f13.net

The client is available for download now, although the beta doesn't start until January 1.

I got this email as well.

Tho, I read somewhere that you can't tame goats in this new version.  Wonder what there will be to do.

Alkiera

It is a mistake to talk about goats on f13.  It takes ages for people to shut up about them.  It's unnerving the number of goat lovers we have on this board.

goatse.cx (http://www.fobavenue.com/pets2b.jpg)

Click it.  You know you want to.

That's the cutest grieflink ever.

I got this mail too. I wish I could muster up the ability to give a crap, but it is somehow eluding me. I will wait for one of the other guinea pigs posters to try it first.

I'm probably annoying people by even continuing to post these things here.  It's habit, I suppose.  I didn't post anything on the whole Horizons sale thingy because I didn't think anyone really cares about that anymore... I know I don't.  

Everyone seems tired.

What does this have to do with Shadowbane?

If you hate Fileplanet as much as myself, and are simply putting off getting the Wish client because of it, here's your alternative:

http://www.torrentspy.com/download.asp?id=111059

You know you want to switch to Wish and stop feeding the beast that is WoW.

Yeah, I downloaded it. What the hell, if it still sucks, it'll take about 5 minutes to figure it out.

Thanks for taking the bullet for us.

I'm all about luv for my fellow goat-herders.

I'll find you, Haemish.  We can pick berries.  The only thing I really remember about the game, at this point, is taming goats to kill goats, being killed on the road just outside of newbie town by high level mobs and picking berries.

I am so going to download this game now, it seems to be all about innovative game design and fresh ideas.

(Hm. I wish I could identify irony?sarcasm? when I see it.) Innovative, yep. Name three(just in case you can name one, and in the absurd event that you should know of two) other MMORPG/MMOGs where you can pick berries. I'd better start downloading the client, picking berries sounds like a different kind of fun.

UO
SWG, though they're invisible
WoW, visible
EQ2, visible
ATITD1/2, visible. Shit, you can PLANT them
Eve, if you consider asteroids berries.

Though I too suffer from the inability to recognize sarcasm, so delete/ban/ignore if that was your goal :)

Yeah, but can you bake bread?

Wow, these geniuses really know how to spread good word of mouth, no?

I don't care about bread, I want sunflowers and ponies.

I've downloaded this thing three times now and it comes up with an IO error on the install.

Why do I torture myself with these stupid betas?  I downloaded the thing a week ago, and of course I can't actually log in and beta test because a) my account has not been activated (has anyone's?) and b) the server is down.  Wish probably still sucks, and I will have wasted yet more hours playing a game which is neither a game nor fun.

Bleh.

Be careful, Schmoo, if you start the New Year with that sort of attitude, you will be irritated and pessimistic all year long!  I watched The Chronicles of Riddick last night and started the year confused.  :(

Anyway, I received the initial beta invite email which says the account is activated, followed by an email stating they've had such a good turn out that they'll be sending the final emails in staggered batches.  And that's it so far, although the server seems to be up now and there have been several patches throughout the day.

It has nothing to do with popular response. They're trying to put every single user onto the same server. I'm sure the server already crapped itself under the load of a couple thousand.

There's no way they even had a quarter of the people WoW had in their open beta.

Jeez, my whining has paid off(?), I got my 'account activated' email already and logged right in.

After running around in circles for a while (caused by clicking on things at random) I went through the short tutorial and entered the world of Ganedan.  No goat sightings yet, but I have been killed a few times by some floating things and a sneaky elf.  What fun.

My character is a staff-wielding  elven necromancer lass with orange hair and thick trousers, who seems to want to go everywhere except where I want her to go.  A pox on point and click movement.

Not to derail this, but Chronicles of Riddick was god-awful.

Movie or game? I thought the game was OK, but basically just another FPS (meh). I heard the movie sucked though.

The movie didn't suck. In fact the new Star Wars wish they were as good as Riddick.

The game didn't suck at all.

I'll give it a chance sooner or later. The reviews are kinda scaring me away though:

"The last action hero was the one before Diesel."

"Essentially a long-winded excuse for action sequences and Diesel making menacing faces, mostly over his left shoulder."

"[Judi Dench and Vin Diesel] appear in the same movie, and indeed, perform scenes together. Unfortunately, the film is so bad that even this novelty loses its appeal."

"A glorified B-movie with elephantitis of the mythology glands, it's something of a cautionary tale: This is what happens when genre filmmakers start reading too much Joseph Campbell."

