When I was a kid I used to watch Chip 'n' Dale, Rescue Rangers religiously. It was on at 5pm, and I was mad when the bus ride home from school took too long and I didn't make it back in time to watch the show.

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Oh, Zelda Classic, you will consume what little free time I had left. It started off as a simple PC clone of the original Legend Of Zelda NES game, but over time grew into way more. They made it possible to develop new quests, graphics, and sounds for the game, and there are now tons of cool levels available, developed by users. It's a good thing this doesn't run on Linux, or my worktime productivity would be in danger.

EDIT: As long as we're talking about The Legend Of Zelda, here's an amusing description of the items to be found throughout the game.

Will Wright, the creator of SimCity and The Sims, is working on an incredible new game that I'm really excited about. The concept is called Spore, and essentially, gameplay proceeds in stages, getting more and more complex. As your character evolves, the scale changes, much like the film, Powers Of 10. You start as a single-celled lifeform trying to avoid being eaten by other single-celled organisms (think Pac-Man), and over time the game progresses all the way to controlling an interplanetary culture that interacts with other races (created by other players elsewhere on the internet). GameSpy published a detailed review of the game that explains the concept much better than I can, and GamingSteve has some screenshots grabbed from the introduction Wright gave at Game Developer's Conference last week. It's encouraging how complete and polished the demo appears to be — otherwise I'd worry that the game was too ambitious to be practical. However, it seems like it's actually happening, so now all that's left to do is to wait eagerly for its release.

Frighteningly, I'm actually getting into this EVE Online thing. It's a different experience, because of the whole multiplayer thing. In most games, when you're starting out, you run up to everything and look curiously at it, try shooting at random stuff, etc. In this case though, most ships and stuff you see out there are actual people, and things you do can actually affect other players, so acting like an inquisitive four-year-old ends up drawing attention to yourself :) I was exploring the interface, looking through the list of signed-on users, and double-clicked one to bring up the information on that user. However, instead of doing that it opened up a conversation window, and the person said "Hey, what's up?" I said eek and explained I was just learning my way around.

We'll see if it remains interesting once I get enough into the game where I'm actually interacting with other people regularly — I've never been a super social person, so it's hard to say whether that would be a desirable or distasteful aspect in a game. We shall see. There's tons of potential for interaction in this game if it's desired — players can form corporations to manufacture products that are better than the ones available directly from the game, for example. You can join a corporation and perform some service for them like mining or couriering or whatever. I sort of think that might make it feel too much like work though, because they would probably be pissed if I didn't sign on for a few days because I didn't feel like it or had too much work or whatever, hehe. I don't want to feel obligated to a video game.

Yesterday I came across this entertaining tale of deceit and consciencelessness describing a scam a guy pulled off in a space-based MMORPG called EVE Online. I hadn't heard of the game before, but although the general point of his story is that he becomes disillusioned with the game and turns to "crime," his vivid descriptions of the battle scenes actually sounded pretty intriguing. It's sort of like Homeworld only multiplayer. So, despite my usual lack of enthusiasm for online gaming, I figured what the hell and downloaded the EVE client and paid the $20 for 30 days worth. I highly doubt I'll actually keep paying the $15/month even if I do like the game, but it sounded interesting and worth a $20 experiment.

I've only played it a little so far — I've only done the tutorials, haven't interacted with anyone else yet. But it does seem pretty enjoyable. You can pretty much do anything you want — some choose to mine asteroids, some run trade routes to sell goods in areas where they fetch a higher price. The part I like is that some decide to be pirates and lurk in the less patrolled areas of space between star systems and prey on those traders. Sure, the fact that it's an MMORPG means you're stealing from real people, but hey, their job would be boring if you didn't provide some excitement and risk :)

So we'll see if it proves entertaining enough to hold my interest — very few games do — but at first glance it looks pretty fun.

I stumbled across such a great story today. Apparently about a year ago, some kids who take MMORPGs way too seriously started up a Storm Trooper guild in the Star Wars Galaxies online role-playing game. Just like my old roommate Bobby in Tribes, they'd meet for drills and patrols. Finally, the game developers noticed this little bubble of dedicated players and arranged for Darth Vader to take some time out of his busy day and stop by to inspect the troops and give a speech. Since I'm sure the screenshots on the linked thread will go down soon, here's my two favorites. Imagine the titillation those players felt when their year of hard work finally paid off. It's times like this that make it all worth it.

Doom3 is incredibly well done. I always praise Half-Life because it creates such an immersive, realistic experience. Half-Life is enjoyably creepy, but Doom3 is truly scary. The basic foundation on which they build the atmosphere is the graphics - it looks realistic enough to allow for suspension of disbelief; you can really get into it and forget that you are playing a game.

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