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Thank you for bumping this, I was unaware of Mirror's spore till today. It makes Dark Spore even more delicious.

I give the story a pass. Like Chris said this is something that I'd have found awesome when I was 14, and even though it's corny, it's still a lot better than most games are able to achieve. I think the senior creative team at blizzard is just better at creating grand concepts than it is at characters and dialogue. They're a bunch of gen-x metal heads, and they've grown up a bit, but they still like shit that's a bit over the top. I wasn't disappointed from the end of the campaign, because it was pretty obvious how things were going to go. I set my expectations a bit lower as soon as I saw the trailer with Raynor drinking from a flask. Though i did enjoy talking to my crew.

yeah battle.net may be a bit sketchy still. My friend and I were both ranked platinum, but together our 2v2 team got put in bronze. 2v2 does take a lot longer to sort out, but I have no place in platinum. I had 4 of my 5 placement matches against other placement people, so the game had no information other than i own newbs who fail at cheese openers. I was lamenting my poor placement after getting crushed in a platinum match and the guy thought he was being charitable when he forfeited the match. Now i'll just be here longer before getting nocked down to gold :/ I'm really enjoying 3v3 though, my friends share control and we will often micro for each other when money needs to be spent.

Just read through the article, it's not really as interesting as his talk on their podcast. I was hoping for a more of an article discussing gaming in general, but it is pretty much just a bunch of impressions of specific games and short mentions of the culture. His review of God of War 3 is funny though, basically saying that they use the Greek myths to try to excuse it's brutality, and that it was a waste of talent. There's also an idle thumbs worthy sunset and lighting ramble while talking about Red Dead Redemption.

I like that format. I know it can seem a bit douchey, but so do a lot of reviews. People get so focused on writing "well", that a lot of things are left unsaid or come off as rushed opinions. Other than a short news article, this is the first post on a gaming site i've read in it's entirety in a long time.

scout early, and early pool if you need to. Often you may need to bring your drones in to destroy the pylon. Zerg's got an advantage that the overloard can guard your ramp, so you shouldn't be getting any unexpected pylons if you're paying attention. Also, most players won't attempt a pylon rush if they know they've been spotted, even if they don't know you were too busy to notice them.Also, once you've thwarted the attack, immediately send zerglings into his base. He'll have invested in a Forge instead of a gateway, and lost a pylon, so you should have the upper hand.

I'm interested because Ken Levine, Shawn Elliott and Chris Remo all working on the same game would blow my mind.

I think it's good they're taking baby steps into multiplayer, it's easy to underestimate the complexity.

I find it wierd that so many characters look like they spawned from some JRPG: Ariel Egon Matt Mira Valerian And the choreography and acting of Ariel and Valerian is super Japanese.

Irrational. The timing made sense, and as far as I can tell they're the only company with only one game that's on that list.

Does anybody feel like doing some art for Ides? I'm thinking of throwing together a quick XNA game.

Here's a few posts which I hope remain if he is banned: http://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/showpost.php?p=148594&postcount=420 http://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/showpost.php?p=148592&postcount=73 http://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/showpost.php?p=148591&postcount=1058 http://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/showpost.php?p=148593&postcount=8

If you haven't noticed, we have a new member on the forums. mykoo000 is a robot, and he is determined to sell you wow gold. I'm not sure this is all bad translation, I believe his language is seeded by a few documents of bad translation, but he seems to be stitching together sentences from a large library. This is the true future of malevolent AI.

check out the Multiplayer forum, there's a SC2 thread with ids in it already.

Hmm, it'd be interesting to hear from someone who has played it though. That was a strange era of software.

Wow you're absolutely right, for some reason I thought it was in Tarren Mill.

I remember hearing that Douglas Adams worked on game about Starship Titanic that had some interesting conversation AI. I never actually played it though.

Twig I'm just now realizing you said you didn't play WotLK enough to know if there was something like Halaa. I was assuming you knew about Wintergrasp, which is basically the next step in that direction. It's a zone in the middle of Northrend with a fortress, 4 workshops, and 3 towers. Every 2 1/2 hours or so there's a battle for the fortress, and whoever ends up winning will gain control of a Raid instance in the fort called "Vault of Archavon". VoA is a massive incentive, because every major patch they will add a new boss that's relatively easy which drops highest level tier loot (non-heroic). Also, you get a crazy amount of honor from the quests that you complete by participating in the raid (destroy a tower, win wintergrasp, kill 10 alliance, destroy 3 siege vehicles). They balance the teams by proportionally buffing the members of the faction with fewer people in the zone, so that on server with major faction imbalances it's still a relatively fair fight. They added a pooling system in a recent patch that restricted the zone to 200 players per faction during the battle because some servers were having huge lag problems when 2,000 people showed up to fight, but other than that I'd say it's a much more organic experience than a battleground. Any player that choses to join the battle will be automatically put into a raid (there will typically be two per faction), and will share quest objectives as other members take out towers and enemy players. There's also a ranking and siege weapon system to breach the fortress, but that's less fun than it should be. Other incentives for participating include StoneKeeper shards, which are rewarded from WG quests as well as from bosses in dungeons killed while you control the zone (like the towers in BC). Which can be used as currency for some PVP and heirloom gear as well as turned into honor which can be used for purchasing gems. If you're a hardcore PVP player, it's the best way to get honor, if you're a raider you'll want to do it often for some easy gems, and if you're casual you'll want to control the zone so you can get an easy PUG raid for VoA which will get you great gear. The zone is a bit like elemental plateau, in that the best elementals are scattered around. And when weekly quests are given for killing elementals (or players) of a given type, you can run into some interesting fights. I never played Warhammer online, but does that sound similar to the world PVP group events? WAR and WotLK were released in Sept and Nov of 2008 respectively, so I'm not sure if it could be inspired by that system, maybe there will be some more influences from WAR in the TM PVP zone.

To that in particular I point to the dungeon guide queueing system. If you play a tank class you will literally never have to wait to get into a dungeon and level up with other people, you could easily level from 15-80 without leaving a major city. Healers queue pretty quickly as well, and DPS are able to blend dungeons with regular questing.I'm not sure I would want more in the world implicit raid questing, but I do really love the game when an expansion is released and the entire server is invading new lands as if it were a world event.

Personally I believe it has to do with design, you can't blame the community for those first PVP events because they were in the most remote locations in the world. Even if they had decent rewards, it'd be difficult to encourage people to do it. They were added just before Naxx, so it's arguable that halaa might have been designed before them and they were added as an afterthought into the game to test out the mechanics of persisting world pvp information.The TM rewards look significant, and given it's been a hotbed for PVP since release, it should see some traffic. It should be fun.

They kinda had it long before Warhammer with the world pvp events, but a more flushed out implementation for questing might be interesting. EPL and Silithus weren't that high traffic, Halaa was great, and Wintergrasp was good as well. The new pvp zone will be in Tarren Mill, which should be nostalgic. I'd love to see something large scale again like the opening of the AQ gates, or Sunwell.

Well he's got that going for him, which is nice.

Unless they've already hired Nick.

Somebody tell snooglebum to cut that into a remix

I agree on all points. Montreal is a great city, it also has a strong development environment, possibly only surpassed by Vancouver, Austin and the Bay Area in North America. And as for it being on the coast, it's actually on an island in the Saint Laurence, so I don't see how you could say it's not "east coast". I've never heard anyone object to anything east of Chicago being called east coast before.