Just a quick notice: Prius Online English version, which is being made by GPotato, has a promo website right here. And it says the following: “Coming Spring 2011. Be one of First 10,000 people to “Like” us and win an Epic Mount for free!”. Did you get that? Spring 2011! Don’t know about you, but i’m getting the Epic Mount ASAP! The Prius Online Facebook page also mentions the epic mount give-away. 

It says the following: “Be our first 10,000 fans of Prius Online Facebook page! We will send you an epic mount upon the closed and open beta tests early next year! Easy, right? Spread the news and Bring your friends, so you and your friends can enjoy Prius Online with free mounts!! Hurry to click that "Like" button, before we hit 10,000 fans”.

If you don’t know what Prius Online is, see my post about it here. Aaaahh, i can’t believe this game is actually coming out! GPotato is scary, yes, but a hope dies last, isn’t?

Read more...

Cities XL 2011 (my MonteCristo) is out and already selling on Steam Store, I’ve got myself a 50%-off copy and then i thought: wait there, this is an interesting example for my blog! The thing is, that Cities XL was released back in 2009 as the first online city building game. The easiest way ever to describe this game is to say “it’s like SimCity, just online” – which isn’t a very detailed description, indeed. Also, this is one of the first examples of how a game can combine offline gameplay with an MMO part (yes, i do remember about Conan – that’s why i said “ONE of the first examples”). The game’s success is somewhat doubtful, because it worked in online mode for only half a year, but they released 2011 version, which indicates that the game sold well enough to continue it. So, how did it worked?

First of all, i’m not going into any very detailed descriptions of both games (still have to play Cities XL 2011, had no time because of the advertising festival i took a part in), you can find a lot of reviews for the both games. Just a brief description – Cities XL is about city building, it had a nice graphics (you could zoom in to a person or off to see the whole map with a little skyscrapers cluttered on it), and i was beta-testing the online part of it for about 2 months or so.

The game had 2 modes: offline and online. In offline mode it was just another city building game, with its own pluses and minuses. The online mode was called “Planet mode” and it wasn’t just a multiplayer, it was more like MMO. There were several planets (i.e. servers) which hosted maps, each with its own downfalls and “goldmines” – some were rich with oil, some were good for tourists, etc. They were also of different complexity, some were easier to play on, some harder – you had to find a map to build a city, and then your city was available for anyone to interact with, even if you was online.

The trick was, that you couldn’t play without other players, you needed to sell and buy some resources, which was arranged in a manner of contracts. In an offline mode these other cities were managed by the computer, and it wasn’t so much fun like the planet mode, where we could chat all the time. Here i must note that when i took part in the beta testing, the developers always listened well to the testers. I myself had filed a lot of bug reports and they all were attended to – i was asked a lot of questions on how these issues happened, what i have done, etc.

Another sign on MMO was that to play you had to create a character, which was your impersonation – you used it to interact with other players or to walk on the streets. Yes, you could load in a mode where the game allowed you to run around your city just like a character in any other mmo would run around their world. The difference was, that you could visit other player’s cities, and they could visit yours! It was quite fun, i must tell you.

Of course, not everything was all sunshine, the game had its downfalls (like, no trains or watering system a-la SimCity), but it was fun to play. I don’t know why MonteCristo had shut the servers – i wasn’t playing at that time, came back later when the planet mode was already gone – but it was a nice addition to SimCity-style gameplay. The online cities weren’t lost, everyone who played online had a way to save their games offline and keep playing in offline mode – so the game transferred from online to offline mode. I wish some other online games had an offline mode to play too…

I will look into Cities XL 2011 as soon as i have some spare time – until then i hold a dear hope that at least it won’t be worse than the first game in this franchise :)

Read more...

Hello there! This is an off-topic post – it’s not about games, it’s about me and advertising. You may have noticed an unusual lack of posts during a few last days – that’s not because i lost my mind and self-identity playing some MMO especially full of grind, no. In my city there has been an IX Intercollegiate Student Advertising Festival “Advertising Gallery”, hold by Don State Technical University (it’s quite big, holds about a 13,000 students at the same time). The festival continued for 4 days, and i took a part in it as a short video director. My video won 2nd place in “Social video advertising” nomination :) DSTU decided to name the winners in some night club, i wish i had better pictures from it, but this is all i have…

I’m the one on the far left. I was tired, because we’ve been waiting for several hours for everyone to gather - and also sober, because i had to drive a car.