"His harsh, Marine Corps sergeant's voice, echoing Lee Marvin's, was made to bark commands. Add Telly Savalas's shaved head, slack mouth and eyes as mean as a charging bull's, and finish off with a dungeon master's studied arrogance, and you have the recipe for the most exaggerated caricature of macho menace Hollywood has yet produced."

And last but not least:

"This utterly superfluous sequel is plotted with pretentious
pseudo-religious conflict that makes "The Matrix" sequels look profound"

Or if you look at it from the "it's a space opera without being shitty" and "they've got a great anti-hero," it suddenly becomes really fucking good.

I don't trust reviewers one fucking bit anymore anyway. They're rooting for Maria Full of Grace and Sideways to take home Oscar's. They're two of the worst movies I've seen in my entire life. 1. I have no pity for mules or sad south americans driven to be mules. Fuck them. 2. Fuck the guy from American Splendor. He's more depressing than anyone else caught on film. I'd rather spend 2 hours stabbing the inside of my thigh with a butter knife.

Riddick rocks comparatively. You can watch it as a brainless movie or high art and easily qualify either opinion.

Riddick... high art?  Let's not get carried away.

Trying to dissect your taste in movies is like trying to gather wisdom from Bazooka Joe wrappers.  You love total crap, bash good movies over trivial minutia and personal hangups, and then somewhat manage to redeem yourself on a few titles.

I said it could be qualified. Or at least argued. I didn't say it was true. I would challenge anyone to show me a better space opera besides Star Wars Ep. V which is marred by it's brothers.

Pfft, that's because on the whole I have better taste than 99% of the other morons out there. The problem is, once you've seen about 3,000 movies, the lines between good and bad get grayer and grayer and you can start to argue redeeming value in absolute shit. I can back up movies I absolutely loathe. It's quite annoying when I can rationalize an Oscar Award or any award for the matter even if I hate a movie.

Edit: And what total crap do I love? Besides Knight's Tale. I'll give you that one. It's like goddamn ambrosia to me.

I have to call foul.  

First, everyone thinks that they have good taste just as everyone thinks they are a good driver.  I'm not commenting on your particular tastes, just throwing a flag for the comment.  

Second, having watched a few too many movies myself I find it easier and easier to point the finger at crap.  However, while I do agree that it becomes easier to find redeeming parts of bad movies it doesn't remove the fact the most movies still suck.  Maybe I'm just getting picky, but each year I find there are fewer and fewer movies even worth watching.  

Addendum: There are no good space operas.  No offense, but saying Riddick is the best of the lot is pretty empty praise.  I didn't really think much of it myself but I could just have shitty taste in movies.

I find it easy to point my finger at crap as well. The problem is, I can also rationalize why the morons and critics out there liked it.  



Addendum: There are no good MMORPGs. No offense, but saying World of Warcraft is the best of the lot is pretty empty praise. I didn't really think much of it myself but I could just have shitty taste in games.

Funny how that works.

Just watched Riddick again, and I rather enjoyed it the second time through.  There are a few annoying parts, but you have to suspend your belief a bit.

Oh and if you haven't seen Croupier, you are not qualified to talk about any movie.  Mad props Schild, mad props.

Yea, I saw it right after it came out and have watched it about once a month since. It was time to respect the Clive Owen. Easily one of the best narrator driven movies in recent history.

The Woman Chaser tops my list.

For some reason, I didn't 'get' that movie at all.  It made me confused.   That Diesel bloke is really a dreadful actor.

I liked Chronicles, but thought Pitch Black was a better movie overall. Riddick was a decent action flick. I like Vin Diesel, but I don't expect him to act, nor do I expect him to do arty things. I expect him to look menacing like a typical action hero. The biggest problems with Riddick were that it brought in this entirely huge story that felt distinctly seperate from the world established in the first movie. It was narrative scope creep. I'd watch another Riddick movie without hesitation.

I apparently am not in the chosen few to be allowed into the Wish Beta just yet. I weep with wistful longing for my goats.

Riddick was pure and utter shit.  Need I go through just how fucking stupid that movie was?

Necromongers
Crematoria
Elementals
Furians

Come on.  If some 12 year old came up with these names we'd roll our eyes and just chalk it up to immaturity.  In an actual screenplay it's pretty fucking unforgiveable.  Add in the fact that the action parts are pretty goddamned yawn inducing and the cliches fly thick and heavy, the acting sucks, and the story is idiotic and you have a movie that defines "piece of shit".

