A salute to mature gamers

It would be a lonesome journey without them

As you might know, the Clairebear and I are in the middle of our wedding plans. We're not anywhere close to being done, however, since there's a whole lot of money and paperwork involved. They're not happy with my sheet of paper, which clearly states, "Yeah, that guy has been born someday ages ago", because it's in German. Same for the sheet of paper, which states that I have divorced that fat, nasty devil I used to be married to. I don't understand why they're having such difficulty figuring out 2 lines of text in a foreign language, but rules are rules.

Should we ever manage to get all of that crap sorted in this life, I'll find myself embracing a whole lot of strange new things: A new lastname (seriously, who'd pass up a chance to call themselves 'Nicholson'?), monogamy and a brand new mother in law.

Alright, it's not like I'm really gonna have to get used to Momma Bear there. In fact, she's been part of our WoW guild for several years now, she sports several level 85 toons in full epic gear and she actually raids! She's not exactly that hunter, who put BWD-Solo videos on Youtube the other day. Truth to be told, before she joined us on WoW, she hasn't really done a lot of PC gaming since the days of Monkey Island. I know, I know. It shows how WoW goes out of its way to cater to casual gamers, does everything to protect them from failure and attracts people, who haven't touched a computer since the days where 128kb of RAM were an utter luxury.

But I think that she, as well as her generation of gamers, deserves a lot more credit than we, as well as the industry, are willing to give. The other day, she got herself a high end gaming rig. How fucking cool is it when somebody, who is old enough to be your mother in law, spends a metric shit ton of money on a powerful gaming PC? And since WoW doesn't exactly push modern hardware to its limits, she grabbed the free client for Age of Conan: Unchained (AoC).

I'll be honest with you. I didn't think she'd make it through the tutorial. Don't get me wrong - I sincerely hoped that she would, but when it comes to difficulty, AoC isn't just a far cry from the rainbows and candy-cotton clouds that pave the way of the average Azerothian noob. AoC is the Anti-WoW. For as much as I love virtual Hyboria, it's not the kind of game you'd present to somebody, who has never touched an MMORPG before.

But what do you know - she hacked and slashed her way through the first ten levels without casualties, her sword-swinging barbarian was chopping off limbs and heads left and right and there's a fair chance she'll help set up our guild city one day. Is she gonna wade through piles of corpses on the pvp battlefields? Will she slay the biggest and baddest raid baddies at some point? Maybe not. But that's not the point. She knows how to pull off her combos. She knows how the stealth system works. If you screw up on AoC, if you can't figure out the core mechanics of your character, the game will kick your ass. Hard. Over and over again. And that's a good thing. Because it makes winning, killing a tough enemy or beating a difficult quest so much more rewarding. There is a sense of achievement here.

And it shows how all that core vs casual crap has gotten way out of hand. They're getting rid of basic character attributes in Skyrim. Strength and Intelligence are no longer deemed necessary, they're too complex, too confusing, too outdated. I dunno about you, but to me, they're part if the RP-feeling. If my character is strong like an ox or dumber than a brick, it feels different to me, it adds to the immersion. It's an important part of the game, which the designers are going to scratch, in order to appeal to casual gamers. To the industry, those people must be a bunch of drooling morons, who couldn't wipe their own butts without help. Which might be true to some extent, but when and where is it supposed to end? When is a game too casual, too simplistic to be fun?

So this one is for the Clairebear's mum. For all gaming mothers. For all those 'casual' gamers, who don't give up, who show that they're very well capable of playing stuff, that goes beyond pushing 3 or 4 buttons and following the massive onscreen text, "Move out of the flames!" What you do deserves nothing but respect and I'm proud to have you on there. And I hope I'll never stop playing kickass modern PC games myself, even if one day I'll be old enough to be a mother in law.

Keep on rocking! And be living proof that it's time to stop dumbing down our games more and more. Because if you remove every challenge and every obstacle, flatten the learning curve and take away all punishment for failure, you will inevitably reach a point, where you lose all sense of achievement, competition and fun. And fun is what it's all about.

-Cat

Screw it, I'm playing Allods

Character Creation

Gameplay footage of me getting lost in some mines.

Note: I'm a lazy bastard. I know the full title of the game I'm referring to is Allods Online. But come on. It's a fucking MMORPG. Of course it's fucking online. 


If you've known me for a while, then you're aware of the fact that I'd sell my own mother - and all my siblings, aunts, uncles, their cats, dogs and whatever else I can find if the price is right. However, believe it or not, even I have limits. I don't usually sell my dignity. So when I got that phone call offering me a massive special on Allods, I didn't hesitate to refuse. Sometimes that's the way it works, you know - people call me, tell me they need somebody to write about a game and then I say no and they say okay, we're expecting your finished article next week.

Allods and I have a bit of a history with each other. I used to love that stupid game, believe it or not. Loved the graphics, the music, some of the more unique and cool playable races and how the whole thing was basically a really shameless, high-budget Russian WoW clone. Some of the monsters, their animations, the whole look and feel, everything was so blatantly copied straight from Blizzard's monstrosity, if you didn't actually play either one of those games, it was impossible to tell them apart by looking at screenshots and gameplay footage.

Unfortunately, the European publisher got greedy and added more and more pay2win-mechanisms, which made the game absolutely unplayable if you didn't spend any RL money on it - up to a point where you'd spend more on the item shop than you would pay for any subscription-based MMO out there. You wouldn't believe some of the things they came up with to milk their customers! But chances are, if you've ever heard about this game, then you also know the horror stories about the dreaded item shop.

So yeah, I wasn't exactly keen on getting back into the whole thing for my job. I was expecting the worst. And assuming you're not a complete idiot, you've probably figured out by now, that this is entry is gonna be about how most of the crap that drove me away had changed for the better. How the whole thing was surprisingly good and really fun. Up to a point where my job was finished and I've kept on playing just for fun. In fact, I'm still playing right now. But let's start at the beginning.

If this was Age of Conan, at least one of them would be naked right now.

Take the Alliance and the Horde out of Azeroth and put them in Soviet Russia. Rename them to League and Empire respectively, put a pair of wings on every elf and some cyber implants on your undead guys. You can see where I'm going with this. Allods isn't trying to be unique here. And why would they? Being derivative worked for Rift and it's gonna work for SW:ToR. It works for Allods.

