Sephiroth

@ Cammy -- Really? The gaming populace that would be interested in playing WoW wouldn't understand how to plug a USB cord into a USB port?

@Everyone else -- I've played FFXI on PS2/3 since it came out. It allows either Keyboard/mouse or Controller to play. You can even use a combination of Keyboard and Controller or Controller and Mouse.. whatever you choose. FFXI's macro setup is tied to the trigger buttons. Pulling the X-trigger pulls up a menu of all the macros tied to Alt(plus the F keys). Pulling the other trigger pulls up a menu of the macros tied to Ctrl etc. Sure it might be slightly slower than just reaching down to the keyboard and hitting ctrl-F3, but it's still easy and fast to use.

And really... sitting on my couch or laying in bed, with my keyboard on my lap while playing on my 50 inch LCD tv is much more comfortable than sitting in a chair all close to the desk and hunched over the keyboard. But, *shrug* to each their own.

Just saying that "its not as easy" is just a lazy excuse imo though. FFXI is playable by PC users as well as PS3 and XBox 360 users, from North America to England, Germany, Spain, France and all the way to Japan. All versions, all countries on the same servers playing together. There's even an Auto Translate function so you can type to people who speak other languages.

Cross platform MMO?

Hmm... I don't remember making my name Sephiroth... I didn't even think he was all that badass and generally don't like people who use the name Sephiroth. I call shenanigans.

Ashlar

They already made this game. Well EA didn't but Konami did. It was an arcade game back in maybe the 80s or 90s. It was almost exactly like what is described above. A 2 player co-op game with both characters running straight ahead passed/through Cobra forces. Then at the end of the stage your stage Boss would come out and you'd have to take them down. You could chose between 4 characters, Duke, Snake-eyes, Scarlette and ... im not sure, maybe Gung Ho or Road Block (basically most of the same characters from the movie).

Ive got a version of it on something someone downloaded on my computer here at work. MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator). Tons of old Arcade games on there. I had forgotten completely about the game until reading this article today. Booted it up and its exactly like in the article.. just slightly worse graphics.

I've got to mention some things about this that no one seems to know/have heard yet:

This boss, the Pandemonium Warden, is the final boss in a string of NMs (Notorious Monsters..). To even get to him, you must kill multiple other NMs along 3 seperate 'paths'. Once you've killed one NM, you obtain an item to fight the next along the path. To have gotten to the PW you would have had to have already fought 18 (?-rough calculation) other battles. This luckily would have been over a long time period not 1 day. Losing to PW means you have to do all those fights again just to be able to have another shot at him.

This battle everyone is talking about was one of the first attempts on the PW on any of the games servers. Of course it wasnt easy, no one knew anything about the PW before this fight. Could it have been killed easier? Probably... but without a few more attempts (or preferably some NPC/quests to give hints about weaknesses) no one would know.

As to why not stop after X hours? They thought they were actually doing good... They'd beat the bastard down and he'd change shapes. They'd kill that form and he'd come back and then change forms again. Once they killed that form he'd change forms again. Being the first try, they had no idea how many forms he would change into before it was his final form...


"alterations are required to prevent such battles from exceeding a certain predetermined length of time" - This is believed to mean that they will add a 'Rage' effect to these NMs. Basically once they've been popped they will behave normally until X time. Once that time passes they will 'roid out and slaughter everyone.

I've always loved SOCOM for the fact that you can easily switch between first and third person on the fly. Sometimes running around and shooting its nice to have that first person view, however I always feel vulnerable in first person. You can't tell exactly where you are and what's exposed.. 'Am I behind the tree or beside it?!??! ****, it doesn't matter now, cause I'm dead.'

"Also, it’s important to us that the entire player base is able to play together. Microsoft’s Xbox Live architecture is very protected from all sorts of outside influence, so shared play between 360 and PC owners would be very tough."

Er.. Square/Enix seem to not have any problems with this. FFXI is coming to the 360 in about a month, already been in Beta test for a few months now. You just have to log into Live and then log into PlayOnline. And as for the play between 360 and PC.. well, FFXI not only has that, but also play between those two as well as the PS2...across multiple continents (NA,EU,JP).

It seems it's possible to do it, Blizzard either just doesn't want to, or doesn't know how to..

I play Final Fantasy XI and RMT is certainly going on there as well. Known 'gilsellers' rountinely camp hard to claim mobs which drop very rare items and basically have a monopoly on certain high-priced items. They often engage in underhanded tactics such as 'training' higher level mobs onto you if you try to compete against them. These higher level mobs then kill you, leaving the gilsellers all alone to camp with no competition.

Then this Christmas came. The Gil selling websites all dropped the price to buy Gil, causing more and more people to buy, while at the same time raising the Auction prices on the items they've monopolized in game. Some items which sold for an already high price of say 6 million skyrocketed to as high as 16-18 million. This isn't just one server either, this happened on every single server.

Many have already quit the game and many more are talking about it if nothing is done to curb this. RMT is crippling the games economy.