World of Warcraft role-players will no longer need to worry about players with names like “Iownu,” “Halomasterchief,” and “Vindiesal” distracting them from the game’s fantasy setting. NameViolation, a new WoW interface addon for the latest version of the game, allows players on RP servers to quickly report character, guild, and pet names that violate Blizzard’s naming policy by right clicking on the offender.
The addon will automatically generate a GM-friendly message based on the specific rule the offending name violates. Because addons can’t page GMs directly, you only need to copy-paste the text into a GM ticket and patiently wait for “Xhaxorx” the night elf hunter to be renamed “Legeles.” Ah, sweet justice.
Blizzard recently implemented a similar system that allows player to automatically report players for spamming with a simple right click. While the developer has always policed spamming and gold selling to the full extent of their abilities, lesser issues like naming policy violations, which were heavily monitored at the game’s launch, have gone mostly ignored. It’s interesting to see the RP community beginning to enforce the game’s rules themselves.
I’ve never particularly understood all the love The Princess Bride gets. I guess it’s fun enough in that post modern, lets-dissect-a-fairy-tale sort of way. Maybe if I actually sat down and watched the thing from beginning to end, something I’ve yet to do despite the amount of airtime the movie gets on AMC, I’d finally understand what all the praise is about.
Yesterday WorldWide Biggies, an unfortunately named company that produces flash games, webisodes, and “gametoons,” announced that a demo for its upcoming download-only True Love and High Adventure: The Official Princess Bride Game would appear on the fourth DVD version of the film. Given the “developer’s” track record, the game is almost certainly little more than a simple flash affair, so it should have no problem living up to the low standards set by Scarface, Reservoir Dogs, Heat, or any other of the movies that have no business being video games. Thankfully, Majesco aborted the Taxi Driver game last year, saving Jodie Foster the humiliation of staring in a terrible video game until the inevitable Silence of the Lambs survival horror title hits the Xbox 720.
Game demos for video games nobody asked for aside, this newest DVD release of The Princess Bride at least has a completely awesome cover. In fact, I’m half-tempted to buy the DVD based on the novelty of the cover alone. I figure I could get two hours worth of entertainment from the film itself, several more from whatever special features are present on the disc, and a few weeks worth of joy from twisting and turning the case in my hands. Seriously, it’s rad.
I haven’t been this tempted to buy a product based on its box alone since Kororinpa, and in this case I actually own a device capable of reading the discs inside the packaging.
Konami has gone to great lengths to protect the integrity of its franchises in recent years. Sure, they’ve completely mishandled the Legend of the Mystical Ninja series (Ganbare Goemon, if you’re a “core” gamer) and there’s that large, brown smudge on their otherwise fine smelling track record called Every Nintendo 64 Game The Company Released, but Konami learns from its mistakes. After disasters like Legacy of War and C: The Contra Adventure, Konami used the Playstation 2 as the staging ground for a Contra comeback with Shattered Soldier and Neo Contra. The former is a Treasure-developed boss fight hell; the latter is a wacky Smash TV clone with poor controls. Though the upcoming Contra 4 looks to be all flavors of awesome with a side of “it’s about damn time,” the PS2 games, for all their faults, should not be so quickly forgotten. Today, let’s not forget Neo Contra.
Upon first starting the game, players are immediately deafened by the sort of blaring, electronic video game rock that hasn’t been in vogue since the days of the Ocean action platformer. In fact, in a lot of ways, Neo Contra harkens back to a simpler time when video game heroes were muscle-bound meatheads with full heads of hair and a game’s story was written entirely by a Japanese level designer and localized by a PR flunky. Bill Rizer, star of the original Contra, is awoken from cryogenic sleep and teamed with a gun-totting samurai named Jaguar. Together, they must kill the four members of Neo Contra, an elite force that includes the likes of Animal Contra, a pit bull in WWI-style military uniform complete with a Pickelhaube, and the beautiful but deadly Pheromone Contra.
