This update, to protect the games economy and make the gaming experience better, will now cause all mail containing gold, silver and copper coins attached to it to delayed for up to an hour. Just like it has been with mail containing items.

From the WoW Forums, written by Eyonix(Blizzard Poster):

As part of our continued efforts to protect the game’s economy and ultimately the game-play experience of each individual player, we’ve made a small change to how an aspect of our mail system works. Just like in-game mail transactions containing items, mail sent with gold, silver, and copper coins attached will in most cases now take one hour to reach the recipient. This change will help us to better ensure the legitimacy of such transactions and further prevent the unlawful influx of currency into each realm’s economy. Keep in mind that this delay will only affect the following mail transactions containing coins:

Regular mail with coins attached.
CoD payments received via the mail system.

Note: This will NOT affect mail sent from one character to another when under the same account.

The Chinese Government is requiring companies that make MMORPGs to install software that requires players to register with their real ages and ID number to prove their ages. If the player is under the age of eighteen, they can play for three hours and gain full points, then when the hit three hours, the points are halved until hour number five and finally after too long all points are set to zero.

MMORPGs have until July 16th to install the software or else the game will shut down.

-Unstable

Wow! Sorry I haven’t posted here in a while guys and gals, I’ve been busy anwsering the 500+ emails I got from GameSoul.com fans! Remember about 3 weeks ago to e-mail me with gaming questions? Ya, there was a massive turnout. This was the most popular question, because it was asked 76 times!

Q: Other than Neopets.com, Runescape.com, and WoW, what site do you best recommend?

A: Gaiaonline.com! I recommend Gaia because it has so much Role-Playing. Not only will you meet friends, the role-play layouts are, well, amazing!

Since I e-mailed back to those 76 e-mails, 59 of them actually joined.

I will be still looking forward to game soul e-mails! Any game soul fan with a question about me, gaming, or game soul itself can go directly to gamesoul_writer_darren@inbox.com

~Darren

Konami’s hit game for the PlayStation hits the XBox Live Arcade. The game is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. For just 800 Microsoft Points you can download the whole thing, in its entirety just like on the PlayStation only with upgraded graphics and what would an XBox 360 game be without achievements?

I downloaded the trial today but I was only able to make it to the first boss fight against Slogra and Gaibon. The trial is only for 15 minutes so if you want to play the game you’ll need to get Microsoft Points.

-Unstable

Whoa, whoa. Calm down, this doesn’t totally mean you get to pawn off WoW as an educational tool to your parents quite yet after reading that title. MMO’s like World of Warcraft can however be used to teach people English as they attempt to copy other players on the game.

Dr. Edd Schneider explained in a recent speech at the Game Developers Conference about English MMO’s being used to teach people who don’t quite have a full grasp on the language. He tested his theory using a bunch of English speaking graduate students play online games with students from Shanghai’s Qi Bao High School. His theory tested true as the students went from being afraid to talk and attempting to mutter simple lines to exclaiming how the graduate students were going to get their asses kicked in the next game.

In fact, the power of typical online games being used for education turned out so well that Schneider has already planned setting up a summer camp using his ideas.

His proposal to the audience of the speech was simple. He wanted to encourage MMO developers to introduce more international servers to allow people who’s native language is not English to play native English players.

 DC’s recent announcment of World of Warcraft action figures remotely show that they might also be planning on release of some WoW comics or WoW stories

The announcement included the statment “license and promote the world’s greatest pop culture characters and stories.”

Now, I didn’t put bold on the last word for no reason. What do they mean by stories? We all know what they mean by characters(the action figures). So, let’s read between the lines a little here. It’s DC comics and they’re mumbling about “licensing and promoting stories”. Sounds like a comic strip or comic book for WoW is possible.

It sounds like a great idea to me. It almost makes me wonder, why haven’t they thought of this before? It would probably be a huge seller among WoW fans and could only increase the popularity to WoW. It would be cool being able to be a part of your favourite comic book.

Enchanted Arms is a nice RPG for the XBox 360 that I’ve had for quite a while now.

This game is about a college student named Atsuma who is studying a magic known as Enchanting. One day, a powerful monster called a devil golem gets revived and his journey begins.]

Gameplay: 7.5/10

The battle system is a little bit weird. It works as a 4×6 grid divided into two 4×3 grids. Your characters on one side, the enemies on the other. Each attack covers a certain number of grid squares and hurts any enemies that has any part intersecting the area being attacked.

Something that makes this gameplay good is that you aren’t just limited to your main characters. You can also find and kill monsters called golems. When you kill a golem you find, you get its core and can synthesize it at a shop.

Another thing that makes this game unique is that after each battle your HP goes back to full. However, something called Vitality Points runs down with each battle and when they reach 0 your HP goes down to 1.

