Or maybe I’m just easily amused. See what you think:

“Don’t you hate it when you want to buy weed but your disposition with your dealer isn’t high enough? We do.”

The video has become an overnight viral sensation which is great news, because Max and Sam have now committed to making more. I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with!

You can find out more by following their tumblr account: This Guy Are Sick (Note: includes adult content)

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

Cow Clicker is a Facebook app which encapsulates everything that is great about social games. The game accounts for all different playstyles and makes for riveting gameplay.

Ian Bogost, the developer, explains Cow Clicker in his blog.

You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom “premium” cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called “mooney”), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends’ cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.

You start with a single cow and a pasture. In your pasture, you can house your friend’s cow. When your cow moos, the other cows in your pasture moo. Clicking your cow earns them clicks and when they click you get credit. This is viral game sharing at its best.

In the barn, you can collect different cows. You start with a plain cow but you can swiftly move up the ranks and get exciting upgrades like a Holstein Cow or a Hereford Cow or even a Bacon Cow! If you are impatient, you can buy Mooney which allows you to click more often or simply buy that handsome new cow you have your eye on. At a rate of 1,000 Mooney for $10, it’s a bargain!

Visit the herd and visit your friends to find their status update. When you see one of them broadcast I'm clicking a cow, you can choose the option Click my click and earn a Mooney for both you and your friend. The game also includes an exciting ranking system based on clicks. Watch the leaderboard to see who is clicking the most. You can earn a gold, silver or bronze udder for making the top ranks of all time!

There’s great information on the Facebook discussion forums including this useful thread of Favorite strategies for cow clicking?

I like to click with the left button on my mouse every 6 hours. Anybody else have a good strategy?

I like to forget about the cow, then suddenly remember that several hours have indeed passed before I frantically click it. That “Moooooo” is really a thrill.

I just click constantly, maybe 120-180 times a minute, so I don’t miss the time turnover.

I alternate between my right index and right middle finger in order to avoid clicking fatigue.

Note that some players are discussing Greasemonkey scripts and mechanical clicking devices in order to get ahead, which, in my opinion, is not in the spirit of Cow Clicking. But I guess if you really want that Bling Cow, you might want to consider it.

I recommend reading Ian Bogost’s post about why he developed this game and his thoughts on the latest breed of social games which encourage compulsive clicking without effort nor gameplay. He concludes the piece with an uncomfortable insight into his own time spent developing the game.

Even over the few days I spent developing Cow Clicker, I found myself watching people play, listening to feedback, and imagining changes. I “listened to my players” and made enhancements far beyond what was reasonable for a work of carpentry or a simple parody. It’s hard for me to express the compulsion and self-loathing that have accompanied the apparently trivial creation of this little theory-cum-parody game. Have I fully represented the distillation I hoped to accomplish? Or is some feature missing? And ought I not to add it if so? Where’s the vampire cow or the werewolf cow or the cthulhu cow? Ought I not to make them? Perhaps I became consumed myself. Such is the spirit of the day, it would seem: mundane, outward obsession whose worst trick is to disguise itself as fruitfulness.

And with that, my six-hours are just about up, time for another click! That golden udder will be mine…

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

One of the fun options within APB is the ability to customize yourself, your clothes and your vehicles. Not only does this give you a unique look that people can recognise from afar but the Marketplace means you can also sell your designs, clothing and vehicle designs to others, either for APB$ (The default non-pay-for cash) or RWP (Real World Points, also known as the pay-for currency).

There are many different stations within the Social District, the area where all the design takes place. Each of them serves a different purpose and all of them have different interfaces that allow for deep customizing of everything your character owns.

In order, Vehicle/Music/Marketplace/Designer/Clothing/Persona

There are six stations in total:

• Vehicle
• Music
• Marketplace
• Designer
• Clothing
• Persona

All of the above stations work on the same principle with the exception of the Music Design station, which will be discussed in a future article. The other stations interact with the Designer Station. Although this station can actually be accessed from within any of the stations that use it, using the solo station reduces load times greatly. The Designer is the main focus of the customization, allowing you to make symbols with the many vinyls, decals, fonts and other graphics within the game.

Vinyls are basic shapes which you can use to make more complicated shapes. Different pages have different styles. Vinyls and other graphics are unlocked along-side Threat levels, as well as contact and organization standing. Vinyls are by far the most useful items, as you can make anything even with the basic shapes.

Decals are essentially preset images provided with the game. For the most part they have very little use but they can be useful if you just need a quick and easy gun/flame/other graphic. There are some really nice graphics in here, but be prepared to see some of them on other peoples stuff too. Your customization options are limited as you can only tint decals, not change their color outright.

