Ginormo Sword is by no means a good game, but I still spent a few hours transfixed by its siren call of RPG minimalism just the same (while on the clock, naturally).

I’m a big fan of RPGs, the actionier and loot pornier the better, and Ginormo Sword is the genre stripped down to its most minimal essence. “Here are some numbers,” it says, “they represent you. Go; make them higher.”

There’s something inherently compelling about leveling up, raising your stats and finding that perfect piece of equipment. There’s a reason people shell out a monthly fee for the right to grind away in their same-y fantasy MMORPG of choice, filling imaginary bars. This shit is fun, yo.

So Meta It Hurts: Ginormo Sword [Rock Paper Shotgun]

I wanted to do this earlier, honest. But then I had to find a new job, and once that was done, my host of seven years decided it would be super funny to take the site offline for a month and mostly ignore my support tickets.

Oh, well. Timeliness never was this site’s strong suit anyway.

Let’s have it! My favorite games of 2008!

Fallout 3

Fallout 3 does more for the “games are art” argument than supposed art games like Rez and Braid. It’s a game where pain, dread, hopelessness, and wonder are in no short supply, set in a sprawling desolate wasteland ripe for exploration and filled with suffering, humor, and humanity. So much more than just “Oblivion with guns” (though that would’ve been just fine too), Fallout 3 knees the naysayers in the groin and gives us a glimpse of the American dream long after America’s death, delivering the finest roleplaying experience of recent memory. When all is said and done, this may just
be the best game of the generation, and will certainly be the title we’ll still be talking about long after we’ve forgotten about Halo 3.

Burnout Paradise

I’ve never been a fan of open world games. If I wanted to spend long stretches of time traveling between the fun bits, I’d go play an MMO. Burnout Paradise is all fun bits, transporting the fast, frantic gameplay of the Burnout series into a massive open city that never feels as large as it really is thanks to a wealth of hidden treasures and the fact that you’re always going so God damn fast. Every street features multiple challenges and high scores to beat, and every
intersection is an event in a world filled with hidden passageways, alternate routes, and a sense of verticality to rival even Crackdown. Even though the game was released in January of 2008, Criterion has kept people playing year-round with a nonstop stream of free and paid DLC, successfully accomplishing what so few developers and publishers have been unable to do by treating their game as a platform, not a product.

Everyday Shooter

This once PSN-exclusive indie shooter was released on Steam for the cheap in 2008 (so it totally counts), and is even slightly cheaper this weekend. A Robotron-style survival shooter/extended music metaphor, Everyday Shooter features unlockables you’ll be chasing for weeks, levels so distinctly different they feel like entirely new games, and gorgeous stylized visuals. Forget Geometry Wars and its mediocre sequel, this is the downloadable shooter we should all be celebrating.

The DORK Club is now a games developer. If Nibris can get away with being classified as one in the eyes of the gaming “press,” then consarn it, so can we. We’ve got a $100 game engine and everything!

We’re setting the bar high with our ambitious first project: An MMO based on Stephen King’s cherished library of award-winning novels and short stories. Being good friends with Mr. King, I secured the rights for just $19, meaning I got a much better deal than J.J. Abrams.

While the game is obviously still in the very earliest stages of development as we look for cheap out-sourced programmers, today I will reveal the first details of this tentatively titled project, and give you an overview of some of the game’s most exciting and innovative features.

Players can choose from one of four playable classes as they pledge allegiance to The White in the ongoing war against The Red. Gunslingers dual wield deadly six shooters and command cunning hawk pets. Elderly Jedi can teleport short distances as well as control others and lift heavy objects with their minds. Impossibly Mature 12-Year-Olds use
their wise-beyond-their-years maturity to outwit enemies four times their age. And finally, Popular Artists Trying to Escape Their Past walk a thin line between hating and embracing post modernism. Possible expansion classes include the Mildly Racist Magical Negro and the Gentle Retarded Mongoloid.

As players level up (wait until you hear our ding sound!), they will actually transcend to higher levels of The Dark Tower itself, gaining access to more and more of Stephen King’s “other worlds than these,” including locations as diverse as Derry, Maine; Castle Rock, Main; and Haven, Maine.

