Micro-Review: Dreamfall: The Longest Journey

Posted by Helvetica | December 7, 2008

This game made us cry.

We cried like little baby voces who had just got coal for Christmas, and it was strange because we knew what had to happen. Dreamfall is one of those games that starts at the end. Except the difference is: the beginning is without context, without a sense of presence; a perfect, crystalline introduction without emotion…

With all this talk about Funcom and what their current holdings are doing to their company we just had to hearken back to this beautiful game and its predecessor. We still remember the day that we got The Longest Journey (the first one, this review is of the sequel) opened the box with melancholy hearts and read the end of the instructions.

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Age of Conan: What is Best in Gaming?

Posted by Nelson Williams | December 5, 2008

Yesterday, Slashdot linked to my Age of Conan: How a MMORPG Dies article as part of a roundup news clip on the state of the Age of Conan union. Six-thousand hits later, it’s come to my attention that not everyone agrees with that post-mortem of the game. In fact, some of you think the game has alot to offer, even if it came running off the starting line like a special olympics hopeful dressed up in Jesse Owens’s track suit. I’m told that quite a bit of progress has been made in patching the bugs that plague the game and with the server merges, players will one again be able to work together in ways that don’t involve a slow, wary dance with knives out.

I must admit, my discussion of Age of Conan was based on the game that shipped at release, not the …

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Age of Conan: How an MMORPG Dies

Posted by Nelson Williams | November 29, 2008

The MMORPG Age of Conan was released by Funcom right around the middle of May in 2008, probably to avoid getting steam-rollered and plowed under by the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for everyone’s favourite fantasy juggernaut. In less than a month of blistering sales fueled by desperate gamers trying to escape the pull of Warcraft, Age of Conan had gathered up over 700,000 subscribers in its muscled and well-oiled arms.

Six months later Funcom was quietly merging servers and banning anyone who talked about subscription numbers on their forums. Age of Conan is now, for all practical purposes, a walking and half-naked corpse shambling toward a dark horizon. So what happened? How did Age of Conan die?

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