Fonts let you, as the name implies, write on your design with letters of varying styles. These are fairly basic but useful none the less.

Symbols are similar to decals, in that they are a preset arrangement of vinyls, however, symbols, unlike decals, are ones you have made yourself or bought from the Marketplace.

Following are some design tips and tricks which you can use to give your character some flair as they start out.

Symmetry: Symmetry looks good and draws the eye. The APB Designer makes it easy. Just lay down your first graphic, get it where you like, then hit the handy “Duplicate” button at the bottom of the menu. Now select the Axis Movement button at the top, which will look like a set of arrows either vertical or diagonal. This means you can’t move the graphic outside of that one axis, and thus making it very easy to mirror your design!

Alignment: It can be hard to align two symbols, especially when you can’t simply duplicate when you want to line up two different graphics. However, you can use duplicate to help. What you should do is, duplicate the first graphic, drag the identical graphic to where you want the different graphic to be. Now click and drag your new graphic but instead of dropping it on the canvas, keep moving and drop it on the duplicated symbol. The duplicated symbol will turn into the one already there, and will have the same color and size properties as before you changed it. This is especially useful with Fonts, as misaligned text looks weird.

Styles: Most graphic sets have multiple pages and each page is dedicated to a different style. An easy option is to stick to one style, graphics within their own set always look good together. But if you enjoy designing, don’t be afraid to experiment with other styles to see what works and what doesn’t!

Layers: Layers are an integral part of designing, as they keep from looking messy and being hard to arrange. The Layers panel is on the right hand side of the screen, and every graphic you put onto the canvas will appear there. Items at the top will appear over items at the bottom of the list, and you can drop and drag to rearrange graphics so that they are in the right order.

That’s all for now, I will be back sometime soon with further techniques, design inspiration and a brief description of the Music Station.

While I was writing this article, I created a new image for testing which goes to show how quickly you can create a simple logo:

Posted by Conot on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

In that spirit, I created this quick reference guide to Scandal. My mother would not be surprised.

You have fled Fallen London for Tomb-Colonies in an attempt to avoid the gossip. Soon, the scandal will die away and you can show your face in society again. But it is somewhat dreary. There must be ways to speed things up, mustn’t there?

Opportunity Cards

Storylets

A letter to an old flame

The price of forgiveness

A letter to a trusted friend

Straight-forward Persuasive challenge. Successful result is an increase to Scandal and an increase to Persuasive.

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

With the launch of our new Battle.net, we’ll be making some changes to how players and Blizzard posters are represented on our official forums. Click here to read about our plans for integrating Real ID into our official forums, learn about the design philosophy behind the changes we’re making, and find out about some other upcoming features designed to make the forums a more enjoyable place to visit.

Ashelia has written a great article for Hellmode explaining why this is crazy talk: Why Real ID is a Really Bad Idea | Hellmode

All Blizzard is effectively doing is giving those who fall between the cracks and margins more fodder to mess with people who do continue to use their services. A lot more fodder. Real life names, addresses, and downright terrifying fodder.

Additionally, by using a full name, players are tied to their real life persona and unable to separate themselves from their online one. In this system, it becomes linked forever in search engines. This means potential employers could find out if a player was a World of Warcraft fan and even the characters they have with a simple search. As cool of a story as it would make to be fired because your boss is staunch Horde and you’re Alliance (or more likely, because you play video games and your employer frowns upon MMORPGs in general), realistically there are aspects of one’s private life that don’t look good during an interview process. My boss doesn’t need to necessarily know if I have three level 80s, or if my arena team is about to get Gladiator using a cheap team composition.

There’s other issues, too. Women might find it harsher with new avenues of harassment opened. Transgendered people could be inadvertently outted when someone sees Sally, the friendly Paladin chick, posting under the name Steve. Someone could have a distinctive name and be disregarded solely because their name sounded like a person of a certain background, race, religion, or otherwise. And if someone’s a minor–or even major–celebrity, having their name exposed could be damaging. From Felicia Day to Mila Kunis, I doubt they’d like their alternative identity exposed simply because they decided to post a suggestion on the WoW forums or report a bug to support.

Go read the full article … and join me in hoping that they come to their senses at Blizzard.

Edit: And if that doesn’t convince you, try this round-up from Lum: RealID: Scare-Mongering From A Lot Of People With Funny Names on Broken Toys.

And Another Edit: BBC News – World of Warcraft maker to end anonymous forum logins

Mr Brand said that one Blizzard employee posted his real name on the forums, saying that there was no risk to users, and the experiment went drastically wrong.

“Within five minutes, users had got hold of his telephone number, home address, photographs of him and a ton of other information,” said Mr Brand.