Cutscenes bridge levels, highlight boss fights, and feature an over-the-top absurdity reminiscent of Karamri Damacy. Bill and Jaguar exchange deathly serious dialogue with hilariously named characters such as Mystery G. Our heroes travel between levels by blasting themselves out of volcanoes, riding in the warheads of space missiles, or saddling up on armored dinosaurs. One of the levels even has the characters running along helicopter blades, tiptoeing with alarming speed in order to keep up with their rotating perch. Neo Contra takes the sillier elements that have always been present in the Contra series and ratchets them up to the extreme. Players battle four-legged tongues, surf on torpedoes, and blast boulder-riding robots with arching beams of electricity. This overwhelming, seemingly random wackiness permeates the entire experience, keeping players grinning at both its sheer stupidity and inspired brilliance.
Unfortunately, the game doesn’t play as well as it looks. Neo Contra is not a side-scrolling shooter like most entries in the Contra series, its PS2 brother in arms Shattered Soldier included. Instead, Neo Contra is a top-down shooter in the same vein as Robotron 2084 or Smash TV (or, more accurately, the top-down levels in Contra 3). That’s all well and good; I love a top-down shooter as much as the next guy. Hell, I even played through Robotron 64. But rather than feature directional firing and aiming via use of the second analog stick or face buttons themselves, players are given only a single fire button that shoots in the same direction they are facing. This is bad. To make up for this, Konami instead allows players to use the L2 button to lock the direction they’re facing – allowing the D-pad or analog stick to be used for strafing – or to use R2 to lock their character in place, thereby allowing for 360 degree aiming. Neither system works particularly well, and players will find most of their deaths coming from enemies standing directly next to them as they are left with no sufficiently quick method to eliminate these threats. Such a glaring control oversight is particularly damning given that Konami’s own Contra 3, released 12 years earlier, at least lets players use the shoulder buttons to rotate their characters, allowing for greatly simplified aiming. And only two of Contra 3’s six levels were top-down.
Thankfully, Neo Contra is a very easy game. Too easy, in fact. Actually, were it not for the lackluster controls, dying in Neo Contra would be a near impossibility. Still, the game is playable, even if its control options prevent it from stranding on equal footing with other games in its genre. There’s a lot to unlock – weapons, playable characters, new levels – but unless you’re completely won over by the game’s presentation, or at least enough to stomach the poor controls, there’s very little incentive to do so.
I promised myself I’d never write a “watch this embedded YouTube video” update. We can all agree that YouTube and its Web 2.0 ilk are all mostly terrible. Still, for all the boring webcam bloggers, AMVs, and “this video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by ________s,” YouTube serves nicely as a dumping ground and archive for the bandwidth and webspace-challenged. And it’s the only place you can find a solid hour of cartoon theme songs. Web 2.0 is redeemed.
Here we have a solid thirty minutes of ’90s cartoon themes:
I’ve always had a special place in my cynical heart for the cartoon theme song. More so than television themes in general, the cartoon theme song effectively condenses the content of an entire series into a catchy, easily-memorizable jingle. And memorize them I did. There’s something uniquely appealing about being able to express your unwarranted love for a piece of stupid syndicated children’s programing through song. So watch, sing along, and enjoy a nostalgia overload (even more so if you’ve already seen these videos in the year they’ve been online).
Later today: more YouTube fun. It’ll be video game related.
As a sickly obsessed Stephen King fan, I felt obligated to read Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box out of a perverted sense of loyalty. Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son. Heart-Shaped Box is his first novel.
In his introduction to ‘Salem’s Lot, his second published novel, Stephen King writes about the difference between “good trash” and “bad trash,” a difference first taught to him by his mother. Though his mother would die before the book was finished, King knows she would think of ‘Salem’s Lot as trash, but hopes she would recognize it as good trash.
