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So you’ve got Guild Wars 2 and you’re ready to get started. You’ve heard this game is a little different from other online games, and you’re wondering what you need to know. Or maybe you don’t have the game because you’re a big meanie who hates innovation, but you want to know what sorts of vibrant new ideas you’re boycotting. Whatever, I’m not here to judge. Here’s how it starts…
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Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Guild Wars 2: Your First 10 Levels”
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I apologize in advance. Actually, it’s too late for that. If I was going to do that, the apology should come BEFORE the video embed. So I apologize for the late advance apology, for the awkwardness of this apology, and for the video you may have just watched without the comfort of a preemptive apology. I may apologize for more things later. This isn’t very organized. I’m sorry.
So this was the first ever episode of Spoiler Warning, which appeared in January 2010. This was done while Conan was being booted from the Tonight Show, which is a pop-culture reference that is now well past its sell-by date.
This episode is one hour and eleven minutes long. By Crom that is ridiculous. As Josh said in the YouTube notes:
The very first episode of Spoiler Warning ever published, now finally available on Youtube in the aftermath of Viddler’s self-inflicted and ever-so-deserved financial suicide. Featuring 480p, awkward commentary, more awkward jokes, terrible audio, lawful-good gameplay, and the ever-elusive not-the-baseball-player-Randy Johnson. This episode is extremely… odd – and bad, by our current standards. But it was the first step we took on the long road of establishing the Spoiler Warning formula.
I still get a pang of nostalgia when I hear that music at the opening. I’d love to play the trilogy suggested by this first game.
One of the most common conversations I had at PAX East 2012 was with indies who were trying to get their title onto Steam. They were all in different stages of the process, from “waiting for their material to be reviewed” to “trying to get Valve to respond to their emails”. There were so many young people with interesting projects, and they were sinking a lot of time and effort into trying to get through the Valve gatekeepers instead of building, polishing, or marketing their game.
The problem is that Steam is the best place for an indie to be, there are a lot of indies, and Valve can’t handle the volume of applicants. So when Steam announced Project Greenlight just a few months later, I was very excited. However, Chris makes some really interesting points about Greenlight here:
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Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Greenlight”
Link (YouTube) |
Volus! Volus is the name of the species I’m always forgetting. Anyway, Elcor are my favorites. I’d always hoped that we’d get some Volus, Elchor, or Hannar on our ship. Squad members would have been awesome, although I would have settled for someone on the ship who did a thing. I was really sad to see they were basically abandoned after the first game so we could tell more stories about the humanoid races. Or actually, just a story about the human Cerberus vs. human Alliance.
I have nothing to add on the ending of this episode. I think it speaks for itself. Although to be perfectly fair, the game did continue normally once Josh clicked on the popup. But still, what on Earth was that popup doing in the game at all, much less in the single-player gameplay?
I was wrong when I claimed that the Guild Wars 2 gem trade was a real market. Yes, it LOOKS like a market. It feels like a market. But it’s not really a market. The prices are controlled at the top by a single human being and not by players, which means they can become completely un-moored from their true values and go drifting off into irrelevance.
Since the game is in state of economic flux post-launch, this has already happened and will probably continue to get worse.
Here is how I made such a profound blunder:
On the trading post where you can sell items to players for in-game gold, it has this little feature that just sets prices for you, which you can disable and use whatever prices you like. So, it offers just a simple “buy” and “sell” button with some fine-grain controls for those who want to speculate. I assumed the gem exchange worked the same way.
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I saw the price graph above and I just couldn't imagine a market where buyers and sellers didn't set their own prices. I bought some gems at the offered price, and I assumed I had glossed over some advanced-mode checkbox somewhere.
I mean, what’s that graph for? If buyers and sellers don’t set their own prices, this graph is just a record of what ArenaNet is selling things for. It would be like a grocery store having a bar graph so you can see how much the price of this loaf of bread has fluctuated in the last week. I can’t haggle over the price, I can’t time-travel, and ArenaNet offers no information on when they change the price or why. This graph is largely useless other than as a curiosity. Actually, this is even worse than the bread example. Bread might go up or down as the price of wheat or gas fluctuates, but gems are an abstract good with no production cost. Their price is completely arbitrary from the shopper’s perspective.
I got some in-game spam this morning:
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Right now on the legal, in-game gem exchange you can get a single gold for about $6.25 worth of gems. At that price, 20g would set you back $125. Going through the gold farmers you can get the same thing for half price. That’s enough of a discount to entice would-be shoppers, which means I don’t think this system is any better than what they have in World of Warcraft.
So, no, I don’t think the Guild Wars 2 gem exchange is nearly as impressive as it seemed at first. My bad. It’s still a great game, but I spent 1,600 words talking about a system they don’t have and clearly don’t intend to offer, so I thought I should make a correction all official-like.
It’s a shame. I think an opportunity was missed.
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I’m not sure why BioWare has so much trouble with translating real-world ladyfaces to their game. They based Commander Shepard on model Mark Vanderloo, and I think they nailed it. But the in-game versions of Yvonne Strahovski (Miranda) and Jessica Chobot (Diana Allers) seem to come from a deep crevice at the bottom of the uncanny valley. For the record, here is the real Chobot:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect 3 EP12: Space Magic Town”
I linked this on twitter a couple of days ago and managed to botch the copy & paste. I’m sorry, but sometimes internetting is hard. If you’re an old person like me who gets confused by clicking on things and using more than one window at a time, then let me do you a huge favor and just embed the dang thing.
Here is Mumbles, doing the first of what I hope will be a series of videos about Mumbles-type vidogames stuff.
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I would encourage you to go to Digital Gumballs to discuss the video. I mean, you’re welcome to talk about it here, but I’m sure Mumbles and Nick would appreciate having the discussion on their own site. Having it here is kind of like throwing your housewarming party at a friend’s house because everyone knows how to get there already.
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