In Memoriam: Star Wars Galaxies

By now we've all heard the news that Funcom is being taken out back to get the Old Yeller treatment, which means that The Secret World is likely to soon be added to the long, dreary list of dead MMOs that thought they could topple World of Warcraft by being, well, sorta like World of Warcraft.

Woah, wait... three factions?! That's so fresh!

Now, don't get me wrong, TSW is a decent game, and it did at least attempt to do something new with the tired old skill trees. But still, come on, you have to bite your tongue pretty damn hard if you want to pretend that it's not a WoW-clone at heart. The core gameplay is lifted directly from the first page of "MMO 101: So You Want to Craft War in the World?", and so is the user interface. It looks like WoW. It feels like WoW. It acts like WoW. Granted, it's the WoW that Cthulhu would play, but it's still pretty much WoW, minus the financial support and craftsmanship of Activision/Blizzard, and that's not a good position to be in if you want to take on the WoW that has the financial support and craftsmanship of Activision/Blizzard.

So is that it? Is that the reason MMOs that aren't WoW are dying like a bunch of flies repeatedly banging their heads against a closed window? That they're trying to fight WoW on the terms set up by Blizzard? Yes and no. The way I see it, there are two main reasons they're all failing. First of all we have the absurd notion that MMO makers carry with them, the one that makes them think that they either have to surpass WoW in popularity or pack it up and go home. But then we have the second reason, and this is the one I think is truly important: failure to identify and target the right player base.

The Men's Rights Aneurysm

Here's a funny thought experiment for you: what do you call someone who advocates the classic (and sorely outdated) view on what it means to be a man, and yet breaks down in an avalanche of snot-covered tears each and every time someone disagrees with him? A Men's Rights Activist. Or man-baby, depending on who you ask. I'm gonna go with man-baby.

Pictured: The only thing that should come up when you google 'MRA'.

Now, I'm not sure exactly when being a misogynistic asshole and being a gamer became linked at a sub-atomic level, but it sure as hell sneaked up on me. It is perhaps the most common misconception regarding the average gamer, and the more you look into it, the more you think about it, the more you start to realise that it may not even be a misconception at all. As a movement, we have failed miserably at welcoming half the population into our midst, and instead of doing something about it, those of us who are not actual assholes are still firmly stuck in "this can't be us, can it?"-mode, when we should be trying our very best to root out the poison that is clearly running through our collective veins. It's that simple: we have failed. We may not all treat women poorly, but we have all, every last one of us, failed at shutting down those that do.

The Bad Kind of Fun

I'm not very good at playing games, which is sort of a shocker since that's pretty much all I do.

Sure, sometimes I'll stuff my face, change diapers (I'm just gonna let the question hang in the air) or drink way too much coffee, but other than that, there's not a lot going on that doesn't involve a computer and stuff I click on. And yet, I often find myself cranking the difficulty setting down all the way to "are you kidding me?" before I reach my comfort zone.

It's not that I'm stupid, because I'm not. I mean, I do stupid stuff all the time, but I don't think I am stupid. There are plenty of people whom I consider to be a lot dumber than me, who are able to out-game me at every turn. I can figure shit out. I can add numbers together and get other numbers back in return. I can follow along with even the most convoluted movie plots. But I can't for the life of me apply a decent strategy in any of the several strategy games I enjoy playing. So what the hell is going on then?

Well, there are several things going on I suppose, but they all lead to a happy place where I can frolic with unicorns at my leisure: a place where I'm able to have fun, despite being really, really bad at something. Sounds great, doesn't it? Don't worry, just take my hand and I'll lead you there.

In Defence of Early Access

I'm a sucker for Early Access. There, I've said it.

I know that to a lot of people, the service (provided by Steam) is little more than a red flag, something to rally against in the name of consumer rights, but to me, it's where I find most of my games these days. That probably has to do with the fact that most Early Access games are indie titles, and the ones that aren't tend to be large, sprawling sandboxes. In other words, it's all right up my alley.

Still, the service has a reputation of being sort of a rip-off, a reputation I feel is undeserved. The truth is that considering how wide open the field is for exploitation, I'm amazed by how rare the outright scams are. The most notable, and therefore also the ones most often brought up, examples of epic fails within Early Access are Spacebase DF-9 and Earth: Year 2066. Those are the titles people will point to as an example of how few fucks are given within the service. But to be honest, only one of them was an outright scam, and while we're being honest, are we really pretending that Earth: Year 2066 ever looked and felt like a real game? That spotting it's status as a shovelware in the making was a difficult task?

Using Impact and the Canvas filter effect from photoshop in your promotional material: 

the true mark of a quality product.

Games of Yore

For as long as I can remember, I've been a gamer. Even before I unpacked my first C-64 with trembling hands, on what I now realise was the best damn Christmas eve of my life (The Christmas of Castle Greyskull coming in as a distant second) you would find me hunched over an LCD-game, or you wouldn't find me at all. It didn't matter where I was, or what I was doing. If I was awake, I was gaming in one way or another. To this day, my only memory of the several trips to Spain my family undertook during the 80's, is the insane amounts of turtles acting like assholes.

"This is the pinnacle of graphics!"

Me, at some point, probably.