Heart-Shaped Box is trash, but it is not bad trash. Though comparisons between Joe Hill and his father aren’t really fair, they’re unavoidable. Heart-Shaped Box bears such a striking similarity to an early Stephen King (or Richard Bachman) novel, that it is virtually indistinguishable from either. The novel is a simple and effective horror story that stands toe-to-toe with many of King’s own.
Hill’s novel features a protagonist ripped straight from the pages of his father’s work. Both a down-homey everyman and a famous popular artist dealing with the personal demons of his past – two of King’s favorite archetypes – Judas “Jude” Coyne is an “aging death-metal rock god” (so sayeth the book’s jacket) with a fascination for the darker elements of human nature. A collector of macabre artifacts – a South American snuff film, a cookbook for cannibals, sketches by John Wayne Gacy – Jude buys a dead man’s suit, ghost included, from an Internet auction site (not eBay). He gets more than he bargained for when the ghost turns out to be the real deal and begins stalking Jude, threatening him with his bladed hypnotist’s pendulum. Following a foreshadowed discovery of the power of animal familiars, Jude and his live-in girlfriend Georgia (one of many female companions named after their state of origin) are forced into a supernatural cross-country chase to discover the mysterious origin of their spiritual assassin.
What follows is an engrossing, and often genuinely chilling, story of redemption. Quickly moving beyond its initial premise, Heart-Shaped box is as moving as it is thrilling, as charming as it is disturbing. Written with the same sort of crudely poignant bluntness King himself employs (check the dorkclub.com archives!), Hill quickly establishes a welcoming, conversational rhythm intercut with episodes of gruesome violence and bodily harm that upset even my desensitized stomach. The novel has no delusions of grandeur: this is a horror story designed to appeal to our baser instincts, and it does so with alarming effectiveness. This is the sort of book that is easy to pick up and lose hours to without even blinking.
Given the novel’s leading man, Hill saturates his book with heavy metal references. His characters often liken events in their lives to songs they know (just like in a Stephen King story!), but here the songs and bands referenced are all of the death rock variety. Though initially charming, the constant intercutting of real musicians with the fictional events of the novel and the romanticization of Life On The Road wear thin quickly. Also annoying is the fact that every minor character instantly recognizes Judas Coyne and needs to share their opinion about his music with him. Honestly, how many death-metal gods could you recognize walking down the street?
Still, the concept of a horror-obsessed shock rocker faced with the real version of the content of his stage performance makes for an interesting premise. The book is certainly a better piece of genre fiction than any of Rob Zombie’s movies. And though it makes for a great read, and is an undeniably impressive debut novel, its similarities to a Stephen King novel in both style and content are rather unfortunate. I love Stephen King, but the world already has one. Joe Hill is obviously a talented guy, but hopefully with his next book he’ll prove that an apple can fall further from the tree.
Acceptable TV premieres tonight on VH1 and I’m legitimately excited about it. Created by Channel 101 creators (more or less) and featuring an all-star lineup of Channel 101 contributers, it’ll be the first time I’ve seen most of these people in something other than a 320×240 Quicktime window.
Much like Channel 101 itself, Acceptable TV allows viewers to vote on mini TV shows, in this case no longer than two and half minutes, in order to dictate next week’s lineup. However, whereas only viewers at Channel 101’s live showings can participate, the entire Internet gets to vote on Acceptable TV’s shows. At the moment, the Acceptable TV website is saturated with big ideas and very little clarity as to how, exactly, any of these ideas are going to be executed. Exactly which contributed shows are eligible for the VH1 airing and how (or even if) shows return after winning a week aren’t even addressed on the site. As it stands at the moment, the website is basically a bad YouTube rip off, but all signs point to the actual television program having at least some value. Hopefully it can overcome obscurity and a poor time slot and find success. The people behind it honestly deserve it.
