Evan's Blog

Tribes: Ascend Gameplay Trailer Analysis

2011-07-01T14:17:00.000-04:00

Gameplay teaser slowed down

At the very start, we can see Blood Eagle logos on some crates.

Plasma turret. It's shown later on in the video with a blow glow at the tip of the barrel, so I'm fairly certain it is indeed a plasma turret.

HUD explained, or at least my best guesses. I don't really get the point of the speed indicators, if they're even that. The community over at the T:A forums came up with it, and hasn't been confirmed. They only show up when moving through the air.

The laser rifle does not use energy. We never see the actual sniper/laser rifle(s) model in this video, only the zoomed-in view, so the ammo count is likely on the gun itself. As far as I know, every gun has its ammo count on the weapon somewhere, as opposed to somewhere else on the screen like in previous Tribes game.

This part of the video would seem to confirm the base auto-repair statement from an anonymous playtester. It's seen a few times throughout the video, only when either of the energy/generator icons are faded out.

Double flag icon. This is seen a few times as well throughout the video, and I can't quite figure it out. There are really only 3 possible flag positions: on the stand, off the stand, and in the posession of a player. The single flag icon is shown the most throughout the video, leading me to believe it means the flag is on the stand. No flag icon at all, which is also shown in the video, likely means it's been taken. So there's really only one option left for a double flag icon: not on the stand. Who knows.

This is a zoomed-in view of another gun. It's the exact same display as the laser rifle, so every weapon likely has the exact same zoom in view. I originally thought the laser/sniper rifle zoom would be different, but this says otherwise. Also note the object at the top left; likely a type of grenade. It doesn't look anything like the one we see towards the end.

Player with flag. Nothing to analyze here really, just a snapshot of someone with the flag. Sure does seem pretty damn big though. He is killed a second or so later in the vid, and nothing on the HUD changes, so I dunno what's up with that. Then again, alpha...

Regenerating health?. I don't like this picture for several reasons. 1. The damage effects shown when getting shot. 2. Note the health bar. This is a Light armor player, who has a maximum armor of 800. He was shot, and was dropped down to 480. However, instead of his health bar going black, there are faded blue sections of health shown. This could mean 2 things. 1. His health will regenerate to that point over time. 2. It merely shows how much damage was received, and will turn black over time. Who knows. Also note the orange bars above his (empty) grenade icon. This is seen several times in the video and no one seems to know what the fuck it represents.

And finally, here are some shots of the sticky grenade at the end of the video.

http://i.imgur.com/Ql0WL.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/vse38.jpg

Also worth noting is that in several images you can see those large, long ships. On top of them are what I think are rocket/missile turrets. Not positive since we never get a close up look at them, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were.

Freemium: The concept that just won't go away.

2011-06-23T20:31:00.000-04:00

In my last post I talked about F2P games and their bullshitty-ness, and hoped that the trend would be gone within the next 5 or so years. Unfortunately I doubt that'll happen after today's big announcement from Valve. In case you haven't heard, Team Fortress 2 is going the F2P route, which honestly isn't terribly surprising after the popularity of hats. I myself am not a fan of the game at all, though I might reinstall it one of these days to see if I can finally 'get' it.

With such a large company joining the Freemium bandwagon, it really doesn't help to sway other publishers from going the same route. Just last night I was skimming through the front page of N4G and stumbled upon an article about the new Star Trek game. I believe this was first announced either at PAX or E3, and intended to read up on it but never really got around to doing so. I love Star Trek, and remember having a pretty fun time playing one of the games for the PS1 (I honestly can't remember the name). However, I found out it's going the F2P route as well, which obviously disappoints me.

While the developer tried to make it clear it won't have any real effect on gameplay, he did explain that you could simply buy experience points to get to higher levels. Honestly, what's the point in that? Manually leveling up consists of actual, you know, gameplay. Buying your way up to the top just doesn't sound all that fun, and an obvious advantage over those who either refuse or just can't afford to pay for the same experience. With Valve's decision to make TF2 free-to-play, it wouldn't shock me one bit if they did the same for Dota 2. If so, SMITE is even more fucked. Out of curiosity, I decided to take a look at the games that went F2P this year alone:

Age of Conan
Champions Online
City of Heroes
Global Agenda
Fallen Earth
Team Fortress 2
Battleground Europe
Ragnarok Online
Pox Nora
Pirates of the Burning Seas
Lego Universe
Blacklight: Retribution
ARMA 2
Ryzom
Hellgate: London
APB: Reloaded

I'm sure there are more, but those were the ones that stuck out the most when I did a quick Google search.

Random stuff about games.

2011-06-21T07:13:00.000-04:00

The following are drafts I never got around to finishing/publishing, along with some new stuff.

It's no surprise to anyone who has read this blog that I like Tribes. I've been playing the game on and off since 98, more-so over the past 5-6 years. The main reason I've been playing for so long, besides the overall fun and addiction to the game, is that throughout my life I've never really had a gaming PC. I stuck with a beast of machine for far longer than I should have, with hardware that made pretty much everyone laugh when I gave them the specs. This held me back from being a modern day PC gamer, and meant Tribes and any other game made pre-2003 were the only ones I could play. I was mainly a console gamer until 2006'sh, when the Xbox stopped being relevant and decided to skip on the current generation of consoles. I was in a grey area left playing games from the past. While frustrating at times, I enjoyed what I had.