Anyone who'd even call it good deserves to have their license to criticize movies revoked.

It was better than Attack of the Clones.

So is a cheese grater to the nutsack with a hint of tobasco thrown in.

The fact that most of those names are slight modifications of the same concepts from WarHammer 40k, which most people here seem to have played at one point or another, might help you.  In fact, the whole setting was SO '40k', it's silly.

Franky, I thought both Pitch Black and Riddick were good, enjoyable flicks.  I do not call myself worthy to judge if something is 'high art' or not, but given that what alot of people think is 'high art', I think most of it is be crappy and out of reach... great for critics and art majors, usually crap to everyone else.

Yeah, it requires some suspension of disbelief.  Then again, I don't think anyone who went to see it expected anything else.  If you DID manage to get into the theatre without realizing Riddick was a sci-fi film...  What rock do you live under?

In an attempt at re-railing this thread... I also have not been yet chosen to enter the Wish beta.  Not having played the first one, I don't have any goat-related preconceptions, but I am kinda curious what they've done.

Alkiera

I 'won' and got my account activated on the 1st. Haven't clicked the link in the email yet. I am very afraid.

I don't think anyone here is asking for high art. "Not shitty" is good enough. "Not shitty" = Tolerable acting, more than 2 or 3 characters you don't hate, good pacing, a storyline that isn't too predictable, etc.. Just the basics.

Just because it's Sci-Fi or whatever doesn't mean you have to drop your guard, or that it doesn't abide by the same "Shitty" or "Not Shitty" standard we apply to everything else (Again, I haven't seen it myself, so I'm not judging it just yet).

Take the "Road Warrior" for example: Was that meant to be "high art"? No, but it stands right up there with all of the other great films that have been made. And puts the bulk of "artsy" ones to shame.

I'm laughing... I happen to agree.

Does anyone else find it interesting that a thread about Wish has turned into a movie review thread?  Perhaps that speaks volumes.

No, the tell-tale "baaaing" of a train of goats crossing the road speaks volumes. But it's in goat language, so no one bothered to translate.

If I'm not supposed to see Vin Diesel as an actor, what am I supposed to see when I watch one of his films?  Besides the fact that he's big, muscley and has a nose as wide as the Missouri River... what else is there?

Gaaaaaahh!

I decided to actually install the client...  And discovered a problem.  MR is yet another company that, idiotically, ignores several Windows standards and assumes, and forces, you to have free space on your system disk.

I have my drive partitioned so that I can easily remove and re-install the OS regularly, as I feel is neccesary when running Windows.  The system disk, in this case 'K', is just large enough to hold the OS and leave room for updates and drivers and whatnot.  There is ~800 meg available there on average.

The first thing the wish_beta.exe installer does is extract WishInstaller.exe to "K:\Program Files\tempinstall\"

Nevermind that this is stupid in and of itself.  Windows has registry entries and system calls to determine where the admin has asked temp files be placed.  I've designated they be put on a different drive(H), and 99% of all apps understand this.

100% of the games that have had issues with this are MMOGs.  WHY???  What is it about being an MMOG dev that makes you unable to write a standard installer script?  Most of the MMOGs I've run actually have simpler installations than other apps, it should be easy.

Again, GAH!

Alkiera

I imagine it's probably because every time they run the program, they want to do a file check to ensure proper sync between client and server versions. I also imagine it wouldn't be too hard to write such checks so that they don't HAVE to default to your system disk, but for a beta, that's probably asking too much.

It's actually easier to write file I/O to work in the program's working direcotry than it is to write it for a specific location... and causes infinitely fewer problems.  If I could write apps that did this properly when I was 12, ideally full adults who are professional programmers should be able to manage.

It boggles the mind.  Seriously.

Alkiera

Did anyone see Chronicals of Riddick: Dark Fury (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0001O3YA8/qid=1104785131/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/102-0306937-4712974?v=glance&s=dvd)? If you like Anime-like stuff, you might enjoy it. Available on Netflix (http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?movieid=60037825&trkid=73) as well.

I wouldn't know.  I ran the client once, that was enough.

Holy shit people, Riddick sucked. It was terrible, even as space opera.

The names were retarded.

The plot made no sense. The Necromungers (or whatever they are called) are a religion of sorts founded by some guy who discovered the "Underverse." WTF is the Underverse? How did he get those powers? Why does he have to kill everybody? How did he raise an army in the first place? It seriously would have been better if there was NO explanation at all, just "this guy with special powers and a big army wants to kill everyone."

