-The One Evil Flame-
I thought it was only proper to write something before January ended; that said I have no idea what to write whatsoever right now. There are many things going on right now, so I think I can manage to write a somehow lengthy post without problems.
First and as always: school. This semester seems to be particularly tiring, given that all of my classes begin on the afternoon, and most of the week I get to leave school quite late which effectively kills the rest of my day. It saddens me to admit that I’m not as sleep-resistant as I used to be, so I have troubles keeping myself awake til 2am where before I could get to the 4am mark, sleep 4 hours and be completely awake the next morning. I’m not used to make my morning useful, but I sure should get used or else I won’t be able to keep this rhythm.
I haven’t seen much anime as of lately, but I do try to keep it up with a couple of series. Surprisingly enough, I don’t keep it up with the series that I was looking forward the most last season. I have no idea why, but I simply don’t feel like seeing them. With some of the newest events I am now unable to see those really old series that were practically impossible to find anywhere else; oh well it’s not like I need them to live anyway.
I have to admit that I actually have been gaming lately; I don’t think I waste as much time as I did before though. This last couple of weeks I’ve been playing Guild Wars a lot, and I’m happy to announce that a couple of weeks ago I finally achieve 30 points on the Hom reward calculator. Basically I’ve played enough GW so I’ve earned myself some nice looking items for GW2, yays me. At this point I don’t know if I’ll aim for 40 or more points, but right now I’m happy with 30 and I’m going to stay there. The current goal is to help a friend get 30 too, which thankfully won’t be as difficult.
My personal projects are still going on; I still post at a weekly basis in Pocky and I’m working right now to get some gifs done (though this might take a while since all the Raws I’ve found so far seem to have a watermark -.-,). There are still a couple of things I want to do, but I’m not sure if I’ll have the time for that. I spend the rest of my day searching for GW2 news; yeah I’m that desperate to play the game.
This will be a busy semester I can tell already, but I still plan to keep it up and do my best. So cliché. Bring it on life.
I am no writer. I’m a guy who periodically writes on different blogs, a blogger if you want; yet I’ve read so many stories. When I was younger I used to devour books as if there was no tomorrow, but eventually the reserve of books in my house grew smaller and smaller until I had nothing left to read, or at least not anything that I was interested in. Years passed and I eventually got internet, one thing led to another and I ended up seeing anime, tons of it. You could say that even if it’s impossible to see every single anime that has been created it’s quite obvious that there are some stories that get repeated over and over with different settings; you could even say that some are just built as if they were LEGO. Thankfully beneath the mountain of cliched stories I always find one that has something new, something unexpected, a story which direction I can’t foresee, and it is thanks to this that I keep watching anime.
I don’t know what it takes for someone to write such a story… but I thought I might actually try to write one.Yes, you read right. I’ve felt for a while now that maybe I should write a story of my own. It obviously is not the first time I’ve tried to write one, and I have to admit that all those stories I had tried to write have failed. The reason is simple since all of those were revolving around my ideals, and I simply didn’t know what do with them.
Has anything changed? Well after writing on regular basis for a blog, I found a way in which I can write freely and not worry about what to do next… so I was thinking it might be time to give it another try. Will I succeed? I have no idea, but I won’t loose anything if I try. This is like a flare to the darkness, I’m not sure whether I will actually go for it or not, but I will probably know the answer in a couple of weeks. Let’s see how this works out.
Ugh…. really? It’s been more than a month already? Blergh.
I’m happy to announce that I haven’t been slacking the last month or so; I could even say that the last pair of weeks have been rather productive. I haven’t mentioned it here yet but I’ve been writing for an anime and videogames blog for the past month. It’s on Spanish which is good because it had been a long while since I wrote on Spanish… and now I feel my English redaction has gone down the hill.Anyway if you’re interested you can check it out around here.
I also resurrected anigifs and I’m happy to announce that I’m up to date! (at least with the current season). As I thought it’s way easier to keep it up than to catch up.
I think that will be all for now since I just wanted to pop and say hi. Maybe I’ll write a bit more often here, but the other blog does fill out my blogging necessities. Signing out, poof.
Ello der!
It sure is hard to force yourself into writing when you don’t have ideas of what to write. I could start with “My first partial exams are coming up again”, but exams is a topic that for some reason I always bring up on my posts so this time I decided to do something different. What are you doing different this time? you may ask. Well to be honest I’m not sure myself right now since I’m writing whatever comes to my head. I’d also like to point out that I’m paying attention to class while writing. How does that work? Well… somehow it does.
Anyway, seeing my other posts being too small and squishy I figured that I would like to write a bit more lengthy post. So far I like what has been coming out of my head so let’s keep it up. At this point this thought crosses my mind: Who am I kidding?, I want to write about games. So be it; or so I thought. Thing is I don’t have many games to talk about. While I’m a Guild Wars 2 fanboy and I could probably can write a LOT of it; I’ve already decided that at some point I will do a very lengthy post of it. Very Lengthy. Now lately I’ve been playing Microvolts, a very fun 3PS Multiplayer that has proved to be a very fun experience. My gameplay hours on Team Fortress 2 have paid off and I can still pwn even when I have level 1 equips. Sadly getting kills on Microvolts maybe a bit way too easy so last time I logged to Team Fortress 2 to play I actually got worse. I didn’t thought that was even possible.
Also I got into Mass Effect once again, I gotta finish that game someday. While Mass Effect is definitely an awesome visual novel game, I only play it when I feel like reading through everything and exploring every single corner. It’s the first game in which I’m taking my time so I can get the best experience I can get out of it, instead of rushing through the cut-scenes and not doing side quests. Which reminds me I had Mass Effect 2 on EA virtual store, and I’m not sure if I still have it after they switched to origin. Mental Note: Gotta check that.
Hmmm I’m wondering if I should insert a youtube video around here. I thought around paragraph 2 that it would be a good idea, but since I’m speed writing I haven’t done so, oh well might just leave it to the end. Speaking of youtube I want to change my youtube theme again. While GW2 looks pretty good I feel that it doesn’t look as good as it did before (to me). That said, I have no idea whatsoever of which theme I should pick next. I still have my Touhou theme but I don’t really feel like using it again right now. I don’t feel in the mode of a Team fortress 2 theme either. Maybe I should get the good habit of changing theme every anime season which a current anime? That might be a nice idea, though there aren’t as much pics available of on going anime so picking the last one would probably work.
Now Im starting to get satisfied with the length of this post. Let’s see what else pops out of my brain. Oh yeah, I haven’t looked at my last.fm lately. I really really should look into that, but I don’t feel as attached to music as I am to anime and videogames. Don’t get me wrong I do love music but I just can’t listen to music for periods of time as large as the ones when I game or see anime. Oh well enough of this. It has been a very lengthy post and I’m really happy with it. Now I feel like writing a lengthy post of Guild Wars 2. Yep yep.
Well I guess that’s about it. See ya around people!~
Lately for some reason I’ve been feeling really dopey when I’m about to write; I come up with good ideas but for some reason when I’m about to materialize them my head begins to spin and I forget what I was about to write. Then some weird stuff ends up on my posts.
Maybe is just the fact that I’m bored to death but… who knows?
Anyway, this was an explosive back to school. [pun intented] I have hopes for this semester, let’s see how it turns up.
It’s been almost 2 months since my last post, but worry not I haven’t neglected this blog. I know, I know, I should post more often, that’s what I always say and what I will do; I also know that I haven’t updated anigifs in a while, which I hope to between this and next week.
It’s vacations so I’ve been a bit lazy to update everything. Also I’d like to comment that now I’m part of a “bigger” blog which makes me really happy.
Hmm I think that’s all right now, cya later.
If you are familiar with online gaming, you probably have heard of World of Warcraft (commonly known as Wow). If you play MMOs, you are probably quite tired of terms as Wow-clone, Wow-killer, Wow is way better, LOLWOWCLONE LOLOLOLOLOLOL. If you play Wow you are already hating this post, please don’t yet.
I’ve never played Wow, I can’t say it’s a bad or a good game simply because I’ve never played it; it just doesn’t get my attention. Yet always I read something about Wow a strange hate goes through my nerves, which isn’t normal given that I am hating a game I’ve never touched. It took me quite a while to determine what was exactly what made me want to punch people that defend Wow.
The Wow-tard
Now, I’m not saying that everyone that plays Wow is just a mindless drone that dedicates himself to play a game that drains his life; we all have different ways to throw our lives through the drain, and playing a game is just another way to do it. The problem comes when another MMO appears. Many of us have expectations on xyz game, we are just seeing and loving what we see and suddenly it appears.
WOWCLONE / WOWKILLER
These two terms while having way too different meaning are more than enough to detonate a flame war with mortars, bazookas and whatnot.
Trolls that trash other MMOs and defend Wow are frequent and damn they are annoying. They give arguments that imply that your current favorite game is just a copy of Wow (Aka Wow Clone), and that just being interested on a game like this makes you a complete retard.
Some people with the need of feeding the fire may reply. “WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, THIS IS THE WOWKILLER”. The Wow killer oh dear lord, that fabled game of the legends that will break away the Wow reign of horror and bring balance to the force.
For no reason at all I call both of these people Wow-tards.
Wow Clones
MMOs that play similar to Wow are normally labeled as Wow clones; sadly most of them play similar to Wow. They ARE MMOs after all and even worse, many are 3D Fantasy MMORPGs which you could say is one of the most famous settings for MMOs.
MMOs that play different from Wow are labeled as Wow clones as well, by Wow-tards.
So who in here is to blame? Gamers? Developing companies? Wow-tards?
You can’t blame the gamers, because it is true that some mechanics commonly used in MMOs share similarities to World of warcraft. It is worth reminding people that Wow wasn’t the first one to implement these systems, it’s just the most famous MMO nowadays (to the point it is pop culture).
You actually can’t blame developers either. To justify this argument I’m going to quote a game developer that is currently working on a MMO. For objective purposes I’ve removed the name of the game he is working on, but you can click the source at the end of the quote.
GameSpy: Here’s kind of a high-concept question: A lot of MMOs are – well, how can we put it? They’re World of Warcraft copycats. What is it about this genre that causes it to (largely) stagnate for years on end?
Eric Flannum: Although I’m not sure I’d go so far as saying most MMOs are “World of Warcraft copycats,” I think some amount of stagnation is definitely going on in the MMO genre. Having gone through development on the first game and with what we’ve experienced developing [Insert-Game-Name-Here], there’s actually a pretty simple explanation for this: Developing an MMO is hard. I mean, really hard.
I’ve worked on a lot of different types of games, and while all of them present challenges, none of them compare to the difficulty of developing an MMO. You have complex network models to deal with. You have to create enough content and systems to support players getting not just 20 or 40 hours (which is a long time for most games), but hundreds or thousands of hours of play out the game. You have to deal with the community aspect of the game. The economics and balance of the game become much more involved in an environment where you have thousands of players interacting. The list goes on and on.
You don’t see a lot of companies taking many chances, because developing such a complex game is not only hard, but also very expensive. Add to this the fact that you have a clear “number one” game that’s making a ton of money. From that viewpoint, it becomes very easy for a company to become conservative and not take any chances that could cause the game to take longer to develop – or even risk it becoming a failure when it does launch.[...]
As for Wow-tards… well it’s not like they are even trying to make a point.
The Wow Killer
This is the biggie. After you think about it for a while, you’ll notice that there is no reason for wanting any game to kill Wow. Even if “Lady Gaga Online” becomes the new best MMO and it takes over Wow… will anything change? What would stop people from coming and saying GAGA CLONE to any other incoming MMO ? Or even worse, what would stop people from calling LGO a Wow clone?
So here it is. The Wow killer won’t be an MMO, it will be a collection of MMOs. This MMOs must have two characteristics.
1) Their gameplay mechanics will differ from the vast majority of current MMOs. The more the better.
2) They will be successful and they will call the attention of masses.
Which is the point of this? At some point we will start getting lots of new MMOs with better gameplay mechanics. When you see a new MMO people will say “This game is a Wow clone.” at which people can actually respond: “Naaah I feel it’s going to be a bit more like ZYX game, but we’ll have to wait and see.”
This is it. I am just tired of Wow being the only way to measure MMOs. What we really need is MMOs that break the rules and that work well; that way we will get to see new parameters, new ways to see MMO playing and even better, this is the way in which the MMO genre will move on from the mud trap it has been for the last years. People don’t need to stop playing Wow, it has only 11 ~ 12m suscribers and considering there are billions of people in the world I don’t see why we should depend on the exact same playerbase that has supported that game for years.
The End
Last part and best part: It is already happening.
Lately there have been MMOs that are really trying to break pieces of the old school MMOs, and many more are incoming that try to do the same. We have games like “Divine Souls”, “Vindictus” and the incoming “Tera”, and “Blade and Soul” which some people are already labeling as Action MMORPGs; we have the incoming monster of “Star Wars The Old Republic” (SWTOR) which will probably be the most heavily voiced acted MMO in the History, trying to put a story into MMORPGs.
Last but not least we have my personal favorite: Guild Wars 2 (GW2), that MMO I hope you have heard about. This last one is not only trying to change gameplay and add a story, but is also trying to change the tank/healer/DPS trinity into something that will seemingly work. I would also like to mention RIFT that while not being THAT different, it made really good impressions in the MMO market.
If these games and the many more coming deliver, we will have the genre back to its tracks advancing as it should, and we will be finally be able to forget what was a Wow Clone.
…this semester.
Phew, that last weeks after the 1 week vacations were brutal; but it is finally time for some well earned rest, or that is what I would love to say. Being this busy had it’s downsides and I’m way behind with my gifs site; I will make sure to catch up in the following week. That said I’m off to see some more anime.
Monday. The so waited 1 week vacations are over, and it’s time to go to school again. I said this last year and I’ll say it again: I probably love this vacation period more than any other week of the year. The reason is quite simple!
The complete atmosphere over there is quite different from what it is over here; it is so easy going that sometimes I feel as if life were really easy over there. Even the weather is awesome! The result? Me forgetting about everything else (including hobbies) and just relaxing without caring for the rest of the world.
Ok, time to confront reality. Vacations are over and this rest won’t come until next year. Time to get back to daily routine, and even if summer vacations are really near I don’t feel as if they will compare to this ones.
Moving on~
Exactly 1 year and 1 week ago I made a post in which I described how I enjoyed vacations at that time. This year for some reason those vacations will begin until next week. The pressure of the exams, the new anime season and some other obligations I have to get done before the week ends are really piling up, which makes me want to throw everything away. I can tell that these vacations are going to be of the best, specially because I need to relax. Hopefully I will make it alive.
