My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. We’re still working on the Origins of Madness content update, with with the two new world bosses (the Great Jungle Wurm is permanent, while the Marionette is tied to the living story and will eventually go away). In addition, there’s the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
January 31, 2014
This week in Guild Wars 2
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January 24, 2014
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. We’re back online at a new hosting service, so this is just the usual link to the full round-up there. This week saw the release of the Origins of Madness content update, with two new world bosses (one is permanent, the other is tied to the living story and will eventually go away). It is one of the four final episodes in the Scarlett Briar story arc. In addition, there’s the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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January 19, 2014
Guild Wars 2 Community Event Calendar
I’m hoping that this will be the last time I need to temporarily host any GuildMag content as we should have the site up and running at the new host very soon.
This post is intended to help you to publicize your guild or alliance event, and as long as your event is open to the whole Guild Wars/Guild Wars 2 community, we’ll list it here. Send us the details at community@guildmag.com and we’ll get it out to the fan community (given that we only do a weekly wrap-up, try to send the information at least a week in advance).
- On the official Guild Wars 2 forums, Foghladha.2506 posted on the topic Great Tyrian Adventure: Legendary Edition: “The Gaiscioch Family, host of Sanctum of Rall’s fan favorite Great Tyrian Adventure, announced plans for it’s third season of the public community event. This 12 week season is dubbed “Legendary Edition” and will feature over 100 prize giveaways including the legendary Bifrost to one of its lucky participants. The season is set to launch on Saturday, January 11th, 2014 at 11:00 AM Server Time (Pacific).”
- On the official Guild Wars 2 forums, KitOnlyHuman.6807 posted on the topic Rookie Camp [Bi-Weekly Event]: “Rookie Camp is a lore focused event designed to be fun, educational, and an immerse experience to remember. Originally a concept for new players wanting to learn the game, and for those wanting to meet new friends, Rookie Camp will be conducted twice a month with the premise of becoming a soldier, following the character Commander Bloodclaw, and fighting the woes of Tyria in an ongoing battle! Low and high levels, new and old players, roleplaying or not, this event is open for everyone! Hosted by MadCast Gaming on Sanctum of Rall. For more information, feel free to message KitOnlyHuman.6807 and/or Cakeisalie.1976 in game! January 18, 2014 – 8:00p EST”
- vVv Gaming — Kings of The Mists 2. “I am proud to present you with the second Guild Wars 2 PvP tournament hosted by [vVv] Vision. Valor. Victory. Guild from Fort Aspenwood, Kings of the Mists 2. This is an open invite tournament for all the teams in Guild Wars 2, to come have fun and support Guild Wars 2 PvP scene. Tournament will be commented by none other than John ‘Blu’ Mullen and Will ‘Sireph’ Abreu on the official vVv Gaming Twitch Channel. This will be a one day tournament starting on Saturday February 1st at 12:00 pm EST (09:00 am PST). Team captains will be required to sign in their team between 11:20 pm EST (08:30 am PST) and 11:50 pm EST (08:50 am PST). Failure to sign-in their team on time may result in losing their reserved spot in the tournament.”
- Reddit — [Events] Weekly Map Exploration. Wednesday 9pm EST (NA) – Sorrow’s Furnace. “For a couple of weeks now, /u/jereklo and I have been adding lore/story of the area we’re exploring, while doing these exploration events. People seem to enjoy it, so if it’s something that interest you, and you already have completion, you’re welcome to join us too. I’ve been hosting Map completion every Wednesday at 9PM EST on Sorrow’s Furnace (NA). Here’s our schedule”
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January 17, 2014
This week in Guild Wars 2
Hopefully this will be the last time we’ll need to post TWIGW2 here, as GuildMag is moving to a new hosting service. Once the site is back up and running at the new host, I’ll re-publish this article and last week’s posts so they will at least appear in the right sequence.
