Second Life: GOM Closing Down

We regret to announce that Gaming Open Market will be stopping all
trading of L$ effective 10pm eastern time Sunday October 2nd. After
that, the site will remain open long enough to allow everyone to
withdraw their cash and L$ balances.

This choice has not been made lightly. However, we feel that closing the L$
market to concentrate on other projects is in the long-term best
interests of GOM.

Thank you all for taking part in what was for us an interesting adventure.

This is the e-mail I got from GOM, announcing the closing down of the service. It’s all over the place now, and has caused a bit of a turmoil in the L$’s rate in the past 24 hours. As lots of people playing Second Life know it, GOM (Gaming Open Market) has been trading the virtual world’s currency against real-world one (namely US $) for quite some time.

Coming on the heels of its former president’s resignation and of Linden Labs announcing that they’ll also hold currency exchange, this closing may not come as too much of a surprise, but it remains a blow no matter what. Given that LL’s exchange system hasn’t been implemented yet, we’re currently left with IGE’s clumsy system as the only alternative… and it’s not a very appealing one, I admit.

World of Warcraft: Everyone Has The Plague!

I couldn’t resist adding a little bit about this here, because I’ve found this bug (or should I say “intended feature that completely backlashed”?) to be highly interesting in the way it has spread. What I’m talking about is the Corrupted Blood debuff, that will kill low-level characters, and be transmitted like a viral agent by characters high enough in level to survive it:

Blizzard adds in a new instance, Zul’Gurub. Inside is the god of blood, Hakkar. Well, when you fight him he has a debuff called Corrputed Blood. It does like 250-350 damage to palyers and affects nearby players. The amazing thing is SOME PLAYERS have brought this disease (and it is a disease) back to the towns, outside of the instance. It starts spreading amongst the genral population including npcs, who can out generate the damage. Some servers have gotten so bad that you can’t go into the major cities without getting the plague (and anyone less than like level 50 nearly immediately die).

My first source about this was a post on Shacknews, but I also found this entry on Brian Carnell’s blog, that describes how exactly the “plague” was able to start spreading:

Included in the patch was a new 20-person raid instance called Zul’Grub. Some creatures in Zul’Grub randomly infect players with a Corrupted Blood, which causes a large hitpoint loss over a short period of time and can also be transmitted to other characters in the instance.

The problem is that a character with the debuff can apparently leave the instance using a hearthstone (a method of quickly teleporting back to one’s home city) and go to a major city, like Ironforge, and spread the disease to hundreds of characters. Most low-level characters will die very quickly. High level characters won’t, however, and will spread the disease. In addition, high level NPCs can also pick up the debuff and then spread it themselves.

Of course, while it wields promises of terrific roleplay for a person like me, I’m also very aware that low-level players probably don’t find this very amusing—nothing’s more frustrating than dying like that when all you wanted was to grab a couple hours playing after a day at work! I’m not sure as of yet how this is going to be fixed by Blizzard, since quarantining players hasn’t worked so far (they keep on breaking free!), but the very process has been fascinating to follow. It’s almost more true than real life itself, in a way—and almost more frightening as well, to see how something supposed to be completely created and kept in control by the hand of man has just… well, escaped from any control.

Tringo Licensed For Game Boy Advance

There’s a press review from Crave Entertainment on Planet GameCube. Indeed, Crave has now licensed the Tringo game for Game Boy Advance, scheduled for release in November 2005.

What’s so interesting about Tringo? Well, what is Tringo, anyway? This game is a little craze that started in… another game, many months ago. Born from the imagination of a Second Life player, Tringo games didn’t take much time to become a well-known and widespread event recently scheduled in this online world:

Los Angeles, Calif.-September 19, 2005-Crave Entertainment, a leading publisher of console videogames, today announced the signing of the Tringo license. Developed by Kermitt Quick, Tringo combines elements of puzzle games and bingo for an amazingly addictive game that’s quick to play and easy to master. The game became a huge hit within weeks of introduction on Second Life, a virtual world that encourages players to develop their own content.

For more information, a very detailed review of the game and of its rules as it is played in Second Life can be found on the Clickable Culture blog.

Where MMOGs Go To Die

Today, the Guardian’s games blog features a piece about developers pulling the plug on games. Last month, I had already linked to the press release regarding the end of Asheron’s Call 2; this made me think even more to what happens to MMOGs when they come to an end, and furthermore, to their players.

