Funcom establishes casual MMO games subsidiary SweetRobot
– SweetRobot to publish upcoming social online game `Pets vs. Monsters’ –

Durham, USA – December 11th, 2009 – Funcom today announced the establishment of a new subsidiary, SweetRobot, who will be publishing Funcom’s ventures into the social and casual MMO-gaming markets. The first project to be made available through SweetRobot is the upcoming MMO-game `Pets vs. Monsters’ which will go into public beta testing later this month. The game is a massively multiplayer online game aimed at a younger demographic, specifically children aged eight to twelve.

“SweetRobot will be focusing on publishing games outside the traditional high-end MMO-segment which Funcom has been focusing on the last years,” says Funcom CEO Trond Arne Aas. “This will allow us to explore new market opportunities that differ from what we have been doing before while still retaining Funcom’s familiar profile. This definitely marks a new and exciting direction for us.”

A team of fifteen people have been working on `Pets vs. Monsters’ for almost two years, during which time the team has also focused on developing a highly flexible game engine that can easily be customized to work with multiple concepts. `Pets vs. Monsters’ is the company’s first venture into the more casual, social gaming segment, and SweetRobot will use this as an opportunity to experiment with different concepts, gameplay mechanisms and business models. No release date has been set for `Pets vs. Monsters’, and the upcoming public beta is intended to help the developers gather early, but valuable feedback from the target audience that will prove important to the game’s direction and development.

“Our passion and dedication for high-end online games remains the same, and `Age of Conan’ and `The Secret World’ are still our primary focus”, says Aas. “But we are also eager to explore new opportunities within the industry, and it felt natural for us to step into the social gaming segment especially considering our outstanding experience with making online worlds and communities. `Pets vs. Monsters’ is very much an exciting project for us, our first attempt at creating an online game for a younger target audience with gameplay mechanics and production values that differ from what we have done before. The fact that these productions require significantly lower budgets and smaller teams to develop is very attractive to us, as it allows us to try out several concepts instead of placing all our resources into one single bet.”

`Pets vs. Monsters’ is a massively multiplayer online game intended for children between eight and twelve years of age. The user is treated to a quick download and will be logged in and playing in no time due to the game’s streaming technology. Players will adventure through numerous different `worlds’ – from deserts to jungles – accompanied by their trusted pet which they ride into exciting battles. It is also possible to chat and play with other players from all over the world, and the game employs typical role-playing mechanics such as statistics, equipment and loot to incentivize progress.

For more information on `Pets vs. Monsters’ please visit the game’s official website.

And here’s some images to feast your eyes upon, if that got you excited.

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Minneapolis, MN – December 7, 2009 – Last Straw Productions announced today the founding of Looking for Group Expo (LFGX), a massively multiplayer online game fan event like no other. Last Straw also announced a call for speakers and sponsors. Exhibit space will be limited to ensure an incredible experience for gamers during the inaugural event. The event will be held June 25-27, 2010 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Only a small handful of MMOs have individual fan events and with those, we see players who are forced to choose their favorite games or events based on what’s coming up and who they would like to meet with the most. The goal of LFGX is to provide the ultimate experience for all MMOG and virtual world fans to check out what’s new in the world of MMOs as well as meet friends across all games and participate in exciting MMO related events. LFGX will have allure no single game or company event can provide: an event for everything MMO related. Developer sessions, special VIP attendee events, game competitions, private screenings, guild meetings and more will combine to draw an incredible numbers of players.

LFGX offers a cost-effective solution for game developers and publishers to showcase their existing and future MMOs without the added overhead of creating their own events. Games will get exposure to current fans as well as prospective future fans with this unified event. Companies will be able to increase brand awareness and connect with current and future players on a more personal level through participation in LFGX.

LFGX 1.0 is offering key founding sponsorship packages only available through January. Please contact Jonathon Stevens at jonathon.stevens@laststraw.info or visit LFGX’s website at www.lfgexpo.com for more information or follow LFGX on Twitter to keep updated on the latest happenings.

About Last Straw Productions

Last Straw Productions, founded by CEO Jonathon Stevens , is built on a passion for building success in independent MMOs both in its own Studio and industry wide through IMGDC. IMGDC, now in its fourth year, was founded with the mission of open sharing of knowledge and resources to empower independents to build quality MMOGs that spark imagination and innovation.

