Wakfu

My tastes run to the geek side. While many of my mathematical colleagues are chess masters or world ranked scrabble players, my hobbies tend to fantasy and super-hero role playing (like Dungeons and Dragons but the Heroes system is better); comic books (I could say graphic novels); magic the gathering (for conservative friends, I say I am going to play cards with my friends - they might imagine it is poker); computer games. In the relatively short history of computer games, the (massively) multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG) are relatively recent. I believe the first was Ultima Online. As it was described to me, it had massive playability flaws so I am glad I did not start with that one. My first MMORPG was Asheron's Call made by Turbine which debuted in 2004 and is still live. It has a great community and honestly I would be playing it still if I had a PC and the stones to sort out the details of the ancient connection protocols and how they would get through my router at home. The graphics are dated but the gameplay is thoughtful and fun and there are still monthly content updates. I went on to the industry standard, World of Warcraft (WoW). There is nothing bad to say about this game. It was well conceived with great gameplay for a diverse player base and looks fantastic. OK, I can say one bad thing about it: the stories and player community just don't match up to Asheron's Call, although many of the best ideas were taken from AC (the insect infestation in Silithus must have been inspired by the Olthoi of AC). I'll forget about WoW someday but I still have a map of Dereth on my wall at home. Oh, oh, I remember one of the great things for AC was the fan web site of Maggie the JackCat for the game. I briefly played Dungeons and Dragons Online (another Turbine offering) which was fun in a nostalgic way; also Guild Wars which had some innovative ideas: but I never found a community in either of these games. 

These are supposed to be short posts (one paragraph) but I guess it is OK to make an exception for the first one. Another game I devoted a couple of months to was Wakfu. Overall this was a low quality game and I can't recommend it to anyone. The game system was broken (you could defeat larger groups of higher level mobs but get less experience) and all servers allowed player versus player (PvP) without consent. However, there were just a couple of things about this game I thought were interesting. Combat was turn based! After initiating combat your character was moved to a grid and combat occurred by turns with lots of time for strategic decisions. This really worked for me. There was a great "housing" system: you had a TARDIS-like (if I have to explain TARDIS to you why are you reading this?) bag that you could flop down and enter your extra-dimensional housing hole. I really liked this. My main character was an Iop, a melee focussed character (picture below). I can say I never understood from the game whether Iop was a class or a race. As you advanced in the game you could pick skills from a skill tree (I honesty forget all the details except what follows). I took a set of skills where as you engaged in combat you built up power which you could then release in a burst, doing higher damage. What I remember best of the game is that as this power built up, my character would cackle with increasingly frenetic glee. I picked the picture below of the many images online because you can imagine the cackle looking at it. Again, I can't recommend the game but that gleeful cackle was pretty endearing. I understand that a French cartoon series was inspired (or inspired or was co-marketed) by the game and it is now available on Netflix. I don't imagine that it will be a quality show, but I will check it out.