The Funeral of WoW Gold

Hamburg  - The principle of “higher, faster, further” seems to have been taken very much to heart by computer game developers. They strive valiantly in a never-ending quest for titles with better graphics, “never before seen” game play and everything else ratcheted up a notch over the last generation - at least in theory.

The reality is that many home PCs groan under the strains placed on them by resource-hogging games. And the much ballyhooed, new content often turns out to be much ado about nothing. Even the technology doesn’t always work as planned for many new games. Yet there are alternatives: Many of the games currently touted as the hot thing will soon be discounted in just a few months - and have some of the glitches ironed out as well.

PC gamers with a taste for only the latest games are probably used to being a bit light in their wallets. That’s because new titles usually cost around 50 dollars during the first few weeks after they’re released, and they often require an investment in current hardware as well. In many cases, the gaming fun is relatively brief, with the entire game “played through” in just a few hours. The only option then is another investment of 50 dollars to install more current titles.

The alternative is patience. Those willing to wait a bit can save both time and nerves. Most newly-published games still have some rough edges in the form of programming errors, known as bugs. These require small programs to fix them, known as patches. Those who buy during the first days are forced to install patch after patch to get the game working right, but latecomers can usually simply install all of the previous patches in one rolled-up package.

Wait long enough and there’s no need to patch at all because a few months after first appearing, many formerly hot games drop in price to 10 or 20 dollars, with all the fixes already on the DVD.

There are lots of titles to choose from in that price range, from recent hits to modern classics. Many gamers are currently waiting for the continuation of the Anno colonization series from Ubisoft, for example. Yet while the developers are currently tinkering away on Anno
1404, its well-respected predecessors Anno 1503 and Anno 1701 are both available for cheap.

In some cases they are even offered in bundled, special edition packages, containing not only patches but also game expansion packets that were originally sold separately.

Role playing game fans can also find lots of interesting titles from the recent past. The recent title Gothic 3 was considered by many a let-down in terms of gaming quality and bugginess. Yet its forebears Gothic and Gothic 2 are currently being offered for pocket change. While the earlier versions are noticeably less cutting edge in terms of graphics, they do run well even on average computers.

Graphics aren’t everything, after all, as attested by the success of game maker Blizzard. The company is more than just World of Warcraft. Fans with a longer memory still speak fondly of classics like Starcraft or Diablo 2. Both titles are currently slated to receive sequels. Yet many retailers often carry the original titles, guaranteed to provide tremendous enjoyment for anyone who hasn’t yet played them.

The same could be said for the upcoming title Mafia 2. Its predecessor Mafia set new benchmarks for atmosphere and staging of an action game, putting players in a US city back in the 1930s. When it first appeared in 2002, Mafia required a powerful computer. As with Gothic, however, almost any computer can easily handle its needs nowadays.

Those whose computers are considered peppy by today’s standards will really be able to put the high-end games of the past through their paces now. The action game Bioshock, for example, lured players into an underwater, Art Deco-inspired world. The fascinating visuals only serve to highlight an unusual and effective story - and are now available for just 10 dollars.

The list of potential alternatives to expensive new games seems endless. Those waiting for the latest Empire: Total War can revisit still fresh older titles like Rome or Medieval 2. The same holds true for the legendary Lara Croft games and the many others as well. In other words, it’s not always all about “higher, faster, further.” (dpa)

