Anyone recognize the "Glaciators"?

Before we begin this list I think it's fair to mention that I spent at least 50% of my time this year playing two games not released in 2008: Team Fortress 2 and World of Warcraft. I do not regret time spent in either even though there were a lot of great games released this year. I also will mention that as an engineer first and a game commentator second, I have the awesome ability of not having to worry about finishing every game I play. I also missed out on Dead Space, which everyone tells me I'd love. I also did not take part in any of the official game of the year picks so don't look for any insights here. Take my list with a grain of salt.

Jeff passed over some copies of Wrath that just came in for Andy and I. You won't see us for a little while guys ;-)

I have started to love the japanese philosophy of Kaizen which focus on continuous improvement using small steps. Unlike most big sites, the Giant Bombs dev team likes to push code on an almost daily basis, with a new feature once every two weeks or so.

Today was the first day I comitted and pushed code on 4 different sites. It wasn't a hugely busy day, but I figured some people are interested on what it's like working on sites like GB so I thought I'd make a post about it. Here was my day:

• 9:00 - Leave the house and stop in at 7-11 for coffee. Then proceed to walk to work (I like 5 blocks or so away) whilst thinking about how much work I need to do on the new site we're launching.
• 9:30/10:00  - Arrive at said office, check my emails and browse my RSS feeds. Attempt to decipher PMs usually sent while I sleep from a country that starts with "The".
• 10:00/10:30 - Check in with Coonce and brainstorm on his new project, which people here will love.
• 10:30/11:00 - Check in on ad delivery and make sure our ads are hitting their targets. Test some code Andy wrote yesterday for new ads to be run later in the week.
• 11:00/11:30 - Fix a bug on GB that caused the video page promos to wrap funny because of a long title name. Fix a bug on Comic Vine that causes the home page to load all funky. It only shows up on one computer in the office, but it happens to be the guy who runs it, so that means it's a real bug.
• 11:30/12:00 - Realize that it's too close to lunch to start working on the new site, and instead go get some awesome egg/sausage scramble at the local diner. Read a copy of Wizard and lement about my comic book reading habits of late.
• 12:00 - 12:30 - Put out a fire on political base and blind push a bunch of code I'm not sure about since I haven't edited that site in forevs. Stop in downstairs after and give the dudes the scoop on our dev schedule. Use the oppurtunity to talk with Jeff and Ryan about how excited I am Cammy is going to be in Street Fighter IV.
• 12:30 - 6:30 - Spend a lot of time trying to lay out a single page on the new site. It's a complicated one similar to the main game page here so it takes some thought.
• 6:30 - 7:00 - Go downstairs to hang with the guys and marvel that Ryan edits every bad sound spike in the podcast. Chat with Jeff about ways we can make ads not suck for users, but that publishers will still like, then go into the usual routine where he reports hyper-specific bugs or feature requests and I immediately feel guilty I haven't fixed them yet. Attempt to cheer up Jeff by throwing a couple crazy ideas at him instead.
• 7:00-730 - Chat up Ethan about the new site and feel guilty that I'm not able to work on it as much as I should.
• 7:30-10:00 - Go home, play some TF2 and catch some election drama whilst drinking a beer or two. Remove a bunch of porn some asshole put on the site (thanks MB), respond to more PMs.
• 10:00-12:30 - Realize I'm kinda bored and really should be working on that new web site and head back to the office, where I find that Ethan is online doing the same thing from home. We trade compliments/insults at each other over our respective work and I get another big page laid out. I jam the tunes super hard-core since no one else is around.
• 12:30-1:00 - Watch an episode of Samurai 7, which I'm strangely very much enjoying.
• 1:00-2:00 - Check the traffic stats for the previous day, which are good. Check GB before I go to bed, get lost on the boards, then decide to write this blog because it might be interesting and I always feel guilty for the Euros that get second dibs on the boards.

Giant disclaimer: I've only played an hour and a half or so of Fallout 3. This is just a quickie impression.

No, not Baraka, but Barack Obama. We checked it out and it looks legit. I also noticed when I checked out the page that it had been vandalized (uncool dude). This also brings up the question of whether or not people should be attached to games simply because they show up in ads. My vote would be no, but I'll let the community fight this one out. What do you think? Should a dynamic ad in a game count as a reference in a game?

