Our second and final MMO Log for World of Warcraft's Cataclysm expansion begins with a five-year-old Horde character defecting to the Alliance.

Kotaku's MMO reviews are a multi-part process. Rather than deliver day one reviews based on beta gameplay, we play the game for four weeks (or in this case, two) before issuing our final verdict. Once a week we deliver a log detailing when and how we played the game. We believe this gives readers a frame of reference for the final review. Since MMO titles support many different types of play, readers can compare our experiences to theirs to determine what the review means to them.

I've gotten a lot of comments in our Cataclysm coverage regarding a supposed Horde bias on my part. It's not that I prefer World of Warcraft's more monstrous Horde faction over the more traditional fantasy races of the Alliance. It's just that I've been playing Horde for years, and it's hard enough to focus on the side I'm playing without worrying about what the other half of the game is doing.

I do feel the Alliance players' pain, however, and because of this I dropped $30 to transform my level 77 Undead Mage into a Level 77 Worgen Mage. Then I spent two days reaching level 80.

What I Played

There are two choices for the discerning level 80 character when it comes to questing through the new Cataclysm zones. One can either enter Mount Hyjal and join the battle to protect the wounded World Tree, Nordrassil, or travel into the briny depths of Vashj'ir to join the battle between the Elementals and Queen Azshara's naga forces, the latter of which has teamed up with Lovecraftian horrors of the deep.

I poked around Mount Hyjal a little bit before dedicating myself to the underwater world of Vashj'ir. Hyjal was pretty enough, and the quests were engaging, but Vashj'ir offers an entirely new experience in World of Warcraft, and I couldn't tear myself away.

How It Went

It went swimmingly! Get it? Ha!

Sorry.

I spent the majority of my post level 80 time swimming about the oceans of Vashj'ir. First I grabbed the Call to Action quest off of the post board in the Alliance capital of Stormwind, and then I waited on the docks for my ship to come in. The ship was then destroyed by a giant octopus, and I had to learn to swim rather quickly.

A convenient buff made it possible for me to breathe underwater as long as I was within the Vashj'ir vicinity, so my first stumbling underwater steps were spent getting used to the fact that enemies are no longer limited to one plane. The shadows of elite sharks passing overhead served as a chilling reminder that just because I could move in any direction didn't mean I should.

After a handful of initial quests I got the chance to wrangle my own sea horse, which serves as a very fast underwater mount. It's the only way to travel in Vashj'ir, unless you count the gigantic Gnomish submarine used in some of the storyline's more epic moments and the odd bout of shark riding.

The basic questing structure is the same as it usually is in World of Warcraft. You complete a series of quests in one location and then get ushered on to the next. The main difference I've noticed in Cataclysm questing is the story connecting the various quest lines is much more developed.

It bears noting that I didn't run into one group quest throughout the entire quest line. Everything is solo-able, at least until you reach your first instance.

The quests in Vashj'ir lead directly into the five-man instance Abyssal Maw Throne of the Tides. In order to play in the Cataclysm instances you have to find the dungeon entrance first, and the Vashj'ir quests lead you directly to the Throne's front door. The quest line culminates in a massive battle where an elemental god is attacked by a giant squid and an important NPC is kidnapped. Inside the Throne you're tasked with saving said NPC and helping the god defeat the squid. It's one of the most natural progressions from questing to instancing I've experienced in the game.

Other highlights of Vashj'ir include the aforementioned submarine rides and a sequence where you get to relive a major battle in the role of a naga warrior princess.

Since Vashj'ir I've wandered through Deepholm, the starkly beautiful elemental plane that Deathwing used as a point of passage into Azeroth, damaging the column that keeps the two worlds from collapsing into each other. I've also taken a caravan ride into Uldum, the new Egyptian-themed zone located off of Tanaris in Kalimdor. I even took a trip to the Blackrock Caverns instance, which proved ridiculously easy, especially when compared to the relative toughness of the Throne of the Tides dungeon.

Oh, and I joined a new guild called The Mended Drum, filled with the sort of mature, relaxed players that appreciate the series of books The Mended Drum is in reference to. Nice group of folks!

The Story So Far

When Blizzard first revealed that there would only be five new levels in Cataclysm instead of the ten tacked on with World of Warcraft's Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King expansions, I was skeptical that it wouldn't be enough. What I've seen so far shows that the narrow focus has allowed the developers to create a much more intense experience. In other expansions I was simply traveling from zone to zone, picking up the next series of quests. Here I'm actively playing a part in a larger story, and when I finally reach level 85 I've got the feeling these will have been the most memorable five levels I've ever earned.

It makes me feel bad for the folks that rushed to level 85 in order to gear up for the big raids and player-versus-player combat. They're definitely missing out.

Look for our full World of Warcraft: Cataclysm review later this week.

No memes about covering wars, you know, in this new trailer for Dead Rising 2: Case West. Just the return of Dead Rising's intrepid photog and a hint at the story behind his team-up with the sequel's motocross-racing protagonist.

Dead Rising 2: Case West is exclusive to the Xbox 360 and arrives Dec. 27. It will be 800 Microsoft Points.

To: Ash
From: Totilo

Stories you may have missed from the day shift
Call of Duty Publisher's Accusations Are 'Deliberate Misdirection," Rival Says
What Ever Happened To The Christmas Video Game?
Do Video Games Really Need To Be Immersive?
Are Game Companies Doing Enough To Avoid Funding War In the Congo?
The Year She Stopped Arguing Whether Video Games Are Art

What was 2010? Maybe it was the year we got past the "are-games-art" debate. Game developer Kellee Santiago hopes so. She was in the thick of it, as she discovered one very early morning back in the spring.

The Santa Monica-based game developer was in Baltimore last April, booked on the first flight out of town. At 5AM in a sleepy airport, she had little to keep her occupied. She checked the Internet.

"Someone had put a comment on my Facebook page that 'Oh my gosh, Roger Ebert wrote about you."

Santiago is the president of an acclaimed game studio called ThatGameCompany, but she's not famous. She's not someone Roger Ebert, a man who has been public for years about his disinterest in video games, would likely write a column about.

She checked the link. Yeah, he'd written about her in what would prove to be a volatile essay about the potential for video games to be seen as art — and the relevance of deciding whether or not they are.

Santiago had admired the famous film critic, even given a book of Ebert's reviews to her brother once.

"It was really surreal to have Roger Ebert write about me," she recalled. She looked around that Baltimore airport that morning, burning to tell someone. There wasn't anyone there to tell. So she called her father. He was half-asleep.

In the April 16 column entitled "Video Games Can Never Be Art," Ebert picked apart a talk Santiago had delivered in 2009 about video games' artistic potential. He criticized the three examples of artistic games the she shared — Braid, her own small company's Flower and Waco Resurrection. Without having played them, he deemed them "pathetic" and re-iterated his position that ""No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets."

He continued:

Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care.

Vs. Ebert

Then and now Santiago says she didn't' mind Ebert's essay. "I always thought it was a good thing. I think it got a lot of gamers engaged in the conversation about what games mean to them and what they could mean — and what the future of video games is."

Ebert was flooded with angry and thoughtful comments from gamers. He wrote about some of it, spent spare moments of his spring needling gamers via Twitter and eventually consented that "It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art" even though he doesn't expect it to happen.

Santiago wrote a public response to Ebert (republished on Kotaku), and she sent him a PlayStation 3 with Flower loaded on it. She doesn't believe he ever played it but she was satisfied to be done. "I didn't want to keep poking the fire of the debate over whether they're art or not because I don't feel like that's an argument anyone should be engaging in anymore.

"I didn't want to just be the person who talks about games as art," Santiago recalled. "The point of the talk — the title of it was Games Are Art: So What's Next? — the point of it was we're not debating whether video games are art anymore. Just say that they are, because then it allows us to move forward in what I think is a more thoughtful and positive position as far as talking about where the future of video games lie."

Awe Toward The Unknown

You can become part of a big debate, and you can try, as Santiago did, to not let it define you. For her, 2010 wasn't a year about debating whether games are art. It was a year that she and the rest of her small game design team at ThatGameCompany spent creating a game they kept secret for until June. It was a year that began with collecting awards for Flower, a year that had her meeting with other ambitious developers determined to help fund a new generation of game creators with a project called Indiefund. It was also a year to get married.

The game that was secret until June was called Journey, though for a short time this year, ThatGameCompany was trying to figure out another name for it. They might not have been able to secure the rights. Something about a band. That problem was temporary, and "Journey" was secured.

The concept for Journey came together well in the first half of the year, Santiago said. That wouldn't make presenting it easy. The game wasn't going to be obvious or common. All of ThatGameCompany's games have been attractive but as removed from the depiction of realistic human figures that we see in a Call of Duty as an Atari 2600 game. In ThatGameCompany's Flower game, the player controlled wind that blows flower petals; in Flow, you were some sort of amoeba or aquatic bug swimming in a sea of similar things.

In Journey you would be an actual person, or at least two-legged person-like thing, walking around in what seemed to be a desert. The environment was spartan and, only in December, five months after debuting the game to the press would Santiago and her peers travel to New York to show how the game would link players together, syncing two gamers at a time, letting them randomly, voicelessly, quietly co-exist for a time.

The game appeared to be about wandering and wondering.

Santiago said her team, including lead designer Jenova Chen, spent a lot of time in the spring trying to figure out how they would tell people what they were going for. They rehearsed presentations for the game in their office, hoping to figure out how to explain the game when they unveiled it for reporters at the E3 trade show in June.

"In one of those rehearsals we came upon the story that Jenova did tell in the presentation about the conversation he had with a space shuttle pilot and how that got him to thinking about a sense of awe and wonder — and the possibility that we're lacking that in our day-to-day lives and that we may need it, and that a video game could be a good form to provide it."

The space shuttle pilot had told Chen of the spiritual awakenings — the "awe towards the unknown" — that people who had flown to space had experienced while peering at the Earth and beyond from their elevated perspective.

Hopefully, Journey could convey some of that.

The Healthiest Use For A TV

Some game developers talk about having children or the experience of being married as influential moments that make them re-think the games they make. Santiago, married in the fall, hasn't felt any transformation from that. Her husband is in the games business too and so neither has experienced any great shock about how the other spends their time in front of a controller or in the development studio.

But in reflecting about her year she mentioned something about the future that helps put in better contrast the difference between her and that famous critic she briefly sparred with in the spring. Aside from their artistic potential, Santiago had begun to assess video game's societal value.

Video games, she realized, would be an important element of her family's life, something she and her husband have talked about should they have children.

"There are already conversations we've had about how much more comfortable we'll be with our kids playing video games than watching television," she said. "We see it in a different way than I think our parents' generation and older [people] viewed video games and their place in the household."

She sees little of value on her television for a kid to watch, not compared to what else they could be doing with that TV, playing video games. "I think [playing video games is] a lot more stimulating on many different levels, depending on the game," she said. "A lot of the Nintendo games are a good example because there's a lot of reading involved and games in general are about problem-solving and discovering systems. And now you have games with creative tools."

She's more ready than ever for games to be an integral part of her life and the lives around her, the stance of someone who could never have agreed with Roger Ebert.

Next year will be different for Santiago, of course. ThatGameCompany will release Journey on the PlayStation 3. The art debate is in her rearview mirror. And she'll be able to answer that question she posed in that 2009 talk that led to that 2010 debate: Games are art. So what's next?

The folks at Madden NFL 11 put out a list of all plays run by all of its zillion-plus users so far, sorted by average gain. No. 2 is "Cougar Cross," which sounds like Rex Ryan's wife's best-selling video.

In fact, I'm not sure where you find it in the playbook. I've never seen it and I'm away from my console right now. Googling it gets nothing. So it could be that, being average figures, the per-play gain is goosed by a comparatively small sample size. Ian Cummings, the Madden creative director who released these stats over Twitter, didn't say how many times they'd been run. But "Cougar Cross" bagged 11 yards, on average.

Update: Cummings replies that Cougar Cross "might have been renamed to Titans Cross after we locked in the play ID's. Thus, it is in the Titans playbook." That would explain why no one's heard of it.

The no. 1 gainer may be more useful. FL Drag Under is out of the Shotgun Tight formation, gaining an average of 18.15 yards; one team that has it is the Arizona Cardinals. Of course, you may expect every cheeser from here to Hempstead to start using it this week.

See the full list here (screengrab of an .xls) Cummings also supplied the 50 most frequently called plays on both offense and defense. I'd be curious to know how many of these were served by by GameFlow, the playcalling engine new to this year's Madden. Update: Cummings says that between 70 and 75 percent of all plays called in Madden are done so through GameFlow.

Keeping a dozen cranky infants happy hardly sounds like a fun time in real life; on the iPhone, it's the premise of Dirty Diapers, a fast-twitch puzzler just released on the App Store.

Dirty Diapers is by Streaming Colour studios, which made 2009's Dapple, a game I still think highly of. In it, 12 babies are constantly waking up and fussing - needing either a bottle, a fresh diaper or a spell in the rocking chair. Drag the appropriate icon to the kid and he's happy. For another couple of seconds.

At its hardest difficulty the game gets really frantic (and is over quite fast.) At easy, the babies come at you in waves, a sentence I never thought I'd type. At hard, it's nonstop.

The game is 99 cents. If you listen to this with headphones on, that creaky sound is my tape-based minicam, not anything coming from the game.

Earlier this year we reported on efforts to urge electronics companies from using conflict materials mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Enough Project has released a report ranking companies' responses. Where do Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony rank?

The Democratic Republic of Congo is a country torn with strife. Since 1998 the Second Congo War has raged, with military groups funding their efforts through the exploitation of the country's natural mineral deposits. Once it was blood diamonds, but international scrutiny caused that trade to dwindle. Battling forces have since turned to minerals like tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold; items in high demand in today's electronics. The sale of these minerals is so important to the ongoing conflict that it's been dubbed The PlayStation War, as Crecente noted in his column back in June.

The Enough Project is spearheading a campaign to get major electronics manufacturers to examine their supply chain and end reliance on these conflict materials. Now they've released a comprehensive report detailed which companies are making changes for the better and which aren't making any changes at all.

In June Microsoft told Kotaku that a conflict mineral free pipeline was a priority, and the company certainly seems to be sticking to its word, ranking among the top tier in terms of action taken.

Sony Ericsson ranks among companies that have voiced their support of industry0wide measures to stem the use of conflict materials yet have not shown any active movement in that direction.

According to the report, which can be read in full at the Enough Project website, Nintendo is one of several companies that refuse to acknowledge or deal with the problem. The company had previously responded to an inquiry from Raise Hope for Congo, telling the organization that Nintendo does not purchase raw materials directly, and that it requires suppliers "to comply with its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Procurement Guidelines, which stipulate suppliers comply with applicable laws, have respect for human rights and conduct their business in an appropriate and fair manner."

Read the full report at Enough Project.

Science has not told us whether notoriously hard video game Super Meat Boy is tougher than notoriously hard N+. So we must rely on a second-best method.

MTV Multiplayer's Russ Frushtick has studied the two game's Xbox Live Arcade statistics for both side-scrolling, curse-inducing games and declared Super Meat Boy as the more rigorous experience.

He has four metrics of comparison. Such as:

N+: Percent of Total Registered Users Who Have Completed The Final Level (Episode 49) - 2.20%

vs

Super Meat By: Percent of Total Registered Users Who Have Completed The Final Level (7-20X) - 1.04%

Do the laws of mathematics allow me to hereby declare Super Meat Boy as twice as tough as N+?

Which Is Statistically Harder: 'N+' or 'Super Meat Boy'? [MTV Multiplayer blog]

Should you save up for the rumored PlayStation Phone or the equally rumored PSP2? Sony Computer Entertainment boss Kazuo Hirai manages to calm potential consumer confusion without actually confirming anything.

What do we know about the PSP2 so far? According to various sources from throughout the gaming industry, it's a powerful little machine that houses a combination of standard portable gaming controls with some sort of touch screen. Kaz almost but not quite confirms these details in an article posted today in the New York Times. When asked how Sony would impress portable gamers in a market slowly being taken over by Apple's iPhone and the Android platform, controls was one of Hirai's answers.

‘‘Depending on the game, there are ones where you can play perfectly well with a touch panel,'' Mr. Hirai said. ‘‘But you can definitely play immersive games better with physical buttons and pads. I think there could be games where you're able to use both in combination.''

Not that Hirai sees the iPhone and Android platforms as competition.

‘‘The games being played on Android and Apple platforms are fundamentally different from the world of immersive games that Sony Computer Entertainment, and PlayStation aims for,'' Mr. Hirai said

The PSP2, if such a device were to exist, would continue to cater to the more hardcore audience the PlayStation brand caters to.

What does that mean for the rumored PlayStation phone? With reports indicating the PlayStation phone might be able to play original PlayStation games along with popular PSP titles like LittleBigPlanet and God of War, won't gamers be confused over which device to purchase?

‘‘We don't want gamers to be asking, what's the difference between that and a PSP,'' Mr. Hirai said. ‘‘We have to come up with a message that users will understand. It would have to be a product that keeps the PlayStation's strengths intact.''

Of course we're talking about two devices that don't officially exist yet, so nothing is set in stone. I just know it would be much easier to sell me a powerful dedicated gaming device than trying to get me to switch out my iPhone for a PlayStation-branded device.

Clues About the Next PlayStation Portable [The New York Times]

NOTE: The above image is not a picture of the new device just one of many fan-created mock-ups of a new PSP.

The Philadelphia Eagles beat the New York Giants on Sunday with a play that just should not have happened. It defied logic in real life; it defies logic when it's recreated in the classic video game Tecmo Bowl.

The video game version is here. Tecmo DeSean Jackson even runs along the goal line properly. Well done. Just sucks if you're a Giants fan. Terrible punt, Matt Dodge.

The real version of what happened is here.

DeSean Jackson's Game Winning Punt Return Against New York...According to Tecmo [YouTube]