Oh, look! Two ding sound effects from Mike Brust’s favorite MMORPGs with terrible box art have found their way online.

…And that’s it for today, I’m afraid. Expect the same sort of new content tomorrow and Sunday, just without worthless reminders here on the index.

Iron Lore Entertainment, the uber-talented development studio behind Titan Quest, Dawn of War: Soulstorm, and their now-canceled unnamed game described as “Titan Quest meets God of War meets Oblivion” has closed their doors, citing “several unrelated events … which resulted in Iron Lore being unable to secure funding for its next project” as the reason for their sudden closure.

While working on Ding! The Sound of Progress!, I decided early on that Diablo 2 would be the only Diablo-clone included. The only thing keeping it from being a “real” MMORPG, after all, is a persistent world and a monthly fee, but if Guild Wars is considered an MMO despite not having either, then Diablo 2 is too, goshdarnit. But now I’ve gone ahead and included Titan Quest’s ding sound effect anyway, as a sort of pathetically inadequate memorial to an amazing developer whose life was cut tragically short.

Iron Lore was supposed to be one of the all time greats, held in the same regard as the Blizzards, Relics, and Valves of the world. Any developer that can produce a game as fantastic as Titan Quest on their first try was clearly destined for great things. At least we can sleep soundly knowing that each and every Iron Lore employee will find a home at a top tier developer and will continue their legacy of creating—Fuck it. It’s all over. Nothing but simultaneous console releases and monthly fees from here on in. Pack your bags; PC gaming is dead.

After a week of dealing with some of the worst video games ever made, I now have a whole lot of MMORPG trial accounts, a couple dozen level 2 characters, more sound editing software than I ever thought I needed, and a brand spanking new feature: Ding! The Sound of Progress!

Before you start bitching about your MMO of choice not being included, please notice my pathetic attempt to be clever by including a “patch notes” section. Obviously, I’ll continue to add new ding sound effects as I come by them, though I won’t be pursuing them at the same breakneck pace I have been for the past week. There’s something less than satisfying about spending 50 hours to produce less than two minutes of sound effects. I have, however, taken a note from the developers whose games inspired the feature, and have already begun work on the first “content patch.” Expect 1.1 – The Mike Brust Special, featuring EVE Online and Neocron, to hit sometime in the next few days.

Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to spend the next seven hours playing Guild Wars like a good little addict.

I’ve been downloading every MMORPG I can get my hands on for a top secret project that’ll hopefully go live some time this week. These days, “PC gaming” is more or less synonymous with “publishers drooling over World of Warcraft’s profits,” as every major company pushes to get their WoW-killer out the door, stretching the limited MMORPG playerbase over more and more virtual worlds. And why not? MMORPGs are licenses to print money, even the bad ones—and let’s be honest here, 94.34% of them are insufferable garbage. MMORPGs are virtually piracy-proof, require monthly fees to play, and their server and bandwidth costs aren’t nearly as high as publishers hope you believe. If you can make a living selling virtual currency, or even farming that virtual currency, you can make a God’s honest killing on even a barely successful MMO.

Yet, despite the genre’s transition to the mainstream of gaming and its position as the poster child for PC gaming, little has changed since EverQuest, Ultima Online, and the MUDs before that. These are games designed to feature a lot of content that takes a lot of time. It’s funny, then, that the free MMORPG trial, the frayed end of the rope publishers use to string new customers through several thousand hours of life-destroying addiction, matches the content of their games so perfectly. Funny in that “how and why do people stand for this” sort of way.

My hard drive is no doubt a fragmented mess at this point, having been on the receiving end of over a dozen MMORPG installations and uninstallations over the last several days. Every MMORPG follows that same installation process: (1) download 2 GB file, in either .exe or .zip flavors; (2) extract 3 GB of install files from initial download; (3) install 4 GB game; (4) spend upwards of an hour downloading years of patches. It seems to me like there’s more than a few ways to optimize this procedure, like oh, I don’t know, including those 500 MBs of patches with the original client for starters. But MMORPG players are gluttons for punishment. This is a genre that until recently featured interfaces so unusably terrible, players defended the acrobatic keystrokes and developer-mind-reading telepathy required to use them for baring those unable to decipher them at the virtual gates. The only MMORPG that offers a free trial experience that functions as something other than a metaphor for rape is, unsurprisingly, World of Warcraft, whose small client streams content as you need it, and doesn’t require a single patch. It’s no wonder they have ten times the subscribers as their closest competition.

However, not all MMORPGs offer free trials. Typically, when you buy a PC game you own it now and forever; if you really want to play SimCity Societies a decade from now, you’re more than welcome to. But when you purchase an MMORPG, you’re merely paying for the right to log on and pay your monthly dues. If you don’t like the game, you’re left with a very expensive (and very ineffectual) coaster. Surprisingly, many of the MMORPGs that don’t offer free trials are the ones that need them most: City of Heroes with its unique, comic book setting; The Matrix Online with its love of tradition and its upholding of the crappy Matrix video game legacy; and Vanguard, if only to prove that it’s not quite as unplayable as everyone claims. Truthfully, there’s a lot of sense in not offering a free trial in the first few months of an MMO’s life, as the influx of tourists degrade the experience for early adopters. Still, when your entire business model is built around trapping unknowing players in a deep pit of addiction and then extorting a regular fee from them so they can continue to enjoy their drug of choice, it only makes sense to give them the chance to get hooked in the first place.

Basically, what I’m saying is this: Spending four hours just to extract a single sound file from an MMORPG is unnecessarily painful. If I was actually interested in playing any of these, I’d have lost whatever whim inspired me to download them in the first place between the time I finished extracting install files for twenty minutes to save someone a few bucks on their bandwidth bill and confirming my e-mail address.

