Category Archives: Games

Games, News & Politics

China Taxes MMO Gold Farmers

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Anyone who plays MMOs will know how insistently gold sellers spam their services. Many of these outfits get their gold (or equivalent virtual goods) from legions of Chinese players for whom farming the virtual currency and selling it to more affluent players mostly from western countries at a mark-up has become their primary occupation.

Now The Wall Street Journal reports that the Chinese government is getting in on the action by imposing taxes, now set at 20%, on profits earned from such sales. I’d imagine that the move is less as an effort for the state to gain tax revenues from the growing industry than to dampen it and keep it under surveillance. If virtual currency can be freely convertible into Chinese yuan, it’s easy to imagine that it might one day cause problems in the greater financial system, given how tightly the yuan is regulated.

What will be interesting, as the article notes, are the implication this has for the legal rights of owners of virtual goods. If the Chinese government legitimizes the trade of virtual goods, does that mean that the players own the goods as opposed to the MMO companies?

Games

A Game: The Witcher (Enhanced Edition)

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If you’ve ever felt that every fantasy RPG always rehashes the same generic tropes over and over again, then you might want to check out The Witcher. The first release of the game last year by its Polish makers at CD Projeckt suffered from numerous technical hitches and a Polish-to-English translation that sometimes left players scratching their heads. Thankfully, the newly released Enhanced Edition of the game, available as free download for customers who had bought the original, fixes many of these problems and includes extended and fully voiced translations, so RPG fans have no excuse to put off buying this gem, even if it is still a bit unpolished.

The game is based on the Polish book series of the same name by Andrzej Sapkowski and as such is set in a medieval fantasy world with a distinctively eastern European twist. It is a grim and dangerous place where at night simple folk bar their doors and huddle safe in their houses while monsters roam at will. The player takes on the role of one Geralt of Rivia, the most famous of the few remaining witchers in the world who are tasked with defending humanity from these monsters, for a fee of course. As the game explicity states, witchers aren’t noble knights in shining armour, and as you’ll soon learn over the course of this game, there’s no unalloyed good in the world since everyone, and I mean everyone, has an angle.

Continue reading A Game: The Witcher (Enhanced Edition) →

Games

Shout-out in The Witcher

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I noticed a sarcastic shout-out to a popular novel while playing The Witcher the other day, so I saved a screenshot of it. The full text as follows:

This was popularized by Bronze Dan and begins with a convoluted theory about the derivation of the word Grail. A few tortuous pages in, we learn the Holy Grail is actually Sang-Real, which in the elder tongue denotes royal, “hallowed blood.”

I’ll leave it to the reader to notice which book is being alluded to.

I’ve just finished the game last night. The ending was a real shocker. Dramatically powerful, yes, but also painfully cruel to the player. Look out for a full write-up soon. In the meantime, I’m playing the two downloadable adventures for it, The Price of Neutrality and Side Effects, available from the official site of the game.

Games

Sex Cards in The Witcher

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I’m now playing the recently released Enhanced Edition of The Witcher. I’d originally bought the game at the beginning of year but put off playing it after reports came in about its lack of polish, garbly translation from the original Polish, frequent crashes and extremely long loading times. The Enhanced Edition of the game, which was made available as a free download to customers who had already purchased the original, fixes many of those problems, and I’m happy to say that even though there are still too many crashes for my comfort, I’m very happy with the game. I’ll write a full review when I’m finished with it, but so far, the game easily matches Mass Effect.

One of the most controversial aspect of The Witcher are the infamous sex cards. As an M-rated game, it presents plenty of opportunities for sexual activities, and it’s fair to say that the protagonist, Geralt of Rivia, is more than a bit of a ladies’ man. Each time you manage to bed a lady in the game, an entry is recorded in your journal together with a “sex card” of the lady in question, something like a collectible card. I was leery of this aspect of the game at first, but after having played the game for over a week now, I have to say that it’s damn refreshing to play a no-holds-barred, mature RPG that doesn’t skirt around sex and morality for once.

I note however that the copy of the game I purchased in Malaysia turns out to be the U.S. version, which is censored. The original Polish and European versions of the game had uncensored sex cards and in-game textures. Of course, this being the Internet age and all, it’s easy enough to get a look at the uncensored versions if you know where to look.