I’ll certainly be there!

The game begins with Batman returning a recently escaped Joker to Arkham Asylum, Gotham’s favorite place to house the criminally insane. Of course, no good deed goes unpunished – Joker manages to escape his captors, leaving Batman stuck on an island madhouse with Joker running the show.

Batman’s a tough customer, and combat is brawler-based. Button mashing is usually enough to get you through the early third of the game, but as the story progresses, you’ll be going up against larger groups of tougher inmates and bigger stronger bosses. Batman has basic strike and counter moves along with combo attacks that can stun his enemies with his cape, throw enemies or take them down to the ground. Knocking inmates to the ground isn’t enough, though – you’ll need to mix in “ground takedown” moves that will knock out prone enemies – otherwise, they’ll get back up and try to slap you around again. Ground takedowns are tougher to achieve in the game’s later sections because of the larger number of enemies you’ll face. Batman’s not lightning-quick (he feels appropriately ponderous – after all, he’s wearing a big heavy suit and carrying a bunch of tools), so the amount of time it takes to execute the move often leaves you open to getting hit from behind. With large groups, you’re better off keeping up your physical assaults than bothering with knocking out inmates on the floor.

Stringing attacks together will increase the amount of XP you receive from combat and, of course, net you some achievements. There are a variety of upgrades available to Batman’s offensive and defensive arsenal – he can upgrade his armor, his Batarang and several other items he’ll acquire by proceeding through the story. I upgraded armor first, since my grasp of combat was a bit lacking when playing through the early parts of the game (I played on Normal difficulty). Believe me – I’m no fighting game expert – upgraded armor was helpful in getting my brawling act together without dying constantly.

The boss encounters aren’t horribly difficult, but they usually boil down to one tactic – quick-fire your Batarang, strike, evade and repeat. Many times, you’ll be fighting a boss while, at the same time, being attacked by thugs and other inmates. This rapidly becomes annoying as having to fight these huge gangs while taking on a boss is the least enjoyable part of the game. Batman can be fairly slow, so until you learn to counter nearly EVERY time an enemy flashes a “counter” visual cue, you’re going to end up getting constantly hit from behind, leading to a diminishing health circle and a retry screen.Throw a few enemies that can’t be countered into the mix and you’ve got a recipe for irritation. The most I had to retry any boss fight was five times, which  probably isn’t too terrible for someone who’s no fighting game expert, but I wish the developers had included a little more variety. Two or three of the more unique boss fights happen to be the easier ones in the game, but I found them preferable to the more common, “Let’s throw more grunts into the mix,” approach to difficulty.

Brawling may be the main focus of the game, but it’s hardly the only one. Batman’s stealthy, too, and it’s also an important part of his arsenal. The grappling hook (the “Grapnel Gun” in Batman lingo) is a joy to use, allowing you to zip around the more open areas of the island with ease. Inside buildings, it’s essential to gaining access to closed-off and hidden areas. Batman can hide under grates, crawl around in air ducts (a standard gaming convention – at least there aren’t crates!) and, with certain upgrades, hang upside down from gargoyles and string up his foes. These abilities allow him to perform “silent takedowns”, allowing him to take out single enemies without alerting the entire group.

Enemies react appropriately when finding Batman’s unconscious victims – they’ll show fear, and sometimes, when armed with a gun and terrified, will fire wildly into the air in a panic. They’re not always the smartest knives in the drawer – you’ll often be able to silently take down a thug standing right next to another thug without him noticing. On the whole, however, their behavior makes sense and adds to the feeling that you’re someone criminals should fear.

The most enjoyable part of the game is when using Detective Mode. Batman’s view of the world can be toggled between a “normal” view and “Detective Mode”, a filter that emphasizes the interactive elements of the environment. Batman will have situations where he’s required to analyze certain clues to proceed with the story, and will need to follow different types of physical evidence to where they lead . More often, you’ll be employing it to solve the numerous “Riddler Challenges” issued to you by the criminal himself.

