“The only reason Zynga exists is because people like EA, people like Blizzard, failed to step in…And so I think that the challenge for Blizzard, when you are that good, when you’re making that much money, when you’re that much on top of your game, in the current era, it’s actually fairly difficult to spend money towards things that seem to not be as profitable, that people don’t understand as well and that you don’t imagine could possibly beat how well you’re doing at the top of your game in the current era.” – Richard Garriott, Richard Garriott: Blizzard will have to contend with the new Zynga’s of the World, Industry Gamers

 Well it seems that if the Zyngas of the world will be the contender that brings World of Warcraft to its virtual knees it won’t actually be Zynga.  In an article over at Escapist Magzine.com  entitled “Zynga’s Profits Continue To Drop” Mike Thompson net profits were down from last year by almost 54 percent.   The point is, no matter what part of the profit and loss statement you put the most emphasis on, what matters the most is the line that says “net profit and loss before depreciation” – and in Zynga’s case a large part of the operating expenses these days seem be in Lawyers fees .

If Blizzard has anything at all to fear it’s attrition as players seem to be dropping out these days  faster than the freshman year engineering classes.  While Blizzard still has more subscribers than Switzerland has citizens Mike Morhaime (co-founder and CEO of Blizzard) who always seems to be in the right place at the right time is busy working on the next 800 pound gorilla (codenamed Titan as we are all aware). 

In the end, it appears that Richard Garriott won’t even be right for all the wrong reasons and Rob Pardo is still “THE MAN.”

See you online (for show 97 being edited now)

Julie Whitefeather

“The only reason Zynga exists is because people like EA, people like Blizzard, failed to step in…And so I think that the challenge for Blizzard, when you are that good, when you’re making that much money, when you’re that much on top of your game, in the current era, it’s actually fairly difficult to spend money towards things that seem to not be as profitable, that people don’t understand as well and that you don’t imagine could possibly beat how well you’re doing at the top of your game in the current era.” – Richard Garriott, Richard Garriott: Blizzard will have to contend with the new Zynga’s of the World, Industry Gamers

Richard Garriott is right… probably (Source).  And even if he isn’t the man has made so much money in the same industry that is currently laying off people faster than you can say “laying off people” that the industry some part of the industry may listen to him. After all, like Tevye singing “If I were a rich man” in Fiddler on the roof, when your rich people think you really know. On the other hand I heard the Bobby Kotick described as a clown shoed asshat and he is probably pulling in a lot more cash than I am.   So in the end analysis the “golden rule” – you know, the one that claims “whoever has the gold makes the rules” – isn’t necessarily true.  After all, I have met a few people with healthy amounts of cash that have their head so far up their posterior they could whistle through their belly buttons.

Still, I think Richard Garriot may be right.

On the other hand I think Keen’s observation of Dr. Richard Bartle is so far off base it isn’t even in the same town let alone the same ball park. Mostly I attribute it to not taking the time to listen to what Doctor Bartle has to say – the same unenlightened attitude I slipped into and for which I apologized to the good Doctor on the air.  And hey Keen, you will get your chance to have a good long listen to Doctor Bartle on show 100 in the coming weeks.

But as I said the first Richard, Richard Garriott, is probably right…

…but I don’t think the results are what he things they will be.  After all, this is the same man who described World of Warcraft (WoW) as “a system of inventory management”.  While he meant it with a bit of disdain, Blizzard said “yep, yep” and continued making so much money with that system it would take a team of Sherpa guides a week to reach the summit.

The right place at the right time.

That big pile of money that Blizzard made doesn’t necessarily mean they are right, it just proves they were at the right place at the right time .  When Paul Barnett was on our show he called them a “fluke of nature”.  Personally, I just think what it means is that Michael Morhaime has a sense of timing that would have made Fred Astaire green with envy. While it may be true that Blizzard didn’t step into the world of “virtual –villes” there is probably I doubt it will ever prove to be as disadvantageous as Mr. Garriott thinks it will.  Zynga was simply in the right place at the right time.  However, unlike Blizzard, I doubt Zynga’s continued success is the result of anything more than a matter of throwing enough crap only to find that some of it will eventually stick. If Blizzard will have to contend with any up and comers in the future there is very little chance that challenge will come from the Zyngas of the World (or the Portalariums for that matter).  Blizzard has expended a great deal of time making Wow more accessible to people who don’t want to make a full time career of playing a game.  While some portion of veteran gamers may see this as “dumbing down” a game, it is simply a matter of doing what Blizzard does best – appealing to ever wider audiences.

