When not playing WoW, the other game MMO that absorbs seemingly all my free time is City of Heroes.  Some folks over on the ever-popular forum hangout at Quarter to Three started up a new "Super Group" (CoH's equivalent of a guild) around the theme of Golden Age super hero characters.   Having neglected CoH for a while, this seemed like a great opportunity to get back into it, so I created "The Eye of Amun-Ra" (the big flaming guy in the back right of the awesome sketch done by Jason Lutes who organized this whole thing in the first place). 

One of the things I love about the superhero genre, and City of Heroes in particular, is how easy it is to roleplay and get into a character without having to affect a bunch of Medieval Times-wannabe speech or memorizing the arcane backstory of some convoluted fantasy world.  Superheroes have great origins that define them, are easy to get into, fun to play, and when all the Guardians are together and we're all hamming it up in our super hero IDs, it's a blast.  I used to do a lot of "live action" roleplay in the MIT Assassin's Guild when I was in college, and this is the closest experience to that that I've found online.

Anyways, the Guardians play on the Virtue server in CoH, so feel free to send me (Eye of Amun-Ra, anyways) a tell if you play. 

Recently, a bunch of us completed the "Positron" Task Force, and to be honest, it was an effort of pure willpower to complete it.  The whole thing took about 9(!) hours, start to finish, though we did have an abortive initial attempt.  We started at 8 PM and finished up at 5 AM the next morning.   I couldn't believe how dead I was the next day... fortunately it was a weekend and my wonderful wife is incredibly understanding when I do foolish things like this (and she rightfully mocked me about it all weekend). 

The idea of these Task Forces, epic missions with a tight storyline, is a great one.  Unfortunately the execution is a bit lacking.  Not only does it take a ridiculous amount of time, you cannot start and stop it midway through -- it locks out all your other missions until you finish it.  Requiring a 9 hour effort is the sort of thing that might be OK for the final, level 50 Task Force, but for the lowest level starting one?  This shows a mindset common in MMOs that will continue to keep casual players out of the market.  There are other execution problems too -- the difficulty level scales unevenly with # of players.  So our initial attempt at the TF with 8 players was nearly impossible, but restarting with 2 groups of 4 made it vastly easier.   That's just backwards, IMO... the larger group should be rewarded for more organization, or at the very least not horrendously penalized.

In the end, I did enjoy the Task Force, grueling 9 hour session and all.  There is something about sharing that experience with others that makes it a lot more compelling.  I certainly don't understand how people can do the equivalent "endurance" sessions in games like Gran Turismo or the old-school arcade games.  That takes a certain gamer-dedication gene that I appear to be missing, but maybe that's just my old age and family lifestyle talking.

---

Speaking of Gran Turismo, GT4 is finally out.  The soap opera of their release date and feature set aside, the final product is quite fun.  I've always had a soft spot for the punishing Gran Turismo series.  It must be the masochist in me, but managing to finally finish a license test after hundreds of tries brings a kind of satisfaction few other games can match.  I wouldn't want every game to be that taxing, mind you, but GT pulls it off for me.

---

I added a link in the "game dev blogs" column on the left to Phil Steinmeyer's new blog.  Phil worked on some of my favorite games of all time (Heroes of Might & Magic, Tropico, Railroad Tycoon 2) and it's cool to see him have more presence online.  Check it out!

I spent the better part of last week at the DICE conference in Vegas.  DICE has such a different tone than GDC, so it makes for a good counterpoint -- one track, much smaller attendence, bigger focus on industry trends and high level topics.

Mark Ecko and Stan Lee are fantastic speakers, though neither had too much to say interesting about games per se (though Mark Ecko did have a lot of interesting thoughts on culture).

There was a demo from a guy at Sony R&D about vision input systems (like the EyeToy).  The demos of per-pixel depth detection and chroma tracking were particularly compelling.  He painted a very interesting vision of how technologies like head tracking and light probes could be used to create "fake" holographic displays, or how they could let you use something like the PSP as a window to an augmented reality.  Very fascinating stuff.

Speaking of the PSP, I spent a few minutes playing around with an import one that Graeme Devine (a fellow Ensemble person) had.  I was blown away, and can't wait to get my hands on one of my own in March.

Tim Schaefer made me very, very nostalgic for the days of games like Full Throttle and Monkey Island.  I hope Psychonauts is even remotely good as my expectations.

Ray & Greg from Bioware gave a fantastic talk of the community building efforts for Neverwinter Nights.  It was quite inspirational, and I hope that someday we can create a similar coherency and organizational focus in Ensemble's online presence... but it doesn't come cheap.

The AIAS awards (of which I was on the console RPG peer panel) was embarrassingly bad.  Again.  I wish I could say I was surprised, but I'm still disappointed.  Someday they'll get that right, our industry could really use a meaningful award ceremony rather than the mishmash we have now.

One neat thing about DICE is that due to the smaller format, there is a bigger focus on Q&A with the speakers in most of the talks.  My one attempt at such question was pressing the issue of game resales and rentals (which I think are the biggest single threat to the industry).  Sadly, my question was either poorly asked or poorly understood, and didn't get any coherent response.

A bunch of Ensemble folks did quite well at Poker.  I did, um, not so well at Craps, though made up most of my losses with some good luck at the utterly skill-free slot machines.  I split a 20 at blackjack, and was roundly mocked by my peers (but won both hands anyways). 

Vegas is such a smoky city.  All my clothes came back reeking of smoke (which I find fairly repulsive).  Ugh.  Well, it was still worth it for a fun trip.  However, I do find that now that I'm a cranky old man, the time and effort involved in flying out for a conference and not seeing my kids for a few days is becoming more and more of a barrier.  It's the 21st century, where is my personal teleporter?  It's especially bad when you try and hit the "trifecta" of big conferences like I do on non-game-crunch years (GDC + DICE + E3).  Fortunately I do absorb a lot of data on these things, so I think they are worth the energy and disruption involved.

---

I played a lot of Civ 3: Conquests on the plane and in the hotel.  The interface is surprisingly well suited for playing on a tablet PC.  Conventions like "click to scroll" are insane normally, but work perfectly with a pen device... it almost makes me wonder if someone there was developing the UI with that in mind.  Then again, given that the new Pirates! game still virtually requires you to use ther numeric keypad, I'm guessing not. 

Unfortunately (in a good way) the flood of good games is kicking back up again after a small reprise.  Grigsby's World At War, Heritage of Kings, Xenosaga 2, Ys, Gran Turismo 4, Wario Ware Touched, Fullmetal Alchemist, Oddworld Stranger, Starfox Assault, Sims 2 University... and that's just February!  Agh!  I still need to finish Halflife 2, and even start Halo 2, Resident Evil 4, and Metal Gear Solid 3!  Yeah, I know, I'm obsessive-compulsive about all these games (as if the big lists weren't a tipoff). 

What an extraordinary time to be a gamer.