I came across a post on Torill Mortensen’s blog with a youtube comedy ad for a women’s version of Wii, called Shii. The video was funny, so I figured I’d share it here:

The ad does hit a nerve, because some of the games shown pretty much exist already. There are plenty of games for the Nintendo DS targetted at girls where you cook and do other ‘girly’ things. I haven’t actually tried any of them, but they do seem to be a bit popular (though I have a bad feeling they’ve got to be boring).

It’s been a good while since the MMORPG Age of Conan was released. I personally don’t know very much about the Conan universe created by Robert E. Howard as I haven’t read the books, though I think I watched a Conan film or something very many years ago. For these reasons I can’t tell if the game is a good representation of Howard’s world.

Age of Conan has been going through some hard times since its release, and what I heard about the game back then is one reason why I didn’t personally try it out until now. I’ve been interested in giving it a try, but being a casual gamer I couldn’t be bothered to try out a game that was full of bugs and probably with far too many gamers playing it that Funcom could really carry.

I did become more positive to giving it a try when I read some Norwegian news articles about the work they’re doing on the game and that many bugs have been fixed and more content is on its way. So I tested the free 7-day  trial, and my first impression was that it is quite fun to be able to create your own, very individual character, even by customizing your character’s bodytype and the details of his/her face. I could probably spend half a day entertaining myself with customizing a few characters. I was impressed enough after some hours of the free trial to check prices on buying the game. The best offer was on Amazon.co.uk for only £3.99, and since that also includes a month of free play, I was happy to get it to try it out properly.

So, moving on to the gameplay, AoC is a very interesting development for MMORPG games (I have previous experience of playing World of Warcraft and Guild Wars extensively, as well as several singleplayer RPGs). Now, at first glance my impression is that AoC has more a feel of being a singleplayer game rather than a MMO, this is mainly due to how the user interface is set up. I can’t instinctively tell where the party window/bars will show on the screen, and since I haven’t played in a party with other people yet I can’t say how well it works. The user interface is a bit cumbersome in other respects too, I find it a bit hard to figure where things are (such as talent trees and such) so I end up clicking my way through all the tabs on the top till I find the right one. To be fair, AoC isn’t the only game out there with a bad interface, so this isn’t a very big point for me, and it is also a matter of individual preference.

The graphics of the game are very good if you can run it at a high spec, if you have to run it on the lowest spec it looks rather bad. Fortunately the laptop I usually use for gaming is good enough to run it with higher than standard specs without problems, so I’m happy with that. There are a few graphic bugs in the game that I have seen (which is a bit bad, since I rarely notice that kind of bugs). The soundtrack is very good, and possibly one of the things I like best about the game.

Playing AoC can be a bit cumbersome in some respects. For one thing, every time you speak to a NPC to get a quest or whatever, it goes into a conversation window where you have to read across the whole screen and click on sentences that are your replies to what the NPC is saying. This is another reason it gives me the feel of being a singleplayer game, and to me it feels a bit out of place in a MMO, probably because I’m used to quests coming up in a small window on your screen where you can easily accept or decline without it shifting in and out of conversations.

The character classes is another point that needs some looking into. I haven’t tried all of them, of course, but of the melee classes I’ve found the Dark Templar to be pretty much useless. They simply die too easily. I only played my Dark Templar to level 13 because I really couldn’t be bothered to play a character that kept dying whenever she faced more than 2 enemies of the same level as her. I don’t want to depend on finding a group just for questing and levelling, so I had to find another class. The one I ended up with was the Conqueror, and I feel much more happier with this Class since it is powerful enough to solo most quests without too much trouble. My boyfriend tested playing a Ranger and was disappointed because shooting things in first person is a brilliant idea, but switching to and from first person is really cumbersome and doesn’t work because you can’t click on anything where the cross-hair is and either have to move the cross-hair to the side or use tabs. It’s also cumbersome when switching to melee, as you have to use the mouse to zoom in and out, which can take more time than you want to spend. The idea of first person shooting is cool, though, and he could see it working very well in parties and pvp where the ranger would always stay at a distance and not have a need to change into melee. He was also concerned about the newbie quests requiring a certain number of points spent in Hide in order to be done properly, without telling him, so he ended up having to level his character further before he could do those quests. Based on this, I would say that the classes appear a tad imbalanced from a soloing perspective, so I would choose my class carefully.