But that doesn't mean they're not adding some clever bits and bobs here and there. Take the Gibberlings, for instance. They're a playable race, which faintly resembles antropomorphic hamsters. I shit you not. And since they're relatively tiny and unimpressive by themselves, you play three of them instead of one. You don't get any real benefit from that, the game still controls and feels as though you're playing a single character, but you actually see three guys onscreen instead of one and the way they interact with the world is simply hilarious. Where any other character would draw their bow and shoot a baddie, the toughest one of your Gibberlings will hold the bow in place, another one will pull the string and the third one aims the arrow. Where bigger characters wear a full suit of heavy armor, one of your gibberlings will put on your helmet, the next one wears the pauldrons and a third one dons your cape. There is no micro-management involved, you don't gear up three individual characters and the game treats them as one, but the whole idea behind this is as unique as it is brilliant.

Some will find the setting refreshing and unusual, others will probably be put off by some of the outfits and uniforms worn by the soldiers of the Empire, which look a little too war-inspired and not very high fantasy. You might chuckle at Igor Postov, your local mail-NPC and his traditional fur hat. Or you might find it hard to get used to the many Russian-sounding characters and locations and it might hurt your immersion a bit, when your capital is called Nezebgrad and features a theme song, which is clearly a remix of the Russian national anthem.

Listen to this fun little tune, then compare it to this:

Notice something?

I won't tell you that this game features tons of never-before-seen quests, dungeons, raids or pvp battles, because it doesn't. It does deliver in all those aspects, from instanced dungeons to heroic mode stuff to massive raids and it all works pretty much the way you'd expect it to. Some quests are great, some dungeons are incredibly fun, but there's also a huge amount of your everyday kill X loot Y stuff going on. Content is not better or more exciting than in any successful pay2play MMO, but during its best moments, it's at least on par with those titles and it doesn't cost you anything if you don't want it to. You cannot say that about most other f2p games.

The eight playable classes are nothing groundbreaking, either, but they do provide some fun, unique twists. Healers, for instance, get to use heavy plate armor and polearms, meaning it's absolutely possible to turn them into capable front line fighters. At the end of the day, you're still down to the usual tank, healer, melee/ranged DPS jobs you see in every other game, but if you're the healing warlock type or a lover of battle-clad war priests, then this one is for you.

Those uniforms are sure to rub some people the wrong way.

Surprisingly enough, you even get to customize the game with AddOns, so if you're craving a penis meter, fitting room, crit notifications or most other crap you're used to from WoW, you can download and add it all on Allods, too.

As for the item shop - well, it's still there. You'll level up faster and more conveniently when you buy stuff there, some of the cooler mounts and costumes are cash shop exclusive and you won't be able to avoid using the shop if you want to get married to your ingame partner. Yes, you can have lesbian Elven weddings and you even get special partnership buffs.
But you no longer have to spend any actual money on those things. Mounts and their food are handed out via quests and one of them was given away absolutely free as a launch event for the latest content patch.

And shop currency can be traded and bought on the auction house, provided you have enough gold in your pockets. Naturally, this also works the other way 'round: Sell some item shop money on the auction house and get tons of gold for it. It's like goldselling, but legal. And you're supporting Allods with it.
But prices in the item shop didn't just drop and they didn't just make their stuff available for gold. They're actually giving things away now. Free costumes, free experience scrolls, free buff potions. Every fresh toon ends up with a loot chest in their inventory, which can be opened with an increasing cooldown timer and whenever you do, you get showered with hats, helmets, outfits and god knows what else.

Yaaay, cat mount!

I won't lie to you: You will inevitably reach a point where you end up wanting something from the shop and you won't have the gold to buy it. After using up your free respec, for instance. After running into your first bit of open world pvp and getting your ass kicked by a guy, who has spent a tenner on powerful runes to buff his attack power a bit. But do yourself a favour and don't believe those horror stories from the guy who knows another guy whose cousin's neighbour has a son, who has spent 3000 Quid in the item shop. It's bullshit. Spending some small amount here and there makes things easier, but we're talking peanuts, something you do once or twice and not repeatedly, every single month.

And here's another thing: If you're an incredibly cheap bastard, you do not even have to pay for those things. Because the Allods website lets you fill in surveys and other boring crap for free item shop currency. It's not fun, it's not very entertaining and it won't provide you with virtual riches, but if you're desperate enough, you can get free stuff that way.

This massive astral demon is eating my ship. And that's only the fucking tutorial!

You can play this game for free. It offers all the features and content you'd expect from any good MMORPG and, granted it's not very difficult, parts of it look better than WoW. Allods' Russian flair doesn't appeal to everyone, but some of the cooler-looking races and characters add an undeniable, unique charm to the game. It doesn't really do anything new or groundbreaking, but what's there is mostly solid and entertaining - and if you're bored of leveling yet another Azerothian toon to 85 whilst waiting for 4.3 or even Pandaria, then Allods is just one click away. With its free download and no subscription fees, there is little reason to ignore this one, even if you're just killing time until your next big p2p-MMO-fix.

-Cat

Dear Clairebear

Our 4th anniversary is coming up - and what a crazy four years it has been!
I'm not a religious person. I don't waste time wondering about the meaning of life, heaven, hell or any of that crap, but if there is a god, then that guy has one messed up sense of humor and they're watching us up in heaven. Just for laughs. There's a reason I like to refer to our relationship as an RL white trash sitcom.

The first time we've ever met, you resembled the grim reaper - robe, scythe, everything. Oddly enough, you also had a golden halo and you were smoking a massive cigar. And I still remember the second time we ran into each other. Not because you were a blue dragon wearing a Star Trek uniform, but because I had a picture of your tits in my mailbox. Internet dating is awesome!

To be fair, neither one of us were really "looking" and we didn't exactly use SecondLife hoping to hook up with somebody. It really just started with me hitting on your mother, until she dragged you in front of the computer to get you to talk to me.
I think the real drama began when we decided to meet for real. The ride from Birmingham airport back to your place was fantastic. You were squeezed against the door on your side of the car to stay as far away from me as possible, eyes focused on the road, your window and all kinds of things, which weren't anywhere near my direction.

