As Seen On TV

The television commercials for the Nintendo Wii usually feature two Japanese guys bringing the Wii to people and saying "Wii would like to play", then showing various people enjoying the system. The one that features Wii Sports shows at one point some senior citizens, in their old bowling shirts, playing the bowling game of course.

When I bought a Wii back in March, I mentioned it to my future mother-in-law Arbadella, as she was for many of her years an avid bowler, and a good one, having a shelf full of trophies in her apartment to prove it. It's a hobby she unfortunately had to give up due to arthritis. She is generally disdainful of modern gadgetry, having only recently gotten a cell phone and needing a lot of help just to figure it out.

That's okay, of course, as even I have trouble figuring out all these modern doohickeys. When we told her about Wii Sports bowling, she seemed intrigued, but not to the point that she'd ever try it. We gave up after a few times mentioning it to her.

Recently, though, she was told about it again, but this time from a friend of hers at church who plays it with her family. Where our attempts to introduce her to the game failed, peer pressure from someone her own age suddenly got her interested.

So, on Thanksgiving she came over and tried it before we had to go to the family dinner, and she loved it:



So, yes, with the Nintendo Wii, you can believe the hype. It's as close as she can get to real bowling, and without the arthritis pain she would get with the real thing. She wants to come over again soon and play some more.

The Wii Zapper and Link's Crossbow Training

It's another great week for owners of the Nintendo Wii system, as the Wii Zapper has been released with the game Link's Crossbow Training. For $25 at my local Gamestop, I got one after work yesterday, and immediately took it home to give it a try.

The Wii remote acts as the barrrel and trigger of the gun, and just behind it sits the nunchuck controller, with the wire between the two conveniently tucked away within the zapper itself. Although it's made of plastic, it's heavier and sturdier than one might think, giving the whole package the kind of weight one associates with a gun.

Link's Crossbow Training is a nice little set of shooting games that comes with the zapper, and it offers a lot of variety. Each level consists of three challenges and at the end of the three a score is tallied. Bronze medals are awarded at 20000 points, with silver and gold following at 40000 and 60000 respectively. The game starts with three levels unlocked with the others opening up when bronze medals are achieved in the first three.

Some shooting is stationary, with targets appearing. Others have Link moving left and right as he's encircled by enemies. The best challenges have Link moving through an area shooting at enemies with a third-person view. I've only played through the first four levels so far, and it's a lot of fun, with a few power-ups like a rapid-fire crossbow available at times.

The game uses locations and enemies from the Legend of Zelda : Twilight Princess, which reminds me that I need to go back and finish that game some time. It's a great pack-in game for the Wii Zapper and a great addition to my Wii collection.

I really wanted the Wii Zapper for Medal of Honor Heroes 2, though, as that game is also compatable with it, and man does the Zapper kick ass with this game. In the review I had read before buying it, the reviewers stated that hardcore gamers would probably prefer playing Medal of Honor Heroes 2 without the zapper, but in the online mode I found it made a big difference for the better in terms of my personal performance.

I played online deathmatch with the Wii Zapper and the Thompson machine gun and was doing much better than I had with just the Wii remote and nunchuck. The weight of the Wii Zapper combined with the rumble feature of the Wii remote to really make it feel like a machine gun. It was just a blast.

I also tried the Wii Zapper with Medal of Honor Heroes 2's arcade mode, which plays like a classic arcade light gun rail shooter, a genre of gaming I had never found all that much fun before, and again I was having a blast. Once I got the rhythm down for shooting and reloading, that is.

I'm loving the Wii Zapper and recommend it just for Link's Crossbow Training alone. With Medal of Honor Heroes 2, though, as an indication, I can clearly see this controller holder getting a lot more use as more games come out for it in the future. Well done, Nintendo.

Nintendo Wii - The Long Dry Spell Is Over

I spent a long summer with growing regret of my decision to get a Nintendo Wii. After I was pretty much done with The Legend of Zelda : Twilight Princess, and after I had beaten Super Paper Mario, all that was left was Wii Sports and Wii Play, usually enjoyed when Monique (my fiancee') and I both had the time to play. I tried several other Wii games over the summer - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Rayman Raving Rabbids to name a few, but none were really any good.

