Insert Credits

Everybody has to start somewhere, and those beginnings usually aren’t pretty. Something Awful has a feature up about some of the questionable artwork from the original version of D&D that you might find enjoyable if you’re into that geeky sort of thing. So basically if you’re reading this site then the article is going to at least get a chuckle.

Second Edition is the oldest version of the D&D books I’ve ever seen circulating in the wild. The art was passable in the same way that a picture of a chain mail bikini wearing warrior princess riding a dragon airbrushed on the side of a pizza delivery van gets the point across. I got my start in the game back in the far off year of 2001, and even then the artwork wasn’t really anything to get too excited about. The monster paintings looked good, but anything remotely humanoid in those books was usually from the wrong end of the uncanny valley.

So if you’re not one of the few who played D&D when it first came out back in the ’70s then this feature is definitely worth a look just for the ability to see where the game was coming from without shelling out hundreds of dollars to an overweight dealer with a scraggly beard and questionable personal hygiene at Gencon.

Share This:

I was in Gamestop over the weekend browsing to pass the time while my wife and mother were off on a shopping expedition when I noticed something curious on the tiny three foot section of shelving they’d relegated all the PC games to. A printed and bound World of Warcraft strategy guide. Sitting there in book form.

I couldn’t resist having a look at this strange creature. It looked like it came out around the same time as Wrath of the Lich, so it at least had a small advantage over the last Warcraft strategy guide that I saw in Gamestop a few years before that covered information from the original Warcraft launch when Burning Crusade had been on the shelves for a few months. But anyone who has played Warcraft for any amount of time could tell you that this guide was going to be next to worthless for anyone who was looking to get into the game in a Patch 3.3.3 world.

I really have to applaud the huge balls that it takes for the publisher to put out such a blatant cash grab. And I sit in stunned and horrified admiration of Gamestop, a company that will truly stop at nothing to squeeze any penny out of its customers no matter how far they have to bend said customer over their counter to make that sale.

I can just imagine some gamer’s grandmother or significant other going into Gamestop to try and get something that their gamer SO would like, and don’t they spend a lot of time playing that Warcraft thingy on the computer? Or a new gamer who wants to try out this World of Warcraft thing that they’ve heard all of their friends talking about. They walk in, see this guide, and think that their prayers have been answered, only to be disappointed when it turns out that they’ve bought the gaming equivalent of a phonebook.

So please, don’t let your friends buy these books. Here’s a list of sites that you should go to that provide information in real time about the game that is far more comprehensive than any strategy guide author could ever hope to be.

1. WoW Head
2. Thottbot
3. WoWWiki
4. WoW Insider

Remember, friends don’t let friends buy useless strategy guides.

Share This:

Sonic the Hedgehog was a hero of the highest order in the early ’90s back before the furry subculture that would eventually curse the franchise with a permanent aura of creepiness was still in the first stages of having their sexual awakening horribly distorted. And the pinnacle of Sonic’s 2D adventures is, hands down, Sonic 2 for the Genesis. The title refined and added to mechanics from the first game without suffering from the bloat and blatant money grabbing that would tarnish Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles.

But there’s always been something in Sonic 2 that’s really bothered me: Sky Chase Zone.

The old manuals for Sonic maintained that Dr. Robotnik (back in the days before Dr. Eggman when Sega Japan gave Sega of America more leeway with translations) had enslaved all of the cute fuzzy animals on Sonic’s island and it was up to the player to save said cute fuzzy animals by jumping on their robotic exoskeletal prisons with extreme prejudice. Normally this would result in a happy little animation of an innocent forest creature scampering offscreen, but not so with Sky Chase Zone.

The level finds Sonic taking to the skies atop a biplane piloted by Tails in a rare autoscrolling level in a series that had otherwise been happy to let players explore at their own pace. But the thing that really changed the tone of the game in Sky Chase Zone was the indiscriminate murder Sonic committed in his quest to exact revenge on Dr. Robotnik.

You see, any animals that were “freed” from their flying mechanical confines hopped happily out of their robotic exoskeletons an promptly plummeted happily to their death. Observe:

A happy little animal freed from slavery?

Gravity reasserts itself.

Going... Going...

Gone.

I can only imagine the horror on the faces of all the little woodland creatures gathered on the ground to watch Sonic’s final assault as they saw their friends and family splattered on the ground in a messy mammalian rain of blood.

