The 600 Years from the macula on Vimeo.

A special event for the 600th anniversary of the Astronomical Clock’s in Prague.

As with any so-called free-to-play game, free is quite a bit of a misnomer.  Sure, you can play the game for free, but at the end of the day, SOMEBODY has to pay. The company running the game (Turbine) isn’t a charity – they need to make money somehow.

In this case, the ‘free-to-play’ part of the game is pretty limited. You only have full access to part of the game, specifically three zones (Ered Luin, Bree-Land and the Shire), all of which are starting areas for lower-level characters. These zones will have enough quests to get you to level 22-24. After that – well, there are a few options.

The first is to purchase Turbine points. These cost roughly a penny/point (The actual value depends on how many you buy at a time – a larger purchase gives you more points per dollar. The general value, though, excluding sales, which they seem to have every other weekend, is about a penny/point, so that’s what I’ll go with.) Using these points, you can buy quest packs, extra bags, special powers, etc.

The second option is to subscribe, which costs $14.99/month ($9.99/month if you subscribe for 3 months.) A subscription gives you access to all the base game quest packs, as well as 500 points per month to buy special powers, or to buy the expansion packs.

The third option is to play the game as entirely free-to-play. Although there’s a good chance I’ll resubscribe at some point, for the moment, my plan is to play the game for free and see how it goes.  Which is, at the moment, how I’m playing it, as well as the purpose of this post – to break it down.

The free to play game allows you to level up to level 50. However, as previously mentioned, you’ll only have access to quests in 3 lower-level areas, which will get you up to level 22-24 or so. You can enter most areas in the world, but the NPCs simply refuse to give you quests. Instead, they just take you to the in-game store where you can purchase that area. You CAN simply kill monsters to gain experience, but in LOTRO, experience comes mostly as a quest reward, with NPC kills giving fairly low amounts of XP. You’d have to kill a veritable MOUNTAIN of boars to get to level 50 that way.

The other option is that you can earn Turbine points in-game by completing achievements, and then use them to purchase quest areas. The question is, how feasible is that as a way to gain access to the full game? The starter areas of the base game have 480 Turbine points worth of deeds.  You’ll only do one, perhaps one and a half of those zones naturally leveling (Ered Luin and the Shire will get to to around level 18-20, while Bree-Land has some slightly higher level content that will get you to 22-24), which means that you’ll have to do a lot of grey quests to get all of those 480 Turbine points.

There are 2 level-appropriate zones you can so at that point, either the Lone Lands or North Downs. North Downs costs 595 TP, which means that you won’t be able to afford it at this point.  Lone Lands is 350 TP, so it definitely seems priced as what you’re ‘supposed’ to buy.  Assuming you do buy that, you’ll have 130 TP left, and gain another 180 TP from deeds in the Lone Lands, giving you 310 TP. Which is not enough to buy any more quest packs.

Which brings us to alts. Turbine Points are shared across all the characters in your account, as are the quest packs you buy access to. That means you can, at this point, roll a second character, redo all the quests in the Shire, Ered Luin, Bree-Land and the Lone Lands and earn another 660 TP. At this point, you could buy the North Downs, but you’ve kind of leveled past them on both your characters at this point, so a better option might be Evendim or Trollshaws, both of which are 595 points.

You’ll probably be around level 35-40 before you run out of quests again. You won’t quite have enough TP to buy another expansion pack. If you want to keep playing for free, that means you need to start ANOTHER alt. Except that you’re limited to 2 characters per server on a free account (you can purchase more character slots for 595 TP), which means you’ll have to start over on a new server. So, if you do that, grind through Bree-Land, the Shire, Ered Luin and whichever 2 zones you bought, you’ll be able to buy another zone, which should have enough quests to get you to 50. At that point, to buy the expansion packs and raise the level cap to 65, you’ll probably have to roll 2 more alts, bringing you to 5 characters across 3 servers, all of whom have done a whole lot of repetitive farming for deeds.  So, yeah.

