Cheat LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean

Nirwana Sitoeking » Cheat LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean

Characters
Entry Location:  pause menu, cheat codes

• Ammand the Corsair – EW8T6T
• Angelica (Disquise) – DLRR45
• Angry Cannibal – VGF32C
• Blackbeard – D3DW0D
• Clanker – ZM37GT
• Clubba – 644THF
• Davy Jones – 4DJLKR
• Gunner – Y611WB
• Hungry Cannibal - 64BNHG
• Jacoby – BWO656
• Jimmy Legs – 13GLW5
• King George – RKED43
• Koehler – RT093G
• Mistress Ching – GDETDE
• Philip – WEV040
• Quartermaster – RX58HU
• The Spaniard – P861JO
• Twigg – KDLFKD
• Governor Weatherby Swann – LD9454

- ( Baca Juga : Cheat Resident Evil 4  )

Player democracy

In case you are wondering why I never have any happy EVE stories over here, it is because I get these stories from other blogs and gaming press, and curiously there never ARE happy stories about that game. It is always about scams, treachery, and betrayal.

The latest case is interesting because it concerns the unique way CCP interacts with their players. They allow the players an elected representative who negotiates player issues with the developers. Sounds nice? Well, as Stabs reports, the Goons (a group of players dedicated to making the game worse for everybody else) have subverted the election process, got one of their own elected as player representative with the help of a Goon player who was employee of CCP, and then pushed through changes to the game directly helping their alliance against other players.

At this point player representation and democracy can be said to have pretty much failed. Or as Stabs say, it is only about metagaming now. Any other company thinking about player representatives will see this, and decide that the effort isn't worth the bother. Anybody elected will only ever represent the most powerful alliance of players, never the silent majority. And if anything, companies have learned by now that they need to listen *less* to their most hardcore players, not more, to be successful and drive revenue.

The Ex-Files

MMO-Champion mentions interviews the Blizzard developers gave on patch 4.3, in which they made a side-remark that "There are more people that played World of Warcraft but no longer play World of Warcraft than currently play World of Warcraft". I believe that this has been true for years already, and that the number of ex-players is not just "more", but significantly more than current players. The reason I believe that is that I regularly stumble upon PC games sales charts, and World of Warcraft has been in the top 10 for years, and pops up again frequently whenever there isn't a great number of big new releases. Thus if sales of World of Warcraft are strong over years, but the overall number of players has plateaued and is now declining, it means that as many or more players leave WoW.

I don't know if there are 15 million ex-players, 20 million, or 30 million. But as Blizzard themselves said, it is more than 11 million, and that by itself makes the number of ex-players huge. And that is very important, because most bloggers and commenters tend to forget about these ex-players when discussing size of the market. How often have you heard arguments about some new game like SWTOR "hurting" (if not "killing") WoW, because "the players of the new game have to come from somewhere".

Surprise, surprise, that is simply not true. Even if the analysts are right and SWTOR will get 3 million subscribers, that does NOT mean that WoW or other MMORPGs will lose 3 million subscribers. Because the overall market size is NOT the sum of all subscribers of all MMORPGs, but is in fact a much bigger number. It is likely that for many other games the same statement is true as for WoW, and there are more ex-players than players. And not all ex-players of game A are now playing game B. For example I am not currently subscribed to ANY monthly subscription MMORPG, nor do I actively play any MMORPG in Free2Play mode. Nevertheless I'll certainly pick up SWTOR and Guild Wars 2, so these games can obviously gain subscribers without another game losing any.

It has become pretty much impossible to track all the potential players of MMORPGs. People take breaks from MMORPGs, play single-player games, play social or browser games, or play Free2Play games where they appear as "customers" regardless of whether they are actively playing or not. Even if you only count North America and Europe, there are probably well over 20 million people who at some point in their live played some variation of online role-playing game and are likely to do so again if something sufficiently attractive comes along. A big new game like SWTOR is able to attract players from this ex-players pool, and significantly grow the number of "active" MMORPG players.

