I’m writing this next sentence not only because it’s true, but because I know at least one hardcore Marvel fan is going to have a stroke after reading it: Who’s a cute little alcoholic? You are, little Tony Stark, yes you are.
The trailer I mentioned earlier this week for Marvel Universe Online, I mean Super Hero Squad Online, has arrived.
What we know of the game so far is that it likely follows the television show closely. The heroes are fighting the villains, both sides searching for the shards of an ancient and powerful sword. Throw in some jokes about Wolverine slicing bread, toasted over The Flame’s fiery body, and Dr. Doom throwing a temper tantrum, and voila! You have something.
And if the medics have arrived and are in need of assistance, you can mention to the gentleman/lady that this is not the Marvel Universe MMO. Whatever it is, expect more news in the coming months.
Super Hero Squad is being developed by Gazillion Entertainment, who you may know from the upcoming Lego Universe, Jumpgate MMO, and the defunct Auto Assault.
NIDA Online is a Korean free-to-play MMO. For some of you, that is enough to avoid this game like the plague, and for others it is enough to question: Omali why are you bothering reporting on yet another cookie-cutter MMO shutting down. Why is this significant? NIDA Online opened in September 2009, around the same time as Aion, Champions Online, and Fallen Earth. So, from start to finish, NIDA Online lasted slightly less than eight months.
Now I have never played NIDA, so I’ll leave the quips about the game’s quality to another person, but eight months says a lot. Consider, for instance, the fact that two very widely panned MMOs are still going rather strong to this day, after two years of being live (I’ll leave you to fill in what those two MMOs released in 2008 with high preorder numbers are). NIDA’s run even knocks out FURY, the only MMO we are aware of to fire off emails to its ex-players calling them losers. FURY, for reference, had a ten month life span.
Perhaps now Gamekiss can focus on its other riveting titles, such as the Freestyle basketball MMO.
All Points Bulletin is all about customization: The more we learn about the game, the more options for making your cop or villain unique come to light. Everything from changing the details on your car, customizing your weapons, your character, your radio, and even subscription allows you to tailor to your style of play.
But we ask: What methods can I use to taunt my opponents using the same method of customization? Well Chris Collins has the answer.
“Players can create what we call death themes, so every time that you kill a player they’re forced to listen to your music,”
Looking forward to being killed by someone and hearing “We’re no strangers to love…” or ten seconds of some teen shouting expletives through his cracking voice.
Mortal Online, like many indie MMOs, is no stranger to delays. Out of a rabid attempt at fighting back the de-synchronization issues that have plagued Mortal Online for months, Star Vault has pushed back the title month after month until they could finally defeat this beast that knows no enemy. Luckily, however, Star Vault has appeared to come out victorious, announcing that:
“With the new engine build, we have finally solved the desync issues we suffered from in the old network solution. Earlier on we lacked the proper tools to be able to track all packages sent from server to client, but with the new software now in place we have managed to eliminate the problem. A lot of internal QA testing as well as positive feedback from our Beta testers confirm the result.”
Excellent! The open beta period is over, however, and only those who purchased licenses will be allowed into the server. Open beta discount ends on Monday, however, so now is the time to act.
Star Vault has set a date of June 9th for Mortal Online to go gold, and I will be neither the first nor the last to say: FINALLY!
Note: Never write a headline at 1am. Fixed July to June.
Log Entry for the second week of May 2051: After my most recent encounter, I have determined it best to find myself a suitable permanent residence. Traveling for miles over these burned out plains, I pass by numerous, if not countless, houses and buildings in varying states of disrepair. Entire sides of the buildings gone, if not completely crumbled. In my passings, I find plenty of the various flora and fauna of the wilderness, and although I am not exactly living in style, there has yet to be a point where I become too hungry to walk.
But I write this because one day as I was foraging vegetables, a man approached me. Dressed in ragged clothing similar to my own, I presumed him to be the owner of the farm, readying my pistol only to find some cosmic force preventing me from willingly drawing my only means of defense. The man, however, simply approached me, extended his arm, and shook my own. When he spoke, I felt myself awash in heat, his voice reminding me of the depictions of God on the various radio shows, yet not as low pitched. He said;
“You have proven yourself to be a masterful survivalist, and you have foraged more than a thousand fruits, vegetables, and various other plants. For this, I want to give you a special reward.”
