Technophile Monkey

I don’t do any of these games justice because I’ve only tried them for 15 minutes each, but the theory here is this: If I come back after a 15 minute session, the game can’t be too bad Tipa would shrivel and die if she’d read this.

So I went ahead and tried a large chunk of Aeria Games offerings. Aeria takes free-to-play MMORPGs from Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China. Then they localize them, add a central login system (you use the same username/password for all the games) and an item store. I think the concept is amazing, but the quality varies a lot.

The games I’ve tried in very few words:

• Twelve Sky 2: the sequel to Twelve Sky, of course. Lots of NPCs with Chinese (Mandarin?) voiceovers, a massive grindfest and bloody combat. Couldn’t detect anything that isn’t cookie-cutter, but if a mix between Diablo and Guild Wars with very bad translations and cut off text floats your boat, this might be your thing. You can cut up mobs like a berzerk here. A grindfest extraordinaire — chop, chop, chop, level, chop, chop, level, scream, chop, chop, level…
• Dream of Mirror Online (DOMO): they say it’s a “social MMO”. I loved the character creation screen but ran away screaming after the clichéd first quest introduction and taking a few steps in the world, which looks very colorful but feels dead.
• Luminary Online: Tobold loves him some Luminary Online. I thought the Evil Raccoons you meet are the cutest things ever, bubbles of fur with tails and raccoon heads that bounce around (since they have no legs). It overflows with cuteness, but hidden underneath is a cookie-cutter MMO with a special feature, the 100% player-driven economy. Apparently, it works according to Tobold. It didn’t work for me, I got lost in the layers and layers of stats screens. You even have stats for hunger level, nervous system, respiratory system and other bodily functions.
• Shin Megami Tensei Online: Imagine (aka MegaTen): my favorite by far. It was co-designed by one of my top shoot ‘em up makers from Japan, Cave, so this must be good. I’m totally ignorant of the 20 years of Shin Megami Tensei backstory, but I still got into the groove of this game quickly. You befriend demons in a post-apocalyptic, destroyed version of Tokyo. You do rush combos during battle, and it all feels very fast and energetic. That, and the bassline in all songs rocks, especially the Home III theme. Really, really good. Well translated, too.

Yes, this is all biased. If you’re not me, you won’t get to the same conclusion. So try all of those games, and make sure to give Tobold a shout if you end up playing Luminary more regularly.

Thanks so far, Aeria Games. Even if some of your translations are silly, I appreciate the effort of bringing those games over here.

In a previous posting, I was a bit harsh to Free Realms. All this sugarcoating, it had me close to vomiting.

Since then, I’ve read a few more hands-on reports, a few more first looks and pages upon pages of forum comments all over the web. It seems that yes, grown-ups are playing it. No, it doesn’t cater to the hardcore MMO crowd. And yes, that’s intentional.

I only just wrote about how I barely have time to play MMOs in the first place, so I was shocked to discover that Free Realms might actually be targetting people like me as well. Even if it doesn’t want to. So I decided to try again, and I’m slowly seeing how someone could enjoy themselves in the game. I’m not saying I like it, mind. So don’t quote me.

The biggest issues I had with the game were superficial so far, and are quickly remedied. I didn’t like the inane music and the horribly overacting voice actors. The solution? Switch off the game sounds, put on some black metal and imagine that every single overdrawn pixie you meet turns into something grotesque at night and hangs around at BDSM clubs.

That way, the whole game suddenly became bearable to me.

Also, I think my character’s groovy old-school pimp credibility will make sure he’ll be down with dem ho’s. Observe:

The only thing that could make me play WoW right now is a pay-as-you-play subscription plan.

I tried playing WoW four times. Three trials and two months of paid play. On average, I find perhaps 2 – 3 hours of time to play per week, since weeks are busy. The price they’re asking for a WoW subscription, something like CHF 19.00 per month, is much too high for such a short amount of playtime. People like me get better mileage from free-to-play MMORPGs with RMT systems, such as Runes of Magic or Dragonica or donation-based ones like Shards of Dalaya.

What would fix all this is a pay-as-you-play plan for WoW. With the above numbers, based on current monthly WoW subscription costs, we’re at about CHF 6 per hour. Ridiculous! Silly! Nasty! Now how about CHF 0.50 per hour? Much better. For people like me, that’d be CHF 1.50/month for WoW, savings of 17.50. Until I’d reach the 19.00 of the current subscription plans, I’d have to play for 38 hours. Seems roughly fair to me. For anyone playing more than 38 hours/month, the normal subscription would be cheaper.

I have doubts that Blizzard would ever consider such a plan. Since they’re a North American company, they’re probably not so open to pricing models that work in Europe and Asia. But they’d at least have busy people like me as players and could make a few bucks a month off of us, compared to not earning anything from me at the moment. If the CHF 0.50/hour is high enough to be profitable, they’d be making money that they are not making now. Even if it isn’t profitable, it would drive up revenue, something that might be nice to report in a time when the North American economy is down.

One can dream. But until something like that happens, WoW is not for me

Update, 2009-05-25: Tesh let me know that I’m not the only one with an opinion on WoW pricing, here’s Wolfshead’s reaction and there are some other crazy-slash-funky ideas out there as well.

What’s up with all of us posting about MMO pricing in May 2009 and not any earlier? Thanks, Tesh, for the heads-up

It seems that not only was the judge in the trial against the founders of The Pirate Bay biased (he was a member of the same copyright lobby groups as the plaintiffs), but now also the judge responsible for determining whether this bias influenced the trial has turned out to be biased as well, for being member of these same groups!

