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Sony, Microsoft Begin Battle of Virtual Worlds
Slatterz writes "Sony and Microsoft are poised to do battle in virtual worlds. The console kids both announced Second Life-style virtual environments at the Tokyo Game Show today. Both games show striking similarities to Linden Lab's creation. Players are represented by avatars which live a virtual life — engaging in relationships, going about day-to-day business."
It's funny how the article also talks about home like it's only started development, yet it will be out in November. We've been waiting for it for something like 2 years now. If the MS thing is just like Miis then there is nothing like a 'battle' going on..
I hope Home is as technically advanced as GTA with the ability to drive around and play minigames. I wonder if there will be any overlap between the two. Getting your Home avatar into GTA would be pretty cool, and I'd prefer a better method for finding multiplayer servers as well..
which is totally what she said
If the rumours are true, a staggering fraction of people abandon SL very fast because the can't get along with the client interface. It may well be that the pool of potential participants is much larger than the current SL population.
Nice avatars to gather along -yeeah-...well I suppose that IRC wasn't enough graphical (or maybe too metaphorical in his representation for most people) and that you couldn't conclude serious business within all those Multi players games /sarcasm.
The problem is that they are wholly boring. the best of the world would be to include a "second world" into an already existing -and even moderately successful multi player game-. Imagine a "low paying" WoW/Eve/Warhammer account where your user would be forced to stay within cities (you could travel using existing methods or players) - some basic skills learning and basically their paying accounts gives'em some gold every month so they can shop for clothes and various other stuff".
That would ensure a lot of people "who would buy" stuff from the players creating a more vivid economy "hey looks there are the peons in the cities". They could get some funny things like plague, rest in buildings "with their names into them" and so on.
you could upgrade on those accounts to go kill things out there or well downgrade a full time killer to being a city dude with maybe some gears being put in a repository so you don't encounter a neighbor who wears a flaming armor with killer ghosts trapped into it".
It looks like a good idea
My main beef with Home is the fact that the average real-life looking avatar seems to be a hip 20 something with a slim athletic build and angsty haircuts (what Sony probably believes is their main demographic). I'm not some fat dork but I'm close to 35 so I really having problems connecting with the avatar. Meeting up with pals in Home would be ridiculous when everyone looks like someone fresh from college. Miis and the new Live avatars while a lot more simple offer a better way to create a good caricature of yourself. Sony should watch and learn.
Trivia:
One of the first (perhaps the first) online virtual worlds was hosted by Quantum Link for the Commodore 64. Connections were made by modems with speeds from 0.3 to 2.4 kbit/s. Q-Link eventually renamed itself America Online, aka AOL.
"Q-Link's Habitat is a multi-participant online virtual environment. A cyberspace. Each participant ("player") uses a home computer (Commodore 64) as an intelligent, interactive client, communicating via modem and telephone over a commercial packet-switching network to a centralized, mainframe host system. The client software provides the user interface, generating a real-time animated display of what is going on..." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link
Note that it says "animated". This wasn't some text-based BBS, but a fully-graphical interface similar to the world wide web, but with much lower resolution (320x200).
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The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
...to move all stock exchanges to these virtual worlds. We're practically using virtual money anyways, and this way we can easily 'patch' any bad stocks by adding an arbitrary number to badly going stocks ;=)
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Nice photos! I like how those old magazines used direct camera shots of televisions. There was no such thing as a "screen dump" back then. Here's me in 1989: http://www.qlinklives.org/qlink-old/me1989.jpg * And here's the 1985-Commodore 64 version of "Miis" - http://www.fudco.com/chip/habitat.gif - I don't know what this is but it looks cool - http://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/feature/1991/c64_11.jpg
Those were the good old days, when computing was an adventure into unknown territories & unrealized possibilities. Nowadays it's more like a boring appliance (IMHO).
*
* (just joking; I looked more like Weesley Crusher on TNG - just a teenager.)
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
i'm curious; how could you tell that it was a _badger_ dick rather than, say, a weasel or ferret dick?