Games like The Sims, Freelancer, Day of Defeat and Tribes have such an immense amount of replayability that it wasn't a huge issue that I couldn't play modern games. Sure, I would've loved to try out games like Crysis and Bad Company 2, but I didn't make a fuss out of it. I stuck with the games I had and played them to death. So after receiving this laptop in September of 2010, I started looking more closely at modern games such as Mass Effect, Bad Company 2 and even Half-Life 2. But then I started noticing something that quite honestly has me scared a bit. Over the past few months I've seen posts on Reddit from people in similar situations asking a question that I find hard to comprehend: "Does Bad Company 2 still have players?"

The game came out in March of 2010, and people are asking if it still has players? Do today's games, even ones as popular as BC2, have such a short life-span that people are asking these kinds a questions just a year after release? After playing the same game for over a decade I guess I've been spoiled by such a dedicated community, and just assumed all big-name multiplayer games have decent-sized communities that last for at least 5-10 years. While I have no doubt BC2 has a good number of players, it just feels really odd to read a question like that, and I'm seeing it more and more these days. I had the same reaction shortly after the first Section 8 game came out, and someone reported it only had 15 players on at one point. Even Prejudice has low numbers apparently, and that received generally favorable reviews. Anyways, onto my next topic.

Enter bizzaro land: I'm sick of free stuff. I want to pay money for games again. At least, that's my general attitude towards free-to-play games, which is seemingly the 'in' thing to do nowadays when your company fails harder than InstantAction at trying to make a profit. The main reason I'm sick of F2P games is because they're full of shit. And lies. While they may be free to play, they aren't free to enjoy for any decent amount of time. Every F2P game has that sweet spot the developers put in place to stop you from enjoying the game, and requires some sort of financial investment. This is why I have zero interest in Hi-Rez's SMITE, and a dwindling interest in Firefall and whatever the hell Valve is up to(likely Dota 2, which I wasn't interested in to begin with). The same goes for Battlefield P4F, Global Agenda, Champions Online and the most recent F2p game City of Heroes. They all eventually turn into subscriptions which I absolutely refuse to pay. Make a game, require a one time $30-$60 fee, and I'll be happy. I weep for a future void of F2P games, and hope this is merely a passing trend that'll pop within the next 5 or so years. Next topic: Legions.

I'm so confused with Legions at this point. At times I love it, other times I hate it. Right now I'm faced with some pretty crazy realizations about the game and where I thought I wanted it to go. For quite a while now it's been apparent that Legions will take on more Tribes-like gameplay elements such as inventory stations and base assets. Normally I'd be more than happy with such a change, and would welcome it in a heartbeat. I've defended their decision to do so several times on the forum without actually experiencing said changes. However, after a recent 'change' in gameplay I'm starting to doubt my original thoughts.

The developers recently implemented an inventory-like system, and it certainly raised a few eyebrows. In short: you spawned in a default loadout and could only change classes at ammo stations, opposed to whenever the hell you wanted via respawning. It's a feature I just didn't like, mainly because it slowed down gameplay. For someone like me who always plays as the default loadout the developers selected, it didn't affect me one bit. But I still didn't like it because I knew it affected many, if not the majority of others. It took away the one thing from Legions I prefer over Tribes: speed and ease of access. It's so easy to just hop in a game of Legions, pick your class and go. There's no inventory station to deal with, and more importantly there's no wait for the inventory station.

The developers, along with a few players, keep throwing out one very special word: depth. "Legions needs more depth" they keep saying, and claim adding inventory stations, deployables and generators will do just that. Added depth it might provide, but it'll certainly come at a cost, namely speed. Unless of course they have some genius plan to retain the fast-paced nature of Legions, which is mainly due to how damn simple everything currently is. If they could somehow add depth to the game by focusing on making the game even faster, things could get interesting. One proposed idea, which started out as a joke, would be to implement a Quidditch-type game mode. Whether or not it'll actually happen is anyone's guess(mod support would take care of that...), but it certainly makes me chuckle at the thought of it happening.

Thankfully it seems they aren't solely focusing base assets and have recently introduced Rabbit, but again there are problems. In Tribes, there are specific maps with specific spawn points for Rabbit, where as Legions uses existing CTF maps with not-so-friendly spawns. While Tribes has you spawning either in the sky or on a hill so you can gain speed, Legions places you on flat terrain, making it impossible to actually match the Rabbit's speed without rocket/grenade jumping, which of course takes away health. It's yet another balancing issue that plagues Legions, and makes me think if the game can actually become fully balanced. Even the sniper, which launched with the game in 2008, is still getting tweaked to this day.

Well, I think that about sums it up.

Hi-Rez Studios: First look at SMITE?

2011-06-18T03:09:00.000-04:00

Oy vey. Where to even begin with Hi-Rez Studios. I've been meaning to write a few posts responding to the information we've been given over the past few weeks, but it's such a touchy subject that I've decided to take the 'wait and see' approach until we get more information. Modding, credits, consoles, ranks, leveling. There's a lot to ~~bitch~~ talk about, and I'd rather have more details before going on the attack. One thing I will say is that I'm pretty disappointed at their general lack of activity on the Tribes forums. Their community manager visited the forum yesterday for the first time in two weeks. I thought perhaps the company was busy with creating a centeralized forum or with the games their developing, but if you visit their Global Agenda forum you can see the same CM posting on a daily basis. It's pretty disheartening, especially after the Todd Harris interview when the community went absolutely ape-shit. That's when your companies CM should step in and do his job. But I guess I should be used to receiving nothing but silence from game companies these days...

In other news, I believe I've spotted our first look at SMITE. A recent intern at Hi-Rez has updated his demo reel, which showcases a quick animation of a character with a mighty large hammer, along with a Hi-Rez Studios logo at the bottom right.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/24143695]

Skip to the 30 second mark for the animation. While Hi-Rez has posted a few concepts from the game, this is the first video/animation. To be honest, I have very little interest in SMITE, but I can never pass up the chance at leaking something. I wouldn't be too surprised if the majority of future posts mainly consisted of hatred towards their CM. God knows I'm used to it...

M&B Warband: Alone Again, Naturally.

2011-06-12T17:32:00.000-04:00

I've lost it all. Everything.

The day started out great. My main goal had finally been accomplished: joining a faction. This was my goal ever since I first played the demo over a month ago, and it finally happened. Unfortunately it wasn't the one I wanted(the Nords), but I wasn't going to be picky about it. Not only was I finally part of a faction, I now had actual enemies to kill rather than wasting my skills on sea raiders. Hell I even had my own flag. Shortly after joining an army, I had my first battle. And it was glorious. As I said, no more sea raiders. These guys were actual soldiers on horseback. Gone were the days where I took on 10-20 sea raiders. Now I was taking on over 100 men at a time, alongside 100 other men. Joining this particular faction pissed off one of the Nords, but I didn't mind.

I took a glance at my notes and saw I was supposed to meet up with another general to take on an army of assholes. His last known location was 4 days old, and it was a good 2 days away. Alas, it was the best place to start looking for him. I actually put off this meeting for a while, because I didn't even remember receiving such orders. I made my away to his last known location, only to find a trap. The general wasn't to blame. He was likely long gone, busy tackling another battle. The castle I entered was under siege, and I had no choice but to fight them. It was just me and 54 of my men, against their 200+ army. Needless to say, I lost.

But not only did I lose the battle, I lost all of my men. And my horse! I still have my armor and some money, but I'm honestly thinking about starting over. I know what I'm doing now, so it shouldn't be too hard to get back on top. Then again, I still retain all my skills and strength. I have no idea if I'm still part of this faction; I likely am, but I might just ignore it. I have the entire world in front of me. I could either get a few more men and take on the sea raiders as usual, or try to build up another army and take the game a bit more seriously. Time will tell.

Oh, and this is Thera. I have no idea where we are at this point, and I might just give up on her as well.

M&B Warband: Bitches Be Teasing Me

2011-06-11T01:05:00.000-04:00

I've decided to start playing Mount & Blade: Warband's campaign again tonight, and ran into some interesting situations. For quite a while now I've been carrying 10 prisoners with me wherever I go, unable to find a place to put them. Every castle has a prison, so I thought I could simply drop them off there whenever I wanted, but you can't. After doing a quick Google search I found my answer, and sold them off to a slave trader in a town called Tihr (which turns out is a pretty happening town). After gathering a decent number of men (30), I set out and took on a few battles.

After winning several battles I decided to return to Tihr, sold off a few more prisoners, and headed to the castle. That was when I met Lady Thera, the only one of four women who would even consider holding a conversation with me. At this point my name was well known amongst everyone in the town, with many saying I "struck fear in men", so I thought getting a woman wouldn't be all that difficult. After being rejected 3 times in a row my expectations slowly dwindled until I met Thera. Apparently she likes strong, bold men like me, and I managed to create a relationship with her. Unfortunately I was told to come back in a few days, because she felt things were moving too quickly.

After waiting several days, slaughtering a few men in the mean time, I returned to Tihr to see if I could progress things a bit with my new lady friend. Apparently she's rather high up on the royalty chain, or at least in that castle's, so the guards weren't too happy to see someone like me asking for Lady Thera. I was told that her nurse would find a way to sneak her out of the castle to see me. Fantastic. She actually wants to see me, enough to sneak out of a damn castle. Marrying her should be a cinch...

I finally make my way to her and we start chatting it up, and ask if we have a future together. She informs me that I'm not the only man looking for a future with her, so I demand to know who the other guy is. After some persuading, she finally gives a name: Jaral Gerald. I ask her nurse where I might find Gerald, and I start my search for him. I quickly find him and challenge him to a duel, which he accepts. We draw our swords and commence dueling, and I beat him within seconds. The man fought like a coward, and I'm offended he even offered a future with my Thera. I quickly race back to Tihr, but my lady is no where to be seen. I ask for her location and am told she is was last seen in a nearby castle just a short horse ride away. I pack my things and commence galloping.

I arrive at the castle and am again greeted by frowns by the guards, but luckily her nurse thinks otherwise and arranges a secret meeting for me and Thera. After a good first impression, dueling another man, and even reciting fucking poetry, I'm thinking this is it. I'm asking this bitch for her hand in marriage. I again ask about her future, when she informs me that, basically, I need to have a better name for myself. At this point I didn't know what to think. Right now I'm actually playing the game, finishing up a few side quests until I can meet her again. I just delivered some cattle to a small village and am on my way to see Thera, when her nurse met me in the field and delivered me a letter. Basically, this bitch wants to see me pronto but her father won't permit it. Still, she conjured up a plan to the two of us to meet somewhere.