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January 12, 2014
Guild Wars 2 Community Event Calendar
We’re still having issues with the ISP for GuildMag, so I couldn’t post this week’s community event calendar there. Hopefully we’ll have the hosting situation cleared up soon.
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January 10, 2014
This week in Guild Wars 2
A bit of a throwback to an earlier time, as I’m posting the whole column here instead of at the GuildMag site — technical issues with the hosting service have made GuildMag temporarily inaccessible. Fortunately, I’d saved a local copy of the weekly round-up just before the site went down, so I’m not starting from a completely blank slate (but I probably missed some links in the change-over). I’ll repost the whole thing at GuildMag once the technical issues have been addressed.
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Grognards Anonymous
Dan Hodges makes his wargaming confession:
I remember the morning I became a Grognard like it was yesterday. In reality it must have been back in 1978 or 1979. I’d always liked games with a war theme, my favourite being Escape From Colditz. Oh, the cold terror of drawing the Shoot To Kill card. But that was with little wooden counters that looked like bowling pins. It was fun, but you couldn’t really empathise with a bowling pin, even if he was supposed to be a downed Polish Spitfire pilot.
And then one birthday I opened a package that looked like a large book. But it was actually a game box, and it had the words “Squad Leader” on the side. So I opened it gingerly, and that’s when I first set eyes on Sergeant Hamblen.
Sergeant Hamblen came in the shape of a blue grey counter, about the size of your thumbnail. He was a German soldier. You could tell it straight away. He was in silhouette, but you could clearly make out his helmet and his boots and his backpack, and his machine gun. Sergeant Hamblen was no bowling pin, he was a warrior.
And next to him was all sorts of cool stuff. His squad. His long-range machine gun. His demolition charge. A tank! Sergeant Hamblen came with a tank! And then there were the boards. Six or seven hard mounted boards of buildings and forests and hedges and rivers and walls and trees, all in beautiful detail. This was where Sergeant Hamblen lived and fought. And now I was going to live and fight there as well.
So that was it, I was hooked. Me and Sergeant Hamblen spent the summer roaming all over the Eastern Front. He survived the Guards Counterattack. Stymied the Russian assault on Hill 621. OK, he was fighting for the wrong side. But he was a good German. I knew this, because the game was so detailed that the nasty Germans — the Nazis — came on special evil-looking black counters.
Although I played and enjoyed the original Squad Leader game (along with its expansion sets), eventually I fell behind and when Advanced Squad Leader came along, I didn’t buy it. I’d reached my limit on remembering and applying all the rules: Avalon Hill, the publisher, had chosen to write the rule books in “programmed learning” style, where you got the basic rules, then each scenario after that built on the rules you’d learned to add more complexity … and to supersede earlier simple rules with more complex ones. My interest was tailing off after the second expansion set (Crescendo of Doom) came along and the last expansion (GI: Anvil of Victory) finished me off. The Squad Leader system wasn’t a game — it was a lifestyle, and I didn’t have enough time to devote to it to keep all the modified rules in my head.
But although I didn’t know it at the time, my cardboard forces were fighting a losing battle. Time was against them. I was growing older. Computer games, music, football, videos, girls. In roughly that order they came to hold more of an attraction than Sergeant Hamblen and his comrades. So the battle-weary Sergeant sat on a shelf, slowly gathering dust. Not dying, just fading away, as old soldiers do.
I sold off a lot of my wargames after I got married … including some that might be worth a lot of money nowadays. I still have far too many sitting on the shelf in my office, gathering dust. I don’t want to get rid of them, but I also don’t have the time and patience to set them up any more.
