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Industry Insights Reflective Reviews

E3 Reviews

It’s been a week since E3 and I’ve been going over my notes to finally put together my review of the games, besides Hero’s Journey, that I had a chance to look at.

This was my first experience at E3 and while it was a lot of fun it was also very tiring, I think my feet started proceedings to disown me on Thursday, and loud. I understand that they had some strict noise policies in place and this year they were enforcing them but still, when you’ve got 100’s of games playing at even normal volume the din can be overwhelming. I heard that the NCSoft booth got fined for one of their bands being to loud and I can believe it, lets just say that watching someone playing Aion on a system 10 feet from the stage is NOT where you want to be when the drummers started up.

The demise of the booth babe was also overly exaggerated, they were still out in force and there were still lines of gamers lined up to get their picture taken with them…kind of sad really. There were also quite a few women gamers/developers there too which just goes to show it’s not strictly a “boy’s game” anymore – a good thing if you ask me.

And now on with the reviews…

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Site News

Mostly back…

I’ve gotten most of the posts from the old site back into the new site. I’m still working on trying to get the comments back but not only are the table names different – see what happens when you have more control over your site – I also created some new categories before I started the import so I’m going to have to go through and manually import them into the database. This will have to wait until I have more time though so if you commented earlier and want to repost your comments now please feel free. 🙂

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Site News

Hello world!

As you can tell the site is in the process of being rebuilt.

I changed hosting companies and I think I’m going to like this one (DreamHost) much better. They’ve got simple installs – that actually work – of some of the major packages but they also provide you much more control over your site including SSH access so that you can actually get to the inner workings of your site if you want. This is especially true with the email system where I can actually go in and configure the spam filter stuff and not just have an On/Off setting.

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Reflective Reviews

Who put this platformer in my MMO?

I’ve been playing D&D for more years than I care to admit and I still think that the Baldur’s Gate series are some of the best PC games ever made so I really wanted to like Dungeons & Dragons Online. Sadly it was not to be. Turbine came so close but the things they missed on they missed by a mile.

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Industry Insights

On Death and Penalties

Over at MMORPG.Com there is an editorial debate on Death Penalties. While I’m a strong believer in the theory that challenging MMO’s will have a longer lifespan than those with little or no challenge and that death in an MMO should be something that the player is encouraged to avoid I don’t agree that this requires the harsh death penalties advocated by Frank Mignone in this article.

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Theoretical Thoughts

Shifting paradigms in future MMO’s

In his most recent post my friend Pentane raised some interesting points about the state of roleplaying, or the lack of it, in the current crop of MMO’s. As someone that hopes to one day work in the MMO genre there is a lot of food for thought in there but the main point I want to address today is one that he kind of glossed over, the conservative player syndrome.

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Industry Insights

Women, Marketing and Magazines

UPDATE: June 10th 2018.

I originally wrote this in October of 2005 and the only reason it isn’t as relevant today as it was then is that I focused on gaming magazines. Those are no longer as relevant as they once were.

I have to admit that browsing the major gaming websites (Kotaku, IGN, Gamespot etc.) today the front pages look mostly benign. Of course, today is the start of E3 2018 so it’s mostly about who’s announcing what but at least they  have images from the games and not tons of photos of booth bunny’s.

So while it may be improving I think things like GamerGate and the way women are treated in the majority of the gaming community’s still show that many of the sentiments expressed 13 years ago still hold true today.

Next-Gen is reporting on a speech by Suzanne Freyjadis-Chuberka, the Conference Director, at the Women’s Game Conference being held in Austin this week. In it she claims that there are plenty of games out there that women would find enjoyable if they would just sit down and play them. According to her, the issue isn’t the games and their content but in how they’re marketed and how the gaming press presents them.

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