Of all the things to adopt from other games, the unskippable, uninterruptible cutscene that advances the “story” with wretched dialog and worse voice acting was a poor choice. I pay to play your game, not watch NPCs run a third-rate school play.

#1 offender: the final quest line in Vashj’ir to unlock the dungeon. Poorly conceived, poorly written, poorly implemented, confusing, and way too fucking long.

#2 would be the multiple Indiana Jones “homages” (ripoffs) in Uldum, which are not even a little bit as cool as you seem to think they are. The only reason they don’t make #1 on the list is because they’re broken up into several different quests, and sometimes you actually get to participate instead of just watch.

Honestly, if you’d spent less time scripting these abominations, you’d have had more time to make sure that all the other quests actually worked, especially the way-too-many vehicle quests with mechanics that you’ll only ever use once. You might even have been able to write some original story and dialog instead of relying on an endless stream of really lame pop-culture references. I’m sorry, but when a shaman tells me to “check out the big brain on Braddock”, I don’t laugh, I wince.

Steam is having a big Christmas sale. Recettear is 66% off. This game was worth full price, so it’s now three times as cool.

[Update: okay, now only 50% off, still worth it. The daily specials are daily, it seems.]

I know, I know, you had to cut some corners to get Cataclysm out the door on time, and I’m sure you intend to fix all (most) (some) of it as soon as everyone gets out of the hospital. And some of it is hard, like quest phasing, or getting armor to fit onto werewolf bodies (the Bravo Company headband is particularly bad, I must say), but some of it should be easy, and can be done by liberal-arts majors who would be happy to have a job working with prose above the level of “would you like fries with that?”.

So, for the lengthy and generally quite entertaining Azuregos chain in Azshara, please find someone who knows the difference between “route” and “rout”, and “discrete” and “discreet”. A good interview question is to ask them about the difference between “affect” and “effect”, and if you don’t understand the answer, hire them.

Also, “lost on the throws of love”? What is this, a wrestling game?

Finally unlocked Griff, which gave me access to The Lapis Ruins. Also, a revelation: this game is what you’d get if you put a 7-11 and Seven of Seven in a blender and set it to “puree”.

Recettear is a silly, fun, and surprisingly deep game about being the shop owner in an RPG adventuring town. Windows-only, and allergic to most netbooks due to the mostly-invisible use of heavy 3D graphics (honestly, it looks like it should run on ancient hardware, but somehow all sorts of crap is getting linked in), but worth booting up a VMware session or less-anemic laptop for (my Lenovo S12 w/ION handles it just fine).

Full review when I can manage to stop playing it for a while…

Short take: extensive free demo, clean enough for kids, earbug-worthy background music, full English translation with limited Japanese vocals, unusual default keyboard controls, no DRM if you don’t buy through Steam. Gameplay mixes customer relationship management, Econ 101, and casually-paced dungeon-crawling. The only time you can’t just save and come back is in the middle of a dungeon, but there are town portals every five levels.

“Capitalism, ho!”

[The Japanese developers were also responsible for the brilliantly-named ElePaper Action]

[Update: okay, not 100% kid-safe…]

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So, the new kid on the MMORPG block will be Tera. All I want to know is, how did they make it so far without realizing that they named one of their races potpourri?

Did I say “fresh air”? I meant “air freshener”.

Now this is cosplay that separates the gamers from the noobs.

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“Congratulations. You’ve moved your unit.”