whups

Marketing FAIL. Apparently EA sent out brass knuckles with their press kit for the new Godfather game. It turns out that possession of brass knuckles is illegal most places. And shipping them is illegal too. Whups!

Resident Evil

Ouch. Been a little while since I posted. It turns out Lord of the Rings Online wasn't good enough to keep me playing (not saying it wasn't good - just not good enough). So I'll keep reading the news and see what should be next on my 'try it' list. I really hope this year we don't see any failures due to unfinished games at release. That would make me sad.

One of the things I ran across recently, that I hadn't heard about, was the Resident Evil racism thing. I saw this comic on Penny Arcade, followed it to the related blog entry, and then did some research, finding an interview with Newsweek's gaming journalist in which he spoke at length about how troubling the game looked.

Now, first person shooters generally aren't my thing, and 'real world' type games aren't either, so I'll most likely never play this game. But I think it offers a nice warning (for those who will take it) that if you are making a 'real world' type game, you should be careful (even if it's not real world, in fact, you should be careful).

WAR is now in phase three

So I tend to think of the way people deal with a new MMO release in the same way I think about culture shock - it runs in phases. Phase one happens before the game is released. Phase two would be your initial release run (or in the case of culture shock, the first two months of living in the new culture), and phase three is the hate phase. Those who survive the hate phase will mellow over time, the rest will quit/go home. We appear to be in phase three for Warhammer Online, as a number of bloggers have now decided it isn't fun anymore. To be fair, there's also the levelling question, although to my understanding this shouldn't be a concern in a PvP game. The theory there is that if you build stuff for levels 1-20, once people hit level 21 you either need to churn out more content, or they'll get bored.

Of course, some people blame the players. I respect this position, but it's not really realistic - people game to have fun, and either they are or they aren't. There is no try, as Yoda would say. It may be the game was marketed poorly, or it may be that gamers as a class suck, and this sort of game could never work. I doubt that, but I'll throw it out there.

It's a shame these games take so darned long to build, and cost so much. Now we'll have to wait another year or so for the next big thing. And then we'll do the whole cycle again.

Are we really dying of surprise here? Apparently Age of Conan is merging servers.