The content of the game so far (based on the newbie area Tortage) seems quite good. I am happy with the quests. They seem to be very much similar to the quests in most similar games (kill this, pick up that, talk to x, etc). There is a twist to it that I love though, which is the more adult content of including prostitutes into the game and doing quests for them. AoC is an adult game, and I like it. I haven’t come across too much childish gibberish in the chat window (yet), which is very good.

The combat system is a very interesting development where you have more detailed control over your character’s  fighting, by steering the direction your weapon hits. It takes a bit to get used to the combo system, but once I worked it out it became quite fun and easy to use (I found it easier to do combat with both hands on the keyboard rather than one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse).

All in all, I do like AoC quite well. It’s a game with a lot of promise and I will be watching its development. It seems rather unpolished yet, but that takes years to accomplish anyway and is to be expected for an MMO for a good while after release. My main criticism is that the user interface is a bit cumbersome and messy (not the most user friendly one I’ve ever seen). It is a game designed more for the experienced gamer looking for a challenge, and probably wouldn’t be good as anyone’s first MMORPG (for that I would rather recommend GW or WoW).

That’s it for this review. Please bear in mind that I’ve only played one small portion of the game yet. I might write another review later when I’ve played through more of the content.

Fluffeh (my boyfriend) just got a new, shiny laptop and I’ve sort of taken over the daily use of it since it’s much better than my own laptop and he usually works from his base unit. Settlers VI runs like a dream on this one, so I took the opportunity to get some better screenshots than I got from my laptop and figured I’d make a blogpost with them. I have cropped the images a fair bit, so they make more interesting pictures than having my whole screen on. Hover the mouse over the pictures to see my comments.

Hope you enjoyed the pictures

Settlers: Rise of an Empire is one of my favourite games, and the one I play the most after World of Warcraft. It’s a nice strategy type game, without being all about winning battles and stuff. In fact, in many scenarios there’s no need for fighting at all. I like building villages that turn into towns that turn into large cities, with a vast surrounding countryside.

Here’s a trailer for the game:

As you can see, this is a very sweet and cozy game in many ways. I haven’t played through all of the campaign part yet, but my impression of the game is very good, nonetheless.

One thing I really love about this game is the festivals where the workers go an get spouses. These ladies look so sweet the way they dance around the men and when they later stand on the streets gossiping with other spouses, or going on errands to get food, clothes or whatever else. Here are some festival screenshots (unfortunately taken on my laptop, so not the best quality!):

And a more focused cropped part:

One thing in particular that I like about the spouses is that they come in different shapes, both thin and fat, and as far as I have noticed the thinner spouses are not preferred over the fat ones. I believe they are fairly equally distributed.

Like I mentioned farther above, I really like the non-military aspects of Settlers. I have tried some earlier Settlers versions, but it is Rise of an Empire that stands as my favourite. This is because you organise villages/towns/cities, with farms and other gathering professions outside of the village. To me, it makes it look a lot like a realistic medieval(ish) world and something I can relate to (I read a lot of fantasy and historical books), so my village sort of becomes my own private pretend-world.

You can also play the game online against other people, but I haven’t done that, and don’t know if I will in the future. At the moment I’m perfectly happy playing it for myself, and I can do that for hours on end, no problem!

It’s been a while since I’ve written about World of Warcraft in this blog, so I thought I would do that today.

An update since the review is that my Paladin reached lvl 80 a few weeks back. I wasn’t among the quickest to reach lvl 80, nor amongst the slowest. I wanted to take my time about it so I could just enjoy the game and not do any rushing. In the end, I did rush through the last couple of levels because the Guild was preparing to start raiding a bit (casual raiding, that is) and we needed more lvl 80 people to do 10-man Naxx.

