Greetings, readers. I’ve been playing a lot of Diablo III the last few days, but I want to save my full thoughts for when I finish the game. For now, I’ll just say diamond skin + force wave = win. Also, the Templar is played by Dominic Keating. The Enterprise fan in me is pleased.
But while I continue to compose my Diablo thoughts, I have some other things to cover.
New articles:
WhatMMO has posted a couple more of my articles: Signs Your Dungeon Group Is Doomed, and Story in MMOs: A Paradox. The first should include some painfully familiar stories for just about any MMO player, and the second is another article like I’d write for my blog.
Being paid to ramble about video game stories… Life is good.
If you have any thoughts on the story in MMOs, I’d love to hear them in the comments. It’s a subject I find endlessly fascinating.
Retro Review: Starcraft: Uprising:
Similar to “Of Blood and Honor,” “Uprising” is a novella only available as an ebook or in an anthology, the “Starcraft Archive,” which was another of my prizes from Blizzard’s writing contest. Unlike “Of Blood and Honor,” I can’t say that I enjoyed it.
Written by Mickey Neilson, another Blizzard lore bigwig, “Uprising” tells the story of the earliest days of the Sons of Korhal and how Sarah Kerrigan came to join them.
Simply put, it’s just not very interesting. The writing is bland, and extremely frequent scene and perspective shifts make the story feel disjointed. Furthermore, the characters feel pretty weak and underdeveloped, even in the case of larger than life major lore figures like Arcturus Mengsk and Sarah Kerrigan.
More importantly, it doesn’t really add a lot to the Starcraft universe. There’s only one significant revelation that you couldn’t get from any other source, and it honestly doesn’t feel important enough to devote a hundred pages to. It’s not as if a stronger motivation at all excuses what Arcturus did…
I don’t wish to give the impression that it was some unreadably bad train wreck of a book. It wasn’t. But at the same time, I really find myself hard-pressed to find any reason to recommend it.
Overall rating: 4/10 Only for the most voracious Starcraft lore hounds, and even those should not expect miracles.
Superior Realities 
Small world… of D3! I took almost that EXACT same screenshot! I went, “ooooh, pretty! Bet this is the only rainbow I’ll see in the game!” and snapped it just before crossing the bridge and oneon the bridge.
I’m not a big fan of D3’s graphics, but that spot is awful purdy.
Very weird. Today I posted a shot from the waypoint just before that bridge; same rainbow, different angle. o.O
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