January 3, 2014
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week’s (unusually short) roundup has more coverage of the “A Very Merry Wintersday” event which will continue until mid-January. In addition, there’s the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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December 27, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week’s (unusually short) roundup has more coverage of the “A Very Merry Wintersday” event which will continue until mid-January. In addition, there’s the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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December 20, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week’s roundup has more coverage of the “A Very Merry Wintersday” event which will be active until mid-January. In addition, there’s the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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December 13, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week’s roundup has a lot of coverage of the latest content update called “A Very Merry Wintersday”, which includes the return of events and activities from last year’s Wintersday event with some new wrinkles. In addition, there’s the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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December 11, 2013
The legacy of id Software’s Doom
Following up from yesterday’s post on the 20th anniversary, The Economist also sings the praises of Doom:
Yet for Babbage, the biggest innovation of Doom was something subtler. Video games, then and now, are mainly passive entertainment products, a bit like a more interactive television. You buy one and play it until you either beat it or get bored. But Doom was popular enough that eager users delved into its inner workings, hacking together programs that would let people build their own levels. Drawing something in what was, essentially, a rudimentary CAD program, and then running around inside your own creation, was an astonishing, liberating experience. Like almost everybody else, Babbage’s first custom level was an attempt to reconstruct his own house.
Other programs allowed you to play around with the game itself, changing how weapons worked, or how monsters behaved. For a 12-year-old who liked computers but was rather fuzzy about how they actually worked, being able to pull back the curtain like this was revelatory. Tinkering around with Doom was a wonderful introduction to the mysteries of computers and how their programs were put together. Rather than trying to stop this unauthorised meddling, id embraced it. Its next game, Quake, was designed to actively encourage it.
The modification, or “modding” movement that Doom and Quake inspired heavily influenced the growing games industry. Babbage knows people who got jobs in the industry off the back of their ability to remix others’ creations. (Tim Willits, id’s current creative director, was hired after impressing the firm with his home-brewed Doom maps.) Commercial products — even entire genres of games — exist that trace their roots back to a fascinated teenager playing around in his (or, more rarely, her) bedroom.
But it had more personal effects, too. Being able to alter the game transformed the player from a mere passive consumer of media into a producer in his own right, something that is much harder in most other kinds of media. Amateur filmmakers need expensive kit and a willing cast to indulge their passion. Mastering a musical instrument takes years of practice; starting a band requires like-minded friends. Writing a novel looks easy, until you try it. But creating your own Doom mod was easy enough that anyone could learn it in a day or two. With a bit of practice, it was possible to churn out professional-quality stuff. “User-generated content” was a big buzzword a few years back, but once again, Doom got there first.
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December 10, 2013
Twenty years of Doom
At The Register, Lucy Orr gets all nostalgic for id Software’s Doom, which turned 20 today:
Doom wasn’t short on story, never mind the gore and gunfire to follow, I particularly enjoyed the fact my own government had fucked things up by messing where they shouldn’t and opened a portal to hell. Damn, it’s just me left to go ultraviolent and push the legions of hell back into fiery limbo.
Faced with dual chain gun-wielding bulked up Aryans as your foe, Wolfenstein 3D was funny rather than scary. Indeed, I don’t remember being scared by a game until Doom appeared, with its engine capable of dimmed quivering lights and its repugnant textures. The nihilistic tones of Alien 3 echoed through such levels as the toxic refinery. Like the Alien series Doom’s dark corners allowed my imagination to run wild and consider turning the lights back on.
But Doom had a lot more going for it then a few scary moments, and I don’t just mean those scrambles for the health kit. Being able to carry an army’s worth of gun power is not necessarily realistic but neither are angry alien demons trying to rip my flesh off. I’m never empty handed with a chainsaw, a shotgun, a chain-gun, and a rocket launcher at my disposal.
With Doom you were not only introduced to a world of cyber demons but death matches — be sure to have the BFG 9000 on hand for that one shot kill — cooperative gameplay and also a world of player mods including maps and sometimes full remakes.
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December 6, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week’s roundup marks my second full year as the community editor at GuildMag. The final content release of the year will be “A Very Merry Wintersday”, which will include the return of events and activities from last year’s Wintersday event with some new wrinkles. In addition, there’s the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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November 29, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week’s content update is called Fractured, which involves major changes to the Fractals of the Mists “infinite” dungeon, plus there’s the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
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