Wednesday 9 March 2005

Pic of the day: Polite Americans, as portrayed in the game City of Heroes.

Quick game notes

I'm playing less and less World of Warcraft. Despite deftly seting up my characters such that they all receive 200% experience points pretty much all the time, it is just not fun enough to compare with City of Heroes for me. Not in the long run. Well, medium run I guess it is yet.

Speaking of CoH, I was surprised to find that the European CoH players are less polite than the American ones. My European fire tanker gets plenty of invitations to team, but always in the form of system messages from the /invite command. Only once did someone send a tell to ask whether I was interested - and then only after I had declined a system invite. And even then there was no mention of what the team was for, or where. Most Americans are like that too, but some actually ask first. And some only ask those who are flagged as "Looking for team", or they broadcast a zonewide invite stating the purpose of the team and the appropriate levels.

In all fairness, the most dedicated European superhero and RPG fans have probably played on the American servers, like I did. (To some extent I still do, when I play Moekoi the fire tanker and dedicated power leveler for the girls in the supergroup Zutto Yume Mamotteru. But lately I have played a bit on the European server Defiant too.) So the people who play on the Euro servers are probably those who hadn't heard about the game before it showed up in their local games shop's shelves. I suppose you can't expect too much from them. Yeah. That must be the reason. It is not imaginable that young Americans are, on average, more polite and thoughtful than their European counterparts. Surely not! ^_^*

***

But tomorrow dawns a new era in computer gaming, well that's how it feels up this close. With the release of the first expansion pack to Sims 2, University, the already monumental life simulator takes another great step toward becoming a "Massive Singleplayer Role Playing Game", to use an expression invented for Morrowind. (This is of course a pun on the MMORPGs, Massive/ly Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games.

More about Sims 2: University soon, Light willing.