I like Naxx, I was among the lucky people who got lots of drops the first times we went it. And we have learned the last few weeks how important it is to have reliable healers and tanks, and also there has been a lot of adjustment on dps, since many of us dps-ers are/were relatively inexperienced and had builds that needed a bit of work. I let my boyfriend build my Pally, and he had nerfed her quite badly when we started raiding because he got the idea that a build with Seal of Corruption as a central skill would be very efficient and deal lots of damage. That turned out to be very wrong, and at first he thought maybe the dps-meter didn’t count all my damage. After looking more closely we went back to a variation of my old build, centred around Seal of Command, et voila, my dps shot up into the roof.

Anyways, here is my dear Ret-a-din, in some old gear and some new, shiny purples from Naxx:

While I’m at it, let me present my other characters (that is, the ones that are more or less likely to get levelled sometime). My most used alt, and one I really love playing is Flavya the Hunter (currently lvl 48):

I love Flavya’s pet, the turtle Alisia who was named after a certain tree (my boyfriend’s Druid):

Next up is my Mage Maurawien (lvl 22), who was actually the first character I made on the server I play on (I originally played on another server first, but moved after TBC came out), but hasn’t really been used much since I created Elrawien:

After WotLK came out I created a Death Knight named Elisjeba (lvl 55). I haven’t really played her much, and I don’t know if I will play her very much:

And lastly, I have an Alliance toon, Eldrene the Shaman (lvl 18). Again, I don’t know how much I’ll level her. I do like this character a lot, but I really prefer playing on the Horde side and with the Guild, so we shall have to see. I mostly just play her a little bit now and then, so she might actually get levelled a bit, it’ll just take a lot of time:

And that’s it for today. I now need to go do something useful since we start moving some of our belongings back to London tomorrow.

My boyfriend linked me to this ad on YouTube. It’s made by MediaWise. A little boy talks about he does various violent acts against people in a video game. The ad is directed at parents and ends with “Learn what’s in video games. Kids do. Go to MediaWise.org”.

You can wish to visit that website if you wish. This blogpost poses one simple question: Why are these kids playing violent games in the first place?!

There are plenty video games out there that are not violent and that are made for, and targeted at kids.

Parents are themselves responsble for what kind of video games their children are playing. If children are playing violent video games and as a result end up violent themselves, the parents can blame no one but themselves. Parents are responsible for what their children do or do not do. This is especially so in their own home.

I worked in a shop that sold video games, and I know very many parents picked up Grand Theft Auto for children who were really too young to be playing the game. These parents may later blame GTA for their children’s misbehaviour. And I want to ask: why did you by that game in the first place? You’re responsible for checking out what these games are about. When a game says it’s meant for people 18+ of age, that means it’s not suitable for 10-year olds. If a game case has a fist on it, that means the game contains violence.

So yea, my basic message is: There is nothing wrong with the video games in themselves. What is wrong is parents letting their children play games that were made for adults.

Today I read this article on BBC’s webpage, and it’s about compulsive gaming, also known as addiction to video games. It especially considers online games. Simply put, a treatment center for gaming addicts has found that only 10% of the people seeking their help are actually addicted to the games. The other 90% (the vast majority) are compulsive gamers who have a social problem, rather than an addiction.

“These kids come in showing some kind of symptoms that are similar to other addictions and chemical dependencies,” he says.

“But the more we work with these kids the less I believe we can call this addiction. What many of these kids need is their parents and their school teachers – this is a social problem.”

In response to this realisation the clinic has changed its treatment programme for gamers to focus more on developing activity-based social and communications skills to help them rejoin society.

Further on:

“Eighty per cent of the young people we see have been bullied at school and feel isolated. Many of the symptoms they have can be solved by going back to good old fashioned communication.”