The girl in pink is my friend (she helped to find an actor for the video), we had no one else to take a pic of us, so we asked someone in the crowd to do that.

And yes, that’s a stripping dance pole on the far left background.

Read more...

It’s been quite a pause after i wrote part 1 and part 2, it’s time for a new part in this story! For those who just have joined us, I'm talking about game design here – the one based on behavioral psychology (which is all about how people are acting in different situations and why). If you think that such a complex thing has nothing to do with the games we play, you are dramatically wrong – if you play a game (almost any game these days) – you’re seeing behavioral game design up close. So it’s very useful for you as a player to know how exactly it’s working – because it’s that what makes those kooks who play MMOs play until they drop out of work, college and human life, and also because you’ll find out why Final Fantasy XIV sucks on a whole new level!

A little reminder of what i spoke in previous parts (skip that if you have read the previous parts):
* “reinforcers” - rewards given for results or actions
* “contingency” - a set of rules for getting a reinforcer
* “responses” - action taken to fulfill the contingency.
Real-world meaning of these: you have to kill mobs (response) to gain xp (contingency) to raise your level (reinforcer).
There are also “ratio schedules” that make sure you get your reward after you have done a certain number of actions. They called like that because of ratios and intervals – interval is the pause between actions taken by a player, and ratio means how often a player does something.
* “fixed ratio schedule” – example: “kill 20 boars and get a rusty sword”
* “variable ratio schedule” – example: “get me 20 boar hooves and get a rusty sword”.
The difference is that with “fixed ratio” you have a fixed goal, and with “variable ratio” you have the goal, but you don’t know how many boars you’ll need to kill, just 20 or 200 (depending on the drop rate).

Now, let’s get to the fresh info. There are a few special cases i have to mention.
 "Chain schedules". It’s when there are multiple stages to the contingency. Lineage2 is using a lot of these chains in their most primitive version, for example – first, go gather some stuff, then bring it to a person, they says “oh, cool, now go and do this and that”, and so on. Another way is when you, say, have to kill a certain number of foes before a door opens – and you have to kill a mob hiding behind that door, but when exactly it appears, you don’t know. Usually, people respond to this kind of schedules in a specific way: like the access to that room they opened (i.e. access to a new schedule) is a reward in itself.

The more time a player need to finish a task, the longer will be a pause before he proceeds on with this task. If the pause is too long (it’s too hard to reach a level), the player even might turn around and quit playing – so game developers have to think of a way to keep us busy all the time, so they combine different ratio schedules, one after one or all together. But there is a point when a player must transform from one schedule to another, and many developers make horrible mistakes at this point, triggering a huge backlash on them.

Let’s say, you were killing orcs happily, grinding for XP in some lousy MMO, and then you notice that the orcs aren’t giving any XP anymore! You can’t progress further and are totally enraged, “this game sucks big time” you say, and delete it. You didn’t knew that when the orc became unavailable, you could start killing troll for XP… The contingency had changed – the one you was involved in has been finished, but you couldn’t find how to start a new one. When a player does his contingency and suddenly there is no reward anymore, it’s called “extinction”. And when it hits the player, it brings a lot of anger and frustration, because we expect world to make sense. If you killed a dragon in a specific place every time it respawned, and then it just stopped appearing – the contingency had changed – you will be frustrated.

I mentioned Final Fantasy XIV in the lead of this article, so do you want to know why it sucks on a whole new level? They screwed the contingency. Like, totally. Guidleaves (which is a contingency) had been made to hit player with “extinction” every day, and not only that, but they also actually punished the player that took on their contingency – if you couldn’t finish a guildleave due to connection issues or something like that, you would be kicked out of it and had to wait until a next guildleave is available (several days, maybe). I suspect that Square Enix was thinking they’re implementing a clever contingency strategy there, by putting a long pause between guildleaves – maybe, even that players will want to do guildleaves more than if they were available at any time – but they clearly missed the point.