He reached into his pocket and retrieved an egg, which I immediately recognized as a prairie chicken egg, and number of chips reminiscent of my own poker-chip currency. Handing each individually to me, he turned and was gone in the blink of an eye. I will still remember his departing words;
“Keep hold of those. You will find use for them in the near future.”
Far overdrawn introductions aside, Fallen Earth has finally introduced achievements! The first batch of achievements, totaling five hundred, have been split into five categories of varying difficulty, and include everything from PvP encounters to killing bosses, scavenging, and crafting. The achievements are retroactive. And if you did not catch it from the above story, a second achievement pack is on the way, bringing with it rewards for achievements. The vanity pet reward system is really just speculation on my part.
Achievements are an interesting line in MMOs. On one hand, you have people who will grind out achievements just to say they got them all, even if that includes killing ten thousand of one particular NPC (I’m looking at you, Champions Online). On the other hand, you have people who absolutely hate the idea of grinding out achievements for rewards. Somewhere in the middle you have the casual gamer, who tries to go for the easiest achievements first and then sporadically goes up from there.
Achievements, if done right, can add a whole new level of involvement to an MMO. Warhammer Online is one of the few MMOs to take the achievement book and turn it into an integrated part of the game, the Tome of Knowledge, that gives you a lot of information on the world and the characters who inhabit it.
And to answer your question: Yes, I will be opening every Fallen Earth article with my little ongoing story.
Iron Man! Who wants his milk and cookies? Or would that be gin and tonic? Come give me a big ol’ hug, and then it’s nap time! So your expression right now is likely one of three: You either 1.) would like to know why I am coochy-cooing Tony Stark, 2.) recognize the picture and know exactly where this is going, or 3.) are completely lost.
Back in 2007, Marvel launched the Marvel Super Hero Squad, an initiative at advertising the iconic comic book characters to children. The action figure line shored up a kid’s show that is currently airing called the Super Hero Squad Show, featuring a whole host of Marvel characters in itself, doing exactly what you would expect a kid’s show like this to do: Make references far too old for its intended audience (Thor shouting “It’s hammer time.) and making the kind of jokes that kids love (Wolverine cutting his toenails with his claws, Thor using his warhammer as an extender to wash the wall, etc). Also Tony Stark is not an alcoholic to my knowledge.
Many of us have been waiting for the news on the Marvel MMO, and as many of you see where I’m going at this point, it’s finally here! This website popped up, and Gazillion Entertainment has finally announced Marvel Super Hero Squad Online, the MMO where you have the opportunity to harness the power of your favorite Marvel Superheroes, from Spiderman to Iron Man, and everyone in between.
Now, of course, this is not the Marvel MMO most of you have been waiting for, and luckily Gazillion still has that listed as its own game on their website. It will certainly not be as adorable as this little MMO, however.
More on Marvel Super Hero Squad Online as it appears.
When I said that there were unconfirmed reports that John Smedley had made the same speech of:
“Traditionally, massively multiplier online games have been about three basic gameplay elements – combat, exploration and character progression. In Everquest 2, we’ve added a fourth element to the equation; a story“
in 2004, I definitely should have done some more digging. In fact, after further research after I published the article, I found that the reports had come from, who else, Derek Smart. It was Mr. Smart himself posting on the Kill Ten Rats blog.
Apparently it didn’t come to mind to any of us (except for myself, despite what I imagine to be numerous restraining orders by John Smedley against me attempting to communicate with him and all of my phone calls to him being directed to the local county police office), to actually contact John Smedley and ask if he said that back in 2004. That is, all of us except our best friends (as of ten seconds before I got the idea for this article) at N3rfed. John Smedley’s answer? Never been to New Orleans.
“Um. I’ve never been to New Orleans. That was the one year I missed it for family reasons 😉
I have no idea of [sic] I ever said that. But given that he’s attributing it to me in new orleans I doubt it. Maybe I said it some other year.”