I have met your parents and your sister that day and they all talked to me, but to this day, I have no fucking clue what they were saying. My friends I used to chat with on Skype were Americans, most of the movies and tv shows I used to watch were American and Nottingham accent still doesn't make a lot of sense to me now. It's not just the way you guys pronounce things - it's how everything you say means something entirely different! People around here don't say hello - they ask if you're alright. And they don't give a fuck about it, so you get weird looks if you respond anything other than "yeah, you?".   Ey up, me ducks? Seriously? What the hell does that even mean? Sure, it's another weird way of saying hello, but why ducks of all things?

Things gradually started to improve when we were on our own again and sat down at the market square in town. Lovely place, lots of interesting stuff going on, nice, sunny day... and most importantly, we were about to make out. And that's when a pigeon took a massive shit on us. The very second, that one special moment where our relationship had changed from a weird internet flirt to something real, we got crapped on. How magical!

Interestingly enough, every major step in our relationship has been underlined by shit in one way or another. Remember when we got engaged and you decided to move in with me? Here's what they said at the office: "Congratulations, here's a card and 20 Euros. Now clean up your desk, because you're fired."
Of course they knew about our plans, they knew you were preparing to move to Germany and they didn't say anything until the day your flight was booked and you were ready to go. Little did I know that they would also cheat me out of my last salary without saying a word, so when you finally got settled in, it turned out we couldn't pay the rent or buy any food or water. Good times!

Luckily, I started earning enough dough by writing about video games. An insane twist of fate, but who am I to judge life? So we decided to pack our stuff and start a new life back in England, leaving behind a haunted fridge, my beloved cat and all my awesome stuff I couldn't afford to take with me, only to find most of it stolen or smashed to pieces by random idiots when we put it all outside. And we didn't just move like normal people, either - we went on our way to a flat, which we had never seen before. Sure, we had 3 or 4 pictures your parents had emailed to us, along with their description of the place, but realistically speaking, we were on our way to a place we might have hated, with only the bare essentials in our bags.

And look at us now! We're still in the same old house, we've made the place our home, most of our missing stuff has been replaced and we're sharing the place with more pets than I can count. Reptiles, cats, a legion of spiders, there's even an Axolotl tank on the way and we might get something really huge after ditching the old tv. Our landlady is gonna love this when she finds out!

You have your odd quirks, sure. One faithful day at the park I had to find out that you don't just talk, eat, burp, scratch and swear like a guy - you also pee like one. You talk to things. Things! You're the only person I know, who tells the radio to go away, who shouts "Bye, pee!" after flushing the toilet and who tells me to put the water somewhere nice, because it keeps us alive. You pick your fucking toenails. And my nose. You throw cats at me.

But you also play video games, eat pizza and watch horror movies with me. In fact, that's your definition of a perfect day. You put up with me and my jokes, my mood swings, my job and the fact I like to work at 2am in the morning. You tell people to wait outside when you bring guests, so I can put some pants on. More importantly, you always get rid of them after a few hours so I can take them back off! You like worgen porn. You like my cooking. And Spongebob. And boobs. And cheese-stuffed pizza crust. And bacon. You fall asleep on the couch at night when I'm working and kick me out of bed in the mornings because you can't stand to be alone. We're calling each other names and whenever we get in a fight, it's always, without fail, every single time about World of Warcraft.

I love you. We say that every day. In four wonderful years, there hasn't been a single time, not one day where we forgot to tell each other. And it doesn't get stale. It's not as meaningful as it was the first time we said it. It gets bigger and better every time.

And now we're planning our wedding. Telling by all the crap that always, inevitably happens whenever we decide to take things to the next level, I'm positive that our house will burn down, video games will be legally banned in all of Europe or I'll get abducted by cows, who want me to spend the rest of my life as one of their own. But we'll make it through. We always do. And that's all that really matters. We don't know whether Pandaria will revive WoW or suck massive amounts of ass. We have no fucking clue how much further the Euro will plummet. We cannot tell whether *any* character will *ever* find true, lasting happiness on Coronation Street. But one thing is certain: You'll always be there for me. And I'll always be there for you. Cheesy, cheesy.

All my love,
Wolf

Burnout

WoW is dying. Again. Still. I have no idea. Whenever some of the more popular players or guilds announce that they're quitting the game with some big and meaningful blog post or forum thread, the whole thing inevitably attracts a whole bunch of people, who proclaim the end of the world. Of Warcraft.
And yes, they have lost more active subscribers than a whole lot of other MMOs out there ever had. But come on - WoW has how many million people playing it right now? Eleven? How many other online games have anywhere near as many players as that? That's right - none!

For some fucked up reason, whenever people quit the game they have devoted the biggest part of their spare time to for god knows how many years, they suddenly 'see the light', they have an epiphany of sorts and it all becomes clear: All the trolls and haters were right, all the criticizm is true, WoW actually sucks and it's gonna die! It's a bit like with those assholes who quit smoking.

And naturally, everyone has their own theory on why it's dying. The most popular one is about how everything gets nerfed and everything is supposedly too fucking easy. The other day, I have watched the Clairebear doing a 25man hard mode Lich King run with a whole bunch of well-geared level 85 folks. After 4-5 hours of failing, dying, replacing frustrated players and getting their asses kicked time and again, they gave up. One might argue that those guys are simply crap at clicking 4 hotkeys and moving out of shit on the ground and to some extent, that's probably true. But the fact of the matter is this: They're a bunch of average Joes, they're the kind of people, who make up the biggest part of the WoW community. People, who just play for the heck of it.

I wonder how many of those, who foresee the quick and painful end of WoW right now because of raid nerfs and awesome epic gear for everyone, have actually managed to finish all of the top tier raid content on hard mode. I wonder how quickly WoW would die, if all those people, who hate the raid nerfs so much, because the game actually, really becomes too easy for them to pose a challenge, would simply quit. Would that even be noticeable when looking at the subscription numbers?

If you're familiar with this blog, then you know I hate WoW's instant gratification, epix for every drooling moron and the speedy leveling curve with zero challenge as much as the next guy. But I'm not  an idiot. I know WoW isn't dying because of such stuff. In fact, this is exactly what keeps WoW going - it caters to folks, who don't want to spend god knows how many hours studying class guides, boss tactics and shit like proper enchanting and reforging. They just want to play.

