MMO of the Moment: Free Realms

I have developed an interesting love/hate relationship with Sony Online Entertainment's Free Realms. The game is nothing but puree du MMO at nearly its finest. I tend to describe it thusly: it's Guild Wars, but... you know, for kids... with a bit of Puzzle Pirates thrown in. Those two comparisons particularly stick out in mind to describe the game, but there's bits and pieces that I've recognized from all over the MMO spectrum, including from my stints playing Disney's ToonTown and the more recent Cartoon Network's FusionFall. [1] Then there's a little bit of Mario Kart, the Petz series, and even a collectible card game for good measure. It's hard to find a more vasty collection of "kid-crack" games under one massively-multiplayer roof.

To be perfectly honest, I've spent most of play experience in a sort of "perpetual deja vu". Just about every game mechanic is borrowed from somewhere else. However, the game is executed admirably well. There certainly is a high degree of polish to the art and visual style. I've encountered more than my share of bugs, but I'm sure that most of them have been combinations of growing pains (two million registered players in a month is certainly strong growth, even if probably only a fraction of that is yet monetized) and what seem NAT traversal issues, which I have some small bit of control over. [2]

Allow me to use my earlier main referents to frame the remainder of my discussion: I think the game compares very favorably to Guild Wars. I've pointed out before that I'm not a huge fan of Diablo-style RPGs, and still have yet to complete even the original Guild Wars campaign, but I fell in love with ...

Synecdoche, New York: A Great Film About the Upcoming Zombie Apocalypse?

I've got post ideas for some of the deeper themes of Synecdoche, NY, but figured it might be more fun to open debate on one of the possibly sillier themes. Synecdoche is obviously a movie about the "small horrors", the horrors that occur to a person naturally through the course of decay. Decay is an obvious, deep theme of the movie. The film was always meant to be that sort of a horror film, as from this Synecdoche interview at AICN:

...what happened was that Spike [Jonze] and I originally were approached by Sony to do... to do a horror movie, and we talked about ideas and we wanted to do something that sort of wasn't attached to the genre notion of horror, and so we were talking about things that are scary in the real world, and in our lives...

I think that perhaps the truly amazing part of Synecdoche is that it also merits the debate over whether or not the movie also contains large horrors. The movie wraps us up in all of the small horrors, but then leaves enough ambiguity if you start to wonder about what is happening at a larger level that there is certainly room for interpretation. I shall provide one interpretation, what I consider a "silly" interpretation and I certainly have very little idea about its overall validity, but it is a fascinating angle of the film to talk about: I think that Synecdoche is "secretly" a movie about a Zombie Apocalypse, and if it is, well then I think it may truly be a hallmark film for Zombie Apocalypse films.

First of all, I think its important to start from the realization that the point of view of the film is largely Caden's, and even when Caden is ...

My First MMO Story Arc: Iniquitous Inventions, Inc.

Just published my first arc with the City franchise's Architect system. If any heroes or villains that might read my blog are interested in trying it, it's Arc #145654 "Iniquitous Inventions, Inc.". The story is a fairly simple one, although there are a few complex things I tried to do that I don't think quite worked as planned, revolving around my primary City of Villains character, a (now) Level 41 Bots and Bubbles male Mastermind named Inique (feminine form for a latin word for sin, related to the English word iniquitous, which is not to be confused with ubiquitous or even unique).

When I first started playing this particular villain "way back" in 06, what I sort of imagined doing with the character is basically what plays out in the arc: define a nemesis hero for him, and then place him and whatever goons I put together into silly situations for heroes to narrowly escape from. (I was a little disappointed at the time to find that City of Villains was just sort of a "grimier skin" on just about the exact same game.)

This arc is definitely a little on the silly side, but does flow naturally from what I had been doing with the villain from quite early on. As a robotic mastermind, the character has 6 robots that he can call on to do his evil bidding. When I first started playing that character, robotic masterminds were something like a dime a dozen and it quickly became apparent to most of us that we could rename our pets, our robots, and add some differentiation to the robotic hordes that would sometimes show up in a team mission. My theme for Inique's robot names quickly became "household appliances" and so the names of the ...

Coding Tangent: Awards!

The PAX 10 application deadline is Saturday the 9th, and Derby (the deadline I've been using for weeks) is this Saturday. I've been working on something of a tangent to the game itself this week, the Awards system. Certainly a bad time to run the gauntlet for a tangential feature that is mere "polish" when there are bugs left on the list. However, the Awards menu items are the only remaining items on the menu that don't do anything. The PAX 10 submission wants a strong Beta, and for recent weeks I've been using the percentage of working menu items as a rough estimate of beta-candidacy. Certainly Awards are "polish", but like Help screens they help all the more with the feeling that what I'm working on is a "real game".

I'm hoping to have a chance to do a deeper write-up, if not a full fledged article on this week's work towards the Awards system, because I would like to contribute deeper to the communal spirit. Particularly because I started with a sample from Ziggyware, expanding it to better fit my needs. But also because this is one of those areas where XNA games have to fight to appear nearly as polished as the 360's in-built Achievements. Better "Awards" or whatever we call them, I think, are needed to gain some sort of legitimacy foothold with "normal 360 players". The sample I expanded upon was started in this first Awards article by Nick Gravelyn and expanded a bit in this second Awards article by Daniel Hanson.

Until I get a chance to write that deeper write-up/article I figured I would release early. Until it finds a more permanent home, here's a simply hosted AwardsDemo.zip.

I've included the ...