When Metroid Prime 3 hit the Wii back in August, I passed on it too. I was still smarting from the frustration of the Gamecube Metroid Prime to trust that franchise again.

This week, however, everything has changed.

Super Mario Galaxy
Nintendo has launched their big gun, their system-seller, and man they got everything right. Mario is back in a whole new star-spanning adventure that has perfect controls, a huge number of levels, mind-bending gravity and vertigo effects and gameplay, and of course lots of those little touches that indicate a level of craftsmanship unparalelled in the game design world.

I've barely scratched the surface of this title, and like a fine bottle of wine, I'm gonna savor every moment of this instant classic.

Medal of Honor Heroes 2
At last, That's all I can say about the arrival of this game.

Not that I've been counting down the months until it's release. On the contrary, I just found about Medal of Honor Heroes 2 last weekend when I was looking for upcoming releases for the Wii on ign.com. It's the first first person shooter for the Wii to get it right...for me at least. Fans of Metroid will of course disagree.

What it got right are perfect controls, using the Wii remote to aim and shoot and the nunchuck to move. Here's a few other cool examples of the controls on this thing:

Using the bazooka : You flip the Wii remote over your shoulder, pointing behind you, and aim with the nunchuck.

Throwing a grenade : Press B to set the target, and motion with the Wii remote like you were really throwing it.

The Radio : When you encounter a radio in the game, it zooms in to the dial and you turn the Wii remote clockwise and counterclockwise to try to tune into the OSS secret frequency. Sometimes you get real WWII era music or a broadcast. Very cool.

What it really got right is 32 PLAYER ONLINE ! WOOOOHOOOO! Finally, FINALLY, a Wi-Fi enabled Wii First Person Shooter that I can play online. I just got done with a few matches, and while I certainly didn't "pwn", I held my own.

Especially with the sniper rifle.

The game also has a rail-shooter arcade mode, and tons of control customization that will take me weeks to tailor to my own preferences.

Bust A Move Bash
Monique picked up this game used. It actually came out in April or May I think. It's the old Bust A Move game, which she and I used to enjoy on the Playstation until one of our controllers bit the dust, with a whole new bunch of bells and whistles.

We had some fun with this last night, but sadly the controls are not quite that precise. In fact, they can be jumpy at times. Not enough to make the game unplayable, but enough to cause occasional irritation. The game itself has some weird new things going on in terms of powerups - so much so that it often seems unnecessary to shoot one's bubbles at the same color (the normal way to score points and win).

I think I need to spend some more time with this title to understand it better, though, so take my initial impressions of the game as just that - initial impressions.

I'm not going to get much time to do that, though, since Super Mario Galaxy and Medal of Honor Heroes 2 both kick some major ass on the Wii. It's been a long time coming for Wii owners, but this holiday season is off to a great start. These two games might even have enough lasting playability that they could keep me entertained through another such dry spell of titles.

Let's not test that, though. Keep them coming, I say.

Ultima Online - Magincia Invasion Event

I've been having a blast the last week and a half in Ultima Online, as the city of Magincia is under attack by hordes of demons. There's fire everywhere.

There are some cool loot items to get, but the most fun is in just seeing the whole community come to one place to fight together. People are being very cool, helping each other out and sharing the spawns. Not that there is a shortage of demons pouring out of the moongate, of course.

I spend as much ressurrecting other players as I do fighting the demons, and when I need brought back to life I can quickly find a player willing to do the same for me. I've gotten a few of the new items, not as many as those more determined to get them, but most of all I've just had fun with it all.

And it's a progressive event, meaning that it moves along in stages, so every few days it's a little different. All in all, this event has reminded me of why I came back to UO - the community - and it has reaffirmed my faith in the game's designers and programmers to deliver great things to the game. Hats off to the dev team.

Beaten : The Legend of Zelda - Phantom Hourglass

Sunday I finally beat The Legend of Zelda : Phantom Hourglass for the Nintendo DS. The final boss battle was tough, in a sense, because it caused my hand to cramp during the fight. After a few tries, I finally figured out to pause the game and give my hand a rest after each time I landed a hit on him.

