WoW Again

Last week, I restarted my WoW account. I had played for almost two years (early '05 to spring '07) and then quit before the birth of my third child. In that time, I accumulated a staggering (but by no means comparatively large) total playtime of 46 days. I had nurtured one toon to 70 (pre-Kara) and several into the mid 40s. I quit because I had a good sense of the game, the attraction, and the time required to continue my progress. Also, I became increasingly frustrated at the Looking-for-Group results. As a just-ok 70 Rogue, it took much too much time to find a group to run an instance. My guild (the fun, smart Dawnbringers) were moving too quickly towards attunement, and I couldn't upgrade my gear fast enough to keep up. So I quit.

And now I'm back. I've started a Draenei Warrior. I've started reading Wowwiki again. My hope is that by playing a Prot Tank, I won't have trouble finding a group as I level. As long as I keep an eye on gear, I should be fine for most instances.

And not alone it seems. WoW was the number 2, 3 and 4th best selling PC game in the US last month. The Penny Arcade guys are playing it again. Is that insane? A game that is 3+ years old is still selling crazy-like? It speaks to the power of perfect-enough content and the dogged hard work of Blizzard folks. It also speaks to the complete lack of compelling alternatives. As much as I'm looking forward to checking out Conan and WAR, I'm betting that the constant polish, new content and massive audience will keep WoW going long after the Lich King is dethroned.

If you are ever on Moonrunner, /w Vetali and send gold. I'm not really into the game.

Mobile Games on Kotaku

Every day, like many of you, I go to Kotaku (among others) to read up on juicy game news and watch new vids. They rarely post anything about mobile games for reasons we probably all know: They don't make good movies, they don't involve famous game developers (except for Carmack) and the people who read Kotaku don't care about mobile games.

So imagine my surprise today when I saw two posts on the site for mobile games!

Under the promising headline An iPhone Game that Doesn't Completely Suck? an anonymous poster discusses an iPhone game called Finger Fracture - side scrolling skate boarding with the touchscreen as control. Then we learn that it's an advergame built by someone Vans hired. Then we learn that there's no release date. Then we learn that there's no indication that it's a game at all... This might just be a couple of Photoshop images thrown together by the Vans ad agency. In a final blow, there's an update that notes that the game images are pulled right out of Tony Hawk... so there's no way it's a real project. WTF Kotaku?!?!?

Hope rises eternal, though, as Kotaku posts something about a Gameloft Japan mobile game... But then hopes are crushed down again as we read the description of "Sexed Up Big Sister Flip Over" which turns out to be strip poker. At one point, Gameloft was the paragon of mobile game innovation. The very first title they launched in the US was an original puzzle game that combined twitch and Sokuban to great effect. Even as they increasingly moved towards branded games, their titles had top graphics and design panache. Now, it seems, they've sunken so low that their games can appear on Kotaku... Under the bi-line "Only in Japan" no less.

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, but I had hoped that by now, six years after mobile games became widely available worldwide, we would have earned better industry coverage than this.