Working Title 02.27.08: Working Spotlight - Online MMOs

Posted by Jordan Williams on 02.27.2008

Sure, there's some pretty bad online MMOs out there, but would you believe that there are some good ones too? On top of that would you beleive that one of them is a wrestling RPG?

Welcome back to the #1 Column to fall asleep for the first hour of Lost Odyssey only to be blown away since then, WORKING TITLE. It's been a pretty busy week for me, I just picked up Lost Odyssey and The Club and both are getting a pretty decent workout. But Thursday has rolled around again and it's time for me to put up another column.

This week is another one of those wonderful days when I have to resort to a back-up plan because the other plan fell through...pfft...who am I kidding? We all know I make this shit up as I type it.

Anyway, I was originally going to do a piece about the fallout from GDC, but despite all of the release dates being thrown around, nothing really groundbreaking happened so I'm going to pass on it. INSTEAD, I am going to shine the spotlight on some of those wonderful online games many people around here might not know about.

No, I'm not talking Maple Story or Runescape or things like that, these are online games played via the web browser and I personally play them a lot and think they are great fun. Just wanna get the word out and hope some more people try them out, it's time for another Working Spotlight.


Working Spotlight: Online MMOs

I'm sure when you hear MMO you begin to cringe a little bit if you're anything like me. WoW and Everquest and the like have sort of soured the whole genre and Maple Story lives just to tease you with its non-existent gameplay yet inexplicable popularity. Well, how about you just create a wrestler and beat the shit out of someone? Maybe even become a zombie and munch some faces.

How do you do they pray tell? Well read on and I'll show you how.


Urban Dead


www.urbandead.com
Cost: Free. (Donations offer server priority, more on that below)
Genre: Massively Multiplayer Online Survival Horror/Strategy.
Players: 40,000+

Urban Dead is pretty much exactly how it sounds. It takes place in the fictional Malton, which has come under attack by various zombies. You must survive. Period.

Well, there's a catch.

Everyone is a player. That's right. EVERYONE...even the zombies. When you die in Urban Dead(or if you choose, begin to play) you are a zombie. You feed on the flesh of the other living players while they try to survive against it. The game itself is bare-bones at its best. Using simple scripts and buttons to get you where you gotta go and get shit done. There's also a strategy element in the game in the shape of the Action Point(AP) system. You have a maximum of 50 Action points. Everything you do in UD generally costs one action point unless otherwise stated. The catch is, though, that action points only replenish at the rate of one per half hour. When you run out of points, you run out of 'turns' so to speak and you are stuck until enough time passes for you to gain a point back. This usually means that you will be playing once per day, which in a sense is realistic. If you were in a real zombie invasion you would spend more time hiding and keeping out of sight rather than gunning down every zombie you see. And if you were a Zombie you'd spend more time shambling down the streets looking for food rather than waiting for it to come to you.



This turns UD into a bit of thinking game. Say you have 10 points left, you know there's a bunch of brain eaters outside of the building you are huddled up in and you know if you stay here you are going to get killed. Do you risk making a run for it with only 10 points (which means you can only move 10 blocks) or do you try to fight it out, hoping you kill them all in 10 moves. It starts to become a bit of a management test because for the human players, it's VERY easy to find out you're out of points at the wrong time, which leads to you being stuck outside as the zombies grow closer.

Another thing to consider is that UD has a very diverse community of players. The main point of the game is zombies vs. humans, but many players have done things to change that. There are zombie groups who kill other zombies, human players who kill other humans, people who devote their lives to saving others...whatever you can think of, it's there. It's one of the few games I've ever played where every single aspect of the game is shaped by the players. There's no bots, no admins, no nothing. Every zombie is a player, every human is a player, and the players have all of the control.

Pros:
-Simple Layout and Design for low-end browsers and computers.
-Very active and complex community to play in.
-Choice to be either a human, or a zombie, or a weird mixture of both.
-The players control the game.
-Great game to run in the background.
-Battle system is based on chance, keeping everything as fair as possible.

Cons:
-50 AP will never seem like enough to get much done, and sometimes the wait for them to respawn can be murder, literally.
-Users are limited to 160 server hits a day, but this can be changed via donating to the site.
-Player Killers(specifically, humans killing other humans) is fairly common, and is protected by the site's rules.
-Server tends to lag during peak hours.
-May seem a bit too slow for some players
-Battle system is based on chance, which sometimes just might not be in your favor.

Overall, I'd say give Urban Dead a try. I've been playing it for about two months now and have a pretty powerful zombie character toiling about. It's not a fast game by any means, especially when you are first starting. But if you hang in there you'll find that for a text based RPG this game is about as deep as they come for free. A lot better than some of the other downloadable works you'll find on the internet.