Graphics: 10/10

These graphics are just the excellent graphics people have come to expect from the XBox 360. The graphics from the in-game movies are even better.

Audio: 8/10

The music and sound effects aren’t the best in this game, but they’re still good. Music is fitting, it’s not like elevator music will be playing while you’re in an intense battle. The voice acting could be better though.

Overall: 9/10

Overall this is another great by Ubisoft, though it’s not exactly a traditional style RPG. I think in many ways this makes it even better.

Comments are encouraged.

-Unstable

Ah, named Fire Emblem: Godddess of Dawn in Japan, yet another scan for it!

Click Here!

Looks like Jill will be returning.

- Snid

 

 

Spore is the latest game from the brain of Will Wright- the creator of The Sims. Not only does Spore look amazing, it relies on a very new kind of playing, a very new technology.

 I’m talking about procedural generation; the downloading of other peoples creations, picked from an online database and used to create your world. This will make much more sense when we get to the actual game.

You begin, in Spore, as a micro-orgasm living in a drop of water, steadily building yourself up and clumbing the food chain in pac-man like gameplay (3D though.) As you become stronger, faster and smarter you eventually grow into a larger creature, completely (I mean completely) made by you. Every time you progress you can edit your creature with an amazingly in-depth editor. It allows you to scale parts (feet for example) with the mouse wheel, mould them to any shape with the mouse, twist spines and bones. In the demo Wright creates a snake-like fish that swam around eating smaller fish (all created by other players- they are downloaded and streamed to your computer- via the internet I would presume. The same applies to the plants and weeds in the ocean.) You can pick whether your animal is a carnivore or a herbivore, even omnivore.

 Soon enough this fish lays an egg, and clicking on this egg re-opens the editor. Adding three legs to the underside of his creature, twisting the spine a bit and sticking a ‘clamp’ on its tail Wright has the next generation of his animal. It now has legs, so it walks out of the water onto a beach. After a short period of annoying some nearby bouncing (almost Kirby-like) animals and eating one, (remember, this was a live speech given by Wright, so everything’s speeded up.) Wright continues to show us more of the editor. He shows an extremely tall dog, and one with a mouth at each end of its body. What is amazing is they all move properly, animation created for them on the fly. As you make creatures they are instantly made to walk / fight / eat / dance / drag etc according to how you make them.

 From here you have to survive, and soon evolve into a sentient creature. A small tribe of your creations band together and make a hut (again, completely customised by you) and can upgrade their society with new weapons and other items such as log fires and drums. When you give these things to your tribe (which are now fully evolved in every aspect except from intelligence) the game works out how your creatures will react to and use these things. Depending on how you played your animal originally they will react differently. Perhaps they will prefer peace and trade with other tribes, or war against them?

 We now move to the city level- (again all vehicles, buildings roads and walls are created completely by you,) and you are in control of many more of your creatures. You have to tend to them as in Sim City and such, and soon you will begin to seriously interact with other cities around you that do not belong to you; peacefully or otherwise. At this stage, you are working towards taking over your planet, city by city. This can be done diplomatically or by war, it’s your choice. After taking over your planet, you reach the second last stage of the game: The space stage. With your new UFO, designed by you again, you can fly from your planet and explore the 3D space around you. To begin with you only have a good enough engine to explore the immediate space around you, visiting planets and sometimes civillisations nearby. Now things get really amazing. The whole universe around you is full of planets, blank canveses for you to populate, experiment on (perhaps a cross-breed zoo? You do have an abduction beam and the ability to unlimitedly edit animals now…) Some of these planets are occupied by aliens, ready for you to interact with however you like. Wright demonstrates a nifty death-ray that wipes out an entire planet very beautifully.

 Now, having gained the ‘Steller-Drive’ you can venture from your solar-system and explore the rest of the universe. Zooming out Wright displays the size of it all. It is huge. Hundreds of clusters of stars, all housing their own solar-systems and possible alien-races. You can terraform planets with the ‘Genesis Device’ and make them liveable, dropping domed cities into your new world.

  If done right, Spore could be huge. Very huge indeed. I for one can’t wait for it’s late 2007 release.

 

 

Zelda games are a funny thing to me; in early stages of their developement, when all we see is half-finished code and primitive screen-shots I have no intrest at all in Zelda games. This is because Zelda is not about looks. It’s about gameplay that you can really sink your teeth into. Twilight Princess is the ultimate example of this.

Many people refer to it as Ocarina of Time’s spiritual succsessor, a game that remains modern (like Ocarina of Time when it was released) but holds onto the Zelda magic. I, having only breif memory of OoT would prefer to steer clear of this kind of comparison and concentrate on Twilight Princess as an individual game, not one belonging to a series.

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