Quote of the Day
Ysharros: In games, a slog is bad. A romp is good, but can easily become so rapid you stop experiencing the game and end up merely experiencing the speed of your progress. The trick is pacing a game so that the player still feels as though they’re romping but is also going slowly enough to feel like they’re experiencing a LOT of stuff. : Zubon

Macbeth, Fallen Earth Style
At Depot 66 I was involved in choosing which play the locals would put on. I chose Macbeth and since I picked it I decided to watch. It is now presented here in tl;dr text form (with spoilers?) in the best way I could put together using screen captures and some free OCR software. Macbeth says: If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well It were done quickly. Macbeth says: If the assassination could trample up the consequence, and catch with his turkeys success; Macbeth says: That but this blow might be the be-all and the end-all here. Macbeth says: But here, upon this bang and shoot of time, we’ld jump the life to come. Macbeth says:

The Rolling Mid/End-Game
The Lord of the Rings Online™: Siege of Mirkwood™ launches in a week. I am wondering what happens two months down the line. Turbine’s Middle-earth has a punctuated equilibrium, with the level cap jumping once a year and the end-game moving a little further from the tutorial. If the future resembles the past, the mid-year additions will be less severe than Blizzard’s tiers of equipment, more of breadth at the cap than another ladder to climb. (More cynical version: many treadmills rather than one long one.) This leads to launching with a slim end-game, building it up over time, then moving to a new, slim end-game. There is more to do

The Old Republic – All Classes Revealed
For months now, thousands of people have been speculating and arguing about the names of the eight classes in SWTOR. Not since the debates about the identity of the “5th Scilon” in Battlestar Galactica has it felt like this. The message boards have been bathed in flame on a semi-permanent basis as titles like “Mandalorian” “Engineer” “Noble” and “Droid” were all tossed into the ring of possible classes. The hottest debate has centered on one question. Will there be one Jedi class and one Sith class? Or will there be two for each side, making the total force-users out to be four? Would Bioware make an mmo where four out of

The Morality Gauge
I have not gone far in Overlord. I question whether the gameplay will become much more interesting than “throw a wave of imps at it,” and I found my drive to look further stymied early on by the corruption score. Overlord includes the familiar karma score, in which all ethical decisions fall on a single line. The moral meaning of every action is absolute and completely independent of intention. A surprising amount of violence and destruction has no moral component at all, just specifically defined moral decisions. Most of the early ones are clearly labeled, although you can get a corruption score before being told that it exists (”Hey, if I click on this guy,