More Malaysians by now should be aware of the ridiculous spat between Indonesia and Malaysia over who owns the rights to the song Rasa Sayang, a popular folk song. It seems that its use by the Malaysian government to promote yet another tourism campaign triggered protests from Indonesians who claim that they rightfully own that song.
What most Malaysians probably don’t know that the argument has claimed an unlikely victim, the website of The Software Boutique, a Malaysia-based online games retailer. I’m in the market for some new games and have been trying to access the website for the store for the past few days without success. Curious, I dug around a bit and found this. It appears that angry Indonesian hackers hacked the website for Tourism Malaysia’s Rasa Sayang campaign. In the process, however, they seem to have also hacked every website that used the same hosting provider, and The Software Boutique was one of those. According to the same source, their store remains down until they manage to find a new hosting provider.
Considering that TSB is only one of two online games retailers that I know of in Malaysia, I’d be glad to see it up again. TSB has always had very quick customer service for me in the past. The other retailer that I know of, PC Game.com.my had much slower customer service, though they seem to have improved somewhat lately.
Jim Rossignol at Rock, Paper, Shotgun recently made a post laying out a theoretical game that merges the generic fantasy appeal of World of Warcraft with the flat, level-less design of Eve Online. It’s not an altogether original idea, and I suspect that most players who have tried both games will have hazily imagined such a chimera sooner or later.
There are obvious contradictions with this basic design: Eve Online is all about the complex interactions between its players that its mechanics allows and the profound way that these interactions can shape the universe they inhabit. As such the Eve universe is appropriately enough a mostly blank expanse of interstellar space populated by planets, moons and asteroid belts. World of Warcraft on the other hand derives its appeal in large part from its aesthetics, in the form of player avatars, the environments they live their adventures in and the plethora of enemies that they fight. It’s part of what makes it “compelling and immediate” as Rossignol writes. It’s not obvious to me that the intersection of these two different groups of players constitutes a broad enough player base to commercially justify such a game given the resources that would be required to give a Eve-like game WOW-like eye candy. As an exercise in theorycrafting though, it’s great fun to speculate on the many ways that WOW would need to be changed to make it more like Eve.