Archive for October, 2009

A few years ago something so incredible and awesome happened in EVE, that it was even reported in the main stream media. A heist executed so flawlessly and with dedication, that it has never been seen before or after, in any MMO, of that scale. This thing was huge. So huge in fact, that it boggles the mind. I feel compelled to post the entire article about it as it was released in CVG in 2005.

This feat, for what it’s worth, is so unbelievably impressive, that I commend the people involved and must salute their dedication and skill. Come to think of it, it is this event that made me play EVE. This also reminds you that New Eden is more like a reality simulation, than a game.

The following takes place between 5.00 AM and 6.00 AM on April 18, 2005.

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Murder Incorporated
The story of Eve Online’s most devastating assassins.

5AM, April the 18th, 2005. Mirial, CEO of the giant Ubiqua Seraph corporation, warped into the Haras solar system with her most trusted lieutenant. And at that moment, a single word was sent silently, secretly and simultaneously to operatives of the Guiding Hand Social Club across the galaxy. ‘Nicole’. Mirial wouldn’t leave alive.

Mirial, CEO, Ubiqua Seraph

She was piloting her prize ship, a Navy Apocalypse worth billions of ISK – Eve’s currency. Her lieutenant, Arenis Xemdal, flew an Imperial Apocalypse, of which only two were known to exist in the entire game universe.

‘Nicole’ was the go-code for a hit that took ten months of infiltration to set up. By 6am it was over. Every Ubiqua Seraph office in the galaxy was raided, the contents of every shared hangar – not to mention their corporate coffers – gone. Mirial’s prize ship was annihilated, her escape pod nuked and her vacuum-frozen corpse sucked into the cargo bay of a Guiding Hand Social Club vessel.

The simultaneous ambush and galaxy-wide hangar theft inflicted financial damage upwards of 30 billion ISK – $16,500 US dollars at IGE.com’s prices. The value of the stolen assets utterly dwarfed the original fee for the job. And yet the only item the Guiding Hand’s anonymous client requested for himself was the cold, dead body of the target. It’s safe to say this was personal.

“At the time of the contract’s signing, we requested one billion ISK,” says Guiding Hand CEO Istvaan Shogaatsu, “which was quite a sum so many months ago. We could never have foreseen, however, the gains upon its execution… we found ourselves staring at Fort Knox with the key in our hands.”

Not that there was any question of the spoils distracting Guiding Hand’s operatives from their objective. “The contract above all” is their philosophy. “The financial compensation becomes secondary to the recognition we garnered for our strike.”

Et Tu, Arenis

By April 18th, the Guiding Hand had operatives in every level of Ubiqua Seraph’s organisation. Several were on the board of directors, and primary agent Arenis Xemdal “rose to a rank sufficient to challenge the CEO’s decisions.”

“Multiple vector infiltration is a trademark of GHSC,” Shogaatsu adds. “We feel one spy is rarely enough.”

It took extraordinary effort, meticulous planning, and one moment of spectacularly orchestrated treachery. Xemdal had convinced Mirial – referred to as ‘the objective’ by Guiding Hand operatives – to fly her ridiculously valuable Navy Apocalypse alongside his even more ridiculously valuable Imperial Apocalypse “as a show of UQS (Ubiqua Seraph) might”.

“The early-morning strike against Mirial’s battleship was fraught with concern.” Shogaatsu recalls. “One tense moment occurred when a pilot belonging to an unaffiliated third party hostile to UQS entered the system where our operatives’ trap for Mirial lay. Another came soon after, when Guiding Hand operative Uuve Savisaalo – tasked with assisting the kill on Mirial – was spotted arriving in system by an Ubiqua Seraph pilot. These events spooked the objective, who made a short jump before being set upon by Uuve and – in a moment of ‘Et tu, Brute’ if ever there was one – Arenis Xemdal’s Imperial Apocalypse.”

The Apocalypses clash

The ambush was an unprecedented clash of the titans. A Navy Apocalypse is one of the most powerful and valuable ships in the galaxy, but even so, an Imperial Apocalypse is overkill – a few cheap Battleships would suffice. To use an even more valuable ship was an act of absurd bravado, and one with enormous risks. It’s also typical of the Guiding Hand’s flair for theatrical excess.

