First and foremost, this is a music website, not unlike mp3.com in days of yore. Playing music on it “just works” and their interface is very slick. The site integrates several clever social dynamics to keep you engaged and the site interesting. Artists on the site are generally independent musicians or groups, although there are certainly some recognizable names such as Daft Punk, Ratatat, Arcade Fire, CSS, etc.

Popularity

The heart of the site is a voting system where users promote music by, yes, hearting it. That was a horrible pun. The most popular music is featured on the front page in the “top songs” and “hot right now” sections. That in itself is not that unusual; it’s only logical that a digg/reddit-style voting will be applied to pretty much every concept ever.

Special sauce

The real charm of TheSixtyOne, though, is its game-based design. As a user, you have a certain amount of “rep” (think experience) that determines your level. As you level up, you unlock site features, a clever way of introducing the various features. In addition, each level confers additional hearts per daily login. Rep is gained primarily by hearting music that is subsequently hearted by other users; this rewards users for picking “good” music, under the assumption that if it’s good, then other people will like it as well.

Rep and hearts are also gained by completing a wide variety of quests, which generally prompt a user to listen to songs in a certain part of a site or perform a certain action (ex: heart a song, subscribe to another user, etc). The combination of these two systems make for a particularly addicting site. Additional hearts and rep can be gained by listening to “the rack,” music that has “gone under the radar” (sometimes for good reason; sometimes, it’s worth your ear).

Bread and butter

That said, good web design is nothing without content. Given the focus on independent artists, you may be concerned that there isn’t anything to draw you in. On the contrary; the site has a significant music library, encompassing a wide variety of genres. I am most interested in electronic, rock, and pop, although I have dabbled in some of their other offerings and found them acceptable. That said, everyone has different music tastes and I can’t guarantee that you’ll find what you’re looking for here.

Try it yourself

Go forth and give it a try yourself; my userpage is thesixtyone.com/disavian and you can subscribe to me or listen to music I’ve hearted (”listen to radio” next to my picture). I’ve found it worth my time in a way that traditional radio could never be.

While the summary of the article is fairly obvious, as anyone that has been to a big box store recently has seen the glut of (for example) Petz titles that should really be thrown into the nearest bonfire or airlock.

In particular, I found this part particularly revealing:

Looking at how long it takes a game to enter “price protection”, which is a term used for when a publisher – having noticed a game isn’t selling very well – lowers the wholesale cost of a game so that retailers can keep it on the shelves at full price, even when the public are ignoring it. What they’ve found is that this practice occurs for 7.5% of 360 games. And 9.09% of PS3 games. But the Wii? It happens for 15.1% of titles.

Summary:
[18:27] Andrew: now we know why petz: bunniez 2 is still on the shelves
[18:29] Hillary: Because it’s cheaper for the store to put shitty games on the shelf, and they make more money per sale than the good ones. Got it.

I figure that it’s still early enough in the development process that I can suggest some features in the hope that someone relevant will come across this post in time for it to matter.

I’m under the assumption that the art, sounds, and play style will be great. These are more reflections on hours and hours of Diablo 2 gameplay. I’d also like to know what you’d like to see (or not see) in Diablo 3. Comment! Also note this isn’t intended as a summary of all that we know about Diablo 3 right now – for something closer to that, I found this page to be a good resource.

Release date

I’d like Diablo 3 to be released before Duke Nukem Forever. If by some miracle, Duke Nukem Forever is released before Diablo 3 is ready, I’ll let them have this one. I want a polished game with a lot of replayability instead of a speedy development. Thus, I agree with Blizzard’s Diablo 3 FAQ:

When will Diablo III be released?

It’s too early to estimate Diablo III’s release date. As with all Blizzard Entertainment games, our goal is to create a game that is as fun, balanced, and polished as possible. We intend to take as much time developing Diablo III as is necessary to ensure the game meets our own high expectations and those of our players.

Graphics

As I’m sure I’ll have the relevant equipment by the time it’s released, I’d like the game to scale all the way up to 1080p. That would be shiny, and correspond to the graphical assets console devs have had for a while now.

As for particular graphical elements, I especially like the graphical style of elemental weapons (fire-enchanted swords are flaming, etc), and the extremely detailed level design I’ve seen. The new ‘dashboard’ style (borrowing well-tested elements from WOW) is a sleek upgrade from d2’s interface, and allows more resolution independence.

Item/character storage space

I also want Blizzard to give me infinite storage space for items (you know, weapons, armor, runes, gems, etc), or barring that, the ability to mail items back and forth between characters.

I’d also like more characters per account. Having a billion items and five slots in which to place them was one of my major frustrations of Diablo 2, as was needing several accounts to keep them in.

Map

I liked a lot of the things included in the Diablo 2 map hack; it was particularly useful when going back and leveling up. I know that would be pretty open for abuse, though. Perhaps when you’ve beaten the game at that difficulty level a certain number of times you can set it to automatically show you the entire map.

I don’t want people to abuse the game, but when you’re replaying a certain quest, you don’t want to wander around trying to find the right area. I do like the updated graphical look and position of the map (as compared to Diablo 2) as seen in the gameplay trailer, though.

Health

I didn’t like how D2 was so dependent on potions. The health globe thing Blizzard showed us in the gameplay trailer looks like it will help, especially as it heals the entire party. I was never really a fan of ‘hardcore’, so I’m no stranger to dying, but I’d prefer it balanced so that dying is… unlikely… or at least, unusual for players that know what they’re doing.

Loot

If loot is generated per-player, it would eliminate the need for auto-grab hacks. If you pick it up and drop it, teammates can grab it. I applaud this known design decision and only regret that I didn’t think of it myself. Hopefully, items available only to you and items available to everyone will be visually distinguishable.

