It also might be worth mentioning in SL when in regular 3rd person view, the avatar's head will track where the mouse is pointing. When you alt click on a target for the camera, the avatar's head will lock onto and track the object. This makes some intersting body langage when another avatar is looking right at you, their torso and head twisted around to stare at yours.
Also, these motions help you know what other people are doing. When they are look up at the sky randomly the person might be going through the menues, or when they are looking down and right they are usually wading through their inventory.
SL is quite intersting in that there is an avatar body language. Although it might not be anywhere near the same as RL (in the case of this study, i guess it was), it is still there all the same. SL adds more layers to that body language then typically found in an mmo, since you can turn the body, position the body, and your head is a tell tale sign for other users as to what you are doing and looking at.
Anyway, SL was pretty interesting to me in this regard at first, but after about a year or so of using it, it has really just become an online playground to hang out with friends in. Just think of it as a fun 3d chatroom you and your friends can hang out with. It is great to unwind in after dinner, unlike a regular game, which requires some sort of focus (for me anyway).
Or Ikaruga. I got the the 4th world after a lot of effort on my part, then put the controller down forever, because there was no way in hell I was ever getting past that rotating ship thing. Good lord.
I hated the games that did not pause while you typed things. Some of the spacequests were the most guilty for me. I remember a few sequences from them that really had me sweating.
I was younger then and had no typing ability, so it was hunt and peck on the keyboard.
In on sequence you are caged while your attacker is slowing walking at you. There were a series of things you had to do before you could disable him and escape, but I remember frantically typing stuff in trying not to make a typo before it was too late.
In another scenario, I remember some metal guy was chasing you, and you had to flee to a factory, where you could send some machinery or something in his direction. But he ran at you damn fast, and typing in the command in real time was STRESSFUL for a youngin like me.
When they implemented pause typing, whew, what a relief!:)
Seriously. I used this technique when I first jumpped into jedi outcast online (1.2 patch). I was losing left and right and had no clue. I speced the guy who was number one for a long while. He was running up to people and kicking them, then doing a heavy overhead swing on their prone bodies. It was working pretty well.
I started doing it. I noticed immediate results. I kept doing it until I got proficient at the technique. I later learned a whole bunch of varients on it through expriemntation, but always had that same trick there to use in a pinch.
That's how you get good at games, find a way to "win" (in my case kill), get good at it, then learn another way to win. Then another. Until you have a huge bag of winning tricks to pull out against someone else.
Pretty soon the game will come down to who runs out of tricks first, and who can execute them better, or more creativly. That is about when most online games are the most fun to play.
Very simple concept, just takes a little bit of time to get there.
What they need is to cover some online events in a meaningful way.
How about they follow an "uber" mmo guild as they run through content for the first time? Just highlight them killing stuff, or their failuers, or thier discoveries.
TV needs to show us stuff we can't normally see and do. Running at the high end of a game, killing the crap out of people, or being the first one to explore and do things, is things that 80% of us aren't able to do unless we put massive hours in.
So, cover this stuff. Throw it in there. Show us gamers who are talented doing their thing. Show me that guy working on his latest combo in street fighter. Let me see that guy beat ninja gaiden without taking a hit, show me the devil may cry 3 style video, show me a montoge of halo 2 desctruction, play that q3 annihilation video, show me trick shots in whatever latest fps game.
Show me talented people playing a game, not some idiot who sucks at it. I can buy the game and play it like that. Show me what I cant do, and what I can't see.
Show me gaming. They are so caught up in the culture of gaming, they forgot that the whole point of it is games!
When you show NFL you don't want to see some farm teams sucking it up out there (XFL anybody?), no, you want to see guys who work at this thing all week as a job, going out doing stuff you have no way in hell of ever being able to do. So, apply this to gaming. Jeeze people, this doesnt take a genious to accomplish.
For turn based games you might want to check out Disgaea: Hour of Darkness on ps2, or, more recently, and perhaps more what you want, Fire Emblem: Path of Radience on the gamecube. There is also a Fire Emblem on the gba, as well as numerous japanese fire emblems that were never imported.
The last turn based game that I really got into was so long ago, Panzer Generals. That one was ww2 themed turn based, it was fantastic.
You might want to even start looking back at older games if you missed any on the way along, but chances are you didnt.
I think I spend too much time looking for the next great thing, and am never finding it. Good luck in your search:)
I liked it. I had played wolfstien, the dooms, quake, dark forces, strife, heritic, duke nukem, whatever else the pc had at the time. It was a good game.
It did what halo is doing for this generation. It brings the fps game to a bigger audience then the pc. I didnt play 007 until my first year in college, wow, that was 8 years ago, where does the time go?
Anyway at the time not many people had pcs and even fewer people had games to play on them (I probably went to the wrong college). But they did have n64s and playstations.
I initially hated 007 for the same reason pc people hate halo, controls and graphics just weren't up to par with the pc stuff. But 007 had one thing that my pc games didn't, 3 other people in the room yelling and screaming and having fun. So I ground my teeth and learned how to play it, and ended up having a fun time all year with it.
I later got into the single player aspect of it and found it to be a lot of fun. It had its moments, and i really enjoyed how they changed the level objectives as you scaled up the difficutly.
In multiplayer it also featured a mode I had not seen before, though I will admit that at the time the only mod of a game I had played was quake ctf. Anyway it had the 1 shot 1 kill mode. I racked up many hours with my friend playing pistols only with 1 shot 1 kill. It was a ton of fun.