And in Sonic’s final dick move he blows up a massive space station in the upper atmosphere of his planet. Do you know what happens when something really big blows up in a planet’s atmosphere and transfers the kinetic energy of its demise to said atmosphere? Basically it does the same amount of damage as the object would have had it come plummeting to the ground, leading to massive destruction and die-offs.

That’s right. Sonic the Hedgehog, friend of animals and the environment, just singlehandedly did more damage to his world’s biosphere than Robotnik could ever hope to with his massive polluting cities and robotic armies.

Those animals aren’t looking on in sadness at the potential death of their hero. They’re looking on in horror after watching their friends raining down from the sky and turned into squishy red pulp, with a mass extinction event serving as the finale to Sonic’s aerial dance of death.

Share This:

I’m guessing there are a lot of people out there who are finding the same deal I did with the Asus G72 laptop for sale over at Best Buy and wondering how it performs. Ever since I put that post up I’ve had people coming to the site looking for reviews.

I’m not going to get too far into technical details here. Suffice it to say that the Nvidia GX 260M that the G72 sports is more than enough to beat World of Warcraft into the ground. Here’s a sampling of average FPS that I’ve been getting. This is far from scientific, consisting more of me glancing at the performance tab from time to time.

All of these were done with everything turned up to the maximum. I didn’t use any of the built-in overclocking functions on the laptop either. Obviously you’ll get a performance increase if you turn a few things down, but the G72 does such a good job of rendering on Ultra that there’s really no need.

• Dalaran: 20FPS on initial load. ~40-50FPS any other time.
• Wintergrasp: 40-60FPS. Tends to drop down to 20ish right at the end of a WG battle, but that’s server lag and not something the laptop can fix.
• Alterac Valley: ~50FPS constant.
• Vanilla WoW: 60+ constant.
• Burning Crusade: 60+ constant.
• Lich King: 60+ constant.

I will give the caveat that I haven’t run any dungeons since getting the new computer. I’ve always been more of a PvPer. But given the performance in lagtastic areas like Wintergrasp I have no doubt that it should be able to handle the newer 25-man content without any trouble.

Hope that helps everyone who is looking for more information on the G72!

Share This:

Check out this article over at Cracked if you or any of your friends are stuck in the iron grip of an MMO and then come back. I’ll wait for you.

MMO addiction can be a real problem, but I agree with the assessment in the article that it’s largely a product of the person playing the game rather than the game itself. Everyone I know who has dropped out of school because they were playing games like Dark Age of Camelot or World of Warcraft inevitably did so because they weren’t happy with what they were doing.

Of course there is always going to be the problem that the rewards in the real world run on a far slower scale than the rewards in any virtual world you can name. Since I got involved in the MMO scene back in 2003 I’ve often wondered how much potential is being squandered in my generation because the next great American novel or the cure for cancer was put off indefinitely because of raid night.

I suppose we’ll never know. The only thing you can do is not let these games control your life. My trick is to use my iPhone as a sort of life authenticator. I don’t play the games unless everything in my task list for the day is completed, and I don’t ever play in the marathon sessions that I used to when I was in undergrad.

And MMOs are really more fun when you play casually. I had a friend back in college who was determined to get the Grand Marshal title in Blizzard’s old Warcraft PvP system. He spent his evenings grinding Alterac Valley while his girlfriend studied next to him on the bed. He tunneled into his home PC from his TA office so that he could play in between office visits. He tied an oscillating fan to his mouse so that it would move his character and not log him out as afk before Blizzard really started cracking down on that sort of thing.

And ultimately he hated the game that he felt compelled to continue playing. He got that Grand Marshal title, but at the end of the day he was so burnt out that he couldn’t stand to log in to use the gear that he’d earned. And I’m not even going to go into the griping when Burning Crusade came out and green items in Outlands were better than the PvP gear he’d invested so much time in.

It can be a vicious cycle, but only if you let it get to that.

Of course part of the ease of breaking the MMO addiction is being conscious of what they’re doing to keep you hooked. Every time I log into World of Warcraft I first ask myself if there is something better I could be doing with my time. Sometimes I stay on and melt some faces in the battlegrounds and arena, but more often than not I log right back out. Its all a matter of setting priorities and recognizing the treadmill gameplay for what it is.

Make the most of your casual sessions and help support Insert Credits:

Razer Mamba Wireless Gaming Laser Mouse 5600 DPI

World of Warcraft 60 Day Pre-Paid Time Card

Share This:

Imagine that I’m a huge fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (I know, huge stretch of the imagination there). Now imagine that I decided I was unhappy with the way the series ended and decided to publish my own sequel that I’d been working on for the past decade or so that neatly wraps up the series in the name of fans everywhere. And imagine that I did all of this without the permission of the Tolkien estate.