There’s one more type of contingency there - “avoidance”. It’s when players work on preventing something from happening. One of early examples of this contingency were Ultima Online castles and houses where a player – the owner of them – had to visit his property every now and then, or it’ll start to decay. The first of the recent examples that come into my head is Lord of the Rings Online, where you have to pay upkeep for your house, each week, or it will be locked and you won’t be able to access it anymore.

Well, it’s been 3 parts already, but looks like i have to write a 4th one to finish this theme – next time I'll show you those specific “recipes” – a formulas of what contingencies to use to achieve some specific results - which game developers are using in their games. There are even specific formulas to make players play hard or even forever! What, you thought people are playing some games for years just because these games are sooooo much fun? Nope. It’s all about psychology. So, wait for the final part!

Read other parts here:
Know-How: Game Design and Player Manipulation – Part 1
Know-How: Game Design and Player Manipulation – Part 2
Know-How: Game Design and Player Manipulation – Part 4

Read more...

I have seen a huge boost in incoming visitors after posting about Lime Odyssey being scheduled for release by Aeria Games. To tell the truth, I’ve totally missed out this game – had not played it in either closed or open beta, and barely even heard of it before Aeria came out of the shadows. So, I’ve done some digging around Korean and Japanese forums and blogs to make up for my unawareness, and here is an averaged out opinion of those who had played it during Korean beta testing phases, combined with my own opinion, based on videos, screenshots and available information. Consider it a preview, because, like, who else will tell us about it, other than beta-testers? Beta-testers do not lie (Square Enix is learning to understand that now).

Upgrade on Lime Odyssey theme:  Lime Odyssey: New Screenshots From Actual Gameplay

   So, let us begin with Lime Odyssey graphics – it’s the most catchy part of the whole game for now, because screenshots and video is all what we see, being unable to play it in person. Unlike many other Korean games, Lime Odyssey has a pretty decent graphics (at least, for a F2P project), utilizing shader effects in a way similar to what Perfect World and World of Warcraft do. The world looks very, very nice, bright and colorful. Both character and their equipment models looks very nice too, it is said they are made in such details that even enough for screen size over 1680x1050. I myself did not liked the backpack model, looks a bit lousy, and some armor sets are like that too.

The world of Lime Odyssey, apart from being all shiny and colorful somehow looks a lot like  World of Warcraft does. I mean, looking at the video and screenshots, you can tell, for example, that LO’s mountains are quite low – while the character models are quite high. It’s more typical for WoW graphics than for any other games – the graphics are more cartoonish than realistically. I’m pretty fine with that, but many peoples are concerned with the game “being too WoW-ish”.Also, a big concern is that LO uses Gamebryo Element engine, which isn’t anything new or very optimized, so it may want even more resources than Aion does.

The sound and music effects. I guess, we’ll have to find out what it is like when they game is released – promotional video doesn’t count. Some testers say that they music is actually good for its genre, some say, it’s bad, because it doesn’t fits to Lime Odyssey world. Someone said in some blog that comparing to Aion or Perfect World or any of Ragnarok Online games Lime Odyssey music score is not something that you would listen to alone, without the game itself. A bit subjective opinion, i think, because i wouldn’t listen to Aion score in my player, for example. What seems to be a fact is that LO’s music are scarce and we’ll have to listen to all the same tracks over and over, which is always annoying me in many other MMOs.

