Putting the "Cat" Back in Cataclysm

Image:  Blizzard.com

Yes, that's a cat with wings.  Yes, it's on fire.  Yes, it can be yours if you play World of Warcraft and pay $25.

No, I don't think I'll be buying it.  And I'm not sure hordes of other WoW players will, either.

The Winged Guardian is the second mount Blizzard has put in its online Pet Store, and is arguably a big step up from the Celestial Steed (aka My Little Sparklepony) in terms of model and coolness factor.  It's also going to cause a second wave of uproar from anti-microtransaction players that feel items like this should come with their subscription fee.  In other words, whiny gits.

Full disclosure:  I bought the Starpony the day it came out and I'm still glad I did.  So why am I digging my heels this time around, and predicting other people will do the same?

The Force Just Ain't With This Guy

Check out this report of two Massachusetts seniors that got banned from graduation after staging a lightsaber duel during lunch on the last day of school.  The pair put together a choreographed routine so they could “go out with a bang”, and the school suspended them for it.

There are two things about this story that stick out to me.  First, as much as I like lightsabers I think the school is within its bounds to suspend two kids who start whacking at each other with plastic sticks in the middle of the lunchroom.  The punishment of a ten-day suspension and not being allowed to walk at graduation seems harsh, but from a risk/reward standpoint the school doesn’t have many other tools it can use to enforce order on two seniors with a few weeks left.  If they were just suspended, it’d be like getting out of school two weeks early.

D-Day: D&D Daggerdale

D-Day is a new thing I'm trying, where I play a demo for an upcoming game and give my impressions on it.  Today we're talking Dungeons and Dragons Daggerdale, Atari's recent co-op hack n' slash set in the D&D world.

I remember being very excited when I got Atari's first announcement email for Daggerdale, since this was supposed to be the first solid use of the Fourth Edition rules in a video game.  I'm a fan of 4E, and thought its use of player powers and other design choices would make it easier to translate into different media like video games.

Judging from the demo, I'll have to keep waiting for that to happen.

Playing Against The Clock

Has this ever happened to you?

"Alright, that was a grueling encounter.  Let's camp out on this level of the tower, heal up and get all those big abilities we just used back because that next encounter's probably going to be the boss fight."

This attitude hadn't sunk into my D&D game until just recently, when one of the players switched to a wizard.  Now after using their daily spells, the party is ready to call it for the day/night to try and keep their biggest guns loaded.

It's a natural impulse for players:  the DM is throwing really hard stuff at us and possibly out to kill at least one of us to 'put the fear back in them' (which is so totally NOT what I was doing), so we should keep our hardest-hitting powers available as much as possible.

It's that moment when the warm, fuzzy immersion of roleplaying lifts and all that's left is the cold logic of character sheets, dice and statistics.  It's when DMs that care about story (or care obsessively about it, like I do) start casting about for anything to keep the party from gaming the system.

So what can you do to keep the action going?

The Bloody Cost of Victory

I just finished Dragon Age 2, dragging my version of the protagonist Hawke through nearly a full acre of blood and the mutilated bodies of my enemies.  DA2 finished with a much more epic (and perilous) ending than Dragon Age: Origins did, but it was an ending that I almost wasn't sure I wanted to see.

I had put DA2 down just as I got into the third act for a number of reasons; I was busy, I had blasted through the first two acts in a matter of days, and I was feeling just a little bit... disappointed by some of the changes that had been made.

In then end, I toughed it out and put an end to the madness in Kirkwall, unleashing a new kind of madness on the world as a result.  Wherever Bioware's going with the finale of the triology, it's going to be epic.

Join The Dark Side? ...Okay.

I love Star Wars.  It was the first real geeky thing I ever latched onto, and boy did I latch on like a mynock to a power coupling.

I read the books, devoured the comics, sunk way too much money into the collectible card game, and just overall obsessed about it the only way a young fanboy could.

When it came to Star Wars and video games, I managed to avoid most of the early flops until Bioware introduced Knights of the Old Republic and KOTOR 2.  Both were impressively robust yet accessible RPGs that really captured the epic feel of Star Wars, while still bringing unique additions to the overall universe such as the amnesiac Revan and the murderously-hilarious HK-47.

Now, Bioware's incredibly-ambitious MMO "Star Wars:  The Old Republic"  is going to get me to do something I've rarely done before:  play the bad guy.

Game Over

No big post tonight:  too much news going on.

September 11th was a strange day for me:  it was both a day of great sorrow, but also a day when I confirmed my life's calling to be a journalist.  No one I knew personally was killed in the attacks on New York, and since I was in college working at the TV station at the time I helped report on security measures being taken at the local nuclear plant.  It was my first real TV story, and I knocked it out of the park.