While our planned partnership with Microsoft fell through with the cancellation of their DC Universe MMO, we’re proud to announce that we’ll be partnering with Turbine to help make our Stephen King MMO the best possible game it can be. Players will be able to transfer their characters between our game and Turbine’s upcoming Harry Potter MMO, and vice versa, at no extra charge.

Our partnership with Turbine also allows us to present every aspect of our game in terms of The Lord of the Rings Online. Ka-tets (like fellowships in LotRO) will allow players to forge everlasting alliances and friendships that grow over time. Using our robust music system (similar to the music system found in The Lord of the Rings Online), players can play brief snippets of popular songs that best represent their current situation. Players will even be able to temporarily take
on one of Randall Flagg’s many persona – the hard case, the walkin’ dude, the dark man, the ageless stranger – and fight against their former allies (not unlike LotRO’s monster play).

Like The Lord of the Rings Online, we also have some exciting raid content planned for our upcoming MMO. Planned raid bosses include Stephen King’s alcoholism, Stephen King’s drug addiction, and Stephen King’s head on a stick (like the last boss of Doom 2—a reference to The Lord of the Rings Online). Stephen King fans will also be excited to hear they’ll be able to face off against the Crimson King himself, standing idly by as a previously unmentioned NPC quickly and easily
defeats the game’s ultimate evil. Following the final boss fight, players can enter The Dark Tower and begin the game again at level 1, but with an additional, class-based musical instrument.

I hope everyone who reads this site will be free for GM duty when the game finally ships. We can all hang out in Stephen King’s virtual house, the game’s equivalent to GM island, and ban any player unfortunate enough to find it.

[EDIT: Bango "vector_black" Skank was here<---]

The Escapist’s Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw tries his best not to focus on Army of Two’s homosexual overtones and tasteless “ripped from the headlines” narrative, instead directing this hatred towards the game’s many bugs and broken gameplay. And while he does a good enough job of pointing out just how inept EA’s QA department is, it just wouldn’t be a Zero Punctuation review without wall-to-wall gay jokes.

Zero Punctuation: Army of Two [The Escapist]

I haven’t been wowed by a video game screenshot in a good long while, probably because most games these days are painted in shades of brown and gray and almost always look worse standing still than they do in motion. But when the first shots of Valkyrie of the Battlefield, whose US title may or may not be Valkyria Chronicles, showed up online, I was immediately enamored with the PS3 game, despite having no intention of ever owning a PS3 at any point in my life and no idea what sort of game it was. Based solely on the alternate universe World War II setting, albeit an adorable, watercolored alternate universe World War II setting, I assumed it was just another mediocre WWII shooter with a very pretty coat of paint.

This lovely, seven-minute HD trailer, however, makes clear that the game is actually a strategy RPG with a decidedly action-oriented bent, allowing for real time conflicts divided into more traditional turns. Of course, all the genre stables such as leveling, tech trees, and unnecessary acronyms for game systems (in this case BLiTZ – Battle of Live Tactical Zones) are still present. Plus, the game seems to have completely thrown realism out the window, allowing for ridiculous boss fights against lance-wielding super soldiers. Always a plus in my book. In fact, the game actually looks… fun. Valkyrie of the Battlefield/Valkyria Chronicles may yet turn out to be the only reason to own a PS3 other than Everyday Shooter and Metal Gear Solid 4.

After a few hours spent scavenging through The Matrix Online’s sound files, which weave a diverse and varied aural tapestry ranging from electrical humming and buzzing to electrical clicking and beeping, MxO’s ding sound effect is now online. Spending time with fifty or so different MMOs in the last couple of weeks has completely eroded whatever goodwill for the genre World of Warcraft earned. By the time I work through the next fifty, simply hearing the abbreviation “MMO” will undoubtedly send me into a frenzied rage. Still, I push on with no regard for my mental health.

Besides personal misery and lifelong trauma, my exhaustive foray into the world of virtual worlds hasn’t been a complete wash. In fact, it’s lead to at least one positive discovery. Or more accurately: A rediscovery. It turns out Guild Wars is certifiably awesome. Who knew? Well, aside from everyone, that is.

