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".
Very nice Podcast, thanks guys!
ReplyDeletePretty much agreed with all said, except I wholeheartedly disagree with N'Eligahn's opinion that Jedi Academy's storyline is "blah" :-p
Also, about posting what you want on the STO forums... sometimes they just don't listen no matter how many hundreds are asking for it. Re: Fleet Only Instances.
Good info about the security. Kinda curious if that link was actually at us.blizzard.com which actually is their official URL. I'm guessing that part of the link was mis-spelled but it looks very similar? That's how phishing sites usually trick people.
As to the security, from what I've read they tend to create mirrors on a separate server that's linked directly to the link in the e-mail. So you go to a site they monitor rather then the official one.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment. ^_^