Right now I'm part of a small guild, which contains these exact same kind of people. Most of them started playing sometime around Wrath and they don't give a fuck about how it took me a month to get to level 60 back then, how the boats used to vanish or how you couldn't just solo any monster ten levels above your own. None of this is of any meaning to those guys. And since we've guided and boosted them and held their hands all the way to the level cap, they're only beginning to actually learn how to do their jobs in a group and how to get the most out of their characters.

This is gonna make any top raid tier guild veteran cringe, but one of the coolest things you can do to make these guys happy is by doing a 5man run through Naxxramas. And I'm saying this without any sarcasm or disrespect. It's not difficult. It's not overly challenging. But they're having a great time. And they're paying the same subscription fees as anybody else, including elitist pricks like me, who dish out 50% more DPS than all of them combined, simply because I know my macros and keybinds.

And that's the whole point. So I've been there for nearly seven fucking years. I have been there, before the game made virtually everyone the target audience. And I miss some of those awesome battles, some of the really tough quests and challenges, standing out from all those maggots simply by owning some powerful gear, which wasn't freely available to everyone. But that doesn't make my opinion any more valid, it doesn't make my money any more valuable, it doesn't make my views on the balancing and changes any more important than that of any other paying player. And the game isn't fucking dying, just because it has gone a way I hate.

Of course WoW is gonna lose even more subscribers in the not so distant future. But that's not because of difficulty, nerfs, its community, which is supposedly getting more and more awful by the minute or yet another worst expansion, ever. It's because most of us have played it to death by now. Everyone knows WoW, we've all been there at some point, many of us are playing it right now and there comes a point, where you have simply played the crap out of it and all the new content in the world won't stop it from becoming stale.

And you can only keep a game fresh for so long. I'd kill to see Rift's cool multiclassing system in WoW. I'd love to roll a Tauren, betray the Horde and join the Alliance or vice versa with a Night Elf, much like on Everquest 2. I'd like to have a story, where I get to choose whether I make somebody my enemy or my ally, whether I want to be good or evil and where all my actions have consequences like on Star Wars: The old Republic. But we're talking about a game, where it took forever just to add visual customization for gear, aka transmogrifying. We're talking about a game, where skill trees get more and more streamlined, where the fabled 'Path of the Titans' had been canned for being too complex as a means of character development. They're not gonna make any groundbreaking changes.

Other MMOs out there aren't just catching up - they're getting better. They're adding exciting new features, which WoW will never have. And that's what will one day 'kill' WoW. That day will come. But that's not because Ragnaros has lost a couple HP. It's not because of Valor Point changes. It's not even because of that dumbass arms spec warrior and his fucking epic dagger. Though he sure as hell kills WoW for me quite a bit.

-Cat

Gameplay>Graphics? Fuck off!

So they ran the Diablo 3 beta on hardware, which was nearly a decade old and the game ran without a hitch on maximum settings. Which is no surprise, really, as the game looks a decade old, as well. And whenever there's a Blizzard title in the making, which looks ancient long before you can even buy it, you will hear the legions of mindless fans, chanting their ever-repeating mantra: Gameplay is more important than nice graphics.

Sure. If awesome visuals were the deciding factor behind every successful game, then Final Fantasy XIV probably wouldn't be the rotten pile of garbage it had turned out to be. But just because a really enjoyable game doesn't require the most cutting edge graphics, do they all have to look like shit?

Yes, I'm beating on the proverbial dead horse, but when it comes to World of Warcraft, many gamers and critics alike must have been lobotomized. If you put WoW's ugly, hammer-fisted, blurry-faced human or dwarf models in some random Korean F2P grindfest, people would complain about how ugly they are. Same goes for many of the critters everywhere around Azeroth. I have never seen cats with so many corners in real life! But for some fucked up reason, it's okay for WoW to be ugly.
Until this very day, a heavy titansteel chest plate is nothing but a texture, a slap-on tattoo with no actual physical shape or form. They have introduced new pants in Wrath of the Lich King, which contain an actual polygon or two, but that's where the realism ends.

Some reviewers actually had the balls to call Starcraft 2 'dated' when describing its visuals and the fans went mad! Blasphemy! It doesn't matter, which Blizzard title you dare criticize - you'll always get a load of crap about how the game is 'optimized' to run on all kinds of hardware. Tell you what - using stone age technology, a whole lot of bitmap graphics and the lowest polygon count since the days of the original Sony Playstation in all your games has nothing to do with optimizing.

Of course none of this means the actual gameplay can't be fun. In fact, with the legions of raving fans, those games must be doing something right. But just because they're fun, does that mean it's alright for them to look like crap from day one? Would it hurt Diablo 3 if it actually looked better than Torchlight? Is Modern Warfare 3 getting any better when the same old engine makes it look like an expansion pack for Modern Warfare 2 or Black Ops rather than a whole new game? Does Star Wars: The old Republic really have to look even worse than the shitty new animated tv show for kids? Hell, no! And don't get me started on oh-so realistic Fifa 12!

Of course lots of games look fairly unimpressive, simply because they are shoddy console ports. Thanks to the ever-growing amount of multi platform releases in this day and age, PC gamers have been forced to put up with shitty matchmaking where they used to have server browsers, 12 year olds spouting insults through ingame voice chat where they used to have type-kills and horrible, awkward gamepad-optimized HUDs and menus where they used to have intuitive point & click GUIs. And overpriced, worthless DLC where they used to have a complete game they'd only pay for once.

One has to wonder. What good are immeasurable amounts of memory, lightning-fast DX11 GPUs and multi-core CPUs, when the vast majority of today's games make absolutely zero use of all that fancy hardware? Am I supposed to play flight sims and a heavily-modified Crysis until they finally release a new generation of gaming consoles, which will almost be on-par with a modern PC?

Thank god it's not all Doom and Gloom. Skyrim looks incredibly promising. I doubt it's gonna look as awesome as it could do, because it's yet another multi platform release, but the modding community will fix it. And from what I've seen from Battlefield 3, there's a high chance it's gonna beat Modern Warfare 3 in every aspect - and rightfully so!

Show some balls and challenge today's hardware some more! Gameplay might be king, but great visuals will always enhance your gaming experience! Realistic graphics and stunning effects draw you in, add to the immersion, they can make you feel like you're really there, like you're part of the action. It's a shame they only seem to notice that when it comes to simulations and racing games. But don't we fire up role playing games, because we want to get away for a bit? Because we want to get lost in a virtual world for a while, become somebody else, do something slightly more heroic than housework or sitting on a desk all day? Then give me immersive visuals. Make it look and feel real. The cartoon bandwagon has been fun for a while, but it's getting too fucking crowded on here.