And while there are a good many of veteran WoW players out there who swear they will close down their account forever because of anthropomorphic panda people, there will probably be 4 people who love Po the Kung Fu panda out their waiting to take your place.  And as Hasbro found out long ago with Nerf, Panda’s too can be serious business.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

Greed makes people do funny things.  What is more, the more money people have the more they seem to need – especially if the cash flow starts to falter.  Greed for money makes a cocaine addiction look like a hankering for peanut butter banana sandwiches. 

So we can only imagine the stress that occurrs when the proverbial 800 pound Blizzard gorilla steps on a scale and finds it is losing weight faster than a teenage girl trying to fit into a prom dress -  The free 2 play banners up to level 20  banners fly up all over the place.   Next Blizzard finally tries to beat gold sellers (that bane of all virtual universes) by trying to beat them at their own game , demanding a piece of the action.

The details that came out of Blizzcon this year still leave some of us here at NPNM scratching our collective heads in wonderment. As General George Patton could have told you (or at least George C. Scott) all glory is fleeting.  When Paul Barnett was on the NPNM show he described the phenomenal success of World of Warcraft (Wow) as a “fluke”.

As for the changes, I can certainly live with the elimination of talent trees.  Not only  is balancing talent trees an impossible task, no matter who tries it,  but I am so sick of the most desireable spec for a given task I could puke on my shoes. Is the ranged slot going away?  I am sure my hunter will miss the stat stick on her back. After all, as all Wow hunters know they are a melee class right? (/sarcasm)

But having seen Jack Black as a Kung fu panda puts a whole new light on Wows Panderan race and it isn’t a pretty one.

Had I not seen the movie I would still cast a sideways glance at the new race – and yes, whenever I see the World Wildlive Fund panda sticker I can’t help thinking about wrestling Pandas.

So what’s the  problem?

That is the very question that Fran asked me when I told her about the Pandarens finally making their way to the forefront of WoW. 

“Don’t you have Kung Fu Pandaren monk as a pet?”

“Well yes, but that’s different.”

“Doesn’t Wow already have talking walruses?”

“Oh yes…the Wilfred Brimley people.”

“So what’s the problem – I think it’s great!”

Well I guess there isn’t one, just so long as they aren’t a playable race….oops.   Still, we already see talking cow people strolling through Ogrimar and werewolves stalking through Stormwind.   Perhaps Blizzard, unlike CCP who doesn’t seem to give a rats ass about new players, is trying to bring in fresh new and very young blood to the game. But every time I see a Pandaren I think about Jack Black and Kung Fu pandas.  It’s just inevitable.  It’s like telling someone not to think about pink rhinos – that’s the first image that pops into your head.

Will this outrage hordes of horde players?  Will this drive the dwarven race back into their dens?  Whether or not it does doesn’t matter. After all, Wow was hemoraging players long before playable Pandarens were announced.

Will we cancel our accounts?  We already canceled one of them and it had nothing to do with anthropomorphic pandas.  Will we cancel our single remaining Wow account?  The jury is still out.  If we don’t I can tell you one thing for sure – we refuse to name our Pandaren monk Po.

We won’t be able to – there will already be thousands of iterations of the name by the time we log on.

If you use an authenticator – and we hope you do – you may soon notice that an authenticator prompt may not appear with every login. We’ve recently updated our authentication system to intelligently track your login locations, and if you’re logging in consistently from the same place, you may not be asked for an authenticator code. This change is being made to make the authenticator process less intrusive when we’re sure the person logging in to your account is you.

We hope to continue improving the authenticator system to ensure the same or greater security, while improving and adding features to make having one a more user friendly experience. If you don’t already have a Battle.net Authenticator attached to your account, don’t wait until it’s too late – http://us.battle.net/en/security/checklist -Zarhym, community manager.

The 13 Chair – a movie with Bela Lugosi as inspector Delzante (and you thought he only played vampires in films didn’t you?). 

Although his murdered friend was by all accounts a scoundrel a true “bounder” Edward Wales is determined to trap his killer by staging a seance using a famous medium. Many of the 13 séance participants had a reason and a means to kill, and one of them uses the cover of darkness to kill again. When someone close to the medium is suspected she turns detective, in the hope of uncovering the true murderer. -  Ron Kerrigan, IMDB database  

The Chairman of the Board, Frank Sinatra –  It doesn’t surprise us to discover that Frank Sinatra, the original “Chairman of the Board” was arrested.  What does surprise us is what it was for (see below); nowadays “seduction and adultery” might get Frank an appearance on the Jerry Springer show but it certainly wouldn’t get him arrested.

