Although I'm not entirely sure anyone actually looks at that online status bar to see what I'm up to, I feel kind of bad that it's fallen out of date. I used to sort it with the games I was actually playing at the top, but lately I've been in and out of games so often that I don't really know what to do with it. Maybe I should just let another app, like XFire, keep track of it for me?

Anyways, after having my Drake blown up in EVE by a nasty gate camper, I've lost a lot of interest in it. There's just really no way for a new player to get into th egame now, unless you want to grind really low level stuff and never go more than one or two jumps from your high-sec home base. The fact that they scatter low-sec systems all over the place and force you to fly through them to get anywhere worth going has turned the game into a stress-fest and I'm not particularly interested in trying to survey every system before I jump through just to get from point A to B.

On the other hand, Phantasy Star Universe has had a sudden resurgence. They've added some new missions with way better XP and mission point rewards, as well as dramatically upped the Meseta (currency) drops in lower level missions. All in all, it makes progression much easier, especially for new players, and lets you cut through the three newbie jobs and get a proper guardian license without having to play for 20+ hours. All in all, it's a lot of fun; if you don't mind the same repetitive hack&slash as always.

WoW is still up there at #1, mainly because of raiding. I still don't play much on my own, and I'm already itching for the next expansion and a chance to grind up to 80 on my warlock and hunter. Yummeh.

FFXI's out of the running because of a lack of communication with Squeenix. They sent us copies of Wings of the Goddess to review, and a form to fill out, but we never got any accounts to review the game with. I asked them to reactivate my personal account for use in the review, but no luck. The accounts we got from the previous PR firm are still active, but they don't have any characters on them, so there's no way to explore the high level content that is the WotG expansion. With no way to actually review the game, it's just been sitting there relatively ignored.

I actually re-installed EQ2 to check it out. My account didn't get the new expansion activated; that's probably my fault for not getting involved in the press tour they offered. Not much has changed, I still don't have anyone to play with, so while I still think it's a kind of cool game and I'd love to get into it, I'm not really interested in putting in the effort to find a good community. Vanguard I just havn't even installed, so I have no idea what's up there. DAoC is also uninstalled. LOTRO too. Just don't have anyone to play these games with, really.

Come to think of it, I havn't logged in to SouCON MUSH either. I wonder how everything's doing over there?

It's that time of year again: holiday time! I'm excited about being done with the fall semester, though I'm not particularly looking forward to the winter. So cold, shivery, snowy, ick. Well, what can you do. Warm up the whole world? heh ;)

I've gotten back into EVE Online lately. I saw so many advertisments, it got stuck in my mind; I guess they really do work. That, and the new Trinity update, which makes the game look so much better than before. The only problem is that EVE is such an intrinsically mutilplayer game, so you really need to get other people to play it with you. Kilree's kind of into it too, but Chris and Neb are totally out. Oh well.

I'm still on the fence about getting an XBox 360. Right now there's only one game I really want to play on the system, Mass Effect, and I suppose it's possible that it will be ported to PC. After all, Bioshock and Gears of War, the other two games I was interested in on the 360, are on PC. Of course, GoW must be much better on the console, especially given its multiplayer coop nature. Single player in GoW kinda sucks.

I still can't accept the monthly fee for XBox Live either. I guess it's worth it if you got into the whole multiplayer aspect of it, but given how little I use my PS3 for multiplayer, I doubt I'd use the XBox 360 online much either. I generally don't like the random jump-in-and-play-with-strangers style of multiplayer anyways This includes Enemy Territory: Quake Wars on PC, which I do like, and Warhawk on the PS3, which I also do like. I just don't quite feel comfortale playing them online though. Go figure.

I'd really like to play a good strategy game about now. Something turn based, with squads maybe, like Cyberstorm. Or maybe a good RPG, like the original Fallout? The whole Fallout III thing has got to be doomed to failure. So much is riding on that game and the Fallout brand has such a powerful reputation that I don't think any game could possibly satisfy. Especially since fans of the original Fallout will be expecting something very retro and classic and the new game is sure to dissapoint in that sense. I'm sure it'll be like Bioshock, a let down to System Shock 2 fans but still a rather good game in its own right. I just hope it has a solid game system, unlike Bethesda's earlier titles, namely Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

I recently had a rather good debate with a very firm believer in the Christian tradition, who went so far as to dedicate his life to his beliefs by living as a missionary. I pretty much won the argument about God and/or the soul as the source of free will or moral action, and the one about the immeasurable influence of God on the world. The remaining point put forward by my adversary, which I did not have a chance to properly contemplate, was about the history of the Christian tradition.

It seems that testimony is a veritable cornerstone of Christian belief. This shouldn't come as such a surprise, given that their Bible is testimony. It records what people witnessed. People saw Jesus perform miracles, and someone wrote about it, so clearly it must have happened. I've never had good way to deal with this argument, because it appears to me as obviously fallacious. Putting aside the fact that people have frequently misinterpreted what they observe and that people frequently observe what isn't there, people frequently report things that aren't true. Getting truth from testimony seems as fruitless as praying. Which may exactly be the problem for Christians.

