The Tetris Effect

Moorhuhn, New Game on mobius arcade

noreply@blogger.com (Otaku and The Geek) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 06:31:00 +0000

Faithful to its original concept, Moorhun Invasion invites you to save the world in 90 seconds by getting rid of both alien chicken and flying saucers. Be quick but accurate, find the tricks to make your score go up and observe the scenery: only then may you overcome the threat weighing over your peaceful planet.

Fun and action up ahead: the wild Moorhun saga continues, under a different disguise, for the greatest pleasure of shooting lovers!

How to Play

Left click: shoot
Right click: reload

Buy full game for only 229 ePoints

Easy to manoeuvre
Tricks in the scenery to discover
The wild cartoon universe of the Moorhun saga

Try for free!

Mobius allows you to play Moorhuhn Invasion for free for 1 hour over a period of 30 days.

What mobiusgames and Wii have in common

noreply@blogger.com (Otaku and The Geek) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:04:00 +0000

Wii simply put is “Thumb candy for dummies." It’s simple, more accessible entertainment –and surprisingly not with photorealistic graphics.

So what is the secret behind the Triumph of Wii over other consoles? What do consumers really want out of video games?

There is much to be learned from the Wii. Err.. yes, this tournament is for research.

Literally everyone who has tried out Wii Sports has expressed joy over it. Nintendo is putting "the bulk of our mass-market effort against this extended audience," creating software that appeals to seniors, women and former gamers who had given up the hobby. The Wii has hit a bull's-eye, delivering a console that gamers like and that brings non-gamers to gaming.

Maybe you’ve forgotten by now, but before the Wii, it was supposed to be all over for Nintendo. Any chance that the company might rebound seemed to evaporate when Microsoft entered the picture in 2001, and Nintendo's GameCube console fell into a distant third place behind PlayStation 2 and Xbox.

The 40-year history of the video game industry has been volatile, marked by drastic, unpredictable shifts in market dominance. But one of the maxims that has always held true is that third place is a dangerous position to occupy, most everyone assumed that Nintendo would face the same fate. Nintendo itself probably even thought so. That's why the company decided to create a product that could carve out its own market niche -- a game machine so different that even if it fell to third place, it would support a viable business model.

To answer the questions: “What is the secret behind the Triumph of Wii over other consoles?” And, “what do consumers really want out of video games?”

The Triumph of Wii is on account of one easy concept - the element of FUN! Fun transcends demographics. Fun is simple.

And, as we say in mobiusgames, “Infinite FUN. Pure Pwnage!”

So what do mobiusgames and Wii have in common? Just in case it hasn't been made clear - FUN!

CCP Offers New World of Darkness, EVE Online Details

noreply@blogger.com (Otaku and The Geek) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 02:30:00 +0000

article by Chris Faylor

During a tour of White Wolf Publishing and CCP's new Atlanta Office, CCP North America president Mike Tinney revealed several new details on both the World of Darkness MMO currently under development and the future of EVE Online.

World of Darkness
"[World of Darkness] is in a prototype stage right now. There's a lot of experimentation, nothing is set in stone. It's a very open and active exchange of ideas," Tinney explained. "This project is being co-developed between both the Iceland and the Atlanta offices, with some outsourcing assets being coordinated by our Shanghai office as well."

Tinney noted that the Atlanta office will focus on developing the content for the game, while the Iceland office will be responsible for the technology behind the game, which is based on the EVE Online infrastructure, and also discussed how the company plans to keep development on-track for the ambitious project. "Everybody [on the World of Darkness in Atlanta] is grouped into teams of four, cross-discipline teams between designers, artists, programmers, quality assurance testers," he explained.

Development Setup
"That group is responsible for developing a fixed aspect of the game on a two to four week development cycle that is then turned in, reviewed [and] brought back out again and refined on a later development cycle," Tinney continued. "It's done that way to keep a two to four year project fresh, full of energy, full of small deliverables so that the team stays energized and focused on the task at hand, not caught up in the greater scheme of the project as a whole.

