Garden Party

As I mentioned a few posts back, I've been spending a lot of time exploring virtual worlds for kids. My all-time favorite was Virtual Magic Kingdom, but anyone who is familiar with it knows that Disney closed it down last summer. It was a really sad time...

Anyway, since the closing of VMK, I'd been looking for a new virtual world to call home. I've tried all sorts of worlds, like Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin, Kaneva, Build-a-Bearville, and many more. Not too long ago I came across Garden Party, which has become my new favorite.

If you've got young kids (or you're a young kid at heart), Garden Party is just perfect! The Mods are very approachable, the world is beautiful, there are plenty of neat mini games (including some educational ones for the children!), there's a safe chat filter, overall it's just tons of fun!

While a game about gardening might not sound like a lot of fun, you'll likely enjoy growing plants in order to obtain unique in game items and apparel. Most exciting of all, you never really know what kind of items you might grow, so you'll often find yourself surprised.

My only concern is with a bit of the Moderation features (I'm not sure how much chat moderation there really is) and a few bugs here and there. However, it's still in the early days of Beta and surely deserves a chance!

http://www.gardenpartyworld.com/

Starcraft 2... a trilogy?

Without a doubt, StarCraft is my favorite game ever made. A superb storyline, awesome characters, deep and balanced gameplay, and three fascinating and unique races... it's just a great game!!!

Obviously I'm really hyped about SC2 (although, I'm not much of a PC gamer so I expect I'll need a new computer to play it). Up to this point my only fear wast that I was so used to the ol' StarCraft that playing this "new, fancy looking StarCraft" just wouldn't be the same. Could it possibly live up to my enormous expectations? Of course, I can deal with change and Blizzard has a history of making great games. So that fear was minimal.

But now, I unfortunately have a new worry... Blizzard just announced that StarCraft 2 will... be a trilogy? Each game will focus on one of the three races. WTF?

Obviously this has the potential advantage of MORE STARCRAFT! W00t! As a huge fan of the game, I'd be lying if that prospect didn't get me excited. On the other hand, I also don't want to have to pay for 3 separate games, which is what I'll need to do to see the whole storyline and as all three races. Sounds like a scheme to pull in more cash, huh?

Not to mention, I'm horrified that I'd have to purchase all three just to get the full multiplayer experience of all three races and their unique units and abilities. Of course, this hasn't been confirmed, but it's scary to think that I might have to keep dishing out more and more cash just to be competitive. Naturally, I expect to see bonus features in an expansion and I also realize that these features should be limited to those that purchased the expansion (like in Brood Wars)... but I DON'T expect to see gamers DEPRIVED of features just because Blizzard wanted an excuse to divide the game into three parts. This could hurt the perfect balancing that the original StarCraft had and really limit the online play.

Oh well, I guess we'll see how it goes. Clearly this has me worried because it inspired me to finally update, which is something I should do more often. Read about it below:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20603