-Cat

Spore is melting my brain

Playing the user-generated adventure 'Saving Private Raymond'

I have always been incredibly fascinated by 'virtual life'. The whole thing started many years back with the first Creatures. It wasn't the actual gameplay that blew my mind, but the stuff the game was supposedly capable of doing, the things it pretended to do.
The manual pretty much tells you that the critters you're raising are intelligent virtual beings, which slowly but surely learn how to talk in little speech bubbles, express their feelings and needs and figure out how to interact with the objects around them. Which was true to some extent, but reality was a lot simpler than that. They'd just pick up any random object or flick any switch in the game world without any actual motivation or any clue what's going on. They'd develop their skills over time, giving you the illusion that you somehow magically influenced the way they grew up and 'learned'. Basically, you just made sure they stayed alive by feeding them and injecting them with vaccines, the rest happened all by itself.

Things got a lot more interesting in Black & White. I remember raising a giant lion, which would happily beat the crap out of any other creature around it, then literally shit all over them and laugh its head off. That lion was evil and filthy, not because it was designed that way, but because I have made it evil. The basic concept was still very simple: Your creature interacted with the game world either at will or by watching you. If, for instance, you'd start watering the crops for your villagers in front of the creature, there was a fair chance the creature would mimic you and do the same thing. Now you could reward your pet, encouraging it to repeat this sort of behaviour on its own in the future or you could smack him silly, telling your furry friend to never do this again.

You could raise them to be loving, caring companions, who would do most of the micro-management for you by feeding and protecting your villagers or you could turn them into furred weapons of mass destruction, who would happily snuff out the life of any human being by dropping a massive turd on them. Or anything in between these two extremes. Ultimately, shallow and repetitive gameplay stopped the game from ever reaching true perfection and the mediocre sequel did absolutely nothing to help things, but the game was a fascinating and important milestone for 'artificial life'.

Naturally, my interest in this matter also made me keep a close eye on Spore. However, all the negative press involving the game's incredibly aggressive DRM and copy protection methods, as well as mediocre reviews drove me away from the whole thing until just recently. My friend Sandra summed it up quite nicely: Spore's gameplay is entertaining for about one whole day, then the novelty wears off.

I won't even try to deny that. If you just look at the actual gameplay elements offered by the game's five different stages, you don't find anything complex or entertaining. It is a nice touch how you can solve conflicts with other creatures through socializing or combat, but when you look at it, you'll always be clicking a series of 4 hotkeys until the other guy is either your friend or a corpse. Same with the civilization stage later on - capture an enemy city through commerce, religion or war, but no matter what you do, it always has you sending a handful of vehicles to the target city, then they'll begin trading, bombing or handing out Watchtower magazines until the population yields and joins your empire.

What truly grips me, fascinates me and turns the whole thing into an obsession of religious proportions is the actual universe in a very literal sense. When your first ever Spore creature jumps out of the ocean and starts to discover the planet it was born on, there will be a whole lot of stuff going on everywhere around it. You may find yourself trying to befriend some other wondrous, fantastic critters you run into, when all of a sudden, without warning, a third species comes running into the picture, jumps the guy you were starting to make friends with, rips him to shreds and eats him, then starts giving you the hungry eyes - and not in a Dirty Dancing kind of fashion!

And while you run and fight for your life, mate, wander and evolve, you'll eventually encounter weird, random starships, which appear seemingly out of nowhere and start abducting your buddies. And if we're to believe Fox Mulder, then these events will most likely traumatize you for life. At this stage of the game, as a first time player, you will have zero clue what is going on when it starts raining meteors and creepy UFOs start beaming up the plants and monsters everywhere around you. You run, hide and watch the events in a mix of awe and confusion.

At a much later stage in the game, when your creatures have turned into the dominant species on your planet and discovers the wonders of space travel, you will encounter the exact same situation again, just the other way 'round. You will find yourself on a mission to scan the life forms on another planet, maybe beam up a specimen or two and if you slow down and take the time to look around, you will discover creature stage all over again: Some primitive critters will make their first careful steps into a strange and dangerous world, some species will start dancing and posing when they run into one another and others hunt, fight, kill and drive other creatures to extinction. And suddenly, you're that creepy UFO, which randomly zaps one of them or beams one of them aboard and zips off again.

The really fascinating thing is how there is a whole galaxy for you to explore, full of so many different planets, each and every one of them is but a pixel within the glowy, swirly cosmos you're exploring. And the vast majority of them is full of life, full of virtual creatures eating each other, dancing with each other, evolving into tribes and civilizations, which at some point might travel the stars just like you and end up becoming useful allies or hated enemies.

I know that none of this will make the gameplay any more exciting, because all you'll ever do is scan animals, zap animals, beam up animals, do the exact same thing with plants, shoot a couple space pirates here and there and the whole thing repeats ad nauseam with every planet. But I find that utterly satisfying, especially when I know that everything I do, everything I create, somehow affects and changes the gaming experience of some other players, who are experiencing Spore for themselves, on their own computers.

Because that's the sweet thing about this virtual universe: When you create your own species, design their homes, their vehicles, turn them into nomads, scientists or warriors, define the very fabric of their existence, they will begin to populate the universe of every other player out there. And their creations will make their way into your game in pretty much the same way. When you land on any random planet, there is a high chance that all of the weird aliens, animals and monsters you encounter have been created by other players. You never know what you will run into, nothing is scripted, nothing is predetermined. It's absolute chaos, it's unpredictable, no two players will ever experience the same kind of game. And at this moment, exactly while I'm writing this, some people out there are communicating, trading or waging war with the species, which I have put into the Spore universe. And that's an incredibly cool thought!

-Cat

Grocery heaven

There is this virus spreading in England, slowly but surely crawling across the island, infecting one town after another and it's only a matter of time until the whole world is going to be affected by it. Countless horror movies begin with the exact same scenario. I am, of course, talking about Tesco.

Tesco is the mother of all supermarkets. And lots of people love to protest against them, because with every new store they open up, lots of smaller businesses have to close down, because they cannot compete with their low prices and huge selection. I don't give a fuck. I love Tesco.