"It's one of the first multi-office projects of this nature," he added," and it's a very ambitious goal of ours to develop an MMO with content coming from multiple offices, but that is the way of the future and the direction that everything is going. We're innovating and learning as we go along."

Concept Art
The first floor of the two-story building, which was filled with inspirational printoffs such as "We will crush the critics and make them look like fools" and amusing pictures of cats, also contained a board filled with concept art for World of Darkness. The art depicted multiple vampire- and werewolf-esque player avatars along with rough landscapes of towns and a curious picture of Justin Timberlake. "I'm bringing darkness back," laughed CCP communications director Valerie Massey.

Currently, the World of Darkness team occupies about one-third of the space on the office's left side, the rest of the area being empty space. "We have an aggressive growth schedule ahead of us," said Tinney, who hopes to fill the rest of the room with staff across the next six months and expand into the adjoining room, which is located next to the building's racquetball court, as development continues.

EVE Online Support
With the second floor containing the whole of White Wolf Publishing's board, RPG, and card game branches as well as marketing, the other side of the office's first floor houses CCP North America's EVE Online division. This portion of the company is slated to provide additional and more time zone-friendly customer support for EVE and help with content creation. "Of course, eventually Iceland will fall beneath the waves, so there will be something left of CCP to carry on," Tinney joked.

As for the future of EVE Online, I spoke with a CCP employee who noted that the company has put DirectX 10 support on the backburner in order to focus on optimized DirectX 9 support and the forthcoming upgrade that will add normal mapping and specular mapping to the game, among other graphical features. He also pointed out that that the different focuses of the economy-driven EVE Online and the action-based World of Darkness should allow the games to co-exist without cannibalizing the sales of one another.

What GG Game and mobiusgames have up their sleeves

noreply@blogger.com (Otaku and The Geek) — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 06:52:00 +0000

mobiusgames and GG Game is taking LAN gaming to the next level! Play hack-free and lag-free with GG Client in your favorite LAN games like DOTA, Warcraft, Starcraft, and CounterStrike, Watch out for mobiusgames' premium membership deals that's guaranteed to provide richer gaming. YAY! Find out more here.

Fast Food Zoo, New Game on mobius arcade

noreply@blogger.com (Otaku and The Geek) — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 05:56:00 +0000

At Hustle Burger, the clients aren't like any others: impatient or not, happy or irritable, these funny animals will make you serve them as fast as possible. Salads, Cokes, chips or nuggets, the orders come one after another. The clients leave smiling... as long as you are quick to put what they want to eat on their tray !

Continuous play thanks to Non Stop mode or by level via Challenge mode; fun and pressure are on the menu for hours of unlimited enjoyment!

How to Play

Wait for your clients' order to appear and click on the corresponding items to put them on their tray!

Buy full game for only 229 ePoints

Not less than 7 types of different foods and drinks
8 clients with their own individual behaviours
2 game modes: Challenge and Non Stop

Try for free!

mobius allows you to play Fast Food Zoo for free for 1 hour over a period of 30 days.

Why they call the new Rakion Patch, From dusk till Dawn

noreply@blogger.com (Otaku and The Geek) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 04:36:00 +0000

The Rakion Patch that will keep you up all Day and Night.

Rakion, From Dusk till Dawn is packed with newer, intuitive game features, a slew of challenging events, a collectible armor set, new items, and discount coupons. Start saving up on sleep because on October 16 mobiusgames and Softnyx rolls out “From Dusk till Dawn” across Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines.

Your character has levelled and powered up. If only you could get payback on those stages that got you stomped. Enter stages regardless of level and clearance. For 24 hours, non-stop, wreak havoc like never before. Reset stages at will. Why stop when there’s no limit? Mark your play date and discover what makes Rakion’s newest patch “From Dusk ‘till Dawn”.

