I totally missed the recent launch of the Battlefield 2 "booster packs"... I'm downloading Euro Force right now, as a matter of fact.  I just finished played a little bit of Sin Episodes: Emergence, and I saw that Half Life Episode 1 is done pre-loading via Steam.  Also I saw that Strategic Command 2 came out late last month so I imagine I'll pick that up soon too.

The common thread, of course, being that these are all direct digital downloads.  While I'm still quite far from being able to get the majority of my games digitally, it has come a lot further than I thought it would by now.  I make most of my purchasing decisions online already, guided by forum postings and gaming websites.  Of course physical retail isn't going away any time soon either, and has access to a whole range of customers and impulse buying opportunities that will keep it viable for a long time. 

But digital distribution really is a disruptive technology.  It represents a radical shift in the power between developers, publishers, distrbutors, and retailers, even in cases where it is an existing publisher like EA getting involved.  It's going to be very interesting watching where this goes in the next few years, as avenues like Steam and Xbox Live Arcade really begin to flower.  I can't wait to see where this particular change takes us.

I'm dipping my toes into the world of WoW modding.  We're using a variant of the popular "Suicide Kings" mod and as a programmer by trade I thought I'd volunteer for our raid to try and make some simple modifications.  The changes are nothing too big, just removing some annoying warnings that aren't relevant to the way we are using it or adding some extra filters for ease of use when the whole raid doesn't have the mod.

It's fascinating to me how much games like WoW allow modding of the UI.  It's nothing particularly new overall... and other non MMO games like Civ 4 are definitely taking the idea seriously.  But allowing such extensive modding in a persistent world is a gutsy move that I applaud Blizzard for making.  It's clearly improved the lot of WoW players as a whole with mods like Suicide Kings providing extra layers of functionality (some of which Blizzard eventually folds back into the main game).  Of course, it's hard to assess how much effort it is on their side of things to handle the QA workload, security issues, customer support calls, and the like. 

I was always very pleased with what fans of the Age games were able to do with even the relatively limited modding capabilities present in those games.  Of course, it is only a tiny percentage that actually build the mods, but a much larger group of people benefit from the work of that core.  I had a lot of fun working on the extra scenario editor feature for the AOM Titans expansion, just thinking of the cool things that fans might eventually use.  Some of them (like the ability to make multiple-choice style dialogs and pop up arbitrary bitmaps) probably never got used but were still pretty easy to support...

Ok, I didn't actually go to E3 this year but it almost feels like it!  There is just a ton of media released over E3 and I'm reasonably obsessive about trying to follow as much of it as I can.

Also, Mother's Day was this past Sunday and that meant a full day of watching the our two rambunctious boys.  It sure gives me plenty of respect for what my wife Elise goes through daily, as those fellas can really wear you out! 

Somehow between E3 catchup and child-wrangling I did manage to get in some productive gaming.  I finally finished Quake 4 (boo for super-short end cutscenes, but still a fun game).  I spent a little time checking out Rise of Legends and Sin Episodes: Emergence.  Rise of Legends continues to have some great interface and game mechanics but I think the unusual setting and some rough polish will turn away a lot of buyers.  I hope it does well though!  Emergence struck me as a very, almost painfully, straightforward shooter, with a few control problems but some fun run-and-gun action regardless.  Plus, you can't beat the price ($20).

It's been pretty rare lately that an RTS has captured my interest enough to really want to finish the campaign once I feel I've learned what the game brings to the table.  Rise of Legends may be the first in a while to achieve that... I really had a lot of fun with the core game mechanics even if the campaign itself is a little incoherent.  The mechanics also sound excellent in multiplayer but like most RTSes without a very large multiplayer base I suspect finding a game against someone who won't instantly annihilate me will be difficult.

As was rightly mentioned in yesterday's comments thread, "What about Bioshock"?

I haven't had a chance to play it yet (note to self: bug Ken & Jon for beta copy), here's a good writeup on Gamespot:
link

Looks awesome, and playing it on my Xbox 360 will be the icing on the cake.