In the early nineties a friendly, non-threatening man named Chris Eddy punctuated our cartoons in the greater Sacramento area. A local celebrity of sorts, he was KTXL Fox 40’s Fox Kids Club host, promoting health and safety between episodes of X-men and Eek! The Cat. Despite his rather limited influence, he became part of the local zeitgeist, known as much for his TV hosting gig as his regular appearances at local zoos, water parks, and Fairy Tale Town. Then, just as suddenly as he came, Chris Eddy disappeared back into the air waves.
LeadPipe insisted the man died of AIDS. I tended to imagine a homosexuality-related meltdown. Regardless of any personal theories, however, the man had disappeared from our television sets over a decade ago. He continued to pop up in conversation every year or so, but nobody seemed to know what had become of him. Where had Chris Eddie gone? And where is he now?
Because I am a man of limited skills and resources, I approached this problem the same way I approach all of my problems - with the Internet. The usual suspects proved uncharacteristically useless. Wikipedia yielded no results, and IMDB provides but a single, nondescript page belonging to potentially anyone (named Chris Eddy). Google image searching was fruitless while traditional Google searching technology produced only marginally readable comments to poorly written nostalgic articles that will not be linked here.
And then a break! Xanga user Idbriq works for KTXL, or at least was working for them on March 12, 2006. He writes about wearing a Fox Kids Club sweatshirt signed by Chris Eddy and the discovery that Audrey, the station manager, is married to the man. Further interneting leads to this page, listing a Audrey Farrington as the Vice President/GM of KTXL. Using this name and PURE LUCK, I stumbled upon the ZoomInfo People Directory, which just happens to have an entry for Chris Eddy (and a hundred other Chris Eddys). Here it lists Chris as the host of Cyberlife, Kids Wanna Know, and KTXL’s Fox Kids Club. It’s our Chris Eddy!
Though its single source is a mini-bio from the 2003 Sacramaneto Web Awards, for which Chris Eddy was a judge, it acts as the very Rosetta Stone to Chris Eddy’s life post-Fox Kids Club. It turns out IMDB’s Chris Eddy was the very man I was after all along. And in 2003, Chris Eddy was working as an on-air reporter and webmaster for KTXL rival KCRA (where the news comes first), and this cached article from 2004 shows that Chris Eddy was an online producer a year later.
Whether or not he still works at KCRA, or is even involved in broadcasting, is a mystery. Despite reaching millions of children that are now nostalgic 20-something Internet users, information concerning Chris Eddy is scant online. As far as I can tell, not a single image or video of the man has ever been uploaded. Still, we now know a great deal of Chris Eddy’s fate after the Fox Kids Club no longer needed a host, and I never had to leave my bedroom. Sometimes I love the Internet.
I spent the better part of two years playing World of Warcraft. My account expired on February 3 of this year and I do not intend to renew it. Ever. Leaving Azeroth behind, my feelings on the game are divided. On one hand, World of Warcraft is one of my life’s premiere gaming experiences. On the other hand, for two years World of Warcraft has been my life.
Blizzard puts a great deal of effort into convincing both current players and would-be players alike that WoW is something other than it is. The game is marketed and discussed in such a way as to paint an image of a very casual, laid back gaming experience. This representation is accurate up to a point, but the real meat of World of Warcraft – representing the most development time, post-release content, and volume of playtime – stands in direct contrast to this casual-friendly image.
As one begins to play the game, they find themselves within a massive, beautiful world filled with content perfectly suited to short 15-minute bursts or all day marathons. The game is subdivided into small, manageable, and often overlapping chunks: the world is divided into continents, continents are divided into zones, and the zones themselves are divided into smaller, named sections often revolving around some sort of landmark. Leveling, the game’s primary goal at this point, is likewise cut into bite size pieces. Levels are quick and offer a plethora of rewards and incentives at their end. 20 “bubbles” displayed near the bottom of the UI measure progress, filling as players receive experience from discovering locations, killing monsters, and completing quests. Players are always doing quests. Quests can be simple A-to-B affairs or epic, sprawling multi-zone adventures. Often times they overlap, requiring different objectives within the same subzone, or slowly funnel towards larger objectives. Breadcrumb quests send players to new areas while other quests teach players new play mechanics. The game is simple and inviting, comprised of feats requiring only small investments that reinforce and grow upon one another and encourage players to complete one more quest, travel to one more zone.