And yes, this blog entry is seriously gonna be about supermarkets, so if you were expecting witty and funny today, move along.
Back in Germany, I hated grocery shopping. There's one chain in particular, Rewe, which I hate so much, I considered making it my new religion. You know, gather 12 disciples, go on a pilgrimage from one Rewe store to the next to torch every last one of them. And shoot everybody who runs outside, customers and shop assistants alike.

The store back in my home town was particularly shitty. They would hire ancient, scaredy old ladies, which is generally a nice thing, but it makes a supermarket highly inefficient. Not only does hiring the living dead result in hour-long queues at the conveyour belts, but it also means they're always scared shitless, avoiding dialogue and simple eye contact at any cost. No hello, good day, thank you, nothing - heck, I've tried greeting them first and they put a whole lot of effort into being unable to hear and see me.

To make things a little more fun, it's kind of a German tradition to completely re-arrange supermarket shelves every couple of weeks, meaning you'll never know where the fuck you need to go to buy the same damn shit you've bought the last time you were there. Some say they do that to entertain customers by making grocery shopping feel like an epic adventure, others say they want you to look at aaaaall their fancy products while you're trying to find that fucking can of tuna, which used to sit on a shelf that now contains all sorts of instant coffee.

Another fancy tradition is some ancient concept known as the 'opening hours'. If you want to shop at night or on a Sunday, you're fucked. And to save time, the clever people working at Rewe had the great idea to hire a bunch of retarded 16 year olds to restock the shelves during said fucking opening hours, preferrably exactly while you're shopping there. And you've not felt true happiness in life until you've maneuvered a trolley around fat, stupid mothers with fat, stupid children, the walking dead and some retarded 16 year old with a massive palette full of cat food, who couldn't for the life of him figure out where he's supposed to put that shit. And the shop is getting more and more crowded by the minute, because it's Saturday and people can't do their shopping on Sundays. And all the good stuff is already gone, because people are shopping like it's the last fucking day on earth.

Oh yes, fat, stupid mothers! Genetics! It's a scientific fact: Stupid children have stupid parents! Whenever you see a fat, dumb, sticky, screaming, moaning, whining, annoying kid rampaging around a supermarket and getting on everyone's nuts, you can be sure as hell that their mother, who is busy ignoring the kid somewhere at the other end of the shop, is in every way as fat, dumb and sticky. When assholes breed, they exclusively create more assholes. The world needs more homosexuals. To be fair, though, fat, dumb kids aren't a German phenomenon. They're everywhere.

However, shopping in England means I can do so at 3 in the morning. I can do it on a Sunday. I can do it at times where I can pretty much rule out the possibility that there will be vast amounts of stupid mothers with stupid children. There is no such thing as opening hours. Or assholes constantly re-arranging the whole damn place, so you never know where to find your stuff. But the best feature of all, the one thing that makes life so much better is the club card!


Yes, I know. They use that to analyze my shopping habits, they keep track of my favourite products, they spy on me. They know I buy toilet paper and they can probably figure out I have an ass, which I tend to use on a daily basis. So fucking WHAT? How is that a bad thing? How can they ever possibly use this against me? "You are going to work for our government now, or else we will inform your family that you have not purchased any shampoo or tooth paste in over three months!" Yeah, right.

You know why that card is so sweet? It puts all my favourite products on their website. So I log on to that website and instead of having to click through 38 quazillion pages worth of shit I don't want to buy, it only lists the stuff I always buy whenever I go to Tesco. So I just click on all my favourites, set a convenient time and date and before I know it, the shopping fairy will knock on my door, delivering cookies and muffins and several metric tons of dead animal matter.

Sure, the delivery lady looks a bit like the heavier, uglier sister of Bertha from 'Two and a Half Men'. But somehow she needs to carry all of the shit I have ordered. I'd much rather have that stuff delivered by bikini models, but bulimia usually doesn't go hand in hand with physical strength. It's a small drawback I'm willing to accept. I have officially evolved and given up on being a caveman. I no longer go outside to bring home the bacon. The bacon is coming to me. Life is good!

So you hate Tesco, because they're everywhere, they're a large, faceless, greedy company, who destroy all the local stores and shops? Hahaha! I don't care! I'm waiting for my next delivery of bacon!

-Cat

Man's best friend

As you may know, the Clairebear works in the family's reptile business. Personally, I've never been much of a reptile lover. When I can afford a proper pet with legs and hair, what the hell would I want with a snake?

But if you want a lasting relationship to remain exactly that, you'll have to feign interest in your partner's hobbies and needs. So Claire pretends she gives a crap about that F2P game I'm writing about to pay our bills and I listen to her snake stories. And just in case Claire's mum reads this: Don't worry, we're not really that shallow. We love each other very much.

From what I have learned, the thrill about owning a reptile isn't always just about them being rare, special or unusual in some way. In fact, with all the exotic  pet shops and whole chains of shops selling lizards and snakes around here, pet reptiles simply aren't as rare as you might think. The Brits are waaay beyond that. Just the other day I saw a guy walking down the street with an owl on his shoulder!

The real fascination with reptiles is often about being manly and hardcore, the top of the scale being folks, who crave to possess a deadly, venomous snake. And that's a thrill, which I'll never be able to fully understand. Think about it. There's this animal out there, which only wants to do one thing and that is to fucking kill you! And it's more than capable. In fact, it could easily kill you ten times over. Call me a pussy, but my sense of self-preservation tells me it's a good idea to stay away from that kind of animal. And then there are people, who want to be as close to that thing as possible, own it, make it their pet, feed it and risk their lives every single time they go anywhere near it.

I was told it's not any more or less dangerous than crossing a busy road - you might get hit by a car any day of your life. That may be true, but I only cross the road when I actually really have to. I don't put the road and the traffic in my living room, I don't show it off to my friends and I'm not trying to feed it with rodents. I stay the fuck away from it whenever I can. Because, all things considered, life is actually pretty fun and I intend to enjoy it for a little while longer.

