Morally Ambiguous=WTF?

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Welcome back to GamerCatz!

We Catz are excited to bring you Episode 2. In this episode, we start off by talking about what games we've been playing in the past week. Jae played some Guild Wars, Kheren joined Champions Online, and N'Eligahn shared his woes of dealing with NCSoft's latest account protection scheme--remembering one of your character's names. Guess how long it took a dev to help him get back into his account?

Gaming news:

Just how addicting can gaming get? Just ask Craig Smallwood, who's suing NCSoft for making the game Lineage II so addicting that he spent 20,000 hours on it over 5 years. A judge, whose sanity we question, is allowing the lawsuit to go forward.


If you're a Final Fantasy XIV fan and didn't score a closed beta key in the past weeks, you've likely been poring over all of the testing news -- both good and bad -- to keep up with the progression of closed beta.. Square Enix announced that closed beta phase three will be ending this Wednesday, the 25th, and open beta is set to begin in early September.


Cryptic's Jack Emmert talks with Massively about the Neverwinter "OMG". Oh. My. God--Cryptic's going to make a Neverwinter MMORPG? Dan Stahl comments on Emmert's comments in regards to Star Trek Online in a post in this thread.


Jae explains where "dink" comes from--the donut dinking scene in the 1986 movie "Running Scared"
The quote:
Danny Costanzo: One of these days we both have to find women at the same time.
Ray Hughes: ["clinking" a donut] Dink.
It starred Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines and featured one of the best car chase scenes on the L-tracks, ever.

Can Neverwinter OMG outdo Bioware's original RPG, 'Neverwinter Nights', or Obsidian Entertainment's "Neverwinter Nights 2"? We share our thoughts. "Morally ambiguous, otherwise known as 'WTF?'"


The Great Debate--if the debate on the Neverwinter "OMG" wasn't enough for you yet, we bring you the latest Great Debate.
Our topic today: Player input in game development. Can it be too much of a bad thing and alter the game in a bad way? We discuss how people on forums for STO and WoW can affect game play. We discuss how groups like United Council of Fleets, led by fleets and groups like Lotus Fleet and Outpostgamez, want to affect game/fleet play in a positive direction and how groups like the STO Advisory Council can backfire.


MMO Drop of the Day: The Giant Mosquito that Ate N'Eligahn! Seriously, the game for this week is "World of Tanks". Tank OMG, anyone? It's a F2P game in closed beta that recreates the great tank battles of WWII. It won the award for 'Best New Concept' at E3 2010.

Feel free to contact us with your questions, ideas, kudos, and criticisms--you can leave comments and questions here, on our GamerCatz Facebook page, or at GamerCatz@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Welcome to GamerCatz Podcast #1!

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Welcome to Episode 1 of the GamerCatz Podcast!

In this episode, we welcome everyone and introduce ourselves. We share how we got started gaming in general, and MMOs in particular.

Other topics we cover:

1. The Italian-American community protests stereotypes used in the upcoming game, Mafia II. We comment on both the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of of UNICO's protest, and Take Two's chairman calling the game 'socially responsible'.

2. Duke Nukem!! Kotaku posted a rumor that Gearbox Studio (producer of the Borderlands game) will be developing Duke Nukem Forever. Whether we actually see the vaporware come to fruition or not remains to be seen.

3. Square Enix nailed for deceptive advertising in the UK for using images from the PS3 movie to advertise the Xbox 360 version of the game.

4. Rumor: New Lucasarts President Paul Meegan is making a lot of changes, including cancelling Force Unleashed 3 and partnerships with other gaming companies for external development of future games.

5. Lord of the Rings Online is going free-to-play on September 10th.

6. Star Trek Online has released their latest Engineering report. Some of the changes look really promising.

7. Internet and gaming safety--Protect your accounts!! We discuss different spam and phishing attempts that have been hitting our inboxes lately.

First rule: Don't EVER click a website in an email and fill in your user name and password. The gaming companies already know your user name and password--they'll never ask you for it in an email.
Second rule: When in doubt, don't click the link, but rather go to the actual site itself. Many of the links in emails take you to sites that look almost identical to the original site and have very similar domain names.
Third rule: always have a good antivirus running. There are a number of great free ones available such as Avast! and AVG. You can get them, along with a number of other great security software such as anti-spyware and anti-malware, from CNET's download site.
Fourth rule: Secure your browser. Use a script blocker (Jae uses NoScript on FireFox), an ad-blocker, a pop-up blocker, and a flash-blocker. Jae also uses Web of Trust of FireFox.
Fifth rule: Don't use the same user name and password for every game. Don't use the same user name and password for your games that you use on forums or email.
Sixth rule: To thwart keyloggers, keep your game passwords in a word processor file. When you log in to your game, open up the file, copy your password, and then paste it into the password field.

8. "The Great Debate" topic of this cast: How much should a game hold your hand as you learn the game and the class or profession you've chosen to play? We share our feelings on this, and which games provide the best tutorials.

9. MMO Down--we talk about some less well-known or upcoming MMOs. The MMO for this cast: The upcoming Lego MMO called "Lego Universe".

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• Rumor: Borderlands Studio Reviving Duke Nukem Forever [Duke Nukem] (kotaku.com)

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