[Malo...] are you collecting the Gahz’ridian ornaments?

[B?zzoç–µrd]: Hello,you are drawn in the system to receive your gift.Pleast visit: www.Pet-prize.com.Celestial Steed will be yours.

I want to know who buys this crap. Seriously. Who is it? Obviously, they are the same people who are buying Winnie the Pooh t-shirts for their Xbox Live Avatars.

The whole concept of Xbox Live Avatars isn’t completely terrible, I guess, but the fact that they are charging real money so I can put some kind of stupid shirt on my avatar… is just bizarre. It almost proves the insane ideal that anything will be bought by someone at some point in time just because there is a price attached.

If this crap were free would anyone download it? Aye, there’s the rub. This is something I like to think of as “the pet rock phenomenon”. Take something that is pretty much worthless, attach an arbitrarily low price to it, and suddenly it has worth. I guess that sums up this whole Playstation Home business model. It isn’t pure evil (don’t touch it!) or anything, but what happens when the PS3 and Xbox 360 go away? Never gonna happen, you say? Au contraire, mon frere.

The part of all this that is the most infuriating to me, is that Sony and Microsoft wouldn’t be selling this garbage unless there were enough people buying it to make it profitable. That’s the worst part of this whole thing. This whole stupid, inane, pointless endeavor is actually working. I’ll admit, though, the face that Xbox Live is full of people who buy this crap makes me reconsider even subscribing to the service. Auto-renew: off!

Maybe that’s me being elitist, but here I am… still subscribed to Xbox Live. So, who buys this crap? Apparently… I do.

And then, to go to U2′s show, with their “UFO has landed” stage was the perfect capstone to an amazing day.

What an amazing show. The extra shoutouts to NASA were great, and it also seemed like the baby animation was redone as well, as it showed the baby in a space suit floating around. I wish I could better understand what the baby actually said. All I got was “Spacejacket” at the beginning. But the video and lights during “Your Blue Room” were truly amazing… and with a special coda from one of the ISS astronauts! It’s giving me chills right now, just thinking about it again! It’s great to be able to have a reminder of how great our space program once was.

Everything about this show was brilliant, though. I think this is probably the best stadium tour U2 has ever done. I didn’t think they could pull it off, but the they really did make it feel like the entire stadium was part of the show. The Claw is brilliant! Magnificent stage design as well as how they used the video wall and light show. Really felt like we got our money’s worth, that’s for sure.

Hearing Ultraviolet was a treat as well, as I’ve always wanted to hear this song live, but never got the chance. It’s like a dream come true!

Firstly, the setting is cool. It’s like Cowboy Bebop meets Mass Effect meets Neuromancer. It also (on purpose, I’m sure) channels the old Paranoia RPG. Like… a lot. The overall tone, however, is decidedly less humorous than Paranoia, but certainly no less dark.

That being said, the core Eclipse Phase rulebook and all future supplements are being released under the Creative Commons license. Specifically, the CC BY-NC-SA license. That is, you are free to share or remix Eclipse Phase as long as you do so non-commericially, attribute the original licensor (in this case, Catalyst Game Labs), and only share your remixed work under the same license.

Unlike Wizards of the Coast and their “Open Gaming License” which wasn’t all THAT open, this truly is Open Source Gaming. Which is another reason you need to play this game. The potential within Eclipse Phase for the community to be able to develop and re-use the material is like few RPG’s before it.

So, here is the torrent to download Eclipse Phase. Yes, it’s legal and cheap as free.

Oh, just checked the Eclipse Phase blog, and apparently, Eclipse Phase is the number one seller on DriveThruRPG.com. Not bad for a free, open source product.

That being said, there are a few… issues I’ve been having lately. Yes, it is sometimes annoying to get the “No more instances can be created message” but that doesn’t cause seething hatred in the cockles of my heart. Nor does ganking, nor Death Knights constantly being nerfed, nor even the guy in Vent that turns his speakers up really loud so that whenever anyone else talks you get this annoying echo effect.

What fills me with rage is drama.