Now the Tolkiens have shown themselves to be perfectly willing to pick over the dessicated carcass of J.R.R.’s voluminous notes to make a quick buck on so-called unpublished masterpieces, but chances are if I tried to do something like that you’d find me getting my ass sued off faster than you could say “Holy torts Batman!” And the Tolkien estate would be well within their rights to sue me into the ground and make sure that my fan masterpiece never saw the light of day.

So why is it that the Internet gets upset when Activision, who recently acquired the rights to former gaming giant Sierra’s properties, decides that they’re going to flex some legal muscle and stop a fan project to make an unofficial sequel to the King’s Quest series?

Here’s just a small sample of the fine Internet lawyering going on in the Joystiq post:

Activision isn’t supporting indie developers!

Well, no. This is not a case of independent developers versus the evil corporate machine. This is a case of a group of fans using someone else’s intellectual property in a game that they are developing in violation of even the most generous interpretation of our oft draconian copyright laws.

Activision couldn’t lose money from this project!

How do you figure? Activision has no plans for the moment for making a new King’s Quest game, but if they ever did decide to exercise the right to use their intellectual property then this game would be in direct competition. It’s a hypothetical situation where they are losing potential money, but copyright law is designed to protect IP holders’ hypothetical potential money.

Companies like Valve support independent developers!

The guys who made Counterstrike weren’t make Half Life 2. Early DOOM 2 modders weren’t making DOOM 3 with the engine. There is a major difference between developers who release map creation utilities and a team that is coding a direct sequel to a series from the ground up.

There’s no way anyone could confuse a fan game for a legitimate professional release!

Never underestimate the power of idiots and assholes on the Internet. The fact that I’m forced to make this post at all should automatically invalidate this argument.

So it sucks for the people who spent the last eight years of their lives putting together this game. It sucks for the community that grew up around this project. It sucks for the retro fans who just wanted a chance to revisit one of their favorite abandoned game franchises.

But that doesn’t change the fact that Activision is acting perfectly within their rights here. Fan fiction and fan projects like this are a violation of copyright. They always have been, and they always will be within our lifetime unless there’s a major overhaul of existing copyright law. And yet we get the same annoying people crawling out of the woodwork complaining about their rights being violated every time one of these projects is crushed under the cold and uncaring heel of some bigwig corporate attorney.

How many cease and desist orders will it take for these people to realize that it’s the fan projects that are the problem, and not the lawyers?

Share This:

I logged into Star Trek Online for the first time two nights back and made my way through the first set of missions.

The introductory mission featuring combat with the Borg felt almost deceptively easy, but understandably so. Given a choice between an easy introductory tutorial and a trial by fire for new players it’s easy to see why Cryptic opted for the gentle introduction. The novelty if space combat and the fun of blasting Borg with a phaser more than made up for the lack of difficulty, but a small part of me worried about the rest of the game being a similar cakewalk.

That worry grew as I went out on the first real mission in the game. It was a simple exploration mission straight out of an episode of Star Trek or the mission log of an old Wing Commander game. Starfleet sent me to visit four star systems and check for any trouble.

The first system I visited involved escorting a damaged mining vessel back to its base. The second involved beaming down to a planet and solving some dispute on a diplomacy mission, which translates to walking around and talking to a few characters.

That’s all talking and no killing, for those of you keeping score at home. That mission was a definite and pleasant surprise given the MMO trappings and speaks volumes to me concerning the great potential offered in the game if they keep doing more Star Trek-feeling things like that instead of opting for a generic MMO with Star Trek graphics. But it was still incredibly easy to complete given the lack of talking.

The third mission was where things started getting interesting. I entered a star system to discover it had been taken over by Orion pilots or some such nonsense, and Starfleet wanted me to introduce them to Federation space on the business end of a phaser and some photon torpedoes. Easy enough, right?

Except that I found myself being bombarded by neverending waves of escort ships and battlecruisers that were really giving my poor little ship a pounding. I was able to defeat the first group of escorts easily enough and outrun the battlecruiser so that I could move in to destroy the shipping platform that was the real objective of the mission, but by the time I got around to destroying the platforms a second fleet had closed in on my ship. And when I turned around I was maneuvering straight into the waiting crosshairs of that first battlecruiser that I’d escaped from.