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

EQ2 Quests and Faction Guides

• Chronomagic (Automentoring)
• Kunark Faction Overview
• Kunark Faction Rewards
• Kunark Language Quests
• Lavastorm Essence Rewards
• Lore and Legend Books
• Order of the Rime

If anyone would like to submit up-to-date information, I’m more than happy to post the details.

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

The core idea is a city-wide game of cops and robbers where players can play either side, Enforcers or Criminals and make themselves legends within their chosen faction.

APB’s server strategy has had many different influences, including the experiences of Realtime World’s Creative Director, Dave Jones, with Dark Age of Camelot. He refers specifically to an incident where a French language server was merged with an English server, causing a language barrier which soured the game for many players. As a result of his experiences, he wanted a MMO that didn’t need large amounts of players on a server to survive, allowing each player to play the game his way, without interfering with what other people wanted to do. To this effect, APB features a interesting method of handling servers. The world is separated within two Districts (or zones): the Social District and the Action District.

The Social District, a 100,000 population server, is where players can socialize as well as customize clothing, tattoos and cars (more on that later). The Action District is where players get into the meaty part of the game, with non-stop chaos and bullets. When a player accepts a job, he (and his group) are taken to one of the many 100-user, low-population servers which comprise the Action District. Within the standard Action District, players may only interact with cars and other players related to their primary mission, so Criminals need not fear getting several groups of Enforcers on their tails randomly.

An exception to this rule is a few servers with the Chaos rule set implemented, wherein the restriction to only interacting meaningfully with things related to your mission is removed.

NPCs have very little impact in the city and their primary purpose seems to be keep you from spraying bullets wildly into innocent bystanders, which penalize your score regardless of your faction. One meaningful role they do play is represented in contacts. Instead of using a level system, the game uses a system of contacts, where the better you do, the better contacts and therefore jobs you get. Both Criminals and Enforcers get contacts, although in most cases it will be the Criminals who will initiate jobs, and Enforcers will then get All Points Bulletins (a reference to the title, where All Points Bulletins in real life refer to a communique from one law enforcement agency to another regarding crimes or missing persons) informing them about the heist that the Criminals are planning.

In this way, the game’s method of dynamic difficulty is shown. The game will assess your progress and aptitude through a variety of methods, including kills, deaths and how far into the job you are in relation to time since the job was taken. This information is used to decide which Enforcers are of a suitable difficulty to take on the Criminals. As a balancing feature, Criminals can call in back-up, which can result in all-out battles between Enforcers and Criminals, bullets whizzing everywhere.

APB also offers celebrity status within the game via a series of ranking boards for Criminals and Enforcers. These boards come in different flavors, with Daily, Weekly and Monthly versions. In this way, the Criminals quickly learn of which Enforcers to fear and the Enforcers know which Criminals they wish desperately to arrest or take down, boosting their own popularity. To complement this, APB discards any possibility of generic characters through its in-game editor, which allows you to create and use your own designs on clothes, cars and even tattoos. The editor means that no two players look alike and allows players to make their cars as cool as they want. In addition, the Auction House in-game allows for people to auction their clothes for Real Time World points. These points can be used to purchase in-game time, although only very good designs are likely to get people paying out RTW points for it.

The Squid T-Shirt was made by the player

APB has two different subscriptions methods, with the tried-and-tested monthly subscription, for which you get unlimited access, and the refreshingly new hourly subscriptions, where a player can buy hours in 20 hour blocks. These hours are only used up while the player is in-game, and even then, only while in the Action District. This allows casual players with limited time simply to buy blocks of play-time and not worry about recurring charges while they are not playing. As a interesting thing of note, if you are in the Action District, and you run out of play-time, the game will not simply disconnect you mid fire-fight but instead wait until the person has finished the current job and then return them to the Social District which they can continue to access. To return to the Action District, they will have to buy more hours.

The game has received widespread attention from professional game journalists, as well as the interest of Internet figures. Tim Buckley, of the Webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del said:

APB takes some fun, fast-paced, shooter action, and mixes it with lots of fun MMO-style customization. It’s rough around some of the edges, but it’s also got a pretty solid foundation to build on.

While the popular gamer’s magazine, PC Gamer’s writer Craig Pearson summarised the game well when he previewed the game in the June edition:

A burning car drives past on two wheels. A tattooed, nipple-ring wearing thug leans out of the window, firing back at a wailing police car.

The game released 30th of June in the U.S., today the 1st of July in mainland Europe and will be available tomorrow, 2nd of July in the UK.

I’m Conot, a Criminal, on the Patriot server. Feel free to hit me up to go for some heists.