That is not to say that new games don't also attract players currently playing other games. And given its market share, a lot of players switching games will come from World of Warcraft. But don't think that whatever number of people SWTOR attracts is directly linked to an equal number of subscribers less for World of Warcraft. A lot of people that will play SWTOR end of this year are not currently subscribed to any MMORPG.

Bastion tells the story right

I've been playing Bastion over the weekend. Brilliant game, and well worth the $15 it costs. Now normally I'm mostly looking at gameplay in a game, but in that respect Bastion doesn't revolutionize the genre: You get one weapon on the left mouse button, another on the right, plus one special attack, and the possibility to heal yourself with potions. And then you go and kill enemies and smash inanimate objects to find hidden loot, getting xp, and various upgrades. There are a lot of action adventure games with similar gameplay.

What makes Bastion special is its unique style. And a lot of that comes from the way that Bastion tells the story of the game: With a narrator who is talking about YOU all the time. The whole story of the game is told while you play, and in comments that are in direct relation to what you do. It is a bit like a sports commentary, with you being the only player on the field. Places, NPCs, items and events are explained as you encounter them. And even if you just fool around, the narrator gives an appropriate comment to that.

That style of narrative works extremely well to get you interested in the story, because you get the feeling that it is YOUR story that is told. You aren't just some interchangeable hero, some secondary actor in the scripted story of somebody else. There are no quest-givers telling you various boring versions of various boring reasons of why they want you to kill 10 foozles. The story is something that happens while you play, not an intro before playing that you'd rather skip.

There have been a lot of games that promised a revolution in story-telling. Bastion passes on that hype and goes directly to delivery. It turns out that it isn't just the difference between written text and voice-acting that makes you involved in the story, but the timing and subject of the story. In the end you want to be the hero of an adventure game, and that only really works if the story is about you and what you do, and not about some fictional characters and events you don't really care about.

Is that still a choice?

I was watching a video review of Deux Ex: Human Revolution. It showed the same scene played through twice, once using violence, once using stealth. Great! The player gets choice! Not so great: The non-violent way gave twice the xp of the violent version. And the reviewer showed other scenes where the non-violent choice was not only giving bigger bonuses, but was also considerably easier. So that at some point the player has to ask himself: Is that still a choice?

The question reminded me of the previous discussion here on the light side and dark side points and gear in Star Wars: The Old Republic. But ultimately, by comparison with the real world, it appears that the problem is predictability. In the real world your choices are complicated because you don't know all the consequences. You don't know if you will lead a happier life if you propose marriage to your girlfriend, or just the opposite. In a video game your choices result either in no consequences at all, or in some change in stats and points which are usually immediate and easy to understand. If stunning the guard gives 100 xp and killing him gives 50 xp, the choice you make is easy. It doesn't involve guesswork, a conscience, a moral decision, or wondering whether the police will be after you.

I haven't played it yet, but I assume that in Deus Ex there are save games, so if you make the "wrong" choice, you can reload the game and try again. And you'll either learn yourself, or read somewhere, that the non-violent option is *always* better, so soon you don't make those "wrong" choices any more. But if the option to make the "wrong" choice disappears, then that is not really a choice any more. It is like the "choice" in a MMORPG whether you want to accept the quest to kill 10 foozles, or whether you want to those foozles without a quest and miss out on the quest reward.

While in MMORPGs you don't have the option to save and reload, there are a lot of other players around who will tell you what the "right" choices are. That might be on some website or forum, or it might be people you play with. If your raidleader wants to talk to you about the "interesting" talent choices you made when building your character, you know what is coming. Now on the one hand that might be a social problem of in how far others you play with have the right of demanding you playing an optimized character. But the underlying problem again is predictability: If talent A gives 0.3% more damage output than talent B on every possible encounter, the choice between A and B becomes a false one. If encounters were more random, and talent B would be slightly inferior most of the time but much superior in some special cases, there would be more of a real choice to it.

Time to roll out again one of my favorite quotes on game design, Sid Meier's "a good game is a series of interesting choices. In an interesting choice, no single option is clearly better than the other options, the options are not equally attractive, and the player must be able to make an informed choice.". Looking at Deus Ex, Star Wars: The Old Republic, or World of Warcraft, I don't think these conditions are fulfilled. And in a way that is a more general trend: By trying to prevent players' frustration from having made bad choices, developers ended up giving them no choice at all, making games more and more an exercise of following a predetermined optimal path. The consequences of every choice are now predictable and one option is clearly better than another, or our choices don't have consequences at all. Is that still a choice? No, it isn't!

Kickstarting games

Would you pay for a game that doesn't exist yet? That sounds a bit like a crazy idea, but in fact the possibility exists in various forms. For example I already paid $5 for my pre-order of Star Wars: The Old Republic. I'll get the money back when I purchase the game, but right now I'm out of pocket $5 and have to hope that the game actually releases, or if not that EA would refund me my pre-order. EA being a big company and SWTOR such a big project, the risk of the game and my money disappearing is minimal. But there are other examples with more risk.

One other game I paid for which isn't released yet is Glitch. I'm in the beta, I like the game, and they had an offer where whatever you pay now for subscription advantages is applied to both the beta and the release version of the game, so it is kind of a full-price pre-order. The risk is obviously higher, but Glitch is a game I believe in, and which I am happy to support in the beta stage.

And then there is Kickstarter, a website on which you can fund various projects which only exist in an early planning stage. For example you can give money to fund the NASA MMORPG Astronaut: Moon, Mars & Beyond. 645 people did so, giving a total of over $33,000. Every project has a list of rewards what you'll receive if you pledge money to that project. The more you give, the more you get, so a small donation gives you beta access, a big donation gets you an appearance as 3D hologram in the game.

If you aren't interested in the moon, you could also give money to the Steampunk MMORPG Notch. They only got 59 backers up to now for under $3,000. Again there are rewards for pledges depending on how much money you give them, ranging from beta access to having a god named after you. More info on Notch here.

While interesting as a concept, the risks of funding a game via Kickstarter are obviously high. You are giving money to people you don't know based on a video and some concept art. If the game fails to ever be released, your money is gone. And even if the game is released and you get your reward, you can't be sure that the game is really that great as advertised. But if you really believe in a game, Kickstarter is a way to put your money where your mouth is, and maybe get in at the ground floor, scoring some unique rewards that won't be available any more later in the development cycle.

iTunes transfer

One of the "joys" of getting a new computer is re-installing a lot of software and transferring a lot of data from the old computer to the new. This has gotten easier in the age of digital distribution, for example I only had to install Steam on the new computer and log into my account to have access to all the games I ever bought on Steam. The problems started when I tried the same with iTunes. As my iTunes library consists only of songs I bought on the iTunes store, I expected to have access to them on the new computer. Especially since the iTunes help specifically tells me that I'll have access to all my purchased songs and offers a detailed guide on how to download the old purchased songs to the new computer. Only problem: It didn't work at all. Following the instructions I soon ended on a screen where the screenshot of the help file showed a button to press, but that button simply wasn't there.

After several tries, browsing through the iTunes help files and the online support, I finally mailed Apple support. Who answered me within a few hours, which I consider good service. But the answer was that in fact their system does not at all work as described in the help files, unless you live in the USA. The download purchased songs functionality is part of a service called iCloud, which is only offered in the USA for various copyright and license reasons. Okay, I understand that. But then why don't they write that in their help files??? Nothing is more annoying than having a detailed guide on how to do something, only to find that it doesn't work.

I ended up going for the more complicated Plan B: Setting up a home network between my old Vista computer and the new Windows 7 computer, setting the iTunes on both computers to sharing mode (which isn't easy because again the iTunes help files contain lots of errors, obviously having been written for an earlier version of iTunes), and importing the shared library from the old computer to the new computer. So now I do have all my songs on the new computer. But I find the inaccuracies of the iTunes help files really annoying. Misleading help is worse than no help at all. And if your software works differently in different regions of the world, that fact needs to documented in the help too.