The “Riddler Challenges” are varied – some will require you to solve riddles by scanning certain locations or items throughout the island while others can be solved by scanning mysterious messages written on specific stone carvings. You’ll also be searching for audio recordings of psychiatric sessions with the Arkham’s villains. The island and buildings are scattered with “Riddler Trophies,” many in areas that can’t be accessed until you’ve obtained certain specialized tools or equipment upgrades. Completing these challenges awards significant amounts of XP, which is essential to upgrading Batman’s capabilities. Completing challenges unlocks other game elements, including character biographies, combat challenges (scenarios separate from the main storyline) and virtual “Character Trophies”, 3-D renderings of the numerous allies and enemies Batman’s will encounter as the story progresses. As a VERY casual Batman fan, I found the biographies helpful in fleshing out the backstory.

If there’s one drawback to Detective Mode, it’s that because it filters your view of the world, it keeps you from being able to fully appreciate the artwork and atmosphere the developers obviously spent so much time and care creating. While using the mode, the world will appear as primarily blue or yellow, with areas of interest highlighted in orange. As the game progresses, it becomes necessary to be in Detective Mode on a near-constant basis. You’ll need it to be able to see enemies through walls (their skeletons, anyway) and to see which ones are armed (Batman does NOT deal well with gunfire.) You’re not going to have much luck being stealthy without it. You’ll also need it to be able to easily spot areas and items necessary to solve both Riddler Challenges and to progress through the story.

The voice acting throughout the game is almost uniformly terrific. I STILL can’t visualize Mark Hamill voicing lines as The Joker – he’s THAT good. The 5.1 surround mix is well done with plenty of environmental cues in the surround speakers – this is the ideal game to play with the sound cranked up and the lights turned off. Batman:AA is built on the Unreal engine, so all of the character models have that weird Unreal “shine”, but I think most regular game players are probably used to it by now, given the number of games based on it (the Gears of War franchise being the most obvious example.) It’s certainly no knock on the development team.

Save points are very closely spaced together, something I wish ALL developers would emulate. Inside buildings, your game will be saved nearly every time you go through a door. Batman:AA will also save directly before boss battles – load times are extremely brief and cut scenes before the actual fights are skippable after a few seconds, so you’ll be able to quickly get back in the action. The only areas where you’ll have to be careful about saves are in the open areas areas of the island. Several times, I’d solved a half-dozen challenges and then quit the game, not realizing that upon quitting, the game won’t automatically save your progress. The easiest solution is to enter a building or another area before quitting to the main menu.

As far as game length goes, I didn’t find it either too short or too long. While I’m sure you could speed through the game in 8 or 10 hours, I don’t know why you’d want to. I probably spent 30 hours playing through the storyline, but that involved solving every single Riddler Challenge. I was also able to obtain every upgrade with about 20 Challenges remaining. (One piece of advice – don’t worry if you haven’t found every Challenge by the end of the game – you’ll have a chance to finish them up after the story is over. I nearly had a heart attack when I thought I’d have to replay the whole game again to get all 240, but my fears were unfounded…) I didn’t spend a great deal of time with any of the Combat Challenges, but they’re a nice addition and something I plan to revisit later. They have varied goals (e.g., defeat as many enemies as possible, take down x number of enemies via stealth within certain time limits, etc.) There’s no multiplayer here and the game certainly doesn’t need it (does Batman REALLY need a sidekick? I’m not missing Robin here…) It’s nice to see that Rocksteady recognized that multiplayer (or even co-op) doesn’t belong in EVERY game. Their focus was on the story and the single player experience and it shows.

Highly recommended.

Their new website includes a bunch of free to play online games including old favorites like Asteroids, BattleZone and Yar’s Revenge.  There’s also news about their upcoming games and some spiffy gear you can buy.  Definitely worth a look.

Here’s the bread and butter:

When flesh-eating, shambling undead corpses invade Seattle, Undead Labs will probably be the ones responsible. Video game industry veteran Jeff Strain today announced the formation of Undead Labs, a Seattle, Washington-based game development studio that’s on a mission to take online gaming in bold new directions. Undead Labs’ sole focus will be to create the definitive massively multiplayer online zombie game (MMOZ) for console gamers. Nothing screams funny quite like wading into a group of rotting zombies with a lawn chair and a box of sharpened #2 pencils, and nothing says fun quite like doing it with your friends, whether online or on your couch. Undead Labs is committed to bringing to life an MMO loaded with action, humor and, of course, a whole lotta zombies, because the world doesn’t need more dragons.

Strain left NCsoft last summer to build a creative studio around the most talented – and zombie loving – developers in the industry, and to pioneer a new development model that will create a new breed of MMO built from the ground-up for console gamers.

