Sweet Flag – the final curtain

15 months have passed since Sweet Flag was born – it’s been a great journey but I feel now is the time to draw this journey to a close.

But don’t despair, dear reader, as I have found a pasture new.

Get yourselves over to my new site, Construed. Where I will be discussing a broader field of entertainment with a heavy bias towards videogames:

New site – Construed

Thank you all for your support & comments over the last year or so – I hope you can join me again at Construed!

DM Osbon.

Please also point your feed readers, in future, towards:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Construed

Preparing for WAR – would you accept a ‘freebie’ account?

Tobold is curious to know if any other press/bloggers got offered a ‘free’ WAR account, as he did? It’s an interesting question, as no-one else seems to be holding their hand up on it to say they did.

It has also sparked my curiosity to know, so I’ll ask the question here – have you been offered a freebie WAR account?

I didn’t get offered the opportunity but I’m not bitter about it. What I can’t understand is why people would knock Tobold for accepting an account. He has come out & told us he was offered an account which makes everything clear & transparent. Tobold has been sensible in telling us on his blog, if he hadn’t had done then the news may have come out at a later date which would have made things very uncomfortable for him.

Of course, this could again be a region specific PR incentive – the freebie account that Tobold holds in WAR is on the US side of things. After speaking with Tobold, he told me he wasn’t sure there was such a incentive set-up for the EU which lead me to contact EA myself, asking that very same question – is there an EU freebie account incentive being offered to press/bloggers?

I haven’t heard back as of yet…

[EDIT: Tobold posted further on this subject here]

Trackback Tuesday #9

Sweet Flag doesn’t have a links page & that’s something that will not change anytime soon. I just don’t like them, instead I began a series of trackback posts, here on Sweet Flag, from April to June this year. They contained links to gaming news/musing/discussions that I found interesting on other sites with a commentary from me for each highlight.

I have since decided to bring Trackback Tuesday out of semi-retirement.

Just for this week, here are some of the new sites that I have been reading since the last trackback in June.

OK…

Fidgit – Tom Chick covers a wide spectrum of gaming & has been writing about the games industry for 15 years. Fidgit is his baby – some great posts include the game diaries he writes on the site. These went some way in influencing me to start a game diary here at Sweet Flag.

Edge – Just recently the Edge magazine re-branded itself on the Internet. While I still read the magazine more than I visit the site, I still find it a great place to find quality writing about the games industry.

Other blogs/sites that I have been added recently to the Sweet Flag reader:  Book of Grudges – A EU WAR blog where you can find a number of the I2I guild members actively posting, Online Games Are a Niche Market - is a blog that WAR’s very own Mark Jacobs, pens(bet he’s had a few headaches recently!).

If you want me to highlight something in a future Trackback Tuesday, something that I may well have missed reading then please drop me a line.

Preparing for WAR – EU open beta flounders

Teething problems for GOA, on the day that EU open beta servers were to go live & by now you will know all the problems players began experiencing yesterday – but rather than dig up old news, I thought I’d concentrate on my humble beginnings in open beta.

Unlike many others, I experienced a lot less of the hassle getting into WAR because I was active in the closed beta. It still took me until today to log in but I felt very little in the way of frustration that I am sure many players did/are still.

With the Insult to Injury guild up & running in open beta on the Karag Dron EU server – I joined them with my Witch Hunter, Jonas. The guild interface itself looks an improvement over a number of other MMOs which I suppose isn’t that difficult to trump – although currently a game bug means that guilds are at presently limited to 100 players max.

I experienced a little lag which is too be expected & I had the game on the highest settings on my PC. Most noticable was the delay in clicking anything to make it active(still not sure if double click is required or not) & the difficulty in maintaining a correct path when moving forward.

I’ll post more when I have had more time in-game.

Spore finally releases

So begins a new dawn in gaming…

…hmm.

OK. I’m not one for buying into all the hype(although I did argue this point), especially when the only demo we have had to go by, in the years of wait, is the Creature Creator. But I’m glad Spore has finally released & we will now start getting players talking about the game itself, rather than the hype that surrounds it.

I have spoken with a number of hardened gamers about their thoughts on Spore, here & AFK, with many worried that the game will just be a succession of mini-games. Even if this shows to be true, Spore will probably live & die by it’s community – if players keep creating & sharing content then Spore will be a success in terms of its in-game editors.

What interests me though is why, my readers, you are going to get Spore? What drives you to want to create a being & then watch it develop? Are you interested in the life story of what you create? Is it all about Galactic domination?

Game diary – Greenfingers in PixelJunk Eden

Following on from downloading Siren:Blood Curse, PixelJunk Eden was my next purchase from the PSN. It was a close run thing, as I hesitated for a moment when I saw that The Last Guy was also available. In the end I went with the ambient PJE because I wanted a game that wasn’t too heavy on the stress levels.

Funnily enough, PixelJunk Eden can get a little frustrating when it need not be. Each of the 10 ‘garden’ levels have a countdown gauge, that depletes over time. For me, in a game of this type, it is a little unnecessary to have to worry about completing each level within a time limit & it’s something which you can’t turn off either. Saying that, you can extend your time gauge by collecting the crystals that have been statically placed around each level plus more crystals can be created if you complete a combo move.

It’s been a long time since I have played a game that represents the player in such a small way. You play as a Grimp, spinning its web & floating around a silhouetted garden while aiming to collect the total of 50 Spectra(5 in each garden).So far, I have played in 3 of the gardens – 637 Volpe, Bord de lac & They Said, managing to collect 3 Spectra.

It has been a nice break to play something at this more relaxed pace, add to that it supports Trophies & the option to record gameplay movies for uploading onto Youtube – something which I’ll try to do for the next post.

My cup half full..?

Things are getting busy!

I should be getting Spore at the end of the week but just to muddy the waters a little more, I have just received copies of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09(PS3) & Space Siege(PC).

September still has some big gaming titles to come & for me that means I will have to be clever with my time management, as I want to get to all these games in one way or another.

Sure a number of titles will be casual play for me while others will eat away at every spare moment of time, if I allow them too.

So how do I decide what game title I’ll play casually & what will I play more intensely?

Well I make a conscious decision before the game is released based on some predispositions about previous games that fall into the same category. Sport games tend to be casual affairs for me while MMOs are very intensive from the start but can burn out if bugs/total unoriginality are evident.

Saying all that, games can take on a life of their own & surprise me with how hooked into them I get. Here’s an example of my theory on what games I’ll be playing, be it casual or intense for September:

Spore – Intense/casual

Depends on how each of the stages of the game are developed & if this game has been over-hyped. Both these things could decide how much I play.

WAR – Intense

My affair with MMOs seeps back to 1996 – I will have to guard against it devouring all my gaming time!

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed – undecided

Single player alone could make this a casual affair for me, depends heavily on how well the storyline hooks me.

To go with these titles I still have Pixel Junk Eden(casual), Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09(casual) & Space Siege(undecided) to contend with through September. And if I thought it was a busy month now then October looks very top-heavy with both Fallout 3(argggghhh!) & Bioshock – PS3(mummmmmmmyyyy!) released within a week of each other.

Anyone got a sedative?