I run another blog on religion and digital culture, and it’s been poaching a lot of my posts on games recently. I’ve decided to post them here instead, and simply link to this blog over there.

A user on a gaming forum I frequent mentioned his preference of “Buddha Mode” mods over God Mode ones, the other day. Apparently the distinction is that, while God Mode makes the player immune to damage, Buddha Mode will reduce the player’s health to 0 or 1, but no further. I imagine this is so that low health effects such as red flashes or reduced movement remain, but the character doesn’t die.

The naming of this mode doesn’t sit entirely comfortably with me, as I don’t really imagine the Buddha as someone immortal but eternally suffering. To keep with the Buddhist metaphor, it might be more correct to call it Boddhisattva mode, as these beings have dedicated themselves to remaining in this realm of suffering until all have attained Nirvana. Gautama Buddha did stay around for a little bit after his own Enlightenment, but certainly not to that degree.

Jesus is famous for his “Turn the other cheek” ethos and, to some extent, his existence was defined by his suffering (or Passion, to use its archaic meaning). But he was also defined by a very real death, before his resurrection.

I figure that whoever came up with the first mod of this sort (the earliest reference to which I can find is for 2004′s Half-Life 2) simply couldn’t think of a better name than Buddha Mode.

Pitcure derived from:

LOTRO have just announced the second expansion to their MMO, entitled The Siege of Mirkwood. This is the follow-up to their launch ‘volume’ Shadows of Angmar which took part across Eriador, and the first expansion Mines of Moria which took players under the Misty Mountains and into Lothlorien. I wonder how much farther east they’ll go before they start to move south? I suppose they realise that once they get to Mordor there’s not anywhere left to go.

I haven’t played LOTRO since I took part in the beta, but that’s only because I was busy and without a computer decent enough to handle the environments. When I finally (!) get my new PC, I’ll be plunging into Middle Earth for a bit.

Previous coverage:
First impressions of LOTRO
LOTR beta baby

… before they choose YOU!

Funcom‘s upcoming MMO The Secret World have updated their website for the first time in a while to launch their new “Initiation Test”, basically a personality test that asks the player to answer a series of questions with one of three choices. At first it appeared that 1 was the ‘Illuminati answer’, 2 the Templar one and 3 was for ‘Dragon’ and, while I usually tended more towards the ‘Dragon answer’, I tried to mix it up a bit. I ended up being lumped into the Templars, but I decided to align myself with Dragon in the end.

Unlike some of their earlier ARG’s, there doesn’t appear to be any great effect from this choice yet and, rather, they actually invite you to post your allegiance to Facebook (how terribly secretive of them!).

UPDATE: Apparently too many of the questions are weighted towards Dragon answers. I wonder how they’ll right that? And you can see a representative from each of the factions at Director Ragnar Tornquist’s blog.

I love this idea. The king of a 2D fantasy realm declares his kingdom will upgrade to 3D. An extra dimension is added, some awesome water effects and… well that’s about it. Actually, something else goes wrong and it’s up to the hero to resolve it.

I have no idea about gameplay, but the ugliness of the pixels is so cute I’m thinking even harder about getting that PS3. I saw that my local EB has a 2nd-hand 60Gb version, but they’re charging retail for it ($680). Maybe when the PS3 slim is launched they’ll drop the price to the new retail: $500. Heavy Rain‘s on its way soon, too.

Blizzard have been busy boys. At BlizzCon they announced the next World of Warcraft expansion: Cataclysm. The Black Dragon Aspect Deathwing will return from his convalescence in the Earth Elemental Plane of Deepholm to wreak his revenge on the unsuspecting denizens of Azeroth. A result of this will be the sundering of the Azerothian landscape as familiar zones such as the Barrens are rent with rivers of lava.

This redesign of classic Warcraft zones has finally meant that flying mounts will be usable there. They are also adding two new races: Goblins for Horde and Worgen (the previously quarantined human kingdom of Gilneas) for Alliance. Apparently Worgen players will be able to switch between human and werewolf forms at will, except in combat when the Worgen form will be locked. I was hoping for a day/night cycle thing like the poor citizens of Pyrewood had to follow, but I imagine that wouldn’t be very playable. They’ve also opened up a whole lot of new race/class combinations, with every race except the Draenei gaining at least one class.

