Previous News01.03.2009 - Terrence Marks:I was supposed to try City of Heroes out years ago. I nearly traded my car for a copy, once. Carmax offered me $5 for the car as a trade-in, so I was going to take the better deal.The costume designer, firstly, was one of the most enjoyable things I've played with in years. I spent the first hour trying to construct a costume that'd get me banned for copyright infringement, since I just had a ten-day trial.
I played through the tutorial. There seemed to be at least four different colored bars in the upper right. The tutorial didn't explain what any of them meant. It involved talking to a bunch of people who were all a quarter-mile from each other, which violates my rule of tutorial compactness.
The problem was that I didn't feel like a hero, much less a superhero. The city was full of these shabbily-dressed guys who stood around shouting at each other. It was my job to go beat up two or three of them. I felt like I was roughing up hobos because the cops told me to. If they had all attacked at once and I had beaten them up, it would've been something. I would've felt heroic. Instead, I had to jump a fence to get into the hobo corrall, punch some of them a few times to show them who's boss, ignore the other hundred or so, and get back out. If you tossed me into a room with twenty guys, they charged at me, and I had to beat them up, I'd feel like a hero.
After I finished the tutorial, there was some kind of quest to find a watch. I couldn't find the guy who'd give me the quest, though. Rounding up quests didn't feel heroic either. I want to be prowling the street and see a mugging in process. I want the mayor to call me on the red telephone. I want to see a searchlight shining on the full moon. I want to come across a freshly-robbed bank and see a bunch of riddles leading to the villain's hideout.
To me, that would be superheroic. I didn't get that. I understand the limitations of MMORPGs, but I just wasn't feeling the Hero.
12.26.2008 - Terrence Marks:IGG runs about ten MMORPGs. I'm not sure how different they are from each other. Are they more different than, say Mario Party 5 and Mario Party 6? More different than Namir Deiter and You Say it First?* I had suspected they would be the same game, repackaged with different sprites. Their webpage does very little highlight the differences.I tried two of them, Mythwar II and Angel Online. They were both isometric 2D sprite-based games (hence my suspicion).
There were differences. In Mythwar II, monster encounters would be random and would take you from the overworld to a separate combat screen. It reminded me a lot of the original Final Fantasy. More accurately, it reminded me of those parts in Final Fantasy II when I was wandering cluelessly and kept getting ambushed. It had Active Time Battles, which premiered in Final Fantasy IV.
Mythwar has four races: Humans, Mages, Centaurs, and Borg. I'm not sure how they avoided an infringement suit from Paramount. The second thing I noticed was the Centaurs. None of the other reviews I saw mentioned this (which makes me wonder about the standards of internet game review journalism). The centaurs? Two legs. Not horselike in any way. Slightly less horselike than the humans, actually. I found that slightly odd. It's the kind of thing you'd think someone would notice. One of the subclasses of Centaurs is "Elves". I suppose I can accept that because this is Mythwar. The myths are losing.
Angel Online has about twelve different classes. There are four different kinds of fighters. They all start out hitting things with sticks. There are four different crafting-oriented classes. They ride around in giant robots....that hit things with sticks.
Both games drop you in the middle of a giant hub city with minimal instructions. Angel Online has a "tutorial" that shows you how to talk to people and hit things with sticks. My next character was a Mechanic, which apparently mines ore and builds robots out of it. I got the same tutorial on hitting things with sticks. How do I build robots? No idea. I guess I just didn't have the Spark.
It's difficult to make a game about angels. There are two ways to do it. You can either have a very preachy religious game or you can have a game set in fluffy-cloud heaven designed by somebody who fell asleep during sunday school.
The important NPCs include the archangel Raphael, the archangel Michael, and Cupid. Presumably because he has wings in some of the Renaissance paintings and because, like the Centaurs, they just didn't care enough. The backstory includes a love triangle between Lucifer, some girl angel, and some boy angel. It didn't end well. So, yeah, fluffy-cloud heaven. I'm not sure if this is more sacreligious or less sacreligious than the alternative. Probably less, considering that the alternative involves smiting rats and wolves with the Power of Jesus. And only doing 38 damage.
Anyhow, how different are the games? About as different as Mario Party 4 and Mario Party 6.
*: That's a false comparison, mind you, because after the days-long archive trawl, keeping up with both takes an extra couple minutes a day. MMORPGs pretty much demand a few hours at a time to progress.12.22.2008 - Isabel Marks:Happy Winter everyone!Terrence's Spare Parts email is more or less back to normal now, but now perfers you use the YSIF e-mail now- send him congratulations on You Say it First's 100th story arc (or as they are called, chapters. I have no idea why we named them differently ><). Happy Milestone, You Say it First!First off, I'd like to take a second and mention that today is our 6th wedding anniversary. I'm very blessed to have met Terrence, I couldn't have rolled up a better husband and friend. I love you and hope for many more!
On to the news...
Spare Parts is fully moved from Network 11 to our current hosts GeekISP (who are also helping us work out some kinks in our RSS feed, which I greatly thank them for). Unlike Minerva's archives are currently being smacked around a bit to- not sure what's going to come of that, Terrence should have more information on that soon... I have no idea, really.
