ben is on the inter.net

Day one of The Great Recruiting was a disturbingly powerful success (for Blizzard). Ended up playing some new characters on our server and it was pretty awesome to behold our group (which incidentally will be well balanced for instances!). We have a Dwarf Hunter named Bedrest (my wife Jess), a Dwarf Priest named Foamier (Colin’s girlfriend Mel), a Human Mage named Smeepers (me), and a mostly naked Gnome Warlock named Doomsnuggler (played by professional puppeteer Jack). Juls will also be joining in the fun again, and Mike created a new guy on our server. Jess and Jack have never played the game before, and it’s really interesting to see their reactions to things that now seem so trivial. At the end of the night we walked over to Ironforge and Jack was nearly speechless with reverence. What’s funny is all I see is a gryphon master, an auction house, and a mailbox. It’s nice to see the game along with new eyes, though, as it forces us to slow down and really look at the lovingly crafted world.

So I really think Mage is for me! This was confirmed as soon as I got Frostbolt last night, and all of a sudden my character felt awesome. It’s also a good low-maintenance class I can play while teaching Jess and Jack how to do quests and get they kills on.

The boosted XP is kind of ridiculous. In a party of 4, we’re earning XP that is almost equivalent to soloing from kills. But with 3 DPS classes and a priest we’re killing stuff pretty fast! The level meter might as well just animate. Quest rewards are much higher, too. Unfortunately, it seems like we don’t have to do nearly as much questing, at least in the beginning. In the process of doing one quest we’re earning so much experience that all other quests in that chain are too low level. And grey quests won’t provide the triple XP. Personally I don’t think that matters, as in a few more levels we can start hitting up instances, and it seriously feels like we’d never have to do open world quests again.

Hooooooolyyyyyyyyy Crap. I’ve sent out invites to some friends. Let’s look at this objectively:

For each person you refer who upgrades to a retail version of World of Warcraft and purchases two months of game time, you will be able to give a character on the account you sent the invitation from an exclusive in-game zhevra mount. This unique mount can be claimed through the website, is only available to Recruit-A-Friend participants, and can only be applied to a single character.

1. Characters on both accounts can summon each other once per hour.
2. While adventuring with your linked friend/family member, you will each gain triple experience.
3. For every two levels the new player earns, the new player can grant one free level-up to a lower-level character played by the veteran player.

Is quest experience tripled too?

Yes, but only if the quest was not trivial (gray difficulty) for either character.

For each person you refer who upgrades to a retail version of World of Warcraft and purchases his or her first month of game time, the account you sent the invitation from will receive a free credit of 30 days of play time.

Hooooooolyyyyyyyyy Crap. I will be writing more about how this goes as things progress. But WoW at triple speed, PLUS extra character levelling, PLUS it’s only about 2/3s the normal price of playing (thanks to 30-day credits). That’s a video game right there. That’s how they get from 10 million to 20 million.

UPDATE: Jess has agreed to play with me, at least through the trial. Can you guys IMAGINE.

I watched the opening cinematic for World of Warcraft for the first time today in at least three years. I’m happy to report that the cinematic still looks incredible, and it does a pretty great job of making you want to really play the game and eventually become a badass. The Burning Crusade one isn’t quite as good, but is still better than the attract mode movies for most games. I remember being disappointed with WoW’s lack of cutscenes after the intro (or the in-engine voiceover plus camera pan that you get when you make a character). Sure, instances have a good amount of well-presented story in them, but over the course of the game your story is told predominantly through your quest log. It took me a few tries at the game before this stopped mattering to me.

About a month ago I was reading about Death Knights in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion and I really, really wanted to play one. But there was a small problem; I’d never reached the required level 55 to create one. So I started up again. I created an undead mage named Ouchdown. Several other people, now long past Just 70, show up from time to time to level their Horde Alts and I’ve been genuinely having fun with the game. I know now how important it is to really enjoy playing your class. At first I was put off by my mage’s frail body and his relative simplicity (compared especially to Druids and Warlocks), but after putting enough points into frost (and getting Mana Shield and Blink at level 20), I can say that playing a mage has been the most fun I’ve had. Since I’ve been back I leveled Pewpewpew to 30 and have just had him sitting there accruing rest XP, and as of a couple days ago I’ve got Ouchdown at 30.

But something was still missing. I still didn’t have any way to get a panda.