Games

A Game: Medieval 2

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I’ve long had a love-hate relationship with Creative Assembly’s Total War series. On the love side of the equation, the basic formula of a turn-based strategic game coupled with real-time combat, unchanged since Shogun: Total War was released in 2000, is supremely satisfying. The combination of deep decision-making played out on the grand stage of history with a graphically rich and detailed tactical combat phase just scratches all the right strategy itches. At this point, I’d play total war anything. Robotech: Total War? Warhammer Fantasy: Total War? Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Total War? If they’ll make it I’ll buy it.

On the other hand, CA’s failure to update the interface for the strategic portion of the game is an endless source of frustration. It is wholly unacceptable that the Total War games still don’t have the basic tools to streamline gameplay, such as the ability to quickly check which units still have unused movement points, that the Civilization series has had since its inception. This means that actually playing through an epic campaign is unnecessarily daunting and time consuming. Medieval 2 continues this trend and actually adds to it by making the strategic portion more complex compared to previous games. This means that the latest game in the series is epic, beautiful and grand, but, boy, but does it take a long time to actually get through a campaign.

Continue reading A Game: Medieval 2 →

Games

Religion in Medieval 2

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I finally finished my epic campaign as England in Medieval 2. Boy, did that take longer than I expected. The next game on my play queue is the Enhanced Edition of The Witcher. Since it might take a while for me to get to writing a full review of Medieval 2, here’s a screenshot of it showing my English pope who is secretly female!

Religion plays a fairly big role in the game. The nations are divided into three different religions: Catholic, Orthodox and Islamic. In addition, there are heretics and pagans, both of which are bad from a gameplay perspective. Basically, if you play a Catholic faction and attempt to conquer a region that isn’t Catholic, you’re going to have huge Public Order issues. Heretics are particularly bad in that even a very small percentage of them in a given population will cause tons of unhappiness all around. In order to get around this, you need to recruit and send priests (or imams in the case of the Islamic nations) to the regions that you intend to conquer and convert their population to your own religion. Here’s a picture of my God squad busy turning the Middle East from 100% Muslim to 100% Catholic.

Catholic factions (including England, since King Henry VIII only broke ties with Rome in 1534 and the game takes place from roughly the 12th to 15th century) are also hampered in their plans of conquest by the Pope who hates it when Catholic factions fight each other. If you annoy him too much, he might excommunicate your faction, which really makes your people mad. Fortunately, he can be bribed with money and lands. He also likes it when you build lots of cathedrals all over the map. Orthodox and Islamic nations don’t have the equivalent of a Pope so they can freely fight whomever they want. A new Pope is chosen whenever the old one dies by the College of Cardinals, which is essentially made up of the Catholic priests with the highest piety scores. Since priests can get the “Secretly Female” trait randomly when recruited, getting her to become Pope was a simply a matter of levelling up her piety by converting lots of heathens to Catholicism.

Catholic nations can also ask the Pope to call for a Crusade while Islamic nations can call for a Jihad whenever they want. They work the same way in that they target a specific city owned by an enemy religion, allowing the formation of special Crusader / Jihadist armies to have formed to conquer that city. These armies benefit from special bonuses including greater movement speed on the strategic map, being free from upkeep costs and being able to recruit special reinforcement units while in the field. The caveat however is that they need to make progress towards the targeted city every turn or units will begin to desert from the army.

Games, Politics

Obama Ads in Game?

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In-game advertising are nothing new now. In fact, my very first experience with MMO games was with Anarchy Online’s Free Play program in 2004. It was one of the first experiments of this type and offered free accounts in exchange for being shown advertisement posters and billboards in the game. However, this is the first time that I’ve heard of a political campaign buying advertisements in a game, in this case, the console racing game Burnout Paradise.

As the site notes, it’s not sure whether this is legitimate yet and may simply be a case of good photoshopping skills. But if it is true, it speaks volumes of Senator Obama’s savvyness. He’s also bought a half-hour of network primetime to speak directly to U.S. audiences on the 29th October. What’s surprising is that I think a lot of Americans are going to tune in to listen to him. When is Malaysia going to get a politician this cool?