What is surprising is just how much Harry  Connick Jr. looks like the young Frank Sinatra. What is more, if you listen to the two you will see how much the two sound alike. Still we happen to think that the Chairman of the Board, even as a young man, couldn’t even begin to hold his own in a “sing off” with Mr. Connick.

In 1938, a 23-year-old Frank Sinatra was arrested in Bergen County, N.J. on charges of seduction and adultery. According to the FBI reports, “On the second and ninth days of November 1938 at the Borough of Lodi” and “under the promise of marriage” Sinatra “did then and there have sexual intercourse with the said complainant, who was then and there a single female of good repute.” This, the charge stated, was “contrary and in violation of the revised statute of 1937.” The charges were later dismissed when it was determined that the woman involved was married. (source)

The Comfy Chair –  Some of my favorite lunatics, excelled only by the immortal Douglas Adams.  A classic Monty Python bit. In this case a single chair…the comfy chair (insert dramatic music here).

Chairs of Doom

Photocredit: Chicago Dibs by Meryddian   

There have been several wars on North American soil; among them the Revolutionary War, The War of 1812 and the Civil war in which my great, great grandfather fought.  But of all these conflicts none have inured so many people, engendering such vitriolic feelings in the process as that which takes place after a major snow storm in the northern reaches of the United States. Everything else pales by comparison (at least in the minds of the participants in these hostilities).  I speak of none other than the dispute over small plots of land consisting of little more than an area that is 8 feet by 15 feet lining urban streets.  

The catalyst for these open hostilities are even more graver when urban residents who have no other choice but to park on city streets must excavate their car in an attempt to extricate it from six foot snow drifts.

Chairs at 20 paces

Chair free Chicago (photocredit)

The weapons of choice in this case are chairs that have been placed in newly shoveled parking spots, set their  like totems erected to warn the wary not to trespass on turf newly carved out of the urban jungle. It is a long standing law of the land that urban residents “call dibs” by marking their territory in such a manner… sort of like a dog who always pees on the same tree. There are arguments both pro and con where this practice is concerned.  It is a practice that is mirrored near the 4^th of July in many North American communities where blankets line the streets days before “the big parade” – a practice that some municipality have even been forced to outlaw. As aggravating and outlandish as the practice may be, if you have ever been forced to search for on street parking for three hours even something this absurd begins to boarder the understandable and less on insanity. And woe betide those who move what we have come to call…

The Chairs of Doom

Feel the love -

As much as we all love our WoW it’s not often that we get to write about a kinder gentler Activision/Blizzard Gorilla (especially with Bobby Kotick at the helm of Activision). It seems the modder that has caught the eye of League of Legends (see Dancing with the Stars)  has also caught the ear of Blizzard at least (and not just their legal department).  For those few not in the know, when Ryan Winzen began work on World of Starcraft Blizzard quickly had Youtube video touting the mod removed (Early reports that Blizzard fired a cease and desist order across Ryan’s bow are incorrect).

While Riot Games was busy extending job offers, it seems that Blizzard was busy extending offers for tours of their offices and encouraging words for Ryan’s Mod:

“It was never our intention to stop development on the mod or discourage the community from expressing their creativity through the StarCraft II editor. As always, we actively encourage development of custom maps and mods for StarCraft II, as we’ve done with our strategy games in the past…With the name so closely resembling that of World of Warcraft, we wanted to discuss the title of the mod with the developer, and as part of our routine procedure, we contacted YouTube to request the video be removed while that discussion took place.” – Bob Colayco,  public relations representative, Blizzard

While no one here on the NPNM team bought Starcraft 1 or 2 when it dropped, Ryan’s mod has us all reconsidering.

Fake Pirate

In this particular case imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery – it’s an attempt to shut down sites like The Pirate Bay that deal in pirated software.  It seems that companies like MediaDefender that make a business of fighting pirate or peer-2-peer (p2p) web sites with everything from fake data to (allegedly please) denial of service attacks. Arstechnica reports on what they call “poisoning the p2p well” citing a paper published by academics from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid:

“The portals fight this phenomenon by removing the fake content as well as the user accounts used to publish them. However, contrary to what has been reported in previous studies, this technique does not seem to be sufficiently effective since millions of users initiate the download of fake content.”