Of course, up until this point, I haven’t brought up what may be the most annoying problem, which is storage space. A subscription character has access to 5 bags, while a free account has only 3. Frankly, even having 5 bags is pretty annoying because LOTRO has a LOT of items. Lots of junk loot from monsters that you sell for cash obviously, but more importantly, faction and crafting items which you probably want to hold on to. On a free account, you can purchase access to those extra 2 bags – for 495 TP each. Fortunately, this is also a per-account purchase, so you’ll only need to buy them once. Consider that another character right there…

You’ll also want a mount. LOTRO is a huge game – traveling everywhere on foot gets old pretty fast. Those are 195TP. This one is a per-character purchase. Of course, you’ll probably also want to buy some skirmishes, which are 300-400 TP each. Maybe some shared storage for 1295 TP. If you’re into crafting, you’ll probably want to buy access to a crafting guild. Oh, and free accounts are limited to a maximum of 2 gold, so you’ll probably want to purchase to remove that cap. And you’ll want to unlock virtue and trait slots. And access to the auction house…

Basically what I’m saying is that if you want to play for free, its going to require a lot of dedication and grinding. But it IS possible, which I find rather interesting. If you wanted to simply purchase Turbine Points and simply buy all the content, it would apparently cost about $200, which is what LOTRO was selling lifetime subscriptions for when it launched. A more reasonable approach would be to purchase SOME Turbine points, then earn the rest. I suspect a $50 purchase would make it pretty easy to get everything you’d want/need to play the game.

But ultimately, the easiest choice is probably to just subscribe, at least for a month. Even subscribing for a single month gives rather massive benefits. A character on a subscription account automatically gains access to the 4th and 5th backpacks, as well as full auction house access and the option to purchase riding with in-game cash (at level 20) as well as unlocked trait slots. Your character retains these benefits even after you cancel your subscription and your account reverts back down to free-to-play. For just $15 for a one-month subscription, you get 500 TP as well as benefits that would cost a few thousand TP otherwise. The only problem is that those benefits only apply to characters played while you’re subscribed – any new characters you create later won’t inherit them.

Anyway, as I said at the beginning, I’m currently just playing the game as free-to-play, to see just how fun/not fun it actually is. Up until level 20, its a great experience without spending a penny. How much fun it is to continue playing without paying after that – well, we’ll see. I’ll probably have an update later.

The best part is the ‘P-p-p-p-p-p product placement’ line.  The telephone video has some of the most blatant and jarring product placement since I, Robot, where the action would simply grind to a halt every once in a while so that people could compliment Will Smith’s ‘vintage’ sneakers. Telephone is less of a music video and more of a 10 minute infomercial for Virgin Mobile.

The parody of Ke$ha’s Tik Tok is nearly as good.

By far the funnest part of Petville is the decorating options. You can decorate your house from a nearly overwhelming number of items that are available to purchase.  There’s dozens of carpeting options, dozens more paint/wallpaper options, a huge variety of windows, furniture and electronics,  kitchen appliances and even cars. Clothing options are similarly massive with just an overwhelming number of shirt, pant, dress and shoe options. There’s even a lot of costumes available, so you can dress your pet up as anything from an astronaut to Santa Claus.

Much like the Sims, upgrading your pet’s house with new and fancy stuff serves as the main draw. You start out with a broken down sofa, leaky sink and a few other things. Everything else you’ll need to buy, and its fairly expensive to decorate the entire house with nice items. You earn money by playing, and that’s where the game’s problems start.

Chiki keeps leaving his underwear in the kitchen, which is weird because he doesn't wear pants.

The biggest problem with Petville is a significant lack of gameplay. There’s several things to do, but they’re all fairly boring and repetitive. You have to log in once a day or so to feed your pet (by refilling his/her bowl.) Then you give your pet a bath (they tend to get really dirty somehow), which just involved dragging the nearby bar of soap over them for a few seconds.  Then you clean up the house a bit by going from room to room clicking on the banana skins, socks and half-eaten cookies scattered everywhere (this part tends to be really annoying because its easy to miss a piece of trash, resulting in having to make 2 or 3 passes through each room to get the ‘clean house’ bonus.) And that’s about it. You can then visit your neighbors and clean THEIR pet and houses.