New Game Features

Character Preview

First-time players will now find it easier to pick what character they want to use through the Character Preview feature. The new preview window displays each of Rakion’s five playable characters, a brief description and strengths and weaknesses to help new players decide what character they’d be more comfortable playing and help more seasoned players decide on their playing styles.

Invite Button

Inviting friends to play in your room is now made more convenient with the Invitation button, which allows room masters to invite friends and anyone else in the channel the room is hosted on with just the click of a button. Invited players can choose to either accept or reject an invitation by clicking on the appropriate button on their invitation window. Because they were invited, players can also enter password-protected rooms without having to provide a password.

New Ex-Items

The Stage Reset item resets all stages you had previously cleared, allowing you to set new records, earn gold and experience points all over again. The Level Limit Disabler, on the other hand, clears any level limit in all stages. Both items can only be used once and will only affect the character you use to buy it with. The Level Limit Disabler lasts up to 24 hours upon purchase.

Bonus Feature

But the feature that would most probably make old and new players alike happy is the introduction of Discount Coupons for Gold and Cash transaction in the Rakion shop.

Players level 30 and below can expect a surprise in the form of a randomly generated coupon, which can be either Cash or Gold, in their inventory upon levelling up. Frequent shoppers also have a chance to receive a coupon, which they can use to purchase items from the Rakion shop.

Events, From Dusk till Dawn

Golem GM event

In Golem War mode, two teams of players go up against each other in a bid to defeat the other team’s Golem, found on either end of a game map. In the Golem GM event, the Golden Golem will be replaced by a Golem with the face of a Softnyx GM in random Event rounds during a match. The player who successfully defeats the Golem GM gets a randomly generated item. The lucky player also has a chance to receive a much-coveted piece of the collectible Elemental Armor Set, with the added bonus of seeing his name in a server-wide announcement.

Stage Game Level Delimiter event

Players can choose to participate in the Stage Game Level Delimiter event, where they can play any stage regardless of level for FREE, with each event lasting 24 hours from first log-in. Remaining hours can be checked through the time trackers, visible from channel windows and game rooms.

Chaos Reborn event

An advantage players love to look forward to in Death Match games is the Chaos mode, where their character changes appearance and becomes monstrously stronger after a certain number of kills. In the Chaos Reborn event, players randomly switch into Chaos mode during Death Solo and Death Team Play modes.

Just when you think it’s safe to take a rest from Rakion, we’ve got more goods coming your way! Expect to lose sleep from October 16-31 in Rakion’s From Dusk till Dawn and experience gaming without limits.

GET STARTED!

The Tetris Effect

noreply@blogger.com (Otaku and The Geek) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 03:45:00 +0000

And when the power goes off for good then I
Will play in my head until I die.
Neil Gaiman, Virus

So you've discovered a new video game. You're not quite sure it's what you really want at the moment, but it got pretty good reviews and it's a genre you enjoy, so what the hell. It's just fifty bucks.

You top up, check the minimum requirements then download the installer, and -- if you're particularly studious -- click through the game guide. Then you put it in your system and start to play. And play. And play. And play. Stop for a bathroom break -- Didn't I go just before I started? -- and play some more. And play. And play. And play. And then suddenly you hear an annoying beeping noise -- it's your alarm. It's 7:00 am, and you need to get moving to class.. err.. to work.

But the game follows you. Every time you stop playing, you feel like you still have some pending business. You're seeing passwords in your Alpha-Bits. You try and power-slide on the drive to the office, wherever. Clouds are looking suspiciously like troop formations to you.

Work's interminably long. You speed home and start playing again. You play. And play. And play. Maybe you beat the game somewhere in there, but that's no barrier -- just an opportunity to start over and do things better this time. You play some more. You get the Infinity Plus One Sword. You beat the Bonus Boss. You unlock the Bragging Rights Reward. You argue about the minutia of the game on message boards. You engage in impossibly involved Self-imposed challenges. Maybe you even write some execrable Fan Fic.

