After years of killing Tibetan monks and occasionally rolling over the odd protester in tanks, China went too far and shut down World of Warcraft. Why? Ostensibly because the Lich King expansion, which launched in China September 19, was not given approval by the Orwellian sounding Ministry of Culture. If you want to do business in China, you must first assure the government that you will not be inciting rebellion or a rise in antisocial behavior.
Blizzard recently introduced ‘for pay’ pets, pets you can buy for, you know, actual money. My boyfriend, who is an avid Warcrafter (four times a week raider, occasional table pounding nerd rager if the prospect of wiping on a final attempt rears its ugly head,) was rather snide about the whole thing. “They’re useless, they just sit there and look pretty,” he said with a wondering expression whilst curling his lip in disdain for anyone who would buy anything just to look good. (This is a man who does not understand games like The Sims 3 at all.)
Are you one of those people who regrets that PC games seem to have had their soul sucked out of them and have become tools of the evil one, turning perfectly nice gamers into little more than digital psychotics who become grossly uhnappy if five minutes goes by without someone’s head being blown off? If so, you need to play Machinarium. Playing this game is like playing through a children’s story book, one made back when illustrators were still illustrators and they occasionally got real ink stains on their fingers. Machinarium is imbued with a winsome sense of innocence that pervades the game and enchants the player.
Action adventure game mini ninjas is fun for the whole family. If your family are cartoon ninjas.
But is it any good? Mini Ninjas lacks a clear explanation for why it exists in that the game begins with you coming rolling down some steps and an old guy telling you that your ninja friends have gone missing and strange samurai are wandering about in the forest messing with the animals.
Torchlight is an RPG setting the world of RPG’s alight with its ‘I played it all night long and lost my job the next day’ game play and exceptional customer service. Unlike larger companies which seem to delight in confounding their customer base, Torchlight makers Runic Games won hearts by demonstrating just how dedicated they were to their customer base. When a player had a bugged save, a developer asked him to send him the save file and actually debugged it for him. Try getting that kind of service from any of the major game companies and see how far you get. This is the sort of thing that makes gamers go nuts for a company, as evidenced by this thread on reddit.
