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Kingdom of Loathing celebrates its tenth birthday
Happy birthday to Kingdom of Loathing, which is turning (or has turned, or is about to turn) 10! That's 10 years of Disco Banditry, Pastamancing, and Turtle Taming. Ten years of mysticality and musculature. Ten years of adventuring with your favorite Sabre-Toothed Lime familiar or Hovering Sombrero. It's almost hard to imagine life, 10 years and a day or two ago, without those simple joys. To celebrate the blessed occasion, Kingdom of Loathing will be rewarding players with the knowledge that the game's been up and running for 10 years and is now working on an eleventh. [Thanks to moxious tipster Kevin!]
Choose My Adventure: Once more into The Kingdom of Loathing
Wow, how time flies. Here it is, the second-to-last Choose My Adventure for The Kingdom of Loathing. I have to admit I am surprised at how much I am enjoying the experience so far. The reasons I am enjoying it might be surprising, but it's possible that my time with KoL is nothing new. After all, the game is one of surprises and twists as well as options for play. I've also discovered that the world of KoL is a steady one. I really expected it to be much more loosely assembled because the variable pace and lazy artwork seemed indicative of a developer that doesn't care. It turns out that quite a lot of care has gone into The Kingdom of Loathing, whether the developers are aware of it or not. Judging by the podcast they host twice a week, I suspect they are too consumed by developer details to notice just how deep their own world goes. (Developers often get a bad case of tunnel vision.) I find the communication each week to be refreshingly different from what I see from many other developers. Most seem too afraid to say anything at all, much less to host a scheduled podcast on which they curse and discuss game mechanics. So in this last vote of the run, be sure to make your voice heard! Give me advice!
Choose My Adventure: Out of breath but not out of meat in The Kingdom of Loathing
Here we go into another week of The Kingdom of Loathing, a wacky, free-to-play, browser-based MMO published by Asymmetric Publications. The community proved on the first day of voting just how strongly its members feel about this stickman world, and I've learned over my short time in playing the game that the community is really the game's number-one feature. Sure, there are tons and tons of items to collect, adventures to go on, areas to explore, and terms to memorize, but the community really binds the game together. Without its help, I am convinced my time in The Kingdom of Loathing would have been a confusing blur. I am slowly getting the hang of the pace of the game. Last week's votes showed that most players enjoy the game at about the same pace I do. It's only an hour or so a day that many of us play, but that's because of how the game is built. I can guarantee that a lot of that time is spent hanging on the forums, chatting it up with other players, and generally staying connected to the game while not necessarily playing it. It's a good pace, especially for someone like yours truly who cannot sit for several hours a night playing a single title. So let's recap the last week and get to voting!
Choose My Adventure: Disco dancing through The Kingdom of Loathing
It's been a fun week so far in The Kingdom of Loathing, but I know I have just barely started. The hardest part of this adventure is going to be deciding what to put up for a vote next. There are so many choices and so many ways to play that I might have to put up a vote just to see which area of the game I should put into the real vote! After all, the poll must run for the next several days, so I basically have to predict what I might be considering doing in the future. Future-self, help me! I thought it would be a good idea to ask a range of questions in order to buy myself a little more time with the game as I level up some more and get my bearings. But before I do that, I'll tell you what I think about the game and community so far. Spoiler warning: Both are... interesting, to say the very least.
Choose My Adventure: You're nobody till somebody loathes you
Last week's Choose My Adventure poll was not really much of a race, was it? Almost from the beginning, The Kingdom of Loathing took the lead and held it, eventually winning the day. In my experience with the column, the strong front-runner can sometimes be overtaken by a slower community. In this case, however, it was a knockout. I shared the link to the article across the community boards for each game (save one that wouldn't allow me to for fear of linking to other games), and the response was immediate. It just goes to show that sometimes the largest communities have the least active forums. So here I go into the odd world of The Kingdom of Loathing. I played it before and enjoyed it somewhat, but in hindsight, I think the game is just not really newbie-friendly enough to make a week's worth of play worthwhile. I found myself a bit turned off by the attempted humor, but as I have read more about the game, I've realized there's much more depth in store for me. So click past the cut and get to voting. And hurry it up -- that meat won't gather itself!
Samsung prices 950 Series 3DTVs in Korea, rest of the world soon to follow
We've been keenly tracking the progress of these 3D displays from Samsung, from their pre-CES tease -- where we were first told they were TVs, then monitors, then it turned out they were monitors with optional TV tuners -- through their official launch and now to their first pricing and availability. South Korea is the unsurprising debut market for the 950 and 750 Series, both 27-inchers, discernible by their design, which in the 950's case is asymmetric and in the 750's is all about the thin bezel. A 1,000:1 contrast ratio, 2ms response time, 1080p resolution, and a litany of input ports await the buyer of either one, but he'd better bring a well-fed wallet to this party -- the 27TA950 reportedly costs 890,000 KRW (nearly $800) whereas the 27TA750 is an 840,000 KRW outlay (just over $750). Not exactly value models, but those prices will likely change when the pair go international at some point later this month.
Unbalanced PvP in EVE Online
Nate Combs over at Terra Nova has another piece up in his PvP series, this time about EVE Online and the "asymmetry of PvP." In a game like World of Warcraft, the devs have said that they're aiming to keep players as equal-- if you take on another player at your level with your level of gear, you've each got a pretty good chance of winning, and the game is designed to set it up so that you can both show up on a level playing field. But in a game like EVE Online, that plan goes out the window-- players can attack each other anywhere and anytime. There are consequences and advantages to attacking at certain times, and it's up to players to decide when and where PvP works for them-- it's an asymmetric system that leaves it up to players to find balance.I've just recently starting playing EVE Online, and I can tell you that the system has its drawbacks-- yesterday I had to log off because I had a wartarget camping my station, and if I left, I would have gotten blasted to pieces. Later in the day, I was mining and had another enemy warp in on my location with a much more powerful ship than mine-- I had to hightail it out of there, losing my ore completely. But on the other hand, a complex system like this leaves a lot of options open, too-- if I wanted to, I could buy my own powerful ship, and go and hunt that guy down when he least expected it.
