Category: Writing

I’ve got a long video covering Ultima Online releasing on Massively OP today. I’m essentially touring all my favorite places and activities in the game while discussing the game’s development history as a lesson in sandbox design. It’s one of my favorite soapboxes. And making the video was so much fun that I thought I’d go back through my video files…

Last week, I finally got caught up on this season of Game of Thrones, though not without having been mercilessly spoilered by the internet. “Spoilers?” one of the MOP writers asked me. “Didn’t you read the books?” I did, fervently, in college and a few times since, usually whenever a new installment was released. (George Martin even signed my A…

I’ve already spilled plenty of ink about the Massively sunset saga, so here’s the short version: AOL decided to dump a ton of quality, profitable pro blogs last week, tried to keep it a secret until almost the last minute, and then cut us all loose without the slightest sorrow, merging our years of work into a mess  that I can…

Massively’s Mike Foster coined this lovely phrase last week. “EVE Online offers me many opportunities to engage [a] sense of curiosity and my love for ‘horizon gaming,’ which is my term for playing just to see what comes next,” he wrote. Not for gear. Not for levels. Not for ganks. Not for socializing or achievements or a fat gold purse….

Have you met Justin Olivetti? He’s a crazy man. I do a podcast with the guy, and he’s the type who launches into silly songs and can’t summon a mean-spirited word about anyone. He’s just the kind of guy to found something like the Newbie Blogger Initiative in a bid to get more gamers into blogging about our hobby. Way…

Launching today is my first entry in Massively’s newest opinion column, called Why I Play, in which we tell you… well, why we play certain games, as it says on the tin. I chose City of Heroes first, since it’s one of those mid-2000s games that’s had some staying power but is far from being the new shiny, and hey,…

Earlier today, I posted to Massively an article titled Ten things to do in Star Wars Galaxies before it’s gone. Truthfully, I had a lot more than ten, but space is an issue in this new tl;dr age. Instead, I held back a few of the more niche suggestions for this very post. I promise the title makes sense later….

I’m uncertain how to feel about the response to my recent Soapbox column on Massively. It was meant as a mix of ideas — a refutation of parts of a past article and comments, a demand to game developers to stop passing off free-for-all PvP as anything but a cop-out of a game system, and a suggestion that tweaks to…

I mentioned back in November that I’d gotten a day of play with the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO due out next year from BioWare. The embargo finally lifted last week, and my hands-on article was gobbled up by fanboys everywhere. Overall, the response was ego-bloatingly positive, but I did get one comment that gave me pause. On…

Ask any Star Wars fan about Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and you’re likely to hear some variation on a list of its weaknesses relative to the Original Trilogy: Episode I is formless and lacks a protagonist Wunderkind Anakin and Jar Jar Binks complete the kiddie-fication that began with the Ewoks Padme acts as though she’s been injected…