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Sunday, August 29, 2010

Orlando LIC & LEGO Universe

My wife and I met our friends at the LEGO Imagination Center (LIC) today, I was expecting to be disappointed in their selection.  After we walked in the door, I noticed that one of the LEGO games (#3847 Magma Monster) actually has a orange 16x16 baseplate in it!  I picked one up.  Then I noticed over by the castle section, that the store had the #7952 Kingdoms Advent Calendar in-stock -- score!  Then as we looked across the store & spotted our friends, we notice they had the #8684 Collectable Minifigs, Series 2 in hand... The store upped the limit to 16 per customer, because families were complaining that they weren't able to collect a whole set with 5 per customer.  Hurray for the customer!

So it's been a good (now I'm much poorer) LEGO day.

In other news, I've been playing LEGO Universe as a Beta tester on my Mac laptop.  I'm very happy with the game play so far -- I've unlocked a few worlds, I've completed a few quests... so far, I'm very happy with how beautiful the artwork is and the story line.  However, it is very quirky... with enough quirks, that I hope they can iron them out before the general release in October.  I would hate for NetDevil to release something that crashes often, your character pauses for no reason without a way to resume movement, you're prevent from equipping a faction torso to complete a quest, all character names in a world are replaced with strange graphics (happened once so far, the world started out fine, then gradually degraded over time), and switching from chat to game play causes quirky in-game behavior as well... As a consumer, I would NOT be very happy with the product... But then again, it's still in Beta.

I plan to fill out a bunch of bug reports tomorrow for the developers... *sigh*

2 comments:

Bricknave said...

I have a solution for the LEGO Universe chat-to-gameplay switch quirk. If the input box of the chat window is activated, click on the output area of the chat window (the place where you read player dialog) to deactivate the input box, thus allowing your character to move again. Plenty of times throughout Beta, my navigational commands would be logged into my chat instead of making my character move. Sometimes, this would happen when I'm being attacked. ;-)

Michael said...

Cool, I'll try that next time. Thanks.