But Juls did, and he had quit back in 2006 (pre-expansion). He’d gotten a dwarf hunter to 60 and before signing off for good he sold off all his gear and mailed away the money. But he kept his panda collar. And his box for the Collector’s Edition. This past week Juls traded me his CE box and gave me access to his account. I know, I know, this technically violates the EULA, but it’s not like I’m anywhere near the same league as a guy who bots or a guy who buys a fully geared out level 70 character. The first thing I did was make an Orc hunter named Hugman who runs around with his best friend, a panda cub. I also tried my hand at dual-boxing (expect another entry on this later).

I had never seen Outland. And with Jhonen being born really soon, I doubt I’ll get Ouchdown or Pewpewpew to 60 any time soon. And I really want to see that content. I logged in and tried Juls’ character out. He still had a pet wolf, thankfully, but his armor was lower than my level 30 mage. I renamed him from Trygger to Barkbark (Hugman and Barkbark are eternal enemies) and moved him over to Farstriders, the server we’d all played on since Burning Crusade dropped. I had to get him a ranged weapon, and the cheapest one with the highest level was a bow on the auction house. Awesomely, Juls had never trained bows (or crossbows), so I had to find a bow trainer and basically start from scratch in Hellfire Peninsula.

After about two hours of questing with help from my friends Mel and Colin, Barkbark is up and running with about half of the armor he needs, and will hopefully finish off all the pieces with a few more hours. He can actually survive fights now, which is awesome.

I’m going to work on Ouchdown for a while, though. I want to earn that high level for reals. Also, to those of you close to me, I beg of you to force me to buy the Lich King Collector’s Edition, because if I don’t do this we’ll all regret it later. Just ask Jess who heard me complain about the WoW:CE for the last 3.5 years.

Fortunately for my future self, I pre-ordered and successfully received a Collector’s Edition of Burning Crusade when it dropped in 2007. Interestingly enough I did this using Best Buy’s website! Note also that on their website you don’t deal with employees! Anyway, when the expansion was released, pretty much everybody was playing again. We started out in the Draenei starting area with a bunch of Blue Skinned Freaks. In my spare time I played a Blood Elf Warlock and quickly realized that Warlocks were great! Unfortunately for him, most everybody I knew was playing Alliance, so I made a Gnome Warlock, did the March of Tears from Dun Morogh to Menethil, and hopped a series of boats to meet up with the Draenei characters.

His name was Pewpewpew. We had some fun questing! We did the Dead Mines a couple times and Blackfathom Deeps. I played until level 27 and then something took me away from the game; I think it was a busy time at work. Looking back, yeah, that was just about the busiest I’ve been here that Spring. Anyway, Pew took a rest, and I eventually unsubscribed. 27 was the highest level I had reached at this point. All the characters I had played with stayed on until 70 after I dropped out.

So I ended up keeping Warcraft offline from January 2005 until November of 2006. By far the longest lapse in my subscriptions. My wife and I were about to have our second anniversary, and she had said on more than one occasion that I was never to play Warcraft again. We had lived with this guy who played it all the time. Literally all day long every day. She thought this was not something I should do, and she had become convinced that this game was destined to ruin all players. So I let it rest.

But around Thanksgiving in 2006 I was bored one weekend and renewed the subscription. The expansion was looming at the time, and lots of people I knew were getting back into the game. Two friends from work and I started up new characters on a RP-PVP server getting ready for Christmas. Three Tauren Druids named Bullthazar, Calfspar, and Milkior, walked the Barrens looking for a King. We only played a few sessions but it was still remarkably entertaining (and this was not just because I had created a “/yell TELL ME, %t, HAVE YOU HEARD THE GOOD NEWS?” macro that I would use whenever we started a fight). When we went on the druid quests, we would sometimes encounter very high level Night Elf players, and most of the time they wouldn’t kill us. They would bow, and we would bow back. It turns out, I actually liked this game, quite a bit. Oh yeah, and another guy showed up named Beeflehem, which was an added bonus to our Christmas Story.

I learned two things in our time as the Wise Men. One: this game is more fun when you quest with friends; you level up faster and you die significantly less. Two: the priest class was not for me. While I never really liked playing a Druid, I had way more fun playing one than a low level priest. After Christmas, though, we sort of tapered off. I’d log in every now and then and use the GOOD NEWS button on NPCs, but we never played these character seriously again.

When World of Warcraft went Beta, I stayed up all night for several nights playing it. I played a Dwarf Priest. Looking back on it now I’m pretty sure I didn’t know about training on even levels or talent points. I just liked walking around, seeing Iron Forge for the first time. Seeing my first Night Elf was crazy (HOW DID YOU GET TO LEVEL 18 SO FAST). I was frothing pretty hard for this game to come out, even if it was going to be released less than a week before Jess and I left Chicago for our wedding in Los Angeles. Before the Beta even dropped, I had already reserved the Collector’s Edition. At Best Buy.

