01.12.2009 - Terrence Marks:

On Monday, January 12th, the Atlanta Jounal-Constitution cut 13 comic strips. One of those strips is Kevin & Kellwhich we color. They're having a poll to determine which two strips get brought back - the full details are available at kevinandkell.com. We ask that you please vote for Kevin & Kell, especially if you live in the Atlanta region.

01.11.2009 - Terrence Marks:

I tried playing Monato Esprit. Firstly, it looks beautiful. It's a new game, and is going to look better than something four years old. There are a few new games that look great, partially because they're giving up on the market segment with older hardware. I don't think Isabel's computer could run this one at any kind of speed.

It has a decent tutorial section. You start out on their equivalent of Noob Island and they send you on a lot of quests. If Alice sends you to find Bill, you need to talk to Bill once to finish the "Find Bill" quest, a second time when he asks you if you're ready for the next quest, and a third time when he actually gives you the quest. Just a minor issue, though.

There's a decent range of appearance customization when you start. You choose a horoscope sign and season, as well. I mention this only because it gives you various bonuses. I do not like it when a game has you make what might be major decisions then makes you wait an hour before telling you what the consequences of that may be.

The game has a non-navigable mini-map and a manually controlled camera. The graphics settings are not adjustable.

I died while exiting a dungeon. When I got out, I didn't see any NPCs. I logged off. When I logged back on, I was in a new city. My spawn point was in a woodpile. I couldn't move. I don't think there were any GMs on. I'm not sure there was anybody on, actually.

Reading about it online, I found that the game's currency is MetaTIX, which can only be bought with real cash money. It costs money to go into some (most?) dungeons. The game hints that you can just trade things to other players, to avoid paying. The player base doesn't seem big enough to realistically support this. The literature mentions these being accepted in many different games, but Monato Esprit is the only one they actually name.

The game's classes include Harlequin, Hwarang, and Sheriff. It sounds like the design concept was "Let's take the awesomest stuff we can find and toss it all in". The Templar and Hwarang seem similarly tankish and I'm not sure what the difference between the Sheriff and Mage are, much less what the Harlequin actually does in game terms. Again, stuck in a woodpile.

01.06.2009 - Terrence Marks:

Firstly, I recently discovered PS238. It had been highly recommended to me several times in the past and I finally got around to reading it. It's a superhero comedy comic book that's being brought onto the Internet, one page at a time. I enjoy it very much and highly recommend it to you.

Secondly, I've been a bit busy for the last month or two. Working a lot of overtime. If you emailed me and I didn't get back to you, it's because I pretty much didn't get back to anybody. I'm taking a break from my game search for a bit. I still have about five reviews to write and post.

I know the tone of things has been a bit negative lately. I fail to mention most games' good points. I'm trying to find the right game for me. This is why they aren't it. If you enjoy the game, I hope you continue to enjoy it, and aren't waiting for my validation. Also, I enjoy listening to myself complain.

I've been thinking more about what I want in games. Like an automatic camera. I like the option of adjusting it manually, but when I turn I want the camera to turn with me. I want the camera behind and above me about 98% of the time when I play, so why do I have to move it myself every time I turn? It's 2009. Computers should be able to do this on their own.

Noob Island is a fairly clever idea. I had overlooked how clever it was because it seemed completely obvious to me. I keep finding games that don't give you much any tutorial or instruction. I want a quick walkthrough of the controls, what classes there are, and such. I want to have stuff to do at least until I hit level 10.

A lot of games dump you in the hub city. There's the NPC for that level 50 quest standing by the gate asking if you have any copper marbles. You, being new, don't realize that they're only dropped by greatly huge dragons who can kill you as a free action, so you're trying to figure out if you have any, and where you get them. There's 30 mostly-identical NPCs standing around, so finding the five that you actually need is hard, and making the game hard isn't condusive to keeping me as a player. Give me a small area with five NPCs, free healing, and nothing that can kill me in one hit until I decide to leave Noob Island.

I want a tutorial that explains things concisely and as I need them. If there's a green bar in the upper right that I'm not going to use until I hit level 15, don't even show it to me when I'm on noob island. I want to be able to pull up a cheat sheet that tells me what an enchantment does and how it's different from an inspiration, especially if one is difficult to obtain and/or permanent. Maybe I wasn't paying much attention the the tutorial. I do that sometimes. And don't just show me the tutorial again. If I didn't sit through it the first time, I probably won't sit through it the second time.

One of the design principals of Final Battle Adventure Online is that you don't have to make decisions before they're relevant, and that very few decisions are immediately permanent. (Gender is, for instance, because it doesn't affect gameplay, and because you should know which one you want to play as). Don't make me start out the game and decide if I want a bonus to magical defence or physical attack before I do anything else. I don't know if, say, there are only three enemies that use magical attack, or that you can buy attack boosters at any shop in town.

If I'm an archer, I want to start out shooting things with arrows. If I'm a cleric, I want to start out healing things. Don't make me spend the first four hours hitting rats with a stick, as if I'm some kind of incompetent fighter.

Anyhow, that's what I'm looking for in a game. I'll let you know when I find it.

01.05.2009 - Isabel Marks:

*PHEW* Comics are once again back on track... if you didn't catch the three comic updated yesterday, they are in the archive at their respectful dates. Hopefully this insomnia I keep having doesn't come back any time soon. Sorry for the delays- thank you for your patience!

01.03.2009 - 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!

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.

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!

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!