If you play Petville, that’s basically going to be your daily routine. And I do mean daily, as if you miss a day, your pet runs off and you have to pay a rather massive fine to the animal catcher to get them back. And the game is really picky about the timing, too. If you feed your pet at 4PM one day, you can’t feed them until 4PM the next day.  If you log in at 3:30 – too bad, gotta wait. And if you log in more than  a couple hours later (even though its the same day), there’s a very good chance your pet got hungry and ran away. It WAY too particular about the timing of feeding your pet.

The game is a fairly new one, only having been released for a few months now.  During that time, they’ve expanded the game world quite a bit. New items to decorate your house with are added constantly, to the degree where the options are a bit overwhelming.  They’ve also added options for adding-on to your house, via a garage and a third-floor. An outdoor/yard area is supposed to be added soon.

A while back they also added a feature that I thought had the most potential to make Petville a game worth playing, which was the option to play with your pet. Unfortunately, the only option they added there was a painfully boring game where-in your pet blows a bubble and you click it to pop it. If they ever expand that section to include several activities to perform with your pet, it could definitely improve Petville significantly.

As it stands, Petville is fun and cute, but seriously lacking in anything that would make it worth playing seriously.

When your pet gets bored, things tend to get cute

]]> http://www.drocket.net/?feed=rss2&p=189 0 http://www.drocket.net/?p=196 http://www.drocket.net/?p=196#comments Thu, 25 Feb 2010 08:12:06 +0000 Drocket http://www.drocket.net/?p=196 60 minutes news story about the Bloom Box:

He invented a new kind of fuel cell, which is like a very skinny battery that always runs. Sridhar feeds oxygen to it on one side, and fuel on the other. The two combine within the cell to create a chemical reaction that produces electricity. There’s no need for burning or combustion, and no need for power lines from an outside source.

Dictionary definition of combustion:

combustion, burning (a process in which a substance reacts with oxygen to give heat and light)

Clearly, what’s going on in the Bloom Box, in which fuel and oxygen react to produce energy, is TOTALLY different from combustion, which is where fuel and oxygen react to produce energy.  Completely different. Not even remotely similar. Nope, no combustion going on here.  And that’s not even getting into the later part of the article where they mention that the Bloom boxes could also run on solar power.  How would that even work?  I mean, I guess you could use them to prop up solar panels…  A giant cardboard box would work just as well, though, so that’s not much of a selling point.

Without a doubt, its a pretty casual game.  You plant some crops, come back later and harvest them.  That’s about 90% of the game there.  Like the best of casual games, ‘playing’ it doesn’t require much time investment, which is why it often winds up eating up so much time.  When you play a game like World of Warcraft, you always have to ‘plan’ your playtime – you know that if you’ve anything else that needs to be done in the next hour or so, its really not worth starting the game up at all.  There’s always a fairly hefty minimum time investment to get anything done.

There were jokes back in the 80′s that Tetris was invented by the Russians as a plot to destroy American productivity. Farmville follows in those sneaky footsteps of being a collection of tasks that “will only take a minute”: “Think I’ll check to see if my cabbage is ripe yet.” “Gee, I wonder if anyone sent me any gifts.” “Lets see if anyone has posted any events on their wall.” Even though the crops have fairly long grow-times, there’s always something to do, something that’ll only take a minute, so why not check it?  4 hours later, you realize what time it is.  And now your strawberries are ready to pick, so you can’t stop right now. It’ll only take a minute to harvest them, though…

Farmville is definitely fun, yet slightly unsatisfying. There’s always something going on, some task to work on, but none of them require any real skill, so you really can’t feel proud of them once you achieve them. The ‘social’ aspects of the game are quite important, but there’s no real interaction with other plays to give that any depth or meaning either.  But its still fun. And it only takes a few minutes to play, so…

I’m a big fan of cooking shows. I’ve been watching FoodTV for years, and am a fan of Top Chef on Bravo (though its gone downhill the past couple of seasons.) So its not really surprising that I was attracted to a game that lets you run your own virtual restaurant.  Cafe World allows you to decorate your restaurant with pretty many different themes and items (most items are available for cafe coins, which are earned in the game, but some items require cafe cash, which is the game’s form of microtransations to make the developer, Zygna, some money. There’s no need to buy Cafe Cash, though), hire staff, and has a fairly decent number of different food items to serve.  Its a game very much under active development, with new decorations and food items being added nearly every week.

