Socialist Gamer Review

Happy Halloween (Events)!

By Ravenhawk | October 28, 2006

It’s that time of tear again, Halloween. You know what that means: For the kids, sickeningly large amounts of candy that keep them on a sugar high for months. For the college students, an excuse to go get so drunk, they won’t be able to go to class for a week. And for the gamer’s it means Halloween Events.
There is a long tradition of Online Gamers cashing in on holidays which are celebrated by a large majority of their users; christmas, halloween, easter, valentines day. It’s a chance for players to get limited edition holiday-themed baddies, and generally get pulled back to their computers from whatever festivities they may have been going to attend.
The part I always revel at is how they can put a slight twist on the thing you’ve already been doing every day and all of a sudden its an awesome new thing. Puzzle Pirates is currently running their halloween event; All the Pirates have been turned into ghosts, put into teams, and must pillage forth on their ships to kill hoards of zombies and skeletons. The skeletons just replaced the typical brigans and the zombies replaced the barbarians. The only difference is a change of graphic. The teams are ranked on how much poe they swag from the hoards and in the end they’ll each get a special trinket based on the rank of their team. My team always seems to suck. In my inventory I hold two last place trinkets and a second to last place trinket from past events. Not that trinkets really mean much, they’re just a trophy for you to display for your bragging rights.
City of Heroes has halloween themed foes in different portions of the city, apparrently led by a pumpkinheaded baddie named jack. It’s quite original.
Ragnarok Online is directing players towards Niffelheim, their city of undead, demons, and ghosts. Likely they will also hold monster invasions of their cities, a typical thing to happen in RO during special events.
Speaking of invasions, Flyff has a new twist on the typical halloween monster mobs. All three of their servers are going to have scheduled invasions of the three main towns. Players will have two hours from the start of the invasion to defeat the baddies. If they succeed, they shall be rewarded with double experience for the next week. Sounds like a better reward to me than a special pumpkin hat any day of the week.
No matter what you’re going to be spending your halloween doing, I hope everyone has a good time. And give the evil pumpkin jack a good bash for me. (There is one in many games, but if yours doesn’t have one, slay a zombie or your game’s halloweenish equivilent for me.)

And I’ll put forth a promise here of some vague reward to anyone who actually does the above, and emails me a screenshot of the monster getting pwned.