. so there is a alot of work still to be done. the only thing that really irked me was the shotgun. It has no power. Point blank range took 2 shots to kill an unarmored soldier. so lets hope they fix the shotty. Graphically it is hands down the best looking game I have ever seen. Even on DX9. Stunning is really the only word I can think of to discribe it. A must have game!.

Feel free to leave comments or questions about any of the games listed and I will try to answer them

-Tranziq

the LAW of men

Recently I saw a blog post about certain man-laws. Obviously written from a ah... "worldly" view of a single man, I wanted to alter it a bit for the married with children christian - "dude".

THE LAW EXPLICITLY STATES:
in relation to proximity of your persons and another man:
1 You must ALWAYS enforce the 1 seat buffer law in a movie theatre. There are ONLY 2 exceptions - opening night of any Star Wars movie, or Matrix movie.
2 Never accept "doubling up" under an umbrella. Neck-punches are reserved for offerers or offerees.
3 Sleeping in the same bed with another man is strictly prohibited. The following states of the floor are the only acceptable excuses: The ENTIRE floor is currently on fire, floor is flooded (ONLY in the case that an electrical appliance is submerged AND plugged into an outlet)
4 Man hugs (grip right hand, pull and slap back) are the only acceptable "hugs". If it is held for more than 2-3 seconds, you are authorized to fight.

in relation to the wife husband relationship:
1 Under no circumstance will you ever answer the question "Do I look fat in this?" Your options are to:
a. Say NO! (Your wife is beautiful and you love her how she is)
b. punch yourself in the face as hard as you can
c. break a bone (fingers are acceptable)
d. set some portion of your person on fire
2 Leave the seat down. (The earth has not known wrath as a woman scorned by the "bowl sit")
3 There are very few occasions when it is OK to tackle your wife. I have no idea what they are- I just wanted to throw that out. (at least make sure you drive your shoulder with a good form tackle when you decided to tempt fate and go for it)
4 When called and asked "Do you have ANY idea on how bad the kids are today?" Your answer is always NO! Do not deviate under any circumstance under penalty of your Xbox360 being killed in the face.
5 Yes, you love her new shoes/shirt/dress. You love it so much your face hurts.
6 Yes the food is delicious. (It is ok to decline seconds. Sometimes.)


...to be continued next week.

Hi there!

Well, I'm back. Sorry for leaving you. See, I played this one game called World of Warcraft. It consumed all of my gaming life, leaving me a single minded gaming snob. Then the clouds receded, the one ring returned to the abyss, the 3rd day passed- and all is well within my gaming soul.

So what is going on now? A bit of reconnecting is past due. Before my MMORPG binge, I was a moderator at http://www.geezergamers.com - I'll try to catch back up with everyone there, jump back on my '360 with my "homies" and try really hard to beat my wife in Guitar Hero.

I bought Shadowrun not too long ago, and I really like it. I describe it as a cross between Counterstrike and WoW. I actually like how the developer just focused on the multi-player aspect, and left out the single player. Developers get so one-tracked anyway that it's refreshing to see this kind of commitment.

I also purchased the Northern Strike content for Battlefield 2142. It basically adds 3 maps, some vehicles and 2 free* unlocks. If you aren't familiar with Battlefield, each class of soldier has equipment and weapons you can unlock after doing extra-ordinary things that give you points. After X amount of points you are awarded X rank with 1 unlock credit. Basically I paid $10 for 2 unlocks. :)

*1 you have to kill 6 enemy soldiers in 1 round, the other kill 5 enemies in a vehicle in one round. You can accidentally kill 2 or 3. (Basically free.)

Strategery

Video games developers are making me angry lately. They sit atop their ivory towers, aloof and growing fat with their own misconceptions of their creative talent. Their game is going to be revolutionary, millions of people will sell all of their belongings to get their grubby hands on the masterpiece.

Suddenly when no one gives a crap about their stupid game, they speak of the gaming generation as cynical.