Ah. The copyright mafia. They act so holy, but they’re rotten to the core.

I’m planning to write a PC configuration manager for an online shopping system, but I can’t decide between adding my own module to a PHP-based shopping system and writing a standalone app in Rails.

It’s the horror. Let’s see:

If I write a module in PHP…

• I have to deal with a frankly idiotic plug-in architecture and the mess of spaghetti code that is (insert well-known Free Software e-commerce system here).
• I get multilingual product descriptions for free, but don’t know how they’re implemented in plug-ins yet.
• I have to write PHP. Yes, this isn’t that bad anymore, but ever since I had to learn Java I’m really fed up with languages that have a C-style syntax, which PHP has.
• I may have to write some utility functions myself that I take for granted in Rails (linking around between controllers etc.)
• The thing would run on any installation of (popular Free Software e-commerce system), it would be easy to deploy even on cheapo hosting plans that don’t have Rails.

If I write my own in Rails…

• No C style. Less braces. Funky Ruby constructs. Collections. ActiveRecord. Rails helper functions. Nice file layout. Yum!
• I accomplish more per line of code.
• I have a reason to dig deeper into current Rails, since my Rails knowledge is about four years old now.
• I would ignore the body of work already done in (insert ugly PHP-based e-commerce solution here).
• Deployment would require a Rails hosting plan.
• I would eventually have to extend this to be a full e-commerce system, but for my limited feature set, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal to do this.

If I list these points, it seems that I really, really want to do things in Rails, but somehow in my heart I’m not quite sure. I’m split 50/50 between both solutions, no matter how rationally I try to look at them.

Bah. Dilemmas.

Edit: I just discovered Spree, a framework for e-commerce on top of Rails. This seems great, especially since it’s a gem, not something that uses Rails Engines. Maybe I can kickstart development using that.

Edit 2: I talked to the Spree guys, read a lot of their documentation and had a look at the code. This is a really cool project with lots of potential! For now I just contributed a locale for Switzerland (in German), but I’m seriously looking at migrating my store to Spree and perhaps help with the features that are necessary for a PC configuration system inside it.

Woohoo

Rivella, the traditional Swiss drinks manufacturer that makes soft drinks based on milk serum, has the same kind of competition entry codes on their bottles as other drinks manufacturers like Coca Cola. But they don’t seem to filter their codes for nasty words, that’s why my girlfriend was told to AJAGFUCK by a drink bottle:

Thumbs up from me!

If you’re interested in system administration and would like to learn everything there is to learn about VoIP while looking at one of Switzerland’s most beautiful landscapes (a view onto the Rhine river from 1300 meters above sea level is right outside your bedroom window), please register for Admincamp #2: VoIP.

Admincamps are weekend events where professionals teach you a specific technology in an intense workshop. Everything you learn here has been tested in real environments and is in daily use somewhere, so you won’t just learn theory. You get to try the technology first-hand, and after each day’s courses there is time to get to know the others.

These camps are unique events in Switzerland and you should certainly take a look.

Maybe you remember that back in March, I ordered broadband and phone service from Cablecom after all other phone/broadband carriers gave up and said they couldn’t manage to hook me up on time.

Just to give you an update: Cablecom managed! Right on time, on the first workday after May 1, a little package from Cablecom arrived containing a miniature cable modem with Ethernet, USB and two phone connectors. I hooked it up in the new apartment, and boom, it connected and worked immediately. Speeds are exactly as advertises, 10 MBit/s down and 1 MBit/s up. I couldn’t be happier. Proves that sometimes you should root for the underdog.

After giving NCSoft all my money (well, buying all their Guild Wars episodes) and really enjoying the game, I noticed that I get awful motion sickness because their camera is implemented with a weird softening/dampening calculation whenever you move it. So as you turn your character, the turning won’t stop immediately when you release the mouse or the direction button, it will smoothly glide into place instead. Makes me vomit after 15 minutes. I asked them if anything could be done about this more than a year ago, but except for creating a ticket, nothing ever happened. Even in the recent large game update, no option to disable camera smoothing. That means goodbye Guild Wars, without even finishing Factions

So I looked around for another good free to play MMO. I found Shards of Dalaya, which I can whole-heartedly recommend. It’s based on EverQuest technology (but with an original storyline and content), so you probably wouldn’t like it if you’re looking for something modern. For that, there is Runes of Magic by the way, a free MMO that ignorant people would call a WoW clone, but that really can hold its own. It combines the best elements from many other games, looks pretty and runs gracefully — what more can you ask for in a free game?

Another free MMO is getting a lot of publicity nowadays, though. Free Realms. I won’t link to their site because the saccharine colors would burn out your eyes. I went through the signup process guided by a mutated Disneyesque sugar glider or something, only to get to the character creations screen and noticing that there is no way to not look like an arsehole in this game:

I realize that this game is aimed at preteens and whatnot, but these looks are ridiculous. Every single person in the game looks like the annoying twelve year olds that spit on the floor in the train and listen to Lady GaGa on screechy mobile phone speakers. There is no way I can ever identify with any of that. Look at the first tutorial NPC, an arsehole as well:

Horrible. The whole thing is narrated by a voice actress trying to sound chirpy, smooth and smoky-voiced at the same time, which completely explodes in her face.

I couldn’t take it anymore after five minutes. It’s like Bollywood, only with less class. Tell me how long you lasted.