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!