So not a confirmation that it wasn’t said, and there exists no transcription of events to prove it, so we’ll leave it at this question: How is plagiarizing a quote from 2004 any better than a quote from 2008?
We do have one confirmation, however, that the coincidental misspelling of “multiplier” and “everquest” were due to rogue spell checkers.
More on Alganon as it appears. I promise this is the last article I will run on this issue.
When I said that there were unconfirmed reports that John Smedley had made the same speech of:
“Traditionally, massively multiplier online games have been about three basic gameplay elements – combat, exploration and character progression. In Everquest 2, we’ve added a fourth element to the equation; a story“
in 2004, I definitely should have done some more digging. In fact, after further research after I published the article, I found that the reports had come from, who else, Derek Smart. It was Mr. Smart himself posting on the Kill Ten Rats blog.
Apparently it didn’t come to mind to any of us (except for myself, despite what I imagine to be numerous restraining orders by John Smedley against me attempting to communicate with him and all of my phone calls to him being directed to the local county police office), to actually contact John Smedley and ask if he said that back in 2004. That is, all of us except our best friends (as of ten seconds before I got the idea for this article) at N3rfed. John Smedley’s answer? Never been to New Orleans.
“Um. I’ve never been to New Orleans. That was the one year I missed it for family reasons 😉
I have no idea of [sic] I ever said that. But given that he’s attributing it to me in new orleans I doubt it. Maybe I said it some other year.”
So not a confirmation that it wasn’t said, and there exists no transcription of events to prove it, so we’ll leave it at this question: How is plagiarizing a quote from 2004 any better than a quote from 2008?
We do have one confirmation, however, that the coincidental misspelling of “multiplier” and “everquest” were due to rogue spell checkers.
More on Alganon as it appears. I promise this is the last article I will run on this issue.
I have not paid nearly enough attention to Archlord and, to be honest, I apologize for it. Not only do I have to start this out by bringing you back into the loop, but I had to do enough research into the Archlord archives just to bring myself up to speed. Last we left Archlord, back in January, I announced that Webzen, who had taken over hosting from Codemasters last year, was opening up a new server: Deribelle, which would play host to increased experience and drops, where players could transfer from the shutdown North American servers.
I am still not 100% back up to speed on Archlord, so if any players are viewing this I would love some information. Deribelle is still there, but American/Australian players are still without a server in their area to play on. There are currently four European servers and one Asian, and from my research of over 70 pages of Archlord threads, most of these servers shut down on a regular basis due to stress and server load.
Much of this might be attributable to the number of players attempting to reach the servers from America and Australia, who will be happy to know that Webzen has just announced the upcoming opening of Gracia, a server for American players. How for American servers is it exactly? So for American players that only American players, of the North and South variety, can transfer their characters over to this server when it opens for beta May 27th, for a live launch June 3rd.
As is usual for new servers on Archlord, the new server will play host to events as well as upped experience and drops. Hopefully I will have something to talk about by the time this update hits, but by Archlord’s way of getting into the news, that might not be until October.
NPD did a survey recently on the question we all ask: What MMOs do World of Warcraft players play when they no longer player World of Warcraft? Based on a survey of nearly 19,000, the reason I note this survey in particular is because NPD has a pretty good past of their surveys giving an accurate representation.
So, without further ado, here is the list:
Runescape
Dungeons and Dragons
Guild Wars
Final Fantasy XI
Age of Conan
Champions Online
Second Life
Lord of the Rings Online
City of Villains
City of Heroes
Eve Online
Treasure Hunt
Aion
Warhammer Online
Pirates of the Caribbean
Toontown
Dark Age of Camelot
Star Wars Galaxies
My only disagreement is lumping City of Heroes and City of Villains as their own games. City of X has been the one game representing both titles for several years now, and they are no longer standalone titles.
I do, however, feel bad for The last six items on the list. I hadn’t even heard of Treasure Hunt MMO, and I couldn’t find much information on it, but the fact that it is beating out six titles is both confusing and raises a few questions about those MMOs, for another article.
Any ex-World of Warcraft players here? What are you playing nowadays?
MMO Fallout 