In Memoriam: Star Wars Galaxies

By now we've all heard the news that Funcom is being taken out back to get the Old Yeller treatment, which means that The Secret World is likely to soon be added to the long, dreary list of dead MMOs that thought they could topple World of Warcraft by being, well, sorta like World of Warcraft.

Woah, wait... three factions?! That's so fresh!

Now, don't get me wrong, TSW is a decent game, and it did at least attempt to do something new with the tired old skill trees. But still, come on, you have to bite your tongue pretty damn hard if you want to pretend that it's not a WoW-clone at heart. The core gameplay is lifted directly from the first page of "MMO 101: So You Want to Craft War in the World?", and so is the user interface. It looks like WoW. It feels like WoW. It acts like WoW. Granted, it's the WoW that Cthulhu would play, but it's still pretty much WoW, minus the financial support and craftsmanship of Activision/Blizzard, and that's not a good position to be in if you want to take on the WoW that has the financial support and craftsmanship of Activision/Blizzard.

So is that it? Is that the reason MMOs that aren't WoW are dying like a bunch of flies repeatedly banging their heads against a closed window? That they're trying to fight WoW on the terms set up by Blizzard? Yes and no. The way I see it, there are two main reasons they're all failing. First of all we have the absurd notion that MMO makers carry with them, the one that makes them think that they either have to surpass WoW in popularity or pack it up and go home. But then we have the second reason, and this is the one I think is truly important: failure to identify and target the right player base.

Let's Play Invisible Inc, Part One

So this happened. I could no longer resist the urge to take this game for a test run, largely due to a perfectly timed sale on Steam. I've had my eye on Invisible Inc. ever since it was released, hearing nothing but good things about it. The art direction is simply stunning, and I'm a sucker for squad based XCOM-styled games, so a 40% discount was as good an invitation to start playing as I could have hoped for.

Check out my first video in the series, as I begin by playing through the short tutorial tied in to the story. In the next part, I will begin my first campaign, exploring the gameplay along with you.

Let's Play Offworld Trading Company, Part Two

The second part of my Let's Play series for Offworld is now up on my youtube channel. This time, I play as the Scavanger HQ, enjoy the constant cash flow of the Pleasure Dome and spam the offworld market with no less than five rockets at a time. I also sneeze. So if you don't watch it, you'll miss out on hearing me sneeze. Could you live with that? Could you?!

Let's Play Offworld Trading Company, Part Two
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nM22XbjVu8

The Men's Rights Aneurysm

Here's a funny thought experiment for you: what do you call someone who advocates the classic (and sorely outdated) view on what it means to be a man, and yet breaks down in an avalanche of snot-covered tears each and every time someone disagrees with him? A Men's Rights Activist. Or man-baby, depending on who you ask. I'm gonna go with man-baby.

Pictured: The only thing that should come up when you google 'MRA'.

Now, I'm not sure exactly when being a misogynistic asshole and being a gamer became linked at a sub-atomic level, but it sure as hell sneaked up on me. It is perhaps the most common misconception regarding the average gamer, and the more you look into it, the more you think about it, the more you start to realise that it may not even be a misconception at all. As a movement, we have failed miserably at welcoming half the population into our midst, and instead of doing something about it, those of us who are not actual assholes are still firmly stuck in "this can't be us, can it?"-mode, when we should be trying our very best to root out the poison that is clearly running through our collective veins. It's that simple: we have failed. We may not all treat women poorly, but we have all, every last one of us, failed at shutting down those that do.

Let's Play Door Kickers, Part Two

I just released the second part of my Door Kickers series on my youtube channel. This time around, we take a look at two new classes and the games deployment mechanics by playing a medium sized map that's a bit more complicated than the missions shown in the first video. So check it out and be amazed as my two brave troopers, Misery and Hipster, clear out one room at a time while kicking ass, taking names and chewing bubblegum, even though they mainly came for the ass kicking. And door kicking. Duh.

Let's Play Door Kickers, Part Two
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCK1XZba_lA

Endless Endless Space Legend

So this is interesting. The game studio Amplitude released a cinematic teaser for Endless Space 2 earlier this week, and Endless Space just so happens to be one of the best grand strategy games set in space ever to be made. Guess what else was really good? Endless Legend. And Dungeon of the Endless was, from what I have heard, also pretty damn good. As far as teasers go, it's pretty but also pretty damn nondescript. Check it out for yourself:

"What if I could begin again?"

Oh, like with a sequel to your game? Clever.

Right, clearly no information to be had there, right? Just some pretty CGI and ethereal voice overs. Some snippets of a soothing soundtrack. But wait! If you act now, there's more!

Let's Play Door Kickers, Part One

Indeed, let's. Let's kick down some doors. In Door Kickers. This one could easily turn into a series, which would make this part one, where I go through the basic gameplay and mess around with some early missions.

Since it's me, I get some cops killed, indulge in some minor fat shaming (it's okay, I'm having difficulty tying my own shoes these days, so I think I'm allowed), attempt to pay tribute to one of the greatest unsung heroes of Star Wars by getting his name wrong (I'm so sorry, Porkins), discuss the (surely) far fetched linguistics behind weird names like Piere Åkerblom and question my superiors, who deemed a 50% casualty rate an "improvement". The cold hearted bastards!

Let's Play Door Kickers, Part One
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnnDIJ6wDJQ