I just spent the afternoon playing spectator at a golf tourny. This is the first time I have ever been to a pro golf game and it was pretty fun. Sure you get to see more golf if you stay home and watch it on TV, but watching these guys play mere yards away from me was cool.

Now during this event I walked a lot, and all this walking re-enforced to me how much being forced to travel back to a location in a game is punishing. Which then reminded me of how mad I was when my City of Heroes avatar fell to a mad freak and when I came to I now had XP debt.

Gah! There is no reason to punish a player with lost/or future loss of XP. WoW, Matrix and Guild wars have see the light. XP loss does not make the game more fun in any way. Some people will claim that with out it players would play the game less careful because they will not care if there characters die. I say that is hogwash. Human survial instict maps from the real human to their avatars. Meaning I dont think players ever want thier characters to die.

I am just as carfeful in WoW than I am in CoH. If I die in WoW my character takes a slight penalty and I possible have to spend time running back to where I died, but if my character in CoH dies I the player am penalized. Good grief I am getting mad again.

I mean what purpose other than to slow down the rate at which a character can adavance is there for xp loss? I don’t think so. In a game like CoH where players are encouraged to try a variety of characters what is the problem with increasing the advancement rate? My guess is they think enough players will not hate it enough to quit but die just enough to keep having to pay a monthy fee before they reach level 50. *sigh* lame.

Now, on to the new Xbox. Not that I hate the name, but xbox 360 is wordy. Its like the marketing people were sitting around one day…
“So I say we go with Xbox 2.”
“No, thats to much like sony, we need to be more than 2.”
“How about XBox^2?”
“Lot of our customers will not know what the ^ symbol means.”
“Well this machine is super fast so why not XBox Mach 2?”
“no no, that still has a 2 in it, and we need to be more than 2. Really we need a way to have a number that is actually more than three so when sony’s box comes out we are still more than them.”

I imagine this went on for some time, before they settled on 360. *shrug*

As for the harware, I am initally impressed. It looks to be setting a nice standard for TV gamming. I worry about the price point, shipping date and of course the games. I mean for me to really feel compelled to buy one, I the games need to be signifigantly better than what I can play on current hardware. That and the games need to be fun. Hopefully more real footage will be floating around the net after E3, but for now I am not holding my breath.