A whole bunch of news tidbits
Boy, have I neglected the blog. Here’s some stuff I said to myself, “I should blog that” that flew by.
- Near Death Studios, the company that has been behind Meridian 59 for the last nine years or so, is closing. The game will keep running, but it won’t be a business concern anymore.
- The procedurally-generated MMO Love is going into a (paid) open beta on the 7th.
- Looks like Second Life is surrendering another piece of its hacker/geek culture legacy with the move towards real names. This is really part and parcel of an overall move towards greater usability and mass market acceptance, of course.
- Today Google intro’ed their new phone. And at the same time, here’s Adobe’s video of Flash 10.1 (not Flash Lite) running on it. Full Flash, on a phone.
- I tweeted this, but Marc LeBlanc’s list of the top board games of the decade is good reading.
Thanks for the link to Marc’s list of games! That’s a great resource for those of us who don’t keep in close enough touch with the board game scene.
Another interesting take on the best board games of the decade —
Now with link —
http://thethinkinggamer.com/2010/01/01/board-game-decade-in-review.aspx
I am really enjoying the Love beta. I played the alpha for a bit as well. Its definitely unique and takes some getting used to, but when a good group of players is together building a settlement its fun. However, one griefer can take the game down to a terrible level in a heartbeat.
Also wanted to note I’m disappointed that Battle Lore didn’t make the top games. Personally, I really enjoyed it. But I can understand it is a bit derivative of the games like Memoir 44.
My game of the decade would be Carcasonne (I love it so much Slashdot even posted my review of it while back, go me!).
If you plug my real name into Google, you get tens of thousands of hits, only a scant handful of which have anything to do with me. If you plug in the names of my primary Second Life avatars, you get a few hundred hits, but they’re all my work or related to me. Paradoxically, I’m less anonymous under my ‘pseudonyms’ (which are therefore arguably more ‘real’ than my given name).
Figured Flash on a phone after MP closes it’s doors to us. 😛
I never got into Second Life, but when I did register an account, I was able to find my real name in the fantasy names. 🙂