“Every time I see a good zombie movie with friends, we spend days debating our strategies for surviving the zombie apocalypse,” said Strain. “The police station, or the supermarket? Garden rake, or staple gun? Bach, or the White Stripes? I’m a game developer, so I’d probably be useless for anything other than ghoul bait, but I’m excited to have the opportunity to build an MMOZ that lets us put those strategies to the test and find out for sure.”

More information about Undead Labs can be found at http://UndeadLabs.com.

Certainly a shame to see them go and we wish them all luck.

Notice that I didn’t say “developed” or “assembled”.  There are many good things to say about Dragon Age: Origins, but the most remarkable aspect of the game is the writing.  I’d actually pay for a novelized account of my character’s adventures through Fereldan.

But lets get down to brass tacks, shall we?

User Interface

Fans of prior Bioware titles will instantly feel at home with this game.  The standard keyboard shortcuts are all there, and getting into the game and just moving around should take no time at all.  The game prompts you with tutorial popups while you’re playing through the first time, but for the most part, I found I didn’t even read them.

As the camera in this game can zoom down to 3rd person view (as well as the more traditional tactical sky-view) a player will also notice that the standard movement keys for a game like World of Warcraft are present:  You use a combination of WASD and your left and right mouse button to simultaneously control movement and camera position.

While the User Interface is to blame for some limited game play (character portrait space allocation limits party members, not counting pets, to a maximum of four) a move-able mini map and a shortcut bar that can stretch to fill the bottom of the screen are some elements that will do a little to ameliorate the limitations.

Game Play

Once again, Bioware follows form by allowing for real time play, and a tactical space-bar controlled pause to issue tactical orders.  You’ll find that on the harder difficulties, not only is this suggested, but the challenge encounters will require it.

Each character can be independently controlled by the player, and each issues commands, but it’s eventually down to the AI to make snap decisions.  For that purpose, you can set up combat tactics scripts for each of the characters.

Difficulty in this game can scale dramatically.  In Easy mode, your party members are not subject to friendly fire, and your opponents are greatly diminished in power and toughness.  On the other end of the scale, on Nightmare difficulty, you’ll find each encounter to become an exercise in how not to kill off your entire party with a misplaced fireball.

If you read the sales literature on this game, or you’re just standing around in a game store reading the box, I want to stress one piece of marketing relating to game play:  This game is advertised as containing 80 hours of potential play.  I’d like to go on record as saying that they’re not lying here.  Remember when Fable first came out, and people were astounded to hear that there was an estimated 12 hours of game play involved in the game, and then ended up running through the main plot in 2 hours (and then subsequently, a mob of disaffected nerds attacked Peter Molyneux when he went down to the corner store for some milk)?  Yea, that’s not going to happen here.

Not only is the game dramatically long to play, but it promotes replay-ability.  When you begin the game, you’re given the option for race, class, and background.  You can end up playing through a number of different openings that have some minor variable outcomes depending on your initial choices.  And when I say “different openings”, I don’t mean that people call you by a different name and they substitute the phrase “backstabbing rogue bastard” for “knight.”  The openings are completely different areas of the world based on your selected background and race, complete with a selection of NPCs, quests, and even cinematics.

Story

Dragon Age: Origins shines with the original storyline, the minor quests along the way, and the character interactions between party members.  You’ll find yourself yelling along with your characters in certain battles, wiping away a tear during specific quests, and laughing along with some of the pop culture references that have been thrown in the game as not-so-subtle Easter eggs.

Like prior Bioware titles, your party characters have a range of like or dislike for you, the main character.  You can modify this by asking the right questions and talking about the right things, but DA:O has added another wrinkle in the form of Gifts.  Gifts are small items that you can find along the way that, when given to the right party member, will greatly enhance their attitude toward you.  In fact, some gifts are so appropriate, the whole game will come to a halt so you can discuss the implications of the gift, and the gift itself can become the subject of a side quest or plot line element.

Beyond the standard fantasy trope that’s present here and in just about every other Fantasy RPG you’ve ever played, the writing has overcome some of the stilted back-and-forth of questioning and quest giving.  The only drawback of this is the noted lack of any voice acting for your main character.  You’ll be posed a question by an NPC, you’ll answer it by selecting from a multiple choice range of answers that set you up as a decent person or a raging asshole, but nothing will end up coming out of your mouth.

