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I see that the CEO of Funcom has resigned – the same day as the launch of the Secret World. This cannot be a good thing. As one reading the tea leaves instead of playing the beta (or the game, now) I’m a bit worried.
Who all remembers the Master of Orion series ? Alan Emrich was put in charge of designing MOO3, and sometime before the game launched in 2003, he “left the company”. This is clearly a euphemism for “We fired him.” After looking at the game (Which, I stupidly bought at full price. Dumb fanboy!) I could understand why.
In a turn based game, it’s all about being able to take a few actions, and save your progress. Or take a lot of actions, and be able to save. I want to be able to walk away from the computer, you know, before the game’s over, because these things can take weeks to play through. But somehow, they neglected to include a workable save feature in the game – you could only save at one specific point, the beginning of a turn (or was it the end?). All your other progress would be wasted. That, plus a gigantic host of other bugs, and truly awful design like above, is how MOO is now remembered.
Am I going to hear the same thing about Secret World ?
I dug into XVM’s config files and found the spot that describes colors used, and the ranges that they mean. But the color values are in something like hex – 0xDDD000. When I look that up at clrcds.com, it describes a blue color, and that’s the color of the deep red win rate players. So I’m not sure how that red is being generated, and now I’ve lost interest in investigating any farther.
Last night the mod failed twice at predicting the match outcome. OK, good, it’s not infallible. It predicted a 75% win chance for us, and we managed to lose the match due to one very smart arty player – he took me out first, and racked up a top gun. It also predicted a 18% win chance for us, and we won the match. I managed to move up to 164 games over .500.
Started another Minecraft game today. This is not a strange thing in our household – my boy starts a new game. Every. Single. Day. It’s like the only part that appeals to him is the beginning. Meanwhile, my game is set on peaceful mode because I’m tired of exploring deep dungeon caverns and getting myself killed in spots where I can’t retrieve my stuff. I’m making a very large farm, after building myself inside of a mountain, and planting trees and wheat to get going with feeding myself, and harvesting wood.
In peaceful mode you don’t have to worry about food, but I choose to farm anyway as I expect I’ll switch back to normal at some point.
Tomorrow, on July 4th, Endless Space is going to be released on steam. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to resist. This is a modern 4x strategy game, single player, with really neat visuals and supposedly great gameplay. I’ve not played one I enjoyed since…… well, ten years ago. Stardock’s games just seem like copies of old stuff and Civilization and bored me.
This one caught my interest months ago, and so far all the buzz is positive about it. I never did get Star Ruler either, which might be pretty good, especially in its patched state.
Gaming spending update :
- Jan 2012 – $15 EQ2.
- Feb 2012 – $15 EQ2.
- Mar 2012 – Zero.
- April 2012 – $50 WoT. This makes a total of $150.
- May 2012 – $0
- June 2012 – $18 for Saints Row. $15 for Carmageddon.
Not exactly spending like in my 20’s, but starting to pay for games again.