The acting was terrible. Jack/Kira was awful. Vin was Vin, it's getting old. The movie structure was terrible, very poor pacing. It had none of the charm of Pitch Black, which was just an OK movie to begin with. The entire thing was just half-baked. The initial premise (to fight evil get someone just as bad) was good, EVERYTHING else was awful. There is a good movie to be made there - but that wasn't it by a longshot.
---

Sorry...let's continue talking about how Wish won't run for anyone!

...and why nobody cares.

I think it comes down to something very, very, very simple.

All the people in a game on the same server is the most hare-brained idea since a Joey spinoff. Everyone knows watching Chandler go on a bender would have been a lot more fun and wouldn't have needed scriptwriters.

I don't even understand the premise. Let's say the game does really well and has a lot of subscribers. How do they all fit on one server? I don't mean technically as in handling load, I mean how do they all physically fit?

WoW has what 80 servers or something? FFXI has 20-30 or so. That isn't just load. It's also to alleviate overcrowding, camping, etc. Take the average levelling zone in FFXI and multiply the population by 30 and basically every square inch would be taken.

So is the world just really really large? Is there a ton of instancing? Is there some randomly generated content?

A world that is 30 times the size also implies 30 times the content. It's a lot easier to make 30 smallish worlds than one gigantic one.

Hence the reason I have more faith in the rebirth of Jesus...


...and I'm Jewish.

Yeah, good question. It's been done before though: Eve. But it's easier to justify there because it's in space. Wish, on the other hand, can't even satisfy one player.

Anyways, anyone seen Shaun of the Dead yet? Shitty or Not Shitty?

How many space operas can you name anyway? It's not like that's a very popular genre. I suppose it was better than Wing Commander: The Movie...

There was a good movie in there somewhere. I good writer could have taken the basic premise and made something really cool out of it.

The Last Starfighter
The Fifth Element (arguable, EASILY)
Solaris (Russian and American)
Starship Troopers
Red Planet
All the Star Wars Movies
All the Star Trek Movies
Titan A.E.
Final Fantasy: Spirits Within
Pitch Black
Last Starfighter
Stargate
Dune
2001/2010
Event Horizon (arguable)
The original Planet of the Apes (the sequels are barely movies, let alone in a genre besides crap...though unfortunately some fun to watch)

and

There's tons of space opera TV from Battlestar Galactica to Firefly.

That's mostly off the top of my head. I'm sure there are a lot more. Pitch Black/Riddick tops my list there with Solaris, Fifth Element, and the Stargate movie. I personally would put Event Horizon in horror because it is a horrifying movie that fucks more with the mind than the idea of space and time. The space-time thing in there was a gimmick. But like I said, arguable.

Shaun of the Dead was very good. Rented it the other night. Plan on purchasing it when a proper special edition comes out. Between Dawn of the Dead 2004, 28 Days Later, and Shaun - I'm pretty happy with this years crop of zombie movies. I mean shit, I even enjoyed RE: Apocalypse. But then, I didn't see any Uwe Boll movies, which probably would have tained me forever.

If the .exe is just a ZIP self-extractor wrapper and you have something like WinZip installed you can just right-click extract the files somewhere else then run the setup.exe/installer.exe manually. I do this a lot with things like driver installers cause I want the files left around after install instead of having the installer "clean up" after it's done installing.

It's an actual installer, just a poorly scripted one.  Vise, I think.  The sad part is as best I can tell, it's extracting another installer.  Why the layers?  Installers shouldn't be like onions.  Is Wish really a lil tiny Russian wooden doll, inside half a dozen layers of installers?

Alkiera

That's the best definition of vaporware I've ever seen.  :)

I'm still waiting for my bloody email.

I got the "Your account has been activated!" email, but given that I HATE point and click, was unimpressed when trying it at E3, and have no faith in the current direction of Wish, I won't be playing.  

Mutable Realms might want to try to lure the several thousand remaining Horizon players since they seem to be the only ones this game might impress.

They've been fiddling with the live content the last couple of days.  Gremlins attacking one day, and wolves the next, I think.  Once you get in the game, it's worth reading the newspaper... though you can find copies posted in some forums.   Players who take part in the live content can become famous as part of the lore.  

I like these sorts of things.  I think, however, that this won't be near enough to make this game popular.   One thing that would go far is to add WASD or, at least, tweak the PnC system they have.   Coupled with the camera control, even though you can adjust this, makes movement ackward.  You would think that with the requirements for this game, they would be able to include WASD without too much strain on it.

