Minions of Mirth -- WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

[Naked_Lunch]

Yep. So recently I've had an online craving and been trying out everything from Diablo 2 to a free trial of Guild Wars (ugh). Sadly, all of my ventures have been retreads of games I played many a year ago and so I yearned for something new. Well, by pure chance I remember Minions of Mirth, some wacky MMO/SP hybrid that utilized the "blob with arms and legs" style that gets old timers so horny.

So I installed the free demo and was...pleasantly suprised.

Sure, the game has little bearing of a story but it's an MMO. Doesn't matter. Quests are rather vapid (at least for low levels) but then again, get a party going and they can be quite fun. Especially multi-men Trinst sewer raids or double-teaming a demon in the tower. Even when you solo the game's still fun. My favorite in-game moment so far is wandering around the hills near the desert and seeing this huge giant. I ran up to it and smacked it with my Longsword of Fluidity (9 damage and-5% to physical resist, BITCHES) and dealt approximately -400^3 damage. It strikes back and deals 610 damage in a single hit and demolishes all the self-esteem I had from previously killing an entire camp of bandits.

There's also a crafting system, pets, alliances, guilds, all that good stuff. Haven't gotten into all that yet, but for a genre where the lower levels are usually nothing more than boring grinds that make Progress Quest an interactive experience MoM's "grind" is actually entertaining.

Plus, there's no monthly fee and the game's only 30 bucks. I'll definitely be picking this bad boy up.

So anyone up for some MP action or whatever?

 

[Psilon]

Is there actual documentation available now?

 

[Shagnak]

Hang on.
I thought everyone told me I was mad when I said I had fun with this.

 

[Shagnak]

Okay, it was more of a case of "anyone wanna play this with me?", and everyone said "no" so I didn't buy it. (Feel rather guilty, actually, after my "support the indies" spiel at the time).

And then...um...life got busy and I didn't have time for it anyway.

 

[vazquez595654]

Well I put games into two categories.

Diablo 2 / MMORPG style grind games

and

Everything else.

The game can be fun, but just remember it's just another type of Diablo 2. Nothing new and you'll get tired of it once you reach the second zone, because you realize its just more of the same, just higher levels.

 

[cutterjohn]

Hey! They're still running and added several major new features:
brewing and cooking crafting skills
poison crafting
alchemy crafting
armor and weapons crafting
magical item crafting (weapons, armor, etc.)
more "quests" anemic still, and originally lacking in quantity, but more of them

Plus, they also just released a fairly major patch(1.24 last week) and are working on an expansion. The expansion at this point will be yet another freebie for premium(i.e. paid) owners. (One of the more popular new features is the integrated PvP system which users can change from within a charact info window settings tab, w/a 2m cooldown between changes. Also trigger change to PvP in a non-PvP player buffs, allies with, etc. a PvP player.)

Add to this they are building a generic MMO toolkit based around garage game's Torque engine, of which there will be a more limited version available, again, for premium owners, if you're so inclined to that sort of thing.

Other than that, it's your typical MMORPG grinder which I can only handle in small doses(my 3 primary chars are all low level 20s after more than a year of play) and so appreciate this one w/o a monthly fee(and a shipped SP version) that, astoundingly enough, has continued support and content expansion. From recent experimentation w/ that emulator for a particular S ony game it plays alot like that game from the early days with somewhat better graphics. (Although, now being somewhat of a graphics whore, I'm hoping for a Torque engine upgrade and some shader goodnes...)

 

[Atrokkus]

Damnit john, you made me think NL is back again.

 

[cutterjohn]

Damnit john, you made me think NL is back again.

Sorry, but the new largish patch renewed my interest in the game for the time being. I've actually been finding decent people to group with in MP, and have been playing my SP game more often, although some time in the last few months the ability to update and play online under linux + wine has been broken, as it is unable to retrieve remote manifests for downloading of patched files and verification. Current supposition is that it's an expired cert, yet windows + OSX versions continue to work fine, so I'm wondering if it might be a wine bug or some sort of security setup under linux as someone else4 recently suggested.

I liked having it running under wine + linux, because it was one of the few games that I had interest in that ran well under wine. It almost seemed to run BETTER under wine than windows, but in the mean time I've been copying over my updated version from windows to my linux partition, and playing SP, although I have to remember to sync the SP world db when switching. I just hope the manifest retrieval problem gets resolved, although I'm sure that Prairie Games doesn't really care as it's technically not supported although the developer was the one who originally pointed out that it worked perfectly under wine, and I could run it with no problems while having other jobs running with little impact on game performance. (Maybe I'd better not hope for a Torque Engine upgrade as that might make it require too much processing power to effectively play while running other jobs...)

Also had some other weird problems with wine as of the 0.9.37 build with dialog boxes sometimes seem to be rendering transparently, i.e. no background color, yet outlines and text renders. I HAD thought it was some sort of funky CPU scaling interaction, although I had it happen this morning even with CPU scaling set to performance...

MoM SP also seems to be much more crash prone since the updates. MP seems ok though.

Pixel shaders have now been supported under wine for a while, although performance using Oblivious as a test is pretty pathetic ATM. e.g. water looks shaded but animation speed is AWFUL, as in so bad it looks static. Everything else looks as good as it does under Windows, maybe a little slower in places, which is likely shader related again. I haven't even tried G3 as I'm sure it's just too much of a hack job, although I'm sure that the PB gofer has more coding skillz that Bethesda's lead developer...

[EDIT]
wine + linux works again see forums...