First, to give you a little background, I’ve recently joined a new raiding guild. The guild I had been in which was pretty much just a group of friends, while fun, was not very diligent as far as keeping to ANY kind of raiding schedule. When Ulduar came out and I was still kicking around in Heroic 5-man purples, I decided to strike out for greener pastures (and better raid schedules.)

I found the current guild through the WoW forums (I know, I know… but with horrible gear, and very little actual raid experience, I can’t be too choosy, here.) They seemed pretty laid back when I browsed around their forums, and it looked like the kind of place I could join up and not get in too much trouble if I couldn’t make a raid night every once in a while. (Family first, ya know!)

Well, we’re running our mid-week Ulduar 10-man and we’re clearing out Freya. I vaguely remember there being some in-game chatter about who has herbalism blah blah blah okay let’s go kill stuff. Well, we clear the whole area (because we don’t want to do hard mode, mmkay) and right before we’re getting ready to pull Freya, the Shaman/healer/Guild Master leaves the raid group, immediately disconnects from Vent, and goes offline. Everyone is shocked for a few seconds as we wonder if his connection blew up, or maybe evil Nazi super-scientists teleported him to the black sun dimension, or what. Then, someone in vent says, “If he wants the 3 Frost Lotus, I’ll give it to him. It’s really not that big of a deal.” Wait, what?

Yeah, so our shaman ragequit over some stupid herbs. Granted, they are somewhat valuable, but enough to actually ragequit over it? Seems a little dramatic to me. At this point, I’m thinking to myself, “No biggie. We’ll just pug another healer and keep going.” Well, that’s when our Resto Druid and a rogue both /gquit. “Wha??”

They inform us in vent: “Yeah, <GuildMaster> just threatened to /gkick us over this Frost Lotus thing because he says he’s the guild master and doesn’t have to be treated like this. We don’t really want to stick around for this. Bye.”

At this point I should explain that the core of this guild is a group of IRL friends. The GuildMaster is actually more of an officer, and the real guild master, the guy that organizes raids, determines who can join the guild, grants forum access, is really a great guy, fun to play WoW with and in all respects is pretty cool. If the GuildMaster were actually the guild master, I suspect a large amount of the guild population would’ve been looking for new guilds at this point.

In the meantime, the raid has ground to a halt, and I’m suddenly NOT getting any closer to getting my Tier 8 gloves. And this is what bugs me. It’s one thing to be pissed about something, and it’s another thing to be pissed about something so inconsequential. It’s entirely another thing to leave people hanging because you want to go have a cry-fest over some stupid herbs. This is playground-level of getting pissed. Buck up, little camper! If losing 3 Frost Lotus is enough to send you into a fit of rage, just wait until your mom kicks you out of the basement.

Ugh.

Last week Digg released something they call the DiggBar, which serves as both a new interface for Digg and doubles as a URL shortening service. The way it works is that you just add “digg.com/” at the beginning of any URL, and Digg creates a short URL in the form of digg.com/1234. Here’s an example DiggBar URL that points to google.com: http://digg.com/d1nYVs. Further, the Digg homepage now links to these DiggBar URLs rather than linking directly to other web sites.

But unlike normal URL shortening services, when you load these Digg URLs, rather than redirect you to the original URL, Digg loads a page which frames the content of the original site. As a user, what you see is that the URL in your browser’s location field remains digg.com/1234, and the content of the destination site loads underneath a Digg-branded toolbar.

Obviously, this is a problem.

I’ve gone ahead and implemented Daring Fireball’s 3 lines of PHP code on my site here. You can see my results: http://digg.com/u1j0Z

Begone, DiggNation.

UPDATE: Apparently, Digg has not set up the diggBar so that Digg doesn’t show up as the HTTP_REFERER. Therefore, I’ve had to unleash the nuclear option and added some javascript to block all framing whatsoever. Not really what I wanted to do, but until I come up with another solution, it will have to do.

Woot!

Joystiq posted the above video this morning with the following screed:

Hey Star Wars: The Old Republic, want to know the best way to suck the excitement out of your upcoming space opera MMORPG? Show us a bunch of still pictures not taken from the game, while a guy who sounds like Sam Elliott’s less commanding brother, Denny, tells us a super boring story about galactic diplomacy.

