Jeff Freeman, also known as Dundee, one of the founders of World of Dreams, died the other day, apparently of suicide. I haven’t spoken to him in years - shortly after the end of WoD was the last time - but he was a great guy. I learned a lot from him. The world is definitely a poorer place without him.
My dad’s hearing has been deteriorating for a while now, to the point where we’ve now been using closed captioning on the TV. I have to say, I’m rather amazed at how badly closed captioning sucks. So often its just awful.
I was watching a Bruce Willis movie the other day that kept transcribing completely unimportant things the background characters were saying. You’d have the main characters having an important conversation that was made completely impossible to follow because they’d stick in sentence fragments from the background. Stuff that’s completely inaudible and has absolutely nothing to do with anything.
The subtitle of this post is “The Corruption of my Mother.” You see, she’s never really been a gamer. A bit of Pacman and Frogger back in ye olden days. Some Solitaire and Bejeweled more recently. That’s about it.
About a year ago, McDonald’s had one of their Monopoly games. They’ve gotten a lot fancier than the stamps you used to lick and glue to a gameboard - now you enter a code on the gamepiece online, and it keeps track of your properties. I landed on Chance, and my prize was a video game download from RealArcade. There were a few options, but I chose Little Shop of Treasures.
It was a reasonably fun game. You search for hidden objects in ridiculously overcrowded shops in order to serve customers. Pretty much the definition of a ‘casual’ game. I figured I’d show it to my mom and see how she liked it.
Drocketville has now reached a population of 5000. Its now growing pretty fast again, after a period of rather slow growth. If anyone is interested, I’ve started using a new link exchange program, one that focuses specifically on MyMiniCity - the MyMiniCity click exchange network. Its a lot easier to use than Yarod’s. All I need to do is click a single link, and it then automatically opens and closes browser windows to visit other cities. I’ve only been using it a few days now, and already I’ve gained 1000 population (plus who knows how many industrial, parks, etc.)
Drocketville today hit a population of 3000. Its now the 226th largest city in the USA, in MyMiniCity universe at least. I suppose that would make more sense if each person is supposed to represent 1000 actual people or something, making that a population of 3 million. I dunno. Either way, I’m moving up the ranks and have some rather decent looking larger buildings.
You can get the game Burger Rush for free by visiting this link and watching a commercial for Chilis. Apparently this is how Chilis makes their burgers or something. I’m not really sure. (Note: it isn’t actually a game BY Chilis - they’re just using it for advertising purposes.) It is, however, a relatively fun game. I got it a couple of weeks ago and have played through it, and in my own opinion, its worth getting.
Drocketville continues to grow. It’s now up to a population 1500. Commercial buildings are now starting to spring up. I’m fairly certain that one of those buildings houses a data server center, mostly likely with 100% guaranteed uptime. I can’t help but to wonder what sort of servers are being used in those server centers. Blade servers running on Quad-Core Intel Xeon CPUs, I would guess.
That’s according to NPD. That’s a whole lotta World of Warcraft subscriptions. I was a tad surprised by the number 2 game, Runescape. Who plays Runescape? Lord of the Rings Online is number 3, a well-deserved spot, I think. Final Fantasy XI is number 4, followed by City of Heroes.
Drocketville has finally reached a population of 1000. Now we can start building commercial buildings…
Here’s an interesting MMORPG development: City of Heroes is going to add a system in which players will be able to generate content which other players will be able to then experience. Actually, content is too broad a word most likely: it seems limited to the creation of missions (which are basically dungeons with storylines), not artwork or anything of that nature.
This is (as I sort of already said…) an interesting development in the MMORPG field. I can imagine a lot of extremely interesting things that players could do with this sort of thing, assuming, of course, that the developers make the tools powerful enough.