Welcome home. Let’s talk games.
(…is in my ears, and in my eyes)
This delightful rant by Nicodemus over at KTR got my failing brain cells firing. I was sure I had written something in the same vein a while back, but couldn’t find it. Well, after braving ars’ search for a while, it came up. Well, here you go, reposted three years later in its entirety. I don’t know much about these things, but it seems to be as valid today as it was back then. Not much has changed at all.
Because I got tired of the old one. Hopefully this is more readable.
(I either post something once a month or once a day. No middle ground for me)
Came across a small, player-made collection of shots from LOTRO using the hi-res texture pack available on the pre-order DVD. Looks very, very nice. The difference can be subtle, but it’s there. Personal favorites: 4, 7, 13, 14.
According to floon from Turbine, the pack in question is “… a few gigs of textures”, hence the reason it’s included in the DVD and not available as a download (afaik, at least).
Wonder if it would trash to HD too much if I try it on my old TNT2.
Will’s keynote at SXSW is up at Kotaku. He talks about Spore and… well, not really just Spore. He talks about it and a lot of other things.
Very much worth the read if you like Will or if you’re interested in what’s going on in his head. Which is an Herculean task on any given day.
And I’ll be damned if he doesn’t like a mix between David Carradine and Kevin Sorbo in that pic.
I was recently skimming the LOTRO boards, and a post caught my eye. Rather, a post that shouldn’t have caught my eye, did. I should have just read the topic and kept going, simply because I have seen posts like that, with subtle variations, a thousand times already regarding different games.
It was a post complaining about crafting.
Why is it that, way more often than not, crafting systems all across the board feel hollow and unrewarding? Why is it that, going by that nebulous thing known as the opinion of the gamer in the street, we can only point at one or two more or less common examples of acceptable crafting systems (DaoC seems to come up usually), while the rest are generally determined to be crap? Just what the hell is it about crafting, and why does it seem that no one apparently can get it right?
