I’ve been playing the beta of Tabula Rasa.  It’s fun.  I can’t say it totally re-writes the MMO rulebook…maybe shuffles things around a little.  Tastes a little like Anarchy Online with a dash of Auto Assault fried in a pan that WoW was cooking in. I don’t have a lot to say, I just wanted to break up the WoW pissing contest.

My XBox 360 arrived home from the repair center yesterday. Well, not my xbox, but an xbox. It got me to thinking about the tens of thousands of machines that will need to be disposed of or recycled. Below are a few solutions to consider Note to any companies seeking a creative director: this is the kind of outside the paradigm, creative thinking I do all the time.

FEMA take note. Free sandbags!

Target practice!

And a little something for the kids.

A take note.

Some people go to the Poconos. Me, I thought I’d take a few days to revisit some of the many MMOs that are cluttering my hard drive…see how things are shaping up, how they’ve changed.

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

Then: at launch, I really loved this game. Great graphics, beautiful world, classic–if kind of hardcore–MMO gameplay. Sparsely populated landscape but helpful, mature community.

Now: 6 months later. Still looks very good, runs well. Chaining spells into combos is still cool. After LOTRO and WoW, though, death’s sting is a little too harsh. If it was empty before, it’s truly desolate now…and you can’t solo this game. How about some AI henchpersons? My guild up and left. So have I.

Everquest 2: The Echoes of Faydwer

Then: I rejoined the EQ2 fold when this expansion came out. Huge selection of races (including the Fae), classes, and subclasses. UI very much improved over the original EQ and EQ2. Graphics and design quite beautiful and detailed but hampered by stuttery performance and over-the-top system requirements, that still don’t guarantee smooth framerates.
Now: At high graphic settings it’s a sludgy slideshow, made more frustrating by the fact that other MMOs look good and still run well. Textures and camera controls not so impressive. Battles seem limp. Why do spiders drop coins when you kill them? Must my magical flying pet be a beetle?
more after the jump (Read on …)

We (ok, I) frequently bitch and moan about the lack of attention paid to story and characterization in games. So often, it’s the graphics that get all the love, and the potentially most important element of an interactive experience–the story–gets short shrift. We all have suffered those titles where mediocre voice “talent” destroys the game; even professional actors often sleepwalk their way through the gig. So, let’s celebrate The Darkness, which hits all the right notes when it comes to characters (interesting, multi-dimensional), story (mature, disturbing, effectively plotted), and voice acting (nuanced, believable, committed). We like to talk about games as “interactive movies” and usually that means there are a lot of cut scenes and precious little action, but here I think the description is accurate and for all the right reasons. Sure, the graphic novel provides strong source material, but good source material does not a good game guarantee. So, huge props to Starbreeze (the studio from which came Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, another strongly-voiced game) and if you care about character, story, and acting, I highly recommend The Darkness. (Technical issues: there (Read on …)