Friday Bullet Points

Small items that I feel compelled to bring up, yet couldn’t really build a post around, so I will just steal somebody elses format.

• You’re not really rage quitting until you have compared your situation to the Holocaust. Quartzlight Evenstar Icefluxor cries out about the extremists who blew up… wait, it wasn’t blown up… who put his station tower into reinforce. (Hint: It’s the evil Goons again.)

• Free to play might be a nice idea, but when you make your $15 a month subscription available for $1.25, you may have made a wrong turn somewhere.  SOE suddenly yanks the ability to pay for your subscription with Station Cash.  Sounds like somebody did the math.

• Is the Diablo III auction house going to kill off the game early?  The reward patterns are apparently reversed when compared to its long lived predecessor, Diablo II.  Somebody tell Dabigredboat he can stop now. (Ah, I see Blizzard picked up the assist in sending that message.)

• What do those points mean?  Jester details how the EVE Online kill boards calculate the points you are awarded for your kills.  Except the Battle Clinic kill board, which does something else.  They make EVEMon, so I guess we can forgive them.

• Oh, and the EVE devs have another great economic post up examining the price of minerals since the Inferno update and Hulkageddon.  I love that sort of thing.

• Nexon plunks down $687 million for 15% of NCsoft.  I am not sure what that will mean in the long run.  Maybe I’ll get to play a US version of Kart Rider on my PC some day?

• Derek Smart provided one of the more cogent statements about the 38 Studios collapse.  Yes, it is in a comment thread.  Isn’t he always there?  Anyway, with 38 Studios filing for chapter 7 bankruptcy, it is all over bar the criminal investigation.  It was nice to hear that the Big Huge Games team has options.

• And my Burn Jita video on YouTube passed the 100,000 views mark, which gives it 99,142 more views than my second most popular video, which involved using LEGO technology to cheat my Pokewalker.  Thanks to all the viewers in Poland and France!  My poor WoW Instance group video, which is probably my personal favorite, sits at just 300 views.  Maybe I failed to make proper use of the media.  Where have I heard that complaint before?  Hah!

KartRider Comes to the US at Last… on Your iPhone

A little over three years ago the Nexon game KartRider was in open beta here in the United States.  My daughter and I tried it out and found it reasonably light and enjoyable.

Big Ad on the back of GFW Magazine

It wasn’t quite Mario Kart, but it was a decent game and seemed to have quite a following in Asia with a reported 230 million people having tried the game world wide. (Or is that just 230 million accounts created?)

However, within a few months, the beta closed down and nothing more was heard about a US version of the game.

Open Beta has Ended, See You Some Day...

Apparently it was not a big hit in the US.  It disappeared from the Nexon America site.  That was nearly three years back.

Now, however, Kotaku reports that the game will be coming to the US market after all.  But not on your computer.

Instead it will be available on your iPhone, iPad, iTouch, or Android device.

You will be able to play against three other people in local match ups, and it will hook up to Facebook and the Nexon item shop, where you will be able to buy new tracks and all the car upgrades and customizations.

The odd thing is that online play will not be available.  At least it is not mentioned at all currently.  I can see how you might sell things in the MMO version of the game, but on the mobile device version, where you can only play against three other people locally, or against the CPU, the item shop seems… less compelling.

Still, it is supposed to be a free download from the App Store, with the Apple device version available soon followed by Android support this summer.

KartRider?

I went looking for KartRider this morning, but it seems to have disappeared.

A little less than a year back I ended up, due to a big colorful ad on the back of Games for Windows Magazine (which itself disappeared in April of last year) downloading and installing the Nexon free to play game KartRider.

It is (was?) a fun little racing game that my daughter and I played on and off for a couple of months.

This morning my daughter was looking at the icons on my desktop, pointed at the KartRider icon, said that we had not played that game in a while, and asked if we could give it another try.

But when I tried to launch the game, it gave an error, citing my firewall as a possible issue.

I went to the KartRider site I had bookmarked, to see if anything had changed or if I needed to download a new client and was greeted by this:

Open Beta has Ended

The open beta is over (oh, yeah, I forgot it was still in beta) and thank you to all the people who made it a huge success.

The main Nexon site had no obvious mention of KartRider.  The Korean site for the game still seemed to be up and in full swing however.

Eventually I found a notice on the site about the end of the open beta:

Greetings KartRiders!

We’d like to thank our beta testers for all their hard work in testing KartRider!

The Closed Beta will come to an end on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 5pm (PST). We encourage you to get your last few races in!

We will announce the full launch of KartRider at a later date.

Thanks for playing!

– The KartRider Staff –

Hrmm, it has been a while since I peeked in on the game.

Still, I have to wonder how huge of a success the open beta was if they removed all mention of the game from the main US site and have let the US localized version of the game sit for more than seven months.

They still have MapleStory, Combat Arms, and a couple of other games listed on their US site, but could this be another sign (ala NCsoft) that Korean game makers aren’t able to tap the US market as effectively as they do their home market?