One of the central arguments that fueled my side of the debate was in scientific reproducibility. I made the claim that what matters for science isn't what happened in the past, but the prediction of future events. Science does not record past occurences for the sake of recording them; rather, it does so purely for the sake of prediction future occurences. Moreover, science acknowledges that measurements are taken with a level of uncertainty. The purpose, therefore, is not to record the universe as it was, but to understand enough about the universe as it was in order to be able to understand the laws by which it operates and derive accurate future predictions.

Science is eminently discoverable. By this, I mean that science can be discovered from observation and experimentation. If some apocalyptic event were to wipe out all of human history, human culture, language, knowledge, technology, everything except for humans themselves, then it ought to follow that the new types of humans, though they'd have different and unique history, culture, language, knowledge, and technology, would still have the very same science. They would still discover (eventually) the laws of gravity, light, and so forth; they would come to know the same universe that we know.

But they would not know God. They cannot discover God. Unless God were to re-intervene and re-present himself to these new people, re-teach what he taught and do all these things over again, Christianity simply could not exist. It could not be re-discovered.

It strikes me as a major flaw to vest a belief in something that hinges so crucially on historical events. There are no scientific beliefs that are fundamentally grounded in history. Not even science of ancient things, like geology or plate tectonics, necessarily require history to have occurred in the way it occurred. Even if all knowledge of continental movement was lost, we could still start analyzing continental drift again and start (slowly) making predictions of future drifts with increasing accuracy as we record more data. But the principle science of plate tectonics would not be lost, even if all the history upon which it was based was no more.

The fact of the matter is that God and the entire Christian tradition ceases to exist once all of its history is eliminated. The term 'tradition' seems eminently applicable, considering that what the Christians believe is merely a tradition passed on from some original cultural source. The origin of Christianity is in mankind; it certainly didn't exist before we evolved an oral tradition to preserve it.

Of course, what's particularly fascinating about the Christian religion in contrast to science is its effort to predict the future. Science, of course, exists to make predictions by analyzing the universe and trying to discover laws that determine how it functions. Christianity, too, makes predictions. However, these are not based on any particular observations. Rather, they are merely recorded as revelations, often with divine origin. This confirms my hypothesis that religions served the role of pre-science predictors. This is clearly visible throughout human history, where different spiritual and religious claims were used to not only explain events, but to guide actions by offering predictions of the future.

So in the end, the same test for the validity of science is applicable to the validity of religion: an experimentally verifiable prediction.

Christianity has three main claims: what was, what is, and what will be. The what was, though it is so pivotal to the believers, is actually not particularly relevant to the scientist. It is a matter of history, and while historians may quibble about the truth of whether or not Jesus actually rose from the dead, it is an entirely irrelevant issue to a scientist unless you can experimentally demonstrate revival as a principle of the universe to be understood. Which brings us to the claim of what is: what is, for science, are laws. Christianity may present some laws, such as "God exists" but cannot make any viable effort to prove or even demonstrate the existence of these laws. And it is the laws that guide the what-will-be. While science makes claims about the future by processing observations through scientific principles, all Christianity can do is quote ancient scripture that presumes to foretell future events sealed by divine fate.

In the end, it seems to me that Christians have a mighty weak argument on all three fronts. The foundational flaw of the Christian tradition is accepting a historical account as an explanation for the state of the universe. It should come as little surprise then that the stereotypical imagery of a religious individual is one of the intentionally ignorant individual who refuses to even consider the possibility of being wrong. For how could one possibly be wrong if the history that says they are right says they are right?

Logic like that is infalliable.

I've technically had an Xfire account since, well, since it started, though I havn't had much cause to actually use it. However, since I've recently picked up Enemy Territory Quake Wars and find it to be rather entertaining, I've decided to re-install Xfire. Feel free to add me if you'd like; I'm registered as, of course, Soulrift.

I keep saying I'll put some updates and I never do, do I?

My philosophy of mathematics professor linked us an interesting article about how good writers write for at least 15 minutes a day, rather than writing huge treatise once in a rare while. I suppose that's my problem with these feature articles: I think it'll take so long to write them that I keep putting off writing them rather than just tackling them a bit at a time.

So here's today's try.

I saw this article at Arstechnica concerning cultural misunderstandings between international business colleagues despite speaking a common language: english. However, what I found interesting about the article was the commentary at the end about the people who criticize the proliferation of english because it may eclipse other languages. This reminded me of similar discussions I had in social psychology class about how "big" cultures like Americanism can squish smaller cultures, like native americans, into nothingness.

I think both of these issues are essentially the same problem: both language and culture are tools with which humans interact. The former is more obviously so: you use a language to shape your ideas into words that others can understand. Clearly, both people need to know the language to be able to communicate. Culture is also a tool, though, becuse it concerns more vague yet equally important parts of communication, such as how to behave and interact.

What I don't get is why languages and cultures are sufficiently valuable that we want to preserve them. If we all spoke the same language and had the same culture, wouldn't all of our language and cultural issues go away? I can certainly see some value in preserving them, but you can do that by writing them down in history books. To preserve a languge or culture by having real people practice them is a punishment to those people. Like, we certainly find ancient Roman culture facinating, but we wouldn't want to populate a town with people and tell them to treat each other in the ancient Roman fashion just so we can preserve the culture. Gladiator battles, I think, are better preserved in books than in blood.