I don't know why the requirements are so demanding for this game.  The graphics are not spectacular or anything.  Maybe it has something to do with trying to have only one server for everyone.  Who knows?  I always suspect the teams of not being clever enough when the specs get too outrageous.  There also seems a to be a lot of graphic cards left unsupported.  Hopefully this will change a bit by release.

Edit:  Going with what Mi Ties said... for some reason they're targeting this game towards UO players.  I just never got that.  I agree that this would be more appropriately aimed at Horizons customers.  It may even be better than Hz, eventually.  (not hard)  Both Hz and UO had live content... maybe it's the open skill system?

It's good to tweak live content, but more important is first establishing a solid server architecture that can handle the ULTRA MMOG environment that they've been boasting for years. They need to place a call to CCP Games and find out how Eve does it because even with all the "space" in that game, they still have a solid cluster that supports over 12,000 concurrent players. So once Wish can support that many simultaneous connections, then they can go figure out how to provide that much content and that big of a world.

Apparently my account is live. I don't ever remember signing up for this thing, especially with my new email.  Fucking odd.

Go away Wish emails, I have no intention of playing.

Fucking hilarious. Great homage/send up of the zombie genre. Worth every minute and more.

I am now a chosen one for the Wish beta, and am downloading it at work. Details to come, provided I actually get to have lunch instead of another impromptu meeting.

EDIT: And shame on you schild, for calling the Planet of the Apes sequels barely movies. Battle was an excellent continuation on the first, though the rest were pretty poor. Of course, they were all better than that Tim Burton abortion, and ten times better than Star Wars Attack of the CGI.

Hah!  My account hasn't been activated yet and I skipped beta 1.5, so I'm still not able to log in with my own account.  Someone lent me theirs but I gave it back... the password offended me.

I think it's personal and they are snubbing me.

You're insight serves you well, titterer...

Good luck on actually connecting to the Wish server.  It seems to be down more than up.

I bought a chicken, named it Flossie, and let it follow me for a few hours until I got tired of its incessant pecking and butchered it.  Now I've got some eggs and a piece of chicken meat.  Lunch, anyone?

You ate your pet?

He probably pets his meat too.

Of course not, I sold the meat and bought some armor.

I think my chicken-loving cyclops is ready to be retired.  I already lost my first character in a dungeon or something that just kept going down into the ground until I lost all interest in trying to find my way out again.

My next character (if the server comes back up before I delete the game software) will be a gnome with a horse, because they look sorta cool.  I'll try not to slaughter the horse, but I'm not promising anything.

When I installed the Wish client, it set my Windows theme to something with low colors, deactivated the options in the Display panel to fix it, turned off anti-aliased text, and removed icons from my desktop. Luckily, uninstalling the thing and rebooting fixed it.

I still feel dirty.

What you need is Animal Husbandry and a catapult.

After 4 days of silliness, I finally got this installed on my home computer and played it last night.

First off, your install program is balls. Monkey balls. Big bowls of monkey balls. On my work computer, I tried installing this. Apparently, I didn't have enough hard drive space, but instead of your program gracefully informing me of this, as well as informing me of how much space I would need, it just shit itself, gave me some programmer jargon popup about Error on maximum disk size: 0 and then sat there until I cancelled. Strike 1. I do not care if it's a beta. Those are really easy things to fix.

Having installed it at home, I tried to login three nights earlier this week, during prime time hours. Every time I was told either the game server or the game server AND the patch server was down. Yes, that IS a hallmark of betas. It's just not a good sign. Foul tip. Also, the place you linked me to in your official forums to check server status doesn't actually tell me server status, unless the users happen to post that the server is down. On Tuesday night, I looked there to see if the server was down and the most recent post was from early in the morning of the previous night. Now, either the server was down since that time, which is entirely too long even for a beta, or you aren't updating the forum. Another foul tip, off your foot this time.

I finally get logged in last night and make a character. Ummm, for this I need a DirectX 9 card and WinXP? The models look like badly proportioned versions of the original DAoC models. That is not good in 2005. Sure, they got a little bumpiness or something, but the textures are really low-res looking, and the models don't appear to have enough polygons. They also just aren't proportioned right. Character creation is fairly painless and quick. Another foul tip.

Log in, have to eat dinner, try to log back in 30 minutes later, game servers down. At this point, the server has been down more times than Jenna Jameson. Foul tip.