They aren't not worthy to enjoy the load of mindless pile of binary code we spent weeks on.

As if the gaming industry is in some otherworldly dimension where all must buy their products not matter the quality.

Hey developers...It's time you listen to me- your target market.

If you want to sell a game, there are things you will have to work at to do this. One tried and true way is to look at your industry and try to study success being had. Not sure why I have to tell you this, but obviously you have no clue about. If you did, you sure as hell would'nt be pumping the type of crap into gamers hands like you are now.

Massive Success is rare. Take a look at the MMORPG world, you need not to look any further than World of Warcraft. Over 7 million subscribers, they generate an ungodly amount of revenue simply off of monthly subscriptions. Take a look at some of the things that make up World of Warcraft:
Content: Detailed, coherent, engaging, robust, and more is constantly being added
Technology: They are able to support hundreds of thousands of concurrent players, most of the time flawlessly. Lag is almost non-existant.
Features: They know you have friends, they know you want to play with them easily. They create functionality that lets you do this in all aspects of the game.

Now look to the console world- you see a ton of games milling about, with Halo 2 posing brilliantly in the middle of them, towering above all. Bungie has figured out the whole friend thing might be a good idea to jump on board of.
Lobby/friend system: They found a way to communicate with your friends, find out where they are online, find ways to quickly and easily get them into a lobby together, get them into games together, and keep them together throughout the entire session of play.
Medals: If you do something extra ordinary in the game you get rewarded with a medal- extremely simple, but amazingly effective. Everyone wants to be rewarded with something after they do a good thing.

The FPS scene of PC gaming has a few standouts as well- to me the Battlefield series really capitilizes on the "reward" schema that Halo started.
Unlocked weapons: To be rewarded with new and better weaponry as you gain points and rank is gratifying and rewards you for good play. Again, very simple- people like to be rewarded in any situation.
Ranks: Gaming culture is about me being better than you. How do I know? I have more kills than you, my rank is higher than you, I have more unlocks than you, I AM BETTER. To be able to give concrete proof of that from your rank or leader boards is gaming nirvana.
Medals/Ribbons: Again, when I blow up 5 enemy bridges in 1 game, I want a reward. When I do cool things, extraordinary things, reward me.
Team concepts: To have 2 Commanders in the game, trying to lead their teams against each other is brilliant. Squad leaders able to take cues from Commanders, visually or audibly is outstanding- then as squad leaders being able to send that information to the grunts in the squad is sheer teamwork bliss. Excellent, innovative, teambuilding features.

Last but not least - ONLINE CO/OP. Appallingly few developers have figured out that we, as gamers, have friends. Real life friends, online friends in different parts of the country. We like to play online games together! Let me play your "first player/campaign mode" together with my friend online. Gamers BEG for this feature. It hardly ever is given to us.

And your extra special bonus feature is.....*drumroll*
MAP EDITORS!!!!
This is just a cool feature. To make my own multiplayer map is just plain cool. Make it simple, easy, and quick to share with others.

If you are making a game and aren't sure that it's the best idea in the world, including these features will ensure at least mediocre success. Give gamers an easy way to see their friends online, an easy way to get and stay in multiple games with them, give us rewards of some kind, give us some way to compare each other, and include online CO/OP in your campaign mode. The rest, grand developers is up to you. Don't complain about finicky gamers when your horrid apperation bombs and you loose millions of dollars if you don't have these features in your game. Yes, I'm sure it's hard to do this, and takes a lot of work. Frankly- I don't care. Make the game with cool features, or I take the attitude with your game that you take with the features that I want.

I blew it...

I started out with grandiose visions of my mighty priest, getting to level 60 and being the awe of all who layed eyes on me. Then I found the "Create a new character" button when I log into World of Warcraft.

So now I have a level 40 priest, level 22 hunter, level 23 rogue, and a level 10 warrior.