Maybe rainbow six was out at that time? I remember buying that and it didn't work due to my video card being unsupported (glad those days are gone).
Anyway 007 was the precursor to halo. Halo is the holy mecca for younger gamers now just getting into it, the same way 007 was before it. We people fortunate enough to have PCs had a lot before it, but 007 was still a very signifigant game.
Great point, and to add the other standard point, it is about the games.
What good is a consol that has a great controller or great output or processor speed when all the games may suck. The games will sell me on a consol, as soon as they put something out that i NEED to play, I will be there buying one, until then, I'll let everybody else buy the first round of equiepment and find all the bugs for me.
Another strike against the Wii is the lack of HD support. I recently have been looking at buying my first hd tv, and looked at plasma, dlp and lcd. I was initially going to go with dlp, then found some great info about lag due to upscaling. If the wii comes ouat at 480p, the lag should not be too great, but it will be more so then if it supported 720p on our great new tvs.
Apparently 480i output (gc or ps2) on a samsug dlp has horrible lag and makes any rythem or timing based games difficult to play. Imagine any sort of video lag due to upscaling with the wii-mote where your point and shoot is delayed 1/4 of a frame. That doesn't sound "next gen" to me.
Anyway the wii looks intersting, but I usually end up going back to my regular controlers when i try to branch out to steering wheels and other types of periferals. I find that I enjoy tight control where I don't have to move around too much and can quickly get to every control, over the novelty of swishing my hands around.
I guess for me the money is on immersion, and that is to the point where I don't even realise that i'm holding a controler, and i'm focused on making the player do something via muscle memory and not even thinking about the fact i'm holding a controler in my hands.
I guess the wii will be nice if it allows us to have more control at our fingertips, and allow new game types, so we can do new things with games rather then the same old with a new method.
Anyway, I hope people like the grandparent stick around, because if everybody waited, people like us would have no opinions to sit around and wait for. So grandparent is doing us a favor, spend on, spender!:)
Ha. I used to have a small tv and play bushido blade 2 slash mode on my ps1 while leveling up in DAOC. The sad part was all I had to do was pause, stand up, start swinging, then unpause and continue playing. Thinking back on this has made me realise how stupid it all was. Now I just play the games that are fun, and stop playing when it ceases to become fun.
I guess that is a testament to the articles point, the fact that I had to sit down and evaulate why I was doing something for fun, that wasn't fun at all.
I just thought I would comment on your point b, regarding lieing to your friends to spare feelings.
I am by no means an expert in socialization, but in my own experience, I find that the best friendships in my life are with people with whom I can say "I don't feel like doing anything today." and that being all the reason I need to say no to them.
Perhaps there is a reason that you feel down and do not want to go out, then you can talk about it, or simly the reason could be that you want to spend time with a new video game or book or work out, or any host of things.
For myself personally, when people lie to me when they do not want to hang out, it is very easy to pick up on, especially if it is a common technique someone uses. In your short example about using the computer too much and saying that your mom could not use it on a certain day, it is too shallow of a lie, which is probably what brought your gf at the time to your mom, asking about the rule. Gee, this seems odd, no computer on tuesday.
Most people see through the small lies like this. Again, I myself find it fake and upsetting when people lie to me to spare my feelings, when in fact I find that they are doing just the opposite.
Honesty is a good thing in all relationships, romantic and otherwise. A good approach with your girlfriend would have been to mention that you want to spend more time with her and less on the computer. If she reacted by saying no, there really isnt any more of a reason to be with that person.
Again, this thread struck me because I have repeatedly had this conversation with several people I know about the "little lies" people tell. Usually they are so lame that they are offensive. Say what you mean, be honest, and you will find that there isn't much you need to hide from people.
I am in no way making excuses for the way your mother acted, it is one thing to control the flow of personal information about yourself, then it is to have someone deciding what to tell everybody around them.
I think you have a fantastic understand of the things in place that drive your emotions the way they do. I think the next and most difficult step is to then figure out who you want to be, and start working towards it. I've seen many a people defeated once they labeled themselves. Sometimes people even use the label as an excuse to continue acting the way they do.
Life sure is hard sometime. It's a lot easier online, where all you hve to do is push a bunch of buttons at the right time, and everybody automatically respects you.
The hardest part of soft modding is having a game which has an exploit on it, then getting that game onto the xbox.
The games that have exploits are spinter cell, mech assault, and 007 agent under fire.
The way I managed to get the game on the hard drive was a little tricky, but not too bad.
I bought a memory card for my controller.
I took apart an old usb mouse and an extra xbox controler dongle.
You can match the cords together by color between the ubs end and the controller end. For ease of splicing I happened to have a bridge from radio shack, where all I had to do was screw down the stripped wires on the bridge instead of trying to twist them together or solder them. Wrapped the whole thing in electric tape. There is a tutorial how to do this on xbox scene.
Next I downloaded the action replay software, and drivers for the xbox controller called XID. Plug in the controller, install the XID drivers. Plug in the memory card, then use the memory card drivers from within the action replay install directory.
Now you can use the action replay software to copy back and forth to your memory card. So copy the saved game file onto the card, then plug in to your xbox like normal and copy it to the hard drive. I used the splinter cell one, so I had to copy two files.
I then loaded splinter cell, then loaded the saved game. I found myself in linux. I was able to easily set up an ftp on the xbox in order to save my eeprom file and back up anything I wanted.
Next I used the menu and began the automatic installer. It took care of everything for me.
The next tiem i rebooted I had a softmoded xbox. I then went around and found lots of software to use on it, including xbox media center.
I honestly read stuff for about a week or two, just trying to understand what I would be doing to the xbox, and figuring out the simplest and cheapest way to get the save game on the hard drive. At one point I was almost going to try hot swapping thd drive so I didn't have to buy a Mega X key or a flash stick that could be subsituted and used with the mega x key software.
Once I figured out how to do it, I then modded all of my friends xboxs who were not using xbox live, and it took me about 15 minutes per xbox to do it.
After modding the xbox it increased its value to me 10 fold and I've been able to enjoy watching a lot ot tv shows I wouldnt have bothered watching, as well as running some emulators on it. I highly recommend modding it.
I for one, have been looking forward to Oblivion since I heard it's annoucnment, and the only picture was that silly little picture of the name.
I've been holding off watching videos because I remember running off the ship in morrowind and standing with my mouth agape looking at the fucking amazing water. I jumpped right in that, and ran around in it for a good 15 minutes watching it splash and move around different ways.
Then I remember picking up and throwing silverware and forks and all the "junk" all over the freaken world. It was as cluttered as an ultima game, but in 3d!
So I want that again with oblivion. I want to crawl out of the dungeon and just gape at the amazing world they created.
But, I cracked last night, and watched him play for a bit.
I enjoyed it a lot. I watched for maybe 15 minutes or so. This really reminded me of playing the game with my buddies. It was sort of like we all got the game, unwrapped it, and started plowing along with one guy driving and the rest of us commenting.
I honestly could see myself leaving the window up last night while I was surfing the web and doing other things and watching the wonderful game that is oblivion. I just wanted to save the exploring for myself, so I turned it off.
I enjoyed the reviewers little comments as he played, and I could see him really getting into it, and doing a great job showing off things in the game. It was probably the best type of review you could EVER get for a game.
So I think this was a really cool idea, and wouldn't mind seeing more of these types of things going on.
There actually are some things like this in Second Life. A few musicians play weekly concerts in the game. They set up a streaming server, get a location in world, and people show up with the avatars and listen to person playing, who is also present in world. Often on the stream they will comment on the chat between songs and take requests.
Granted the quality and flavor is that of a local bar rather then a "profesional" concert, but I found the experience to be quite unique.
Yes, linden labs central storage is vital for those points you brought up, IP and currency.
I guess the only comment I have to that, is try to take everything you have listed and apply it to the current web we are using now.
What currency do we use? Real world money. What do we do about IP? Lawyers.
I guess my point I was trying to make was that I completly understand what SL provides and why they charge for their services, but because of those things, it is the reason SL will not be one of the things to bring about a 3d revolution on the web.
The reason is that if I want to go 3d, I can ONLY pay linden labs for hosting. I can't even host my own simulator even if I was sitting on a really sweet oc3 connection.
That is the limitation that will always make secondlife just secondlife. Should there every become a free 3d browser, like mosiac or netscape or ie, AND a free 3d server, like apache, then that would become the start of a new shift towards 3d (should the tech work of coarse).
There is no need for intelectual property protection that LL provides. If I created a texture and posted it on my website to buy, and someone buys it, then puts it in sl years before I have even heard of it, there is no way for LL to provide any proof of ownership with their closed system, and the proof would have to come from "the real world" so to speak. I do not see why this could not extend to 3d objects like it works now with text and pictures.
There is no need for money. The linden dollar is only valued because it works within the closed system. This is an interesting thing because due to the closed system, it requires using lindens to obtain anything in the games, which creates the value behind making objects and selling them. I am not sure if this market would exist in an open system, but maybe it would, except people would sell things for US the same way any online store does today.
Bandwith is a big issue. 10 years ago I used geocities to host my webpages, they had the bandwith to do it. Now I just host it off my cable connection, something I would never have dreamed of back then. My personal page is just that, for myself and a few friends, so my cable easily can handle the bandwith. Perhaps in another 10 years, I could host it on my new connection that offers me gigabit speeds into the internet, who is to say where the bandwith will go, and perhaps we wont even see any 3d things until the bandwith is there to support it.
So again, I didn't mean to knock linden labs in what they do and their fees. I think SL is a fantastic product and enjoy it immensly. But LL will always be akin to a MMORPG system as long as they are the sole owners of the network. It has to go free and distributed if it wants to be the next thing on the web.
SL is an interesting thing. I would like to see it as what the next shift in tech will go towards. I imagine in a short enough time period running a simple 3d app will be easy, all our current pcs will be legacy old buckets, very easily capable of handling something like sl.
The problem with sl is it is still linden labs trying to stay a float. They aren't creating an interesting technology as much as they are creating a closed system to keep themselves in buisness.
The first step really should be a 3d webserver. This would be something that I could run on my home machine, jump in, create a 3d world with some files, and leave it running for people to connect. They connect with their 3d browser via my url, log in with the avatar they have created, and can wonder around and do the types of things that I have defined in the 3d world. That would be the first step in a huge shift on the net.
SL is not. It requireds a credit card to have access. It requres the use of their asset server. It requires currency to upload anything to the server. To put something down perminatly, you have to rent server space by buying land from them. If they lose power or something similar, the whole thing goes down. It is all this sandbox stuff that people want, but stuck on a closed system.
Is this idea similar to VRML, I sort of remember that but I honestly have no clue, I was too ignorent at the time to really understand what most of that was.
But what I described above would be the big first step towards a new direction. I can def see regular old webpages running along side 3d worlds on a server. The idea of that, to me, is really, really amazing.
I don't even understand how they could even know your sexual orientation? I understand the idea of wanting to be around a group of people who are not going to discrimiate against you due to whatever reason. It is a good idea.
But I don't understand how your guild has to know all these personal details about your life? You are there to raid and have fun and goof around. When I was a part of my guild I don't think anybodies relationship status ever came up. The only reason I knew the guild leader was married is because his wife was playing the game with him.
I just read the summary but I am thinking bliz was just saying due to all the "that was gay" type comments and maturity in wow, advertising for the guild would cause a whole rash of heated debates all over IF or OG that have nothing to do with WOW.
Someone did mention it's your right to burn the american flag in public and compared it to this. While you can burn the flag to make some sort of political statement, burning the flag to incite anger in other people is not legal.
What bliz is trying to say is that everytime someone shouts in pub that they are doing the GLTB or whatever guild, you are going to get like 8 "gay suck" comments, followed by 15 other people calling the "gays suck" people idiots and defending GLBT guild, followed by heated debate and flame fest. EVERY. TIME. I know the wow crowd, you should too, it is definitly going to happen.
I think the idea of a gay only guild is pretty cool, and you should avertise as such through a website that bliz doesnt control. And it is a shame that you can't activly recruit in the game, but really, it is just going to cause homesexuality flame fests all over IF, when it has nothing to do with the game.
I disagree with you on the point that most other games are more simple. It is quite the opposite, which is why I love doa.
Typically I enjoy most fighting games, but often do not have someone to play the game with. Recently I've met a friend who is very into fighing games, so we've had a few nights going back and forth with them.
The problem here is that the skill level difference is so much that you just can not learn to play against them in vs mode. It started with SC and me getting my ass handed to me until I spent a good day or two with the move list practicing. From that point with one character I could somewhat hold my own.
What I liked about doaU was that I was able to learn to play better while playing the person. DOA on the lower level (I don't play tourny level players so I can't speak for that) is about beating the other person.
I can just guess what most moves coming out will be, but the more I play, I just have to learn what level the attacks my opponent's are going to be so that I can reverse them. I spend more time just watching and countering/guarding, then throwing/poking with moves I don't know , and I do pretty well. Sure, I could learn juggles and all that to improve my game, but I don't need that, and that is why I love doa.
Visual treat, no dobut. But simple to pick up, with enough depth in there that I don't have to spend a few days in practice mode learning 4000 movies for just one character.
So doa is the casual man's fighting game, and it does a damn fine job of it.
For a quick fun fix you could check out Kung Fu Chaos for the xbox. It's a quick and dirty 4 player fighter, and pretty fun, esp if you like the whole quarky 70's kung fu movie thing they have going on. It is very easy to pick up, with just a lil bit of depth to it to be intersesting. It can get old fast, but for it's cost, it's def worth a night of gaming.
Avi interaction still sucks. You have to both sit on the poseball, and then everybodies avatars have different arm lengths, body masses, heights, and whatever else. There is no way to make an animation match up consistatly with another. You can't even shake hands consistantly with another avi.
On top of this, some of the dancing animations people have that use poseballs, still don't work that well due to lag. The animis just start at different times, or get loaded at different times, and there is no sync at all.
The hud ui stuff is very slow and laggy. It is like having a prim shoved up in your face that only you can do. So you can only do the things you could do on the faces of blocks before.
Overall, sl is pretty cool, but still has a long way to go. I think that if they focused on avi interaction, sl would grow leaps and bounds. It would bring in a lot more people who want to buy and exist in the world, who would support the people who want to build and sell, and it would just make the place a lot more interesting and varied.
Still, as I said, sl is a cool model with lots of potential.
Though in ja i still had trouble getting the game to recognize my mouse button 3 and 4 in the key config.
But anyway, what I keep waiting for when i see "gaming mouse" is a mouse with a lot of buttons. Why are we limited to 5 buttons? I find that i can only easily hit a few keys with my hands on asdw, even then, sometimes you can not move a certain direction and hit another key comfortably at the same time.
I try to stretch my mouse as far as I can, often I use mouse wheel up as a button, mousewheel down as a button, click as a button, and the side buttons on some of them (current mouse only has 1 extra button:( ).
I would love to see a mouse that is loaded down with buttons that are easy to hit. Maybe even a design that allows the main left click button to be "broken up" so to speak, where that big area is a few buttons, but out side of a game they act as though they are one... ie any buton you hit in the left click area acts like it is left click.
I think it is definatly very possible to place lots of buttons to a mouse comfortably. Who needs mouse weight adjustments? Pft, give us some more buttons!!
Yeah, I knew that sounded wierd. In shadow you press once to start stab, press again to execute it. That is correct. I just got done playing it a week or two ago so it is still fresh in my mind.
Slashdot Mirror
It also might be worth mentioning in SL when in regular 3rd person view, the avatar's head will track where the mouse is pointing. When you alt click on a target for the camera, the avatar's head will lock onto and track the object. This makes some intersting body langage when another avatar is looking right at you, their torso and head twisted around to stare at yours.
Also, these motions help you know what other people are doing. When they are look up at the sky randomly the person might be going through the menues, or when they are looking down and right they are usually wading through their inventory.
SL is quite intersting in that there is an avatar body language. Although it might not be anywhere near the same as RL (in the case of this study, i guess it was), it is still there all the same. SL adds more layers to that body language then typically found in an mmo, since you can turn the body, position the body, and your head is a tell tale sign for other users as to what you are doing and looking at.
Anyway, SL was pretty interesting to me in this regard at first, but after about a year or so of using it, it has really just become an online playground to hang out with friends in. Just think of it as a fun 3d chatroom you and your friends can hang out with. It is great to unwind in after dinner, unlike a regular game, which requires some sort of focus (for me anyway).
Or Ikaruga. I got the the 4th world after a lot of effort on my part, then put the controller down forever, because there was no way in hell I was ever getting past that rotating ship thing. Good lord.
I hated the games that did not pause while you typed things. Some of the spacequests were the most guilty for me. I remember a few sequences from them that really had me sweating.
:)
I was younger then and had no typing ability, so it was hunt and peck on the keyboard.
In on sequence you are caged while your attacker is slowing walking at you. There were a series of things you had to do before you could disable him and escape, but I remember frantically typing stuff in trying not to make a typo before it was too late.
In another scenario, I remember some metal guy was chasing you, and you had to flee to a factory, where you could send some machinery or something in his direction. But he ran at you damn fast, and typing in the command in real time was STRESSFUL for a youngin like me.
When they implemented pause typing, whew, what a relief!
Haha, that idea about an mmo red vs blue type thing is great! That could be amazingly hilarious.
Seriously. I used this technique when I first jumpped into jedi outcast online (1.2 patch). I was losing left and right and had no clue. I speced the guy who was number one for a long while. He was running up to people and kicking them, then doing a heavy overhead swing on their prone bodies. It was working pretty well.
I started doing it. I noticed immediate results. I kept doing it until I got proficient at the technique. I later learned a whole bunch of varients on it through expriemntation, but always had that same trick there to use in a pinch.
That's how you get good at games, find a way to "win" (in my case kill), get good at it, then learn another way to win. Then another. Until you have a huge bag of winning tricks to pull out against someone else.
Pretty soon the game will come down to who runs out of tricks first, and who can execute them better, or more creativly. That is about when most online games are the most fun to play.
Very simple concept, just takes a little bit of time to get there.
What they need is to cover some online events in a meaningful way.
How about they follow an "uber" mmo guild as they run through content for the first time? Just highlight them killing stuff, or their failuers, or thier discoveries.
TV needs to show us stuff we can't normally see and do. Running at the high end of a game, killing the crap out of people, or being the first one to explore and do things, is things that 80% of us aren't able to do unless we put massive hours in.
So, cover this stuff. Throw it in there. Show us gamers who are talented doing their thing. Show me that guy working on his latest combo in street fighter. Let me see that guy beat ninja gaiden without taking a hit, show me the devil may cry 3 style video, show me a montoge of halo 2 desctruction, play that q3 annihilation video, show me trick shots in whatever latest fps game.
Show me talented people playing a game, not some idiot who sucks at it. I can buy the game and play it like that. Show me what I cant do, and what I can't see.
Show me gaming. They are so caught up in the culture of gaming, they forgot that the whole point of it is games!
When you show NFL you don't want to see some farm teams sucking it up out there (XFL anybody?), no, you want to see guys who work at this thing all week as a job, going out doing stuff you have no way in hell of ever being able to do. So, apply this to gaming. Jeeze people, this doesnt take a genious to accomplish.
Of coarse, prey was developed back in a time when stereotyping in games was cool :) Now we don't do it at all anymore *cough*gta*cough*. :)
Exactly. I don't see this guy ripping on the diamond engagment ring.
For turn based games you might want to check out Disgaea: Hour of Darkness on ps2, or, more recently, and perhaps more what you want, Fire Emblem: Path of Radience on the gamecube. There is also a Fire Emblem on the gba, as well as numerous japanese fire emblems that were never imported.
:)
The last turn based game that I really got into was so long ago, Panzer Generals. That one was ww2 themed turn based, it was fantastic.
You might want to even start looking back at older games if you missed any on the way along, but chances are you didnt.
I think I spend too much time looking for the next great thing, and am never finding it. Good luck in your search
I liked it. I had played wolfstien, the dooms, quake, dark forces, strife, heritic, duke nukem, whatever else the pc had at the time. It was a good game. It did what halo is doing for this generation. It brings the fps game to a bigger audience then the pc. I didnt play 007 until my first year in college, wow, that was 8 years ago, where does the time go? Anyway at the time not many people had pcs and even fewer people had games to play on them (I probably went to the wrong college). But they did have n64s and playstations. I initially hated 007 for the same reason pc people hate halo, controls and graphics just weren't up to par with the pc stuff. But 007 had one thing that my pc games didn't, 3 other people in the room yelling and screaming and having fun. So I ground my teeth and learned how to play it, and ended up having a fun time all year with it. I later got into the single player aspect of it and found it to be a lot of fun. It had its moments, and i really enjoyed how they changed the level objectives as you scaled up the difficutly. In multiplayer it also featured a mode I had not seen before, though I will admit that at the time the only mod of a game I had played was quake ctf. Anyway it had the 1 shot 1 kill mode. I racked up many hours with my friend playing pistols only with 1 shot 1 kill. It was a ton of fun. Maybe rainbow six was out at that time? I remember buying that and it didn't work due to my video card being unsupported (glad those days are gone). Anyway 007 was the precursor to halo. Halo is the holy mecca for younger gamers now just getting into it, the same way 007 was before it. We people fortunate enough to have PCs had a lot before it, but 007 was still a very signifigant game.
Great point, and to add the other standard point, it is about the games.
:)
What good is a consol that has a great controller or great output or processor speed when all the games may suck. The games will sell me on a consol, as soon as they put something out that i NEED to play, I will be there buying one, until then, I'll let everybody else buy the first round of equiepment and find all the bugs for me.
Another strike against the Wii is the lack of HD support. I recently have been looking at buying my first hd tv, and looked at plasma, dlp and lcd. I was initially going to go with dlp, then found some great info about lag due to upscaling. If the wii comes ouat at 480p, the lag should not be too great, but it will be more so then if it supported 720p on our great new tvs.
Apparently 480i output (gc or ps2) on a samsug dlp has horrible lag and makes any rythem or timing based games difficult to play. Imagine any sort of video lag due to upscaling with the wii-mote where your point and shoot is delayed 1/4 of a frame. That doesn't sound "next gen" to me.
Anyway the wii looks intersting, but I usually end up going back to my regular controlers when i try to branch out to steering wheels and other types of periferals. I find that I enjoy tight control where I don't have to move around too much and can quickly get to every control, over the novelty of swishing my hands around.
I guess for me the money is on immersion, and that is to the point where I don't even realise that i'm holding a controler, and i'm focused on making the player do something via muscle memory and not even thinking about the fact i'm holding a controler in my hands.
I guess the wii will be nice if it allows us to have more control at our fingertips, and allow new game types, so we can do new things with games rather then the same old with a new method.
Anyway, I hope people like the grandparent stick around, because if everybody waited, people like us would have no opinions to sit around and wait for. So grandparent is doing us a favor, spend on, spender!
Ha. I used to have a small tv and play bushido blade 2 slash mode on my ps1 while leveling up in DAOC. The sad part was all I had to do was pause, stand up, start swinging, then unpause and continue playing. Thinking back on this has made me realise how stupid it all was. Now I just play the games that are fun, and stop playing when it ceases to become fun.
I guess that is a testament to the articles point, the fact that I had to sit down and evaulate why I was doing something for fun, that wasn't fun at all.
I just thought I would comment on your point b, regarding lieing to your friends to spare feelings.
I am by no means an expert in socialization, but in my own experience, I find that the best friendships in my life are with people with whom I can say "I don't feel like doing anything today." and that being all the reason I need to say no to them.
Perhaps there is a reason that you feel down and do not want to go out, then you can talk about it, or simly the reason could be that you want to spend time with a new video game or book or work out, or any host of things.
For myself personally, when people lie to me when they do not want to hang out, it is very easy to pick up on, especially if it is a common technique someone uses. In your short example about using the computer too much and saying that your mom could not use it on a certain day, it is too shallow of a lie, which is probably what brought your gf at the time to your mom, asking about the rule. Gee, this seems odd, no computer on tuesday.
Most people see through the small lies like this. Again, I myself find it fake and upsetting when people lie to me to spare my feelings, when in fact I find that they are doing just the opposite.
Honesty is a good thing in all relationships, romantic and otherwise. A good approach with your girlfriend would have been to mention that you want to spend more time with her and less on the computer. If she reacted by saying no, there really isnt any more of a reason to be with that person.
Again, this thread struck me because I have repeatedly had this conversation with several people I know about the "little lies" people tell. Usually they are so lame that they are offensive. Say what you mean, be honest, and you will find that there isn't much you need to hide from people.
I am in no way making excuses for the way your mother acted, it is one thing to control the flow of personal information about yourself, then it is to have someone deciding what to tell everybody around them.
I think you have a fantastic understand of the things in place that drive your emotions the way they do. I think the next and most difficult step is to then figure out who you want to be, and start working towards it. I've seen many a people defeated once they labeled themselves. Sometimes people even use the label as an excuse to continue acting the way they do.
Life sure is hard sometime. It's a lot easier online, where all you hve to do is push a bunch of buttons at the right time, and everybody automatically respects you.
xbox-scene.com
The hardest part of soft modding is having a game which has an exploit on it, then getting that game onto the xbox.
The games that have exploits are spinter cell, mech assault, and 007 agent under fire.
The way I managed to get the game on the hard drive was a little tricky, but not too bad.
I bought a memory card for my controller.
I took apart an old usb mouse and an extra xbox controler dongle.
You can match the cords together by color between the ubs end and the controller end. For ease of splicing I happened to have a bridge from radio shack, where all I had to do was screw down the stripped wires on the bridge instead of trying to twist them together or solder them. Wrapped the whole thing in electric tape. There is a tutorial how to do this on xbox scene.
Next I downloaded the action replay software, and drivers for the xbox controller called XID. Plug in the controller, install the XID drivers. Plug in the memory card, then use the memory card drivers from within the action replay install directory.
Now you can use the action replay software to copy back and forth to your memory card. So copy the saved game file onto the card, then plug in to your xbox like normal and copy it to the hard drive. I used the splinter cell one, so I had to copy two files.
I then loaded splinter cell, then loaded the saved game. I found myself in linux. I was able to easily set up an ftp on the xbox in order to save my eeprom file and back up anything I wanted.
Next I used the menu and began the automatic installer. It took care of everything for me.
The next tiem i rebooted I had a softmoded xbox. I then went around and found lots of software to use on it, including xbox media center.
I honestly read stuff for about a week or two, just trying to understand what I would be doing to the xbox, and figuring out the simplest and cheapest way to get the save game on the hard drive. At one point I was almost going to try hot swapping thd drive so I didn't have to buy a Mega X key or a flash stick that could be subsituted and used with the mega x key software.
Once I figured out how to do it, I then modded all of my friends xboxs who were not using xbox live, and it took me about 15 minutes per xbox to do it.
After modding the xbox it increased its value to me 10 fold and I've been able to enjoy watching a lot ot tv shows I wouldnt have bothered watching, as well as running some emulators on it. I highly recommend modding it.
I for one, have been looking forward to Oblivion since I heard it's annoucnment, and the only picture was that silly little picture of the name.
I've been holding off watching videos because I remember running off the ship in morrowind and standing with my mouth agape looking at the fucking amazing water. I jumpped right in that, and ran around in it for a good 15 minutes watching it splash and move around different ways.
Then I remember picking up and throwing silverware and forks and all the "junk" all over the freaken world. It was as cluttered as an ultima game, but in 3d!
So I want that again with oblivion. I want to crawl out of the dungeon and just gape at the amazing world they created.
But, I cracked last night, and watched him play for a bit.
I enjoyed it a lot. I watched for maybe 15 minutes or so. This really reminded me of playing the game with my buddies. It was sort of like we all got the game, unwrapped it, and started plowing along with one guy driving and the rest of us commenting.
I honestly could see myself leaving the window up last night while I was surfing the web and doing other things and watching the wonderful game that is oblivion. I just wanted to save the exploring for myself, so I turned it off.
I enjoyed the reviewers little comments as he played, and I could see him really getting into it, and doing a great job showing off things in the game. It was probably the best type of review you could EVER get for a game.
So I think this was a really cool idea, and wouldn't mind seeing more of these types of things going on.
There actually are some things like this in Second Life. A few musicians play weekly concerts in the game. They set up a streaming server, get a location in world, and people show up with the avatars and listen to person playing, who is also present in world. Often on the stream they will comment on the chat between songs and take requests.
Granted the quality and flavor is that of a local bar rather then a "profesional" concert, but I found the experience to be quite unique.
--- Waiting and hoping darkfall will be what shadowbane was supposed to be.
Yes, linden labs central storage is vital for those points you brought up, IP and currency.
I guess the only comment I have to that, is try to take everything you have listed and apply it to the current web we are using now.
What currency do we use? Real world money.
What do we do about IP? Lawyers.
I guess my point I was trying to make was that I completly understand what SL provides and why they charge for their services, but because of those things, it is the reason SL will not be one of the things to bring about a 3d revolution on the web.
The reason is that if I want to go 3d, I can ONLY pay linden labs for hosting. I can't even host my own simulator even if I was sitting on a really sweet oc3 connection.
That is the limitation that will always make secondlife just secondlife. Should there every become a free 3d browser, like mosiac or netscape or ie, AND a free 3d server, like apache, then that would become the start of a new shift towards 3d (should the tech work of coarse).
There is no need for intelectual property protection that LL provides. If I created a texture and posted it on my website to buy, and someone buys it, then puts it in sl years before I have even heard of it, there is no way for LL to provide any proof of ownership with their closed system, and the proof would have to come from "the real world" so to speak. I do not see why this could not extend to 3d objects like it works now with text and pictures.
There is no need for money. The linden dollar is only valued because it works within the closed system. This is an interesting thing because due to the closed system, it requires using lindens to obtain anything in the games, which creates the value behind making objects and selling them. I am not sure if this market would exist in an open system, but maybe it would, except people would sell things for US the same way any online store does today.
Bandwith is a big issue. 10 years ago I used geocities to host my webpages, they had the bandwith to do it. Now I just host it off my cable connection, something I would never have dreamed of back then. My personal page is just that, for myself and a few friends, so my cable easily can handle the bandwith. Perhaps in another 10 years, I could host it on my new connection that offers me gigabit speeds into the internet, who is to say where the bandwith will go, and perhaps we wont even see any 3d things until the bandwith is there to support it.
So again, I didn't mean to knock linden labs in what they do and their fees. I think SL is a fantastic product and enjoy it immensly. But LL will always be akin to a MMORPG system as long as they are the sole owners of the network. It has to go free and distributed if it wants to be the next thing on the web.
SL is an interesting thing. I would like to see it as what the next shift in tech will go towards. I imagine in a short enough time period running a simple 3d app will be easy, all our current pcs will be legacy old buckets, very easily capable of handling something like sl.
The problem with sl is it is still linden labs trying to stay a float. They aren't creating an interesting technology as much as they are creating a closed system to keep themselves in buisness.
The first step really should be a 3d webserver. This would be something that I could run on my home machine, jump in, create a 3d world with some files, and leave it running for people to connect. They connect with their 3d browser via my url, log in with the avatar they have created, and can wonder around and do the types of things that I have defined in the 3d world. That would be the first step in a huge shift on the net.
SL is not. It requireds a credit card to have access. It requres the use of their asset server. It requires currency to upload anything to the server. To put something down perminatly, you have to rent server space by buying land from them. If they lose power or something similar, the whole thing goes down. It is all this sandbox stuff that people want, but stuck on a closed system.
Is this idea similar to VRML, I sort of remember that but I honestly have no clue, I was too ignorent at the time to really understand what most of that was.
But what I described above would be the big first step towards a new direction. I can def see regular old webpages running along side 3d worlds on a server. The idea of that, to me, is really, really amazing.
I don't even understand how they could even know your sexual orientation? I understand the idea of wanting to be around a group of people who are not going to discrimiate against you due to whatever reason. It is a good idea.
But I don't understand how your guild has to know all these personal details about your life? You are there to raid and have fun and goof around. When I was a part of my guild I don't think anybodies relationship status ever came up. The only reason I knew the guild leader was married is because his wife was playing the game with him.
I just read the summary but I am thinking bliz was just saying due to all the "that was gay" type comments and maturity in wow, advertising for the guild would cause a whole rash of heated debates all over IF or OG that have nothing to do with WOW.
Someone did mention it's your right to burn the american flag in public and compared it to this. While you can burn the flag to make some sort of political statement, burning the flag to incite anger in other people is not legal.
What bliz is trying to say is that everytime someone shouts in pub that they are doing the GLTB or whatever guild, you are going to get like 8 "gay suck" comments, followed by 15 other people calling the "gays suck" people idiots and defending GLBT guild, followed by heated debate and flame fest. EVERY. TIME. I know the wow crowd, you should too, it is definitly going to happen.
I think the idea of a gay only guild is pretty cool, and you should avertise as such through a website that bliz doesnt control. And it is a shame that you can't activly recruit in the game, but really, it is just going to cause homesexuality flame fests all over IF, when it has nothing to do with the game.
That was my take on it when reading the summary.
I disagree with you on the point that most other games are more simple. It is quite the opposite, which is why I love doa.
Typically I enjoy most fighting games, but often do not have someone to play the game with. Recently I've met a friend who is very into fighing games, so we've had a few nights going back and forth with them.
The problem here is that the skill level difference is so much that you just can not learn to play against them in vs mode. It started with SC and me getting my ass handed to me until I spent a good day or two with the move list practicing. From that point with one character I could somewhat hold my own.
What I liked about doaU was that I was able to learn to play better while playing the person. DOA on the lower level (I don't play tourny level players so I can't speak for that) is about beating the other person.
I can just guess what most moves coming out will be, but the more I play, I just have to learn what level the attacks my opponent's are going to be so that I can reverse them. I spend more time just watching and countering/guarding, then throwing/poking with moves I don't know , and I do pretty well. Sure, I could learn juggles and all that to improve my game, but I don't need that, and that is why I love doa.
Visual treat, no dobut. But simple to pick up, with enough depth in there that I don't have to spend a few days in practice mode learning 4000 movies for just one character.
So doa is the casual man's fighting game, and it does a damn fine job of it.
For a quick fun fix you could check out Kung Fu Chaos for the xbox. It's a quick and dirty 4 player fighter, and pretty fun, esp if you like the whole quarky 70's kung fu movie thing they have going on. It is very easy to pick up, with just a lil bit of depth to it to be intersesting. It can get old fast, but for it's cost, it's def worth a night of gaming.
Avi interaction still sucks. You have to both sit on the poseball, and then everybodies avatars have different arm lengths, body masses, heights, and whatever else. There is no way to make an animation match up consistatly with another. You can't even shake hands consistantly with another avi.
On top of this, some of the dancing animations people have that use poseballs, still don't work that well due to lag. The animis just start at different times, or get loaded at different times, and there is no sync at all.
The hud ui stuff is very slow and laggy. It is like having a prim shoved up in your face that only you can do. So you can only do the things you could do on the faces of blocks before.
Overall, sl is pretty cool, but still has a long way to go. I think that if they focused on avi interaction, sl would grow leaps and bounds. It would bring in a lot more people who want to buy and exist in the world, who would support the people who want to build and sell, and it would just make the place a lot more interesting and varied.
Still, as I said, sl is a cool model with lots of potential.
YES!
:( ).
Though in ja i still had trouble getting the game to recognize my mouse button 3 and 4 in the key config.
But anyway, what I keep waiting for when i see "gaming mouse" is a mouse with a lot of buttons. Why are we limited to 5 buttons? I find that i can only easily hit a few keys with my hands on asdw, even then, sometimes you can not move a certain direction and hit another key comfortably at the same time.
I try to stretch my mouse as far as I can, often I use mouse wheel up as a button, mousewheel down as a button, click as a button, and the side buttons on some of them (current mouse only has 1 extra button
I would love to see a mouse that is loaded down with buttons that are easy to hit. Maybe even a design that allows the main left click button to be "broken up" so to speak, where that big area is a few buttons, but out side of a game they act as though they are one... ie any buton you hit in the left click area acts like it is left click.
I think it is definatly very possible to place lots of buttons to a mouse comfortably. Who needs mouse weight adjustments? Pft, give us some more buttons!!
Yeah, I knew that sounded wierd. In shadow you press once to start stab, press again to execute it. That is correct. I just got done playing it a week or two ago so it is still fresh in my mind.