There’s probably some spoilage ahead. If you haven’t seen “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith” yet you shouldn’t probably read on. If you do however, don’t say I didn’t warn you afterwards.

Somewhere in the roaring mass of Wookies is probably Chewbacca standing and shouting. After their furious battle cry they storm forward and engage their druid enemies in a brutal combat. Cut. Obi Wan and Anakin are flying their agile spacecrafts thru a storm of raining fire in an orbital battle scene. Swoosh-Cut (one of the kind that only looks really cool in any Star Wars movie, but looks amateur in every other movie because it is basically one of the standard transitions digital editing suites offer).

Today we watched the latest and last Star Wars movie. And I really liked it, I could say loved it, though not as much as the old incarnations (nothing gets close). What really was brilliant about the movie was the constant feeling of war going on around and the lurking shadow hanging above all things. And the way characters, especially Anakin Skywalker / Darth Vader evolved. Especially his reasons in finally giving in to the dark side were completely reasonable and understandable. To save the life of the woman he loves, and their unborn children. What better reason can a man have to fight?

After Episode I “The Jar-Jar Menace” and Episode II “Attack of the Lovescenes” I really hadn’t high expectations about the last one, but I hoped that it would be darker than the first 2 ones. And it really was - though not in visuals, the fights and locations were as bright as ever (ever being Ep I+II) - but in the context of what was going on with the characters and the worlds they inhabit. All this really makes the movie seeable, logically understandable and what it does superb is making the jump back to the old Episodes from times back. And that is a major accompishment even from George Lucas himself.

So to sum this up, if you haven’t done yet, go watch “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith” in cinema as soon as possible. That is my only recommendation for today ^_^

I haven’t got much time to do anything else besides studying for exams at collage and playing Guild Wars. So I just resent to showing you some pictures of my ingame characters here:

This is AetherMcLoud, my Ranger/Elementalist, although lately he had to make space for a Player-VS-Player character (damn that 4-char per account limit!)

Alamos Undomiel, my Elementalist/Monk, currently sporting his Pyromancer outfit, although he plans to rework his skill in favor of Air or Earth magic later in the game.

Kitsune Torinasu, a Necromancer/Mesmer showing off her dark minons in the right picture. Mesmer in Guild Wars are the finessé class, they interrupt other warriors, disrupt enemy sorcerers’ spells and so on. Which works pretty well with the Blood & Death based Necromancer class.

Mononoke Hime was already in use as a name, so I baptized her Rei Mononoke. She’s a Warrior/Necromancer and curses her enemies before she strikes them down with vengeance and her sword!

… bestow a monthly fee upon its gamers. Guild Wars that is. Since the first true Massively Multiplayer Onlince Roleplaying Game (MMORPG for short) Ultima Online there were and are many contenders for the throne of this market - Everquest 2, Dark Age of Camelot and Asheron’s Call to name a few. World of Warcraft started a whole new hype for MMORPGs, particularly because it was both easy on beginners to the genre, and also hard to master for the experts - just like all of Blizzard’s games. Though any of these games use completely different worlds, inhabitants, engines and play mechanics, they have one thing in common: first they want money from you for the game on CD/DVD and then they want a monthly fee so you can play the game you just bought.

I recognize that developing games and getting the server farm needed for such bandwidth-heavy online games, and keeping them alive all the time costs (a lot of) money. It’s just that not everyone (and I believe almost noone) can and will play the game in question every day-in day-out. So if you got an exam-ridden time at college, you got another nice game, or for whatever reason you just can’t play the game for some weeks, you are still paying as if you did.

Guild Wars is the first Massively Online game that doesn’t use a monthly-fee system. Instead the publisher will release expansions on a regular basis, but you can still play and even meet people who got the extension, if you didn’t buy it. So you really only play for what you get, and not for what you already got.

Great, at the start I wanted to give a quick review on Guild Wars and point out all the things that are so great about it, but then I quickly driftet into politics and business. So I will just give you some likes to reviews from guys that do them much better than me anyway ^_^

GameSpy Review
pc.IGN.com Review
Game Revolution Review
UGO Review

Can’t write… must… play… Guild Wars…
I had some issues for new topics in mind recently, but I didn’t get to write anything specific down because all my spare time gets used up by the new king of online RPGs (Role Playing Games) - Guild Wars. In the next few days I will publish something more elaborate and in-depth about the game, but at the time I really have to level-up, search for skills and quest, form parties, and generally have a great time in the game world. But for now, just to get you hooked up on the game, a few screenshots from my charactes made:

Just read a post on the Games Workshops forums about which rules, rules-updates and FAQs one is supposed to play Warhammer 40k by. Which brought up a though I have about that firm since long time ago: They have all these awesome miniatures, stories, universes and characters, and yet their codices (army specific sub-rulebooks if you want) have ruleholes as big as a sumo-wrestler in it and they bring forth nazi-like policies about their stuff.

As a counterpart to Games Workshop (GW hereafter) I will list Wizards of the Coast because they are the other major player in the otherwise known as geeky or even worse art of playing games (Tabletop and Trading Card games that is). Wizards cashcow is without a doubt Magic the Gathering. Sure the cards aren’t particularly cheap, but especially when you start buying individual cards you need rather than hoping to get some good card in a random booster pack, you won’t spend as much as you have to on a nice and shiny Warhammer 40k army, models, painting stuff, books and all.

Anyway, to get to the punch line: Games Workshops rulebooks get revisions like 1 or 2 weeks after release. And of course if you want those revisions nicely printed you have to buy a new book, or download them from the net (if they are nice to you), or often you have to buy their monthly magazine to get the latest updates. So after a while you have like your rulebook, codex, 5 sites of printed out FAQ text, a few magazines with erratas and so on.
Wizards on the other hand update the texts on their cards regularly, and when they find a loop in one of the rules they will close it immediately. Also they have constands, as in daily, updates, news, tips, articles, rants, features, tactics and more on their website. GW, while having a forum per sé, have a policy about their stuff that isn’t funny anymore. I mean I can fully understand wanting to license and copyright your work and all. But closing threads and banning people because they quoted 2 lines of text from the rulebooks to proof some point or show something that doesn’t quite fit with that rule is nothing but rude and (for a lack of a better term) Micro$oft-ish.

Now, to finally come to the conclusion of this rant: Wizards primary sales come from their cards, which they of course copyrighted, but they give the players an always up-to-date rules library and articles on the hobby to really keep them at bay and into the game. It is understandable that they want to let everyone know, when some card or art from them is shown somewhere that it comes from them.
Now what would GW do in such a situation? Right, sue everyone that uses images from you on their private homepage that they made because they love the hobby and want to tell people about it. Or stop letting other stores selling your stuff and therefore giving you money passivly and just sell everything via your shops that are like 1 per 50 kilometers at best.
What Wizards did was the following: They coded Autocard. Now you only have to implement 2 lines of javascript into your website and can make links to every card (image) they ever produced in a nice and shiny popup window from your site. Now that’s what I call a good decision both marketing- and player-wise.

So does this mean that GWs primary sales come from rulebooks too because they guard their written rules like a 6 inch diamond? Of course not, their biggest sales come from their miniatures - so keeping everything that evolves around them, like making good rules for fun games with your expensive minatures would be a good idea.
Of course I know about next to nothing about big business strategies, I only see 2 very different companies with 2 very different approaches to 2 very similar markets.

I hope GW will somehow get a huge market decrease to let them think about their position again, may it be for the first time. Now excuse me while I kiss the sky.