An Ongoing Tribute to my own lameness.....

General random thoughts about gaming, both within and outside of the MMO genre.

Author: Jimmy_Scythe

So it's been about two weeks since my last entry.....

I really don't have anything to say about MMORPGs at the moment and common sense tells me that I should just stop typing right now and back away from the keyboard slowly. Unfortunately I've never listened to common sense so I'm just going to spill my game related stream of consciousness out onto the screen and hope for the best.

To begin with, I've abandoned my attempt at making an Atari 2600 "de-make" of the first level of God of War. It isn't so much the extreme limitations of memory and processing power as it is the complexity of programming the 2600's TIA (Television Interface Adaptor).

You see, by the time I started making games as a hobby (1995) hardware manufacturers had made video cards that handled much of the timing for you. You could wait for the card to tell you when the vertical and horizontal blank was and then just write to the appropriate register from whatever block of memory that you wanted transferred to the screen.

This just isn't the case with the 2600 since you have to do everything yourself. The programmer has to practically be a TV repairman and time everything in his / her code to sync up correctly. It's a little bit like writing down music since you have to count everything out in nanoseconds and be absolutely precise about it. Long story short: I'm just not that fucking bright.

So I've decided that I'll just do the whole thing with in text mode with color ANSI in under 100K instead. Not sure if that's possible even in a Win32 console program, but it'll achieve mostly the same effect. I'll still be using a joystick ( or arrow keys) and one button (or spacebar) for the controls though. It wouldn't be a de-make if I didn't step it completely back.

In other news, I recently acquired an Xbox for free. No, not a 360... just a regular Xbox. one of my neighbors was moving and he told me that he had thrown away an old Xbox that didn't work anymore. He had already bought a 360 so it didn't really matter to him anyway. Being the cheap bastard that I am, I fished the poor thing out of the dumpster, cleaned it up, plugged it into the TV and hit the power. Lo and behold, it booted up. I then rented Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil for $1 at the local video store and tried it out. Sadly, it didn't play. Not to give up so easily, I broke out the 12oz. air duster can and blew out the drive. This time the machine read the disk and I was able to play all the way through RoE.  Haven't had any problems with the machine since. Currently killing time with Unreal Championship 2 when I don't feel like being hunched over the keyboard in Battlefield 2142.

I haven't played any MMOs for several months now. Sure, I played Wolf Team for awhile, but that isn't an MMO. I had to leave since I encountered blatant hackers in three different games, one right after another, all on the same day. I have Guild Wars installed, but I couldn't tell you the last time I actually ran it.

Looking at that current crop of MMORPGs and those that are soon to be on the shelves, i can't really see myself laying down any money for any of them. Sure, I thought about spending some money on a FFXI trial disk, but my curiosity about this game isn't worth $3.

I think the real problem is that I've played almost every game that has a free trail out and of the P2P games that I haven't tried, they're all too new to actually have trails to play yet. I lost interest in F2P games at about the same time I uninstalled Archlord.

It goes a little deeper than that though. I would say that it's a flaw with the RPG genre itself, but that would be a lie. I've played one hell of a lot of RPGs in my time, online, offline, and tabletop. MMORPGs just don't have that nebulous "something" that makes a compelling RPG experience. Instead, they offer community as a consolation prize. Like a community of shit talking, macho insecure, socially retard teenagers that think Chuck Norris jokes are the height of wit is really worth $15 a month.

I could go over my favorite RPG list and point out exactly the elements that make them compelling and then turn around and point the suspicious absence thereof in MMORPGs, but I think I've pointed that out in earlier posts. Just to recap though....

1) Exploration - MMORPGs just don't have this. Everything is already mapped out for you with big exclamation marks to let you know where all the important NPCs are.

2) Tension - I remember in Dragon Warrior on the NES I used to actually have to make hard decisions about pressing on in a dungeon or turning back because I was running low on health, mana, and potions. Even this simple level of logistical planning isn't required in MMORPGs since you can just wander into a safe spot and wait for your health and mana to replenish.

3) Interesting Combat - Remember Vagrant Story? Remember Fallout? Yes, the combat is done with dice rolls and charts, we know that. The catch is that we still want as much control over what's happening on the screen as possible. Unfortunately, MMORPGs give us automatic combat with just the occasional button spamming. It looks something like this. To be fair, it also looks like this. That's still a far cry away from the way it should be. It's definitely nowhere near what most of us really want.

4) Story - It's funny, I never felt like skipping any of the text in FFIII (actually VI) on the SNES) but I usually just skimmed the "flavor text" in most MMORPG quests for the objectives. I realize that the community is supposed to be the story here, but it just doesn't fill the void.

Aside from that, all the most boring aspects of RPGs are included. Grinding, restating, unnecessarily long travel times.... you get the idea.

I may not love RPGs to the exclusion of all else, but I'm not someone that hates RPGs either. You'd think that a never ending RPG would be great, and it would be.... If it was a good RPG to begin with. Sadly, none of the current or upcoming MMORPGs qualify.