Don’t get me wrong browser based games have come a long way from before.  1-up has even posted a list made up of 101 of 2010’s best browser games, many of which are very impressive.  Here’s two that really caught my eye so far that I’ve been playing quite diligently:

Elements the Game

This one had a feel of the collectible card game Magic the Gathering.  It was very addicting though at the start it was somewhat difficult.  The ability to play against random people online, with decks that you’ve built up is pretty nice.  Though some of the player vs player decks don’t work well against the god decks the computer runs with.  The different types of cards and abilities made it fun, and the fact that you could ‘improve’ your cards to be better made the game addicting since perfectionists try play the game, to raise enough cash, to upgrade their whole deck.

Heroes of Might and Magic Online

This one is a spin off of the old Might and Magic series that I remember playing as a kid back in the 90s.  The Creature types, and the way your cities need to be upgraded are similar, however the game is no longer turn based.  Its real time and similar to other online strategy games like Travian or Evony.  My friends, and I, are doing pretty well on the 3rd us server called “Zombie Assembly”.  The only downside to it is that the worlds are relatively small (400×400 grid), and new players are only allowed to join newer servers due to space limitations.  I hope that they increase the capacity at a later time.  It would be really nice to be able to play or bring on more people to an older server.  The goal is the collect ‘Tears’ after you’ve reached a certain rank to dominate the rest of the world.  After which the world resets, and you’ll gain a slight advantage the next time around.  I hear it takes roughly 6 months for the game to come to fruition.

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In the guild that I’ve been a part of for a while now, we’ve been using Ventrilo for the last few years.  It was really good for organizing those 40 man raids in World of Warcraft back in the day.  At one point we probably had upwards of 150+ people when we were zerging fighting the destro back in the days of Warhammer Online.  Aside from having to mute everyone, but the leader the server handled pretty well with that many people.

There was one really annoying thing about having that many people online though.  It was the fact that everyone was speaking at different volumes depending on how they had their microphone was setup.  Well we figured out a way to fix that so that everyone sounds roughly the same volume all the time regardless of what they have their outbound microphone volume setup as. Its called Ventrilo Normalization, and its a really great tip for using Ventrilo Voice Chat.

The steps are pretty easy, and you can tweak it yourself to suit your needs.  There’s a really good post about it here:

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And in case you’re wondering what I’m up to, here’s my character Xight on there.

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It seems like my Alexa ranking took a huge hit ever since I dropped that Entrecard widget a little while back.  It did give me a pretty good boost in traffic for a while, and some long term readership.  However over all it was more work than benefit really.  Quite surprisingly the  traffic to the site is higher now than it was before yet, the Alexa ranking for this site is considerably lower now.  What perplexes me to this day is that my account is still accruing Entrecard credits even though I have no widget posted, and the fact that my widget is not accepting new adverts.

My Google Page rank decided to come back up again from a 1 to a measly 2.  The cuprit for this one is the wide linking to of the Warhammer Tome Tactics Guide.

The most popular page besides that one would be the 214k Gold limit for World of Warcraft.  Which to this day still receives quite a few visitors from StumbleUpon.  Many thanks to those of you who gave those pages a thumbs up.

Also another thanks to all the guys from MIT, and Texas A&M who seem to be the majority of readers who come back on a consistent basis, and in bulk.

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Some of my friends were wondering why the switch to this old game instead of World of Warcraft.  While I used to play WoW quite avidly, I just don’t have the desire to now.  It seems like they give away the end game content way to easy.  There’s no sense of reward anymore.  Granted I don’t really miss the second job like raiding that I used to do, however I do miss the sense of achievement after learning a hard encounter for the first time.

I’m sure some of you hard core mmorpg raiders know what I’m talking about.  The weekly raids with 20-40 people getting together to beat the other guilds on your server to a server first boss kill.  Especially when it meant something that your guild killed Onyxia, in Molten Core, fighting in Blackwing Lair, or fighting bosses in Naxxeramus.  Even prior to that there was people who got together to do planes raids in Everquest, which was an even harder thing to do back then.

What’s happened to the current MMORPGS nowadays?  There’s no real sense of accomplishment in getting to the end game.  We want that achievement, but games like World of Warcraft have really spoiled us in terms of how we should get there.  It seems like the standard is now to have an easy time getting to the end level, which is where the content starts.  Where as, before the fun was actually in leveling up or even the grind. Its something that I thought I would never miss after playing games like Lineage 1 and 2.  Or even Ragnarok Online.  However, I do admit once you got to your next level you did get that little bit of joy even though you’ve spend most of your day sitting at your computer neglecting your social life.

In a game like Warhammer Online, you play against other people in one of two factions.  Yet there was no stake in the game.  If you died you didn’t lose any items, exp or anything of value to you except time.  You had no stake in any of the keeps, or land that the opposing faction was trying to take over.  There became no real reason to defend said keeps/forts/even capitols.  Even Failcom’s Age of Conan got that part right, by forcing people to grind out their guild cities they emphasized a need for that guild to stay together, and make enemies/allies with caution.  You had a ’stake’ in what you put into the game, and to defend this you actually put in an honest effort since you didn’t want to lose your hard work.

Has it really come to this?  Have we as gamers who have always wanted to skip through content to see the end game now just complaining that we have it all too easy?  I kind of miss the grind, but I kind of don’t at the same time.  Is it just me that feels this way?

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