There are still a few things I never did in the game, mostly involving the mini-game challenges that come up throughout Link's journey, and the collection of things like ship parts. Usually, after I beat a game I never go back and try to beat it completely like that. There's just too many other games around to linger too long on minor details.

Still, this game kept me playing for most of October and was a real treat, especially with the touch controls. If you have a DS and don't have this game, I highly recommend it for great portable adventuring fun.

Ultima Online - Huge Layoffs and Another Forced March Across the Country

I had a feeling another big shakeup was due for UO. I've seen them occur in regular cycles since the early days.

EA is doing the whole corporate restructuring thing due to some profit concerns, it seems, which means a lot of mid-level managers being pressured to bring down the axe on their departments.

Which means that a lot of the UO team has apparently been laid off already, and those that haven't have a choice to move to EA / Mythic's main studio in Fairfax, Virginia, or lose their jobs. It's been only three and a half years since the forced relocation from Austin to San Francisco decimated the team and killed Ultima X Odyssey.

Rumors and unconfirmed inside information are starting to fly around about a harsh and bitter layoff, and who is staying and going. And specuation about the future of Ultima Online is of course mostly bleak.

I have nothing to add to all of that at this point, other than to once again wish those men and women who have been pouring their hard work and passion into UO all the best of luck during these trying times. They are real people with real lives and real families, and should they stay or go they deserve better from me and the rest of the playbase than EA is giving them.

For the players, keep logging in and enjoy it while you can. Everything you know and love inside the game could very well be unaffected by this for many months or years to come. Time will tell.

A Huge Case Load

Yesterday I purchased the third Phoenix Wright game for the DS, called Phoenix Wright : Ace Attorney Trials and Tribulations. I won't be playing it anytime soon, becase I have failed to finish the second one yet.

I was making progress in the second one, moving along quite well, until The Legend of Zelda : Phantom Hourglass came out. I haven't been seen in the courtroom in quite awhile. So why did I buy the third Phoenix Wright game now instead of waiting until I'd finished the second one first?

When the first Phoenix Wright game came out at the end of 2005, it was a limited release. I got lucky and found a copy at a store called Media Play during the store's closing-down clearance sale for $17. It was the last copy they had. After that, the game was nowhere to be found for about a year until a second print run made the game available again. I checked on eBay during that time and saw it going for $60.

I wasn't about to take a chance on this new Phoenix Wright game becoming rare, so I went ahead and bought it. I'll get to it eventually. Plus, I got a little plush Phoenix Wright keychain, which is kind of crappy actually. I'm a sucker for pre-order swag, I guess.

The Legend of Zelda : Phantom Hourglass

I'll be brief and spoiler-free. I bought the Legend of Zelda : Phantom Hourglass for my Nintendo DS three weeks ago and have spent almost every free minute of my game time playing the hell out of it. It features stylus - only controls that work exceptionally well, with only a few occurrences where my own fingers holding the stylus blocked my view of the screen at a critical point.

I'm approaching the end of the game. It has lots of exploration, lots of devious puzzles, challenging but beatable bosses, and a cool map system that allows the player to scribble notes directly onto the map.

It's the best DS game, the best portable adventure game, and one of the best Zelda games I've ever enjoyed. And it has an online Wi-Fi mode that is really cool, but I've hardly touched on it because I've been having a blast with the single player adventure.

I give this game my highest recommendation.

Some Final Thoughts About Ten Years of UO

The tenth anniversary of the landmark, pioneering Ultima Online has come and gone, a moment in gaming history hardly recogized both in the game and on the internet.

For their part, the developers at EA Mythic gave us gift boxes filled with heritage tokens and a fireworks wand (the tokens I sorely needed to redecorate my lighthouse), new items appearing on monsters in the original dungeons (the 7 anti-virtue dungeons that needed something like this to revitalize them), and some in-game fireworks events for players to attend. A brief blurb about the tenth anniversary appeared on their website here.

Some players of course complained, saying what we got was woefully inadequate, but I thought it was good enough. Especially in light of what has been happening behind the scenes at EA. But we'll get to that in a minute. Let's talk more about the anniversary before we go there.