I originally bought the game when it first came out in 2004. I was between World of Warcraft addictions at the time, and only wanted a WoW stand-in to stave off my cravings. As such, I found Guild Wars rather unappealing. The instanced world felt relatively empty, the extremely focused character customization relatively limiting. What can I say? I was an idiot.

Guild Wars offers the best aspects of the MMO experience with none its major downsides. There’s no monthly fee, the levelcap is low and easy to reach, and it’s almost always just as easy to overcome difficult challenges alone as with a group. Because every area is instanced, you never need to worry about monsters respawning or having to deal with griefers, as the only players you’ll see outside of town are the ones you’ve agreed to play with. In these instanced combat zones, the game plays like a more traditional multiplayer or even single player title, but closely resembles other highly populated persistent worlds in cities and outposts. Because of this, ArenaNet pushes the possibilities of its instanced areas in ways World of Warcraft never quite manages, allowing for destructible environments and more varied mission objectives, but never sacrificing that oh-so-important sense of community.

One of the game’s strongest and most interesting aspects is its incredible depth of customization. Each character in the game has a primary and secondary profession, and can use any of the huge number of skills available to either one. You end up with access to hundreds of different abilities, but you can only equip eight a time, forcing you to narrowly specialize and define your character’s role. However, unlike in many MMOs where customization decisions are permanent or difficult to reverse, any time you’re in town you can reassign attribute points at minimal cost or swap out skills at will. Experimenting with new builds and playstyles is incredibly fun. As the game progresses and you unlock more varied abilities, your character doesn’t necessarily become more powerful, but instead gains access to more diverse options.

And while I have been enjoying my time rediscovering Guild Wars, truthfully I almost gave up on the game again early on. The game’s initial areas are disappointingly bland and boring, with very little content spread out over large, monster-infested areas. Thankfully I stuck with it, as about the time you reach level 20, the game’s level cap, Guild Wars suddenly becomes simultaneously more focused and less linear, placing an ultimate objective far outside of your grasp and opening up the world for your exploration. Sadly, there’s no World of Ruin-esque event to correspond with the sudden shift in gameplay.

For the time being at least, I plan to stick with Guild Wars a while longer. There’s still a great many missions (and three expansion) ahead of me, and I’ve barely even touched the game’s PvP content, which is supposedly its real focus. I guess all the time spent hyping myself up for Flagship Studios and Hellgate: London would have been better served appreciating ArenaNet and Guild Wars, as the best game from the best Blizzard offshoot developer was right under my nose all along. Still, a game that stands out against the backdrop of intolerable crap that is the MMO genre is hardly noteworthy in and of itself, but Guild Wars is a real rarity: It’s not just a good MMO; it’s a good game. Period.

Lately, I’ve been playing every free (and by definition terrible) MMORPG I can get my hands on. You know why. Imagine my shock and delight, then, when I stumbled across Forum Warz, an amazingly clever (and amazingly free) browser-based MMORPG. I realize the concept of a browser-based MMO that doesn’t make you retch up your own intestines seems like a statistical impossibility, but Forum Warz is the real deal, brother. Besides being fun to play, the game features some phenomenally funny writing in the same league as Barkley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, and demands only a miniscule time commitment. In short: Forum Warz proves being browser-based and completely free to play doesn’t need to affect a game’s quality.

After unlocking and choosing from one of three playable classes – the camwhore, emo kid, and troll, naturally – you spend most of the game completing missions for your sTalk buddies (a Google Talk/AIM equivalent) and pwning forums to earn cred. You see, Forum Warz takes place on a version of the Internet that’s not so different from our own. In fact, it’s shockingly similar. You’ll interact with 60-year-old men pretending to be 15-year-old girls, otaku with very particular fetishes, a Fatal1ty stand-in, and even Anonymous. Thankfully, the game never takes itself very seriously at all, and is overflowing with Internet memes and in-jokes. Forum Warz even includes its own functioning wiki, e-mail system, and (obviously) forums.

Forums stand in for dungeons and threads for individual monsters. You can only visit four forums per day, leaving you with plenty of time to go outside explore Forum Warz’ other features. Besides the titular forums and their warz, there are other games-within-a-game, but I’m currently too noob to have unlocked anything more interesting than the text-based adventure Trapped in the Cupboard or some simple casino games (including rock-paper-scissors!). Forum Warz also has built-in achievements and Klan support, though the Penny Arcade community is currently ruining the latter, as is their nature.