Seriously, if the video was capped by a young Jack Palance playing a guitar solo while he kills a bunch of guys with a lightsaber (that’s also an electric guitar), it still wouldn’t be enough to wake us from our coma. Can we all agree to leave boring in books, where it belongs?

ZOMG NEEDS MOER SPLODEY!!!11

Wow. If there were a way for Joystiq to sound less intelligent, I’m not sure what it would be. “Don’t talk about diplomacy and intrigue… I just want more asploding! WAAAAAAAHHHH!!!”

First of all, the only people in a coma over this game are the gibbering unthinking mass who couldn’t be bothered to play a title for more than 5 minutes unless it has the word “Madden” in the title. Bioware is taking an honest stab at trying to make the STORY interesting, and you’re gonna take a dump all over it because it didn’t have any action?. You remember STORY, right? Yeah, it’s that thing that happens in some games while certain Joystiq writers are trying to figure out which end of their controller is up. Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt your frathouse shenanigans with our plot development.

Honestly, for the kind of people they need to attract to this game, this video is perfect. Most Star Wars fans will think this is downright cool, especially if they played KotOR thinking “Gee, this would make a cool MMO.” Darth Malak FTW! These are the same kind of people that were super-hyped about Star Wars Galaxies and then were horribly defeated by SOE’s ineptitude.

Listen twerp, I LIKE DENNY!

Oh, and I should probably point out that “Denny” is actually Lance Henrikson. You might know him from such films as Aliens and the Chris Carter television series, Millenium.

ZOMG NEEDS MORE BORG!!!!!!!111one

I bet I know who else balked at this video. The guys that thought Enterprise would be SO much better if they just added THE BORG! Forget that your characterizations are shallow, your concept of Vulcans are totally broken, and your opening theme song is about as inspiring as a kick in the junk (they both make me want to chunder).

“Where are you going with this, Finster?”

Just hold on a sec. Guys, the issue with a lot of MMO’s is that the story never gets through the layers of gameplay to the player. The whole “WRITE YOUR OWN STORY” bull crap is really not going to get MMO’s anywhere these days. Mostly becuase, when we let MMO players write their own stories, that story is about “HOW I NINJA’D THAT GUYS LOOT!!1 QQ MORE! lern2PLAY nub!”

World of Warcraft doesn’t always do the best job of telling their story, but with the latest expansion, it does it right at almost every turn, from the Battle at the Wrathgate all the way to Loken, Hodir, and Storm Peaks. Did Warhammer Online underwhelm because of a lack of story-telling? I don’t know. I’m sure people that spent more time in there than I did might be able to come up with better reasons, but I can honestly say I would’ve stuck around longer if Warhammer Online did a better job of telling some kind of story… any story really. I’m sure there was some lore spread around, but it just didn’t come through in the course of leveling.

Basically, I see two possibilities: WoW is huge because it has an awesome story, or WoW has an awesome story because it’s so huge. I would love it if SW:TOR has as much depth to its story as WoW. And based on this video that Joystiq was so quick to dismiss, it really seems like it will.

Congrats, Bioware. You just won me over a little bit more. Coma averted!

The first combat experience they give you with Star Ocean combat in this iteration of the venerable Squeenix franchise is a battle tutorial that teaches you the various moves that you’ll be able to use throughout the game. The problem is that this combat is NOT indicative of the combat once you actually get into the game.

I didn’t find this out until I had decided that this combat “isn’t FOR ME” and had pretty much moved onto other things. Later, a friend of mine informed me that the combat is much different than the what the tutorial area would lead me to believe. After watching him play a few combats it was obvious combat wasn’t as horrible as I was expecting.

In the interest of full disclosure I should let you know that I generally prefer turn-based combat to real-time, at least in the scope of Japanese-style RPG’s. Unfortunately for gamers like me, there really hasn’t been a lot of compelling turn-based games in recent history aside from Lost Odyssey.

So, after seeing how combat REALLY plays out in Star Ocean: TLH, I’ve gotten back into it and actually started playing the story a bit. Based on the demo my friend had given me, which was at about the 10 hour mark, the story does seem truly compelling. We’ll see.