As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the STO review as been pulled, that’s due to some interesting developments on my end of things. However fear not, we do have some other reviews pending in the next week or two, so stay tuned!

There are times when I wonder about the state of the world, and then there are times, I simply getting annoyed over the little things. Now I understand people whom actively use twitter would love to have followers and have people who find them interesting want to follow their tweets for a variety of reasons.

Of course we all hate spam bots and we detest getting stupid tweets from said bots, but then there’s interesting people whom would be under normal circumstances great to follow and even interact with via Twitter. However something occurs that for whatever reason annoys the crap out of me.

Someone follows you and you check them out and hey they’re not a spam bot, but someone interesting so you follow them back, a bit of time passes and then suddenly they un-followed you for no obvious reason and yet you’re still following them along with a pant load of other people whom were probably drawn in much the same way.

Now I can understand filtering out people whom annoy, offend, or otherwise just aren’t interesting anymore, but to unfollow people en masse just to have a nice high follower count (or so it would appear) just seems kind of cheap. Celebrities get away with it for obvious reasons as they’re usually not even the ones doing the tweeting, or they don’t want to be flooded with the silly toils of every Tom, Dick, and Harry. But when it comes to the regular folks whom probably just like having a large following without any real interaction with them, or better still without being interesting in any way do it, it’s no different than the folks on social networking sites who make friends with everyone but doesn’t speak to anyone.

I generally have the policy of following back people who follow me, unless they either turn out to be spam bots, complete idiots, or just plan don’t tweet for several months. It’s partly because it’s the polite thing to do, and also because I enjoy interacting with people from all over the place in many different industries.

What kicked off this particular rant was going through my twitter account today and discovered a whole slew of people I’d been following no longer seem to be following me and while it might be that I’m just not that interesting, it could also be they don’t want to appear to be uncool by following more than they are being followed.

I’ll never really know the case and maybe I just don’t want to, no belay that, I do want to know, who wouldn’t? I’d love to know if I some how pissed someone off, or if I’m simply not that interesting anymore. It’d make me more aware of how I might have done such a thing, or it might aid me in being more interesting to those whom do follow me.

I’m quite sure others feel the same way, so what’s the moral of this rant? If you’re just out to get followers then either be really interesting, or build them the old fashioned way by communicating with people. If you’re just in it for the popularity, then you either need to star in some A-list movies, or grow up and get passed the grade school mentality.

Networking etiquette dictates that to build successful connections you need to be open and interactive with those connections, not just have a long list of names of people you really have no interest in.

At least that’s my understanding of things; feel free to correct me in the comments!

Gamepot USA officially released Bright Shadow today, it’s a lovely anime-esque mmorpg that I’ve been enjoying lately, and we hope to have our review for it posted soon. Included in the release was of course a patch with their initial item mall content. Patch Notes below.

Greetings Lucienians!

Firstly, we would like to thank everyone who took part in our Closed Beta and Open Beta testing phases. We truly appreciate the effort you all put to helping us test Bright Shadow, to bring it to its Official Launch today.

Rarely does a game see such a smooth launch, as Bright Shadow has seen these past weeks. However, there were still a few things we felt needed changing before our Official Launch. We will detail these now:

Item Mall Release
We’re pleased to present the item mall, now available for users. Users can purchase PotCash to spend on rather spiffy items such as costumes, wings, and weapon covers.

The following items will be included in our Item Mall premiere:

Function

-SP Potion
-Thunder Hill Scroll

-Meteor Pit Scroll

-STR Reset Book 1

-CON Reset Book 1

-AGI Reset Book 1

-DEX Reset Book 1

-WIS Reset Book 1

-INT Reset Book 1

-Phoenix Feather x5

Equipment

-Ninja Costume

-Racing Costume

-Cowboy Costume

-Devil Costume

-Giant Panda*

-Broom*

-Calligraphy Brush*

-Big Banana*

-Antenna*

-Lyre*

Use

-Red Firework x3

-Red/Yellow Spiral Fireworks x3

-Giant Angel Wings x5

-Giant Golden Wings x5

-Rain x5

Others

-Hairstyle Well-Traveled

-Hairstyle Solo Strand

-Hairstyle Angel Strands

-Hairstyle Schoolgirl Sally

-Face: Enthusiasm

-Face: Friendly Fred

-Face: Innocence

-Face: Doe Eyes

-Lens: Ocean Blue

-Lens: Brown

-Hairdye: Crimson Red
-Hairdye: Orange

-Shop Sign: Wooden x3

-Shop Sign: Neon x3

-My Shop: Golden Tent x3

-Tumble

-Dance

Full Screen Mode
We’ve changed the default for game launch to full screen when you first play. Don’t worry though; you can still change back to window mode from the launcher.

New Hotkey Defaults

We’ve changed the default hotkeys to reflect a more user friendly experience.
Detailed information about exact changes in this will be posted soon.

Thanksgiving Event

What’s November without turkey?
We’ve got a buffet of an event ready to serve up for the season!

From 11-16-2009 to 11-30-09 we will be hosting:

A Thanksgiving Nightmare

The Thanksgiving Goddess has been having a terrible nightmare. Enter her dream and slay the terrible beasts, to help her get much needed sleep. If you do well, she may just give you a reward!

Once again, we would like to thank everyone for taking part in our testing phases, and wish you all happy gaming into the future of Bright Shadow.  We are constantly working to improve our games, and look forward to growing with both you, and Bright Shadow.

Kind regards,
Gamepot Staff/Bright Shadow Team

Alright now that I’ve set the tone with the above video, as everyone knows (unless they’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of weeks) Closed Beta has started for Star Trek Online, and beta sign ups have begun for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Now I’m a pretty ‘core fan of both franchises and I’m eagerly waiting to play both of these games, as I imagine every other fan boi and fan gerl is also. But there begs the question…

Which am I anticipating more?

The answer to that isn’t simple as I have no idea! I want to be a rock’em sock’em Jedi, but at the same time I want to beam around the galaxy in a star ship tackling those Federation yahoos. This is a conundrum facing many sci-fi geeks the world over; which franchise and which game do we really want to support. I’m certain many will opt to play both, but for us time constricted folks it’s likely to come down to one or the other. Certainly some will gravitate based on their experience with the aforementioned games, some will like one more than the other based on game play, graphics, or some obscure geeky thing or another.

But given who’s behind each game, Cryptic Studios doing ST:O and BioWare doing SW:TOR, I suspect it’s going to be a hard fight with ourselves one way or another. A duel of the fan-bases is going to ensure and I’m not sure which is going to win if either. Lots of us are more staunchly embed in one camp or another, or split evenly down the middle. The flame wars that will come and spread across the internets is going to be astounding as fans will rally behind their choice and evangelize whichever game that might be.

When caught up in so much chaos, where will that leave the fence sitting fans, who can’t decide either way? Worst case they will decide which community is less annoyingly vocal and mature than the other, or they’ll get fed up with both sides and run off to play Farmville. I hope, I desperately hope that both communities can learn to co-exist and we don’t see to much tomfoolery go on.

But when it comes to fan bois and fan gerls that seems about as likely as my winning the lottery. So I leave it to you dear readers, how will you decide when the time comes, will you be Dances with Siths or Gone with the Vulcans?

For me, I can tell you one thing…

I have no idea! They both look awesome XD

For the majority of time we’ve had video games there’s been music attached to them. It a fact music can trigger memories and sometimes music can just spontaneously pop into our head at the strangest time. Like any good gamer, most of the music that pops into my mind and the strangest times is game music. There’s a lot of music that instantly plays and recall that particular game, or that period in our life when we were playing that game.

There’s been good music, and bad music in games and the use of music in games can either be a good counter point to the game experience or it’s just thrown in there because either the developers liked the song or they just couldn’t find anything better and took whatever they happened to hear in the elevator on their way to the office.

As far as recalling music, whenever I hear the Legend of Zelda theme, regardless of which version for which iteration, my thoughts always go back to the gold cartridge for the NES.

Music can be very effective in games to set a scene, add ambiance, make for kick ass battle scenes and cinematics, or  just be part of the experience that comes with a game. For the sake of not pissing anyone off I’m not going to list the misses that fall into the game music category, and I can think of a wealth of music that stands out in my mind as game music I could listen to for hours. I’ll post one of those examples later.

My point however is that when making games we should and personally have to think about the music we associate with our game. Music that adds to the experience is a benefit, both to the game but also to longevity. If people can hear a tune and instantly think back to the fun and joy they had playing your game not only did you get the game right but you have a certain kind of stickiness that you might not otherwise find. Music as a memory cue can add a wealth of recognition to your game(s), but also your brand.

Squaresoft has been remarkably good at this, not that it comes as a surprise of course, considering they have Nobuo Uematsu-Sama, and others making music for their games. Even after all these years of Final Fantasy games, I still get that chill run through me when I hear the tell tale theme, Legend of Zelda manages that of course as I stated above, but I can think of many more examples.

But then there’s the other side of this conversation, when game music isn’t used effectively, isn’t adding to the experience but instead, just sits in the game and ends up either annoying the crap out of the players or gets blatantly ignored. MMO’s are notorious for crappy music selections in the games, often recycling the same music for area after area. Which let me tell you, gets old really quickly, especially when you’re transitioning from a swamp land, through a town, into an ice area and the same ghastly, worse than elevator music persists throughout the game world.

I know music can be expensive if you’re shelling out money for a Big Name composer to do your game, but to be honest you don’t need to go that far to get good music. Looking through the indie music scene is it rock, electronic, or folk music depending on the genre of your game you can find quality music to bring into your game world and add to the experience.

It’s not rocket science and maybe it does require your designers/developers/ and especially your producers to have some level of decent taste, but at the same time, it is worth the effort. Of course you want to focus on game play, art style, game experience, game world and all the components that make up a successful title, but at the same time, you don’t want to cause your players ears to bleed and do a half assed job picking music.

Music can and is effective both for game experience, brand recognition, but also the all important stickiness. You want your players to remember your game fondly, and use music for its memory cue ability so the next time you launch a title, your players can remember the kick ass time they had on the previous one and look forward to your next offering.

Music might not seem important, but I can recall the countless times I’ve seen players ask; “Is the music any good?”

Something to think about; that and remember to be consistent for god sake. For now, here are a few more samples of games that got music right, even if it’s only in one certain part of the game.

Yeah I know, most of it’s Squaresoft, what can I say, they get it right most of the time.