Wish me luck.

Halo 1 Tower to Tower (T2T): Completed!

2011-06-07T21:00:00.000-04:00

Community vs Hi-Rez Interview

2011-06-01T15:39:00.000-04:00

[audio http://www.tribesnetwork.com/podcast/Community.mp3]

Second Tribes Network Interview with Todd Harris

2011-05-28T14:55:00.000-04:00

[audio http://www.tribesnetwork.com/podcast/Shazzcastepisode2.mp3]

Highlights:

E3 appearance: Nope. Skipping it this year, but will be attending both Quakecon (August 4-7) and PAX West (September 3-5).

Gameplay footage: End of June.

Server support: Hi-Rez-hosted servers, possibility of private servers.

UI: Elements of Tribes 2 UI (team/clan-based features).

Maps: Classic map designs(large, open, base structures), 16v16 on the PC. Currently playtesting 4 maps on regular basis. Drydock, Broadside-inspired map called Crossfire, faithful recreation of Katabatic, Ark's Nevena (sp?), urban environment, hard to fly through, sewer system.

Mod support: Not at release; low priority.

Game modes: CTF, TDM, Rabbit so far. Long list of potential game modes to add.

PC/Xbox 360: PC is first and top priority, consoles secondary.

What's new?: Modern UI, maps embrace skiing, uses a credit-based system to purchase items (deployables), ranks/leveling for character profiles.

Beta: Continuing through summer, likely closed beta. Open beta likely after PAX West.

Goodbye Trillian, Welcome Back Pidgin

2011-05-18T21:10:00.000-04:00

A few months ago I decided to try out Trillian, a universal IM client. What drew me to this particular client was its IRC support, something I use daily. I'd been using Pidgin for a while, but decided to mix things up and see if there were any alternatives. I honestly can't remember why I decided to do this, nor do I recall any downsides to Pidgin. At any rate, I ended up going with Trillian. Up till today it performed quite well. The IRC client was fine; lacking in a few areas, but nothing that prevented me from using the core functions needed to join and chat in an IRC room. But then something happend 10 minutes ago. I was talking with a friend when all of a sudden...

Yep. That's an ad inside the chat window, completely intruding my private chat with another friend. For the past 2-3 days I kept getting ads that popped up to the right of the task bar, right above the clock. Annoying? Yes, but bearable. This, however, isn't. Looks like my days of Trillian are over, and I can't really think of any other universal IM client other than Pidgin, so I guess I'll be reinstalling that sometime soon. I'm honestly quite surprised to see this level of advertising within an IM client. Sure, I remember the ads at the bottom of Windows Messenger, but those were on the main chat list window; something you aren't constantly looking at or active in. Ads within a chat, especially the kind Trillian just rolled out, are pretty shocking in my opinion.

I'd love to see some backlash from other users. It'd be nice if things got changed, but I honestly don't know if I'd even consider installing the program again.

What I'm Playing and What I'm Not (May 2010)

2011-05-14T22:49:00.000-04:00

Mount and Blade: Warband

I originally downloaded the demo of this quite a while ago, perhaps during Steam's holiday sale in December. A member of the Legions community recommended it, but I never got around to actually playing it and eventually removed it from my hard-drive. Fast-forward to roughly two weeks ago when this video appeared on Reddit. The video, along with many comments on Reddit praising the game, made me purchase it on Direct2Drive for just $6 thanks to their summer sale(the deal is over, unfortunately). Despite its graphics, Mount and Blade: Warband is an awesome game. Definitely worth the $6 I paid, and easily the regular $30 price tag it has now. The combat is truly unique, and the mod support will make this game last longer than many other games on the market these days. I've been playing it daily since my initial purchase, and have joined a Reddit group to play the Mount and Musket mod every once in a while.

Portal 2

Actually, I'm not playing this game. I've yet to dive into co-op or user-made levels, which should definitely help with longevity. But I have completed the single player campaign, which I found generally enjoyable. There were a few boring parts and not-so-clear challenges, but overall it's a great game. Unfortunately, a game like Portal has very little replay factor so I haven't found myself going back and playing it again. But as I said I haven't checked out the co-op and custom levels. I tried co-op but kept getting disconnected.

Legions: Overdrive

Oh Legions. About a month ago I seemed to really get into Legions after hating the energy system for so long. Something clicked and I found myself playing it daily. I thought we finally came to terms with one another and agreed to be nice with one another. It was a good time to finally get along with the game since the team started to push out new content, including new maps and game modes. However, as of late something has changed. I can't explain what it is(perhaps Mount and Blade stole my interest), but I haven't been playing it nearly as much, nor do I have any urge to. PUG's have apparently been dead for over a week now so I guess I'm not alone. I went back and played it a bit today and it was like deja-vu with the energy system. I just didn't like it.