The slightly less hardcore reptile fan would probably go for a monitor. Just imagine a lizard the size of a medium dog. I have seen people walking those on a leash, some of them keep them in their living rooms like a cat or a dog and for the most part, I can understand why that would be a pretty cool thing to do. But I have also seen them taking a shit. See, that's another thing with reptiles. If they need to shit, they shit. My cat craps in a little plastic box. We have an agreement there - she exclusively craps in the box and nowhere else and every now and then I clean it up. We can both live with that. A lizard doesn't crap in a box or bark or scratch the door when it wants out. A lizard doesn't want out. If it wants to take a massive shit right on your living room carpet, then that's where it's gonna happen. And believe me - you've probably never smelt anything so unpleasant.

At the bottom of the scale you'd find the wussy reptile lovers. People with geckos and garter snakes and harmless little critters, which are still enough to scare anyone with a phobia, but they can't really hurt you. Actually, that's pretty cool about some snakes - the bite of a smaller one doesn't hurt any more than an average cat scratch, but they inject a bit of venom, which makes you bleed like a pig. Imagine that kind of thing happening with your friends watching and then you can act like it's a really big, nasty, gaping wound and act all tough about it and pretend you're handling a really dangerous animal and everybody will be really impressed.
But come on. That snake is never going to fetch a stick for you, it won't recognize its own name (they can't hear you), it never does anything cool and just sits in a tank all day. I don't know whether snakes are happy or sad with a life like that. I don't think anyone does, because it's not like they have any means of showing any moods or emotions other than 'get the fuck away from me!' So you just look at them. You remove their crap. You brag to your friends when they bite you. Many of them don't even bite you at all.


Let's recap for a sec: I don't wanna die, so I don't want venomous snakes. I don't like massive lizards taking a shit in the house, so I don't want those, either. And small snakes are like Paris Hilton - fun to look at when you're into that kind of thing, but completely and utterly useless.

Of course I don't hate reptiles and I do understand the fascination with them. Just owning one is like the ticket to a special club. Reptile owners talk about their pets, their rare and special breeds, the biggest and deadliest animals they have, they like to show them off, brag about them... it works a bit like a Harley Davidson fanclub, minus all the faggy leather outfits. Own one and you automatically become part of something big. Unless you're getting a gecko or some shit. It's just not a club for me. I'm not the target audience. Well...

Then there was Chompy.
Chompy is a bearded dragon. Bearded dragons are only about a half unit above geckos on the hardcore scale, so they're really not dangerous or impressive enough to raise your manliness level. They grow up to be the size of an average French bread, so they're not designed to become very threatening. On the plus side, it means you can slam-dunk them in their tanks or some other safe environment if they prepare to take a shit on your carpet. Now try that with a nile monitor!

More importantly, they're actually pretty clever and active. For lizards, anyway. They're not going to invent faster than light space travel anytime soon, but they jump, climb, play and do all kinds of freaky shit that's entertaining to watch and goes beyond a snake's yawn-stretch-coil-eat-poop-sleep routine. I've seen one of them putting on a little top hat, twirling a stick and doing the happy dance. Okay, I made that one up, but I like the idea.

So one day when I was hanging out with Claire in the shop and had a look around the many reptile tanks, Chompy would run up and down the window, scratch the glass and when we let her out, she jumped me and climbed on my shoulder. Several times, actually. Now I am fully aware that the lizard would have jumped any other random fat idiot, who might have been there at that moment, but I happened to be the lucky one that day.

And when you have 200 Quid burning a hole in your pocket, all this stuff about not liking reptiles and about not wanting to be on the bottom of the hardcore scale won't stop you from purchasing a spiked poop-machine, which enjoys parking its colour-shifting ass on you.

Ironically, she is the coolest pet I ever had. I've grown up having plenty of cats - those of you who know me IRL or on Facebook have endured their billions of pictures and videos. My family had this massive fish tank and at some point we had this really awesome killer lobster, which loved cutting all our fish in half. Turns out many of them can actually live on for quite some time when they're missing their rear half. We also had this incredibly stupid, annoying, smelly golden retriever, which was enough to make me hate dogs for the rest of my life. Gerbils, rats, zombie snails, I've had them all. I ate quite a lot of exotic animals, too, but that's a different story.

We take Chompy pretty much everywhere we go. Supermarket, family dinners, the occasional barbecue session, it really doesn't matter. If I'm there, the lizard is there, too. I've done that with rats before. In fact, I used to take my pet rat to school with me. Rats are fun, clever pets, too, but they're not anywhere near as cool as they're cracked out to be. First of all, they stink. Look, I appreciate all you rat lovers out there, but rats stink of piss, no matter how clean you say they are, no matter how well you look after their cage, they stink of piss and they stink a lot! And that's because they piss a lot. All the time. Everywhere. It's their thing. Rats like to piss.

Even if you somehow manage to teach them the fine art of bladder and bowel control, it's a wasted effort, because 2-3 years later, they usually grow horrible, nasty tumors, which can easily rival the entire rat in size. I don't want to grow fond of some semi-intelligent animal, only to watch it die when I'm finally done potty-training it.

I suppose dogs make better travel companions than rats, but aside from the fact that they're drooling morons, they're just not allowed anywhere! I can't take my dog with me to watch a movie, I can't take a dog inside a shop - nobody gives a shit if I bring a lizard. And my lizard doesn't stink of wet dog when it rains. My lizard doesn't fucking bark at other lizards. And my lizard doesn't try to eat the faces of random children when they try to pet it.

Alright - Chompy tried to kill the cat when we went to see Claire's family today, but that was actually pretty fun to watch. She had a good look around the place, met some strange new people and by the end of the day she just fell asleep on top of me. We took her on the bus when we got there. We also had one of our cats on the bus once and that was absolutely NOT fun.

Unlike our cats, our lizard will never come running when I call her name. She won't hunt down any toy mice, fetch sticks or shake hands. But she climbs right onto my hand when I open up her tank, I can take her everywhere I go and one day I'm gonna put a video of her on youtube, as she is riding a very scared cat.

I'm just glad that boas, pythons and monitors don't jump random pet shop visitors and suck up to them to find new homes. Our place is turning more and more into a zoo.

-Cat

Well, it's better than Star Trek Online - Spore: Galactic Adventures

When we were about six or seven years old, my brother and I had this crazy daydream about a computer program, which would let you create your own games. You'd get to decide what the main character and the baddies look like, whether you're supposed to shoot stuff or whether you jump and run - you get the idea. In a way, the Spore expansion is that kind of program - within modest limitations.

