NVISION 08 promises to be the most visually intense three days of your life, crammed with events like the final rounds of the Electronic Sports World Cup, workshops for everything from using the latest 3D digital content tools to owning the TF2 battleground, even a multimedia video game music concert. What better way for your eyes to spend 36 hours than mesmerized in front of big, big screens covered in pretty, pretty pictures?
Next time you’re on YouTube, you might see some clips featuring the World of Warcraft Spirit Healer splashed over the Related section. Or a friend might tell you to listen more carefully to the ethereal whispers in the mist the next time you get killed while playing. The surprisingly popular theory: she’s beseeching you to play more WoW and give WoW more money.
Game Design, MMORPGs, PC, World of WarCraft
Let’s put on our judgmental hat for a moment and complain about some MMOs. World of Warcraft? With the identical “bring me X of Y” quests and the nearly penalty-free deaths, WoW is grinding for pansies. EVE? No one has that much energy to dedicate to mothering one small frigate before anything can actually happen. Guild Wars? With the level cap at 20, it’s barely even a real MMO.
My little brother, eleven years old with green and orange rubber bands on his braces, enjoys feeding live gazelles to Bengal tigers and packing orcas into fish tanks. He giggles when he hears multitudes of men, women and children getting mauled to death by lions. But most people would consider him mentally healthy. He’s just an avid Zoo Tycoon player.
You might not have heard of it, but if you’re a jaded gamer, chances are you’ll really like it. Savage 2: A Tortured Soul offers not only an array of ten classes wielding both FPS- and RPG-like melee and ranged abilities, but RTS-style commanding roles, as well. Fall in with the Beast Horde or the Legion of Man and tattoo yourself with strange symbols. Become a shapeshifter, a shaman with sinuous tree branch fingers, or even a wheeled battering ram. Work under and over and together with your friends, or struggle together against the PUGs, or struggle together against your friends if you don’t have very good ones. Oh, and invoke the powers of the underworld from crevasses in the earth by accumulating the souls of your foes, om nom nom nom.
Age of Conan, Gamer Culture, World of WarCraft
Many parents fear games like WoW, having heard horror tales - those unfortunates who undergo too many Drain Souls, lose their friends, drop out of high school to become professional mages, and probably brush up against Jack Thompson somewhere along the way. Does Blizzard need its game featured in a popular hardcore pr0ns series to boot? As in: Whorelore: Swords, Sorcery, and Sex and Rage of Bonan, the adult film series based on World of Warcraft and The Age of Conan.
Shorah,
Who wants more rearrange-able runes and Sumerian names with apostrophes in them?
Pulled around between Ubisoft, Cyan Worlds, and Gametap, Myst Online: Uru Live has been given and deprived of life more than once over the past few years. The most recent development: Myst Online is coming back, currently going by the name “Myst Online: Restoration Experiment.” With their work force diminished, Cyan Worlds told the Myst explorers that “the roadmap does not involve any new content from Cyan at this time. The plan is to start to move the content creation - the ‘Art’ - to you.”
Gamer Culture, Nintendo Wii, PC, Xbox 360
For as long as games have had fanboys, those fanboys have tried to recreate the elements of worlds they love using the much less cooperative matter of reality. On the other hand, some games just happen to feature foods that already exist, whether we’d like them to or not. Here are some of my favorites:
