Achievement Insanity: The Noblegarden in World of Warcraft

There’s a certain madness that goes along with achievements in games. Something about those virtual badges makes people display the kind of behavior normally associated with rats in addiction experiments, except unlike the rodents, the players aren’t being fed narcotics pellets.

World of Warcraft’s newest holiday event, the Easter-themed Noblegarden, is only the latest example of this.

During Noblegarden, chocolate eggs are hidden around a handful of towns. You can eat the chocolates, or you can turn them in for various rewards. There’s maybe thirty or forty eggs per location. Once someone picks one up, another appears in its place fairly quickly.

The thing is, to get all the achievements and thus the title of “The Noble,” you need to find and eat at least a hundred eggs. To buy some of the rewards needed for other achievements, you need up to fifty or a hundred more eggs each.

Those items can also pop out of individual eggs, but it’s a low chance, so you’re looking at picking up a couple hundred eggs at minimum.

That’s a bit much, I think. In real life, I get tired after finding a few dozen.

On each server, there were hundreds of people at a time trying to collect eggs. Some people would pick a place where they spawned, sit motionless and stare at it intently, wait for one to pop up, click on it, and repeat.

As the number of “free” eggs dwindled, the only way to get them was to do the same thing. The egg hunt became an egg camp.

Looking over the notes, it seems like Blizzard expected the eggs to respawn fast enough to satisfy everyone. If so, they underestimated their player base.

It’s strange to walk into a town and see all these people staring, unblinking, at a window ledge or shrub, all for an intangible reward. For an activity like gaming that’s supposed to be fun, that doesn’t seem like a lot of fun.

Fortunately for the more casual players, the numbers of campers seem to be thinning out as the week-long event continues. It’s looking like people won’t have to be a trained rodent just to take part.

Star Trek’s Brent Spiner Has a One-Man Show On Twitter

We’ve seen plenty of actors using Twitter for promotion or communication with fans. Brent Spiner may be the first one to use it as a minimalist novella.

Novella might be the wrong word for it, but I’m having a hard time coming up with the right one. What do you call a fictional autobiographical account of a washed up actor whose only gigs are Bar Mitzvah appearances as his old character Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, who is also getting embroiled in some kind of noir-tinged murder mystery, which is told 140 characters at a time?

Spiner’s tweet odyssey started on March 28th, with the entry “I’m thinking of going into rehab. I’m not addicted to anything, but I think it’s good way to jumpstart an acting career.”

While supposedly coasting through rehab, he awakens from a delusion to discover that he has been committed to a mental institution following a breakdown at a Trek convention. He escapes by bribing a guard with an autographed Galoob action figure of himself, but finds that with the market crash, his house is foreclosed and his assets are in shambles.

He moves to a hotel under the pseudonym of Norman and finds out about the new Star Trek movie. (”He did tell me the new ST movie is already in the can. Guess I’m not in it. Directed by a Mr. Abraham or something. Try again tomorrow.”)

At the hotel, he meets an actress, Amber, and her lesbian lover, Bobbette or Bob for short. He takes a job as a driver for Harry, Bob’s octogenarian husband, and promptly becomes entangled in a love quadrangle between the three.

Meanwhile, hints of intrigue pop up when Brent finds a strange and threatening note in Amber’s apartment, but first he has to audition for the role of a dead body.

“On the floor in the audition. Pretended to be dead. Tried to clear my mind of all thought. Images of Amber. Became aroused. Not good.”

“Called Monty for audition feedback. ‘You didn’t get the part. They said you were not believable. That you were wooden.’ I have to agree.”

Oh, Data. I see you’ve finally mastered the concept of humor.

Updates on the story come several times a day on Spiner’s twitter feed. I’m kind of hoping it gets optioned into a made-for-TV movie.

Peggle in World of Warcraft: Popcap Adds Addictive Game to Other Addictive Game

It’s a new victory for recursive gaming. PopCap has put a game inside someone else’s game to promote their own game.

The casual game sensation Peggle just branched out into a new platform: World of Warcraft. By installing the addon, you can play 12 themed levels while you’re doing those obnoxious old-world quests that make you fly all over the place.

This isn’t the first time PopCap has published one of their games in World of Warcraft. Bejeweled is already out in addon form. I’m still impressed they managed to recreate a whole game as an addon with what is ostensibly just a UI modding language.

Blizzard prohibits addon makers from asking for money for their creations, something that rankled some developers, so PopCap won’t be getting revenue from this directly.

This version has a few WoW-centric twists. For one thing, you can earn Warcraft-like talent points to help with your random Peggle ball bounces.

Most creative is the introduction of the /peggleroll command. Normally in Warcraft, when a piece of loot is up for grabs, eligible players generate a random number between 1 and 100, with the the highest number winning. By typing /peggleroll, the players get a quick Peggle challenge screen, and to the victor go the spoils.

Zombies: I’m Calling It.

The walking dead are great adversaries for video games, which by their nature pit lone protagonists against endless waves of disposable enemies. But I think we may have finally hit the point of zombie saturation.

You’ve got Burn Zombie Burn out and getting reviews. Plants vs. Zombies is coming May 5th. Valve just released a new survival mode for Left 4 Dead. The Last Stand 2 is still one of Armor’s most popular web games. The Dead Rising 2 hype machine is starting to crank up. Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers is only a few months old. Resident Evil 5 was the spring blockbuster, though the series is edging farther away from zombies with each new title.

Am I missing any here?

Oh, wait, I am. There’s also House of the Dead: Overkill, Zombie Massacre, Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop, Zombie Wranglers and Zombie Apocalypse.

As a qualified guru of pop culture*, I think the unthinkable is happening. Zombies are becoming uncool!

Of course, the true hipsters among us knew that zombies were uncool the moment they became popular, but even the uncultured masses are going to get fed up with them at this point. And since games can take years to make, there’s no telling how many other unannounced titles are in development with shambling undead.

Pretty soon, the Internet is going to find something else to latch on to, and developers will follow suit.

I’m thinking wolfmen are due for a revival.

*I’m qualified because I write on a blog, you see.

Game Release Updates: Brütal Legend and Oboro Murasama

There’s good news and and okay news about game releases making the rounds today. Let’s start with the good news.

EA has announced that Brütal Legend has a concrete release date. The Tim Schafer-helmed game was long in limbo after Activision dropped it as a publisher. The date is set for October 13th.

For a while, fans of Schafer’s old games like Psychonauts and Monkey Island were wondering if Brütal Legend would ever see the light of day, so this provides a little satisfying closure, even though EA’s commitment wasn’t really in doubt.

In other news, it seemed like the painterly Oboro Murasama, to be known as Muramasa: The Demon Blade stateside, might not have been coming stateside it all when XSEED said it was no longer part of its lineup.

I was all set to call out Atlus to pick it up for publication, but fortunately, Oboro Murasama is no longer part of XSEED’s lineup merely because it’s coming via Ignition Entertainment instead. The company says the street date for the game is September 2009.

Trivial Pursuits: Back To The Future for the NES

Back to the Future for the NES was the second game I ever owned, after the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cartridge that came with the system. My friend’s older brother, Carl, told me it was awesome, so I asked for it for my birthday.

I don’t know if Carl actually believed that or if he was deliberately feeding bad info to a gullible ten year old. Either way, Back To The Future was definitely not a good game. It was what I had, though, so I played the heck out of it.

Most of the game happens from a top-down perspective, with Marty McFly powerwalking along a street to get to his appointment with the DeLorean. A fading photograph of you and your siblings counts down the time limit. That’s about as close as the game gets to the movie.

Most of what you’ll be doing is picking up little alarm clocks which regenerate the fading photograph. You have to dodge guys carrying glass panes, hula-hoop girls throwing marbles (?) and giant bees (??). You don’t actually get to fight back against these menaces unless you pick up a bowling ball, which lets you shoot back.

(The bowling ball is also not thematically appropriate, but I didn’t know that. I had to hide my eyes for most of the scary parts of movies, and I was a serious scaredy-cat, so I’d seen maybe one third of the movie total.)

Keep the bowling ball long enough and you’ll pick up a more appropriate skateboard that lets you zip along and beat the clock. It’s a testament to how much I played this game that I learned to actually use the skateboard for anything other than crashing into obstacles, because that’s pretty much all you’ll be doing unless you memorize the levels. Which I did.

I got past all the walking stages, the mini stages where you have to throw milkshakes at bullies and catch musical notes with the base of your guitar, and started making it to the last level where you have to drive the DeLorean.

The DeLorean stage is one of the few parts of the Back To The Future game that survives in modern game design. All the previous game mechanics get tossed out the window for the final event in favor a punishing pass/fail test. In this case, you have to get the DeLorean up to 88 miles per hour just as you cross the finish line, or you lose, period.

Unlike modern games, there’s no save or checkpoint system in Back To The Future, so my ten-year old self never actually beat the last stage. Forget MMOs, old NES games were a more brutal timesink than anything in World of Warcraft.

How about you? Do you have any fond memories of games that are objectively awful?

Fat Princess Impressions Will Have To Wait

…at least until all the people in the beta learn how to play. Until then, I’m going to be guilty of getting mad at video games.

The beta doesn’t really come with a tutorial or a lot of instructions beyond the occasional tip, so the players haven’t figured out the bits like how to lock on to other people, or that workers can deposit supplies to outposts.

Without knowing that, people can’t see some of the basic strategies of the map, like why capturing the center outpost early is important, or even how to defend it if they wanted to.

On a PC or Xbox game, I’d give people pointers over text chat or voice. The PlayStation Network hasn’t really pushed for voice chat the way Microsoft has on the Xbox, and there’s no keyboard, so I’m just sort of sitting there hoping that by concentrating really hard, the other players will telepathically figure out what to do. So far it’s not really working.

I’m sure it’ll sort itself out eventually, but until then I can’t really comment on how the game plays. Within a week of retail release, people will be doing things the developers never considered, and that’ll determine if the game is solid or broken.

