Rockbanding all night long

Ad essere onesto, dubito che spenderei mai tutti i soldi ncessari per comperare il set/truffa completo dell’edizione Europea di Rock Band. Detto questo, non posso essere che grato al mio amicone Gianluca che non solo ha speso i soldi per il set ma ha oltretutto acquistato una pletora di Dowloadable Contents solo per farci divertire tra amici.

Da questo punto di vista Rock Band è un prodotto affascinante perché tutta la sua mancanza di innovazione (in comune a tutti i giochi musicali usciti negli ultimi anni) la reinveste nel far ridiventare sociale il videogioco, qualcosa che per noi amici, dalla fine degli anni 90 era diventato si massivo e multiplayer, ma aveva anche intrapreso la strada dell’impersonale.

Rockbanding all night long

To be honest, I doubt I will ever spend all the necessary money to personally grab the whole European Rock Band Scam Set. Said so, I will never been more grateful to my pal Gianluca to have spent all that money by yourself, just to let us friends play.

Rock Band is an astonishing game because everything it lacks in innovation (like the whole *Star/*Hero/*Band/etc product line), was gained back from a social point of view, making the video games a get together event again, something we stopped to do as soon as massive games started to wheel their gears in the late 90s.

It’s also safe to mention that Rock Band did the online support with tracks and events millions times better than Guitar Hero. Too bad for the European screw-up.

Mr Creeping Arm

Last night, me and Morhan decided to try to sort out the Book 1, Chapter 11 of Lord Of The Rings Online with a party of two. Needless to say, confronting the Witch King with such a small party was a suicide. The trip let me appreciate more the cure of details level and quest designers put in the game, even if the Lord Of The Rings is not my favourite fantasy setting.

At the end of the dungeon, there are a lots of Elite Wights, most of them completely dismembered, just like the Deadly Tomb Wight depicted here. The Wight was accompained by its own dismembered arm, that was flailing aimlessy during combat.

That’s the right touch of realism you can’t safely expect by today quest-design standards on other MMOGs, but when it happens, it’s always more than appreciated since it increases the realism and coherence of the quest set-ups.

Masterful writing in AoC?

Seems like the suggestion box for the cancel subscription in the Age of Conan account manager is bugged as well: it simply cut your comment up to a point, even if it let you write ad infinitum, without any warning. That’s odd, because after the first month is almost passed, server population decreased critically (in some high-level zones now  you see at most an handful of instances, when before they were about 20), and judging to the forums, lots of people are stress testing the account management page, especially the “cancel” one.

Wonder why their real-time, very small, instanced, game servers are hitching, crashing and burning with bugs? They still have to learn how to do web forms, give them some time (and definitely meaningful suggestions when your account will be cancelled).

Oh, back on topic, Eurogamer made a really strange review of AOC. Basically they say the game is perfect, well written and had the best launch ever in an MMO. The problem, is some features they give for working don’t. Like Keep-Based PVP. In fact until now there were only one Keep-Based PVP battle and was a mess, so much that developers apologized to all the gaming community in the AoC launcher!

Even if they played only the Tortage bit (admittedliy several spans better of all the other quests, but still pretty mediocre and disjointed (why the single player nonsense?), even for an MMOG) how they can justify quests masterfully written (and accompained by broken cutscenes) like that?:

You are asked to surrender to a squad of ten guards, the same guards you slayed coninously for the most part of your Destiny quests. You do that (surrender, not slaying). Fade to black, you are carried away. Fade to back. Inside the Admiral Strom stronghold, a torturer addresses to you, explaining where you are, what are their plans, the standard bad guy stereotype. Then he says: “Oh my! Nobody disarmed you!”. You massacre him, the countless guard inside the keep (“No, you can’t  beat us, surrender for your best!”, they said) and exit the keep. To do what? Looking for an NPC that tasks you to kill an escaping Strom (which is the whole nut of your Destiniy Quest from the start), the same guy that was in the keep when they brought you there.

Masterfully written, for a retarded ten years old, maybe. I’ve seen Mighty Morphing Power Rangers episodes with a better plot and sequence of events.