There’s no death penalty in the game at this point, but simple gamer’s stubbornness left me beating a retreat for open space to retry the mission the next day. I was also happy that there was at least a small difficulty curve and something to provide a challenge so early in the main body of the game.

Then I tried the mission again the next day and realized that the three battlegroups were in there because I’d joined the instance with two other players who had just warped out. The second time I tried completing the mission was with a group that didn’t leave immediately, and we were able to mop the system up with little effort and breeze through the quest in about ten minutes. And as I thought about this it dawned on me that the night before I’d managed to destroy half of a battlegroup that was intended to be fought off by two or three players all by my lonesome.

Star Trek Online is a blast to play, but these experiences don’t leave me with much confidence about the difficulty curve in the early game. Only time and more playing will show if things improve at all.

Share This:

Note: If you’re coming to this page looking for information about the performance of the G72 in World of Warcraft then this second post dealing with that in particular might be of interest.

It is with a heavy heart that I must announce the passing of my old Dell Inspiron laptop that I purchased back in 2007 to get me through grad school. The little guy still works fine for the most part aside from taking a little longer to load now than he did back when he was new, but the old adage of “Groves giveth and Gates taketh away” continues to affect the computer market.

The main problem was the graphics card. The little 128MB workhorse that came with my Inspiron was more than enough to play World of Warcraft, the only game I was playing at the time, but in the two and a half intervening years I’ve gone from being able to run WoW on maximum settings to barely ticking by with everything turned down. I’ve also been wanting to try out Star Trek Online and the graphics card was the one weak link when I ran a stress test to see if my old computer could handle it.

After a bit of searching and consulting with my brother (who spends far more time researching graphics cards than I would ever care to) I decided on an Asus G72 from Best Buy. The price was just right at $999. The G72 only has a dual core processor, but it’s a high end dual core with a screaming clock speed. Right now it seems that few games and programs are designed to utilize dual core let alone quad core, and I think that at this point it’s still a better choice to get a faster clock speed on a dual core than to saddle yourself with a slower clock speed and smaller front side bus on an equivalent quad.

And the graphics card, the GX260M, is a kickass little card for what I paid for the system. I could go on about onboard memory, clock speed, and all that technical stuff, but at the end of the day I’m able to run Warcraft and Star Trek Online at 1600×900 resolution with all of the settings turned up to the maximum and a steady 50-60FPS in heavily populated areas and battlegrounds.

Being able to see Dalaran from atop Icecrown Citadel is something I was never able to do on my old machine, and looking to the other side of Arathi Basin and seeing the fighting clearly on that side isn’t something that I’ve seen since my old desktop gaming machine went belly up a couple years back.

So now that I have a laptop capable of handline Star Trek Online you can expect some coverage of that game to go along with the World of Warcraft coverage that you already enjoy. But more on that in another post dedicated to the game.

And in the meantime, if you’re looking for a decent gaming laptop for the price then the G72 is a nice little deal right now. I get the impression that Best Buy might be lowering the price to clear it out and make way for a new quad-core model, but I haven’t found anything concrete on that. Either way, it’s still an excellent little gaming machine for that price.

Share This:

1. Shard in Cata: “They are all for damage.”

Ghostcrawler says: A more accurate quote probably would have been “They are all for combat.”

We are still working out what exactly you can blow a shard on. Some of the in combat but not damage abilities, such as the Fel Dom example from Blizzcon, are still on the table.

2. 3.3 Scourge Strike was a failure.

Ghostcrawler says: We don’t like melee strikes hitting for straight magical damage. We went through a lot of similar balance issues when Ret hit for so much Holy damage and to a lesser extent with Frost DKs.

I agree we have some confusing tooltips, but I don’t agree that Scourge Strike is one of them. It’s a weapon attack that hits for physical damage. If there are diseases on the target, it adds some Shadow damage too. Doesn’t seem that complicated.

And if you want to read a longer explanation click through here for a post where Ghostcrawler elaborates more.

3. Is threat fun?

If threat wasn’t a factor then it would make tanking boring. If they buffed AoE tanking then it would also be no fun. Basically Ghostcrawler thinks that tanks are good where they are and that threat isn’t much of an issue with most tanks. If you want to get in on the discussion then click through.

4. Cataclysm Stat & System Changes

Remember all those stat changes they’ve been promising in time for Cataclysm? Well they’ve finally released specifics. Click through to have a read!

Share This:

No.

Share This: