Friday Feature – Yivvits and MrBubble - 10/26/2007

If you're a veteran player of Star Wars Galaxies, chances are you've heard of Yivvits and MrBubble! Thisdynamic duo hosts a regular podcast called "SWG with Yivvits andMrBubble". Yivvits and MrBubble took a break from the microphones tolet you know a little more about who they are and how a typical podcastcomes to life.

What is a Podcast?

Apodcast is similar to a radio show, with a speaker or speakersdiscussing topics related to a particular subject. Podcasts are online,downloadable audio files.

SWG with Yivvits and MrBubble is a long-running podcast that covers the latest news and topics for Star Wars Galaxies, and the hosts often share their thoughts on the Star Wars universe as well.

Behind the Scenes with Yivvits and MrBubble

Who are you guys, anyway?

Brent (Yivvits): My name is Brent and I'm the voice of reason on our show. My character is Yivvits the Wookiee.

John (MrBubble): My name is John and I am the puppet master of the toon MrBubble in theValcyn galaxy. In real life I live in the same town as my Wookieeco-host, am a small business owner and live in a house with three catsand a clingy dog in a picturesque town.

Why di

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by Shawn Sines

 

You defeated the deadly King of Shadows in Neverwinter Nights 2. Theshard of the mythical silver sword was torn from your chest like a badsplinter and fused with the power to destroy that previouslyunstoppable foe.

How do you follow up a quest like that, an adventure that saved theentire Forgotten Realms? By becoming an amnesiac prisoner in anunexplored land, of course.

Mask of the Betrayer is the first expansion for last year'sNeverwinter Nights 2. Unlike most expansions, it delivers a fullserving of Dungeons & Dragons, and it expands the world of theForgotten Realms in new and exciting ways.

But with the complexity of the D&D rule set, especially at itsadvanced levels, new players will not find this game simple to pick up.

The story of the Shard Bearer is continued from the previous title,but instead of a sprawling campaign with broad consequences, thedevelopers turn this game inward.

What happens to the hero after he's saved the world? What's the costof sacrificing your soul to defeat darkness? These esoteric questionsdrive the actions of the player, without the bravado traditionallyassociated with epic fantasy tales.

The companions and moral situations the player en

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WarCry Q&A: Warhammer Online
Answers by the WAR Community Team
Questions by Matt Lowery

WarCry: In the recent combat podcast we weretold that you can switch out Tactics between fights, and that you canhave seven active at one time, how many will you have to switch betweenonce you are level 40?

WAR Community Team: As a refresher:

You have seven Tactics slots. Four hold Tactics you earn throughcareer advancement, two hold Tactics you earn via Renown (RvR) and oneholds a Tactic you earn from quests (PvE).

For Career Tactics, the total available will vary by career, but isgenerally between 15 and 20 (out of 30 to 40 available). The othersystems are still being tweaked, but the numbers will be comparablewhen scaled for the available slots.

WarCry: Are their any speed buff, or classes that increase speed like the Minstrel in DAOC?

WAR Community Team: All players have a defaultsprint ability which allows a short period of increased speed at theexpense of your action points, in addition several classes also get anenhanced sprint which uses fewer action points and allows you to runfaster than the standard sprint.

WarCry: What options will players have to store their excess equipment? Will we have b

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Community member Solandor stopped by the official Gothic 3 forums to announce that the game's unofficial community patch has been updated to version 1.5. Here are the fixes since v1.4:

I. Community Patch v1.5
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- Slightly improved memory-use.
- The error "Scripted state is not registered: ZS_Spectator!" is removed
- When an NPC leaves the party, the accompanying message is not shown twice anymore.
- By a deadly fall as an animal the death-animation is acted.
+ Also for the quicksaves the date of the save is shown.
- Resolved graphical errors that could appear when the intro-videos are deactivated.
- Resolved exploit when brewing potions.
- It is no longer possible to insert empty inventory/spell-fields into the quickbar.
- Even when an NPC is long dead, it is still possible to act all the dialogues about him.
- Reading of the stone tablets does not cause an addition and subtraction anymore for "Ancient Knowledge".
- Pressing "Backspace" does no longer cause the end of the dialog.
- Corrected erroneous request of the memory-status.
- Several dialogues are now recorded in the corresponding questlogs.
- Bradleys slavelist and Ashtons goldlist will not be shown rolled up

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Paramount and Wizards of the Coast have released an initial "rough cut" trailershowing off the upcoming Dragons of Autumn Twilight animated movie.Given the fact that Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Dragonlancenovels are some of my all-time favorites, I really don't think thismovie is going to do them justice. The animation might have workedtwenty years ago, but it looks quite dated by today's standards.

If only someone would cough up a quarter billion dollars and hire Peter Jackson to do it right...

Even among videogames fans - who are hardly in a position to poke fun -the mention of Dungeons and Dragons conjures up an image of, well, nerds.It's not exactly a fair image; okay, so there are plenty of sociallyawkward and hygenically challenged virginal males who get a bit tooexcited about pen and paper role-playing, but there are plenty ofperfectly nice, friendly, interesting people who enjoy the pastime aswell.

No, really.

At the end of the day, it's just a social pursuitlike any other; drop in a bottle of whiskey alongside the 20-sideddice, and it's a fine recipe for an evening in. However, despite ourcompulsion to defend role-playing, we have to confess that there'ssomething to the whole "nerd" allegation - something summed up almostperfectly by a quick glance at the most recent Dungeons and Dragonsrule set.

All three books of it. Three books laden withstatistics, rules and minutiae, complex, intererlocking sets ofequations and regulations which define how the game is played down toits most minor details. It's tough, certainly, to flip through thosethree books and not come down heavily on the side of classing anyonewho does this stuff for fun as a nerd.

Those three books areDunge

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Simile-based advertising, long a favorite of marketing types in justabout every industry, is a double-edged sword. It simplifies anadvertiser's life by offering a fast and direct means of getting acrossto a potential customer what's inside the box. You ease the demands ofexplaining your product to an easily distracted public when you canpoint at something else and say, "See that? Like that."

The downside, of course, is invoking names from the past unavoidablyinvites comparison and creates in the audience an expectation that thenew product will be better than, or at the very least on par with, theold. By bringing up the names of Diablo and Dungeon Siege, two franchises that have achieved enviable levels of success, Meridian4's The Chosen: Well of Souls has taken the risky path of lining itself up against some very stiff competition.

The Chosen: Well of Souls is technically sound, and kudosto the developers at Rebelmind for that. I had initially expected toweave a tale of buggy woe, as within the first hour of playing I hadone crash-to-desktop and three hard locks; since then, however, thegame has performed flawlessly. Either I was extremely unlucky at thestart or I've been even luck

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Last year's Neverwinter Nights 2, a role-playing game for Windows PCs, released to critical fanfare and player enthusiasm.

That enthusiasm was shortly muted, however, by technical and game design bugs. By the time these got fixed, many attention-deficit gamers had already been lured away to the next shiny new game.

Now there's a good reason to dust off Neverwinter Nights 2. The first expansion, Mask of the Betrayer, is a potent reminder of just how entertaining games based on Dungeons & Dragons can be.

The heart of D&D is its system of rules, specifications and behaviors governed by statistical probabilities. In layman's terms, players roll dice to see what happens next. Swing a weapon at a monster, and several die rolls determine whether you hit and how hard.

This is pretty ponderous to do in real life, although plenty of people still do, and the majority of role-player game enthusiasts have moved to computer-based games that use D&D-esque game mechanics. In most computer role-player games, the actual probability calculations occur in the background, hidden from the player's eyes, but Neverwinter Nights 2 puts the dice rolling right up front in true D&D fashion, showing the outcome of









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When I first read about Carbine Studiosand Tim Cain’s involvement, I thought about asking them to do aninterview for the “Troika Chronicles”. So I contacted NCSoft and DavidSwofford (Director of Public Relations) arranged the whole thing forme. Thanks again, David!
So Jeremy Gaffney (Executive Producer), Tim Cain (Lead Programmer) andKevin Beardslee (VP of Design) answered some questions for me.

1 - At first I want to thank you for taking your time to answer some ofour questions. My first question is an easy one: Who are you and whatis your position at Carbines Studios?

We are Jeremy Gaffney (Executive Producer) and Tim Cain (LeadProgrammer) Along with Kevin Beardslee (VP of Design) we are part ofthe giant robot that is Carbine Studios. Well, medium-sized robot,currently.

2 - Can you tell us about the projects you have worked on in the past?

Jeremy: I founded Turbine Entertainment and was theoriginal CEO back in 1994. I left there to be the lead programmer onUltima Online 2 for Origin Systems. In 2001 I founded Destination Gameswith the Garriott brothers which became NCsoft’s Austin headquarters…Iwas Executive Producer on City of Heroes/Villains as well as the bizguy who signed up the A

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Introduction

Fallout 3, the sequel to the 90's RPG classics Fallout 1 and 2,has been in pre-production since Bethesda Softworks purchased therights to work on the title in July of 2004. The latest sequel has hada bumpy ride even before Bethesda started with its latest productionafter finishing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The media reception hasbeen nothing short of ecstatic, while discussion across the web showsthat there are some doubts among consumers.
All said and done, the game surely has captivated the interest of many.There have already been many previews based on the same demo, but youcan never have too much information. So I sat down, pen at the ready,as Pete Hines took control of the demo at the 2007 Games Convention inLeipzig, Germany to show us around Bethesda's imagining of Interplay'sclassics.

The Demo

Note that this is also the beginning of the Fallout 3 game, so slight spoilers ahead.
For their iteration, Bethesda has chosen to set the game in 2277 on theWest Coast of post-apocalyptic America. The game begins with astill-slide intro much like the original games, although the black andwhite stills are replaced with grainy postcard-style stills as RonPerlman, narrator o








































































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