Basically, if you use the Internet, and by visiting this site you more or less confirm you do, and you’ve seen Goatse and 2 Girls 1 Cup or have ever participated in a flame war, Forum Warz is sure to make you smile. And while its strict four forums per day limitation seems incredibly limiting at first, ultimately it’ll prevent you from pissing away your entire day browsing a virtual Internet. That’s what the real Internet is for, after all.

This last weekend I logged on Ventrilo for the first time since August. Last night, then, I spent several bittersweet hours reminiscing about World of Warcraft with both real life friends and people who I know only as their WoW avatars. In recounting our fondest memories of the game, we never discussed boss strategies, PvP victories, or anything related to the actual game itself. Instead, all of our memories revolved around the people who played the game and the community they formed. We discussed guild politics and our relationships with people we have no way of ever contacting again. And we were thankful we no longer felt the urge to enter Azeroth every day, junkies hungry for our next fix, but were also deeply saddened by the fact that the game had changed, and in changing, forced us from it forever. It’s interesting how this game allowed us – people from wildly different backgrounds and places of origin – to build collective memories that we could share and laugh over just as easily as if they had really happened.

Of course, they did really happen. Not here in the flesh and blood world of reality or in the bits and bytes of a server farm in Irvine, California, but in the space between, where the real world and the virtual one met in our imaginations. Here, we built an honest-to-God community on the backbone of a game that wasn’t nearly as complex as it ensured us it was. There were haves and have-nots, celebrities famous and infamous, and a real sense of history on the Dark Iron server. Yes, for us, everything that happened there between orcs and elves was no less real than the bathroom breaks we took between raid bosses.

Perhaps you can understand, then, why the book My Tiny Life by Julian Dibbell is so close to my heart. Released in 1999, the book recounts Dibbell’s virtual life spent in LambdaMOO – think a MUD without those distracting game bits – as he lived through the MOO’s transformation from simple distraction to genuine community in late 1993 and early 1994. Back then, the Internet was frighteningly new territory still being mapped out by its most enterprising pioneers. Despite the medium’s infancy and rough edges, however, Dibbell found in LambdaMOO the very essence of the online experience, and wrote with such clarity, poise, and an honest sense of curiosity about topics we take for granted today – gender issues in a genderless world, the power of text in a world forged entirely from it, the differences between community and society – that anyone with even a passing interest in virtual worlds owes it to themselves to read this book.

Thankfully, you can do so entirely free of charge. Just last month, Dibbell released the book as a free PDF. And while spending hours hunched over a computer screen reading the book’s 300+ pages is far from comfortable, it just feels right. The book deserves to exist in the murky waters between real world object and its virtual representation. At its core, My Tiny Life explores the distinction between real and virtual spaces. Events in real life are written in the style of LambdaMOO’s scrolling text while the happenings of virtual reality are recorded in traditional prose, and as the book progresses, Dibbell’s real and virtual lives continue to overlap, becoming increasingly inseparable.

The book opens with the virtual rape of exu, a longtime player who would eventually rise to be one of LambdaMOO’s most influential political figures. In the aftermath of this violent act against her, the community of LambdaMOO rallies against her attacker, and in doing so places the destiny of the MOO firmly in their hands. Mr. Bungle, the cum-stained clown that publicly raped exu is toaded – the MOO equivalent of execution – and his death marks the beginning of LambdaMOO’s evolution from virtual playground to virtual reality. Dibbell becomes good friends with exu and a handful of other MOOers, spending upwards of twenty-five hours a week logged in LambdaMOO in the name of “research,” but mostly because he wants to. Exu confides in Dibbell that her virtual rape caused her to shed real world tears, and Dibbell comes to realize that LambdaMOO is just as real as his New York apartment.