It’s as if you’re playing “Adventures of the Mute in Fantasyland,” and like most people with disabilities, you have to get used to the fact that everyone around you is too politically correct to notice it.  You’d think that some of the more evil characters in the game, who stop at nothing to belittle your attempts at intimidation or just randomly insult your sexual prowess would make some effort to mock you for not being able to speak.  But noooo…you should never make fun of the cripple.

Bioware is getting a small amount of press out of this game as you can modify your party members’ attitudes so much that they’ll eventually want to have sex with you — and then you’re treated to possibly the most awkward sex scenes imaginable.  The media hasn’t focused on just the sex, however:  It’s the fact that you can potentially have homosexual sex in this game.

If you read that and gasped, then the answer to your question “Does playing this game make me gay?” is “Yes.  Definitely.”

Finally, the game follows in the footsteps of titles like Oblivion by offering downloadable content for expanded play.  The company is already offering 2 areas that are available for purchase (or which come bundled in deluxe versions of the game) as well as a number of items or enhancements that were only available to people who pre-ordered, or who used a particular retailer, or who purchased on the evening of a gibbous moon.

Graphics and Sound

Outside of some humanoid form oddities (limbs are a little too long, and the hands are oddly claw-like), the game is spectacular.  You’ll find yourself running through areas where the sun is shining down on dappled autumn leaves, or crystals are forming eerie shadows on the walls of some deep cave.  Weather can sometimes be severe enough that you can’t hear a party member shouting for help, or you have difficulty targeting an enemy in the distance, not to mention their overall contribution to the drama of your situation.

The game client itself will scale up to the maximum resolution of your monitor and graphics card, as well as play in a windowed mode.  It’s a relatively hardy game, and for something so graphically intensive, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the lack of crashes or BSODs that I’ve encountered.

A lot has been made in the press regarding the amount of gore in this game.  It doesn’t really bother me too much, but I may be more jaded toward this sort of thing.  In general, I found most of the gore (outside of the occasional decapitation) to be rather comical.  The level of gore is actually something that can be tuned in the game options, so you’re free to play without addressing the king or the holy mother while covered in embarrassing blood spatter from your last battle.

Sound in this game is, as you’ve come to expect from most games these days, dynamically responsive to your situation:  Battles are accompanied by thrilling bass drums and a dramatic chorus of well-meaning angry people, while a trip to, say, a neighborhood bar will treat you with fine strains of a harpist or bard in the corner plying his craft.  At some point, you’ll have heard it all, however, and even the most die-hard of fan will find themselves tuning up a Pandora station based on the Carmina Burana.

Conclusions

I tend to personally rate a game based on my regret after having actually shelled out money for the title.  I bought into the deluxe version of the game, as it offers you the opportunity to play with a party member that is mostly made of stone (His name is Shale, but I call him Ben), so that was a considerable chunk of change for a single player game.  After playing this game for a week and a half, I don’t regret the purchase.

Even after logging more than 100 hours in the game, I have yet to exhaust the combinations of character types and play styles.  I imagine that, after running through the game with my rogue, I leave royal chambers in castles and don’t get to experience the conversations between the NPCs: “Well, it’s a relief that he solved our problems and restored the world to normal, but Jesus, what an jerk.  I was tempted to take back that magical dagger and shove it up his ass.”

On the other hand, one of my female mages had sex with Morrigan.  Yes, the pixel count was ridiculously low and the women never took off their underwear.  That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it.

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I played the heck out of Warcraft III back when it came out, but I never actually played the Defense of the Ancients mod.  Since I hadn’t played DotA, I really had no idea what to expect.  While I was downloading the client and patching, my first stop was their FAQ, which didn’t help in my understanding of what I was in for.  For example, “League of Legends is a competitive online game set in an imaginative world.” Ok, we’ve now narrowed it down to every game that’s ever been able to played online.  The game is ”session based” but has a “persistent game element that is in the spirit of an MMORPG”.  Yeah, still no help.  There are no classes but there are “mastery trees”, there is no crafting but you can “form powerful items by forging together two or more basic items”, it’s not a RTS, however there are “session-based battles in the spirit of your favorite RTS games”.  Mmkay…so we have a lot of spirit, but I still had no idea what the heck the game was.

