Going outside. It’s quite dangerous. Just ask a World of Warcraft player. Gang fights, turf disputes, trade swindling, imposing authorities, Mr. T. – and we’re not even talking about WoW yet.
So imagine what happens when you mix those things, rampant drug and alcohol usage, internet anonymity, a cross between GTA-style violence and Harry Potter-style witchery, 13-year-olds, and good old FPS teabagging. You get a rather dangerous place called a “PvP Realm.” Roughly translated for those who haven’t yet mastered WoW-speak, it means “open season on your ass.” But since Blizzard has yet to debut its patented in-game butt cup (available soon for only $10, limit one per account) to shield your character (aka toon) from unwanted posterior intrusions, you’ll have to settle with my $5 “Don’t-even-think-about-going-there” tour guide, provided to you free of charge.
So, without further adieu, I bring you, ranging from “hunting guide for Dick Cheney” to “sparring partner for Chuck Norris,” the top 10 most dangerous world PvP areas of WoW.
I just suffered through one of the worst movies I have seen in a long time. I wasn’t planning on writing anything about it; I was just going to let it pass and hide my shame for even having voluntarily seen the film because I should have known better. However the filmmakers appear to have a huge marketing budget that they’re using to push the damn movie relentlessly through posters at every bus stop and an ad during every commercial break. The movie is “Gamer,” and being one myself, it got me thinking about what the film says about this very unique and diverse classification of people.
Before “Gamer” I had never seen any other films by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor who’d both written and directed it and I had no idea that they already had a reputation, of sorts. Their previous movies are Crank, and Crank: High Voltage which I’ve heard many describe simply as “hectic.” (They are also currently working on Crank 3, said to be in 3D, and finishing up Jonah Hex, which IMDb has explained like this: “In the Wild West, a scarred bounty hunter tracks a voodoo practitioner bent on liberating the South by raising an army of the undead.”)
In the special features of the “Gamer” DVD they themselves said, “Watching [our movies] is like audience torture. We were talking about this the other day, like, not only do we torture our characters [...] but we torture our audience. It’s like hitting them over the head with a ball pein hammer for 90 minutes.”
Arriving out of nowhere and surprising everyone, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars has suddenly appeared as a game app for the Apple iPhone. Chinatown Wars received excellent reviews on the DS but had a hell of a time selling copies. End result: Chinatown Wars was one of the best-reviewed games for the DS and failed miserably on the platform. Some cited piracy, but I continue to insist that DS platform was not the correct machine for the franchise. With the Apple iPhone, Chinatown Wars should find the riches it deserved in the first place.
APB is the latest game under construction at Realtime Worlds, best known for Crackdown and its ruler, Dave Jones, who once made a little game you may have heard of called Grand Theft Auto. APB is a massively-multiplayer action game, though the word ‘massively’ may be pushing it, as APB is definitely a smaller scale than something like World of Warcraft.
Details on what we can expect in APB have been frustratingly meager, though this 20 minute video explains several dynamics of the game, complete with actual in-game footage.
Rockstar Games, creators of Grand Theft Auto, have announced via Twitter that, “Details on 2nd episode of GTAIV downloadable content coming soon.” So there you have it. Don’t be sending off GTA IV to the Gamestop used-rack quite yet.
If your cruise around various gaming sites and look at the comments pertaining to this story, what you find is a lot of people blaming piracy for the low sales. I’m afraid that analysis is just as off as those who predicted mammoth sales. People seem to think gamers just downloaded it and refused to buy it.
With that argument, Pokemon Platinum should have sold somewhere around 100,000 copies, but no. It managed to sell over 850,000 in the first week, single-handedly dispelling the “piracy” excuse.
So what explains the horrible sales figures? Probably a mix of factors, not the least of which is GTA fans are simply not using their DS as a platform. If Chinatown Wars had been released on the iPhone, or hell, even the PSP, it would have fared considerably better. What’s the lesson? The DS skews young and will forever skew young. Mature titles have no future.
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