To get your Galactic Adventures started, you need to have a space age Spore creature ready. If you haven't played the original game until that age, Galactic Adventures will let you download a captain, provide one with some of the missions and even allow you to create one from scratch.
This is probably the addon's most important feature! In the original game, you'd only control your own critter until the beginning of the tribal stage. That's where players start issuing orders to ant-sized tribal minions and the original charm of jumping and running around whilst controlling your own creation never comes back.

When you start on an adventure, you will once again assume control of your favourite creature, interact with all sorts of freaky aliens, socialize, fight, solve puzzles and so forth. And since these adventures are almost exclusively user-generated, over 95% of them are exactly as bad, stupid, broken and frustrating as you'd expect. It's the small amount of real gems (by 'small' I'm still talking thousands!), as well as the possibility to create and share your own adventures, which make Galactic Adventures so much fun.

The easiest way to access the really good stuff is by sorting them with the game's search feature. List the most popular adventures and that's 2000 brilliant little games right there. Pick one that looks good to you, select your captain and off you go!
Most of the user-generated stuff plays a lot like those Java-based browser games you play while you're supposed to work, meaning they take anything from 1-5 minutes to beat. However, there are adventures far more complex and much lengthier than that. One of them is Saving Private Raymond. I'll let you figure out the movie reference.

Saving Private Raymond

The whole thing starts with your captain landing at a beach, tanks and soldiers shooting and getting blown up left and right. One of them orders you to blow up tank barriers, so you grab some grenades and blow them to bits. Once you're done, an allied tank will make its way across the beach, destroy the enemy defense lines and you move on from there. After helping various other soldiers you get to tip-toe around a minefield to pick up a spade, which is required to free the tank after it got stuck. Then you team up with a handful of soldiers, fighting back enemies before they blow up your tank with their rocket launchers. Of course you shouldn't expect Call of Duty here, but the level of complexity is pretty amazing and the mission design is clever and really fun.

In another adventure your captain might get swallowed by a giant alien and you have to get out through its digestive system before you get... well, digested. Can you guess which exit you're gonna use?
One mission has you running around a Mario Kart race track, where you have to beat all the popular racers whilst collecting a lot of coins, which are scattered everywhere across the tracks. Or how about surviving a meteor shower, where hundreds of giant meteors fall out of the sky, squishing you in a single hit if you get too close?

Holy fuck, it's Frogger!

Difficulty varies a lot depending on your creature's abilities and skills. Some creatures have powerful bite and claw attacks, which are great when fighting your way through an ancient coliseum. Other creatures are excellent runners or even know how to fly, which is useful during platforming adventures. But fret not - even a modest warrior, athlete or dancer can enhance their abilities through Spore points (aka experience). Each adventure awards you some points when you beat them, granting you level ups and new tools as you get more and more experienced. A jet pack makes life that much easier for captains without wings, a lightsaber helps herbivore creatures pack a little extra punch in the heat of battle and energy shields will prevent you from taking too much damage.

The amount of points rewarded per adventure is calculated by how many people have played it before you and how many times they have failed. If a mission is complex and difficult to beat, meaning it may take you several attempts to get through, you will be rewarded a nice sum of points. If players just breeze through in under five minutes without failing, your reward will be very little. It's an intelligent system, which prevents players from creating insta-finish adventures to rack up tons of points with zero effort.

Bounce around the platforms and collect the tokens - but avoid the mines!

All excitement aside, Galactic Adventures does have its annoying flaws. Once you install it, the expansion firmly integrates itself into Spore's space age mode. Which is generally a good thing - instead of always telling you to beam up random cows, shoot infected villagers or do other dull, boring space crap aboard your starship all the time, you will be sent on a whole lot of galactic adventures, most of which are user-generated. And that's where the problems begin.

When you start Galactic Adventures from the main menu, rather than randomly accessing them through space age, you get to hand-pick your missions, sort them by difficulty, popularity and so on. In space age, however, the game will force you through any random user-generated crap it can find at that time. And that stuff is so unbelievably bad, broken and downright stupid, it's absolutely not enjoyable. You'll get missions with no descriptions, quest texts saying "wtf lol" and if you force yourself through this kind of garbage, you will not even get any useful points out of it. And that's sad, because these problems could easily be avoided with a filter in the options menu - if you could set the game to only do interactice mission downloads, when the adventure has a certain minimum populariy, you'd get rid of the biggest part of the shitty missions just like that.

Other problems lie within the adventure creator itself. While it is relatively easy to create playable missions with the provided editing tools and there is little to no knowledge required, some people will be put off by the amounts of patience and time required in order to create something really enjoyable. And even if you don't mind a fair bit of trial and error and plenty of test runs in order to create your very own masterpiece, you might find yourself having to tone down the depth of your epic quest to match the editor's limited capabilities.

Gavitonga Racing - reach the finish line before the other racers!

Playability will almost always be a bit of a problem - some characters are bigger than others, some fly, some run really fast and so forth. An adventure, which may pose no problem to your captain might have another player get stuck in the scenery, some might break the whole thing by using abilities you don't have and others might be unable to finish the adventure altogether, because they just don't have the required combat skills or social abilities. It isn't perfect, but with thousands of adventures to choose from, skipping the occasional problematic one for one that actually works is a minor issue.

You need to feel a certain amount of fascination with the Spore universe and your creatures to fully appreciate this expansion. It's incredibly fun to steer a self-made character through hundreds of adventures, fight, dance, chat and solve puzzles as you interact with an infinite amount of alien life forms. It's even better once you start unlocking cool new weapons and abilities, which make future adventures that much easier. If Spore's high level of customization does not appeal to you, however, and you really just want to play to kill some time, then Galactic Adventures isn't worth your money.

It's awesome to see how people recreate games like Frogger or Mario Kart within Spore and when everything works the way it should, these adventures can be a lot of fun. Unfortunately, they're just not very good. If you care about your Spore creature, you won't care if buildings have blurred, ugly textures or how the controls can be a little poor at times. You put up with it, because you want to watch your character evolve and succeed. But if you just want to play, then those little flaws and hiccups, messy graphics, animations and controls, inconsistent difficulty and adventure quality will be more than enough to put you off.

If you miss Spore's original creature stage and you just want some extra depth for your game, go get the expansion. Otherwise, stay away. You're not missing out.

-Cat