The paper goes on to report that 30% of the files on The Pirate Bay are fake – which is perhaps why Torrent Freak is cited by Technland.com  that the same company that brought you The Pirate Bay may be bringing us “The Music Bay.”  Here is a quote from an “insider” cited by Techland:

“The music industry can’t even imagine what we’re planning to roll out in the coming months,” the insider said. ”For years they’ve complained bitterly about piracy, but if they ever had a reason to be scared it is now. It will be a special surprise for IFPI’s (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) 78th birthday, and we’re thinking of organizing a huge festival in Rome where IFPI was founded.”

On the outs

Eurogamer is reporting that analyst Mike Hickey of  broker Janco Partners  believes EA investors are betting against the publishers upcoming Star wars: The old Republic.  Let’s hope they are wrong (not the least of which is we really want to play that particular mmo). Still the track record EA’s Warhammer Online MMO produced by Mythic (now merged with Bioware) doesn’t present a good track record.  Our big question is how many mmos has analyst Mike Hickey played?

Déjà vu All over again

Battlestar Galactica Online, the new free 2 play browser based game by BigPoint came out with a trailer based on in-game play; you can see the trailer on Youtube here. What has us all scratching our heads asking “Why?” is the decision to present  us with a product that we understand is mostly space combat with very little time spent not “being the ship”.  We won’t say that CCP has that particular corner of the market sewn up, but it makes us all wonder if the IP alone is enough to pull in the players – especially considering (as Joystiq points out) the developers seemed to have missed the big attraction to Battlestar Gallactica in the first place…the relationships between characters (especially the challenging character Starbuck as portrayed by Katee Sackhoff). This, and the release of DC Universe Online has us all wondering if anyone ever asks themselves what they are going to bring different to the use of an intellectual property other than the IP itself? It just seems to us that the use of a popular IP does NOT guarantee the success of an mmo.

Two boxers facing each other in the ring have long been compared to a dance.  Many will remember the fights featuring the great Muhammad Ali who would “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.”   But these days the fight between Bethesda and Interplay seems to have reached the point of a good old fashion cat fight.

Bethesda VP of PR Pete Hines states rather emphatically that his company owns Fallout:

“We own the rights to everything Fallout. The license is ours. Fallout belongs to us. That’s what I’ll clarify,” he told the outlet during a phone conversation yesterday.

Caen [president of Interplay] claims that it’s bad news for Bethesda if Interplay doesn’t get to make its MMO:

“We sold the Fallout IP to Bethesda in exchange for a certain amount of cash and the right to do the Fallout MMO,” he said. “If they refuse to let us do the game, then the sale of the IP is terminated, and they will be allowed to do only one more Fallout, 5. But in that case, the IP will come back to us, and of course, we will complete our work and release Fallout MMO.”

Via: Gamepolics.com

In the meantime as Interplay fight it out in the court of public opinion (and probably in the courts again) the barn is burning down around them.  Here’s a hint gents: while you were all fighting it out someone already did a post apocalyptic mmo – it’s from Icarus Studios and it’s called Fallen Earth .

The Bureaucratic Shuffle

There are more than a few people these days who are doing the bureaucratic shuffle, and chief among them is Representative Marsha Blackburn (Republican – Tenn).  It seems that the Representative that spent much of her time in the last weeks taking shots at the FCC in attempt to shoot down their impending rules on net neutrality has been doing a bit of the Tennessee version of the shuffle.  The representative has called conservatives to join her in the fight for intellectual property rights including “strict deterrents to infringement, user-controlled privacy legislation and rogue website legislation” (source)

What has us puzzled is who it was that just recently called for less legislation of the internet stating…

“The only sector of our economy showing growth is online. In these times, for an unelected bureaucracy with dubious jurisdiction and misplaced motives to unilaterally regulate that growth is intolerable.” (source: Politico.com)

Oh yes, it was Representative Blackburn.  So are we to assume that there should be less legislation only if such a move favors big business?  Like say, we don’t know…perhaps the Comcast/NBC Merger?