The fundamentals seem to be there, like I said yesterday. But as far as teaching people how to play, the game is going to need a little more in the final version.

Well, it’s just a beta, not a review copy. I’ve got high hopes.

Fat Princess Beta First Impressions

We got one of the 5,000 slots for the current round of the Fat Princess beta, because we’re just that important of an editorial voice for video games.

Ok, so we got it because we know someone who works at 1up.com. Same difference. We get to tell you about it either way.

With lots of little units, resources to gather and structures to upgrade, I was expecting Fat Princess to be something like a real-time strategy game, which I dread playing. RTSes to me always feel like an exercise in discipline than an opportunity for fun, creative play.

Instead, Fat Princess is something more like Team Fortress 2, which I love playing. Hooray!

The map included in the beta is a 16 vs. 16 game. You start as a mook in your castle and go grab a hat to decide your class. Warriors fight, archers shoot, priests heal and workers build. Get killed, and you eventually pop up back at your base. Fairly standard stuff.

Workers are the backbone of the game, gathering resources on the map to upgrade the hat-making machines of all the classes, building siege ladders and trampolines into the other team’s castle and destroying siege devices outside your own base.

Instead of a flag, your macguffin is the princess imprisoned in the enemy team’s castle. Any class can carry cake off the battlefield and into the mouth of the princess, who will happily gobble it up, becoming obese and more difficult for the other team to carry off for a rescue.

So far, I like how Fat Princess feels low-stress without necessarily sacrificing complexity. There’s plenty of ways to contribute to your team’s efforts, and you’re one guy in a big army, so if you strike out on a lark to try something risky, you won’t feel like you’re hindering your comrades too much if you fail.

I found the hat thing to be an interesting twist on the class-based teamplay model. You can pick up the hats of fallen enemies or allies out on the field to change roles on the fly. It gives it some interesting flexibility. The game is all about teamwork, but you could theoretically start as a worker, build a ladder into the castle, pick up a warrior hat and start to carry your own princess out.

Since this is a small beta, there hasn’t been anyone online yet for multiplayer game, but I should be able to find one tonight for a more solid review tomorrow.

Resident Evil 5 Revisited, Again

For the second time, I’m going to have to amend my opinion of Resident Evil 5. I previously said once I was finished the plot, I’d probably be done with game for good.

Well, after we went back and did the game on co-op, completing the rock-punching silliness of the last boss, it unlocked Mercenaries mode. And Mercenaries is a lot of fun, maybe even more fun than the main game.

The Mercenaries mode is largely the same as in Resident Evil 4. You drop in to an arena and mash as many zombies as you can before time runs. You can pick up point bonuses and time extensions, and you get a vital bonus from destroying zombies in rapid succession, and enormous super zombies will try to keep you from doing just that.

The big difference, of course, is that you can play it co-op.

With a neverending stream of infected and a time limit, Resident Evil 5 becomes something else entirely. It’s an intriguing mix of skill and strategy, with the two players working out which pickups to get first and how best to keep the combos going.

As my roommate Dom pointed out, in Mercenaries, the game actually becomes scary. Where the story mode felt like a slog with an inventory management headache thrown in, the overwhelming odds that the optional mode pits you against makes things constantly tense, and also leads to plenty of “Oh no. OH NO!” moments.

If I have any complaints, it’s that maybe it’s a little too hard. We’ve had plenty of runs where we did well and racked up big combos, only to come up a few thousand points short of the score needed to unlock new characters.

It actually kind of makes me wonder if the Versus multiplayer is worth it. Anyone out there tried it?

Achievement Unlocked: Waited For The 3.1 World of Warcraft Patch

Patch days must be godsends for World of Warcraft blogs. When all the game servers are down for extended maintenance, what else is there to do but read about the game instead? (Yes, you could go outside, you wags. I did that already. It’s windy.)

In that vein, here’s a few more things being added to the world in today’s patch that we didn’t talk about last week, particularly the new achievements.

The standout, in my opinion, is the Insane in the Membrane achievement, which lets you add “…the Insane” to your character name. Getting this one involves earning exalted status with neglected, barely implemented factions like the Darkmoon Faire and Ravenholdt. It would take hours and hours of completely un-fun grinding. There’s no excuse for getting it other than a raging case of OCD. You’d have to be… well… insane.

I guess Blizzard knows when to cater to their player base.

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In somewhat less hardcore achivement news, the black and plagued protodrakes are removed permanantly. These used to be awarded to players who completed a laundry list of other achievements in the toughest dungeons the game had to offer. With Ulduar coming out, there’s going to be new and more powerful gear that would make those achievements easier, so Blizzard is cutting off the supply to preserve their special status. New drakes for Ulduar mastery will probably be going live today.

Speaking of Ulduar, WoW Insider has posted a list of the achievements for the new dungoen. The most intriguing is probably “Crazy Cat Lady (Defeat Auriaya while doing something cool on Normal Difficulty.)” I can’t wait to see what that “something cool” is.

Oh hey, the servers are coming back up. Time to check this thing out.