Skills

I like the character skills they’ve demoed; and I especially appreciate the need to use said skills strategically, and the visual appearance of each skill. For example, the use of stomp to make enemies drop their shields is rather clever, and details such as those will add new detail to the gameplay. The way the ground around the barbarian shatters after a stomp is a nice touch.

Now I’ll go by character class as to specific requests. To see the full list of announced D3 character classes, see Diablo III – Character Classes.

Barbarian

As for picky changes, it’d be nice if they made whirlwind a bit stronger- when I played a barbarian, it was just as fast to use double swing and significantly increased run speed, especially if you had mana leech. I’ve toyed with the idea of entirely new skills being introduced in each (distant future) patch and/or expansion, but that could lead to some difficult balancing work. While we’re at it, beef up the war cries, if they’re coming back. When was the last time you saw a high-level war cry barb? That’s what I thought.

Witch Doctor

The Witch Doctor seems to be a clever way to combine the Necromancer and the Druid. I approve of this, as it will likely take the best from each class, keeping the game somewhat original. This is purely speculation, though – Blizzard may yet decide to include a Necromancer.

Sorcerer

While not officially confirmed, there’s bound to be some sort of spellcaster. As I played a barbarian, I usually thought that sorcs were overpowered, and ice sorcs overpowered other configurations. It’d be nice if there was a wider variety of elements for them to spend their skills on.

Levels

I’d prefer it if we could avoid the crazy bug where you had to traverse halfway through the level to get inside the palace at the end of Act 2, to talk to the prince, to go back, to get out of the damn city. If we could avoid any similar level/gameplay design bugs, that would be GREAT.

Oh, and D3 had better have a cow level of some sort. That was awesome, even if it wasn’t an effective place to level by the time I started playing Diablo 2, due to changes in each subsequent patch. It’s that sort of humor that really makes a game worth playing.

Some students decide to spend their life savings over spring break, taking trips to Maui or Cancun, partying all night and not knowing where their pants are the next morning. For the few students who stayed at Tech over the break, the Student Center was the place to be on the weekend of March 17-18.

There, one could find Tech’s very own anime and gaming convention, MomoCon, founded and coordinated by Jessica Merriman, Management ‘05. In its third year, MomoCon is free to attend, a far cry from the large membership fees associated with more established conventions.

This year’s MomoCon had its highest attendance to date with approximately 2600 people attending on both days, about 800 more than last year. Thankfully, the Student Center food court was open both days, a huge boon to hungry con attendees.

The student center was absolutely packed with con attendees who dressed as pretty much anything imaginable. During the costume contest Saturday afternoon, I remember seeing characters from most popular anime series (Naruto, Trigun… pretty much anything and everything that’s ever been on Cartoon Network) and then some.

Other cosplay staples were represented as well; a few Links, Klingons, Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts characters (including a Nobody) and creepy furries could be found in the mix of people. The costume contest on Saturday was held outside due to the somewhat limited seating available in the Student Center Movie Theater, but the weather was unreasonably cold, an unpleasant surprise after excellent weather before and after the con.

The pace of the contest felt rather slow, probably because I so desperately wanted to go back inside and warm up. The costume contest ended up being about an hour shorter than scheduled, for which I am thankful. Despite the poor weather, the costumes themselves were fascinating.

Among the events that could be found were panels that investigated certain aspects of geekdom; examples of the 23 panels and 17 workshops scheduled were “Costuming 101″ and Brent Allison’s “Anime in Academia.” Also available were anime music video (AMV) competitions. An even better draw than the panels, though, is the dealer’s room. A Mecca of sorts at any convention, the dealer’s room draws you in and tempts you with rare items only found at conventions. Inside the Student Center Ballroom, one could find witty shirts, rare game soundtracks, games, art and for those such as myself who played Ragnarok, adorable plush Porings.

Outside of the dealer’s room, the third floor rooms were filled with tables, gaming consoles and excited gamers. Popular choices were perennial favorites Super Smash Brothers Melee and Soul Calibur 3, along with relative newcomer Gears of War.

Due to a power outage, the gaming rooms were moved from large spaces available in the Student Center Commons to the relatively cramped third floor. Perhaps the Student Center should volunteer a few of the dozen or so plasma TVs at its disposal next time.

On Saturday, there were Smash Brothers Melee and Soul Calibur 3 tournaments. Guitar Hero, Halo 2 and expert DDR tournaments were scheduled for Sunday, but they were cancelled.

A few hours before the con was scheduled to close, I decided to visit to the dealer’s room to talk to my friend Jennie Breeden, con panelist and artist of the webcomic Devil’s Panties (devilspanties.keenspot.com). Soon thereafter, MomoCon staff began politely asking people to leave the rooms and locked them.

There was some general confusion as the staff evacuated the building and told attendees to meet at the Campanile for an explanation. Merriman explained the reasons for the con’s early closure: unidentified individuals had detonated small fireworks outside of the student center, and had been planning to detonate several more inside the Student Center.

The Georgia Tech Police Department became involved, and the con staff found several small fireworks inside the Student Center. As a safety precaution, all of the con-goers were evacuated from the Student Center, and the con was shut down for the day.

“We would like to apologize to every one of our attendees.” Merriman said, “We know it is you guys who make MomoCon what it is, and we will do whatever it takes to make our next MomoCon the best one to date.” After her speech, the convention attendees gave Merriman a standing round of applause.

All in all, MomoCon 2007 was a fun and exciting convention, with about 80 percent of the many scheduled panels, workshops and events taking place.

In spite of the security trouble, MomoCon 2008 is in the works. No announcements about the place or time of the next convention have been made, but Tech will allow MomoCon to use the Institute’s facilities next year.