The Wrestling Game


www.thewrestlinggame.com
Cost: Free (Donations offer incentives.)
Players:10,000+
Genre: Massively Multiplayer Online Wrestling RPG(Never thought you'd EVER hear that, huh?)

Gotta love a game that gets straight to the point. If you've ever been a fan of the EWR series of games, you might want to try this one on for size. TWG seems like it would be a simple concept, but it's surprisingly complex and works very well as an RPG. Things start out just as you'd expect them to. You create a wrestler based off of several classes such as Speed, Balanced, Submissions, etc. and you begin your rise to stardom.

All of the simple things end there. The game gets deep FAST. If you've ever played the Fire Pro Wrestling series of games and marveled at how deep the CAW feature is there, you'll be in for a treat when you realize how much freedom you have over your wrestler. You are free to level up their stats anyway you see fit, as well as purchase and train a myriad of real(and some imaginary) moves to use. You can even customize your own taunt and finishing move word for word. As with Urban Dead, this game is primarily text based but has a bit more visual meat on its bones.


You can even look like this guy if you wanted...

The best part of this game to me, personally, is the fact that it's obviously made by wrestling fans and the effort is every clear. The matches even flow in real time with real play by play announcing. You can opt to skip it all if you're impatient, but reading the match as it goes on can sometimes be really fun as they usually are very realistic and take a lot of twists and turns before the end. Who would've thought that someone would've been able to turn Wrestling into an RPG?

Pros:
-Game made for wrestling fans, by wrestling fans.
-Complete creative control when it comes to your wrestler.
-Leveling system works great and actually makes a difference.
-Running the matches in real-time adds a lot of realism.

Cons:
-Due to the game being originally in another language, some of the English is misspelled and/or sloppy.
-The website itself can be a bit hard to navigate at times.
-Donation incentives tend to make the game a bit unfair for the ones who don't donate.
-Tons of copycats(I.E John Cena19382, Stone Cold Steve Van Dam Punk).
-Tons of BAD characters ([insert anime character here])

Overall, I'd say that non-wrestling fans need not apply for this one. This is a game that I feel only wrestling fans are going to really want to sit down with and deal with. Once you get passed some of the glaringly bad errors and characters, you can see that there actually is a fun game here which supports federations and stables and a slew of other things. It's like EWR, but less managerial.

Working Feedback

While changes to a series over time is obviously necessary, the point is that these changes should not take a very good part or a selling point of the series and get rid of it for something worse. That's what both Def Jam Icon and Bomberman Zero did and that's why they both sucked. Yeah, if it ain't broke don't fix it but in keeping that analogy, keep in mind that everything does need maintenance. - MC42

Like I said in the comments, buddy. You've got a good head on your shoulders. I agree that NOTHING should stay the same. When that happens we get boring, stale games. You should always try to make a good thing better, but I think you should never try to overhaul something that obviously worked well for you. That's what EA and Hudsonsoft tried to do with ICON and BMAZ and as you can see, they failed.

I can think of a couple of "fixes" just off the top of my head that would fall into this category as well, whether they are the entire game or just certain aspects. Specifically, Guitar Hero III's multiplayer battle Mario Kart-esque "attacks," as well as most of the new characters in the Sonic the Hedgehog series. (After Knuckles, I would suggest, they were mostly downhill.) All in all, interesting idea for a rant, and I'm sure there are more to be found. Plus, you could do different takes on the idea, like changes that were for the better (Resident Evil 4, anyone?), or even those series that are in need of a change (Mario Party...though maybe it's just best to cut the
life support on that one.) - Hunter

While I didn't have much of a problem with the battle mode in Guitar Hero II, I will say that Sonic the Hedgehog is quickly becoming an offender of this rule. It's not so much the introduction of new characters every single game, it's more so that they just seem to be forgotten in the first next game. Sonic is a fast series, but it's starting to jump around far too much for its own good. They shoved out all of the characters they fleshed out like Knuckles and Tails in favor of newbies that have little-to-no story like Silver and Blaze. Hopefully the Sonic RPG for the DS will bring Sonic back to its winning ways. I also am inclined to agree with Resident Evil 4. I know there are a lot of people out there who didn't like the change of pace that RE4 brought to the table, but I think it was just what the series needed. Better controls, better gameplay, and better camera angles to me made it overall a better game.

Working Question: 4 out of 5 Agree

I don't like the Legend of Zelda series.

I also don't like Final Fantasy 7.

I'd get stabbed in certain places of the world for saying that, but then again there are other people who don't like big game franchises as well. Where do you fall in? Is there a famous/big game series that you just haven't liked or gotten into for whatever reason? Go ahead and lemme know and maybe I'll mail you a Persian hooker in the mail.

Seriously. Those things can live for days without air.

Until next time, I'm Jordan Williams...and seriously, Lost Odyssey is starting to get really fucking awesome. This man has a GUN AXE.