Playing an MMORPG

MMORPG.  Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.  Now I was never one to ever think I would play such a genre of video games because of World of Warcraft.  I shouldn't judge the people who play WoW because what do I know about the community of players? I don't know what their experiences are as a person or why they like the game.  All I know is that it's an MMORPG and that they like it.  How does this genre differ from any other, well in order to play this game you have to pay to play monthly.  The reasoning behind paying to play is because the developers who create the game have a team of people who work on the game to detect bugs or glitches as well as making patches and updates.  Those people can't do it for free right?  So that's where the players' money goes to or at least I would like to think it goes to.  You may or may not know, but there's a little stigma that goes along with people who play these MMOs.  Such examples would be parodies like what the comedy show, Southpark, told.  You could look it up and watch it right now if you want and then get back to this.  If you already watched it, then good for you.  The episode creates stereotypes among this community of players in a satirical way and it's enjoyable to watch and laugh about it.  That's it. That's the image people could possibly picture if they were to think of someone who plays WoW or such similar game.  Sit around at home playing WoW all day only to get up to eat and use the bathroom.  (Except in Carmen's situation... haha).  I can't say for sure that's how the hardcore MMO player plays because I haven't met or seen a typical hardcore MMO player and if I have, well I wouldn't know now would I?  

So why talk about this?  Well some of you readers don't know this, but I'm a Star Wars fan.  Now my level of "fan-ness" could possibly be laughable to those diehard fanboys out there so it's hard to claim myself as a high level fan.  But to some of my friends or people who know a little bit about me would say I really like Star Wars and compared to them, I'm like a super fanboy geek when in actuality I just know a little bit more about Star Wars than the average person.  If there was a survey and the question was, "How much do you know about Star Wars?", I would put "above average" and not "all-knowing". Anyways back to the point!  Recently, an MMO of Star Wars was released and I regardless of my thoughts about playing MMOs, I just had to play it because it was Stars Wars.  Also, I have to add to the fact that it was said this MMO was to delve more in story than any other MMOs have previously and so that little fact interested me more! I decided to buy it and play it.  I'd give MMOs a try and see what my opinions about it would be after.

After is here and no, I didn't even complete the game yet.  Not even a quarter way.  I only just finished the prologue which goes up to level 15ish?  I'm not sure. So a week or so of playing this MMO, I'd say it's not bad.  I wouldn't go as far as playing all out non-stop for days, but it's enjoyable.  The first thing I noticed when I first started playing was the complicated controls.  I'm pretty sure I'm still not playing the game to the fullest potential because I don't even know what the best combos are or what path of the skill tree to even go. A skill tree is some sort of path that you can take when your chosen character levels up.  It's kind of complicated for someone new to these types of games and I'm one of them.  It doesn't really matter though, because I'm playing the game mostly for the story and to understand more mythology and lore about the Star Wars universe.

Okay, I swear I won't always be talking about video games! I'll change the topics around, but these things take time... time I should actually be using to study for school. Speaking of school... this happens to me a lot...check this out...Internet Distractions.

Back.

Well it's been three semesters since my last blog post on Xanga.  For awhile now I've been thinking about reblogging and so here I am.  Hopefully I will be updating more frequently as I have in mind, but things change and maybe this may be my last entry until a year from now.  Who knows?

So what inspired me to finally just start blogging again?  Well I'm going to provide you with the long story AND a short story for those who just want to get to the point.  I'm going to start out with the long story and provide the short story after.  Separated of course.

LONG STORY:

It all started with an update from the Resident Evil fan page on Facebook.  They posted something about the Resident Evil Retribution trailer.  From there, it sparked my interest by asking, "What happened in the previous movie?".  I had forgotten and so I went through my hard drive to see if I had downloaded it and I did.  This meant that I had watched it before, but I just couldn't remember what it was about and so I decided to watch the movie to refresh my memory.

If you're wondering what was going through my mind by asking why I even cared, well it's because the trailer to Retribution gave me the impression that it was a prequel of some kind to the Resident Evil film mythology and so immediately I liked it because I like the idea of story telling where it deals with the flashback or past of a character that has been introduced to the audience that you have no knowledge of their background.  Questions like, "Why are they the way they are?", to a character is intriguing.  This fascination of story telling was introduced to me through the television show, LOST.  I could get started about how other television shows that I've watched before such as Prison Break or even now like Once Upon a Time and the new series that just started this Monday, Alcatraz, but I won't.  Anyways, back to what I was originally saying.

After finishing the movie, I happened to see another post from the Resident Evil fan page, but this time linking to the Resident Evil 6 trailer. After that, I was so psyched up about it that I had to spread the word and share it by posting it up on my Facebook which lead to me wanting to express my opinion on the matter of the video game franchise and the film franchise.  I could have expressed this story longer but I wanted to get to sharing my opinion already because I still have the short story to tell.

SHORT STORY:

I watched the Resident Evil Retribution trailer, watched Resident Evil Afterlife, watched the Resident Evil 6 trailer, and finally decided I wanted to express my opinions some how and my brain automatically thought about blogging which lead to revisiting Xanga and finally creating a blog here on Blogspot.

Now for the main part.

Back in 2002 when I was 13 years old, the first Resident Evil film was released.  You could possibly have guessed I was a fan of the Resident Evil video games and so you could imagine a fanboy's excitement over a movie based upon it.  I remember watching it with a friend at a United Artist theater that is now a Best Buy.  I remember walking out of the theater with disappointment and thoughts of anguish for what Sony and Paul W.S. Anderson did to the franchise.  As the other films were released, I had small expectations for them and that served me well as years went by.  For some reason, I don't know why, but... I see the film franchise in a different light now.  I've come to accept Paul W.S. Anderson's ideas on the film franchises simply on the plain and simple fact that they are based "loosely" on the video game franchise.  The opinions and ideas about that have probably always been out there and I don't know why I never saw it.  The matter of fact now is, are the Resident Evil films good?  Good in the sense of using the Resident Evil realm and ideas with cameos of characters from the game as well as putting his own character to give "his" Resident Evil an original story.  Of course there are many bad critiques about the film that the super dedicated fanboys complain about.  I have not read much about the complaints, but I could imagine what some of them can be because I,  myself, am a fanboy of the franchise.  But once you keep an mind open to Paul W.S. Anderson's ideas, most of those critiques won't matter.

Wow, I got to hand it to the Resident Evil team for dishing out an all-new idea for Resident Evil 6.  Looks like they are bringing the series back to its roots.  When Resident Evil first started out, it was well known for its genre as a survival horror video game. Resident Evil Zero to Veronica stood by this genre, but with the release of Resident Evil 4 and 5, the genre slowly moved towards an action genre with little survival horror aspects as well as replacing the antagonistic zombies with crazed villagers of some sort.  Now it looks like they are molding the two together by putting together survival horror part from Zero to Veronica and the action from 4 and 5 and finding a good middle.  Oh and not to mention the "Hollywood" style story line.  I say "Hollywood" style because the trailer sort of reminded me of the Uncharted series.

Well this blog took me quite awhile to write up due to a few distractions.  It kind of reminds me of when I procrastinate from doing homework except this blog is not for school, it's for me and you.