More hijinks from in-house Lazarus testing. Unfortunately sans screenshots.

This might actually be a fun game when it’s done. I hope so.

I’ve been telling people for a while now that “official” Web-based message boards, owned and run by the makers of MMOGs, are not a good idea following the release of the game. Too much hassle, too much noise, too much liability and there are better ways to get information out to fans and customers, I’ve been saying, and it wasn’t me who said it first — Mythic did it first, with no small amount of ridicule early on.

Leave it to Walter Yarbrough, live content manager for Mythic, to lay it out for me. Archived below.
Continue reading Why official MMOG message boards suck….

VGCats is especially humorous and topical this week.

There was a MMORPG in development, it was called “Realms of Torment.” Now it’s called “Mourning,” and it might or might not suck. A guy at SomethingAwful said it sucked, in so many words:

Just in case you thought the market wasn’t quite saturated enough with games whose sole goal is to run around clicking on the same monster 400 times just to watch a bunch of numbers in a database slowly increase, then here comes one more! Mourning will allow you to “Enter a forgotten realm where magic and adventure abound!” You get to choose a race (human, elf, dwarf or orc) and learn crafting and join guilds! It’s basically the most generic MMORPG known to mankind, except that after 500 hours of playtime, your character will suffer “perma death” and be erased. That’s right, you get to spend hour after hour after hour plodding through a levelling grind and collecting stupid-looking armor, only to have all your work wiped out and have to start all over as your dead character’s child! What a deal! I guess they’re banking on the fact that no one’s ever going to complain about this feature, since that would require you to admit you had actually sat down and played this game for five hundred hours.

I would never review this game because I hate supporting shovelware MMORPG companies with my money. I’ll never quite forgive myself for paying for a month of Ragnarok Online about a year ago just so I could review it. I’ll also never quite forgive the person who tried to trick me into signing up for it. I knew something was wrong right away from his friendly greeting and the not-too-encouraging ending to his message, which were “Sup fuckface” and “ENJOY, ahahahahahahahahaha”, respectively.

As some are wont to do whenever Web sites say bad things about them, “Limitless Horizons Entertainment LLC,” proprietors of “Mourning,” threatened to sue.

More funny stuff happened.

The main reason I often wear cargo pants is because they have extra pockets, and those pockets are deep. When I was a reporter, I sometimes carried a notebook and a camera along with my wallet and keys. Today, for the sake of Ushicon 4, my latest reason for driving to Austin on the weekend, my pockets carried my cell phone, my Gameboy Advance and a portable CD player.

I knew I would be stooping a lot today. Stooping, as in awkwardly bending forward and rummaging in my pockets, as well as walking upright amongst the sort of wild humanity that only a “fan” convention can pull together — remarkable and even beautiful yet terrible, repulsive and ridiculous, all at once. Speaker buds mashed against my eardrums, the experience was made slightly more pleasant as the scenery played out as if on a screen, with the soundtrack from “Garden State” as the background.

Despite how this might sound at first, and that I only spent about five hours, I had a really good time, and $20 for a day pass was money well spent. I’d just reached my spending limit for time and money earlier than some other people.

EDIT: Added photo of Hank, Dean, Brock and HELPeR.
Continue reading Arboreal State (Five Hours of Ushicon is Enough)…

I’ll be attending Ushicon in Austin today, once I get ready and hit the road. Here’s hoping once I get there, I have a slightly better attitude than Kon.

Remember when I said I was expecting to take in a bunch of contract work soon after the start of the year?

Not much has happened yet. One company (that I applied for on Craigslist and had an informal meeting at the office in Austin with my would-be boss) still hasn’t worked through its own corporate bureaucracy to even make me an offer, and the other offer, originally made by a friend-o-mine in the game industry, totally fell through.

Seems their budget for writing about the game for promotional purposes got cut, so they decided to give the job of writing about the game to quality assurance testers. I had to call friend-o-mine today to find this out. Sigh. If I was unscrupulous enough to reveal what game this was, I’d recommend people not play it. That’s just too screwed up for words. Like QA people don’t have enough to do.

Good news is that another prospect, which has been floating in limbo for even longer than the above two options, might actually lead to a fruitful conversation with someone in charge (something it’s been lacking for a while.) Right now a conversation is all I’m willing to expect at this point. I know better than to expect anything more.

Supplemental income eludes me. Will write for food.

Cigarro y Cerveza is especially funny and relevant today.

Florida’s prison system has a page (scroll to the bottom) devoted to the Virtues of the Guardian, that is, the big red-faced bad guy from Ultima, as referenced in Ultima Underworld II. They misspelled “Killorn” as “Killgorn,” and according to the list, they left out Sobriety. It’s not clear that anyone realizes that the Guardian was the villain.

“John Hosie” is aka Houston Dragon. If you can’t read the above page (and some of us on the Lazarus team that have been giggling about it have had trouble, props to Shadow of Light Dragon for noticing it) it’s been archived.

Maybe Ultima fanclubs can qualify as a “faith-based initiative” and receive gummint funds from Gov. Jeb Bush’s big brother.

My dad sent me the following e-mail and pictures. My parents live in central Kansas, for reference. Short story: Frozen-over snow dumped by an ice storm weighted down a tree that stood behind my parents’ garage. It splintered and dropped behind the garage, blocking the alleyway entrance, crushing one section of the backyard fence and ripping the electric box off the house. The whole town got the power knocked out for a day, and they went without power for two more.
Continue reading My Dad and the Tree…