Don't feel bad. It's happened to the best of us. Video games are among the most addictive types of media... YAY! and they consume our time in ways that a half-hour television program or a 600-page novel just can't. The Tetris Effect -- when a game permeates every aspect of your life. Named after the original, Tetris, which has superimposed itself on more ceiling tiles and eyelids than any video game ever.

An amusing variant can occur if you've got two of such games at once, and have to split your time between them. Once they start intermingling in your head, the result can be anything from laugh-out-loud ridiculous to seriously creepy... sigh... okay back to Rakion - NEW PATCH, NEW PATCH!

Rakion Event Patch Increases CCU to 600% in Southeast Asia

noreply@blogger.com (Otaku and The Geek) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 05:00:00 +0000

mobiusgames, SE Asian distributor & publisher of triple-A online games and Softnyx, Developer of Rakion Online rolled out “The Chaos Party Event” across Malaysia, Singapore and Philippines last October 1.

Much anticipated, the Rakion Rave Chaos Event patch was slated to be the key upgrade in significantly changing the game system and the fighting strategies of every Rakion player.

On the date of launch, CCU (Concurrent Users) increased by 74%. Consumption also doubled on the succeeding day. In a span of 5 days, the event patch achieved its PCU (Peak Concurrent Users) with a 600% increase in CCU from date of launch.

The Chaos Party Event Patch is the first series of event patches that introduces major complexities to the game system, enabling players to engage in even more strategic combat. It now allows players the chance to obtain Collectible Armor Set, acquire new player bonuses and receive additional Gold and Party Points purchased within the promo period.

“We remain focused on continuing our momentum with our current MMORPG games and are delighted to see the continued successes of Rakion,” said Steve Coleman, dme VP for Publishing.

“Things are going to get a lot more exciting for Rakion.” said Coleman. “We expect to see an onset of patches events and launches at a higher frequency, each expanding and evolving Rakion’s game play.”

Rakion Rave Chaos Party: The Elemental Patch

noreply@blogger.com (Otaku and The Geek) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 17:38:00 +0000

The cold season is approaching but Rakion is just heating up.

Rakion isn't just a combat game; it involves very complex strategies which turn the tides of the battle. The tides of battle situation can be reversed every time depending on the strategy of both teams. The objective of victory on Rakion is not just annihilating the enemy or destroying specific target. To gain the final victory, the gamers need two or three phases, a great teamwork and know-how to grasp the situation to judge one's course to either go offensive or defensive. These unique game rules are easy but they also make gamers work out thoughtful strategies.

Now, change is fast approaching and new features and additions to the game system will significantly impact the way you play.

On October 1, mobiusgames and Softnyx rolls out The Chaos Party Event across Malaysia, Singapore and Philippines.

What to expect

Potions

The most important feature is the introduction of Potions. Rakion players now experience a significant change in the game system. For instance:

Health or Armor Potions – Potions allow the player to recover lost Health/Armor points. In maps where there are no health power-ups available, players with potions would end up lasting longer than others.

Chaos Potion – This grants the user 1 Chaos point allowing players to use their chaos power 1 or 2 kills ahead of the others.

Fear Potion – A potion that causes an AOE effect, preventing other players from ganging up on you.

Stimpack – This provides the player with more attack power however sacrifices Health to activate.

Cell Point – This supplies the player with cell points which allows the ability to summon their creatures faster than other players.

Scout – A skill that allows the player to view their opponents Heath, thus providing advantage in picking out the weaker players.

Collectible Armor Set

This patch is the first series of event patches that would allow players the chance to obtain Rare Elementals Armor. These limited Elementals Armor set enhance a player’s attack power and are only acquired by gaining “Party Points” in game.