Finally, an hour later, I'm able to log in. I go through the newbie tutorial, which covers the basics of magic, combat and crafting. I play through that and into the main world for another 30 minutes, before I'm killed by two things and log off.

Point and click movement is ass. It was passable in Shadowbane. It's awful here. Your pathfinding algorithim has always been strong, even as far back as Alpha 6. But point and click movement is ASS in real-time 3D. WASD, bitches, say it with me. WASD. If you chose point and click movement to cut down on lag because you are trying to cram 100k users into one goddamn server, YOU CHOSE WRONG. I'd rather see split servers than PNC. In turn-based, tile-based games, PNC is fine. IT SUCKS BALLS FOR REAL-TIME 3D GAMES. Your scheme in particular is frustrating and hard to get used to.

Combat is boring. They have made minor changes since Alpha 6. It was more fun in alpha 6 when I had absolutely no options for combat. You get different sorts of swings with each weapon, and each weapon has a different set of attacks. Which I assume means that for each weapon you use and train, you get a whole other set of options. Which sounds cool, only it's not, considering that the interface APPEARS to only allow one set of hotkey bars. Which are all mapped to the F1-F12 keys. Why? Are the number keys not good enough for you? I hate using the Fkeys. They are too far from the home positions on a keyboard. I assume that as you gain prowess in weapon use, you get newer options with each weapon, which may help. Of course, I'm fighing really bad looking models, and feel so apart from the action I'd rather just hit auto attack and get a sandwich. Did I mention PNC sucks balls?

Crafting is about like DAoC's, only with the added pain of having to drag your components into another menu. YAY FOR CARPAL TUNNEL SYNDROME! I thought many of the past MMOG's had made great strides to remove needless click-dragging from crafting, you put them right back in! GO GO DEVOLUTION! And no, adding umpty billion different types of crafting and harvesting do not make crafting better, it only means you have more options for what to click for.

And you can get a goat pet, which I did. For 240 gold. The goat promptly sat there and watched me die. Why exactly did I buy this goat? Am I going to have to milk it to make it friend enough to, I don't know, toss a ram's horn up somebody's ass if they are fighting me? Do I even want to know what I'm supposed to do with a tame goat as a pet?

I don't know why, but this game seems to have DEVOLVED since I first got into Alpha. I don't know if it's because of the loss of Dave Rickey's design ideas, or the fruition of those ideas in inadequte hands. But this game was much more fun in alpha when almost none of the current game features were added. The concepts are there: skill-based, no classes, use-based skill gains, harvesting and crafting, PVP somewhere. But the implementation is ass, so far. I'm trying to work up the willpower to install it on my work machine to play at lunch, and I'm having a great amount of difficulty mustering up the desire.

Can anyone give me a good reason?

No.  I think you've covered all the good reasons.

Oh... by the way... you can have 2 hotbars up at the same time by right clicking on the hotbar and choosing to 'expand' it.  Nearly every point you made, I also made in another forum but, as usual, the fanbois dragged my good name through the mud and then flamed me to a crisp.  I'm used to it, though, and hardly cried at all.

God no, but in the interests of something that escapes me just now that 'pet goat' you bought apparently is not actually a pet as we know them.  It's a resource that you can harvest.  If you want a fighting pet you have to tame a wild creature (yet another skill to learn).

Also the second hotbar can be accessed with the shift key and the function keys.

Yet another interesting MMORPG idea bites the pixelated dust.  Sigh.

Knock, knock...  The Themis Group used to be involved with Wish.  I've noticed that the emails now come from Mutable Realms.  I went and took a peek at the Themis website and they still list MR as a client... but then, they also include Cyber Warrior (Rubies of Eventide).   They don't seem to be mentioned anywhere on the MR website.  

Hey Azhrarn!  You there?  What's the story?

Just watched it.

Well, it's not really horrible, but on the other hand, I didn't think it was all that either. I've seen worse. Visually, it was great. And the action and choreography were almost equally as good (some parts at least). I wish someone could make a Dune movie look like this.

Storywise....I'm not even sure where to start. I liked the character of Riddick more than I thought I would, but the story itself just wasn't fun at all. The whole necromonger thing was stupid as hell. They would have been better off with a movie version of Butcher Bay.

SPOILER
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
And the ending: "You keep what you kill?" -- Did I miss something early on? I can't believe it ended like that.

Almost art. Unfortunately the dialogue is shit and they shouldn't have said anything. It all should have been done visually.