Quests and crafting. Quests are all the usual stuff: go, get, bring, talk, kill, gather, craft. Some concerns raised the quest log, because it shows only 5 quests, when you can get around 20 of them. Other 15 of them you won’t be able to see at all, their progress are not displayed even in the quest window! That’s kinda sucks! Then, the crafting. You don’t have to buy any recipes – the character knows everything right from the beginning. If you see a tree, you can cut it like in Vanguard, and it’ll drop 2-3 different items for crafting purposes. The bad thing is that inventory isn’t very big (which was another issue with beta-testers, especially the ones who played Prius Online, where they had no problem with the inventory space). Probably, item shop will fix the inventory, but still…

The interface. I already mentioned the inventory and the quest log problems, but there are definitely more. I really hope they’ll fix that before the Western release – haven’t they heard of Final Fantasy XIV Epic Fail? Anyway, the main concerns are as following… You can’t change window resolution without restarting the whole client. Playing in 1280x720 resolution won’t allow you to fit the whole map on the screen. Speaking of the map, there are a lot of usability fails in Lime Odyssey… The map itself can be made transparent, but you won’t be able to click through it, i.e. it won’t be transparent for your mouse. There are other problems with the map – don’t know what happened to it after release, but during open beta period it was extremely bugged, like not showing quest NPCs until they are in plain sight. That makes NPCs residing in another town extremely hard to find, i bet. Radar is also considered useless, because it doesn’t shows anything. 

Another GUI fail – you can pick an icon and drag it, but it’s possibly to accidentally drag it out of the screen – i.e., drag it to nowhere. After that you’ll be able to recover it from the options screen, but why the developers allowed such a behavioral for the GUI at all, in the first place? More fails – private chat window has fixed size, and this size is such that it’s impossible to write an English sentence at all. Well, maybe they don’t have a problem like that with Korean hieroglyphs, but what if it stays the same way for the Western release?.. Also, you can’t see another character’s equipment – there’s no option like that, so if you’ll see someone in a nice dress, you’ll have to ask them what they’re wearing. When you are previewing your own dress, there is a dress-up window, but to see anything clearly you have to have a decent window resolution (above 1680x1050), or it gets too small to make out the details, especially those items you can wear on your face (yes, you can wear items like masks in Lime Odyssey).

Verdict. Lime Odysseys stands on a brink of fail due to errors made in its GUI planning, and i don’t see anything so very special about this game so far. But the graphics and, maybe, character animations (there are a lot of pictures showing characters doing weird moves, kissing each other or even holding a red rose in their mouth) are very good-looking – actually, my eyes rest on LO’s pics after seeing other horrible-looking Aeria games. But if they’ll fail to fix the GUI, i refuse to play this game just because it looks shiny. Another turn-out is Aeria Games itself (at least – for me), which is known for its greedy behavior and the lack of a good customer support in many of its games.

Take a look at one of the Lime Odyssey game play videos:

I think, until Lime Odyssey is released and confirmed to remain at the same state as it was in Korean open beta, I’ll keep hoping that it still might turn out to be a nice game after all.

Because, you know, it looks nice.

Upgrade on Lime Odyssey theme:  Lime Odyssey: New Screenshots From Actual Gameplay

Read more...

Here comes another foreign game I'd like to play – ARGO Online. It has been released in Korea just recently and raised a lot of hype, because this game combines both fantasy and steampunk settings in one world.

Good thing, it’s supposed to be released in Russia till’ the end of 2010 (so, I’ll be able to try it before you, guys!) and Western release is planned for 2011. Watch ARGO gameplay trailer behind the cut.

Read more...

Rift: Planes of Telara is a fantasy MMORPG by Trion Worlds, set in a world that is constantly torn by dimensional rifts, which are playing important role in the game’s unique dynamic events system. Currently, the game is reaching a beta stage, and Curse.com is giving away Rift: Planes of Telara Beta Keys, so you don’t miss them out! You have to register a Curse and Trion accounts first, then grab your key and apply for Rift Beta Weekends at Trion’s website. Actually, these keys won’t give you a guaranteed beta access, but it’s said that they will significantly raise your chances to be chosen for one of the Rift beta weekends. I just registered, have to keep crossing fingers now! See Beta Weekends schedule under the cut.

Beta Weekends:

Rise of the Defiant
Dec. 3rd, 18:00 GMT – Dec. 6th, 18:00 GMT
Levels 1-20 (Defiant)

Guardians of the Vigil
Dec. TBD
Levels 1-20 (Guardian)

Enter the Rift
Dec. TBD
Levels 1-20 (Guardian and Defiant)

Read more...