It was kind of disheartening to see so few of UO's vast development alumni say anything at all about the anniversary. Kirk "Runesabre" Black, from the early days of UO, stopped by the Stratics UHall to wish UO a happy anniversary. Damion Schubert mentioned it briefly on his blog. But that was about it.

Sure, Richard "Lord British" Garriott showed up at a UO Town Hall in Austin earlier in September, but he could have mentioned something. Raph "Designer Dragon" Koster, one of UO's great initial visionaries, said nothing on his site. Neither did the aforementioned (see article below) Jason "Stormwind" Spangler, Anthony "SunSword" Castoro, or even Tim "Mr. Tact" Keating.

The list goes on, of course. Chris "Binky" Lanius didn't mention it on his blog, but I suspect he's got his hands full right now as his new employers, Perpetual Entertainment, have just nixed their upcoming MMORPG Gods and Heroes : Rome Rising completely to (so they say) focus solely on Star Trek Online. Good luck Binky, I hope all is well in your world.

Let's move on, though.

Earlier in September, UO Producer Aaron "Marketing Guy / Darkscribe" Cohen left for another position at EA. Chris Rabideau, also the producer of EA Mythic's Dark Age of Camelot, took the reigns, and his plans remain shrouded in mystery, as he's only seen fit so far to barely introduce himself on the occasion of the anniversary. His similar public posting about the sixth anniversary of Dark Age of Camelot, however, is gushing with pride and promises of upcoming improvements.

Further behind the scenes, Walter Yarbrough, who was until recently what was called the "Group Producer for DAoC and UO", left for Turbine. So it looks like Chris Rabideau has taken over his role. Walt had just introduced himself to the UO Community over at the Stratics UHall back on July 5th, in what turned out to be a long message thread where he officially announced the delay of the Stygian Abyss expansion.

I pulled up that thread the other day when I first read of his departure from EA and UO, which he did without any goodbye to the community. I felt it odd that someone would, just a few months ago, take some time to introduce himself and extend a listening ear to the community then sneak away in the night like an Enron executive.

To my amazement, he responded to my post at the end of that long thread where I had taken it on myself to inform the community of his departure. While other posters of course started nibbling at him like a pack of piranhas, I asked some tough questions about the management structure behind UO and what was going on.

I asked him this:

In the ranks above the UO producer, who makes the calls about expansion themes, dev team size, allocation of resources, budgets, marketing, and so forth?

And he responded by saying:

Well, Admiral, as a Group Producer at EA Mythic, I didn't get to make those calls - Mark Jacobs ultimately retained that authority.

The authority to decide allocation of resources and dev team sizes versus UO budget - this was on the list of changes Mark could have made to keep me.

His response clearly indicates some level of dissatisfaction with Mark Jacobs and EA, if only in terms of what Walt Yarbrough deemed was needed for the game. So now we know that it's Mark Jacobs, far behind the scenes in the UO world, that's calling the shots, with dual UO / DAoC producer Chris Rabideau running both games.

In his last post in the thread, and most likely his last word on UO ever, Walt give us some hope:

Chris is a good guy - and UO still has good solid leads and developers. They can still provide you solid support and service.

And this jibes with the attitude I've had on this tenth anniversary about UO. Basically, in ten years I've seen insane amounts of employee turnover on the UO team, from producers to programmers. I've seen their stated vision and direction for the game proclaim itself boldly and then slip away in the night, leaving the community the next morning wondering what the hell happened. I've seen all sorts of shifts in the game's implementation and boundaries, so much so that none of this recent rumbling shocks me at all.

UO seems to be tough enough to survive all of this, and the players keep logging in, chugging along and weathering these storms. Sure, UO deserves better - full EA support, a producer that loves the game and gets what he or she wants to make the game better - but it probably won't get it anytime soon.

Also on the EA front, it should be noted, is the pausing of the beta test for EA Mythic's big hope for the future, Warhammer Online. They apparently need some out-of-beta time to implement some major fixes to the game before returning it to beta stage. It's purported spring 2008 release date is still on, as far as I can tell.

I suspect that we'll see some more rumblings at EA Mythic in the coming months, and that UO will survive but development will continue to slow down. Hopefully, come spring, there will be some positive changes and an idea of where we're all headed together. Until then, I'll join the masses of UO players who log in and do their things without an awareness of the shifting at the top tiers of EA Mythic.

Three Years Ago - The Community That Was

Three years ago, this very night, the day after the UO Community Day of 2004 in San Francisco, I wound up leading a small group of community members through the downtown areas of that city.

EA had us all out there for the Community Day on Friday, September 25th, a day we got to hang out at EA's amazing Redwood Shores studios with the developers and everyone else at UO. At night, they took us downtown for dinner.

Saturday was ours to do with as we pleased, and I had a personal itenerary for the day all planned out. The other members of the community that had attended, I can safely say, had not planned the day to the extent I had, so a bunch of them followed me into the city.

It was a sixteen hour odyssey only for the strong. Those who weren't strong, well, whined a bit. But all bitching aside, it was a great time and I hope that they had fun too. From downtown to Chinatown to Fisherman's Wharf, and back to the Caltrain Station for the last train out, with folks coming and going from the group.

A highlight of the day was when we picked up some cheap plastic neon-colored weapons at a tourist shop and did some good old UO banksitting:



From left to right are Yukon Jack (of Stratics?)and his wife Partice, me in the back with the shades, a woman named Karen (I think, affiliation unknown), Crazy Joe (Stratics), Fizban (FCB), Trinity X(Ianstorm), Trinity's boyfriend or husband, whose UO name I forget, Fizban's friend, and Nieves of UO Powergamers. Taking the picture was Talanithus Tarant of UOLS

I could write a book on those four days of my life, and the impact it all had on me. But what strikes me the most when I think about it is this - at that time, the UO community representatives that we were said to be were tighter than ever, and Chris "Binky" Lanius had vowed to keep it tight after the event.

Within a year after that event, most of those people were gone from UO and its community, as were most of the developers (and the producer) that we had hung out with there.

Gone from the team were Hanse, Oaks, Vex, Fertbert, Speedman, Toes, Leurocian, and producer SunSword, who had promised at the event to take UO from being the grandfather of MMORPGs to the godfather of them. Mr. Tact held on until recently, and Leurocian returned last year. At the event were new members of the team Lady Lu, who became producer after SunSword left, and Darkscribe, who took over after Lady Lu and departed a few weeks ago.

Almost all of us community people had stopped playing within that time, too, and over at Stratics, the only person who was at the event and as far as I can tell still posts is Sarsmi.

If EA had held such an event this year, it would have been an almost completely different lineup. That event brought the UO fansite community together with the team in such a strong way, with such promise for the future, that it's still hard for me to get my mind around how quickly things turned from that energized feeling of hope we all shared.

Still, I have the pictures and the memories, and I'll never forget those days. In honor of the attendees (the ones that I remember, sorry to those I forget), here's a listing of all of them:

Admiral Ruffie Windjammer (me)
Fizban (FCB)
Fizban's non-UO playing friend
Lady Malynn (Stratics)
Lady Malynn's non-UO playing husband
Lady Beth (Stratics)
Lady Beth's husband (plays UO)
Crazy Joe (Stratics)
Sarsmi (Stratics)
Bella Noire (Stratics)
Yukon Jack (Stratics)
Patrice (Yukon Jack's wife?)
Swamp Thing ? (Stratics)
Trinity X (Ianstorm)
Trinity X's (husband or boyfriend?)
Delilah Jones (Ianstorm)
Nieves (UO Powergamers)
Nevyn (UO Powergamers)
Markee Dragon (Markee Dragon)
Merkere ? (Markee Dragon's wife)
Lady Alexandra (Markee Dragon)
Talanithus Tarant (UOLS)
Dragons (The Syndicate)
Greg Dean (Real Life Comics, and very rude to me at the event when I tried to talk to him)
Liz ? (Greg Dean's wife? in both the comic and reality - I think)
Karen (she was with my group all day in downtown San Francisco, but I cannot for the life of me remember her UO name or affiliation)

That's honestly all I can remember at this point. Wherever you all are, I hope you all look back on those days as fondly as I do.