Blizzard are also using this expansion for some much-needed catch-up on incomplete zones. We will finally be able to access Gilneas, Grim Batol (in the Twilight Highlands), Hyjal and the aforementioned Deepholm beneath the zone just north of Elwynn, presumably accessible through the Blackchar Cave in the Searing Gorge.
[/geek-out]

In an interview with DexX Production Director Allen Breck laughed off the idea of a WoW2, saying the shorter dev cycle on patches and expansions was working fine for them at the moment. I imagine Cataclysm is their alternative: a complete overhaul of the orginal game.

During this site’s considerable downtime Blizzard (or should I say Activision Blizzard now?) announced Diablo III, the follow-up to Diablo (1996) and Diablo II (2000). Diablo allowed players to choose from 3 classes: Warrior, Rogue and Sorceror, and the Monk was added in the expansion Hellfire (1997), which also contributed the unlockable Barbarian and patch-added Bard. Diablo II offered 5 classes: Amazon, Barbarian, Necromancer, Sorceress and Paladin, as well as the Assassin and Druid with the expansion Lord of Destruction (2001). Diablo III has so far announced 4 out of its 5 classes: Barbarian, Witch Doctor, Wizard and now Monk.

The Diablo III monk description goes on about his lack of weapons, but the art clearly depicts him carrying a heavy staff. In Hellfire the monk similarly carried a staff, but it actually did less damage than his bare-handed strikes. It was mostly used to give him some crowd control ability. At least the Diablo wikia says so. I imagine there’s a similar mechanic at play in Diablo III.

I love game wikis. There was an article in Edge a few months back about the archiving and documentation of videogames and videogame culture, and how important wikis were to preserving this. Wikia seem to be the go-to place for gaming wikis now, and even our own TLJwiki has made the migration.

Yes, we’ve returned after a long hiatus due to study and technical problems. You’ll note the snazzy new theme Catherine installed, which is as beautiful as I can manage at the moment. Hopefully it will encourage me to use more pictures and videos to spice it up a bit.

I’ve got nothing against game-based fan fiction, but the idea that there are 51 examples of it devoted to Tetris on fanfiction.net is just ridiculous. I know it’s not the official indicator of game-to-game fan-fic ratios, but still.

SCE Australia have finally announced their 40Gb PS3 for $700. This represents a complete turn-around, not least because when the PS3 was originally launched elsewhere in the world there was already the choice of either the 40 or 60GB SKUs, but for whatever reason it was decided that Australia and Europe would only want the 60Gb one. Now, however, they intend to discontinue the 60Gb version once the current stock is sold.

Bizarrely, this discontinuation seems to be something that only Australia is condemned to suffer – it doesn’t appear to be happening in Europe. I can only hope that this is a precursor to the announcement of the world-wide (including PAL territories) release of the 80Gb model previously only available in South Korea, although this still seems unlikely.

To top things off, this new 40Gb version is said to contain no backwards capability whatsoever – not even their stop-gap emulation software. This seems particularly strange given Sony’s once vociferously pledged ongoing commitment to the PS2.

I understand that Sony and Microsoft don’t have Nintendo’s luxury of not actually making a loss on hardware sales, and that this $700 unit represents a significant undertaking on their part. Unfortunately though it seems far too little at a time when the PS3 is really floundering in the console war.

Not only did we have the Emotion Engine (a chip which allows PS3 owners everywhere else in the world to play PS1 & 2 games) replaced by far-inferior emulation software, but now we don’t even get the otherwise worldwide price cut. The PAL territories (essentially Australia and Europe) were already getting a raw deal price wise, considering that not only was the hardware inferior but the RRP was considerably more expensive than in the US and Japan. Oh well, at least now everyone else will get to be as disadvantaged as us.
http://blogs.theage.com.au/screenplay/archives//006752.html