There's also the community, which I'm getting tired of. The forums don't have anything interesting going on, and perhaps it's just me but there seems to be less activity these days. Several members, even some of the higher-ups, have started to rub me the wrong way. Legions also has this issue of balance, or at least that's what they call it. It seems whenever something new is added to the game, and people start to actually master it, it gets either changed or removed. A while ago they decided to add grenades to the game. Not long after implementation, people started using them to boost them selves off the flag stand.

Now, I always found the hit-box of the grenades to be way too big. 9/10 I'd shoot my own grenades instead of the enemy. I was really hoping they'd at least try making the hit-box smaller, but instead they decided to prevent the flag carrier from throwing grenades. Taking any form of defense away from the flag carrier doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Sure, the typical reaction to this would be 'You're supposed to be looking for team-mates to pass the flag to, not fight other players'. Well, in PUGS this is a perfectly fine argument. In PUBs it is not, considering most, if not all of your team is entirely on the offensive a lot of the time. You're the lone man back at base in this instance, just waiting...hoping...someone will return the flag. /rant

Tribes

As strange as it may sound, I haven't played Tribes in months. With my interest in Legions, along with general tiring of the game, Tribes sort of went on the backburner. I didn't have any urge to play the game. But these past few days I've found myself firing the game up again, though Legions has really messed with my sense of movement. Getting used to more advanced movement, overdrive and downjets has made getting back into Tribes somewhat difficult. Another day or so of playing should sort things out, however.

College...and Tribes!

2011-05-09T19:39:00.000-04:00

I tried thinking of a witty title that would incorporate Tribes and college, but eventually said fuck it. It's Monday, meaning I had my late class, and I'm exhausted. The class itself isn't all that difficult(Composition 1). But I guess starting at 6pm and ending at 9:40pm messes with my inner clock, as I'm always tired after class. Before class started I had a meeting with my adviser to set up summer and fall classes. I went in thinking things would go smoothly. How naive...

Not long into the registration process I'm told that a lot of my classes aren't available on the campus I'm at, and would have to travel to another campus to attend them. The closest one is an hour and a half away, and it sounded like I'd be driving there every other day. While I could do this, I certainly didn't want to for obvious reasons(gas, time. Mostly gas). The only other options I had were to take them online, or choose a different major. To be honest, I'm not absolutely in love with web development. I would much rather go into a web design field, which I've mentioned in a previous post. In short, I'd like to paint the car, but they're teaching me to become a mechanic. Sure it's useful information to have, and the two definitely relate, but I'm not digging the server and MySQL classes I'll have to take.

Unfortunately nothing else interests me. The only other thing I could possibly think of was journalism; something I seriously thought about getting into 5 or so years ago. But they don't offer that, so I'm stuck with taking online classes for web development. I've heard mixed things about online classes, so we'll see how it goes. It sucks to have my schedule fucked with like that, especially since I was told I'd be able to take all the required classes at this campus. Anyways, we got things sorted out for the most part and I'll be taking 3 classes this summer, and a few in the fall...I think. I'll be getting my complete schedule sometime next week so I'll know for sure then. Now, onto the real important stuff: Tribes!

Hi-Rez Studios have released the first in-game screens of Tribes: Ascend and, well, my feelings are mixed. Thankfully they're generally positive, but a few things have me weary. But first lets take a look at the damn pictures already:

First thing that popped out at me was the size of the gun, which is a disclauncher if you can believe it. To me, the Tribes disclauncher has always had a flat, sleek look to it. This does not have a sleek look to it. Honestly, it reminded me of a mix between CoD and Halo. It looks too much like the Tribes: Vengeance disclauncher, which is odd since they've claimed to be basing the game off of Tribes 2, which has a much flatter disclauncher. Really hope they listen to the majority of people and chip away at the current model.

Another thing that I noticed was the jet-trails, mainly their length. I was immediately reminded of the old Fallen Empire: Legions jet-trails. This isn't necessarly a good nor bad things; merely something I noticed. I also spotted the Drydock structures from the concept art they released a while ago. You can spot a 'ship' from the concept art in the second T:A screenshot, along with similar base structures in both screenshots. And I think you can see a red/pink meteorite at the top left of the first screenshot.

As for the not-so-noticeable things, I can't tell for sure if those are medium or heavy Diamond Sword models in the first screenshot. I'm leaning towards Heavy, but they could easily be Medium seeing how beefy their concepts are. I'm also not totally sure of that ammo counter. 19 discs seems like a lot for a disclauncher. The standard amount of discs from Tribes 1 is 15 I believe, maybe even 10. The increase of discs leads me to believe the firing rate might've been increased and damage decreased from previous games, but I could easily be wrong about that. You can also sort-of see that the terrain looks much more 'skiable' than the Drydock concept art they released before. One last thing I'd like to point out in screenshot #2 is the Light Diamond Sword model. Besides the sword on his back, you can also see a white line by his head. Sniper trail? Who knows. Just another small thing I noticed.

E3 2011: What I Want

2011-04-27T19:31:00.000-04:00

Similar to my Games, Games, Games post(s), I thought I'd write what I want to see at E3 2011, not predictions like all the game sites write about each year. While I'm sure some of these are merely wishful thinking, others might have a real chance of actually appearing at this year's sweatfest. So, without further ado:

1. The Return of Master Chief

I realize that not owning a 360 should make any opinion I have on the future of Master Chief void, but I still care about the guy. There's something about the story and his character that I just like. Apparently enough for me to get excited about a new Halo game, regardless of the fact that I might not ever play it. With rumors of a Halo 1 remake, along with whatever the hell 343 is up to, I really do think we'll hear from the big guy this summer.

