Chuck Norris WoW Commercial

Yesterday while watching the Bears-Chargers game (go Bears!) I saw the premier of the latest Blizzard commercial for World of Warcraft featuring Chuck Norris.  Yes, a Chuck Norris commerical was inevitable, wasn't it?  And I was there!  In an effort to keep from getting round-house kicked, since my game is Eve Online, here it is.

My Shopping Spree

While Kirith went on a shopping spree in Jita on Black Friday, I engaged in an equally perilous spree in real life at the local Wal-Mart.  I admit as shopping sprees go, mine might not actually qualify as one.  But the one item I purchased was an iPad.  So instead of shooting Angels this past weekend, I was searching YouTube for videos and downloading my favorites.  Currently I'm in search of videos that show the history of Eve, whether it is lore like Day of Darkness and Day of Darkness II or player history like Tortuga or The Dronelands War.  I also found both the current intro movie and the original one (which I'll find the links to when I get home from work).

For those wondering how I download the videos and then convert them to the Apple iPad friendly format, I use RealPlayer Plus.  I used RealPlayer as my default player for years and a couple of months ago upgraded to the Plus version.  Perhaps something free is out there, but I'm used to RealPlayer and I think I will get my monies worth out of it now.

If anyone has any recommendations on videos to download, I'd be interested to hear them.

Operation Smile: TEST: Newbies Welcome

TEST Alliance Please Ignore is most recently famous for a failed sov grab in Delve that was rolled back by CCP.  But I do have to give them credit for producing a great video explaining why new players are valuable.  I think this video is the perfect answer for those who wonder about the usefulness of new players.

Eve Videos and Incarna

On Wednesday CrazyKinux came out with a list of his top 10 favorite Eve videos.  Clear Skies and Clear Skies 2 didn't make his list because the characters are from Half-Life 2 and the shows felt more like Half-Life with an Eve twist.  That's a fair statement.  But that got me to thinking about the machinima possibilities when Incarna comes out next summer. With avatars in the game and with the imagination that Eve's video makers have already shown, will Eve videos begin to challenge World of Warcraft's hold on YouTube?  I'm willing to wager that by the end of 2011, CrazyKinux's list will have a lot more player-made videos on it.

Operation Smile: 4WARD Tengu Commercial

I visited the CCP Games YouTube page and discovered that CCP has started to point out some of the player made videos.  I thought this 4Ward advertisement for its new line of Tengu strategic cruisers was first rate.  It almost makes me want to give up flying Minmatar.  On second thought, that would be silly.  But this is a great commercial.  Make sure to view it full screen in high definition.  It will be worth it.

Did I mention this was PLAYER made?

Advertising World of Warcraft and Eve Online

One of the complaints I continuously heard while playing EverQuest 2 was that the SOE marketing department didn't advertise the game.  I haven't seen the reaction yet to Blizzard's advertising for Cataclysm on Fox's football broadcasts yesterday, but I will bet some of the veterans are not happy.






Of course, as Blizzard-Activision (as the company should be named) depends on World of Warcraft for so much of its profits, television advertising for the MMO giant makes sense.  And with the revenue WoW brings in, advertising on television is possible.

But lower cost options are available to game companies, as anyone who has seen the ads for F2P games on gaming sites knows all too well.  CCP has gone one step beyond that in looking for new players.  The Icelandic company is using Google Ads and its Adsense feature to advertise throughout the blogosphere.  And when I mean blogosphere, I don't mean just game sites.

One of the biggest websites in the political blogosphere is Instapundit, a site run by Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds.  When I visited the site this afternoon, I was greeted with this sight...

Those gifs look familiar

Followed by this...

Well, Glenn DOES like capitalism

I do believe that using Google Ads could have some drawbacks, although I think this juxtaposition I spotted a little later worked out well...

Not true, carebears are welcome in New Eden

But to see if the ads showed up on both sides of the political fence, I visited The Daily Kos, one of the largest liberal U.S. political blogs, and yes, Eve Online made an appearance there also.

Does Markos know he's promoting laissez-faire capitalism?

I'm actually glad that CCP has decided to advertise this way, because that means I see a lot fewer adds that would annoy me.  Now if SOE would just take the hint.

Operation Smile: SuperTwinkey69 vs Dominion

Sometimes what game designers lead players to believe a game to be is a lot different than reality.  Take for example CCP.  In their trailer for the Dominion expansion, they portray fleet commanders as calm, cool and professional.  Reality can be, shall we say, a bit different.  As an example today's Operation Smile post features two videos: the ideal vs. reality.  The reality in this case being the famous supertwinkey69 vs. Dominion parody.

Faction Warfare Footage

Fresh from YouTube comes some footage of some faction warfare between the Gallente and Caldari militias (with some pirates mixed in) in the BlackRise war zone. For those of you unfamiliar with Eve Online's faction warfare, FW is CCP's version of realm vs. realm (RvR) made popular by games like Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer Online. The difference is that Eve's faction warfare is a stepping stone to playing the Great Game (to use an analogy from European history) in 0.0 space while in DAoC and Warhammer the games are all about the conflict between NPC empires.

I'm posting this video because it is extremely well done. In most pew-pew videos made by players in Eve (and most other games) the UI is usually visable, and in Eve, the UI will take up half the space. Not so in this video. I highly recommend watching this one.

Enjoy!