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Rise and Shiny: Illarion
If your plan in life is partially to cover indie MMOs, a niche within a niche, you're bound to come up with some odd games once in a while. You're also bound to come up with boring, bland, bad, horrible, incomplete, waste-of-time, hideous, and of course, amazing games. I went back to my recently thrown-out roots and grabbed a game at random for this week's column: Illarion. Did I find a bad game or an incomplete game? A bit of both, but the game and its creators deserve an explanation. Making MMOs is hard. We all know this, or at least we should. If you don't, and if you are one of those players who get upset every time their favorite free-to-play title asks them to spend five dollars (usually every six months or so), then you really need to understand that making MMOs is hard. I understand this, but I still have to cover games honestly. So let me first say that what I found in Illarion was honestly confusing.
Rise and Shiny: Doctor Who: Worlds in Time
Somehow, a new title by Three Rings, the maker of some of my favorite MMOs like Puzzle Pirates and Spiral Knights, slipped through the cracks. I pride myself on knowing about every new MMO that is coming out, even if I don't play them much. For some reason, though, Doctor Who: Worlds in Time slipped under my radar. Hey, nobody's perfect. Needless to say I was excited to check out the title even though I'm not a fan of the current Doctor. (Tom Baker fan, all the way. After that they all seemed too goofy. The theme song is still the coolest ones in sci-fi, though.) Doctor Who is like prog rock: tolerable only in small amounts, unless it's Rush. Once I logged in, I found a clever little game that utilizes many of the same mechanics of Puzzle Pirates and Spiral Knights. It's got familiar, puzzle-based, real-time group gameplay that I wish other games would implement. Star Trek Online could solve its ridiculous problem of having only single-player ships by giving players unique "jobs." Those crew members could sit at individual stations and solve puzzle in real time to help do their part. It works in Puzzle Pirates beautifully. Doctor Who: Worlds in Time uses the same instant group mechanic that Spiral Knights does, but it has other problems. In the end, I was a bit confused and often bored by the title.