By offering compulsive gamers a place where they feel accepted and where their voice will be heard, the clinic has found that the vast majority have been able to leave gaming behind and rebuild their lives.

This means that for very many gaming ‘addicts’ what they need is to learn or relearn social skills that will keep them out there in real life, rather than hanging around in their games. It is not surprising that so many of those who get problems with their gaming also have suffered from bullying. I believe that it is easier for many to choose online activities as a way to create a social network and to find friends and feel accepted than for them to resolutely try to find friends in RL. Online you can portait yourself in whichever way you wish, there are no restrictions because people can’t see you and read your body language and thus they cannot create expectations of how you should behave. This gives freedom in a way, but it can also be a trap. Although online friendship and acceptance can keep bullied people up and running and feeling happy, it is not secret that real life friendship is also important. And whichever way you twist and turn it, you have to interact outside the computer, in work or school and other places.

The BBC article concentrates a lot on violent games, and how many of these people are aggressive and get relief from killing stuff. Although this is no doubt true, I think it is also very important to look at the non-aggressive sides of gaming as well. I have been playing MMOs for long enough to have seen both aggressiveness and non-aggressiveness among people I have played with. Without failing, aggressiveness from people in a group is destructive. This could be due to my playing mostly MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars, so this could be different in other types of games. Nonetheless, when one or more persons in a group are very aggressive, this has tended to be detrimental to the wellbeing of the groups and most have deteriorated, and in turn made the social acceptance moot. In groups that have been able to keep good spirits going and where overly aggressiveness is not tolerated, I haven’t seen this problem since people are encouraged to just have fun.

The main problem I have with the article is that it can portrait gamers as being an aggressive bunch who enjoy shooting stuff to let out some steam. Although this is no doubt true for many of those with a problematic relationship to their gaming, my impression of online gaming is that most people have some level of fun. There is much competition going on, and there are many people who don’t quite grasp that it’s ‘just a game’ and a loss is not the end of the world. However, games are, and should be, mostly about having a good time and to escape into another world than your own for a limited period of time.

It’s been a fair few days since Wrath of the Lich King was released by Blizzard. After having had a good look, I must say: this game is yummy! The graphics are fabulous and there’s lots of fun stuff you can do.

My character (a currently lvl 72 Blood Elf Paladin) has learned loads of new Jewelcrafting recipes. There’s a new skill for jewelcrafters called Gem Perfection, which gives a chance to create Perfect Gems, meaning that ordinary green gems can get better at around the same level of quality as the blue ones. This is very nice, and I’ve already had some good luck with that.

Both starter areas are lovely. I especially like Howling Fjord and the Taunka, distant relatives of the Tauren. The first instances are very good, with new and interesting bosses. The first time the Guild went to the Nexus was late on the release day. We were all lvl 70 still, and fourmanned it. The team set up was one warrior tank, one ret-a-din, and two druids. The instance went very well, there were no wipes despite none of us knowing the tactics for the bosses (which was part of the fun for going there in the first place). This went very well probably because of a good team set-up, we have a very reliable tank and the healer is phenomenal. All of us have done fair few instances together by now so we know each other well. I know what to do as a dps and support character with this group. The graphics of the Nexus are really gorgeous. I don’t have any screenshots on this computer, but I will post some later.

My boyfriend and I went exploring in areas we’re too low level to go to, you know, because it’s fun. There were no other players there, since most other people were desperately trying to level (after all, it was still the second day after release), and we may have been among the first to visit some of these places, at least on our server. We went to see Icecrown, and the picture below is from a screenshot of the map to show the areas we got around to seeing:

And here is a nice view from Jotunheim in Icecrown, the character is that of my boyfriend’s druid:

In Agmar’s Hammer I’ve found an orphanage for tiny Taunka babies on the top of the Inn building:

Oh, and Dalaran is a lovely city!

More will come about this game later. It is really lovely, and full of fun. Thumbs up, for Blizzard has done a very good job on this one!