Like nearly all Facebook games, the game primarily happens when you’re not playing. You log in one or twice a day to make some decisions/set some things up, and then you’re done.  In Cafe World, you can spend pretty much time redecorating your restaurant, but usually it doesn’t take too long to set something up you’re happy with, and once that’s done, the game boils down to keeping your restaurant stocked with food.

The way in which the game handles cooking isn’t terribly realistic: You select a food item to cook from your menu of available recipes.  A few clicks does the prep work on the food (peel potatoes, chop carrots, whatever.)  The food then cooks for a period of time (anywhere from 5 minutes to 2 days.)  During this time, there’s really nothing to do. Redecorate your restaurant again if you want, I guess.  More likely play World of Warcraft or something.

Eventually the food is done. Click the stove to serve the food which is placed on a serving counter (anywhere from a couple dozen to a couple thousand servings at a time, depending on the recipe), then back to the beginning: picking another recipe.  Both while you play the game and while you’re not, customers will come into your restaurant and order whatever food items you have prepared. Your staff, made up of Facebook friends you’ve picked, will serve it to them and collect the money.

There’s really not much to do in the game aside from logging in every once in a while to make food and maybe occasionally redecorate.  I generally select food that takes 8-12 hours to cook, which means I really only need to log in twice a day, morning and night, for maybe about 5 minutes each.  Not really a demanding game, that only requires about 10 minutes a day to play.  Still, its managed to keep me fairly interested for nearly 2 months now. Aside from my previously mentioned interest in cooking-related things, that’s both because of the regular updates, and also because of the game’s leveling system, which unlocks additional recipes over time.

Another big feature of the game is its social component. Pretty much all Facebook games are based around social aspects in some way. In Cafe World’s case, while there’s no direct interaction, you still gain a lot of advantages by having friends who play the game. Aside from the fact that you need to have at least a few friends to hire as staff, having friends who also play the game means that you get to visit their restaurant and taste their food once per day. Doing so gives you a small amount of both experience and money, and when one of your friends visits your cafe, you get some money in the form of a tip (no experience, though.)

‘Gifting’ is another form of interaction in the game: each day, you can send your friends a number of gifts, either in the form of servings of food, decorations, or side-dish items. You don’t get anything yourself directly from sending gifts, but hopefully doing so will prompt your friends to send a return gift. In addition, a fairly new feature is that when you serve a dish, you occasionally get ‘bonus servings’. The game prompts you to post on your wall, and friends who click on the link get a number of servings of whatever you made.

The game’s biggest problem is that its slow. SLOW. SLOOOOOOOOW.  I play a lot of Flash-type games on Facebook (more reviews coming in the future) and I have to say, this one needs some serious optimization.   There’s simply nothing all that advanced, graphics-wise, to explain how poorly it runs.  If you can get past that, though, its fairly fun, in a non-demanding sort of way. I believe I’ll be playing it for a while longer. At least until I hit level 52 and unlock the chocolate cake recipe…

I’ll start with Alliance Blue: Alliance Blue is, not too surprisingly, blue. Its official description is “Mountain Dew with a Punch of Wild Fruit Flavor”.  Basically, its a slightly citrusy fruit punch.  Its not bad, but its not that great, either. I thought it tasted a lot like one of the blue flavors from last summer’s Dewmocracy promotion.  I’m sure its not quite the same flavor, but similar.

Horde Red is misnamed, IMO, as its really more of an orangish color. It really should be redder to match the color of the Horde insignia. Its flavor description is “Dew with a Blast of Citrus Cherry Flavor”.  I though it was pretty good, better than Alliance Blue.  Not good enough to be a permanent Mountain Dew flavor by any means, though.  It kind of needed a bit more of a citrus kick to be really good, I think.

You know, this blog has turned into a bit more of a soda review site than I intended.  I’ll have to start posting about, you know, other things…