The morning the game was released, I walked over to Best Buy from my office. Got there at about 9am, right as they opened. There weren’t people lined up or anything. I walked over to the World of Warcraft display, and there was some dude standing there. This guy, this terrible awful guy, asked me if I had pre-ordered. I said “yep!” and he told me that pre-order people had to pick up copies of the game at Customer Service. I stared at about 10 copies of the Collector’s Edition for too long, then I asked if they had those over at the Customer Service area. He said “yes.” I walked over to Customer Service. There was a reasonable line already there. Perhaps a five minute wait. Everybody was picking up copies of World of Warcraft (regular editions, mind). I got to the front and said I wanted a Collector’s Edition. The woman said “you have to go get one off the shelf,” and I said “oh the guy said I’d get one over here,” and then I ran back to the display, but lo, Dear Reader, the Collector’s Editions had been devoured in my absence. The employee guy was gone. I would never have an opportunity to buy a CE version of the game; I had a wedding to go to, and a job to stop getting paid at. Didn’t change the fact that the part of my heart capable of loving video games (according to medical researchers, this part of my heart is several sizes larger than the national average), was broken.

So, don’t ever reserve products at Best Buy. Also, don’t ever talk to the employees there unless you are trying to trick them into giving you a deal on a TV.

But I really, really wanted that Panda.

My friend Juls had managed to get his copy of the CE, thousands of miles away in Florida. We met up (in the game) and he had the panda and it was awesome. I spent about 40 hours on a Dwarf Priest in those early days, not having any idea how to play, panda-less, newly married, and I quit that January (only paid for one month after the free month). I didn’t have any fun, really. I got to level 19. Was this because I was a dwarf priest, or because, deep down, I knew that I could never have a panda?

Back in March, The iPhone Developer Program Sucked. They’ve been adding people into the developer program proper pretty much since the day the iPhone 3G came out. I have some great ideas for some games that DO NOT USE THE FUCKING GIMMICKY TILT SENSOR but I’m not really in a good spot to make them at the moment. One of them — Potions and Stuff: Legends of the Murderwizord — will be playable someday, along with the real version of sup blocks, but today is not that day.

I want Time Travel to be a major part of my life. Maybe not like For Reals time travel, which by all accounts is probably impossible — at least if you want to go backwards — but I think that Capital Tee Time Travel is one of the most interesting mechanics in stories or video games. Unfortunately for traditional One Dimensional media (books, movies, music, anything that has a beginning and an end without direct interaction from the viewer), if the creator doesn’t control the time travel well with nonsense rules (see Harry Potter 3!) the viewer could end up experiencing a broken world where death and fear and loss are not real things. A world without death or fear or loss can be interesting! But usually that fades away pretty quickly, and we, the viewer, will be left with nothing to grab onto. The characters in a world of uncontrolled Time Travel can solve any problem with Superman-like inefficiency; Bill and Ted, for instance, can break themselves out of jail, because when they wish for a key all they have to do is put it there once they’ve escaped. By around the second time we see the trick we’re tired of it.

But games (yes, even board games!), especially video game platformers, are different. Failure failure failure success is the general pattern of video game playback. Games are Two Dimensional media, as the axis of player control can drastically change the output displayed on the screen. Perhaps the programmer decided that it will take 10 minutes to get from Point A to Point B when in execution each player could experience a different scenario. Simplistic platformers (think Super Mario Bros. 1) have nearly infinite solutions to the route from Point A to Point B. While this sort of jumping around (pun completely intentional) is possible in books, movies, or whatever by skipping around, it is generally not considered to be a valid way of experiencing the media in question. I will conveniently ignore that possibility! Time to refocus on video games!

Imagine Super Mario Bros. where you can travel back in time, effectively removing the threat of pits and enemies. How would you make this game challenging? This is the basic premise behind Braid. Since the user can’t kill their character, no matter how hard they try, the game designers had to completely rethink the basic concept of Point A to Point B. And it comes out this week. At a mere $15 you are practically breaking into Jonathan Blow’s house, tracking mud on the carpet, leaving the seat up, and using a giant magnet to steal all of his magnetized valuables. While the story can feel kind of… wimpy at times, just pay attention to the number of mechanics introduced here that WILL appear in countless games of the future.

With Braid, Time Travel can become a major part of your life.

So it’s been a while, yeah?