If you are already playing, you may want to read my post about APB: Customization. Watch this space for future articles as we explore the game.

Posted by Conot on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

How do you enter? Radisson say that the winner should be someone who really deserves it. So you need submit your details on their site and explain why you deserve to win. You can submit a text entry or add photographs or drawings or even videos to support your entry. The general public will be voting for their favorite entries and self-promotion is encouraged, so you can ask all your friends to vote for you.

Whoever has the most votes by the 24th of July wins. Note that you must be a citizen of a qualifying country to enter the competition but anyone can vote.

They’ll also be choosing a separate winner every week for Creativity Awards with varying prizes ranging from gift certificates to weekend get-aways. You can see the current prizes on the Radissonblu website, currently a weekend in Stockholm.

To enter, you must be a citizen of an EU country, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein or Switzerland.

Most of the entries at the moment seem to be fairly straight-forward requests so I think someone taking the time to be creative would have a great advantage. If you do enter, pop a comment here so that we can go vote for you!

Find out more about the competition on the Radisson Blu website: The Greatest Holiday in the World

This is a Sponsored Post which helps keep the site running.

Posted by Taymar on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

Wukung has already rated a number of games this year, including Darksiders, Bayonetta, Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, Mass Effect 2, Dante’s Inferno, BioShock 2, Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, Heavy Rain and Yakuza 3, Bad Company 2, Half Minute Hero, BlazBlue, Red Steel 2 as well as Disgaea 2, FFXIII, Just Cause 2, Splinter Cell Conviction, Nier, Super Street Fighter IV and Iron Man 2! Here is his latest set of reviews, exclusively available on MMORPG-Info.

–Taymar

3D Dot Game Heroes (PS3)

Retro action adventure in the style of the classic 2D Zelda games, with a fun twist on the 2D graphics. While 3D Dot Game Heroes does borrow heavily from the original Zelda, the gameplay brings just enough of its own ideas to feel functional as both a homage and its own unique entity. Its retro gameplay is less sophisticated and accessible than even early Zelda games in some ways. I had a lingering feeling I would have enjoyed actually revisiting Zelda: Link to the Past more but this loving homage still has its moments and the character editor adds a fair bit of entertainment value.
7/10

Alan Wake (Xbox 360)

Horror/thriller action adventure. Decent story telling with strong graphics and presentation carry the game. The action is respectable if shallow, with most the danger coming from several minor control quirks compounding. Aside from some difficulty spikes towards the end Alan Wake does very little wrong but never quite reaches greatness.
8/10

Red Dead Redemption (Xbox 360 tested, PS3)

Red Dead Redemption is an all-round well-made game. The shooting is responsive and is solid enough to support a decent competitive multiplayer. As usual with a big game there are few rough edges and annoyances but these are minor issues. Solid gameplay, a wealth of well made content, great Western atmosphere, impressive graphics and surprisingly strong multilayer make Red Dead Redemption a great package.
10/10

No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle (Wii)

Over the top action game. Having played the original is not required but probably helps. The original had decent core game bogged down with some major frustrations. Desperate Struggle deals with most of these problems but it adds a couple of lesser frustrations.

While it lacks the depth or sharp controls of Bayonetta, No More Heroes gets a bit more up close and personal. Gameplay tweaks such as removing the need to grind to progress the story, 8-Bit minigames and classic controller support makes Desperate Struggle a solid improvement on an already decent game. On the down side Desperate Struggle’s bosses are much less memorable. Excellent if occasionally incoherent.
9/10

Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands (Xbox 360 tested, PS3, PC)

Instead of continuing on from the 2008 reboot of the series, Forgotten Sands returns to the Sands of Time series and was released conveniently close to the film adaptation. After the innovations of the previous Prince of Persia, Forgotten Sands feels like a disappointing backwards step. The combat is dull and the platforming action while still fun, feels overly familiar. However good production values help the game a great deal. Forgotten Sands is a decent if slightly underwhelming game.
7/10

God of War 3 (PS3)

God of War 3 gets a shocking amount wrong, including unskippable cutscenes, a very uneven difficulty curve, some very unhelpful camera angles. But what it does well it does really well, awesome environments, great combat, excellent pacing. The pure joy that is wielding the Nemean Cestus weapon more or less was enough for me to forgive its more frustrating aspects.
9/10

Posted by Wukung on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.

By about level 20 to 25 your rate of production gets very slow in comparison to the resources needed for upgrades. The solution is to attack other players and carry off a silo full of everything you need. Of course the same is true for them too…

Defence

The only reliable defence you have is towers so you need to make sure they are safe. Pack all your towers as close together as you can (known as the ‘Big Dumb Bunch’ or BDB), plonk the town hall and your silos next to them, ring that with a wall (but leave strategic gaps – I’ll get onto that) and put the twig snappers, putty squishers etc. around that.