2. Half-Life 2: Episode 3

Nothing needs to be said about this.

Tribes

Really, anything Tribes-related announced at E3 would be great. The fact that Hi-Rez is juggling 4 games right now is worrying. It'd be nice to get some sort of reassurance from the company that Tribes isn't just a side-project. The chances of this happening are extremely slim, however. I wouldn't be surprised if Hi-Rez didn't attend the show this year(though they did in both 09 and 10). If they did, showing off Smite wouldn't surprise me either...

Re-focusing Your Target Audience

Simply put, I want this casual bullshit to go away. I'm sincerely hoping that the Kinect and Move resulted in disappointing sales, and that both companies go back to focusing on traditional gaming. The Wii had a phenomenal run, at least financially, but I'm pretty sure actual gamers are tired of it. With Wii 2 rumors everywhere you look, I'm hoping Nintendo can lead Microsoft and Sony back to what gaming used to be like.

Why I Hate Wordpress(.com)

2011-04-21T19:01:00.000-04:00

Several months ago I received an email from Microsoft regarding my Spaces profile. Apparently they are shutting them down, and offered to move everything to a free Wordpress page. I made the transfer, but stuck with Blogger as my main blog service in the mean time. Sometime in November I received yet another email, reminding me that my Spaces account would be closed. Even though I was perfectly happy with Blogger, I decided to make the switch anyways. I was always a bit curious about Wordpress; thinking it was better than Blogger for some reason. Ever since then I've regretted that decision.

I've moved from several blogging platforms over the years. MySpace, Spaces, Blogger, one I can't remember, back to Blogger, and now here. Of those services I've used, Blogger easily takes the cake. I honestly can't believe how limited Wordpress is in comparison to Blogger. Lets start with the templates: in Blogger, it's pretty damn configurable. You can go in and edit the CSS to whatever the hell you want. Wordpress? You have to pay to do just that. Sure there are a crapload of themes to choose from, but if I want to change the background image on any of them, I'll have to fork up $15. A year.

How about videos? In Blogger I can upload videos just fine(though I'm not sure of the limit). With Wordpress? $60 a year. Another road block Wordpress throws at you is their handling of javascript, or lack thereof I should say. I used a number of widgets while at Blogger, such as a live visitor count. When attempting to use the same widget on this blog, it didn't work. Thinking I missed a line of code I tried again, but it still wouldn't show up. After a quick Google search I found out Wordpress.com users can't use javascript codes on their blog. If that isn't enough, they won't even allow flash.

So, if you happen to be thinking about switching from Blogger to Wordpress, and you care about customization, just don't. I shouldn't have left Blogger in the first place. I'd go back to Blogger, but I'm tired of switching services. I might later on.

SMITE: Did I call that shit or what?

2011-04-21T12:41:00.000-04:00

ATLANTA - April 21, 2011 — Hi-Rez Studios, the award winning independent developer of Global Agenda, announced today they are developing SMITE, a free-to-play online battleground between gods. Players choose from a selection of mythical gods, join session-based arena combat, and use custom powers and team tactics against other player-controlled gods and non-player controlled minions.

What the announcement fails to clarify is whether or not it'll be available for consoles as well, which I also wrote about. It doesn't specifically mention any platform, actually.

The Big Update

2011-04-16T00:23:00.000-04:00

I've put this off for far too long now. I'm not even sure where to start, really. I guess I'll do things in order of importance(at least to me), so, here we go:

I'm officially a college student. After taking a fairly long break after graduating from high school, I've finally decided to take the next big step in life by attending college. I've decided to get a certificate in web development, though whether or not I'll follow through with it is anyone's guess. Web development isn't necessarily a field I'm 100% interested in, and was sort-of pushed into it from several outside sources. So far I haven't really had any web-specific classes; at least none that deal with coding, which I'm weary about. Next week is the start of my HTML class, then in May starts my Database Application class, which I know jack-shit about and wasn't expecting such a class. I'm so much more interested in web design rather than development, but they don't offer that specific class unfortunately. I'm more comfortable whipping up a quick design in photoshop, than doing the actual coding and implementation.

Technically I am in a web class, though it's an extremely general course on using search engines to find shit and stuff like that. I'm actually surprised that a class like this even exists in this day and age, but I can't really complain about an easy A. Both this and my English class require essays, so of course both will be about videogames. The one awesome thing about my classes is that none of them start in the morning. My earliest is at 12:30, which is the internet search one so I don't really have to be fully awake for, and my latest is at 6:00pm. There's also a whole other aspect to me going to college that actually has a greater effect on my life, but that's a bit too personal to go into so I guess I'll just end it right here.

As for the unimportant stuff, I'm sad to say that Halo has received 2 big blows as of late. HighImpactHalo is shutting down, though you can still access the site and read the forums. It's more or less in a state of 'cryo', as they put it. I can't say I was the most active of posters, but I had been visiting the site on a daily basis over the past couple of months. I originally joined the forum way back in 2005, and just recently discovered my old posts thanks to their forums archive. It's sad to see it go, mainly because it was one of the very few forums that actively discussed Halo 1. Some of the stuff that they managed to do with the game is incredible. Hopefully we'll see it come back someday.