Though the leveling process here is far quicker than in many other MMOs, it still requires a sizeable investment from the player; it takes the average player 15 days worth of playtime to reach the levelcap. That’s 360 hours. At first, this seems to be the entirety of the game. With so much care and love poured into every inch of every zone, how could anything waiting for players at the levelcap match the leveling experience?
In reality, for the players World of Warcraft is really designed for, leveling comprises but a tiny minority of the total play experience. WoW’s casual-friendly adventure towards the levelcap is really just the game’s tutorial, teaching players how to best utilize their character’s skills and abilities alone or in a group. World of Warcraft’s core gameplay mechanic isn’t leveling. It’s raiding.
And just what, exactly, is raiding? Technically, any group with more than five members ceases to be a party and instead becomes a raid group. Realistically, a raid group consists of either 20 or 40 players. For this discussion I’m going to focus on 40-man raids, specifically 40-man raid instances. They are, after all, the core focus of the game for both developers and players.
Raiding is, in all honesty, a ton of fun. It’s fun for the same reason being part of a team in anything is fun: getting better through practice and ultimately overcoming obstacles and realizing goals that once seemed far out of reach. It’s fun because the challenges provided are incredibly difficult, not just because the creatures that inhabit these raid dungeons have millions of hit points and do thousands of damage, which they do, but because they require a great deal of skill, coordination, and organization to overcome. The boss fights especially are amazingly clever, the sort of gaming experiences that would be heralded as noteworthy if any sizable amount of players actually played them.
Unfortunately, the price of entry for these experiences is unreasonably high, and because of this, only a relatively small percentage of the player base is able to enjoy them. Outside of the typical requirements for World of Warcraft (decent computer, internet connection, monthly fee, why am I even typing this?), raiding demands far more of the players. Obviously, you need 39 other people ready and willing to do the instance when you’re ready and willing to do it. However, 39 random people won’t do. You need 39 other players who are skilled at the game and will form a raid group with the correct class composition. Raiding requires a great deal of organization, so you need a guild that can support this raid – lead it, make sure players pull their own weight and show up when they’re supposed to. Finally, and most importantly, you need time. To say that raiding needs dedication is an understatement.
The problem largely stems from the fact that World of Warcraft is an MMORPG that requires a monthly fee. Granted, that monthly fee pays for a multitude of additional content, but Blizzard needs players to keep paying. When initially learning a raid instance, it’s not uncommon to spend ten or more hours in the instance during the week on top of any time spent farming for materials or items needed for the raid. Though a sizable investment requiring a great deal of organization, such a time requirement is still manageable. However, all raid instances are on raid timers, meaning anything raid groups accomplish within the instances is saved until Tuesday morning at about 3:00 AM at which point the raid timers, and the instances themselves, all reset. Because a typical 40-man instance yields about 25 items, which are dictated by drop rates and loot tables, these instances need to be run multiple times in order to properly gear up the raid party for future challenges. Each player has up to 16 item slots to fill. So, given perfectly ideal drop conditions, it would take a raid group consisting of the exact same 40 players (zero attrition DOES NOT HAPPEN. EVER.) 26 weeks (that’s 26 full clears) of a single raid instance before they no longer need to run it. However, players do not simply run a single raid instance for 26 straight weeks before moving on to the next challenge. Instead, after one (or a few) full clears, the raid starts on the next raid instance in the progression while continuing to farm loot from any previous raid instances. World of Warcraft is a game that demands you play it constantly in order to play it at all.