I wonder if I would have been to 60 by now if I had only stayed with my priest. Probably to 50 at least. I started the game at the same time of a friend who is now a level 54. Curses.

But I REALLY like all my characters. That's the problem!!! I love to play them all-it's like 4 different games. My goal is to reach level 60 before the "Burning Crusade" expansion for the World of Warcraft comes out this fall. I figure that gives me about 4 months to go 20 levels...

riiiight....

Level 17 with 125 Enchant/95 Skinning

Yeah. So the whole World of Warcraft thing has caught on a bit. There's a reason this blog has not been upgraded, I've been playing a moderate amount of WoW. My excuse is, everyone at Mission Control is playing this game- so in order to not slip into oblivion concerning the "street-cred" of WRATHofGOD(my online moniker)- I MUST acclimate myself to this puzzling world of warcraft.

I do some acclimating at lunch, and usually it's all I spend time on when I'm at mission control these days, occaisionally during naptime...well you get the picture.

Did you know people actually sell World of Warcraft currency for REAL money? Right now there are dozens of websites out there selling 1000 World of Warcraft "Gold" (100 bronze is 1 silver, 100 silver is one gold) for around $50-$60 Us dollars!!! It's grown to such an epidemic that the IRS is looking into considering this taxable income (which makes sense, I guess...) and setting a rather large gaming culture precedent.

I don't have 1000 gold. I have about 5. I have alot of things I can sell for a fair amount either to vendors or at the auction house, but I keep them in the bank most of the time. I horde my enchanting materials. I'm such a nerd.

Social Experiment: MMORPG + Life EPISODE 0

I'm about to embark upon something so challenging, so brash- it boggles my mind even trying to prepare the blog to report on this feat of impossibility. [WoW players read: Taking an end-game scenario by yourself]

I'm going to attempt to balance life and WoW in an appropriate manner. DUDE- BREATH, you're going to pass out. I'll try to explain. I've got a family- wife, 2.5 kids (I figure 2 dogs = .5 kid?). I work at a LAN center part time, helping out a buddy who owns it. Seems like quite a few people are playing this World of Warcraft thing. I'm royally confused, because Warcraft is that game with orcs, where you build these cities up and try to dominate the universe or something. I think it was Warcraft 2 that I played. I hear there is actually a Warcraft 3, maybe I'll have to check that out.

ANYWAY. I was informed there were no building towers to defend cities, no ordering hordes of soldiers around to attack things. (though apparently there is something called the Horde- it always sounds like they are saying whore when I hear them, so I chuckled politely to fit in. It turns out I'm not even close there...) They say: "It's a MMORPG you noob". Oh, ok. So it's something I need to spend vast amounts of time on, building my character in order to achieve...what? Fame? Virtual Fortune? I'm still slightly confused.

Let me back up here, I'm a FPS player. A console player at that. I have an xbox, I want an xbox 360. I play Halo 2 mostly, and have started to play Battlefield 2 on the PC. (I'm a staff sergeant now.) I used to look at the RPG players like silly D&D addicts that need their virtual social communities. Enter that fateful day when I downloaded a 10-day trial of World of Warcraft.

This is apparently not an easy thing to do. The first attempt took 5 hours, with a corrupted setup file. I then found out the World of Warcraft client is almost 3 Gig in size. Yikes. Second attempt was successful, but then I needed to get from version 1.5 to 1.84. I went down to the LAN center- copied the update patcher thingy. Now I'm good to go. I think.

I've heard stories about people (usually referred to as n00bs) who rush into an MMORPG not picking the right class for what they want to do, people laughing at them when they ask for help- etc. This will NOT be me. I researched websites, spoke with level 60 (is that good?) WoW players and thought about what I wanted to play. Priest it is. I was warned it wasn't really fun, and it's really hard to level up, but screw that- I play medic in Battlefield 2 so I'm healing people in WoW. I figure I'M human, so that's probably what I should choose for race?

Next episode we'll go over my first adventures into MMORPG lands. Nerddome, here I come.