Funcom takes us from New York to Egypt to do battle with everything from demons to dinosaurs in the epic Game Developers Conference trailer for its upcoming modern day supernatural MMO.
The man with the Laser Tag guns had to go to catch a flight. Otherwise I’m sure we would have been zapping each other. Nevertheless, yesterday was my chance to bring up the topic of Battle Tag to someone who works for Ubisoft and ask: Huh?
In January, we linked to a series that was being kicked off by The Morning News, in which writer Todd Levin would recount the story of his life through the various gaming console’s he’s owned. It was good, good reading. Well, it just wound up, so now’s as good a time as any to link to it again, particularly seeing as he spends half the final chapter dwelling on the same love/hate relationship with this site that we have to fight through every goddamned day while we sip cold coffee, alone, and wonder why the hell we quit our part-time gigs in the video games department of Best Buy to work this dead-end beat. Second Place is First to Lose [The Morning News]
Are gamers today being denied the social love of good-old pen and paper role-playing games?
Maybe.
I only recently got back into the swing of things (and took some matters into my own hands), and I’m currently running a D&D 3.5 Edition game with a few mates every third Saturday or so.
Okay, that’s a lie. We’ve had one session. But enthusiasm is super high.
There was the temptation, for a moment, to craft the campaign in something like NWN or NWN2, and do the whole thing online. And yes, it’s social, but not the sort of social I, and indeed my mates, were looking for. There’s something about scrawling hit points and gold piece counts on a slip of paper that no keyboard or mouse can replicate.
Of course, computers can keep track of all that annoying number stuff, like weapon bonuses and esoteric modifiers to saving throws. With the complicated mechanics hidden away, there’s the potential to focus more on the story and characters.
Both have their pros and cons. I was once pretty sold on CRPGs, and I think there will be a point in the future where it can truly compete with PnP, but for now, the pen is mightier than the DWORD. I hope someone got that.
Now, I put the question to you: PnP RPG or computer RPG? Which do you think is superior and why?
PS. And yes, that is Firefly‘s Nathan Fillion with dice in hand, about to engage his warp drive into a nebula of hardcore nerdism.