Dumping Age Of Conan, looking for more

Age Of Conan it’s a design and usability mess. Don’t even get me started, I won’t. As I won’t even tell you anything about the huge amount of technical issues and bugs that a modern MMOG should not have anymore.

So I decided to dump the game for now, maybe returning in a 4-6 months to see if something is changed, while the morons the early adopters do the beta-test for me. There’s no reason to end my trial period before deciding: leveling in general is simply too easy to justify the waste of time and the endgame at the moment is not even playable, so why I should care? The game has not even set clear the objectives a player should be willing to achieve at the moment, everything is a very moving target, with several radical redesign decision that will need to be taken in the next few months, shuffling priorities and player interests in the process.

I still need to decide where to settle seriously, since my EQ2 guild is on “play what you like” mode for the summer and I started to feel a bit bored even back there.

Speaking of a less hardcore interest, The Lord Of The Rings Online is doing a better job to keep me interested: very well written quests, where “exploration” has a meaning and it’s not just the end of following on-screen arrows. I really like the Epic quest lines, sure they stole a lot of ideas from Guild Wars, but who didn’t? And frankly, LOTRO does Epics better than how GW does Coops.

I also went back to Asheron’s Call for a while. Damn, that game aged so well it could be a viable option if you could bare blocky models with hi-res textures, no wonder they still have a strong community. Speaking of communities, I also found several odd players, like the one who insulted me because I used the word “Vendor” while asking for advices. He said I should return to play Ultima, mixing insults with lots of “Vendor Sell”, “Kal Vas Flam” jokes I frankly don’t get anymore. Does he even know that Ultima is almost forgotten as well as Asheron’s Call, nowadays?

Does he even log off anymore?

DRM is made to sell mediocre products?

Adam Swiderski wrote on his A History of Copy Protection on Next Generation:

And then, there’s the interesting case of Stardock, makers of strategy titles Galactic Civilizations II and Sins of a Solar Empire. Stardock has taken the bold stance that it does not plan to take any steps beyond the use of a unique serial number to copy-protect its products, a decision that has endeared it to fans but that famously led a StarForce forum moderator’s posting of a link to a site where an illegal copy of Galactic Civilizations II could be easily downloaded. The game has sold well despite its lack of defense against piracy, but one has to wonder whether such a strategy would work for a larger publisher producing more mainstream titles.

His article is a balanced analysis about how many nuisances copy protection introduced to legitimate users, so I don’t get this paragraph. Copy protection is supposed to help products that don’t have a well perceived niche and adoption by the mainstream so that, on the first opportunity, people prefer to steal them instead of buying them?

If that product would be something non-digital, like a teathaer play, a musical or even a beer, do you really think it will get produced in the first place? I think not. Most of the so-called piracy phenomenon is a mix of majors willing to shift the market on consoles (more profit due to higher prices and first party founding), the inability to innovate and the skewed perception (dropped by the whole entertainment market almost 5 years ago) that there’s a so called mass market for digital entertainment (niches are more resilient and profitable because you have to fill up specific demands instead half-backed of generic needs, that’s why TV series proliferate and movies on TVs don’t fare too well anymore).

You can only spoon-fed the masses so much before them will start to do something else, like renting a €1 serie episode on your gaming platform of choice, instead of playing the same old, pricey rehash of a game that will cost up to 70 times more and won’t scale proportionately in terms of “user time”.

Pinballs and the lack of recognition

Being a old-school pinball buff (and dreaming to expand my game collection up to pinball tables, aside for videogames and arcade boards), I was very interested by the Gottlieb Pinball Classics compilation for PSP. Looking around for reviews, I stumbled upon a lot like this one, that failed in the most basic of the review requirements: tell us what’s inside the box.

It seems like if, to new videogame reviewers, Pinballs are something not even worth mentioning, a dark age of gaming. Most of the revews don’t even list the table names, and prefer to use generic paraphrases to describe them, which is more than sad.

I guess that’s what you get when you live out of your sponsor’s expectations instead out of your writers’ competence.