tekHedd – the blog

I’m in a lull. I have three (count them, three) subscriptions to online multiplayer games, and I’m not using any one of them. Four, if you count the remaining time on my cancelled WoW subscription. Oh, sure, one of them is that $5/mo for Dungeon Runners, hardly a huge drain on the coffers, but it still counts.

Why not? Is it just that I don’t feel like gaming because I’m working a lot? But I’ve been gaming a lot on the console. I think the answer is my computer chair.

It’s a pretty chair. It’s all cloth, wood trim, big and comfy, plenty of room to slouch. But the desk is too far away, the arms don’t fit under the desk… as a gaming environment it fails utterly. And sitting at a desk is too much like what I do all day at work. Heck, it is what I do all day at work.

But I’m sure that’s not all there is to it. Maybe it’s that Mass Effect completely defocused my attention from online games, and quite possibly it’s because I decided to replay Ratchet & Clank 2 (chosen because 1 is loaned to a friend, 3 is sort of disappointingly short, and 4 is a very lame online game with no single player). And of course it’s still great, but (as ever) not as good as 1. And it’s also had me thinking–I played all these games in 4:3, normal TV mode. Now I have the option to play them widescreen, but it chops off just enough of the sky that you can’t see to play. Who decided that games must always do widescreen by clipping the top and bottom, anyway? So I’m playing a game that supports 16:9 widescreen in 4:3 mode on my widescreen TV. It’s sort of depressing, so I’ll stop thinking about it and get a beer.

Work’s over. Time for beer.

(edit) You know, the more I think about the cropping, the less sense it makes. When you crop the top and bottom, it’s like you’ve zoomed in a bit. But, in most cases, a widescreen TV is bigger than your old standard layout. Why zoom in, when the screen just got bigger? It’s backwards. The assumption is that you have more space, you should zoom out a bit. At worst, it should split the difference. Oh well. Enough ranting. Did somebody say beer?(/edit)

Oh, and I ordered the new SteelSeries keyboard. It should get here next week sometime. So I’ll either have to get back to the PC for some gaming, or bring it to work. Either way I’ll wear it out. Promise.

Well, I haven’t had much to say lately. This is partly because I’m too lazy to get out the camera and type up a blog entry, but also partly because there haven’t been that many “gaming experiences” in my life at all. Heck, I’ll bet I’m not even gaming more than 30 hours a week. And most of that has been racing games, and nobody really needs to hear how “Fatal Inertia” is about as disappointing as it is cool, or how I’ve been trying to finish Wipeout 3 (yes, for PS One). Man, that’s one hard game! And, yet, still somehow more fun than any of the racing games I’ve found for X360. Odd, that.

And then there’s adventure games. I’ve almost finished Sam and Max season 1 :luv:, and followed the simply amazing transformation of Tabula Rasa into a playable product, and gone back to City of Heroes (it’s more fun than I remembered), and cancelled my WoW account, run around in Dungeon Runners, and still found time to get started on Half Life Ep 2 from the orange box (surprisingly un-innovative and at the same time tons of fun, can they do that?). So, I guess I haven’t been idle.

And at some time during this stultifying period of almost total non-gaming, I bought a new “accessory controller thingumie” that has captured my heart, or at least captured a few dollars, which is pretty

darn close. I know I’ve been cruel to a few peripherals in past blogs. (Sorry, Razer, but your products aren’t nearly as cool as they look.) So, let me take this opportunity to spread love liberally all over my now-favorite toy, the place my hand rests for hours on end, don’t look at me like that, the Nostromo n52 speedpad thingy. (I’m too lazy to take a picture of it, just look at the stupid pictures on their product page if you really must know.) It has almost three rows of keys, a bunch of stuff for your thumb to play with, and a mouse wheel. Even better: its software is high on function and low on flash, which automatically (and consistently) selects the correct configuration for my games. Even better, it supports four different keymaps per game configuration, or “loadout”, which can of course be toggled on the fly using any button, and so on and so forth. It’s functional, with little or no bling. Oh, there’s a new version coming out that has lit keys, which is very dumb–the whole point of the thing is that you never have to look down!

I feel like I got cheated for not checking this thing out earlier. I guess that’s because it’s such a plain jane controller–it looks just like my keyboard. Hey, I already have one of those…but I’m glad I tried it anyway (well, I was drunk). That d-pad controller under the thumb and instant access to three (red/green/blue) alternative keymaps means I never get lost on the keyboard. I really can’t gush enough about how great it is, so I’ll shut up. But if you are perfectly satisfied using wasd on the keyboard, you’ll be even more satisfied with this thingumie.

