Burrowowl

It’s the 28th, Final Fantasy XI day. Ever since I played Asheron’s Call during its early days, I’ve thought it would be great if Square or Blizzard were to throw their hats into the MMORPG arena. Well, it turns out they’ve both done so, with Square having successfully released Final Fantasy XI last year in Japan. As with all things Final Fantasy, we had to wait for quite a while here in the US (those of us not willing to import a copy and play with a dictionary on our desks, that is). From what I’ve heard from folks that have been playing it, it may almost live up to the hype.

Expected problems are the same you’ll find in Everquest, Asheron’s Call, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Shadowbane, Earth & Beyond, and Shadowbane…

1. There will be complaints of lack of content (this will be allayed by the fact that the underlying game is over a year mature in Japan, so there’s a lot of content already present that other such games have lacked at launch time).
2. There will be obnoxious power-gamers who will abuse the game mechanisms to create insanely-powerful characters that will spend months complaining about the lack of high-level content.
3. There will be obnoxious wannabe power-gamers complaining about every minor glitch that you, a more reasonable gamer, would have passed without batting an eye.
4. There will be mooches running around trying to beg equipment, advice, and emotional support from you.
5. There will be tedious combat in which one presses an attack button and waits for the critter to fall over. The critter will then be looted, and the cycle restarted.
6. The gaming company will react to any complaints about game mechanisms by changing rules. All players that had an advantage under the old mechanisms will cry bloody murder.

There are other likely problems (ah, system requirements…), but before this game hit the US market the underlying system had been in use for over a year across the Pacific. It was made to be used with 2002 hardware by a fairly broad market. It requires an 800MHz processor and 128MB RAM. Oh my.

And so it comes to pass that I’ll be purchasing another MMORPG. I fully expect to enjoy it greatly for at least several months before the other players drive me away. Some day I hope an MMORPG will come along that doesn’t coddle problem players. Some day I hope that the makers of such a game will let the game stand on its own merits rather than give in to the demands of a vocal minority of whiney and abusive players. Perhaps Final Fantasy XI will be such a game. My Japanese isn’t up to the task of checking out the existing FFXI forums, so I don’t know whether this will be the one. I’m cautiously optimistic.

Gather around, little boys and girls, and let me tell you the story of an astoundingly useful, but troubled website. wifimaps.com is a lovely resource for warchalkers everywhere, fuelled by the generous contributions of wardrivers and access point hosts throughout… everywhere.

I take that back. They appear to have no data for Kyoto or Tokyo, in lovely Japan, but I’ll forgive them that because they’re the only resource that’s been able to locate hotspots in Seal Beach, CA for my next trip to visit the twins. With any luck I’ll find an analogous resource before my trip to Japan this winter. Otherwise my Dell’s wifi card is going to get one heck of a workout in a couple months, as I wander around Gion searching for an open node.

But back to the story at hand. These kind folks put together an amazing database of wireless access points from wherever folks have chosen to submit the pertinent MAC Address, address, and/or GPS information. This enables people on the road to quickly determine the location of a place they can get online with a wireless devices such as a laptop or palmtop computer. Such access points include people’s homes, offices, and chic coffee shops all over the place that have (either intentionally or by neglect) created a free access-point. Alas, the usage and database outgrew the software and hardware that ran it. For months, we were without wifimaps.com loving. There was much tearing of clothes, gnashing of teeth, and the women lamented.

Last week they made their triumphant return. Rising up from the ashes, wifimaps.com stands proudly before the masses, doling out valuable information at absolutely no charge. I understand that my employer is interested in contributing colocation and bandwidth services to this project, which may go some ways towards keeping wifimaps.com available for years to come, much to the joy of WiFi mooches everywhere! Don’t you love happy endings?

The much-anticipated release of A List Apart 3.0 debuted for a hungry internet earlier this week. This web magazine published by conscientous web designers for web designers has been an invaluable toolkit of handy links, tricks, and explanations of the arcane for many moons, and I’m glad to see it up an running again. RSS feeds are available for lazy folks who don’t want to scour through dozens of websites every day hoping for new content.

A List Apart has been a strong proponent of heralding web standards as a powerful tool for making better use of the internet as a content-delivery mechanism. I have found the great majority of its articles to be comprehensive and forward-thinking. I would rate this along with Boxes & Arrows as one of the few serious web periodicals focused on information architecture and presentation (mostly presentation and production in this case). Give it a read.

Thank you, Happy Cog folks, for pulling all this stuff together. I, for one, appreciate it.

This weekend the Mrs. and I picked up Jak II for our gaming pleasure. She really got a kick out of Jak & Daxter, playing it all the way through several times, and I rather dug it as well. Like Jak & Daxter, much of the gameplay is classic platform-adventure in 3d. However, the main hub of the game is a city that you cruise around in, ‘jacking zoomers and wrecking havoc as you go around, a la Grand Theft Auto 3 (but without the Cop-B-Gone tokens).

Once again we see very smooth gameplay, this time with a slew of new gameplay features (including the “Dark Jak” alter-ego mode, the introduction of weapons, and the more free-form hub system) all nicely wrapped around an unusually good plotline, complete with character motivations (shock!). As a sequel to a very much child-oriented Jak & Daxter, Jak II has a much more mature plotline.

By mature I don’t mean tits & ass (that’s a plotline aimed at thirteen-year-olds): I mean that the storyline isn’t aimed at eight-year-olds. Jak’s quests are motivated by vengance, and his missions come from rebel strategists, mobsters, and mission objectives reflect the motivations of the folks doling out the work. Jak’s incentive for fulfilling these missions? Information that’ll lead him to vengence against the evil Baron that performed scientific experiments on him for two years.

So far I’m 26% through with the missions in the game, and I give it an unmitigated A+ for style, depth of content, and implementation. Good work, folks.

Firebird v0.7 is out this week. Upgrade to it, already. The installation package for Windows weighs in at a mere 6.04MB and does everything you need your web browser to do (provided you don’t use Livehelp at work).

Along with the PNH Toolbar, this has become my favorite user client for cruising around on the net with. Powered by the same rendering engine as Netscape 7.x and Mozilla, but without all the extra BS, the browser actually feels lighter and smoother. Oh sweet bliss.