So if various people are coming to America and losing their native languages means, as the argument suggests, they will be ill equipped to do business in their home nations. Except, of course, if the people in those home nations are learning English to do business with the people who didn't emigrate from their countries. So, how's about everyone learn English and we put this confusing language problem behind us?

Just to let everyone know I'm working on two new feature articles: a follow-up to my original article on climate change and an article about the future of PC versus Console Gaming. If you have any questions or comments about either topic that you'd like me to adress in my upcoming feature articles, feel free to send me an email.

I've always wanted to write feature articles, so I've decided to add a section for those on my website. Follow the link on the left side there, and take a peak! My first article is about climate change.

It's been what, 3 months since my last update? Go figure.

So, two new reviews of mine are up, Ninja Gaiden Sigma for PS3 and Civ 4: Beyond the Sword for PC so go check them out! I ranked both very high (9.2 and 9.9 respectively) and you probably want to pick them up if you were wondering about them.

Life is otherwise pretty boring. I switched guilds in WoW because my old one (Fist) sort of died and my new one (Riddle) was... well... I guess 'born' is the best way to put it. Anyways, other games have faded out recently: I wiped Vanguard from my system, I havn't logged into EQ2 or LOTRO at all lately, I revisited PSU for a month but didn't feel like sticking around for two, and FFXI has been on haitus for over a month already. I'm always willing to re-visit though, if you want to hook up with me. Just toss me an e-mail!

I've been longing to play a good turn-based tactical game these days. I tried poking through my collection of older games, re-playing stuff like Fallout Tactics or Mission Force: Cyberstorm, and I keep banging my head against UFO Extraterrestrials. But I just can't seem to find the game I want. Something with the strategic pressure of scarce ammunition, the economic choices of which equipment to buy, the RPG-esque leveling of your troops, and the keen tactical choices of an interactive battlefield. Every game I play has something wrong with it though. Man, if only I could make my own games, y'know?

Now I'm not exactly opposed to budget games; I'll buy them when they're fun and cheap. I have a general formula I like to follow that applies to just about every game: I'm willing to pay a dollar per hour of good, quality fun. Take .hack//G.U. for example. Each game was solidly fun for about 40 hours, which means they're worth, to me, about $40. It's not an unreasonable formula. By this standard, a 2 hour movie ought only cost $2. Assuming you want to fill, say, 8 hours of entertainment a day, your annual 'fun' budget comes to about $2400. $200 a month isn't out of the ballpark, when you consider the different games and other forms of entertainment you might buy into.

Of course, the hard part is knowing which games will pay out in fun for their cost. Some games, like World of Warcraft, tend to have a much higher return on your investment. For $15 a month you get way more than 15 hours of fun. Others are not so good. Going out to dinner with two of my best friends is 2 hours of great fun, but it's also nearly $20. So I guess there's a certain give and take, a quality of fun as it were, where some forms of entertainment are worth more than a buck an hour, and others aren't.

One of the trickiest things I've found are budget games. Some of them are kinda fun, and priced so low that you can't really go wrong. Yeah, maybe I didn't play flOw for a whole 8 hours, but even if I only play it for one it's still a better buy than that dinner. But when a budget title like this comes along and tries to price itself at $44.99, I just shake my head and sigh. First of all, it's an X-Com clone, and as much as I love X-Com, there's already tons of clones out there, and at least one free one that looks half decent. So it can't possibly be worth the hefty price tag, can it?

Well, I guess it just depends on whether or not you get 45 hours of quality fun out of it, eh? Sadly, the quality modifier is definately not working in this game's favor. Let me know when the game's down to $15 and I'll pony up my cash; in the meanwhile, it's back to those entertainment investments that are really worth it!

Lord of the Rings Online has arrived and it's been a pleasant surprise. I'm really getting into it. I played through several rounds of betas and it was... iffy. But now that I'm in the full thing and taking it a whole lot more seriously, it's good fun.

The thing that I had to "overcome" in order to get into LOTRO were the classes. They just plain don't fit the traditional archetypes. I was expecting my hunter to be like my WoW hunter, or to play a mage and fling incredible magics all over the place, and I just hit the wall. But after you give up your prejudices, the classes really aren't as bad as it first seemed.

On the other hand, the crafting system blows chunks. It takes 200 skill points to get through the apprentice rank of woodworking, for example. You can get 6 points by making a bow staff and 6 more by making a bow, both steps costing 3 treated rowan, which is 12 total untreated rowan for 12 skill points. 200 rowan to skill up, plus 100 wax to treat the rowan, for 44 silver. How much is 200 rowan? It vendors for 40 copper a piece. 124 silver to level up woodworking to journeyman. Brutal for someone who's got a third of that by level 14.

All that would be at least tolerable if you could sell the bows you make to cover the cost of your wax, but you don't even get a silver per bow! It's a massive coin loss just to level up the tradeskill. I just hate game systems that make you dump a ton of coin into leveling a crafting skill...