But the hard part, according to Shogaatsu, was to then ‘pod’ Mirial. Podding is the usually spiteful, some say dishonourable act of destroying a victim’s escape pod when you’ve already destroyed their ship. The pod is no threat, and if it’s destroyed the victim has to revert to an earlier clone of themselves – sometimes losing skills that take weeks to learn, and in this case losing an incredibly valuable set of cybernetic implants. For this reason some players log out on ship-death in an attempt to avoid being podded – Mirial included, the Guiding Hand say. Successful podding was the only way to attain the physical body of the victim, however, and Arenis pulled it off.

Thievery Corporation

The moment the go-code was uttered, every Guiding Hand double-agent within Ubiqua Seraph unloaded the contents of their assigned Corp hangar – a communal storage area for trusted corporation members – into their own cargo holds and left. The assets were replaced by a note in each, stating simply that this was an act of the Guiding Hand Social Club.

That afternoon, Istvaan Shogaatsu posted on the Intergalactic Summit – a section of the official Eve forums in which posters are required to stay in character, and content is monitored by CONCORD, the in-game police.

Istvaan Shogaatsu, CEO, Guiding Hand Social Club

Posted on April 18, 2005 by Istvaan Shogaatsu

Greetings, everyone – it has been some time since I last stood behind a podium and made a public announcement, so you’ll have to forgive me if I’m somewhat out of form. The reason I stand here before you is to announce that my mercenary outfit, the Guiding Hand Social Club, has completed its most ambitious contract to date.

Further information pending – stay tuned. Thank you all for your time.

Terms Of Endearment

The same forum thread contains a curious post from fellow Guiding Hand operative Zeraph Dregamon, saying simply “What have we here?” and linking a screenshot which is no longer online. According to Shogaatsu, the shot was of Mirial’s personal info page, and showed it to contain the sentence: “Friends of the Guiding Hand Social Club.”

Arenis Xemdal, Double Agent, Guiding Hand Social Club

Gaining a corporation’s trust enough to rise to a the upper echelons of its hierarchy is hard enough, but this seemed to be evidence of Guiding Hand operatives actually altering the Ubiqua policy even in the eyes of its own CEO. The name Guiding Hand was starting to make sense. But how could a double-agent exert so much influence over a corporation’s political stance?

“Arenis Xemdal is what we call a Valentine Operative.” Shogaatsu explains. “Essentially his job is to seduce and entice an objective into a state of trust and confidence. As such, we’d call Mirial’s relationship to him moments before the strike… ‘endeared’.”

Of course, we only have the Guiding Hand’s word for this; at time of going to press, Mirial had not responded to our attempts to contact her for comment. It should be noted, too, that Ubiqua Seraph members role-play. While it’s certain that players belonging to Ubiqua Seraph genuinely trusted the Guided Hand double-agents, claims of a relationship beyond that are likely to be attributable to role-playing fun. Still, it’s a hell of a job title.

Naturally the forum thread exploded with reactions. This was one of the single most devastating acts ever performed in Eve – in fact, it was at the time the largest monetary value of any in-game theft we’ve heard of. It was an act of such staggering audacity and duplicity that it calls into question the very distinction between gaming and reality. Is it really still just a game when you inflict this kind of damage? At what point does an in-game act become morally wrong in real life?

This is the end, my only friend: Mirial’s ship, an Apocalypse, seconds before destruction

Opinion was divided between the impressed, the disgusted, and the impressed but disgusted. But a fair few commenters hint that Mirial herself has engaged in scams similar to those perpetrated against her – a few even express satisfaction at what they see as deserved revenge. For the Guiding Hand’s part, they’ve heard similar stories but aren’t concerned as to their veracity. “Allegedly, she is herself a corp thief, and escrow scammer. This is a large part of why we were hired, although I have not personally verified it – it is simply not my business to.”

The personal nature of the contract – particularly the request for Mirial’s frozen corpse – would certainly be consistent with the client having fallen afoul of Mirial’s actions in some way.

“The client requested Pearl Harbor,” says Shogaatsu. “Specifically a single, surprise strike designed to cause as much pain to a heavily fortified target in as little time as possible. The contract was the result of a vendetta between the primary target and our client, who, while certainly satisfied with the outcome, never expected the utter destruction we wrought.”

“While Ubiqua Seraph was our way of getting at Mirial, and their reliance on shared assets meant that each member likely lost a fair share of hard earned possessions, we do not believe they sustained any irrecoverable damage – save for, perhaps, their sense of security.”

Invite Only

For other corporation CEOs suddenly feeling vulnerable, Shogaatsu let us in on how his corporation avoids being penetrated itself.

“The Guiding Hand relies on distributed assets, rendering us impervious to theft. Since every module and warship belongs to someone, nothing is shared and thus nothing can be taken. As for infiltration with the intent to gather information, we are almost neurotic regarding the compartmentalization of any knowledge we have. The identity of clients is usually kept to the contractor who signed them, with the rest of GHSC never knowing who they’re working for. Regarding new members, we rarely recruit, doing so strictly on an invitational basis and preferring to rely on an old guard of players who know each other well.”

“Beyond common sense,” he adds, “I’m afraid sharing any other ‘tricks of the trade’ would be counter-productive for my corporation.”

For our money, the Ubiqua Seraph infiltration was an act of despicable brilliance. An operation as cruel as it is astonishing, it serves as a simultaneous testament to both the virtues and the evils of a truly open-ended massively multiplayer game. Players crying for developers CCP to step in and redress the balance miss the point – this is exactly the kind of extraordinary player politics that you can’t find anywhere else. CCP been very vocal in the past about their intention to simply create a world – a galaxy, in fact – and let people do what they may within it. If you stop people from doing horrible things to each other in it, you lose the full scope of what a game can be.

Shogaatsu confirms that many of the Guided Hand Social Club’s operations have caused players to leave Eve Online for good. But there will be many more – ourselves included – who get an irrepressible urge to play it when they read about the dark machinations of this extraordinary universe. If there’s another game in which ‘Valentine Operative’ is a viable occupation, we’ve yet to play it.

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Original article in ComputerAndVideoGames

Sometimes, Doomsday Devices or Citadel Torpedoes just don’t cut it. You need a more meaningful vehicle to deliver a decisive message. And it looks a bit like this.

Original post on EVE Online forums

“It may seem trivial… but suppose you’re in a cafe, trying to decide between coffee and tea. The you that chooses coffee, and the you that chooses tea – actually BOTH exist.”
- Homunculus

In my little time that I have lived in this world I have come accross a lot of games. And even today, without a doubt and unmatched by anyone else, is a game I have seen back in 2004: Shadow Of Memories.

Actually it was released by Konami in 2001 and has been more of a sleeper hit. It really is a shame that this game is not known by more people. A story so incredible, it will crank in your mind forever, I promise you that much.

It is the present day and our hero, Eike Kusch, gets stabbed on his way home while being on lunch break. He is however saved by a being we come to know as Homunculus, who then provides him with a device that allows Eike to travel back in time. The device should help him find the root cause of his death – and remove his death from the flow of time. It would be very important for Eike to survive – and this would not remain the only one attempt. So Eike sets out to find the truth about his assassin, and while doing so he travels through 4 periods of history, and all the people he meets are connected to his destiny.

Damned to the endless night of youth: Homunculus

The game had critical acclaim and most magazines gave it a 10 or 9. That was then, but this is now!

Konami decided to re-release the game once again… This time for the PSP. So where ever you go, you’ll now be able to re-live the Shadow Of Memories, and witness the incredible story of a thinking man’s masterpiece once more. The fated hour for Eike is yet again to strike.

Apparently all lines are re-recorded for this title. I have to say I don’t like Homunculus’ and Eike’s voice, they are not the same, really. But I guess if you haven’t played the original and wanna see what I’m talking about, then it makes no difference to you =)

According to the trailer for the PSP version it has been released on October 1 – but it doesn’t say where. Also, I have to say that the graphics seem to look better on the PSP.

Shadow Of Generations: 8 years apart – the original cover and the slightly updated version for the PSP release

The original featured six normal endings you had to get to and unlock to see the whole story, to understand the full circle. On top of that there were two additional endings, each topping it off with an even more incredible conclusion. All of those are gonna be in your pocket: Ending A, B, C, D1, D2, E, EX1, and EX2.

From the looks of it, the PSP gameplay and HUD seems to be practically identical to the original, as the below shot shows.

Death teaches him how to live: Eike in search for clues in a past era

It is very very difficult to convey the feeling of this game in words, its story, its deepness. Rest assured once you play it it won’t get out of your head, you’ll always remember some of Homunculus’ quotes like “Who cares, really?” or “My name is Homunculus – not that there’s much in a name…”. Simpy unforgettable.

Here’s one of the three original trailers, as shown on an E3 before the game came out.

Death teaches you how to live.

And this is the trailer for the ’09 version.

Welcome! I’ve been expecting you. Again…

A tribute to a game that should not go forgotten. A game so incredible, you’ll remember it forever. The choices we make, not the chances we take, determine our destiny.