As I said, Halo has received 2 blows. Xbox.com is finally upgrading their forum, which hasn't seen a significant update since 2005. Unfortunately it looks like it won't have any original Xbox sections, which of course includes Halo 1. This is even sadder than HIH going into cryo, because this is where it all began for me. I joined the forum back in October of 2003, mainly hanging out in the Halo 1 and 2 forums. Just thinking about the Xbox forums no longer have a Halo 1 section is pretty sad, but inevitable I guess. The new forums themselves are quite bad, but again it's only in beta. Who knows, maybe it will have a Halo 1 forum after all...

And just when you thought the InstantAction coffin couldn't receive anymore nails, another one came out of no where. I received an email about a week ago from ChangeDetection.com, which notifies you of any website changes you subscribe to. It couldn't access the site anymore, so it canceled any updates it would normally send to me. In related IA news, the Lore: Aftermath devs have put up a kickstarter page for the game. They're asking for $35,000 in funding to get the game going again. Why the hell they need this much is beyond me, and raising such a ridiculous amount of money in less than 3 weeks is pretty much impossible. Still, I wish them luck.

I suppose that's it for now. Other small things have happened, such as watching The Black Swan, but I really don't feel like getting into that movie right now. I'm still not sure exactly what happened in that movie...

Games, games, games. [Updated]

2011-03-23T23:30:00.000-04:00

Back in January I wrote this entry that focused on games I was most interested in. I just thought I'd update it a bit and explain why later on. This list will also be ordered, unlike the last one.

1. Tribes: Ascend

Now this is the kind of Tribes game I and many others want. I've pretty much lost all interest in the MMO, which happens to be one of the games I've removed from my original list. Still, I'm not entirely happy with what I'm hearing so far. Melee combat? In Tribes? Can't say I'm too thrilled about that. The models themselves seem a bit chunky to me, though the Light Diamond Sword armor is pretty good. The rest could lose a few pounds. We also have no idea how Hi-Rez will handle modding, if they'll even allow it at all. Then you've got the engine itself, which isn't really the preferred type for a game like Tribes. Lots of things need answered before I can mindlessly place a preorder.

2. Portal 2

I've actually just recently started playing Portal again, and despite knowing how to solve every puzzle within seconds, I still love it. I actually discovered a set of achievements today (Transmission Sent), and am currently trying to complete it. It's a nice little refreshment to a game that doesn't even need one.

And that's it folks. Seriously. I've cut down my original list by two-thirds, mainly due to release dates. I have no idea if Ep. 3 will come out this year. It's extremely unlikely, as is Infinity. I'm still interested in Outerra, but again, no idea if it'll come out this year. Another game lacking from this list that actually does have a 2011 release date is Firefall. I don't know why, but I've lost all interest in this game. It happened sometime around PAX East, which is even stranger since we got more info on the game. But nothing about it appeals to me anymore. If I had to guess I'd say the Tribes: Ascend announcement had something to do with it. I'm also interested in Battlefield 3, but I know this laptop won't be able to handle it.

So, there you have it. I'm looking forward to just two games this year, one of which comes out in less than a month. The other could very well get pushed to 2012, but who knows. My original list included some notable mentions, but none of those have my interest anymore either. Well, Driver could be interesting. But that's mostly nostalgia speaking.

Just what is Hi-Rez Studios up to? pt. 3

2011-03-15T20:19:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned in a previous post, Hi-Rez's unannounced game is (probably) called Smite. At the time that's all I really knew; the name. Fortunately I've been able to uncover some more details, namely the inclusion of Wizards and spells. One such spell with raise something from the ground, which immediately made me think of Magicka's defensive spells, but I could be dead wrong about that. Another rather large piece of information I've uncovered is the fact that Smite will be available for consoles. Exclusively? Not sure. I'd find that unlikely considering Hi-Rez seem to be PC developers first. But could Smite and Tribes: Ascend mark a shift towards consoles for them? It'd certainly be a shame, especially now that they're in control of the Tribes franchise. On the other hand it could be a godsend...

You might be thinking 'WTF?' after reading that last sentence, and I don't blame you. Even I don't really want Tribes to move over to consoles, but at the same time it could breathe some serious life into the franchise. Tribes was never a big money maker. The first game saw around 210,000 sales and suffered from piracy, while Tribes 2 had 500,000~ and Tribes: Vengeance less than 100,000 copies. I'm not certain about how many copes of Tribes: Aerial Assault were sold, but I'm assuming not a whole lot. So imagine if Tribes: Ascend saw CoD-like sales by being on consoles. Great for the franchise, but potentially devastating to existing fans. While technically possible, there's no way to accurately replicate Tribes' movement with a controller.

So it basically comes down to making it a multi-million dollar franchise by moving it to consoles, or risking it by keeping the series PC-centric and hope Hi-Rez can pull off the impossible. I'm not saying Tribes (or Hi-Rez) is guaranteed success by shifting to consoles, but it at least has the possibility to. Ideally I'd like them to pull off the impossible, but only time will tell at this point...