Throughout the book, Dibbell provides his insight on the issues facing the digital age, waxing philosophical on virtual sex, economics, and politics. Feeling he’s at a watershed moment in history – virtual or otherwise – Dibbell sets about leaving his mark on this virtual space, even if it may not survive to see the next millennium. He begins construction on the Garden of Forking Paths, a virtually physical representation of the I Ching, an ancient Chinese book of wisdom and fate. He goes to great lengths to decipher LambdaMOO’s tangled history, tracing the existence of virtual worlds back to the first maps and board games and detailing the events of LambdaMOO’s Schmoo War, but also places the MOO and the sort of text-based online spaces it represents in the context of history itself. As one former player describes it to him, the MOOers of the early ‘90s were not unlike the first explorers of the New World, blazing the trails that the journalists and documenters like Dibbell would later follow.

Throughout My Tiny Life, Dibbell provides valuable commentary on lives both virtual and real, and the struggle in leading one of each. His insight hits particularly close to home, but he writes with such clarity that even someone unaware of exactly what the Internet is – as many readers undoubtedly were at the time of the book’s first publishing – will understand the complex issues at stake in building a virtual world out of thin air. This is a book that should be required reading for anyone using the Internet today. Though many of its questions have been asked many times over since its publishing, I’ve never found better answers than the ones Dibbell provides.

LambdaMOO is still online and operational, though not nearly as many people call it home today as in 1993. Connecting to the MOO is as simple as opening TELNET and inputting the address. No new laws have been proposed since 2005, and during my time online this morning I could only find a couple of AFK users, though admittedly, the interface is too archaic for my GUI-indoctrinated mind to fully grasp. Stepping foot in the virtual living room of LambdaMOO described at so many points throughout the book for myself, I could almost sense the power the place must have held over a decade ago, as college students and corporate researchers found themselves face-to-face with a fully-realized virtual world. I’m reminded of the first time I stepped foot into Azeroth, an orc green in skin and sensibility, unaware of the real power a virtual place could hold over me and forty or so of my closest friends.

Watching Lost every week during its live airing isn’t the most ideal way to experience the series. It’s a show made for DVD, after all. Still, like the 16 million or so other junkies who subject themselves to seven-day withdrawals between episodes rather than wait out the year between series sets and the uninterrupted binges they bring, I thank ABC for dolling each forty-four minute dose of sweet relief. And while the real world gap allows us to pour over screen grabs and decipher text and images not-so-subtly hidden in each frame, Lost is a show that demands to be watched from start to finish with as little downtime between episodes as possible. The constant complaints about its “slow” pacing are proof enough of that.

Us hopeless addicts, then, should be thankful for Previously On Lost, a MySpace band that recaps last weeks’ episode in song. These tunes go beyond just summarizing the events of last week’s episode, however, and include clever in-jokes that assume you’re intimately familiar with the series and its mythology. Lost’s own “Previously On…” segments before each episode are never quite enough to accurately prepare the inattentive viewer for the inevitable references to years-old subplots and allusions to complex scientific theory. The songs work both as a reminder of what’s come before, and as a welcome burst of new Lost content halfway through that weekly wait between episodes. If these songs don’t end up on the season 4 DVD set as some sort of extra, clearly ABC just doesn’t care about the show’s scarily die-hard fans that keep it on the air.

Online gaming show Consolevania died a month ago. There are now more links to dead sites on the sidebar than live ones.

The Escapist and Rock, Paper, Shotgun both put up fitting tributes when it happened, but I was too busy not refreshing my RSS feeds to notice. There’s also a thread on the show’s official forums filled with heartfelt goodbyes and sentimental nostalgia to spare.

Rather than repeating what’s already been said elsewhere, I’ll just say this: I stumbled onto the first episode of Consolevania shortly after it hit the internet in 2004, and though initially I could only decipher maybe 50% of what was being said thanks to (what seemed at the time to be) the hosts’ thick Scottish accents, it was immediately clear that Consolevania possessed the one thing every other gaming show had lacked — passion (and talent!).

Watching Consolevania and videoGaiden, the BBC series it eventually became, lead to me playing some of my favorite games of the last five years: God Hand, F-Zero X, Narbacular
Drop (the game that would become Portal) Gitaroo Man, Bujingai, Earth Defence Force 2017, and Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, to name a few. And for that, on top of the hours of entertainment the show itself provided, I’ll be forever grateful.

While there may never be any new episodes of Consolevania, the “cv” folder on my desktop will remain the most treasured 9 GB on my hard drive.