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Skyrim takes top honors at NY Video Game Critics Circle Awards
You'd have to be a fus-ro-dummy to think that Skyrim would be through with receiving accolades. At last night's New York Video Game Critics Circle Awards, the Bethesda Game Studios-developed RPG took home yet one more, earning the "Big Apple Award for Best Game" as decided by a cabal of NY-based game journos from various outlets.Other winners include two apiece for Bastion and Portal 2, portable love for Super Mario 3D Land and Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP, and explosive nods to both Crysis 2 and Saints Row: The Third. Harold Goldberg's "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" took home the "Algonquin Roundtable Award for Best Book" and Sony's "Michael" commercial won the "Mad Men Award," mysteriously beating out Robin Williams' luxurious beard. Frankly, we were baffled. The full list of winners can be found below the break.
[1.Local]: I can haz in-jokes
Reader comments -- ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week.The green-eyed loot monster contemplating readers from the top of this week's We Have a Tabard appeared to be the source of some agitation for one reader. "I wish each and every person who ever used an 'I can haz' joke was firebombed into oblivion, including the author of this story who posted that braindead image," complained Preston. "Internet memes are some of the dumbest trends on the planet."Readers seemed to feel otherwise, peppering this week's comments with insider jokes, geek references, internet memes and a generally wry outlook on WoW and life. Join hands around the bonfire, boys and girls, and let us indulge in an entire post's worth of internet memes and dumb trends ... courtesy of our very own readers.
The Army's Artificial Intelligence invades WoW
Joe Martin at bit-tech.net picked up an article on Gizmodo talking about the coming invasion of Army Artificial Intelligences masquerading as real players in World of Warcraft. According to Dr. John Parmentola, the plan is to test the AI's ability to be a "fake" human by letting it interact with real humans in a virtual world.My first reaction was, "Whoah, cool. All your base are belong to us." But after a moment's thought, this might not actually be such a great idea. Given the communication skills of some players (especially in the battlegrounds), I'm not seeing this as a litmus test of what in-game speech can pass for spoken by real people. While I'm pretty sure the AI won't communicate like a roleplayer, the AI could probably get by with a series of "lol" and "kek" typed out in rapid succession.This isn't the first time we've heard about the military using WoW (or WoW-like systems) for training purposes, which is the nominal purpose of this new AI research. Maybe it won't be too long before we're logging in to have a Gnome Rogue named Joshua quietly whisper us, "Shall we play a game?"
CoX Issue 13: All your base are belong to us?
Bizarre as it may sound, that's the title by which the NCSoft developers have taken to calling City of Heroes Issue 13. Or so players learned while listening in to the Dyyno test over on mmorpg.com, in which lead developer Matt 'Positron' Miller took viewers on a tour of Cimerora and talked them through the highlights of Issue 12: Midnight Hour. Players are always eager for snippets of information on new issues, however trivial, and when Matt let slip the in-house joke title for Issue 13 along with the reason for it, it was quickly noted.Matt's comment allegedly reflected the huge number of base changes and fixes that will be coming in the next Issue. Well, it's not as if there isn't plenty to fix. The base raid system has never worked properly, the Cathedral of Pain trial proved broken and had to be put on indefinite hold, and despite all the excitement building up to their initial release, bases themselves have not seen much use beyond acting as a teleport hub, crafting spot and resource storage area for supergroups, with temporary buffs available from Empowerment Stations if you own any; convenient, but falling short of their potential. Jack 'Statesman' Emmert, former lead developer for CoX, even said of the base design system that '... players hated it. It's the most underused facet of the game.'
