OK, Blogger is Moribund

Can't delete a spam comment, the UI for it is gone but the hell still says to look in the old place.

Mobile UI is a mess, desktop UI doesn't work on Android.

G+ seems to be on its way to shutting down.

I loathe Facebook as a company and distrust giving them and chance to run code on my property. Google can't be trusted to leave a working product alone and working.

Sigh.

Comments

Guild Wars 2 (developers who pay attention)

After playing MMOs as old as EverQuest and Ultima Online, through various other games including WoW, Rift, and EVE Online, I've come to appreciate that most MMOs are aimed at very specific sorts of players or even specific ways to get people to pay money. Only a few, of which Rift deserves honorable mention but Guild Wars 2 is the extreme standout, show a great deal of thought as to what is fun for many different types of player, and consequent design features that provide for most or all of those player types. GW2 is particularly notable in that I find what I do in a play session is almost completely determined by what I'm in the mood to to do. It does not take hours of exclusive dungeon crawling to get gear useful in harder dungeons; players who focus on or exclusively play in the RvR (called "WvW" because the competition is between servers, not between game factions) areas do not acquire gear that makes mostly-PvE players unable to compete with them, and the struc...

Planar Conquest - FInally a MoM-alike worth playing - but fatally flawed

I picked up this title a while ago, and at first was very excited. It's clear that somebody finally actually made a MoM-alike that's actually a lot like MoM. Unlike most of the early attempts, you are the big wizard in the tower, not on the battlefield, and your decisions about magic are the central focus of strategy. The game setup screens had me really excited. It's presented differently but the choices are extremely similar to those in MoM - anything that wouldn't be infringing is practically verbatim, but the presentation is clearer and cleaner. The big change is the larger and interlocking array of spell schools, which are more or less lifted from recent games (IIRC it's straight out of Sorcerer King). In fact, the most striking thing about these screens is that they are still basically low-resolution, though higher than the ancient original. I think they are 1024x768x16. And the gameplay itself is very similar, with some new ideas stolen from the HoMM ser...

Weregamer's Game Musings

Search This Blog