Tattered Page

Ah, the moment has arrived- that magical moment when you no longer get the excitement from a new post from a “you’ve got comments” announcement.  In its place, annoyance at “just another piece of spam.

Guess it’s time to boost up the spam defenses.  Things to look at

• I prefer keeping older topics open for comments, but they tend to be the targets of most steath-spambots.
• Registering users- I’d prefer NOT TO add any more barriers to new visitors.
• More wordpress additions- anyone have suggestions?
• Ben Zeigler’s been playing with a captcha over at his blog.  It seemed unobtrusive enough, though it’s a bit frustrating when you have a rather long message rejected and lost thanks to a garbled captchya (yes, I apparently failed that Turing test a few times)

So, while I mull over what takes more time: cleaning up the spam or blocking it, anyone have any suggestions?

My brother-in-law is a gamer.  He has consoles; an incredible print library , and a wide range of PC titles constantly at hand.  There is no way he could be mistaken as a non-gamer… except for his PC’s hardware.  The man’s main machine barely cracks half a gigahertz & his video card expenses make me envious.

I used to think “eh, he’ll come around and get a real machine” but now I’m wondering whether video-card elitism has caused me to ignore another entire realm of gaming.

The man continues to find new, engaging, low-system-requirements games that I never would have even considered.

His latest discovery is Monstergame.

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I’m not ashamed to promote something I have a blast playing.

Cryptic / NCSoft released a new boxed set containing both City of Heroes & City of Villains. They call it the “Good vs Evil Edition.” If you’re undecided on getting it, go over to MMORPG.com and get the FREE TRIAL.

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In Zen of Design’s post about the Cryptic-Marvel team-up, Aaron and I had a nice debate on story in City of Heroes and whether Cryptic can do well with Marvel’s material. We’ve since moved the debate to our own blogs. Aaron has expressed some concern that Cryptic’s characters don’t have the depth, but read it for yourself. It’s good stuff- even if I disagree.

Aaron is right in one aspect. Although I believe Cryptic advanced the MMO storywriting skills by leaps and bounds, nobody’s going to mistake any MMO’s story for award-winning literature.

He just gives Marvel too much credit- and Cryptic too little.

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