1. WoW is inherently a better game due to its 4 year existence. This has allowed it to amass an insane amount of polish that Warhammer can not compete with in its current state and likely never will.  Yes, Warhammer has some great new ideas and is being patched regularly and COULD potentitally become a better game. For the moment though, it isn't and is playing a game of catch-up with a much larger development team. It's an uphill battle against a stronger, faster foe.
2. The combat animations in Warhammer are unpolished and distracting. Put simply, the fighting animations, be it casting a spell or swinging a sword do not match the timed actions a user initiates. This is turn throws off combat tremedously and is not tolerable to hardcore MMO players who are used to polished, quick-response controls in PvP settings. This is something that can be fixed and is a trait far less noticable to people who haven't gotten into high level MMO content. For the moment, this is my current major gripe with the game and the reason I gave up on it so quickly.
3. Wait times for scenarios are too long. In a game that touts its pvp system and pick up and play ability, having to wait 15-30 minutes for a scenario just isn't very fun. I can pop a BG in WoW pretty much immediately for any of the BGs I choose. Has that always existed? No. It used to be like Warhammer. Does that make me feel any better about Warhammer? No, because at the heart of it, these games are already time sinks and the last thing I want to do is wait around till I can fight. While this might vary server by server, it's just a major turnoff given the alternative of WoW.
4. Scenarios, and PvP combat in general, seems pretty erratic  and boring atm. This one could be due to the fact that players don't have a full grasp of the abilities of other classes yet, but most of the pvp I've experienced in Warhammer scenarios seems all over the place. The maps are almost always semetrical affairs with two groups jousting over a single center position. This means that you have people essentially dying, spawning and running to the middle of the map. To put in WoW terms, scenarios in Warhammer essentially force the incorrect and boring middle ground fights of WSG. By placing your control points on the center of the map, you essentially reward this playstyle. WoW for the most part puts it's capture points at the edges of the map, with spawn points existing on top of the areas you want to control (WSG, AB, AV and EotS all have this) which forces more strategic gameplay. You essentially don't rush to the center of the map, but have to choose to spread out and inherently can't overtake those points unless you are organized because the enemy spawns there. When people just rush to the center on semetrical battlefields you do nothing but force people to the same point EVERY game.
5. Warhammer has too many classes and it clutters the battlefield. Mythic had this same problem with DAoC. The reality is that a smaller amount of classes lowers the barrier for people to learn how to react in group pvp settings and provides a shared understanding of roles when fighting with strangers. This is something that can obviously be counteracted with time, but I found the sheer amount of classes, looks and styles of the toons I was looking at daunting. Add some unpolished spell effects and it was very hard to tell what characters were doing what. More isn't always better, sometimes more is just noisey. Give me a game like TF2 with a small amount of balanced classes vs. Warhammers variety of unpolished ones.
6. I personally prefer WoW's art direction and lore. Warhammer looks great. WoW looks great. Both use the same mythology because hey, let's be honest, Blizzard ripped it off a dozen years ago. That doesn't change the fact that Blizzard out Warhammer's Warhammer. The Warcraft world is colorful, bright and filled with variety. The Warhammer world is way more serious. Me, I'll take the laugh-at-itself world of WoW with it's goofyness and cartoon-like atmosphere. I think it's very hard to pull off serious in high fantasy worlds without a very detailed story, which is inherently a weakness of the genre in general.
7. The mod community is not as mature as it is in WoW. Is this a fair criticism? Well, look at it this way, I play games on PCs whenever I have the oppurtunity over their console counterparts mostly so that I can enjoy post-launch, fan-made content. WoW mods have become a very big part of my effectiveness in that game. Specifically, I would not play WoW if certian mods did not exist and in fact take breaks from the game when major patches break said mods. While Warhammer has a bugeoning community of mod authors, there are modifications that I've grown so used to that not having them in Warhammer severely limit my fun with the game. This obviously has nothing to do with either development company, but I still feel relevant in my own play experience.
8. WotLK looks to be amazing, Patch 3.0 already is. Whatever good original ideas Warhammer had were quickly shadowed by the 3.0 patch and will in turn be over-shadowed by the full Wrath launch. Fanboyism? Possibly, but that was one hell of a patch. The achievement system alone that was added is possibly the best implementation we've seen in a video game.

When we built the guides section we had the hope that users could build better guides if they could work together, add images, photos and tables. Looks like user Lies, pyromaniac and systech proved that to be true. Check out their AWESOME Force Unleashed Mega-Guide.