Yes, it is a sad day friends, it seems the FCC has given the Comcast/NBC merger the green light.  We can only assume that Minnesota’s Senator Al Franken is hopping mad over the whole thing. If he is, he isn’t the only one:

“The FCC just blessed the merger of Comcast, the nation’s largest cable and home Internet provider, with NBC Universal. The Justice Department approved the merger, too, leading to the unprecedented consolidation of media and Internet power in the hands of one company.

There’s no way to sugarcoat it. Wherever you live, the Comcast-NBC merger is a disaster.

Letting one company control the pipes and the content that flows over those pipes is a formula for abuse. Comcast-NBC could soon hike up rates, take away your favorite channels or even stop you from watching your favorite shows online. Comcast has already targeted Netflix and other companies that compete with its video and Internet offerings.

The merger lays waste to then-candidate Barack Obama’s 2008 promise, when he said, ‘I strongly favor diversity of ownership of outlets and protection against the excessive concentration of power in the hands of any one corporation, interest or small group. I strongly believe that all citizens should be able to receive information from the broadest range of sources.’

 

-Free Press CEO and President Joe Silver (source)

Dancing with the stars

Here we aren’t talking about Hollywood stars but the stars in the sky.  Just about everyone has heard about the ambitious modder who finally gave the mmo community what has been clamoring for – a Starcraft mmo – only to be shot down by the mighty Activision/Blizzard gorilla.  While that move was predictable, the good news is that even if the devs at Blizzard (read business executives who have probably never played an mmo in their life) didn’t like what they saw someone else did…

And that someone was League of Legends lead designer Tod Cadwell.

“When I see a modder with a lot of drive that has done something cool, I tend to contact them…”

– Tod Cadwell on the League of Legends forum. (source)

We’re glad that someone thought the price was right.

Sometimes old traditions have passed the way of all things as those around us have gone on to spend Christmas in a much better place (personally I can’t think of a better place to spend Christmas than to say Happy Birthday to the Big Guy in person).   We have made some new traditions in our home, and one of those includes inviting over old friends.  We sat around the dinner table (with a myriad different religions represented) and sang happy birthday dear Jesus, followed by a round of happy birthday Eternal Buddha.

Another of the new traditions for me is Christmas morning in Azeroth.

Things got a bit testy this year for awhile when the goblin who purports to be Grandfather Winter’s helper announced that he had put presents under the tree for all…except for there were no presents to be found.   What followed was a round of Santa Slapping and goblin spitting from disappointed trolls, orcs and taurens.

Then the world server went down.

And when it came back up Blizzard followed with it’s traditional Christmas by providing that wonderful new toy they make ever year.  This year, as fate would have it, Blizzard fed right in to my new interest in steampunk.  As you can see above, the toy this year is a airship.  But not just any old zeppelin…no.  The zeppelin that you can fly (much like the warlock Eye of Kilrogg spell you become the zeppelin) is armed with cannons, sky mines and an afterburner.  As I write this the valleys of Ogrimar are filled with Zeppelin pilots locked in arial combat.

Blizzard sure does know how to make a great toy.

See you online (I have zeppelins to blow up)

Julie Whitefeather

They’re big enough, they’re scary enough…

update: No closed deal (yet) but there has been an announcement of terms: $562.2 million plus “performance liked earn out of up to $200 million. (source) So it looks like its full speed ahead for Disney version of Facebook games. Are we in for treats like “Down on Mickey’s Farm”, “Duck Wars”, and “Minnie’s happy little aquarium”? Get out your barf bags ladies and gentlemen it promises to be a bumpy ride.

No word as of yet if Disney has actually gone through with the purchase of Playdom and it’s ever growing portfolio of Facebook game developers for a reported $500 million plus. But that isn’t the only merger/acquisition in the news today. Senator Al Franken, the man who fought tooth and nail to get the job as senator in the first place, was addressing the Netroots Nation conference in Las Vegas this last Sunday, as reported by TheWrap.com. Calling Net Neutrality “The first Amendment issue of our time” Senator Franken had the following to say about the proposed Comcast/NBC merger:

“If Comcast merges with NBC, how long do you think it will take for Verizon and AT&T to start looking at CBS-Viacom and ABC-Disney”

“Imagine if what is happening with television, the senator went on to say, where an independent producer can’t get a show uon the air unless a network owns a piece of it, where to happen to the internet. There would be no next Youtube or Twitter. There would only be what the R&D departments at the few megaconglomerates could invent and profit from.”

