completist
Latest
The Daily Grind: What makes you stay with a bad game?
I freely admit that I've played games that I hate, but the incredible thing is that I've kept playing them, sometimes for several years. I remember actively hating EverQuest in its early days, but MMO alternatives were slim, and getting my friends off the evercrack and into something interesting like Asheron's Call was darn near impossible. The truth was that I was willing to do almost anything to hang out with my guild, including spend $10 a month to camp-check and corpse-run. So I wonder how many of you have played or are playing a game you dislike, and why? Do you do it out of a sense of loyalty to friends and guildies, like I did? Do you suffer from the completionist's compulsion to finish everything he starts? Do you just want to make sure you've gotten your money's worth? Do you hold out hope that the game (or your tastes) will suddenly change? Or is there some other reason? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
First Look: 24: Special Ops for iPhone
Digital Chocolate has nabbed the 24 license (along with a few sounds and music bits) from Fox, and they've released an iPhone game based on my favorite TV show ever. Unfortunately, things don't get quite as good as they probably should, but the run-and-gun gameplay mixes it up with a nice variety of minigames, so if you're a 24 completist (and have an iPhone -- apparently this doesn't work for iPod touch at the moment), it might be worth spending the $5.If not, there's a "lite" version on the App Store which will take you through the game's first few "hours" (in reality, just a few minutes per segment) of stages. The game itself features Jack Bauer backed up by Chloe doing what else but saving Los Angeles from various terrorist threats. The grid-based action gameplay is simple but fun, and the shooter stages are broken up with encryption and driving minigames. None of it is brilliant, but just like the show, watching Jack Bauer kill bad guys is usually good enough.It's too bad they didn't do more -- 24's strengths have always been in its breakneck story pace and twists and turns, and just from playing the first few hours in the lite version, this seems like a Jack-and-Chloe story only (Bill appears in a suit on the menu screen, so apparently he shows up later, in some role at old CTU). If there are any cool story twists or turns, they take place more than four hours in -- it would be great to see Michelle or even Nina (if this is before Day 3) again, but I doubt we get that. Still, it's got Jack killing and blowing stuff up, and that's never a bad thing.
Are you a recipe completist?
Earlier today I was perusing the official WoW forums, looking for any new info about our favorite game, when I noticed a particular post. Warla, the player in question, was announcing that they had collected all of the cooking recipes in the game. At first glance, this might not seem like much of an accomplishment, but there are a lot of recipes that are more readily available to one faction or the other, such as Dig Rat Stew. Taking into consideration that Warla is on a PvP server and can't easily do a trade through the neutral auction house, this is actually quite a feat.I'm not really a perfectionist when it comes to my professions (and I'm definitely not the type who would announce such accomplishments in a public forum), but I have known other people that were. One guy I know is a blacksmith and spent hours researching and tracking down every last pattern that was available to him. The same guy was making a point to complete every single available quest in the game too, so his blacksmithing goal wasn't really his loftiest.