Download/Install

Registering for a game account was relatively painless, and no worse than any other forum you’ve ever signed up for.  Once your registered you can download the game client that weighs in around 500 MB.  Surprisingly the client download flew and  I had it in less than 10 minutes.  Though I did have a paranoia moment when I noticed that the client name was “LOL_Setup.exe”.  Yeah, my Spidey malware senses started tingling.  Even though I knew I had nothing to worry about, I still had to force my hand to double click on it.

The actual install went smoothly and the Launcher fired up.  This is where my good luck ran out.  I was treated to a couple of hours of patching fun as the client used P2P for the patches.  Unlike the speedy game client download, about 300 MB in patches took me over 2 hours to pull down.  To make things worse, the Launcher/Patcher really doesn’t give you any idea of how many patches are left to download.  It just chugs along, giving you a status on each patch, but nothing on the overall process.  Is this the last patch or are there ten more?  Will  I be done in 5 minutes or 5 hours?  No clue, but hey, it’s free.

My First Game

Once I was finally patched up, I then became lost in a labyrinth of menus and buttons.  Just trying to get into a game was not the easiest thing to figure out and it took some digging around the League of Legends website to figure out what I needed to do.  I’m assuming I’m not the first to get lost, and they have a well laid out New User Guide that hand holds you through the whole process of installing, launching and playing.  If I hadn’t found that I’d definitely been lost for a good while figuring what I needed to do to actually play a game.

To make matters worse, the launcher was about as stable as used chair bought from Golden Corral.  I crashed from the launcher multiple times.  Sometimes it’d just bomb out on me when I tried to create or join a game.  Other times I get stuck at a dead end in the menu with no visible way to get back to a menu I could do something with, so I was forced to close the Launcher and fire it back up.

Eventually I got in without errors, and playing a bit more this afternoon I didn’t have any problems.  Could have just been high load on their servers or user error for all I know.  If it does happen, it’s  just a matter of trying a bunch of times and getting used to the menu and interface of the launcher.

UI/Control Scheme

Like I mentioned before, the UI for the Launcher needs some work.  Yet on the other hand, the actual in-game UI was spot on.  Feeling like a mashup of the UI’s from Warcraft III and World of Warcraft, I had everything I needed right at my fingertips.  Even being new to the game, with only a few minute tutorial under my belt, I never got lost looking for a command or button.

The control scheme was also really well done.  Moving and attacking is done with a single click of the mouse that anyone that’s played Diablo or Warcraft will feel right at home with.  They’ve also done something I’ve never seen before with special moves and toolbars.  As you would expect, you can fire off a special move by clicking on the icons in the task bar.  You can also use key commands to fire them off as well.  While that doesn’t sound so unique, what made me feel warm and fuzzy was the fact that instead of using the normal “1, 2, 3, 4…” keys for your toolbar slots, they used the “Q, W, E, A, S, D…” keys.  It just felt natural and anyone that’s ever played a FPS on a PC will love the feeling of being able to fire off special moves with their strafing keys instead of having to stretch for those number keys.  Awesome idea.

Graphics and Sound

Considering this is a freeware game by a company I hadn’t ever heard of, I wasn’t expecting too much in the way of graphics.  Boy was I wrong.  The graphics have the same cartoonish look and feel as Warcraft III had, but on closer look all the models are highly detailed and have great animations.  All the units and buildings in the game are really well and look great.

As for the in game sound, there’s not really anything I can say about it one way or the other.  The sound is just, well, there.  There’s certainly nothing wrong the sound, I just didn’t find anything memorable about it.  There are the occasional one-liners from in game units that will give you a laugh the first few times you hear it, but other than that, the sound doesn’t really help or hinder the game in any way.

Gameplay

Everything I’ve talked about up till this point is in my opinion, window dressing.  If the gameplay sucks, the game sucks.  I can say without a doubt, League of Legends  is not in the suck category.   The focus of the game is your “Champion” character that you control on the battlefield.  As of right now there are 40 different Champions available for you to pick from, all with different skill sets and play styles.  Whether you like to lob spells or bullets from range or be up in the midst of the melee with swords and cleavers, there’s bound to be a Champion out there you’ll like.  If you get bored, you’re not locked into any one Champion and can pick any of your available Champions for your next session.  You have even more customization available with your Champions and can chose different spells and abilities that you want to take into battle with you, so even if someone on your team picks the same Champion, you both could be drastically different.