What they say: “Aeria Games is excited to be working with Sirius Entertainment on the launch of Lime Odyssey,” said Lan Hoang, CEO of Aeria Games. “The Sirius team has, for the last few years, poured their hearts and souls into the development of Lime Odyssey and the final result is a beautiful, well-balanced MMORPG, with a unique combination of rich role-playing features and robust gameplay. We expect it to be one of the best games of 2011.” Underlined by me. Come on, robust gameplay and Aeria Games in the same paragraph?! They must be living in a parallel world where people still buy such blatant and lame advertising. Double /facepalm, indeed. Also, there are people from Ragnarok Online development team working on this title. Check the screenshots under the cut.

Here’s a teaser site, by the way. Does anyone still remembers Ragnarok Online? Looking at the teaser site makes me feel like the art for this game is going to be a lot like RO’s, just in 3D. A scary feeling, because, who knows how much RO did they included? Unstoppable grind up to level 99999 to wear the same armor all the other players of your level wear, and also to find out you totally screwed your character on the way, so you’d better start a new one not to lose precious grinding time.

On the other hand, the graphics is all cartoonish and looks very nice – you know, bright and colorful… Could it look and feel like a World of Warcraft even a bit? Maybe, they did not screwed the game with SO much grinding as RO had? Well-well… To find out anything we’ll have to either wait until the next summer or get into one of the foreign versions somehow, i’m afraid. Being scared of RO’s feasible influence, i still signed up for beta. Just in case.

More screenshots here:
 
 

 

I gathered more information on this game since this post was published:
Lime Odyssey: Preview - First Thoughts Based On Korean Beta Test Responses
Lime Odyssey: New Screenshots From Actual Gameplay

Read more...

Fallen Earth is a Pay to play Sci-Fi PVP MMORPG by Fallen Earth, LLC (a division of Icarus Studios), set in a Fallout-like post-catastrophic world where Earth became a wasteland after a devastating world-wide virus epidemic and several nuclear strikes. The game had a pretty rough time lately, involving several design flaws and declining player base, and part of the development/management team were discharged from their positions.So, November State of the Game was published today at the Fallen Earth forums (you can read it here), where developers talk of the upcoming changes to the game. Besides a new area they’re going to open soon, they mention “noticeable upgrades to graphics”, “new lighting and terrain changes” and also about remake of the tutorial. I think, it a good sign!

I myself like both Fallout and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. worlds, so when Fallen Earth first opened its servers i jumped at the opportunity to play it and even pushed my husband into it to play together. But we both were disappointed very soon, seeing bleak inexpressive graphics, blank monsters (who looked like a bad rip-off STALKER), lack of real tutorial and boring newbie gameplay. When you started a game back then, you had to choose starting area without having even a single idea of the differences between them, if there were any. And the graphics, well, i can’t say it was *that* bad, you know, many Korean games look much worse. But it was so bleak, and the textures are all low-res, they really could use a facelift IMHO.

Also, i was turned out by a skill system, because you could screw up your character pretty easy - there are a given amount of skill points in this game, and if you put them into the wrong skill, you won’t be able to develop what you really need and end up in a deep ass. Instead of making a possibility to re-roll your skill points, the developers put “Don’t Screw Up Your Skills!” noticed everywhere. But how the hell could i know which skills i do need, if i just have started playing?! Plus, the price tag was just about the one of Lord of the Rings Online (when i bought it first time) which was made far better and well worth its money. I did not felt like Fallen Earth worth as much back then, so it never passed the trial stage for me.

Right now, after the price tag had dropped significantly, and all those discharges happened in Fallen Earth team - i’m really looking forward to the changes they’re going to implement. If everything goes well, i may give its trial another try.

Read more...

I recently got an iPad and found out there are some games for it involving online play, i named a few here. I’ve already reviewed Aurora Feint 3 here, have to finish the business with those other games. CastleCraft is an fantasy PVP MMORTS by Freeverse, Inc. and (supposedly) compatible with iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. I liked the graphics and the fantasy idea as a whole, but i was put on guard by several reviews blaming this game for non-existent customer support and myriads of annoying bugs. I can totally confirm both these points. And it’s really a shame, because if Freeverse ever fixes the critical bugs and starts listening to player base’s problems, then Castle Craft would become a fine game indeed.

