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FCC Transition Team co-chairs are also Warcraft players

Posted by Helvetica (Who am I?) | November 19, 2008

President-Elect Barak Obama may have just hit pay dirt with the gaming generation, he’s appointing people who have actual MMO experience under their belts. Not only last week did we have our first YouTUBE Presidential address, but now we’re starting to see more people put into positions of authority who play the same games we do!

From the titular Gigaom article,
Werbach’s involvement in WoW is worth noting as it raises the possibility that in the coming months, he and Crawford will craft strategic policy positions relevant to online games and worlds, including broadband usage, content regulation, etc. Along with Ito and like-minded academics, Werbach sees both as important to the future of work and technology:

“What [Warcraft] does,” he continued in that post, “is provide an incentive for people to develop new software and ideas for collaborative production. Many of those ideas will translate to other group activities, …

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First Impressions: Dragon Quest Swords

Posted by Helvetica (Who am I?) | November 5, 2008

A slime draws near!

We have been fans of the Dragon Warrior franchise since we first laid eyes on the pixilated visage of our hero from Dragon Warrior. We’ve even gone to great lengths to get translations of the non-released versions. There is a slime atop our monitor that graces our every waking moment.

Behold. Dragon Quest: Swords. A strange land of first-person view guided with the wiimote, sliding between flat landscapes, polygon castles, and people who look as if they’ve been made out of blown sugar and glass pipettes. In fact, talking to the prince of the kingdom makes us concerned that we might breathe on him too hard and break him.

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Azeroth the Electoral College

Posted by Helvetica (Who am I?) | October 31, 2008

The presidential race is on, election day looming, and curious minds want to know: if Azeroth were a state, who would the population vote for? Players of World of Warcraft are a diverse bunch, but are largely made up of teens and tweens, with a heavy subset of hardcore gamers in their twenties.

While this movie is a bit of an irreverent look at the concept of polling and makes fun of news man-on-the-street news broadcasts about the election, it provides an amusing lampoon of Azeroth and the World of Warcraft itself.

What race/class do you think McCain would be? Obama? Cast your vote here at Vox ex Machina.

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The Experiment: First Impressions

Posted by Helvetica (Who am I?) | October 29, 2008

Here we come with the next title from Dreamcatcher Interactive and Lexis Numerique. We do like these guys, they put out some of our favorite adventure games, and we do adore them for it.

The Experiment is no Johnny-come-lately when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of the presentation of adventure; instead it offers up a totally different take on the atmosphere of point-and-click by presenting instead a strange surveillance guided storyline. We walk into the middle of a devastated laboratory aboard a US Navy sea vessel, overrun by foliage, and are thrust immediately into the strange life of one scientist.

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Spore’s Big Mistake: EA’s Brush with DRM

Posted by Helvetica (Who am I?) | September 23, 2008

With almost 3,000 reviews, the nearly 2,500 negative 1-star reviews have crushed the rating of this game to the floor, causing it to plummet from whatever it might have rested had EA not created this blunder by providing security what many users are touting as, “Draconian.”

DRM, Digital Rights Management, is the currently battleground between consumers and producers in the software sphere (and other places) but in few places is it as heartfelt as in the vein of video gaming.

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On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Episode 1

Posted by Helvetica (Who am I?) | September 16, 2008

Action. Adventure. Witty dialogue. Low brow humor! Penny Arcade’s offering to the gaming world has it all…and then some. This game stole our breath when we first heard it was coming out and then stole our hearts (and sat on them) when we finally played it. Precipice of Darkness has been one of the most enjoyable episodic gaming experiences that we have had in a long, long time.

“Four Gods wait on the windowsill, where once eight Gods did war and will. And if the Gods themselves may die, what does that say for you and I?”

You may like it too.

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Anti Spore: Obvious Troll is Obvious

Posted by Helvetica (Who am I?) | September 10, 2008

With the advent release of Spore by EA Games so have also arrived are the townsfolk with torches and pitch forks. We’ve already had the bizarre event of “militant atheists” coming out against the game, but now we also have the other side of the spectrum throwing a gauntlet into the fight.

Except that after we voces arrived on the scene we fairly believe we are righteous in saying,

Ladies and Gentlemen: Anti Spore is a troll.

Update (2008-09-11): Anti Spore revealed to defenitely be a troll when they Rickrolled their readers this morning at 8am. Once again—Anti Spore, our hats off.

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Waiting for Stargate Worlds

Posted by Helvetica (Who am I?) | September 9, 2008

We have been longtime fans of the TV shows SG-1 and Atlantis that when it was announced—some time ago—that there would be a Stargate MMO (Stargate Worlds) we were rather excited. That excitement, of course, has begun to wane as the eventual release date continues to become more eventual.

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Wizard 101: Where There’s Smoke, the Fire School of Wizardry

Posted by Helvetica (Who am I?) | September 6, 2008

“If the mind is a candle, then the heart is the sun.”

If you are looking for the burning heart of unfettered fury—if your deepest desire is to unleash devastating, meteoric catastrophe on your foes—if your closest held mantra is that the only defense is an overwhelming offense. Welcome young pyromancer. The Wizardry School of Fire has a place for you. Behold fire. And we say unto thee: SHEER FIREPOWER.

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Wizard 101: How to Insult People and Circumvent the Filter

Posted by Helvetica (Who am I?) | September 4, 2008

People probably have already heard from us about the white-listed filter that exists in Wizard 101. It is not as badly implemented as similar for-tweens offerings in the market—things that often implode under their own weight as unusable. While it is nice that the filter is less cumbersome it is still a filter. It’s a form of censorship that doesn’t really add to the experience, it doesn’t offer any actual protections, and exists solely to damage the immersion for the players and make KingsIsle Entertainment look better to potential investors and overzealous parents.

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