Although Spore’s ship date has come and gone, many people are still fervent about creating new creatures, vehicles, buildings, and more for the game, and they’ve chalked up over 86 million users creations and counting so far. This panel was about the the wealth user created content out there, and also served as a springboard for talking about the first full Spore expansion pack: Galactic Adventures. Caryl Shaw is a producer at Maxis, and she showed off the new expansion pack, and talked about the tools that Maxis and EA strive to give users so that they can create their own open-ended adventures, which is what Galactic Adventures promises to do. She tooled around inside the game for a bit, showing off the planet terraforming features and a combat-focused user created adventure. But what caught our eye most of all was the sheer amount of extremely creative user creations that just stagger the imagination.While Spore might have come out and disappointed some, this panel was enough to make us want to bust it out again when we get home and either get busy creating, or get busy exploring some of the jaw-dropping user content. Check out the highlights after the break.
Shaw explained that the general rule of thumb about user created content is that, “The vast majority of it is crap.” So one of Will Wright’s goals that the Maxis team tried to do was provide tools that were deep enough to raise the bar in hope that there wouldn’t be as much crap to wade through. However, if you take a spin through Sporepedia, you’ll notice that there is indeed a lot of crap in there. But where there’s a lot of crap, there’s also a lot of wow gold. (Wow, that almost needs to be on a poster somewhere).The goal of Spore was to make the game divide up into a three-part pie of 1/3 Create, 1/3 Share, and 1/3 Play, which is why they spent so much time on the user creation tools, and released the semi-expansion pack Creepy & Cute Parts Pack. They underlying tenet was to get from “zero to smile in three clicks or less,” although with the deep amount of customization available in Spore, that’s like 300 clicks or less, right? In the upcoming Galactic Adventures you can change every aspect of a planet, including the atmospheric density. In their Adventure Creator, you set your acts, choose from tons of objects (like hand grenades) to toss into the mix, and can even choose what type of music plays at different dramatic moments.Shaw booted up an adventure called “Mothership Down” to show us how the interface works, then imported a ship captain and dropped him into the game. It looked slightly like World of Sporecraft, and quickly devolved into a combat situation, which Shaw trying to escape with her captain’s jetpack, although she was killed valiantly in action… shot in the back. It’s definitely something that we’ll have to spend more time with to get a better grip on, but we imagine a LittleBigPlanet situation where thousands of “Adventures” will appear online, but only a few will be very good.

After a heated argument during a raid with his guild, World of WarCraft player Jerald Spangenberg went silent and logged out of the game.  When he didn’t sign back on for the rest of the week, his guild assumed he had deserted them and decided to boot him from the group.  Little did they know that Jerald had a reasonable explanation for not showing up — he was dead.

Jerald had apparently suffered an abdominal aneurysm, went AFK (away from keyboard, an in-game indicator letting people know you aren’t at your computer), and was automatically logged out after 10 minutes.  The other guild members were pretty upset with Jerald for abandoning them in the middle of a raid but thought that he would be back after he cooled down from the argument that had just occured.

Because of the semi-anonymous nature of online gaming, nobody had any way of knowing that Jerald, in real life, had passed away.  Assuming Jerald was just being childish, the guild decided to remove him and continue on without him.  Needless to say, they felt horrible three weeks later when they finally found out what had happened from Jerald’s daughter, Melissa.

To combat this type of scenario from happening in the future, a neuroscientist named David Eagleman set up a website called Deathswitch (which is unintentionally pretty hilarious).  The site requires you to check in to your account periodically to prove you are still alive.  Not doing so will result in your assumed death (or coma, or other serious incident that would render you “critically disabled”), in which case emails are sent out to predetermined individuals.

The purpose is to let loved ones know your bank account numbers, passwords, locations of critical files or paperwork, etc.  It can also be used, such as in Jerald’s case, to let online friends know why you haven’t been around.  The Deathswitch website even suggests using it to “reveal unspeakable secrets” or to get the last word in an argument.  You can also attach video files and pictures, though that’s part of the ‘premium package’ and costs $20 per year.

Even though it seems pretty morbid, how would your fellow guild members or online buddies ever find out that you had died?  If not for the determination of Melissa to protect her father’s reputation, Jerald’s guild would have harbored ill feelings toward their friend and just assumed him to be a jerk. 

With so much of our lives taking place online and so many “friends” that we’ve never met face to face, it’s actually an important topic to consider how death affects our digital selves.  In real life, there is no Spirit of Redemption.