Oh, well. At least my trek through the poo-colored hills of MMORPGland allowed me to rediscover Guild Wars, which, it turns out, is excellent. Shame I was too busy wishing it was World of Warcraft back in 2005.

Ye Olde Inn Music Database is now a full order of magnitude more user friendly thanks to a newly implemented flash player. Go, enjoy the box art and shrill, streaming sound effects. After all, this is the very thing the Internet is for.

Forget it. I’ll just stick the damn thing right here too:

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.

The Internet is specially suited to certain things. Unnecessarily detailed manifestos on subjects of no particular importance are one of its greatest strengths. See: The six years of content buried away at this very site. Perhaps you can understand, then, why I took it upon myself to create the most comprehensive CD/DVD list for Monster Rancher 4 that the Internet had ever seen. Very few CD/DVD lists exist for the game, partially because it’s five years old and nobody cares any more, but also because not many people ever cared in the first place. Mostly, however, it’s because there’s no great effort involved in sticking a CD or DVD in the PS2’s drive and watching a polygonal monster come bounding out of it yourself, always to the delight and shock of the kindly shrine attendant. Only the most lazy have any need for a list that saves them twenty seconds of work.

Still, at no place on the whole wide Internet is there a list of which monsters are born of which M*A*S*H DVDs, most likely because I’m the only person on the planet that owns both Monster Rancher 4 and every season of M*A*S*H. If anyone were to finally right this wrong, why shouldn’t I be the one to do it? I’ve had no trouble wasting more time on more useless projects in the past. See again: The six years of content buried away at this very site.

It turns out I probably should have read my own Monster Rancher 4 review. I’ve spent the last two days trying to earn the last two breeder badges, and with them the right to train any monster that could possibly spring to life from any disc. But, no more. The game is just too damned repetitive for me to put up with any longer, even though my army of Garus are nearly ready to take the final tournament circuit by storm. I could certainly just post what I’ve already accomplished (in a .txt file only usable by dorkclub.com and gamefaqs.com, naturally), but the obsessive-compulsive completionist in me could never settle for birthing the most thorough Monster Rancher 4 CD/DVD list on the Internet if it didn’t also include the monster hidden on the Final Fantasy Chronicles version of Final Fantasy IV. Incidentally, I’ve had Scott Brust’s copy of Final Fantasy IV since 2003 when I first needed it for the Inn Music Database, though I suspect he’s had my copy of Monster Rancher 2 far longer.

Discouraged, I drowned my sorrows and ever-present sense of failure in the Internet, eventually finding solace in the screenplay for an unproduced version of the Watchmen movie written by Sam Hamm. Written in 1989, the script has recently become relevant again thanks to Zack Snyder’s upcoming Watchmen movie and 20th Century Fox’s claim to Warner Bros. that, “hey, we actually own the rights to that.” Anyway, like Monster Rancher 4, Hamm’s Watchmen script is terrible and I was unable to finish it. At least I spent the better part of a week with Monster Rancher 4, though. The Watchmen screenplay lost my attention after about twenty minutes.

And with good reason. Hamm’s version starts in 1976, where Watchmen’s cast of characters have formed a superteam of superheroes called, wait for it, the Watchmen. I’m cringing even as I type that. His script opens with a terrorist attack against the Statue of Liberty, where these Watchmen ineptly bungle the NYPD’s peaceful resolution with the statue-threatening bomb-wielders. The sequence features such cinematic gems as:

The three TERRORISTS fall into a tight cluster at the base of a long metal stairway. One of them grabs the JANITOR, holds a gun to his head.

TERRORIST I
I’M NOT JOKING!!

The COMEDIAN shrugs: okay. He lifts his rifle and fires TWO SILENCED SHOTS directly into the JANITOR’s gut. The old man’s body jerks twice and he slumps to the floor, stone dead.

The TERRORISTS stand there aghast. For an instant they’re too stunned to shoot. The COMEDIAN breaks into a dopey grin –

COMEDIAN
The joke’s on you.

– and opens fire with a look of VICIOUS PLEASURE on his face. As the saying goes . . . it’s nice to see a man who enjoys his work.

This poster child for missing the point eventually ends with Dr. Manhattan rewriting history so that he never exists. A trio of characters then find themselves in our very own version of New York circa 1986. Here, of course, they’re nothing more than characters in a book called Watchmen. Clever in that ‘makes your brain want to jump out of your skull so as to never experience such stupefying pain again’ sort of way.

David “Solid Snake” Hayter’s own take on the unfilmable comic book is leagues better, allegedly, even garnering an indifferent shrug from Alan Moore, which is his highest honor given to adaptations of his work. Zack Snyder’s movie is supposedly using Hayter’s script, in whole or in part, and Snyder himself seems hellbent on capturing the essence of the original book on film, even going so far as to film the Tales of the Black Freighter story-within-a-story as a DVD extra. Sadly, like unhealthily comprehensive Monster Rancher 4 CD/DVD lists, you just can’t find such things on the Internet.

Tomorrow: More stories of failed feature ideas disguised as content.

I’ll admit that the only reason I was ever interested in the Monster Rancher series to begin with was because of that damned cartoon. While the series peaked with Monster Rancher 2, I still firmly believe in my heart of hearts that it’s capable of great things. Sadly, the chances of Tecmo giving it the Ninja Gaiden or Dead or Alive treatment so the next entry could be something other than an overpriced budget title are about as good as humanity ever again coming up with a character as awesome as Suezo.

So, while we wait for the inevitably terrible Monster Rancher 5 (or Monster Rancher Online to finish its beta and see release outside of Japan), why not enjoy a still-steaming Monster Rancher 4 review. Comprehensive M*A*S*H DVD/monster list to follow shortly.