Chimps in Space

We’ve relaunched vanhemlock.com as a brand new portal for the show. It has a forum and the most accurate and fastest links to the show when they’re posted. It will be updated by us both as a general gaming blog if there’s a slight link to the show.

I’ll still be updating here with things that aren’t connected to the show,

News for week ending 4th October 2009.

Tune in later in the week for the second half of the show, in which we rant about what we’ve been playing.

You can follow us on twitter as @vanhemlock and @jonshute, read our blogs at www.vanhemlock.com and www.chimpsinspace.com or leave us a comment at www.virginworlds.com or on iTunes. Or you can just enjoy the show.

You can subscribe to the show through RSS or iTunes to receive the show as soon as it’s published each week.

News for week ending 27th September 2009.

Tune in later in the week for the second half of the show, in which we rant about what we’ve been playing.

You can follow us on twitter as @vanhemlock and @jonshute, read our blogs at www.vanhemlock.com and www.chimpsinspace.com or leave us a comment at www.virginworlds.com or on iTunes. Or you can just enjoy the show.

You can subscribe to the show through RSS or iTunes to receive the show as soon as it’s published each week.

This time we’re back with a review of the free trial for Pirates of the Burning Sea and the XBOX indie games Fishing Girl, The Headsman – Deathlike Silence, Azubi’s Pool of Bethesda and Chillax HD.

• Pirates of the Burning Sea
• Fishing Girl
• Chillax HD
• The Headsman
• Azubi’s Pool of Bethesda

The twitter question was “Champions Online’s Twitter Notifications a bit samey after a while. Spice things up with better ones! What would your MMO Tweet?”

You can subscribe to the show through RSS or iTunes to receive the show as soon as it’s published each week

News for week ending 20th September 2009.

Tune in later in the week for the second half of the show, in which we rant about what we’ve been playing.

You can follow us on twitter as @vanhemlock and @jonshute, read our blogs at www.vanhemlock.com and www.chimpsinspace.com or leave us a comment at www.virginworlds.com or on iTunes. Or you can just enjoy the show.

You can subscribe to the show through RSS or iTunes to receive the show as soon as it’s published each week.

We’re back with more of what we’ve been playing, which is again dominated by LOTRO, Guild Wars and a scary number of console games.

The twitter question asked for blogs and podcasts to pimp, which we obligingly did and now have overflowing RSS readers.

You can subscribe to the show through RSS or iTunes to receive the show as soon as it’s published each week.

It’s hard maintaining an image of somebody who doesn’t enjoy MMOs when the new member of your static Monday night group catches you online 24/7 over the weekend, actually whenever he logs on to level up a bit in order to catch up with the group. I think it’s time to admit something: I spent the weekend having a bit of a problem.

It was all going OK. I logged in on Friday night to do a bit of auction house magic because I sort of like having money and then thought, in a moment of madness, that I’d just tick off a couple of those soon to be grey quests that I’ve been meaning to tick off for a while. These were getting to be a problem because I’d spent the time after the Monday night group desperately running through as many quests as I could in order to unlock fast travel to Erigion. For those that don’t know the horse points there unlock when you get deeds for completing X number of quests. Most annoying, but it forced me to take a look at a zone I would otherwise pretty much ignore. I usually run with a major lack of space in my quest journal anyway, and so while crossing a load off and getting rid of various faction hand in items as I travelled the lands chasing quests (bag space is of course also an issue) I found myself dumping loads of medallions on the faction person in Estildin. This is where my weekend went somewhat off the rails. I made the mistake of looking at what faction options I would be able to buy.

One of the options was to be able to mentor the harp.

Minstrels in LOTRO have this really nice ability to teach other players how to play various instruments. We of course can play them all anyway, but the music system in game is really nice and the multipart ABC files (think very basic MIDI files) often require a mix of instruments in order to play right. On top of that it’s possible to hook a keyboard up to LOTRO and actually play music through the game. All of a sudden being able to teach the rest of the group the harp was the most important thing in my life. I may have gotten a bit obsessed.

I ran grey quests for their faction and I killed grey orcs for their medallions while I did it. I went to Angmar and killed more orcs, this time for better faction rewards and actual XP. I played constantly. I made a nice amount of money through looting (something I don’t usually do because I just don’t sit down to bash through stuff to make cash, it’s mainly the Monday night group). Yes, I hit the game with a soloing obsession that I haven’t felt since I decided to actually talk to other people in these games and get on with playing them properly.

Before I knew it I had finally got there and my weekend was nearly gone. I had the faction and soon after the skill. I trained up the most musical person in the Kinship and he ran off to buy a harp.

I’d forgotten that the harp sucks of course. It’s too quiet for most things and he was back on his lute before he knew it.

Still, word is that there’s a random monster drop for teaching somebody to play the bagpipes! A hunting I shall go!

News for week ending 13th September 2009.

Tune in later in the week for the second half of the show, in which we rant about what we’ve been playing.

You can follow us on twitter as @vanhemlock and @jonshute, read our blogs at www.vanhemlock.com and www.chimpsinspace.com or leave us a comment at www.virginworlds.com or on iTunes. Or you can just enjoy the show.

You can subscribe to the show through RSS or iTunes to receive the show as soon as it’s published each week.

We’re back with the latest results of Operation Cheapseats, which this time was Warhammer Online. We also have reviews of four XBox Live Indy games. Will Warhammer be found to be good? Can some games thrown together by a bunch of indie developers actually be fun?

The most shocking thing that about this show is how much we enjoyed the games we were looking at. My criteria for picking the XBox Indy games was to pick the top of the sales chart (Z0MB1ES!!!1) and a couple of games with Avatar in their name. After playing for a while I had to pick a bad game as well in order to make it look like I didn’t just cherry pick three fun games to make it look good. I came to the conclusion that Avatar Golf could be sold as a proper XBox live arcade game, and I still stand by this over a week after playing the game for the first time. I encourage 360 owners to click the links and try out the three good games I played, you may not want to buy them but they’re worth looking at to at least validate that fun games are on the service.

Annoyingly I came out of the recording session wanting to play WAR again because of Tim’s enthusiasm but I’ve managed to avoid re-subbing so far. My interest in LOTRO is rising again and I think my current disdain for MMOs might be ebbing away. But more on that next week.

Games discussed in this show:

Warhammer Online Trial (US):
http://www.warhammeronline.com/trial/index.php?WHFB9F-PNAIU-3XRWI-E6BRD-TRPTI

Avatar Golf:
http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/offers/00000001-0000-4000-8000-0000585502d8

Avatar Drop:
http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/offers/00000001-0000-4000-8000-0000585502da

I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1:
http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/offers/00000001-0000-4000-8000-0000585502a6

Wizard’s Tower Screen Saver:
http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/offers/00000001-0000-4000-8000-0000585502d7

The Twitter question was: “Scrutiny of WAR this week! What kinds of PvP hijinks have you enjoyed the most or least? Hate it altogether?”

You can subscribe to the show through RSS or iTunes to receive the show as soon as it’s published each week.

This week we’ve changed the format slightly and split the content into two separate files. The first of the week is the news, which needs to be a bit faster on the turnaround than it has been before. Later on in the week we’ll release the talking part of the show

Hopefully people will like the change and it’ll be a nice compromise between the people who want shorter shows and those who want longer.

Join us later in the week for the second half of the show, in which you can find out Van Hemlock’s opinion of Warhammer Online and my reviews of a few XBox Indy games.

You can subscribe to the show through RSS or iTunes to receive the show as soon as it’s published each week.