There are four 40-man instances in the game (Molten Core (MC), Blackwing Lair (BWL), Temple of Ahn’Qiraj (AQ40), and Naxxaramas (Naxx)) and it’s common to have guilds running at least three of these instances at the same time. This sort of insane time requirement is necessary in order to continue to progress through World of Warcraft beyond the initial leveling. Let’s look at my human priest character for some numbers. My priest was both my first Alliance character and my first raiding character. He joined a guild that had only killed the fist boss of MC and helped them progress all the way to the eighth boss of Naxx, becoming the second-best guild on the server. He took about 15 days of playtime to level to 60 and about 6 days of playtime to level from 60 to 70. His total time played was 108 days or 2600 hours. That means he spent about 2000 hours raiding. 2000 hours playing through the same raid instances, downing the same bosses with the same people over and over again for a little under a year. Since August 2005 – when I first began really playing World of Warcraft with any sort of seriousness – 27% of my time, be it waking, sleeping, or otherwise, was spent playing World of Warcraft.
Shortly after World of Warcraft was first released I declared it Blizzard’s best game. I still stand by this statement, based largely on the quality of the raiding experience. Raiding is a blast. Honestly. Sure, it consumed my very existence, but only because I allowed it to. A huge portion of my favorite gaming moments comes from these raid instances, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. Blizzard has crafted a masterpiece. Dying a dozen times to the same boss, seeing your group edge ever closer to victory, and finally watching it die to a roar of cheers over Ventrillo is exhilarating like nothing else in gaming. However, working through the same encounter for the 20th time just to get the last few items the raid still needs is boring like nothing else in gaming. This inane time requirement, existing only to pad playtime and perpetuate monthly fee payments, represents a cost of entry that is far too high for most World of Warcraft players, preventing them from ever seeing the real World of Warcraft.
By Blizzard’s own admission in a May, 2006 interview with the New York Times Jeff Kaplan, lead designer for World of Warcraft estimated that “around 25 percent” of WoW players had killed Ragnaros (the final boss of MC, the first raid instance) and that “15 percent” had downed Nefarian (the final boss of BWL, the second raid instance). These numbers are so low not for a lack of desire among players – our guild saw a constant stream of applicants desperate to raid with us – but because the casual players Blizzard so desperately reaches out to are unable to devote the time and energy required to see the most polished and interesting aspects of the game. Despite this, three of the four 40-man raid instances, both the 20-man raid instances, and all ten of the outdoor 40-man world bosses were released post-launch, paid for with the monthly fees of players that would never even see this content. What a huge fucking waste.
To be fair, Blizzard has made good progress towards more closely aligning World of Warcraft with the image of the game they project. The game’s first expansion, the Burning Crusade, has no 40-man raid content, instead seeing the raid limit reduced to 25 players. Additionally, a great deal of the loot problems have been corrected with the introduction of a token system. All the same, there are still six raid instances at launch, with at least one more on the way. In a classic case of taking two steps forward and one step back, this is a solution that acts as a hastily applied Band-Aid, only lessoning issues already present without addressing the real root of the problems.
It’s nothing short of a travesty that such a tiny percentage of WoW’s 8.5 million subscribers have been unable to participate in the amazing gameplay experiences waiting for them in the game’s raid instances. Unfortunately the obvious solutions (players earn all useful loot through a single clearing of a raid instance, drastically reducing group sizes to 5 or 10 players) don’t exactly mesh with Blizzard’s financial goals. Perhaps someday someone will distill the core essence of what makes World of Warcraft so great to a smaller scale experience that doesn’t require entire years of your life in order to play properly. Until then, for better and for worse, we’re stuck with WoW. I’ve never loved a game as much as World of Warcraft or hated a game as much either. It’s the worst best game ever made, held back by its genre and business model.
Saw The 300 today — lot of stabbing, right on through the ending credits. Also: a lot of beards and teeth.
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This is some stuff that I append to the post after the fact.
