dramatic
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Storyboard: Operatic soap
If you've never watched a soap opera before, you owe it to yourself to do so at some point. I don't just mean a single episode; I mean spending a month or so really following a show, unraveling the plot and character interrelationships, and trying to really get what's going on. Let me tell you, these things are crazy. Silver age comics crazy. And they're dying out, so you want to catch them before they're gone. Despite that, I generally use soap opera as a pejorative term because while the shows might be entertaining, they're not good at character development or drama or nuance or most of what makes RP enjoyable most of the time. They're well-written only insofar as they're written to convince you to watch the next episode, not in the sense that they form any sort of overarching narrative. And while RP can creep into that territory at times, that's generally a problem rather than an acceptable endpoint.
Free for All: EVE drama due to bolster waning TV soap schedule
Much was said recently about the latest EVE Online "drama." If you've talked and written about MMORPGs as long as I have, you'd be very rich if you were paid a nickel every time you heard the word. Drama, when applied to the world of MMOs, ends up feeling like a funeral for an insect... more than a little dramatic. As someone who has played EVE a bit off and on (I have a six-year-old account, but only a 10,000,000-SP character), I was more than a little surprised at the response -- but not really surprised. In fact, the recent drama -- hell, any EVE drama -- comes off as rather humorous. The same thing happened when World of Warcraft began selling the infamous sparklepony or when Lord of the Rings Online decided to sell a special skeleton steed in its cash shop (I was lucky enough to get one during the holiday event). Players screamed that they would be canceling, that they would protest in some form or another, and that they would never buy a product from the developer, go anywhere near anyone who shared the same name as any of the developers, or even utter the name of their poor, lost avatars again. Yet, here we are. Every time something like this happens, it happens for a few distinct reasons. Click past the cut and I'll fill you in.
The forums have been RP'd
Blizzard has made a nice cinematic tweak to the forums today -- as you can see in this impassioned Engineering QQ thread, they've added a little bit of font flavor and some roleplaying text to everyone's posts. Instead of just whining about Engineers, "Aurainsoph's brow furrowed in concentration" before speaking, and after every paragraph, we get a much clearer picture of what our characters are doing, whether that be "putting on her robe and wizard's hat" (yuk yuk yuk) or "liberally applied his custom fragrance, which was made with bits of real nightsaber." Wait -- eww.And every post ends with a nice RP finish as well, most of them more silly than dramatic. All in all, it's very well done -- not only are there lots of different combinations, but the syntax works, and each post really does read like some bad fanfiction. Players seem to really enjoy it, even though their hair was a bird, and they found their point to be invalid. Whatever that means.I like this one more than the Pimp Your Mount joke, actually. Well done Blizzard.Update: Apparently the RP forums have gotten a special change of their own lol. I lol'ed IRL. Does Blizzard really think the rest of the forums talks like that? lulz.
Dramatic Yu-Gi-Oh! gameplay
Konami has shown us PSP fanboys a lot of love. We were so mesmerized by games like Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops that we forgot all about Konami's other games, like Yu-Gi-Oh! The PSP installment takes place in the new GX universe, and will allow players to play against each other wirelessly. The game seems to feature relatively impressive visuals, but the load times seem a bit much. A load screen for every room you enter, and then a load screen before a match seems a bit too much for impatient young gamers. But, at least the characters appear to be over-the-top dramatic, as if they got acting lessons from Charlie Chaplin. The games out in November.