While your Champion is definately the star of the show, you’re not out on the battlefield alone.  You have minions that will spawn on their own, running off to the front lines to fight the good fight without any worries on your part.  It’s up to you if you want to join in their attack or just let them march off in waves as cannon fodder to distract the enemy while you slip around the other side.  I mean, that’s what minions are supposed to do, right?

The goal of the game is simple, push across the battlefield, and destroy the enemies “Nexus” building.  The first team to destroy the other side’s Nexus wins.  While it sounds simple, there’s a great deal of strategy involved.  Not only do you have to contend with enemy turrets, minions and Champions, there are multiple lanes you can take to the other side.  Scattered between the lanes, hidden by the fog of war are brush areas that you can sneak through and possibly run into neutral monsters that will mug anyone that gets near them.  You have to get through turrets to get to the Nexus and the turrets offer withering fire that you have to wade through.  To make things even more difficult, there are major bonuses to attack and damage given to Champions while they are in range of their own turret.  So while, you may be able to wade through enemy minions to get up close to a turret, usually before you can knock it down an enemy Champion will show up and give you a beat down.

Combat involves a lot of retreating and letting the minions take the brunt of the damage.  If you aren’t careful, you will die a lot.  Even if you are careful, you will die.  Though watching your Champion keel over isn’t all that bad.  Once you die, it’s a simple matter of waiting for a respawn timer to tick down and you’ll pop back at your base, ready for more.  Of course, the more often you die, the longer your respawn timer is each time, so it pays to be be a bit on the cautious side.

As the session progresses, your Champion will gain more power through XP and gold.  As you gain XP from killing enemy units and buildings you’ll level up and get access to more powerful versions of your special abilities.  The gold you gain from killing enemies let’s you buy all sorts of upgrades for armor and weapons that could turn the tide of battle in your favor.

As of right now, there are only two maps/scenarios available for play.  While you need to be online to log in and play the game, you can actually play by yourself, just picking a map and adding in bots to your liking.  If you want to fight real folks, 3v3 or 5v5 matches with other gamers are available as well.  The game sessions I played ranged anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour.

The ‘persistence’ that was mentioned in the FAQ is somewhat of a misnomer.  Basically, you have your profile you log into, that they call your “Summoner” (you summon Champions to fight your battles, get it?).  Your Summoner keeps track of your stats and scores.

Conclusion

Overall, I have to say even though I’m still a relative noob at the game and have a lot further to go I am enjoying playing League of Legends a great deal and I think I’ll keep playing.  If they can work out some of the kinks like patching, the launcher crashes and UI confusion I think they’ll have a hit on their hands.  Since Riot Games has announced that they’ll be heavily supporting the game going forward and will take into consideration player feedback, I expect the game will likely get even better.

One concern I do have is re-playability.  Hopefully Riot will continue to add new maps and champions to the mix to keep things fresh.  If not, I would imagine that players will get sick of playing the same maps and doing the same thing, over and over.  While there’s definitely different strategies that will add some excitement to the game, at some point, “Fight across the map and destroy this building.” is going to get old.

So, to sum it up.  If you like RTS games, the game is definitely worth a shot.  Even if you spend the $10 on the Digital Collector’s Copy, the game is a steal.  Even if you don’t like RTS games, this might be a good game to give a shot.  Since you don’t have to worry about resources and only control the one unit, it’s just as much RPG as it is RTS.

Considering the price tag, there’s no reason anyone shouldn’t at least give League of Legends a try.

Passengers will be able to immerse themselves in unique game play as they prepare for blast off, becoming part of the space station adventure. During a recent walkthrough, we deflected asteroids to keep runways clear as part of the story.

The interactive experiences are based on duties you’d find on board a long-traveling space craft, according to Walt Disney Imagineering Senior Show Designer Alex Wright. Each game lasts about 90 seconds with a 90-second interval and the games can accommodate 86 players at one time.

Yep, that’s right, to deflect the long wait-time for the 90 second ride, you’ll get to play a space-based MMO for 90 seconds at a time.  The idea sounds fundamentally flawed for getting the line to move faster, but at least you’ll be shooting asteroids while you’re waiting, right?