Nothing lasts forever, and we all know this. Sooner or later we happen to finish a standard PC or console game for the tenth time and don’t feel like playing it anymore, or the console breaks, the current OS become too different to play our old games… These things happen. My boyfriend has a good deal of games he’s had to tinker with heavily only to make them run on XP, since he had bought them ten years ago, when his machine was still running goold ole’ DOS. What about these real-time strategy games you can’t play anymore because you machine’s CPU is way too fast compared to the formerly planned calculation time? I could list many more examples.

MMOGs, in my opinion, are a different problem. It’s not about when you get tired of the game: it’s about when the developers (or other players) pull the plug. Every time I’ve seen my guilds die, it was a heartache. These were people I liked to game with, an ambience I liked to find back when I’d log in, characters I had taken time to level… Then, one day, too many people have lost interest and the guild is disbanded, the players you’ve come to be close to leave the game and you’re left “forced” to find new partners, or, like in the case of Turbine recently, the developers decide to stop the game because it doesn’t generate enough subscribers and revenue anymore. What to do, then, with your high-level characters, with this inability to play when you weren’t tired of the game yet?

There’s no argument that dedicated players of such games have spent time, energy, money and effort in developing characters, communities and online existences which are important to them, financially, emotionally and psychologically. Online friendships, economic benefits, self-efficacy - these are all important aspects of play for MMOG gamers

Where do MMOGs go when they die? Every person who plays such games has a degree of involvment with them, from casual to daily game style. Depending on this degree, a MMOG coming to a halt, or losing its appeal because of external circumstances and not because of our own perception of it, can be a hard thing to deal with. “It’s only a game”, yet we’ve had fun in it, we’ve built links and friendships, some of them having the ability to last way after the game’s end… It’s not just another nothing in one’s life.

Sometimes, I wonder if it’s really worth it, to invest money and time into a game when not knowing how long you’ll be able to have fun with it—but then, as said, nothing lasts forever. Shouldn’t we all be aware of this, and seize the day while it lasts, right?

Rebelstar: Tactical Command ships to North America

The squad-based strategy game developed by Codo Technologies (known for being, among other things, the developer of X-Com) arrives in North America today. This is on Game Boy Advance, and tells “the brightly colored story of a grim future where mankind has been subjugated by alien invaders. Stepping into the shoes of the newest recruit to the human resistance, Jorel (no relation to Superman’s father), gamers must lead a squad of soldiers through a single-player campaign mode where their troops will hone skills and level up with combat experience.”

Some more information is given on Gamespot.

I know… I really have a thing for tactical games, haven’t I.

Katrina: Help Flowing From 3D Worlds

The BBC News has an article about how donations are being gathered by residents of online worlds, namely There and Second Life:

Virtual worlds Second Life and There are using their community and technology to let players donate funds from within the games.

In Second Life, a virtual memorial has been created, where residents have been donating and placing virtual candles.

The companies behind There have also pledged to match gamers’ contributions.

“In support of these Community efforts and in response to this disaster, Makena Technologies, together with The Maya Foundation, will match the Community’s contribution up to $50,000,” a statement on the website read.

The contribution system in Second Life, notably, allows people to turn game money into real dollars, making the process even more efficient.

In these troubled times, after days of media coverage and seeing the efforts but also the awful things happening in the wake of the hurricane, it’s good to see that even in something as abstract as a “video game”, people also contribute to the much needed help.

New Gundam Seed “Versus” Game for PS2

Bandai plans to bring the latest arcade “versus” Gundam game to the PS2, reports IGN.com today:

Federation vs. Z.A.F.T. takes the versus series to the Seed universe for the first time. For the home version in addition to all the pilots and Mobile Suits of the arcade game, Bandai will be including Force Impluse Gundam and Shin Asuka from Gundam Seed Destiny as playable characters.

While the arcade version was the fifth entry in the versus series, Capcom actually made a number of changes to the gameplay systems in order to make the series compatible with the Seed universe. This is reflected primarily in the inclusion of air-based battles. Previously, the series has separated ground battles from space battles, but this time the flight-based battles are mixed in with the ground battles. The developers hope that, with the game coming to the home now, they’ll be able to expand the series’ audience further than before.

Gundam Seed: Federation vs. Z.A.F.T. should be released in Japan on November 17th.

Instancing in MMORPGs

Neil Thompson at MMORPG.com gives us an interesting editorial about instancing in MMORPGs.

Instancing (he explains it in the article) is when a specific place in a MMOG is opened only to a certain amount of players (usually, the maximum size a group can have); once this amount is reached, the next group to enter the place will appear into a new instance of it, and won’t meet the previous group. This can raise serious problems, for instance when a player gets disconnected and, upon logging back in, finds himself in another instance of the dungeon, and not with his group anymore.

