There are plenty of places to get more AoC impressions, so I’ll try to keep my impressions/review brief (update: failed) and personal.

The best one-word description of AoC is “haphazard”. It’s in the feature list: they have mounted combat but no auction house. It’s in the mechanics: melee combat is innovative, fun, and obviously iterated; spellcasting is dull, repetitive, and generic. The game is technically advanced, but features no auto-config so you’ll spend quite some time optimizing your rig and your video settings. The starting area is advanced well beyond WoW, but there’s only one: if you like to level a few alts to determine your favorite play style, prepare for pain. Itemization is a work in progress: there are quest and dungeon rewards here and there, with whole dungeons and level ranges with nary a decent weapon. Some classes embody Conan (specifically, the Barbarian class), while others feel like piles of somewhat related abilities. Many of the skills and feats are broken, but AoC charges a respec cost to change them– okay, that last point was all negative.

Age of Conan’s primary accomplishment is the revolution of melee combat. While AoC’s spellcasting classes were a huge letdown from my high level WoW mage (20+ keybound abilities that I use almost every arena battle, versus 1 nuke button), the Guardian is sheer twitchy goodness. In a single battle, you might swap weapons several times to enable different moves, activate different special moves plus their combo strikes, switch stances mid-combo to increase damage on the final swing, and run around while doing all of this to optimize enemy position for area of effect strikes (i.e. most of your strikes). In the most striking demonstration of this, WoW has three stances for a warrior– AoC has three sets of three stances each, for a total of nine (three of which can be active at any given time).

Addressing a pet peeve of mine, AoC has successfully de-emphasized healbotting. Most healing classes have one big heal on a several minute cooldown, and the rest of their heals are heals over time. This means you apply your HoTs and then get to fighting.

Finally, AoC’s art direction is a welcome change of pace for any WoW addicts. You’re still running around in a swords and sorcery setting, but you’re clobbering picts instead of orcs, and living in a city that looks much grittier and more human.

AoC might be a great game in a year, if their drive to release the XBox 360 version doesn’t distract too much from much-needed improvements. Is it going to tempt people to ditch my WoW subscription? AoC’s largest hurdle may simply be its WoW-derived model: I have a hard time seeing any game tempting me away from a virtual life without level grinds, significant respec costs, and bad pick-up groups. Funcom isn’t the only company emulating the aspects of WoW that both I, and Blizzard, are already leaving behind.

I had to check out T.W.T.P.B. after I belatedly noticed how my mind immediately switched attention to something else every time I saw the name.  Go back, look at it: can you focus on that name for a long period of time?  Do your eyes glaze over?  Do you feel an immediate urge to go read about something else?  Or does it only have that effect on me?  Once I was able to bring my mind to focus on the name, I began to wonder: does T.W.T.P.B. stand for something?  How might the developers have referred to it during the months or more of production?  “The game”?  Twitpub?  T-dub?

Even Hollywood is not immune to terrible name syndrome, but a quick scan of TIGSource’s current front page reveals:

• Ginormo Sword (full title: Long and Thick My Ginormo)
• Thrustburst
• Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist

Oh, crap.  It’s a full-blown epidemic.

I’m playing 3 MMOs right now, and I’ve had it with starting zones and starting characters. They ALL suck, but developers don’t care because “WoW did it”, and players don’t care because they either don’t have a choice, or “look at all the progress I’m making– this is boring but I’m being so productive!”.

So here’s the solution: Advanced MMO Certification. It’ll be issued by some standards body… say, me. It confers a title on the bearer, so you could be “John Doe, MMO”. I suppose if you were a doctor, you’d be “Dr. John Doe, MMO”. Being an MMO entitles the esteemed title-holder to begin any MMO at level 30, or whatever point your MMO starts to become interesting. (Note to developers: take a guess as to when your MMO becomes interesting, and then add 20. Then double it.)

If you’d like to earn your Certification, you must simply provide proof of a level 60 or higher character in any approved MMO (any MMO that shamelessly rips off EQ counts), or pass the following written exam.

You have created a new spellcaster. Your Death Bolt is bound to the number 1 on your keyboard. An enemy is approaching. What do you do?

Answer: __________________________

The enemy is still not dead. Now what?

Answer: __________________________

The enemy is still not dead. Now what?

Answer: __________________________

Congratulations! The enemy is dead. A new enemy is approaching. What do you do?

Answer: __________________________

If you answered anything other than “Press 1″ to the above questions, congratulations! You fail, and are too smart to play MMOs. Go play Civilization 4, Mr. Ivy League.  (Note: leaving any or all of the test blank is also valid, as your auto-attack would probably kill the enemy without any help.)

Oh, in other news, Age of Conan is great.

To crush your enemies– see them driven before you, and hear the lam– Patching resource database… please wait.

Age of Conan disc 1 inserted 8:50pm. Ready for play: 12:45am. Most of it wasn’t even the patching. It was just installing from disc. This is on a pretty solid but non-RAIDed rig.

Update: check that.  Still working on getting the video settings right (it doesn’t auto-recommend any), after creating an account took forever when all of my normal names were taken, and you have to reenter your password and credit card number each time one is taken.

As usual, Raph Koster’s got another shocking (for us clueless old-school gamers) post .  This one’s basically just about the linked photo: it’s a rack at Target full of game cards for games and worlds such as WoW, Club Penguin, Flyff, Zwinky, and so on.