NamirDeiter.net news... I finally got the Wallpapers for the month of December up, hope all .net members enjoy them. Yes, we are still working out a larger resolution wallpaper archive- I'm just not sure how big we can really make them without them being bigger than the original files... so we're still working on that.
As I'm sure it will be for most of you, next week is going to be a busy one, with anniversary celebrating, tamale making and Christmasing (still need to wrap thing x_X). I'm going to work really, really hard to make sure comics update on time, but don't be surprised if it happens... not saying it will, but it might.Ok... an early Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah and Happy Solstice (or what have you). Have a good winter! Hopefully I'll have a news update before Spring!
12.16.2008 - Terrence Marks:I tried playing Mabinogi. It appears to be a social game. Appearance is customizable, but every time you change your skin tone or hairstyle, your clothes change randomly too, making it difficult to really tell the difference. I was blocky and my shirt was a radioactive gumdrop blue. I felt like a cartoon man in the real world. You can choose your character's age, from 10-17. Their target demographic, I assume. If you're over 18 they assume you'll be out smoking, joining the marines, or one of those other things we keep minors from doing. I played for half an hour and I'm not sure if I fought anything. The first quest I got was "get five chicken eggs and hand them to me". I'm used to games where they start you killing stuff right off the bat. I didn't even have to punch the chickens. Getting the eggs was kinda fun. Then I spent five minutes trying to turn the quest in and failing. Maybe I was supposed to punch the NPC.You get skills by walking around and talking to people. There are about a dozen dialogue topics, and if you talk to people a lot, you get better stuff. I'm supposed to keep track of which shopkeepers like talking about "skills" or "farmlands". If I wanted to spend weeks getting to know video game characters, I'd play Animal Crossing. That way I could at least choose what I say. The Pete/Pelly/Phyllis love triangle is more interesting anyhow.
12.11.2008 - Terrence Marks:Quick game roundupLegend of Zelda: Wind Waker is a gorgeous, amazing game. I was expecting Tetra to be more like Midna and was disappointed at the lack of screen time the pirates got; I suppose that just means that Twilight Princess was a better Zelda game. Nothing wrong with that. I tried playing this game back in 2004 originally, got horribly lost when I first started sailing around and put the game down for four years. Then I got a guide and picked it back up. I enjoyed the game, but I don't imagine anybody was waiting for my endorsement before buying it.I'm playing through Final Fantasy IV. I'm near the end. I get to a treasure chest, get attacked by a red dragon, and my party dies. This has happened about four times in a row. I don't even really need the gloves in that chest. I'm putting the game down until I get smarter. I figure if I enjoy the game enough to do the same dumb thing four times in a row, it must be pretty good. I'm playing through the games in order (more or less) and amazed at how coherent the first four are, in terms of style and gameplay. I didn't notice that the first time around; I suppose going from FF1 to FFTactics to FF7 to FFUnlimited makes it a strange journey no matter what.
Battalion Wars - I liked the Advance Wars games, which this is marginally related to. This game has elements of both the real time strategy and first person shooter genre. By which I mean you have to do both at once. You're trying to coordinate five different troop types at once, and there's no AI to speak of. The vehicles have a MarioKart-on-ice floatiness to them. The sixth mission has you taking on a far superior force with no reinforcements or repair. I failed at it about four times in a row (doing different dumb things each time), didn't enjoy it, and haven't picked up the game again.12.10.2008 - Terrence Marks:Namir Deiter is nine years old! That's old enough to drink, in Internet years.Our RSS feed just got a bit of an upgrade. You can now view the last 8 comics instead of just the titles. Why did I add this now? I didn't realize it was possible earlier. I'm not sure if I should have the RSS feed contain everything or just the last eight. I want to make reading the comic as convenient as possible - I'd probably read twice as many webcomics if getting up to speed on them didn't take so long. I intend to add my blog and the news to them in the near future
I've got a new e-mail address, terrence@yousayitfirst.com. The old one, terrence@sparepartscomics.com, has been defunct for about three weeks. I'm moving Spare Parts over to our regular server. We've got about four different web hosts, and if Network Eleven can't respond to a problem ticket in two weeks, I think we can get by with three. Anything you sent me (including namirdeiter.net comments) since November 25th, please re-send.
What happened? There was a catchall address. It filled up, putting me over quota. Since I'm over quota I can't make changes like, say, deleting that address, adding a quota to it, or deleting the mail. I find this highly disappointing.
I've added a start here link to You Say it First. When I wrote that arc about two years ago, that was what I meant it as - a quick primer to the characters and the situation. And now it's all conveniently in one place, as is the first arc.
11.18.2008 - Terrence Marks:Now, You Say it First is a bit continuity-heavy at times. I'm trying for "rewards careful reading, but makes sense if you've only read the previous week". Since I think about the comic more than most of you, I'm not in any position to judge this. I ask because the other day I was catching up on a webcomic that I hadn't read in a month or two. I got confused. So, reader, do I have enough exposition, too much, or not enough?