Everything else is too low priority to bother trying to defend.

You can have a strong defence with Level 4 towers and Level 4 town hall: you should aim to be somewhere near this at about level 25. The upgrade from 4 to 5 for towers is significant as it gives a bit more range increase than previous levels. So long as your towers support each other and guard the silos you should be at little risk whatever level you are so you can start PvP at Level 20 (or before) if you like.

There are various designs for base defence. You need to leave gaps in the walls or the monsters will just eat through the wall. You don’t want this to happen because that gap will remain undefended for future waves who will then ignore the wall and go through the gap. Monsters hugely over-estimate the effort of chewing through a wall.

Use the walls and the gaps you create to force the attackers to move across your lines of fire or into traps. Monsters who do a lot of damage will be happy to chew through a wall but a wood wall will make an Ichi (a common tower attacker) walk about another five to ten squares. Pathing is odd though and they can make strange decisions.

Monsters can go through the smallest gap in a wall and through diagonals (it’s an obvious gap with stone blocks but they can squeeze through wooden block diagonals too).

Attacking

Target Selection

Find a base where the towers are round the outside, they won’t support each other much (or at all) and your tower attackers will only be under fire from one or two towers at a time. It generally takes about an hour before you can loot (i.e. 4 attacks before you can loot).

If the towers are set up such that they are all near two others you’ll be constantly under fire from 3 towers, each wave of monsters should kill between one and three towers so 6 waves before you can loot – allow at least two hours.

Note how full the silos are, you want ones that are stuffed. If they look nearly empty, you may as well leave that target until it is worth looting.

Also take note of any upgrades they have – very recently started upgrades can indicate that they were recently on line and so moderately likely to log on within the next hour or so. If you are very diligent you could try to note patterns and estimate when they log on but it is only worth it if you have a severe dearth of targets.

The Fight

A fight lasts for seven minutes. You can use the flinger for the first 5 and, when the fight ends two minutes after that, your monsters just stop and wander off and you are prompted to ‘end fight’.

Splash towers should be a priority as they do more damage overall and mostly you want to mass your monsters so they attack one tower at a time but:

1. If you suspect a gap in a wall has a trap in it you can send a single monster ahead.
2. You can send groups of monsters from slightly different directions in order to avoid being close together (and thus avoid the splash damage from the splash towers)
3. You can also send a single tough monster to distract a splash tower while the rest of the force take out nearby pellet towers (or vice versa). Towers pick the nearest target but stay on that monster until it is dead.
4. A slight variety of monsters can be good if you have the options: crabatrons, Ichi, Project X and even Octo-ooze can all work together.

On the whole though, you are best off with a mass of Ichis running about killing as many towers as they can then sending another wave until there are no more towers or at least none near anything you want to loot.

Three things will stop you attacking your target multiple times.

1. You accidentally level up and your target is no longer available. To avoid this, don’t empty out harvesters between attacks. You can attack a player two but not three levels below you.
2. The target logs on and repairs everything. To avoid this use fast turn-around monsters like Itchis and Finks on subsequent attacks where you can.
3. Damage protection: if a target is attacked four times within an hour it gets 1 hour of protection. If you are not ready to do a loot wave after 3 attacks, you should not attack again until an hour after the first attack.

If the target loses over a third of the yard, it gains get 18 hours of protection. If the Yard is over two-thirds destroyed it gets 36 hours of protection. Walls don’t count for this calculation but I’m not sure how it is weighted: Town Halls seem to be worth extra. This means you only get one looting wave because the target will gain protection after you start grabbing resources.

Loot Wave

After you’ve done a few waves to remove their towers you’ll want to cash in on those fat silos.

Brains look best for a loot wave but they do such little damage that they can get very bogged down, also they take ages to build.

Finks do a whopping 300 damage: the best damage per storage space you can get. They are fast to build and cheap in goo. The only drawback is that Finks are easily killed by traps. To avoid this, mix up your loot wave of Finks with a Pokey or two and have them attack in small groups – if you can target a bunch of silos then all to the good.

The Fang is an upgraded Fink but still can’t take a trap hit so there is no advantage. Project-X is marginally the best looter but you need all towers to be gone or he’ll go for them instead. They are also very slow to build and costly on goo so, on balance, probably not worth it.

Next Week: The math behind monster production and resource upgrading.

If you don’t want to miss it, subscribe to the feed.

Posted by Aach on http://www.mmorpg-info.org.