I was a bit startled when I heard one of the cashiers quoted one of the customers a bill over one thousand dollars. Turns out he purchased 24 copies of the game. I never did find out what all the copies were for. I did overhear them talking about his guild, so maybe he’s got a European based guild that needed US account keys.

There was the usual mocking from the more talkative PvP players in line. But, I’ll forgive the one player who had a 2400 arena rating. The person immediately behind me in line was a bit more friendly and we had a good conversation about the soundtrack and Left 4 Dead.

Anyhow, looks like the patch is almost done, so I better log in.

While the animation style is more realistic than that used in the classic Team Fortress 2 “Meet the Heavy/Soldier/Engineer/Demoman/Scout/Sniper/Sandvich” trailers, there are some similarities, including the slightly exagerated motions of the characters. Of course, the other characteristic it shares with the TF2 videos is that it is must watch.

Milestone achievements at levels 8, 14 and 20 which show whether you’ve chosen to play altruistically, selfishly, or somewhere down the middle, provide another indication of how friends have chosen to play the game. Now, achievements like this piss me off as a completist, but I appreciate the fact that they help to define the play experience of an individual iteration through the game. When talking to my friends about the missions they’ve completed I have some indication about whether they blew up the town or saved every citizen. Or whether their professed fiendish behaviour hasn’t really been all that bad after all. And yes, I’m talking about you Shane.

I have to credit this article from Gamasutra, written by a professional game designer playing through Fallout/Fallout 2, with leading me down this train of thought. I got halfway through writing an email to a friend when the combination of that discussion and the subject of the article compelled me to write this post.

I have to say that I am impressed with the CurseForge site that Curse has set up to handle addon submissions. Curse has always been one of the top sites for downloading addons, but with the tools available on CurseForge, I expect they will be a top choice for developers. Zero effort bug tracking and project pages with automatic pushes through to the curse portal and the curse download are hard to beat.

Work hasn’t been the only thing consuming my time.  Aside from a solid session of Rock Band 2 on the weekend with some friends, the bulk of my gaming time has been consumed playing Warhammer Online.  This is the first MMO since World of Warcraft to feel so … complete … at launch.  And the launch itself went much more smoothly than WoW’s did.  I don’t know that it will replace WoW as my MMO of choice, but at least until Wrath of the Lich King comes out, I expect that I will be spending much more time in the Warhammer world than I will in Azeroth.

I also think I’ll finally get around to trying my hand at LUA and making UI addons. In WoW there is already a pretty strong ecosystem but with Warhammer there is a significant demand, but not a lot of product yet.

One of the team’s primary goals was improving performance and stability and I can say that so far they have delivered on their performance promises. I am sorely tempted to make the switch even after putting it through its paces for only a few hours. Everything is more responsive and quicker to load. It doesn’t look like it has improved on the memory footprint much, as all of Chromes processes use a similar amount of memory as Firefox does, but maybe we will see improved memory use over time as promised in their feature presentation.

Unfortunately, I don’t know whether I can live in a world without some of my Firefox add-ons. After spending a month getting used to mouse gestures a few years go, I’m not sure I can ever go back to a browser without them. Every time I use someone else’s computer, I am cursing the lack of those mouse gestures. And as I’m slowly integrating Ubiquity into my usual internet usage, I’d be hesitant to lose that either. I might be able to find a windows based gesture program to replace the first, but the second isn’t easily replaceable. Just writing this blog post in Chrome, there were a few times I would have used Ubiquity to look up URLs without having to load another page.

All in all, I’m pretty impressed with what Google has launched with. If you are using Internet Explorer, or even Firefox without any irreplaceable addons, I would suggest you give Chrome a shot. It will be a faster, and presumably more secure, internet experience.

But the reason I am posting is because a few weeks ago I started up with a regular Zul’Aman group that was aiming to start farming bear mounts. Now, Zul’aman is a 10-man raid instance aimed max level players with a fair amount of experience. But as a challenge for the very top-end, if you can beat the first four bosses in less than 45 minutes, you can earn a rare Amani War Bear. And after getting close last week, this week the group got it’s first bear. I wasn’t fortunate enough to win the bear this week – only one drops each time you beat the timer – but hopefully this group will stick together for the next 8 weeks until the rest of us all get kitted out.

I am impressed how the game feels both traditional and fresh. I suspect that the high quality of animation and the huge array of weapons, armor and special items you can collect play a large part in that. I also think that the variety of different endings is fascinating. It is entirely possible to “beat” the game by killing Richter without realizing that there is fully half the game that you haven’t explored and that there is a more . The story and cut scenes are pretty laughable, even for the time at which the game was released, but it is terribly satisfying to put the clues together to unlock the inverted castle and the chance to defeat Dracula. Of course, I wasn’t wise enough for that myself and had the secret inadvertently ruined when my curiosity got the better of me when checking a FAQ to determine the effect of one of the rings I found.

Unlike Psychonauts, which I talked about in an earlier post, it is the mechanical gameplay and level design of SOTN which make it a classic. The controls are spot on, and the variety of weapons and the equipment system as a whole gives you a lot of choices. Certain weapons do more damage to certain types of enemies. Using certain items together will open up brand new attacks or even a new area in the game. On top of the equipment, are raw abilities (like double jump), new magic spells, health and heart power-ups, familiars and even new forms to collect. When you encounter a difficult boss, you generally have the option to backtrack a little bit to find an easier path or some power-ups to soften the boss up a little bit. Sure, SOTN was not the first game to dole out abilities to open previously inaccessible areas of the game – and far from the last – but rarely has it been so effectively implemented. Much like Psychonauts however, there is a lot to be learned about game design here.

The one that I’ve actually finished is Tim Schafer’s Psychonauts (Doublefine 2005) and it is everything that critics have been talking up for the past three years. The platforming is ultimately mediocre, but you hardly realize that as you play through because the actual design aesthetic is fantastic. The basic conceit is that levels take place within the minds of different characters, which a central real-world hub of the Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp. You take one the role of one of the students determined to prove himself and ultimately save his fellow campers.

Each mind is extremely unique and reflects the personality of that character, whether it’s the war-torn mindscape of your drill instructor of the world bending psychosis behind the milkman conspiracy. But the true strength of the game is really just how well realized everything is. Your fellow campers, while being entirely tangential to the plot, betray a surprising amount of individual identity in their brief bits of dialogue. And not only do the various levels serve as an illustration of the host character’s psyche, they are also used to tell various stories, whether it’s someone’s redemption and return from sanity or another’s dark, buried secret that belies their cool, party-girl persona. Psychonauts really demonstrates how an average game can be elevated by exemplary design.. Tim Shafer gave a talk at GDC in 2004 entitled ‘Adventures in Character Design’, where he talks about just how much effort he and his team put into character design and how he accomplished it. It’s a great talk, but I’d suggest playing the game before listening to it.

After a positive experience revisiting an older critical favourite, I actually decided to hop into another classic right away, but I’ll write that up next time or these things will never get posted.

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On a non-gaming related note, I came across a touching photo essay earlier this week and I’ve been debating whether it’s something I want to put in this blog.  As this man’s tale of his 97-year father was both elegant and moving and ultimately I was glad that I came across the link, I thought I would provide the the link for others to experience.