Castle Craft is based in a fantasy universe, in a kingdom, where people have long forgotten about war and stuff like that. Then *suddenly* comes the Dark Force and kicks everyone’s butts, cities being destroyed, people fleeing to forests, society reduced to ashes, etc. You are the ruler of a destroyed city and have to start rebuilding it right away. The bright side of Castle Craft is the beautiful graphics. The screenshots doesn’t shows the full beauty of this game, because animations really add to it – wisps of mist, clouds running, birds flying in flocks, trees moving, etc. As far as i can see, the visuals are all hand-drawn. Okay, you’ve got my idea by now – i liked the look of it :) If only everything else was the same good as the graphical part…

The gameplay. As this is an MMORTS, you do all the same basic stuff you do in any of these games – build your kingdom, produce resources (there are 3 types of them: food, wood, and gold, plus Dragon Crystals sold for cash), create an army and expand. Also, you can do quests usually based on what you need to build, produce, or research. Dragon Crystals i have mentioned used as a required resource for some buildings and units, and also to shorten building/researching/whatever times.

Unlike from other games, you can have a tremendous amount of cities built in this game -  some players have over a hundred of them! Being an interesting part of gameplay, it also leads to a lot of grief for many players. I’ve seen a lot of complaints from players who had invested  their money and months of time to play this game – and then one day wake up to find ALL of their cities destroyed down to the last building by some of the server’s top players. And this kind of  harassment happened not to just one or just five players, it rather seems to be a tendency – some of the top players got bored and went on harassing other players. And there is no place you can complain to.

Next – bugs and customer support. A flea-ridden wild dog has less flies than this game has bugs! One of the good examples of a critical bug happening in this games, is that after version 1.3 Castle Craft suffers of compatibility issues with its own servers (!), so everyone who upgraded couldn’t access it anymore. There are a lot of other errors – buildings not working, resources and stuff vanishing after you log out of the game, critical balance issues (like, it’s almost impossible to get certain types of resources when you’re clearly supposed to be able to do that)… No one seem to be fixing them at all. Also, a chance of you getting help from customer support of Castle Craft is pretty much close to zero.

Let me tell you about my own experience here. I’ve been playing Castle Craft for some time until i decided i want to buy a package of Dragon Diamonds (they are really cheap – on the other hand, you may have several hundreds of cities to upgrade). So, to try it out i bought the smallest pack for $0,99 – 50 Crystals for that price. The payment went on, but then i have noticed that i get 50 more Crystals added to my account every minute or so. I had issues with other games that charged my MasterCard even when i explicitly declined payment offer, so, instead of dancing in joy i totally freaked out. What if Castle Craft silently charged me $1 every minute or so? Every time i logged into Castle Craft it resumed to bring more Crystals to me.

Usually i get transaction reports pretty soon via sms, but that day either my bank or my cell provider had some lag issues so i wasn’t receiving instant notifications of my card being charged and wasn’t sure how will it turn out. So i logged out, removed the application and even logged out of Apple Store too, and went on to write a question on Castle Craft Support forum. I wrote about the problem and that I'd like to know if i’m being charged (because, by that time i could be charged for $10 or so) and what i am to do in that case. Posts on the Support forum all pre-moderated. Guess what? I am not only not being contacted by anyone, my post wasn’t even published at all! Like it just never happened – i guess, they did not want to scare off whatever potential customers are left there for the game.

To be honest, i’m still not sure if Castle Craft charged my card due to being full of bugs – i received my debit card transaction reports only a day after, and by then it was used several times by me and by my husband, who couldn’t remember how many of those transactions he did in the last 36 hours. But i did not logged back into Castle Craft again, just in case. Even if it did not took the money i wasn’t planning to give, i still did not want to be exploiting bugs

So, my verdict is – stay away from this game for as long as you can, until it’s getting a real customer support hired and critical bugs are fixed up. If that time ever comes. If it does and they’ll find a way to handle the grief-causing issues with the top players abusive behavior, it will be a nice game to play. But i really doubt they will do anything like that.