The news:

• Sold the Vespa!
• Jess is still pregnant, but apparently Jhonen is ready for deployment.
• Been playing WoW again! Playing on Farstriders with Pewpewpew (Gnome Warlock) and Ouchdown (Undead Mage). Hit 30 for the first time! About to hit it for the second time. I’m really thinking I might make a go of it, at least get to 55 so I can play a Death Knight when the expansion drops. I’ve rerouted almost all of my look at the internet time to this task, and it’s strange that playing a game can feel productive.
• Braid comes out next week! Finally!
• Worked on a Wii game for a few weeks. Man, the Wii.
• Pretty much stopped programming for fun for reasons I can’t really discuss! I might work something out soon, though.
• I now have a twitter for day to day chatter. I’ll set up a wordpress plugin for it soon.
• Florida is still too hot to inhabit.

Oh god I want this, originally uploaded by bburbank.

I went by the local vespa dealer today. They had one of these in stock, in the color I wanted. Out the door price was kind of high, but I could probably cover it. It was beautiful and the guy said they don’t think they’ll get any more of that model and definitely not in that color. This thing would do 75MPH on the highway, was fully automatic, and was slightly more comfortable than the really expensive chair that I’m sitting in right now.

My ad slogan: “I just want to kill myself and ride a Vespa LXV150 through heaven.”

So Metal Gear Solid 4 is coming out in 3 weeks and I’m more excited for it than I’ve been for a game in a long time. Seriously I’m frothing like a thousand blue planets here. This might just be residual excitement*. It also might be my very real fascination with a possibly perfect ending to the series**. I’m not sure, but in honor of it, I’m playing lots and lots of metal gear. I’m about to finish off Snake Eater, which I’ve been playing on Very Easy so that I can really mess with people. I bought a copy of VR Missions on ebay because it’s apparently one of the best puzzle games ever made. I’m finally going to open up that copy of Portable Ops to give it a try… Anyway, Metal Gear. Or should I say “Metal… Gear?”

* For the record, the game that I was the most excited for pre-release (of all games ever made) was Metal Gear Solid 2, a game where I watched the trailer probably hundreds of times over the course of the way-too-long wait.

** In the first trailer for MGS4, there’s a section where Snake puts a gun in his mouth. I’m hoping the game ends with him doing that, and then a hint appears at the bottom of the screen “Press X to Kill Yourself!”

Here’s some stuff. Some stuff that my kid will not understand that I understood as a kid. Some stuff that, should I mention it, will probably sound like somebody saying “color television” or “talkies” or “programming with punch cards.” It didn’t occur to me how much of this there was going to be.

• Command Prompts (mostly DOS here, but probably Unix too)
• Standard Definition (NTSC) versus High Definition (also, “widescreen”)
• 2D Fighting Games
• Point and Click Adventure Games
• Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games
• Polaroid (RIP)
• C++ (it’s gotta’ happen some day)
• the Gameboy
• Games without tutorials (PLEASE PROVE ME WRONG, VIDEO GAMES)
• The USSR and the Cold War
• Racism (this is pretty nice, actually)
• Compact Discs
• Drive-in Movies
• the Space Program
• Star Wars?

It just occurred to me that Happy Meals will probably be fine, though. They will be the last thing that God destroys before shutting off the lights on his way out. The last bits of life on the earth (probably crabs and bugs) will make their homes in discarded Happy Meals on the beach, the only proof that once I was a child.

It is without question my favorite Zelda game, and probably my favorite Nintendo game. I was thinking about it because the guys at selectbutton were talking about it (again), and I was particularly moved by this post:

There’s something impulsive and wilfully, blithely destructive about Link’s actions in LA. He is just going around destroying the world brick by brick, he knows he is doing this because every dungeon boss says so, but he ignores them completely. While the townspeople treat him as a nice fellow and are completely oblivious of what he is doing to them, and Link doesn’t bother to explain.

This being in part Link’s dream as well, it is natural for him to keep going through the motions of his day-to-day waking life. Beating up monsters, solving block puzzles, finding the entrance to the next dungeon. But the usual positive consequences don’t follow.

Like Shadow of the Colossus, LA exploits the player’s compulsion/obligation to keep completing the gamey tasks to achieve something bittersweet and morally ambiguous.

All this perhaps has something to do with why although LA is thick with calculated gamey bullshit, it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as in modern Zeldas. Likely in part inadvertently, the game integrates the gaminess into its theme. Remember the scene where you are sitting alongside Marin on the beach, gazing into the distance? Instead of a bright blue sky and sea, there is the dull gray of the GB. Marin talks from her heart but you can only answer with either yes or no. When you finish the conversation and she offers to accompany you, you lift Marin above your head like a sword or hookshot and a text box says “you got a Marin!”. Somehow none of this really undermines the poignancy of the scene though, rather it contributes to its unreal, dreamlike aspect.