So, yeah: today’s younger gamers don’t go to Toys R Us or EB to buy their games.  They go to Target to buy their game cards.  I’ve known about these cards for a while– you’ve gotta have a credit card alternative– but I had no idea they were getting so popular.  People lamenting the demise of PC gaming have simply lost track of it: it moved when they weren’t paying attention.

Everyday Shooter just came out on Steam, and since I don’t own a PS3, this was my first chance to play it.  It’s a beautiful game– head on over to the site to get an impression, but the movie doesn’t show off how beautiful the game looks as you play it, or how the music responds to your actions.  (There are games that are more responsive musically (Rez), but it’s a nice touch.)
The video also doesn’t demonstrate the awesome “chaining” system that gets you most of your points.  Each level has a totally different chaining system, i.e., a way to cause a chain reaction of a lot of your enemies turning into points.  Since chaining is at the core of the gameplay, each level plays totally differently.

Actually, it’s not just the different chaining system that makes each level play differently.  Each level has a new collection of enemies, which combine to form a custom system unique to that level.  There’s a level about a central eye-thing that sends out robots, which return to make the eye-thing more powerful, which then shoots out small eyes to chase you.  There’s another level about these growing linked nodes that feed off each other, each releasing enemies or bullets in a different way– you get to choose to prioritize larger or smaller ones based on how you want to take down the network.  Everday Shooter’s site describes the game as an “album of games”, which is accurate: each level is its own self-contained system.

For people like me who suck at shooters, there’s also an unlock system.  The unlock system is based off of how many points you’ve scored total.  Sick of starting at level 1, and having all your progress not count if you die before your previous high score?  In Everyday Shooter, every point counts.  Spend them to start each game with more lives, or to unlock levels in the level-select mode, or even to unlock crazy graphical effects.

In theory, Everyday Shooter is only ten bucks.  In practice, I either need to pick up a good gamepad for my PC, or a PS3.  I don’t know that ES is worth buying a PS3 for (though I might buy a Wii for Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People), but it’s clearly more than worth its price tag on either platform.  If you’re looking for more information, IGN has a pretty fair review.

We have a lot of small business clients, so we’re always looking for ways to save them money.  High monthly subscription fees, or expensive software that requires yearly upgrades, can be a major barrier for someone just starting their business.  That’s one reason we use OSCommerce for online stores and Wordpress as a mini-CMS.  (Another reason is that these two open source projects have huge, involved communities, who are constantly writing all sorts of useful add-ons.)

With that mindset, we decided to give PHPList a go.  In short, it’s not the right solution for our clients.  Wordpress bucks the open source trend in that it has a well-designed, easy to use interface.  We’ve had little problem handing it off to clients and letting them update their own sites.  (They still require some support, but that’s content for another post.)  PHPList, on the other hand, is designed squarely by coders, for… if not coders, at least highly technical people with a patient try and try again attitude.

For example, a green check mark in the “bl l” category means “don’t ever send this person email” (while a red X means, please, send email to this person).  The default for mailing list imports and user sign-ups is to send that user text-only emails– not a multipart “HTML if you can, text if you can’t” email.  Message sent logs are indecipherable: I still don’t know what it means that I sent one newsletter to 82 users, which includes 4 HTML emails and… 134 text emails?  Isn’t 134 greater than 82?

PHPList does some things right.  It’s great about preventing duplicate mailings, for example, which is crucial when you’re sending to a large list that might get cranky if they get a few too many newsletters.  It also makes sending a test email fairly simple, another big plus.

PHPList is certainly powerful enough to run a newsletter.  However, most of our clients don’t have large tech departments– they have a technically inclined  person who’s already overworked, and doesn’t want to spend a lot of time handling a new responsibility.  We’re experimenting with new options now.  Having rejected quite a few programs out of hand simply because their web sites are far too obnoxious (seriously– ask me and I can email you a link), and others for insufficient flexibility, we’re currently browsing MailChimp.  If we have a successful deployment with one of the new programs, I’ll post about it here.

I like leaving comments on for old entries, in case people happen across my site via Google and decide to say something. Some clients prefer to keep discussion on newer posts, though. Plus, given that most of the spam attempts happen to old entries, I can see the logic in shutting down comments on old posts.

There used to be a plugin floating around to do this, but it seems to be gone. I’m not going to make a plugin out of this change (though it would be helpful if you’ve enabled auto-update for Wordpress), but here’s how to disable comments on old posts:

1. Open wp-includes\comment-template.php.
2. Change this line:
   if ( 'open' == $post->comment_status)
   to this:
   if ( 'open' == $post->comment_status && time() < strtotime($post->post_date)+60*60*24*30 )
3. Figure out what to do with the rest of your day.

The “60*60*24*30″ math up there is for 30 days (60 seconds times 60 minutes times 24 hours times 30 days), which you can of course change to whatever you’d like.

Like many Wordpress tweaks, the coding itself is trivial– you just need to know where to look. Speaking of which, ever want to know how to get a list of all the fields in the $post object? It’s in the documentation for the get_post function.

Jonathan Coulton has a song for the occasion. He’s even got a video!

(I may post a real update one of these days. That is, assuming I survive my police ride-along tonight! I’ve only just realized how little comfort it is when someone offers you a combat vest.)