Now, it’s not a perfect relationship. The “spacebar” thumb button is a bit of a stretch, and that big yellow button above the d-pad takes about 80 pounds of force to engage. But I don’t care. I love it, flaws and all.

UPDATE! I haven’t really used the speedpad since I wrote this, because the buttons are hard to press and go down at a funny angle, while the quote ergonomic unquote wrist rest is at such an angle that the pad slides away while I’m trying to use it, and the rubber isn’t sticky enough to keep it in one place. This also makes the thumbpad more or less useless. The concept and features are neat, but the execution ius guaranteed to give you tunneling carp syndrome.

In other news, why the heck can’t we find a singer for our band? Argh! When you don’t need one, they’re everywhere…

Recently, a lot of MMO development teams have given up on their designs because they were different, difficult to implement, and innovative. The smart ones backtrack, and produce games that duplicate that “same old” experience. Why is this? Because a good franchise with killer art will sell faster than any of your so-called “cool” ideas.

Why should your dev team suffer? (More than you want them to, that is.)

Introducing YFO. Yawning Festival Online’s MMO engine saves you time and development effort by delivering in one package all of the same features you see everywhere. Pluggable modules duplicate everything you’ve already done, and your developers can spend all their time creating all-important “eye candy”. Consider these well known facts that I made up:

• 80% of gamers are happy with WoW’s boring, but nicely polished gaming system.
• 100% of WoW players are bored with WoW, and want to see something “different”, but don’t want to think.
• You’re guaranteed to get financing if you base your game on a popular movie or TV show.

YFO is a skinnable MMO that delivers a predictable, safe game experience to your consumers, but allows you to add one or two twists (chosen from a set list).

Designing a new game with YFO is simple.

Step 1: Get your Franchise On

OK, so granted you can’t just take any franchise and make a violent endless-grind game out of it. Office Space, while funny, doesn’t have much shooting in it. Sex in the City might go over well with the cybernauts, but not so well with the PvPers.

So, you need a franchise with some sort of world, and opportunities for endless violence. South Park, then. South Park Online (a YFO game) allows your choice of weapons, and for a truly iconic South Park experience, some of your favorite characters are NPCs in the game. Drop a few million on art.

Step 2: Choose a Character Class Engine

The character class engine is pluggable. You can choose one of the three standard skill tree systems or build your own module. The skills are all the same, and you can use the stock description and animations (“Lightning Bolt!”) or modify them. The players won’t notice the difference. Trust us.

Step 3: Feature Decimation

You may choose up to four things to change about the core gameplay engine. No developer changes more than this, so you shouldn’t either. If you change nothing, gameplay mechanics are exactly like World of Warcraft. Well, they are different enough that we won’t get sued too often. You can write your own mods, or use off the shelf feature plugins like these:

• Building Stuff – allows guilds to “build” structures, using a menu interface and a whole lot of online time!
• Breaking Stuff – allows other guilds to break their stuff by doing stuff that take a lot of online time!
• Control Points – allows specific zones to be controlled by different factions, based on arbitrary and confusing criteria!
• Crafting – choose from over 35 disturbingly similar crafting systems!
• Travel Systems – Mounts, vehicles, and magic powers. We got ’em. They all work the same, but with slightly different art.
• Guild Support – Guild support features are always the same, and we
  never add more. You can selectively disable some of them, if you find
  they confuse your customers.
• Cross-game Community Engine – Allows in-game chat and guild
  features to span multiple games, as long as all those games come from
  the same development house. There’s no good reason, we just did it this
  way!
• PvP and More – Allow players to PvP in instanced worlds and arenas,
  or experience the joy of balancing world PvP. Our new auto-nerf feature
  automatically detects which features to nerf by scanning the user
  support boards for keywords like “favorite”, “uber”, and “fun”.

But there are many more optional features. If you’ve seen it in WoW, we have it. We encourage customers to create one plugin for each world, to make it “unique”. One customer is working on a world with three variations from the WoW formula! Wow! But no need to get carried away; research shows that 83% of players feel most comfortable if your game is almost exactly like WoW. Our skinnable system allows you to deliver your trademarked intellectual property in a game engine that is Guaranteed Not To Innovate(TM), assuring you success!

Contact tekHedd for more information, and get started on your franchise MMO now.

YFO: Haven’t I played this game before?(TM)