Also, as long as I'm pimping games I'm theoretically marginally involved with, here's the Gamespot piece of Age of Empires 3: The War Chiefs.  link

I've been so crazy busy with my own project here at Ensemble that I haven't had a chance to really dig in and play with War Chiefs yet, but what I have seen is really cool.  I look forward to really digging into it here with our internal playtests soon.

Other random E3 games that caught my eye today:

-- Caesar IV... awesome city builders are a passion of mine.  I wasn't 100% thrilled with Tilted Mill's first effort but I have higher hopes for this one.

--  Tabula Rasa... I'm a huge Richard Garriott fan from the Ultima games and I really like what I hear about the pace and gameplay of this, and it looked pretty good last year.

-- Warioware: Smooth Moves... I'm not a huge fan of the whole Wii thing (seems kind of a gimmick to me) but if there was ever a game for which the whole Wii movement sensor thing will be perfect for, it's this one. Plus, I just love Warioware.

E3, even remotely, certainly doesn't fail to disappoint with lots of tantalizing tidbits of the future... while I'd love to have seen some GTA 4 footage there is plenty out there to sate the appetite!

A random collection of games that have caught my eye so far:

-- Fallout 3.  Bethesda + Fallout = sold.

-- Mercenaries 2.  Gorgeous, and looking more sandboxy than the first.  Plus, a co-op campaign, which is pure awesomeness.

-- Final Fantasy XIII.  If the video so far is at all a reflection of the quality of the final game, it will blow past even the hugely high bar set by the previous games in the series.  Hopefully the market confusion with all the FF XIII variants won't get in the way too much.

-- Saint's Row.  With GTA 4 pushed off to 2007 I think the market is wide open for a clear competitor in the crime game genre to emerge.  From what I've seen, Saint's Row has the best shot at it.  Although something about their visuals doesn't sit 100% right with me, from what I can tell the gameplay will be solid.

 

Due to a last minute logistics snafu, I'm not going to E3 this year.  This is the first time in a while I won't have gone, and it's a huge console year, so I'm a little bummed.  Fortunately, the internets are coming to my rescue.  I've tended to skip over a lot of the E3 coverage on the past years where I've actually been at the show but it's amazing to me the coverage that's out there.

As a prime example, I just finished watching the press conferences from Sony, Nintendo, and of course Microsoft.  Heck, the stream I was watching was even pretty high resolution (from Gamespot).  Tons of video downloads and as always the true insider hardcore info from forum sites like NeoGAF and QT3.  "Threadcasting" is now a new term in my lexicon.

I'm looking forward to following all the E3 content online.  Already there's a ton of exciting stuff just from the pre-show... GTA4 announcement (even if I have to wait until 2007), new Paper Mario game, some fantastic looking PS3 stuff (FFXIII, Resistance, and that game from Naughty Dog), and of course a ton of X360 stuff that I can't wait to be playing soon... Saint's Row, Gears of War, Splinter Cell Double Agent. 

E3 gets me fired up every year... this year may be a little different in format for me but it still seems pretty exciting.  :)

SASU (the guild alliance that my guild on Earthen Ring, Wild Hunt, is a part of) finally downed Ragnaros tonight.  For those of you who aren't World of Warcraft players, this is the final boss of one of the harder dungeons in WoW (at the time of the game's launch I think it was the hardest).  We pulled out all the stops with just about ever consumable and buff possible in the game and took him down with something like 8 deaths.  Our group is not at all the typical hardcore raiding mindset group, so I'm extra pleased that collectively we were up to the challenge.  I didn't figure I'd ever see Ragnaros, much less help kill him, so it was quite a rush.

This was the last week we were running the raid under the same, very open, rules that it was formed on, so it was quite fitting that we achieved our first Ragnaros kill on the last run of the raid.  One of the reasons for the restructure is that apparently guilds (or guild alliances) capable of downing Ragnaros get flooded with opportunists looking for easy epic gear. 

