WOW Now that’s Milking it

I don’t know where I stand with WOW. The complicated way in which they authenticate their Battle.NET accounts and subscriptions  ( Battle.NET was introduced to merge and manage the many Blizzard subscription accounts and games and expansion packs that you can have with WOW). With the progression from WOW Trial accounts (subscription + a client) to The Burning Crusade to The Wrath of the Lich King is complicated enough. But you can download the Wrath of the Lich King client (6.5gigs) and play it with a trial account. Then they throw in authentication keys into the mix which are linked to the account setup and the game clients. Then you can upgrade to a Trial account to a standard account and then you can play the Wrath of the Lich King client for a month free. But Woe on you if your subscription should run out as mine did. In order to play Lich King again you have to look at this and you get this….

Where can I get an Authentication Key? Can I pay to download the game and receive a key direct from you?

Authentication keys are currently being distributed with either the Standard Edition or Collector's Edition boxes. We are not offering sales of the keys via our Online Store; however a trial account (excluding 14 day trial DVD) can be upgraded to a Standard Edition account for €14.99 (£9.99). A Standard Edition account can also be upgraded to Burning Crusade for €14.99 (£9.99) and a Burning Crusade account can be upgraded to Wrath of the Lich King for €34.99 (£24.99) all via your Battle.net Account Management. Please make sure to archive the authentication key in a safe place, as it can be used for verification purposes and account recovery.

Now that’s milking it. As you still have to continue paying subscriptions after all this as well. Not really a free client by my reckoning.

At Long last a Silverlight Video on a Microsoft Site

 

While browsing Microsoft Games for Windows Live ( a desktop application that enables you to download games to the desktop for PC or cue them for Xbox) I came across World of Goo which was recommended to me by JK and there was a video Link. Yes I expected to see yet another Flash Video on a MS site. But Low and behold it launched in Silverlight. Good Video too. Also is Silverlight Slideshow of screen shots. The Slideshow did not function properly with my slow broadband as the main image was not loaded locally until needed. As a result if I pressed on the play button I got a sequence of blank images on the main canvas. Testing, 1,2,3 Testing!!

But maybe MS are serious about Silverlight after all. Or maybe it was the developers of Goo that are Silverlight aware and they maintain their own Games for Windows Live page themselves?

MetaPlace

Meta Place is an online Flash 10 based game making environment and social networking tool that is totally web based. It is similar to Kodu from MS research but not as slick. Some of the tools are a little bit flaky and because the underlying scripting seems to be based on action scripting, the behaviours are limited and a not very intuitive. I think Kodu’s Xbox controller based menu system is more intuitive (with the menu system very similar to that of the Lego Mindstorms code builder). Gamemaker is also superior from a (visual) programming perspective. But MetaPlace does allow for customised avatars, quite a bit of content and customisation I think. You create your own home world and then you can share and jump from world to world. Worlds can be games also.

You do get the feeling that the collection of worlds are populated by a younger audience. Although one game (a weak exploration game called Verik Online) was quite artistic. I believe it is created by two traditional fiddle players from Finland.

The co-creator of Meta Place is Raph Koster. I found Raph Koster through his book “Theory of Fun for Game design” which is an interesting read (so far anyway). It’s available on Ebrary, a library facility provided by IT Sligo Library and other places. I’m sure it’s on Amazon also.