Movie trailers are, on the whole, very stupid. There are some which are not, but I would just ignore that argument by saying it proves the previous rule. For the upcoming movies which aim to be epic in scope (and according to the trailers before the 300, there’s a bunch), the trailers are dramatic to the point of being ridiculous. Almost universally they employ the same rising screech sound effect edited to clips of increasing visual intensity culminating in the pulsing-quiet sound effect coupled with the pulsing black-out between clips. And it goes on like this. And on, and on. Just tease me, and let it go. I suppose, at the very least, we’ve gotten past the 10 minute long trailers that used to run when I was in high school.
Some trailers do not suck, though, and I’m grateful for those.
Every arcade game that somebody - anybody - has any fond memories of will be reimaged for a new generation after an average of 18.1 years1. Today, we talk about Battlezone.
The original Battlezone (1980) features sparse green-on-black vector graphics and some first-person tank driving action. The 1998 PC remake features serviceable polygonal graphics and some first-person American-on-Soviet space-tank action. It-is-rad-.
Actually, the Battlezone remake is far more interesting than a straight 3D rehash. Rather than playing as a simple action game, the PC game plays like a strange first-person RTS, complete with base building, resource management, and a wide assortment of units, each one of which can be directly controlled by the player’s character. And each unit has it’s own weapon loadout and unique control “physics” to boot. It’s a surprisingly deep affair, even if it lacks the strategic depth of an Age of… or ‘Craft title, but there’s something uniquely satisfying about shooting down a UFO in your hover tank just outside a commie Biometal recycler on Venus while your squadron of rocket tanks hits a cluster of turrets.
Oh, and this interstellar cold-war-gone-hot takes place in 1960, as space-Eisenhower battles against the Soviets on the moon, Mars, and on several of Jupiter’s moons, all without the American public ever discovering a thing. The game’s campy storyline is half the fun, really. As you might expect, evil aliens eventually enter the fray, complete with ancient super weapons and a host of deadly technologies.
The game also sports some fun multiplayer options where, aside from standard RTS-style matches, players can pilot one of a huge number of vehicles ranging from the Eagle lander to Soviet death bombers in fast-paced deathmathces. And it’s all playable through Sega’s Heat.net for some reason. Or was, at the very least. Sadly, no multiplayer mode meets the two in the middle. Battlezone as a Tribes-alike would’ve blown us all away in 1998.
Battlezone saw a sequel released in 2000, but, visual upgrades aside, it wasn’t much of a departure from the original PC title. There was also a half-hearted Nintendo 64 port, apparently, but I don’t care and I doubt you do either. Maybe we’ll see another Battlezone game in this vein in the future from whatever publisher currently holds the rights to the franchise (I’m betting EA). It’s FPRTS gameplay is perfectly suited for consoles, now that PC gaming is dead and all. I’d even tolerate racist 14-year-olds to play it over XBox Live.
Farewell, Battlezone. You’ll always be ace.
1. Battlezone (1980) - Battlezone (1998) = 18 years
Defender (1980) - Defender 3D (2002) = 22 years
Frogger (1981) - Frogger (1997) = 16 years
Gauntlet (1985) - Gauntlet Legends (1998) = 13 years
Missile Command (1980) - Missile Command (1999) = 19 years
Pac-Man (1979) - Mac-Man 2: The New Adventures (1994) = 15 years
Pong (1972) - Pong (1999) = 27 years
Robotron: 2084 (1982) - Robotron 64 (1998) = 16 years
Spy Hunter (1983) - Spy Hunter (2001) = 18 years
Sinistar (1982) - Sinistar: Unleashed (1999) = 19 years
![The DORK Club [Index]](http://www.dorkclub.com/index/indexhead2.jpg)
World of Warcraft role-players will no longer need to worry about players with names like “Iownu,” “Halomasterchief,” and “Vindiesal” distracting them from the game’s fantasy setting. NameViolation, a new WoW interface addon for the latest version of the game, allows players on RP servers to quickly report character, guild, and pet names that violate Blizzard’s naming policy by right clicking on the offender.
