100th Post!

It's taken me a long time to get here; over a year and a half. I am not exactly the fastest poster in the West, but it's been an enjoyable journey through many different games and I've learned a great deal in the process. In the next hundred posts I hope to expand a bit more, write some guides, and be a bit more aggressive in putting myself out there (such as starting a twitter account, a thing I never thought I'd do)!

Warframe first impressions, or, "I'm a ninja, I do what I want."

Not often am I able to describe a game as: "You play as a robot ninja from the past and you use various swords and guns to fight armies of clones, robots, cultists, and aliens." I think the last time I could give a summary like that was 1998. I'd installed the game on Steam some time ago but wasn't initially grabbed; it wasn't until the past PAX, when I watched some gameplay at the nVidia booth that I decided to take it up again.

PAX Prime: Season of the MOBA

As I commented in my post yesterday and observed again at Day 3 of PAX, this next year is going to be the year of the MOBA. Riot Games had a huge showing, with a tournament running alongside the convention. Meanwhile, I counted at least four new MOBAs being promoted, not counting SMITE which had a small presence with Twitch.TV and DOTA2 which was not in attendance (I was surprised to see no sign of Valve).

PAX Prime, who phoned in what?

A strange series of events lead to me getting a ticket to Saturday and Sunday of PAX prime this year; the last time I visited PAX, Valve was demo-ing some game called Left 4 Dead...so it's been quite some time. That said, while some of the panels I visited were interesting (more on them in another post) I found I had mixed feelings about the games being shown off.

Iran bans female LoL champions?

Honestly I thought it was The Onion I was reading when I came across an amusing article today, which explained that apparently as part of an agreement to hold a League of Legends tournament in Iran, the WGC would have to ban virtually all of the female champions. The only ones to escape are Anivia (being non-human) and Annie (presumably because she is a child). The full list after the break.

Depictions of weight in gaming

Note: There is now an update to this post, please see: http://outofbetablog.blogspot.com/2013/09/learning-and-evolving-or-weight-in.html

This isn't a topic I see often discussed in the arena of gaming, but I think it's relevant all the same. I am not going to sit and argue as to whether weight is an "-ism"; we can go around and around about "choice" or "predisposition". That is not the topic I want to go into though, instead I want to focus on how it is depicted in gaming, and why the modern trend is problematic. We hear a lot about race, gender, sexual orientation, and classism but I rarely hear people mention ableism or related issues with regards to gaming.

Remember, characters in games don't exist, they don't need to eat, sleep, work-out, have sex; they appear as an artist CHOOSES them to appear. If a female character appears in skimpy armor, it's because an artist chose to put her in it, not because "she likes to be sexy". We can flesh out these characters to justify those design choices, but how we choose to depict a character and the attitude we set around them are decisions the creators make.

Before I dive in, I may use words accidentally that might offend, but I do not intend to. If you, a reader, discover a word related to weight used pejoratively or insensatively, it is not intended. Point it out and I will happily remedy this.

Resets: On the player or on the server?

In my experience I have come across two forms of "resets" on daily quests and rewards; the "Server side" and the "Player side". When I say server side I mean the reset is tied to the server, as in it happens at a specific time of day for everyone. For example, in Guild Wars 2 all dailies and such reset at exactly 5 PM PST. For player side, it is when the reset is tied to the account of the player. An example of this is League of Legends, where the first win of the day bonus returns something like 22 hours after it is completed. Both have their strengths and benefits, and I find I am troubled in figuring out which I like more.