To me, that motivation is entirely backwards.  Now that we've beaten Ragnaros, he's not nearly as exciting and appealing as he was because he's no longer a new untamed challenge.  Of course we will be killing him numerous times again, but that's mostly as a necessity for gearing up to the next level of difficulty in places like Blackwing Lair and Ahn'Qiraj. 

One of the things I thought was most brilliant about the level 1-59 game in World of Warcraft was the way you could never repeat quests and always feel like you were seeing new content.  Unfortunately the high end game is not structured in the same way, and doing so would pose a very difficult content challenge.

(Warning, minor Kingdom Hearts 2 spoilers ahead)

My 5-yr old son and I have been playing lots of Kingdom Hearts 2 together, and having quite a good time with it.  Despite a very slow start it's fun to be romping around the various Disney worlds, spotting the numerous cameos and watching Xavier jump up and down as we mow down hordes of Heartless.  Lately I've found Square-Enix to be kind of hit and miss compared to the good old days, but KH2 is a great example of how their graphical skills and overall polish can really shine.

I'm still amazed that Disney let them play around so much with their sacred IP.  This time around, they explore some more unorthodox Disney properties, such as Pirates of the Carribean and my favorite, Tron.  We just got to the "Space Paranoids", Tron-themed world and so far it is my favorite.  I think in large part this can be chalked up to how much I love that world... hearing some familiar sounds and that distinctive visual look immediately brings back great memories for me.

It is really quite a shame that Monolith's "Tron 2.0" didn't do better in the marketplace.  In my opinion, it was one of the better shooters of the past few years, and they captured the look, feel, and sound of the Tron world perfectly.  It's one of the few first-person shooters in my recent memory that I really want go back and play again, just to absorb more of the world.  But sadly, it didn't do all that well as I understand it, so I'm unlikely to ever see a Tron 3.0 no matter how much I might want to...

A posting on QT3 reminded me how much I loved the Might and Magic series (when it was in it's prime), most notably the Xeen games.  Compared to modern RPGs they were quite simple, but they had a focus, pacing, and presentation that hit right at the core of exploration, combat, and growth that really powers that kind of game.  They had clean, simple interfaces with attractive graphics and didn't get caught up in an overly complex plot or game mechanical system.  It was pure hack and slash, but distilled down to the best core of that experience.

I posted this in that thread, as I think it sums up my sense of loss over the absence of that flavor of game today:

"Between [Xeen] and games like Ultima 4-7 sometimes I feel like technologies have been lost to us, like we have uncovered rare artifacts from ancient astronauts in the ruins of some temple and have no idea how to reconstruct them ourselves.

Don't get me wrong, there are incredibly awesome games coming out now in other genres that are just as good, but it feels as if the pacing and focus that made the Xeen games so great is just a forgotten art now. I'm sure a lot of that is the pleasant fog of nostalgia. But I don't think it's all of it."

I see pieces of Ultima and Xeen in modern games like Oblivion and Grand Theft Auto.  But I still think there is room for games like those and other unmodernized classics like Star Control 2 even in the modern marketplace.

A while back I signed up for Gamefly, which is basically Netflix for games.  Basically, I realized I was spending too much money on crappy games because I wanted to check them out, then playing them once and never again.  I can't bring myself to ever sell used games back to game stores (that's a rant for another day), so they would just sit there as part of my collection and I'd feel vaguely guilty about them from time to time.

So now I just put them in my "Gamefly Queue of Dubious Quality" and check them out one at a time.  Also, it seems like a good way of playing short-ish X360 games that I just want to scam some points off of.  So my first game arrives, Amped 3.  Much to my pleasant surprise, I'm quite enjoying it.  It is certainly... odd.  But it's a fun, quirky kind of odd, much like this snowboarding game decided to cram as much of the incomprehensible zaniness of Katamari Damacy in but only got kind of half way there before being distracted by THUG style faux-coolness.  I'm finding it far more interesting than I'd expected it to be...

Oh, by the way, in reference to my posting a few days about about the Library of Congress... strangely enough, seems I'm not the only one...