If you don’t think the Senator is right, consider the following:

Vivendi SA (formerly Vivendi Universal) divisions are Vivendi Entertainment, that in turn owns the Canal+Group (a French film and television studio), Universal Music Group, ACTIVISION BLIZZARD, Global Village Telecom, Maroc Telecom, SFR (a French mobile telephone company), and a 20 percent interest in NBC universal (the remainder is owned by General Electric)

But wait, we’re just getting warmed up here.

NBC Universal in turn has the following divisions: NBC, Universal Studios, NBC Universal Television Group, NBC News, USA Network, SYFY (the Sci-Fi Channel), CNBC, MSNBC, NBC.com, MSNBC.com, IVillage, Bravo, qubo, Telemundo Television Studios, The Weather Channel, Hulu and the A&E Television Networks.

If you add Comcast into the mix that includes five more networks (source: Arstecnica as well as The Philadelphia Flyers, The Philadelphia 76ers, the Global Spectrum Management company, Front Row (a marketing firm), as well as non-controlling interests in In Demand, TV One, MGM, Sportsnet, New England Cable News, and the Pittsburgh Cable News Channel

When you are all done chewing on that you can go watch the following movies on Netflix (while Comcast still allows it to run) – The Running Man, Robocop, and one of our personal favorites, the John Cusack movie called War Inc. The common theme with all three is, of course, “egaconcongomoerate” corporations run amok vie to control the world (or destroy it).

Is the senator from Minnesota being alarmist? We tend to think not, and if he is, a large portion of the Federal Government is being alarmist right along with him. If nothing else you have to like an actor from Saturday Night Live who fought hard to be a senator; and as the Senator’s Stuart Smalley character used to say, he’s good enough, he’s smart enough, and doog done it, people like him. Just like California, Minnesota may have an actor for a senator, and had a professional wrestler for a governor (Jesse Ventura) but none of the governors are, to my knowledge, wearing prison uniforms – and that’s something that we here in Illinois won’t be able to say for some time to come.

Another one bites the dust?

You had to see Warhammer Online Free 2 play coming from a mile away. It certainly didn’t take a telescope to spot Dungeons and Dragons Online coming up the Free 2 play street either. Lotro was a bit of a shock – we will certainly hand you that. Now in a move that we will claim you could have seen with a blindfold on (never mind that hind sight is always 20-20) Everquest 2 is going free 2 play [http://everquest2.com/free_to_play/extended_faq] with what they are calling Everquest II Extended. Now there are many of our listeners who will, of course, remember Paul Barnett speaking of such matters on a previous show shouting “I TOLD YOU THE SUN WOULD FINALLY EXPLODE.” We will let you look up exactly how much is “free” in Free 2 Play, after all no matter what anyone said our grandmothers were right…there is no such thing as a free lunch. Does this mean that I will be able to get out my gnome and get back the key to my enormous mansion and 1 Antonia Bayle? I sort of doubt it. If the past is in any way precedent I sort of doubt it. John Smedley once said that he considered a game a success if the profits paid to keep the servers open and pay the bills; lets hope the new business model does at least that.

No reviews for you

Today is the day that Blizzard finally takes the chains off that giant of industry IP’s Starcraft 2. As we all know by now, Blizzard would not allow reviews ahead of time. Our first thought was to consider movie Studios like Paramount that refused “professional” reviewers into advance showings of some of their movies after they had been blasted one to many times by reviewers, who later ended up with a few dozen eggs on their face after the same movies where hits at the box office. Still, a comment on one of our regular must reads claimed that Blizzard could defecate in a box, slap the words “Starcraft 2” on the box and still sell it (or words to that effect) and we tend to agree.

What struck us about the release was not the game itself . No, as usual Blizzard doesn’t release anything unless it is polished to the point where it could be used as the mirror in a refracting telescope. Just as striking are the CGI trailers that Blizzard released about the game. Mind you these are not all that uncommon in the mmo industry. But it is not the quality of the trailer that we find lacking – it is the fact that in most cases they are not at all representative of the game. For a game that, as we understand it, is mostly an isometric (albeit highly detailed) view the trailers seem more akin to the hype we see in movie theaters for movies that are big on special effects but low on script quality – rarely do they represent the actual movie. In fact in such cases, if you have seen the trailer you have seen the best parts of the movie with boring filler in between. Mind you in this particular case Starcraft 2 is obviously a “killer game”. Still a bit more of a pragmatic approach, and a lot more honesty in depicting what the gamer is actually getting would be honest and no doubt more productive in the end.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather