femalegamer

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, my husband and I picked up Age of Conan out of curiosity. Despite its bugs, and there are many, oh, so many, the game really seems to have great potential! We’ve leveled our “main” toons up to 40-something (I’ve lost track) with some ease. It seems as though the developers were planning on a much higher focus on end-game content. (In various reviews I’ve read, leveling to 80 takes about 250 hours, as opposed to World of Warcraft’s 500 and some much, much longer times for other games). I even got a second character up to 20 in one day - though it will be some time before she sees more action… we’ve got our eyes on 80 for our mains.

About a week ago, we decided to join a guild whose focus is end-game raiding. They seem like a good group of people and are getting ready to hit the dungeons starting this weekend. Unfortunately, our original goal of trying to be 80 in time to join them will not happen (it seems five levels a day with no time off was, how shall we say, a little unrealistic). Instead, we’re going as fast as we can, while still having lives.

I admit, I’m excited to be starting fresh… a new game, a new group of people… all getting in from the ground level.  We’re all in the same boat… we don’t know what to expect from the game, the content, or anything.

It’s a much different experience than we had with WoW, in which we joined the game a few months after it launched, and thanks to a personal friend, ended up leveling and getting involved in the top guild on the server. In that situation, we were set up to succeed. In AoC, there is no setup… it is just us, win or lose. As much as I loved the roles we were handed in Warcraft, I find myself more excited by this AoC unknown.

In quite possibly the strangest crossover in my life (as an avid gamer and an obsessive Beatles fan), apparently The Beatles’ representatives are in talks with a few companies to create a Beatles-themed video game.

Talks have gone on with both Activision and MTV games. While a source close to the talks says that a deal could be reached within a few weeks, it would have to have the blessing of Apple Corps (the company that oversees The Beatles’ business interests) and EMI (the UK company that owns the Beatles’ master recordings).

Truthfully, this news really surprises me as Apple Corps has always tended to shy away from new and unusual platforms for The Beatles’ legacy. The blessing to sell The Beatles catalogue electronically through iTunes and other sites still hasn’t happened.

For a long time, Apple Corps was under the loving and insightful care of Neil Aspinall, who has been with the Fab Four since the beginning. Since he passed away, many of us fans figured we’d see a change to the way in which their music was handled… I just never guessed it would be something like this.

Whether it is a Guitar Hero/Rock Band styled game or a Yellow Submarine trippy adventure, I’m interested to see where this will lead. I’m a little excited at the potential, but terrified at the same time that they will somehow cheapen the Liverpool Lads legacy.

It seems like the wait for Spore has taken forever. From the first video I saw, well over a year ago, I couldn’t help but feel that it is going to be one of the most fascinating games in years. If like me, you’ve been aching to get your hands on the evolution of a species, your time is getting closer… and there’s something to whet your appetite even more in the meantime.

Electronic Arts has announced that Spore Creature Creator, an introduction game to Spore, by studio Maxis, is now available. SCC, which is available on both Mac (yay for games on Mac - other studios take note!) and PC, is a stand-alone product that allows players to create their own creatures using design tools from Spore.

Once your creature is created, the game features the ability to record movies of your critter in action, upload them to YouTube and share them in the “Sporepedia.”

SCC is available in two versions, the limited toolset free trial and a $9.99 retail version that includes more than four times as many items.

While SCC doesn’t have quite the excitement and anticipation surrounding it, its a nice little distraction until Spore is released on Sept. 7.

Check out a promo for SCC here:

And if you want to check out some Spore footage again, click here:

Video games are selling stronger than ever this year, according to market researcher, NPD. Thanks to strong content, sales figures for video game hardware and software was up 37 percent in the U.S. over last year.

Riding high on Grand Theft Auto 4 and the various Wii releases, including the Fit, industry sales hit $1.12 billion. To date, the industry has hit $6.6 billion in sales for the year, beating 2007’s total annual revenue. If the sales continue on in this manner, the industry is on pace to see revenue in the $21 to $23 billion range.

It is possibly more than just a strong game market that led to these numbers, however. Higher sales of games and platforms could also be tied to the state of the economy and the ever rising gas prices. While there may be an upfront cost, gaming is giving folks the ability to entertain and be entertained all while never leaving the home: no travel cost, no cover charges, no expensive tickets, no food cost incurred (except maybe that pizza delivery)!

A recent study conducted by Australian psychology major Daniel Loton found that 15 percent of 621 adult respondents to an online survey identified themselves as “problem gamers,” or those who spend more than 50 hours a week playing games.

Only 1 percent of those gamers had poor social skills (shyness) according to Loton. Which contradicts the stereotype that all gamers are geeks who seek solace in gaming since they can’t find friends in the “real world.”

The study also found that problem gamers were most likely to be involved in massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) like World of Warcraft and Age of Conan.

Loton’s findings came after last year’s wonderfully profound and inaccurate statement by the American Medical Association which tagged MMORPG gamers as “somewhat marginalized socially, perhaps experiencing high levels of emotional loneliness and/or difficulty with real life social interactions.

Now, I may not be the most outgoing person out there, or the one that is considered the “life of the party,” but I definitely do not turn to MMOs for the AMA’s reasons. In fact most of my friends are gamers and they definitely are not lacking in social skills. Hell, we can party with the best of them, and know that real world fun can tower over gaming any day. Yes, we may all be a bit dorky about our various obsessions with certain movies, books or bands, but put us in a room with a bunch of non gamers  and I bet you couldn’t tell us apart. Unless one of them makes the mistake of mentioning their desktop specs…

It never fails, you want a good night of gaming and something happens to ensure that won’t happen. Having just gotten Age of Conan, my husband and I were very excited to break into the game Monday night after he got back from an evening work meeting.

I was good most of the day, only hopping on the game occasionally to check if I’d sold anything on the Trade Post. I have to admit, having to run the game through Boot Camp is a heaven-sent for my work productivity. While I could hop onto World of Warcraft easily enough every 20 minutes or so (I’m a bit obsessive), the logon process is so long (restarting computer as a PC through Windows takes forever), I’m less likely to do it.

He finally arrived home just before 8 p.m. and within three minutes of him being home… we lost power. Noooo! Where we live, its unfortunately a pretty regular occurrence, and when it does happen, it’s never for a short period of time.

Much grumbling ensued and phone calls were made to the power company. Their estimate 10:30 p.m. Well, there went our evening! Yet again, something in life was telling us we had no choice but to step away from the keyboards.

Despite the initial anger caused by the power outage, we actually ended up having a good time. We decided to hang out on our front porch with a bottle of wine, and before we knew it, everyone else who lives in our building (four apartments) joined us. It was the first time we’d actually gotten to hang out with them apart from the fleeting “Hey! How’s it going?”

Some of the work that was going on was right near our place and we’d occasionally send someone over to try and bribe the workers to work faster. It was an annoying sweltering evening and sitting outside was nothing any of us had had in mind. Turns out the various transformers in our area couldn’t handle the load and they had to reroute power from other areas - I didn’t even know they could do such things. Of that though, I can’t help but fear that it’s going to continue as the summer progresses - this was just early June! We hadn’t even put in our A/C yet! What about in August when that many more people give in!?

Much to their credit, the power company was pretty spot on as the power came on at 10:45 p.m. We all said our goodbyes, happy to head back into our various air conditioned and fanned apartments.

Despite the outage, we still ended up getting a good hour-and-a-half of gaming in before we went to bed.

Well, we did it, we’re putting World of Warcraft down for a while (though I’m guessing we’ll be back). On Friday I picked up two copies of Age of Conan for myself and my husband. I was hoping to have the game installed and good to go by the time he got home from work… I forgot about the PC game to Mac conversion issue.

Instead he got surprised with the game boxes and the several hours of work involved getting the game installed on his PC and Mac’s “Windows program” Boot Camp and the game installed on my MacBook Pro.

Nonetheless, we got a decent amount of playtime in this weekend and so far I have a Level 20 Stygian Demonologist and he has a level 18 Cimmerian Bear Shaman.

I have to admit, we’re both very impressed with the game so far! Beautiful graphics; interesting, immersive quests; nice spells for my Demonologist and a more detailed melee system for his Bear Shaman; the ability to do a solo quest thread in your own personal night instance; and an interesting loot system.

It has already held our interest more than any other MMO we’ve tried since picking up WoW. Then again, that’s not hard to do… There was one in which I played for five minutes and proceeded to get my character stuck on a water well (Dark Age of Camelot, I think). When I realized my character was there for good, I called it quits out of annoyance… five minutes! Maybe we should have given it a better shot.

Although we normally play together, I like that this game has you to play solo in your own instanced world a decent amount. If nothing else, it’s forcing us to really learn our classes right off the bat and not rely upon one another as a crutch all the time.

My biggest complaints so far are the storage opportunities. Your bank bag also serves as the area in which your “trade post” (auction house) items are stored and it isn’t very big. And I’m a pack rat… Mine is full already. In Warcraft we used to use the mail system as backup storage, sending items to one another. In AoC it seems as though there is a limit on the number of items you can send a character… That will get old very quickly.

Anyway, and on an aside, I’m impressed with Boot Camp for running the game. Though I feel dirty logging onto my Mac and having it act as a Windows PC. I’m just waiting for the blue screen of death.

Note to game developers… make more games Mac friendly!

Many years ago, you could watch cars race around the Indianapolis 500 that were just that, cars. These days, if you follow the sport, no only are they cars, they’re moving ads for everything from Claritin to Home Depot and Tide to UPS.

A few years from now, we’ll be saying the same thing about video games. It turns out Sony recently struck a deal with IGA worldwide, a company that promotes in-game advertising.

Gone are the days of the generic cans of fake soda you’d kick around in Half-Life 2 or the wonderful bags of fake chips in BioShock. From now on, those will be Sprites and Fanta or Lay’s and Doritos. The advertisements can be anything from replacing those drinks and eats with a real, simulated product to billboards as you race down the street in GTA or on a TV screen as a commercial when you’re running past a room in Hitman.

Electronic Arts is in line to be the first company to incorporate advertisements into its PS3 games. Their most likely targets, the ever-popular Madden NFL and NBA Live franchises.

It’s going to be an interesting trip to see where this leads us. As it is, I have a hard time watching movies that features too-blatant advertising. It draws away from the “reality” of the movie, when suddenly you find your movie reverie is shattered by the obvious fact that the all of New York City is only driving Audis.

Funcom, the company behind Age of Conan, has announced the game has risen to No. 1 on the PC charts and is also competing well on the all-format lists.

One week after launch, the game already has more than a half a million subscribers and the game has been difficult at best to find in the stores. Funcom said it is working to resupply new copies of the game as soon as possible.

In the seven countries for which Funcom has figures, the game is selling like mad. In Germany, Age of Conan is No. 1 on all-format and PC, while the console-orientated UK market has Conan as No. 2 on the all-format charts, being held from No. 1 by Grand Theft Auto 4. In Sweden and Norway, Age of Conan is sitting squarely at No. 1 on both PC and all-formats, while contributing to making it the biggest week for PC games in 2008. In Spain and Italy, Age of Conan reigns the PC charts, while the Australians sent the game to No. 1 on PC and No. 2 on all-formats.

The company announced it knew AoC had a chance of conquering PC charts, however it claims the all-format charting was a pleasant surprise.

More than 8 million unique visitors (one million less than the World of Warcraft gamerbase) from over 200 countries have visited the Age of Conan websites so far this year. If you’re curious, hop on over to the AoC Web site, www.ageofConan.com.

For the love of Pete, is it that difficult to come up with an original guild name?

I love my WoW server, immensely. I can’t imagine ever going elsewhere. But I’m often dumbfounded by the number of guilds that are created by combining two of the “Top 10 Most Popular Guild Words.”

Guardians of the Light, Guardians of the Darkness, Guardians of the Legion, Guardians of the Shadow, Storm Shadow, Storm Legion, Storm Knights, Shadow Wolves, Shadow of Darkness, Legion of Darkness, Dark Knights, Shadow….

I decided to do some research on the WoW Armory . I searched for the words I tend to see most often. Unfortunately, the Armory takes the search very literally… when I was searching for Legion, I got guilds named Legion, and not the many variations (Legion of Darkness, etc.).

Legion (There are 139 guilds named Legion on the various U.S. WoW servers)
Shadow (102)
Shadows (72)
Darkness (118)
Light (more than 100 according to Warcraft Realms )
Assassins(more than 100 according to Warcraft Realms)
Doom (93)
Guardians (72)
Storm (71)
Knights (55)
Wolves (17)

Judging by the guilds that are named just by the one word listed above, I think the winner of most overused guild word is “Shadow(s).” There are 174 guilds on the U.S. servers named Shadow or Shadows… and that’s not taking into consideration the “… of the Shadows,” “Shadow …,” etc. Wolves, on the other hand, while not a huge draw on its own, makes an annoyingly impressive stand on my server. I can think of at least five guilds that have Wolves in their name in some form.

I see two options… a ban on the most commonly used guild words, so people have to think outside the box. Or, I create a random guild name generator that spits out guild names by randomly combining two of the most commonly used guild words. If you can’t beat them, give them a method in which to come up with their realllllllly boring names.

In the meantime, I’m starting a new guild. It’ll be called “For the Love of Pete,” just for the sake of bucking the trend. Anyone want to join? We’ll be a fun, social guild, have a cool tabard and a guild bank. Oh, and we’ll help you with quests, run instances and once we have Hogger on Farm status, we’ll attempt Stitches.