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This past week marked the official launch of The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. It’s not easy going up against the juggernaut that is World of Warcraft but I think LOTRO makes quite the valiant effort on many levels, the least of which is by adopting a similar UI and quest/play style. Of course, it helps to have a strong mythos already developed and, so far, it’s been fitting quite well for me — even repeating them multiple times since the public stress test, I’m actually reading the quests and trying to follow the story. For now at least.

Michael over at MMOG Nation took a couple looks at LOTRO both at launch and a week later and provided his impressions from the point of view of the seasoned MMO gamer (or so I presume). I originally caught his Launch Day impressions last week and based on his “What I Love/Like/Hate about LOTRO” lists I ended up writing Michael purely because of this comment:

The Classes. Sorry dr00ds. I just have never gotten behind classes that screw up the four legs of the D&D table. If I can’t look at a class in a fantasy MMOG and know whether it’s a Tank, Nuke, Healer, or Skills-monkey, I probably won’t play it. My primary character in WoW was a Paladin, and look where that got me.

I’ve always felt that I could understand the MMOs whose classes more closely aligned with those in AD&D than those who didn’t. Or maybe I’m just a huge nerd. This was something that made Final Fantasy XI easy for me to pick up as my first MMO, because the starting job classes — and even some of the advanced classes — still fell neatly into the base classes I first grew to learn during my pen and paper days. I still have a hard time equating these to the LOTRO classes and World of Warcraft. Both seem a bit more of a stretch than I’d like at times, but there’s not much I can do about that — and, no, I’m not playing DDO. I think the familiarity of the locales and storyline as Michael mentions at the end of his follow-up post a week later help overcome a lot of that “I’m lost” feeling I initially got when playing WoW — although thankfully that’s no longer an issue.

Over at Pinataisland.info, admin jimmcq is running a competition where you are tasked to pick out the name of someone on the credits of Viva Piñata and use a little creativity to decide what piñata that person might be and create them using virtually anything. The competition rules say that the “piñata can be a species that you have already seen or one that has never been documented before. Entries can be drawn, modeled, sculpted, photoshopped, made from a well-known brand of Scandinavian building block, or can even be actual paper-mâché piñatas.”

And the prize(s)? A very rare Wild Card piñata like the Shellybean you see pictured here with a square shell. Very fancy.

Via Xbox 360 Fanboy.

Normally, reading a list of known bugs for any given game would probably make flip out and complain on message boards and blogs until the developer patched the game for a bug that shouldn’t have been there in the first place with proper QA. At least that is what it seems like these days. Or everybody is exploiting some glitch or bug to gain unfair advantages in the online games. Hardly, if ever, are they actually so amusing to read that you are captivated into reading — and laughing — about nearly every single one, reminiscing about some by-gone yet warm and familiar moments of gaming.

This is what Graeme Cree’s Zork I bugs list turns out to be. Yes, that Zork I… the one about The Great Underground Empire that had you starting off the game standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door, and worrying about grues eating you in the dark.

The bugs detailed in the list nearly all produce hilarious results, such as “the command HIT MIRROR WITH SWORD will generate combat responses, such as ‘The mirror parries’…” If you remember those days of text-based adventures, go lose yourself for half an hour or more reading about the bugs. You won’t regret it.

Via Cathode Tan

It’s like Super Paper Mario knows exactly WHO YOU ARE or something. Definitely funny and it’s great to see the fan-service in some of the games these days. It made me laugh. There’s a whole thread — complete with over 100 posts — on NeoGAF about it.

Click the image for a larger view if you desire one.

The “bullet holocaust” of a 2D scrolling shooter that’s been called Last Alarm has released a demo. It is well worth picking up. Ghost and m0dus from NeoGAF have put together an impressive looking — to say the least about the graphics — and fun to play game that is not without it’s fair share of in-jokes.

Also ranking among the several impressive details is that Last Alarm has been developed entirely with XNA Game Studio Express and Torque X.

One thing to note: although you can play with the keyboard, I highly highly recommend you use a gamepad instead.

The system requirements aren’t too bad.

Minimum system requirements:
1.0GHz processor
512 MB RAM
Windows XP Service Pack 2
Video card supporting DirectX 9.0c and Shader Model 2.0

Recommended system:
2.0 GHz processor
1 GB RAM
nVidia or ATI accelerated 3D video card

Download the demo to Last Alarm: The A.R.G.U.S. Complex.

Be sure to leave Josh any bugs and feedback on the Last Alarm blog!

Josh — When’s my Xbox 360 executable due?

Tatsumi-san from the Xbox Japan blog wrote me this weekend to let me know he posted his side of our trans-Pacific piñata exchange which I detailed a couple of weeks ago. He has video of when he opens the crate he received from me which contained the pink and white kittyfloss named Tama I sent him.

Because I’m a huge dork the kittyfloss has a flower on his head and a scarf around his neck. Unfortunately since this was a first generation kittyfloss, Tama didn’t have my personalized tag on him. Sad.

You can read an auto machine translated version here.

Chick Chick Boom is a pretty cool little Flash game, quite obviously made for Europe. It’s “powered by Nintendo” and it uses a DS-like gameplay mechanic and by that I mean drawing like if you had been using the stylus.

Basically you are in control of the yellow chicks — which look almost like Loco Roco characters — and the bunny controls the dark chicks. You have to select and then use your mouse to trace the outline of shapes to do different things in the game. They range from dropping a heavy object or sending a bomb to the dark chicks. On the flip side, when the bunny sends a bomb to your side, you can use either of the directional arrows to move all your chicks away from it. How accurate you are corresponds to how accurate your weapon or control is. It’s a pretty fun game and totally addictive to keep playing through it. I don’t think you even really need the Nintendo virtual-swag — I’ve gotten Mario Slam Basketball and Kororinpa wallpapers so far — to keep you going, in my opinion.

Anybody with a drawing tablet will have just a teeny bit of an advantage I think…