Read more...

Along with other stuff I’m currently playing Ace Online. It’s a free-to-play space shooter sci-fi pvp mmorpg – ship flying mechanics is a lot like the one in Freelancer, where you point where to fly and to shoot with a mouse and use keyboard for additional options. You may know this game under different names – Space Cowboy Online, Ace Online International, AirRivals or even Phi Doe (if you’re Vietnamese, that’s it :). Ace Online title came out re-released somewhere in 2008, so came the new ads for the game (i think it was before Suba Games got it). I find it amusing that the advertisement they used in 2008, for example, for Korean and Thailand versions is almost an exact copy of earlier Mazda MX-5 2007 campaign. I thought, I’d share with you the pics.

Here they are:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mazda MX-5 had a campaign in 2007 called “Every Drive is a Thriller” by JWT-Düsseldorf agency. You can read more about it here.  If you look at the both ads, you can see that being different in details they are the same in their basic concept. Of course it could be that both teams have stumbled over the same idea independently, but… i doubt that Ace Online’s ad creator did not seen Mazda’s ad somewhere. Plus Ace Online’s ad came out a year later.

Here’s also the Thailand version of Ace Online’s ad:

Read more...

A grave news have reached my ears: Atlantica Online is taken over by Nexon America since this month. The transfer is being made due to nDoors’ (previous Atlantica Online publisher since 2008) is acquired by Nexon Corporation. Probably, every AO player knows by now that nDoors (and its customers too, obviously) had suffered from a very poor customer service and of poorly thought out actions they have taken against the game’s community will. Now, Nexon is here to take care of everyone… Is it good or bad? I dare to say, it’s very-very-very bad… Why? Oh well…

nDoors had serious problems with their players even before Nexon came, like, for example, the fatigue system that was highly opposed by players – but still got implemented anyways. Afterwards, as far as i know, nDoors also went on blaming the players who opposed what they did, rather than admitting it was a bad idea and caused more hard than good to the game and its players. If you haven’t played AO, you don’t need to get into the details, and AO players will understand what i’m talking about here.

Now, Nexon haven’t been keeping a good relationship with its community, either. Nexon is very well known for IP blockage for certain regions on most of their games, plus they prefer peer-to-peer connections even inside the games themselves. That doesn’t add any quality to the service, except for adding more lag, but it certainly reduces the cost of Nexon servers and boosts their profits. So usually Nexon is not in my “playing preferences” list.

Now, it looks like nDoors wasn’t really good at keeping Atlantica Online, but Nexon is going to be much more worse. I expect further decrease in the drop rates and i bet the level cap increases won’t match the amount of new content they are going to release. If there will be new content, that’s it. Atlantica Online sure sucked a lot of money from people, but it had it’s good parts anyway. I feel sorry for it.

Read more...

When i wrote “a fresh online games blog” i really meant it’s *fresh*, because my first month of blogging just have finished. I want to thank every one of you for coming to read me and for subscribing to my blog :) It really matters. I know that sometimes i write a post and everyone is reading it, and sometimes there is a lack of “now, that’s interesting, i want to read it!” posts – things like that happen, but I’m determined to do my best and keep you people interested in Chick Geek Games :) Would be helpful, if you left a few comments, though. Okay, i’m here not to make you bored, so there’s some monthly statistics, but it’s behind the cut.

Pageviews last month - 3,148

Top ten posts of last month based on Hits:

1. Kitsu Saga: Tips And Tricks You Wish You Knew From The Beginning
2. Hidden Pearls: Caesary Review
3. Famous Fails: Lineage 2 Review
4. New Facebook game “Zen garden” – a new star or a new fail?
5. Hidden pearls: Regnum Online Review
6. Legendary Champions Review: First And Worst Impression
7. Know-How: Game Design and Player Manipulation – Part 1
8. Perpetuum Online: Announced To Launch At 25th of November
9. About me – Chick Geek Pics Revealed, Yay! :)
10. They’re Really Suspecting Something! Square Enix Sales and Earnings Are Going Down

Read more...