Away and Gone

So speaking of computer games....

Er, just noticed my computer clock is an hour ahead. Daylight Savings Time has snuck up on me again. I'm a "Fall Back" kinda guy, "Spring Forward" just ain't my scene, man.

Coffee.

So for the past week I've been playing Planetside. Now they started an interesting thing "promotion" of sorts which I think is kinda brilliant.

Planteside is Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter (MMOFPS). So it's like Doom, Unreal Tournament etc. I've never been huge into the genre, but it's a great time waster, is all twitch (which I suck at) but what the hey, sometimes my brain just ain't up to managing a civilization over the scale of millennia.

So I did try the 7-day trial of the game years ago. I think I lasted a couple of hours. Like most MMOs, the more experience you get, the better equipment etc you have access to. So for someone just starting, you get owned (or rather pw0ned). When I first tried it, I usually went to a battle, found an enemy tank, or giant robot, or some guy in powered armour and got pounded. Not fun.

But someone at Sony Online actually came up with a great idea. Give the game away for free, but you can only go so high in experience. They call it the 'Reserves' but really its just cannon fodder.

Of course the idea is that some people will want to move beyond the cannon-fodder stage and sign-up. But I can see alot of kids (and adults) just playing for free. Which means there's alot more people playing.

So now there's actual battles. Some of the vets of the game don't like all these newbs running around and killing them. I think it's great.

In The Real World

So I'm going to the Microsoft campus in Redmond this week. The geeks at work were invited for a one week sit-down with the SQL Server development team: the guys who actually code the thing. There will of course be some 'marketecture' but I'm hoping to get some questions answered, see what the real dilly-o is with 2005 and plunder the MS store.

And that's about it for the week then. Have fun!