This is one of the things Thompson deals with, by taking examples from Ultima Online (no instancing at all), Guild Wars (much instancing) and City of Heroes (which stands in the middle). Instancing can indeed affect gameplay and community sense to quite an extent, and the fears he exposes here are, in my opinion, legitimate enough:

I hope that instancing isn’t being seen as the way forward for MMOG, or not total instancing in the style of Guild Wars anyhow. If handled correctly I do think it can add to a game (anyone who has played Ultima Online will appreciate the joys that instanced housing would bring) otherwise is it not the same as sitting around a console with four controllers plugged into it playing a linear game with 4 friends? Part of the appeal of online gaming is surely the unpredictability that only human interaction can bring.

Not the longest nor most detailed editorial ever, but I found it a good read no matter what.

Squad Assault News!

Got Game and Merscom announce that Squad Assault: Second Wave has shipped:

Got Game and Merscom announce that Squad Assault: Second Wave has shipped:
Weston, CT - September 1, 2005 - Got Game Entertainment LLC and co-publisher Merscom LLC today announced that “Squad Assault: Second Wave” for North American release has begun shipping to retail stores across the U.S. and Canada. A 3D real-time strategy game with multi-player, “Squad Assault: Second Wave” immerses players in a realistic, riveting recreation of World War II tactical combat. Featuring 57 total single missions playable at three different difficulties, 26 operations and 6 dynamic campaigns, the game is primed for replayability and retails for only $29.99 (USD). “Squad Assault: Second Wave” is rated “T” for Teen by the ESRB for Blood and Violence.

Created by Eric Young, of DAS Entertainment, designer of such war game classics as the “Close Combat” series and the “V for Victory” series, “Squad Assault: Second Wave” continues that quality tradition. Once the battle starts, the soldiers you command respond with real reactions to the combat situations around them. While the battles can rage fast and furious, the game’s user-defined auto-pause feature for order entry and battlefield assessment also offers a perfect alternative for those who prefer traditional turn-oriented play and a more thoughtful game. Further, the full 2D maps in “Squad Assault: Second Wave” are available at a keystroke to make battle overview simple and easy to view, and a simple to use mod-installer for mod swaps requires just a click of the mouse.

“As World War II buffs know, this Saturday, September 3rd marks the anniversary of the day the United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany in 1939,” said Got Game President Howard Horowitz. “With the release of ‘Squad Assault: Second Wave’ this weekend, both history buffs and real-time strategy fans can experience the intensity and the drama of the ensuing battles.”

For demo and more information visit www.SA2ndWave.com.

Raine 0.43 Released

The multi-arcade emulator Raine has been upgaded to 0.43. Around for some time, it emulates mostly Taito and Capcom favorites from the late 80’s through late 90’s.

What’s new in this version? Here are a few changes, from Emulator Zome Forums:

• Added new games : Pang, Super Pang, Poker ladies, Block Block. All of them playable with sound, adapted from mame.
• Added sound support to these games based on the nmk004 findings in mame: macross, black heart, bio ship paladin, strahl, acrobat mission, mustang, thunder dragon, and even hacha mecha fighter but this one is still totally unplayable. For mustang, I switched to mustang original set instead of the bootleg version to avoid the infamous seibu sound system, so you’ll have to update your romsets. Congratulations go to the mame team for that, everyone has been wondering how this sound emulation worked for YEARS !
• Fixed the file size recorded in the wav files, when recording raine_soud.wav, and the alignement byte which prevented the sound to play in the microsoft media player ! The wav file format is probably one of the stupidest file formats ever invented !

Worms 4 Mayhem Coming to America

Or at least on PC and Xbox, since a PS2 version isn’t in the works, according to GameSpot:

Worms 4: Mayhem expands on the oddball invertebrate warfare of its predecessors. Players will be able to create their own six-worm team to do battle in a variety of terrain created by a random level generator. Players will also be able to customize their worm teams’ look, sound, and fighting style. Furthermore, they will be able to equip said worms with new customized items from a weapons factory, including the tail nail, poison arrow, and sniper rifle.

Worms 4: Mayhem will also support several modes of play, including a 25-mission story mode for single players. Owners of Xbox and PC versions of the game can engage in online multiplayer bouts of up to four players. But if you own a PlayStation 2, you’ll miss out on more than Worms 4: Mayhem’s online play–the game isn’t being released in North America for the console.

The game will be available this upcoming fall, although no date has been announced yet. Let’s hope this will soon be done, as fall is almost upon us now, or so I’m told by my friend the calendar.

In any case, it’s worth a try. Worms is always fun to try with a bunch of friends, after all.