Chaos Party Event

In Team Game Modes, Event rounds will randomly appear where players will be able to collect Party Points, which can be used to exchange for a piece of the Elemental Set. Event rounds will reward the winning team +5 Party Points, while the losing team gets +1 Party Point. Players must collect as much Party Points as they can in the fastest time, as only a limited number of players will be allowed to exchange their Party Points for a much coveted piece of the Elementals Set.

New Player Bonuses

Now is the best time to create a new character and experiment with a new build. Players powering up from level 1-30 get more gold at every power-up equivalent to 1,000 gold x the level they increase, allowing new Rakion players to purchase gear faster. This will be available, only, during the promo event period.

Purchase Promo

Users who top up their accounts with Rakion Cash will receive additional Gold and Party Points purchased within the promo period.

50 ePoints >1,300 Rakion Cash will get you 1,000 Gold and 10 Party Points

100 ePoints >3,000 Rakion Cash will get you 3,000 Gold and 30 Party Points

350 ePoints >12,000 Rakion Cash will get you 15,000 Gold and 150 Party Points

Without a doubt, this patch will change the fighting strategies of every individual player and team. So get started and rally up your clan mates. Reap those Party Points and experience what a true full-scale combat is about.

Want to know how you can collect ePoints?

noreply@blogger.com (Otaku and The Geek) — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 16:00:00 +0000

Being a mobius customer has its rewards - like getting free ePoints just for sharing mobiusgames to your friends and family.

Refer-n’-Collect is mobiusgames’ new Refer-a-Friend program. Like it’s predecessor, a mobius member earns ePoints for every successful referral he makes, only this time, you earn even more ePoints per referral after the 7^th successful referral. The more you refer, the more you save - There's no limit to the savings you can enjoy!

To Refer-n’-Collect, simply provide valid email addresses of friends who haven't registered with mobius before and refer them to sign-up and top-up for any of the following mobiusgames:

Gunbound, Rakion, & GoPets. When your friend signs up, you will automatically earn credits from their 1st Top-up. The amount of credit you earn will vary depending on the number of successful referrals you make and the amount of ePoints your friend tops-up:

1st - 6th successful referral	10% of initial top-up/referral
7th - 10th successful referral	15% of initial top-up/referral

Invite your friends now and get those ePoints & rewards rolling in! For the complete mechanics of this program, click here.

Play Disney’s Toontown for FREE on mobiuskids!

noreply@blogger.com (Otaku and The Geek) — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 03:15:00 +0000

Open a free account and join the Toontown Fever now!

Disney's Toontown Online is now available in Southeast Asia for FREE through mobiuskids, the first “Edutainment” portal in Southeast Asia that offers educational games and activities centered on child learning and family interaction.

Since it was first launched in the U.S., Toontown has become home to over 15 million unique Toons. Hailed as the first downloadable massively multiplayer (MMP) 3D online game for kids and families, Toontown continues to gain marketplace momentum, attracting gamers of all ages and levels around the world.

Toontown is the coolest place in the planet! Be the superhero in town as you defeat the evil Cogs bent on taking over and turning colorful Toontown into a gray corporate city. After a hard day’s work of beating Cogs with your gags, have fun decorating your estate in Toontown! Enjoy quiet time fishing with friends or get competitive for Jellybeans on the trolley games!

For every evil Cog there is an equal funny Gag. Cogs can’t take a joke, and the right kind of gag is the perfect joke to defeat a Cog! But remember that each gag has its own strengths and weaknesses, if you only have limited gags, it’s a good idea to team up with other Toons to take down that mean old Cog!

Toontown Online is and always will be free to play, but if you want access to the best that Toontown has to offer, then join the TTO VIP Club!

To check out Toontown, sign up for a FREE account! at www.mobiuskids.net. Toontown is exclusively distributed in the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam by mobiuskids.

To join the TTO VIP Club, you don’t need a credit card to subscribe, simply sign up on mobiuskids’ prepaid payment system mobiusonline^TM , load up your account with mobiusonline’s universal currency ePoints and start playing!