Free Candy For Everyone

This week my guild decided to just get together and chat. Here we are, gathered together, chewing the fat:

Ok, ok, you can see the corpses littering the floor. We didn’t just sit and talk! We decided to play some catchup since some of us had missed some of the Razorfen Downs quests last week, and we ran it again. So I don’t have any cool new boss pictures to show you since we ran the same instance again.

Hopefully, we’ll hit something new next week - I think the plan is Uldaman. We’re hitting the big time now! Soon we’ll be into end-game raid territory. That’ll be interesting… Though we’re still only in the low 40s, it’ll take us a while to get up into the 50s - levelling definitely has slowed down a lot. I used to level every time we played (since I almost always have a full resting bonus, since we only play together once a week) - this time through I got through exactly half of one level. That’s a big slowdown! Of course, we were also in a zone that was a bit low level for me. Hopefully things will pick up next week!

Today I decided to do something a little different, and I went to the prerelease tournament for the new set of Magic: The Gathering that’s coming out. I used to be really into Magic in college, but then I didn’t really have anyone to play with and so my cards have been gathering dust on a shelf for a few years. Turns out some of my co-workers are pretty into the game, and were going to a tournament this weekend.

For those who don’t know, Magic: The Gathering is a collectible card game that involves building a deck (40 or 60 cards usually, depending on the format) and trying to kill you opponent by summoning creatures and casting spells. It’s really addictive and the way it’s structured so you always want to buy more cards is really ingenious. I get really into buying packs of cards and seeing what I can get. So it’s probably better for me not to play too much of the game.

I’d never played in any tournaments, and my co-worker John said this was the most mellow of them, so a good one to try. I went in fully prepared to have a 12 year old wipe the floor with my limp body. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my skills increase as the age disparity between myself and my opponent increases. In other words, I actually beat some of the youngun’s. Heehee.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I was invited with some of my co-workers to pop on by Demiurge, another development house in Cambridge for a night of gaming. For the most part we played their UT mod, Clone Bandits, which is a lot of fun, but I’m pretty darn bad at. Let’s just say they might have had a bit of an advantage, considering they wrote the thing. Oh, and I’m also pretty bad at FPS games in general.

There was also a lot of Guitar Hero played, which was cool, but they only had one controller, so we just sorta watched each other instead of getting the really awesome head-to-head experience. I’ve never played it multi, so I’m really curious to give it a try. Next time, I’ll have to bring my guitar controller to make it happen.

The Warcraft part of the evening came in pretty late, when we finally switched the PCs over to playing some Warcraft III. I’m a big RTS fan, but haven’t really played anything multiplayer except Empire Earth II in a long time (hey, when you work on a game, you play a whole lot of it!). I played through the Warcraft III campaign when the game first came out, and then didn’t pick it up again. So I know how to play the game in a general way, but anyone that knows the optimal strategies (or “strats” as my super-hardcore co-worker Albert calls them) will totally kick my ass.

So Albert gave me so pre-game coaching, told me to play the Night Elves and recommended a build order. I did a bit of exploring and found some stuff I recognized. The really cool thing was seeing how much of World of Warcraft comes from Warcraft RTS stuff! The icons for lots of stuff are exactly the same, there are units that cast the same spells (Druid units with Faerie Fire, Shamans with totems, etc). Of course it makes sense, since there is a large body of lore for the Warcraft realm, and it wasn’t all created explicitly for World of Warcraft, but when we were playing a match on a map called Booty Bay, it had extra meaning to me, since that’s a location I’ve visited in WoW.

I’ve been enjoying a short hiatus from WoW, and now I think I need to make sure to play some other games. There’s a lot more stuff out there that needs my time. Perhaps I’ll try the free Guild Wars trial this weekend.

I was interviewed by ABC News Radio months and months ago, and I never managed to track down what happened to the interview. Imagine my surprise when I was checking out my company’s website to find a link to the interview! So here it is, Building Better, Not Bustier Games. It’s just more of my thoughts on how women are portrayed in video games, resulting as follow up to the Associated Press article Programmers: Video Games Need Female Touch that got me started blogging in the first place.

It’s funny how my blog has changed. I started out with a passion for talking about the game industry and what I know, what I’ve learned as a programmer, what I’ve seen being one of few women, what is cool about my job in general. But somewhere along the way this turned into something else entirely. The power of World of Warcraft has turned my brain to mush. Ah well, I like mush.

So I’ve been playing a lot of World of Warcraft recently. Where recently is the past five months or so. During that time, I have been neglected my duties as a hardcore (well, maybe not really hardcore, maybe just medium) gamer to play many many games of many types. I managed to bust into a bit of Guitar Hero and some Civ4, but there have been many games I have been curious about and haven’t managed to play because of a certain MMOG.

At the top of my if-I-had-time list is probably Dragon Quest VIII. I really miss the Japanese console RPGs that used to occupy 75% of my gaming time before WoW came along. Guild Wars is also on the list, in large part because of Brinstar’s frequent writings on the subject, as well as some conversations with one of my co-workers on the topic.

Does anyone have any other suggestions of must-play-games that I should try? I also am into RTS games, but haven’t really picked one up in a while since I spend my days working on them. But if there’s any gems I missed, I’d definitely give them a try.

Anyone have any good PSP recommendations? There’s only so much Lumines a girl can play - I love the game, but I could use something a bit more beefy that isn’t a racing game.