Bah, anyways, enough whining. On the bright side of things, C&C3 is fun...ish. It's not bad, as RTS goes, but it's not earth-shattering either. I find it a bit unmanagable, overall. The harvesters are a bit erratic, especially when they wander around looking for tiberium or continue to scratch at the remains of an empty patch when a full patch is a stone's throw away. The game also has very poor feedback, I find it hard to know where I'm under attack when I'm warned that I'm under attack.

Well, full reviews of both games will be posted to gameshout.com shortly. I gotta finish playing them first :)

So it's exactly one month since I last updated, I figured it was time to put in some fresh text. Just in case you were curious, I bared my teeth at Sony and told 'em to stuff it: if they weren't lowering the price on Armored Core 4, I wasn't buying it. Instead, I circumvented the whole thing and got a review copy from Sega. Ahh, good times. It's one of those finicky games though, with details I like and others I dislike. I really like the paint job feature, for example, and I think the decals are particularly well implemented (especially as a gundam model builder). On the other hand, I think the fact that you have to buy seperate weapons for left and right hands/shoulders is one of the worst design decisions ever.

But I'll tell you what I'm really frustrated about, and it's not the lack of PS3 games; it's TV technology. LCD is problematic, at best, and most certainly inferior for a gamer in comparison with phosphor-based technologies. Recent hub-bub about SED technology got my hopes up, but Wikipedia's article on the subject has more or less confirmed my fears: we're probably not going to see SED make a wide-spread sweep of LCD and Plasma technology. Why? Because of goddamn corporate politics, lawsuits, and other crap I couldn't care about.

Now this is why patents are a bad idea. Companies get embroiled in who knows what scandal, and really good technology gets caught in the crossfire. I mean, sure, if you spend all the money researching and developing a technology, you want to profit from it; but for goodness sakes profit from it! Don't squat on it. And if you can't bring it to market, you had better let someone else do it.

Well anyways, enough ranting. I guess I just have to bite the bullet and buy an LCD, otherwise I'll never get to see my PS3 in all its 1080p glory.

Well, tonight, despite being sick with a ruthless cold, I finally made it to level 75 with my Dragoon job in Final Fantasy XI. I guess it's time to swing into full gear with White Mage now.

Yesterday a friend asked me if I was frustrated with the lack of PS3 games. I suppose I am. I mean, don't I always want more games? But I guess with the PS3 there's been particularly few games. I still only have Resistance Fall of Man after having the system for four months. But the source of my frustration isn't really based on the quantity of games, but the quality. For example, I rented the Gundam Crossfire game. It was cool, but certainly not a high quality game. However they want to price it like a high quality game. $70 for crap? I don't think so.

Sony needs to re-think pricing for their games. They have to be a bit more realistic about the quality of their PS3 games. Take flOw for example. It's not a high quality game, but it doesn't carry a huge price tag either. I bought that one.

Right now I have my eye on Armored Core 4. I'm a big Armored Core fan, and that's one of the games I was really looking forward to on the PS3. But, lo and behond, it's gotten a rather poor reception at the hands of reviewers (IGN gives it 5.9/10). Yet Sony still wants to sell it for full retail price, $70. Hell, I only paid $60 for Resistance. Good grief.

But what's the price point I would be willing to meet? $30? $40? I'm not sure. Certainly not $70. I'd offer Sony this: $60 is a 10/10 game. Fraction the price down based on the review rating. So a 5.9/10 is $35. There you go, that's a price I'd be willing to pay. C'mon Sony, get the word out to vendors: if Soulrift asks for AC4, it's $35. That's $35 more than you'll see otherwise.

Now see, this is one of the reasons I'm not a big console game fan. In fact, I havn't purchased a console since the original Nintendo system. The prices are absolutely unacceptable. Well, what am I saying, those prices make console vendors plenty of cash. Apparently there are more than enough suckers out there shelling out the big bucks for every game they squeeze out into skimpy little plastic boxes.

Now if only I could convince those people to buy games for me too.

I was thinking about the post I made earlier today and I think I came up with a solution: the communities get built due in no small part to superordinate goals. In other words, when players have to work together, they do. But they have to share the same goal, and have the same way of meeting that goal, in order to be able to work together.

I think the best example of how game design has failed to create these goals is in Dungeons and Dragons Online. In DDO you had a ton of differet adventures to go on. The developers thought this was much better than grinding because players would have lots of variety, they could do a different quest each time. The problem was that you needed a party to do the quests, and the mathematical probability of finding random people who wanted to do the same quest as you was astronomically small.

As a result, everyone just did the same quest, over and over and over, litterally grinding it to advance through the game. By eliminating one of the variables (the number of quests) players were able to create a super-ordinate goal: they all had to do the same quest, so they were able to work together to do it.

Dark Age of Camelot also comes to mind. In the early days of DAoC, players would meet up at popular camp sites and set up a party to grind the monsters for XP. As one person in the party left, another person, sitting on the sidelines waiting for an opening, would join. This whole process was feasible because players knew of or found out about a small number of popular sites and could actually meet other players there.

Later, DAoC turned to instanced adventure zones, balanced for either solo or group play. The problems here were manyfold; for one, players didn't HAVE to group up, so often would bother. Also, after you did group up, you'd have to make sure you all had the same group instance task. This meant finishing off your current solo or group quest before you grouped up. It wasn't easy to do, so it wasn't done.

It seems that games are trying to get away from the grind, with varying success. WoW gets away from the grind by turning their game into a Massivly Singleplayer Online Game for the most part, as you primarily do quests and the quests are primarily soloable. You only really need to group up to do dungeons or raids. Other games have been less successful, notably EQ2 and Vanguard, which limit the soloability in an effort to encourage grouping, but spread tasks all around the world in a multitude of quests which in turn makes it difficult to find a group.

Ultimately, I can only conclude that the good old grind is the way to go.

So, like, 'foom' 70 in WoW, I finally get misdirection, and let me tell you, it's a lot of fun! But fun is really the focus of today's entry, particularly fun in MMOs other than World of Warcraft.

A friend of mine on teh intarwebs and I were discussing MMOs, notably Vanguard. He was complaining about having two groups of friends at disparate levels and having a difficult time trying to play with both. I was complaining about the opposite, not having anyone to play with and feeling overall disincentived to play the game. You see, Vanguard doesn't cater to solo gaming, certainly not in the way WoW does. For my friend, that's a good thing, because he hates soloing. But for me, it's not so great.

Now, you must understand, it's not because I have any particular fondness for soloing. As any member of my guild will tell you, I'm always eager to hop into groups for questing, dungeons, and of course I'm there for most of our guild raids (lifetime attendance of 91%, not bad eh?). Instead, I have a fondness for being able to play the game, or at least having a reasonable assurance that I will likely be able to play the game.

In WoW, of course, whenever I log in I can play because I can solo with any of my various characters. So no matter what the circumstances are, I can still play the game (provided it's not down for maintainence, of course). If there are people to play with, I can play with them, if there aren't, I can still play.

In FFXI, I can't play by myself, I pretty much need to find a group to go grind XP. But that holds true for just about everyone. As a result, there's a very solid set of social rules in place for finding XP groups. You can flag yourself searching for party, type in an informative comment, and run searches with various criteria for party members. While you aren't necessarily going to be able to play any time you want, you at least have the assurance of a system that supports your group-finding efforts.

EQ2, and lately Vanguard, seem to be stuck in between these two extremes. Both games support, technically, soloing, though it's not very fun (in my experience at least) in either game. Both games have LFG systems, but I havn't had any luck getting them to work. There's nothing more discouraging than opening up your social panel in EQ2 and seeing a total of about 20 players across 70 levels looking for a group. Contrast that with FFXI, where you'll have hundreds looking at any given time.

I'm not entirely sure what the solution is for games like EQ2 and Vanguard. Should they add more solo focus like WoW? Should they take away soloing alltogether to force the development of social norms like in FFXI? Or is there some way for players who don't know anyone else to enjoy these sorts of 'social wading pool' games?

I really havn't had much to say lately. Been playing WoW BC, a bit of Vanguard, and a few other things here and there. Lost Colony trudges along. I wonder how Phantasy Star Universe is doing? Maybe I should pick up another month of gameplay and check out the updates...

Well Burning Crusade is out, and it's been great. Despite all of the technical problems with crashes due to overpopulation, and the horrendous trouble actually getting spawns or items needed for quests due to overpopulation, and the frequent occurance of jack-assery due to overpopulation, the expansion is just fantastic. At this point, anyone who says WoW sucks either doesn't have a clue, hasn't played it, or lives in the bizzaro backwards world. I don't care if you personally don't like it; you can't deny that it is, objectively, a good game.

At this point I'm tempted to go on some sort of rant about the common imability to differentiate one's opinions from objective qualifications, but it's late and I'm not up for it. Instead, I'll tell you about something else that's been on my mind lately: Region Coding.

You know how when you buy a DVD or a video game, it's sold by region to only work on players from the same region? So, like, you can't play a European DVD on a Japanese DVD player, not because they're different formats but because they're locked to different region codes. Same with Japanese games on American consoles. Now, if the product is release simultaneously in both regions and the region coding is used simply for price fixing (why it's supposedly in place, afterall) I don't really have a problem with it. I do, however, have a huge problem when its only released in one region.

Consider the lucrative import market, where companies illicitly import Japanese games into North America; not to bypass the region price fixing but because the game simply isn't released in North America at all. But, lo and behond, there are enough people here who want to play the game that the importers profit enough to make that business viable. So why don't the big publishers just release the games themselves?

Apparently there's a lot of business end of things that makes a release prohibitive without some large number of sales. I'm not going to give a number because, frankly, I havn't heard anything reliable, but as the case stands now if the number of expected sales is too low they don't put out the game at all. Which makes me wonder why they don't distribute it digitally. I mean, the XBox 360 and the PS3 both have online stores. The Wii may too, I don't have any first-hand experience with that. But in any case, a digital distribution ought to allow the company to bypass much of the costs of distribution and allow a smaller sales figure to at least purchase a game which has already been completed and distributed in another market.

I really hope the console companies embrace digital distribution, especially of Japanese games expected to have a small but strong cult following in North America

I wonder if the Japanese have a secret underground import market for North American games that don't get translated for Japan?

Hmm, I wonder if that title will grab random searchers for very different things... Well anyways, what I want to talk about is, as the title suggests, my PS2 emulator, aptly named the Playstation 3. I've even gone ahead and emulated original PSX games on my PS2 emulator! But mainly, I've finally been catching up on some of those great PS2 hits that I missed out on, including Final Fantasy XII, Soul Calibur III, and Devil May Cry. There are some other games I feel I ought to pick up and play, but right now I'm trying to figure out which ones I can borrow and which I'll have to shell out the cash for and buy. The hardest thing, of course, is actually finding some of the older titles, like the original 4-part .hack saga.

Now I did have a little bump in the road when I rented Gundam Crossfire. Which, incidentally, was quite good! I don't know why it was rated so terribly! I mean, it wasn't a five-star title, but it was still fun for the week I rented it. On the other end of the scale, Resistance Fall of Man is really fantastic. I finally had a chance to play it 2-player co-op with a friend of mine and it was a blast, even on my old low-def TV. I can see why this one was a 'must have' for the PS3.

Burning Crusade is 3 days away and I'm plenty excited. Our guild is still plowing through with incredible coordination and effort, and we've got one last Naxx raid tomorrow before the expansion. I hope we get Thaddius! In other MMO news, I finally got to level 10 in Vanguard... Well, the game still seems rough around the edges, though it's certainly improved almost daily. I'll probably still check it out right until it comes out and make a decision then.

So what MMOs are you all looking forward to?

Well, watching the backlash from my blog entry earlier today has convinced me that something is seriously wrong with the way we communicate. I'm losing faith in the english langauge. It seems that you can write one thing, and everyone who reads it interprets it in a very different way. How can we accomplish anything?

The first response from Shock was that I had angered our investers by misrepresenting the size of our company. In my blog I said our core team consisted of four people: shock, myself, and two others. The investors were upset because we were paying salaries to more people. But they seemed to miss the word "core" or, at any rate, didn't understand how I intended to use it. When I say the 'core' team, I refer to the four people most directly involved with the game, the people making design decisions that direct how the game will work and how it will be made. I'm not making any reference to the total employees of Red Planet.

By and large, however, the response from the community has been positive and I appreciate your support. Except, of course, from "WilsonK" who posts ever so suspiciously from Shock's own IP host. Not that I can actually confirm it anymore, since my forum admin rights have been revoked. I still haven't heard from Shock, so I guess I'll just have to wait and see what tomorrow brings. Hopefully we can use this opportunity to move forward and build a closer bond with our community. I still want to make this game.

Assuming, of course, we aren't mired in miscommunications.

Public Relations is a bizarre thing. Your goal, in PR, is to present your company and product in the best light possible in order to encourage investment in both. So there ends up being a very fine line between raw fact and frilly fantasy when you try to tell people what they want to hear.

Personally, I've never been a fan of PR. I want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Unlike the vast majority of people I've met, I don't jump to innapropriate conclusions from dissapointing information. But then again, a lot of people do. So what's a PR person's best bet?

StateOfShock, on the other hand, has a very different approach to PR. For him, the truth doesn't matter at all. All that matters is the end result of making people buy the game. As a result, he tries to build a convincing fantasy that contains all the things that he wants people to think about Lost Colony. If people think that good games only come from big, cohesive game development studios, he's going to make us look like a big, cohesive game development studio. If people think that a game has to be in development for over a year, he's going to make people think our game has been in development for over a year. And so on.

I try not to openly contract or correct him. He is my boss, afterall, and pays my salary (or will, once the game becomes profitable. I hope). And Lost Colony is, in effect, his game, so it's not my place to stop him from doing it the way he wants to do it. But people have been noticing the cracks in his fantasy for a wihle now, and, just like I said, are jumping to innapropriate conclusions.

So what are the facts? First and foremost, the game isn't fake. I still work on it daily and, just like most of our fans, I still want it to come out. This isn't a scam. As everyone has pointed out, it's just too good an idea to waste on a scam.

Fact #2: we're not rich. We're not EA, we don't have millions (or even thousands) of dollars to invest in this project. We're doing the best we can with very limited resources. The core team is pretty much two art guys, a code guy, and me making stuff up.

Fact #3: the game is going to rock your socks off. You don't have to be a billion dollar company to make a good game. I still hold as a model of success the Half-Life mod Counterstrike. I still think that great game design is more important that vast resources, and I know our game has a fantastic lead designer.

Or maybe that's just my all encompassing fantasy ;)

Happy New Year! Especially if you weren't eagerly awaiting Lost Colony's January 1st release. A week's gone by and there's no sign of anything remotely like the finished product I had in mind. Oh well. Shock insists that he's fixed a ton of bugs in the engine, but I'm skeptical about his assurances that art and features are 10% of the game, compared to the engine at 90%.

So Vanguard went from something I didn't really want to play to something I couldn't play at all. Server stability has become worse than Earthen Ring, if such a thing is even possible. The latter is so bad I havn't been playing any WoW for fun lately, it takes me three or four tries to actually log into the game server. I wish Blizzard would do something to fix ER up a bit. They had better, before Burning Crusade comes out; if it's bad now, I can't immagine how unplayable it will be then.

So my Mother calls me up to talk about something she saw on TV, about this American couple that used surgery and drugs to prevent their daughter from growing up because she was so severely cognitively disabled she'd be like a child all her life anyways. Mother was appauled that someone would do something so unethical! Well, having written university papers on the subject of the severely cognitively disabled, I had to remind my mum that such a human would not qualify for personhood or moral consideration, so ethically her existence is no different than that of a pet. And, well, people neuter their pets all the time.

Oooh goodie! I just picked up Maexnna's Fang for my hunter in Naxx tonight. Paired with the Harbringer of Doom, I have some pretty cool danggers and inspire much rogue-envy :) Don't send me any hate tells though, send them to Shades; he's the one that didn't overbid my 45 points (I would have let him have it for 50, honest!). Anyways, they're spectacularly good daggers for a BM hunter to melee with, along with his pet, so it'll make getting to 70 a breeze once Burning Crusade comes out. (wait, wasn't it already?)

I've gone and cancelled my FFXI and PSU subscriptions though. I just don't have enough time for the former and the latter has one of the most exasperating 'grinds' ever. I have been playing Vanguard lately, though, and enjoying it... a bit. I'm not enthralled with it, just yet. The game feels... well, dated. And the classes don't have the same sort of definition that they do in WoW or EQ2. They feel like they have a loose assortment of uninspired skills. But we'll see what the full game brings.

Lost Colony's plodding along slower than I had expected. I guess the coders and artists don't work as fast as us designers, eh? Still, I'm hopeful that we'll make our Jan 1st release date. I know I'm ready, are you?

Not much to update here, I'm going to be enjoying some time with the family this week. It's sort of a slow time for me with LC; there's not much for me to do while I wait for coders and artists to get enough stuff into the game for me to go in and start testing and balancing and figuring out what's what. So I twiddle my fingers, browse the forums, and play some more of the Vanguard Beta.

I was thinking of writing up the Lost Colony storyline as a piece of fiction for the players to get a better feeling and understanding of the dynamics of the game world. I'm not sure if today's gamers have the attention spans to actually read more than five lines of text though. Should I really bother writing a 30-40 page short story? Probably not. Then again, I might just do it for myself. I've always enjoyed writing.

So anyways, Merry Christmas, Happy New Years, all that stuff to all you people out there. I've never been a big holiday person; don't get me wrong, I'm not awash with bad spirit or anything, I'm just not a particularly festive kind of guy. I'd rather just be on good terms with everyone all year, rather than pretend to be nice to them one day a year.

So, like, it's been a while since I've updated my blog. So much stuff going on, it's hard to keep track of it all. We finally got the game server up and running after that crazy weekend fiasco, and people are finally playing the game. I don't know if its a good thing or not; personally, I don't think what we have up there gives a good impression of the game we actually intend to produce. But it certainly helped us work out some technical difficulties that would have hamstringed us had we not performed that little compatability test.

I've started working on another side project, a philosophical treatise about intuition, thought experiments, and moral facts. I'll spare you all the details about why I argue that moral facts do actually exist but only in the future (or the possible futures of thought experiments). Still, I think I'm onto something! Could "Soulrift" be the next Kant?

Well, back to the thing everyone wants to hear about, Lost Colony. Nothing really new to report, to be honest. I havn't been doing too much work on the project; right now it's primarily a crunch time for the programmers and the artists to get everything into the game. They already have my design documents there, and I answer plenty of little questions each day, but until all the gameplay mechanics are in there I can't really go in and balance them. Ho hum.

Been taking the opportunity to get caught up on Neverwinter Nights 2, actually. I played it first with a Warlock, and I didn't get far before getting frustrated with the class. I rerolled a Ranger / Rogue and I'm having a lot more fun, though I desperately wished I had more skill points to spread into the plethora of choices I have! Got any cool NWN2 experiences? Toss up a thread on the forum and I'll read them there :)

I really wanted to put up a post on 12/12, since that's just kinda cool, but I missed it by two and a half hours... because I was leveling my my RNG job in Crawler's Nest. Ding 39? Ahem, well, anyways...

Gotta say something about Lost Colony: about TKing, really. The problem whenever you try to judge interaction between two people is intent. Did you do mean to do it, or did it happen accidentally? It's the difference between murder and manslaughter, for example. In a court of law, lawyers try to prove guilt or innocence or, when guilt is indisputable, they dispute motive in an effort to alter sentancing. But how can you really prove intent, anyways? I mean, it's one thing to be arguing all these assorted facts in a court of law, but how do you program that into a very strict and rather limited set of rules in a computer game?

In LC, we're running into just that problem. We want to penalize players who intentionally TK other players, and we even want to apply a smaller penalty to players who accidentally hurt their allies. We've got that part all sorted out, it's just fine and dandy. So what's the problem? Jerks who intentionally try to get TKed. What do we do about players who intentionally get themselves killed in order to apply TK penalties to other players? On the surface, it just sounds so rediculous, but if our anti-TK measures protect the victims of TKs by penalizing those who cause them, how do they protect the unintentional perpetratrs of TKs from those who abuse the system?

So Shock and I thought: aha, well, if someone gets TKed a lot, they must be trying to get TKed, so we should sanc-lock them. But then we ran into another problem: if the number of deaths to TKs is less than the number of TKs needed to lock a player, a particularly vengeful player could TK an ally enough times to get them sanc-locked for intentionally getting TKed without reaching their own TK penalty. On the other hand, if its higher, a particularly vengeful player can try to get TKed by another player often enough to send them to sanc. It seems there's no viable solution, because even if we put both values at the same level (currently 10), then all you'd have to do is get one friend willing to TK or get TKed to throw the other person over the limit while you stay at 9.

This is why being a game designer is tough. You have to immagine every possible course of action a player could take, and run those through your set of rules. You have to find every possible exploit, every loophole, every crack through which they might try to squeeze their way. And when you run up against one of the most basic problems of human behavior, such as intent, there just doesn't seem to be any system of rules that gives you the result you want.

Well, back to the proverbial drawing board.

So get this: Roland, our modeller, sends me the model for our Reaper aircraft, and I'm like: dude, why are there wheels on this thing. We gotta put landing struts, y'know, since these things are all VTOL and easy to fly for FPS guys, not hard core flight sim planes? And he's like, yeah, we'll do that. But then I'm like, OMG! Claws! Put claws on the landing struts, and they like unfold like, and grab onto the ground!

So anyways, development of LC is speeding along at the speed of light (hopefully no one remembers that I keep mentioning Procyon is a bit over 11 light years away). Still looking for a good name for the mechs though. BFR's were StateOfShock's idea, since Planetside was his only exposure to mecha. Gosh, that's kind of sad, isn't it? Anyways, we looked at MARINE but, well, it's iffy. Got any ideas? You know where to find me.

First up, since this has been bugging me since I first saw the Gears of War ad on TV, the song is "Mad World" with Gary Jules; you can find it on iTunes. I wonder if we'll make a similar movie for Lost Colony...?

So anyways, I spend a bit of time each day browsing through the Dev Forums, checking out what all the fans are talking about. And there's this recurring trend that, well, it's annoying me! However many similarities there may be between Lost Colony and Planetside, LC is its own game, with its own game play considerations. Many of the tactics one would employ in Planetside won't be plausible or possible in LC.

Most of the assumptions our fans seem to be making about our game which are based on their experiences with Planetside simply aren't true.

I do like to read all the suggestions and ideas, though. I read all the posts in the dev forums, even if I can't reply with more than just vague statements about them. Some of the ideas I see are things that we also thought of, right when we started this project. Other things I see are new and give us a different perspective to look at it. Some ideas I dismiss outright, others we debate for hours before laying them to rest. We can't implement everything that gets thought up, sometimes we have to focus in on a few features we think will make a huge impact and leave other ideas for future development updates.

So anyways, to all the fans posting to the LC Forums, keep the ideas coming, but try not to get caught up in long debates about game play considerations that might not even apply to LC, eh?

Well since I'm working on the Lost Colony game now, I supposed that I might as well turn this site into some sort of Dev Blog. Everyone loves those, right? Also took the time to update the online game status rankings on the right hand side over there. Shifted WoW to the top, so FFXI got the bump. I guess it's only apropriate since I'm raiding so steadily now and pretty much given up on Dynamis.

I'm actually wondering if I should get rid of some of those listings. I mean, when was the last time I logged into DAoC? OK, well actually, I was going to try out the new Labyrinth expansion, but it wasn't activated, so forget that. And Planetside? Yeah, I need to get rid of some of those. Never bothered to list City of Heroes, for example, or Archlord. Hmm...

OK, ok, Lost Colony. Go check it out, and sign up to the forums, and come chat with me there! I'm too cheap to get PHP on my site here, and there's no way I'm going through CGI hell again.... So you get to read my Dev Blog here and I don't have to get my site cluttered up with your innane comments! Muah ha ha!

So what are we working on now? Wouldn't you love to know. Right now I've been spending most of my time going over the economy system formulae, reworking stuff as I think up more potential exploits and finding ways of shutting them down. I really hope this economy system holds up to the rigors of MMO players. We'll probably get a bunch of addicts complaining that it cuts them down to only being able to play a few hours each day, but really, that's not such a bad thing is it? You gotta have some variety in your life. Just look at my list :)

Since it's Friday the 13th, I thought I'd update the main portal message. This site may, in the future, provide visitors with interesting information but, for the moment, merely resides as a method of updating my various friends with my status in various online games. I'm still too lazy to do anything else with the site, just yet.

By the way, may I remind everyone to check out GameSHOUT Radio, where I host lots of fun shows like the Science and Technology Show, the MMO Show, and the Anime Show, as well as review plenty of PC games. I let the rest of the cast do all those console things. Bleh. Consoles get all the ratings too... Anyways, check it out at www.gameshout.com!