Hi-Rez Studios announces Tribes: Ascend

2011-03-11T09:03:00.000-05:00

Well, it looks like Hi-Rez is doing the one thing I thought they weren't doing: making another Tribes game. But I'm still a bit proud of myself for uncovering the game before they announced it, even though I was dead wrong about a name change. I was quite pumped after watching the trailer on PC Gamer, then decided to actually read the article. I then saw something that, quite frankly, has me extremely worried. Tribes: Ascend will be available for both the PC and Xbox 360. Now, since Hi-Rez's first game was for the PC I'm hoping they'll view the 360 game as a secondary version, while the PC game gets top priority. One can only wish that this is fan service, and will support modding, dedicated servers, custom scripts, ect. Basically everything that made Tribes awesome.

On the other hand, everyone is familiar with recent titles available for both PC's and consoles. No modding, no dedicated servers, launch-day DLC. While certain developers are claiming the PC isn't in any danger and that the PC version of their game will get top priority, simply saying it'll get the same amount of DLC as the console version isn't very reassuring. Hi-Rez essentially has 2 mountains that are almost impossible to climb: pleasing both the Tribes and PC gaming community. If they can pull it off, then brav-fucking-o to them. Till then, I'll wait for some actual gameplay videos. Speaking of videos, let take a closer look at that Tribes: Ascend trailer:

The first thing people will probably overlook is the 'shazbot' etching, which is visible at around the 0:25 mark. Another thing to note is at 0:31. There's a transparent video on top of the armor of what looks like a T1 disc firing at a T2 generator. This doesn't really make sense, but it looks exactly like a T1 disc and it certainly looks like it's firing at a T2 generator. As someone who hasn't played a whole lot of T2, maybe the disc just looks like that. I've discussed it a bit with people in #tribesascend and we're still not entirely sure. That's pretty much it for the main video, other than the Blood Eagle and Diamond Sword models. Next we'll move onto the quick flashes at the end.

[slideshow]

The flashes provide the most interesting information in my opinion. The AR-30 MOD 6 likely refers to an assault rifle. We can also spot a Diamond Sword single handedly wield a sword at the camera. You'd assume it would be similar to the melee combat in Unreal Championship 2, but Hi-Rez hasn't divulged any details about that just yet. I can't say I'm too thrilled about this possiblity, since Tribes has never been about that kind of combat. Hell it never had assault rifles either, so who knows where they're taking the franchise. One last thing I saw, besides the humorous rock-paper-scissors flash, was this. That Diamond Sword guy sure looks familiar, doesn't he? Let's hope the similarities end there.

I'm also curious about what Tribes will be featured. tribes Universe will be limited to just 3 (Diamond Sword, Blood Eagle and one unannounced). But Tribes: Ascend could, and should include them all. If it's strictly a multiplayer game similar to Tribes 2, which it sounds like, then they'd have no real reason to exclude any of the existing tribes.

In the end, I'm very excited for Tribes: Ascend, perhaps even more-so than Tribes: Universe. If they play their cards right and stick to what made Tribes fun, it could be a fantastic game. But they certainly have their work cut out for them.

Just what is Hi-Rez Studios up to? pt. 2

2011-03-06T21:37:00.000-05:00

Well, it looks like my previous blog got a bit more attention than I was expecting. My average daily blog views range anywhere from 10-20; nothing to boast about. However, I noticed that my last post got more than 60 on its first day, and continued to grow for a few days afterwards. Viewing the stats I noticed that at least some of those views came from Atlanta, GA, where Hi-Rez Studios is located. Just for the hell of it I decided to Google "tribes ascend", and came upon a mysterious search result that I didn't notice before:

Now, I'm fairly certain that wasn't there when I was digging around before. I clicked it and was prompted to log in. Odd, I thought. But perhaps this particular page was under construction, so I tried going to tribesascend.com, and was again prompted to login. This is definitely a new discovery, as the page previously redirected to the Global Agenda website. Whatever tribesascend.com is, Hi-Rez doesn't want people accessing it just yet. In a rather uneventful turn of events, I decided to copy everything after tribesascend.com and try it at the Global Agenda website, but it just gave me this. We've been told to expect news sometime after PAX, which is this weekend. With these recent changes, perhaps they'll shed some light on it? Perhaps Tribes Universe is getting re-named to Tribes Ascend? Either way, I shall definitely be keeping an eye on this.

I also found a bit more info on SMITE, which I previously guessed is the third unannounced game they're currently working on. I decided to type in smitegame.com into Google and, what'dya know, the first result that came up was Hi-Rez Studios' website. It also gave me a whois search result, which confirmed that Hi-Rez owns the domain. They apparently registered the domain on January 28th, and redirects to their website (sort of).

Just what is Hi-Rez Studios up to?

2011-02-28T18:06:00.000-05:00

I decided to take a break from Freelancer, which usually means I probably won't play it again for several months. It's weird how I can go on a Freelancer streak for days, then suddenly lose all interest in the game. Sad, but true. Anyways, I've recently put my internet sleuthing skills to use, something I haven't done since the InstantAction days. I'm actually using the same sources for gathering my information, since I can't really think of anything else to use(other than a lock pick). My first little nugget of info came to me when I wasn't even looking. Apparently, Hi-Rez Studios registered the domain TribesAscend.com on February 3rd, 2011. As of now it simply redirects to the Global Agenda website.

After acquiring the Tribes IP back in October of 2010 and announcing Tribes Universe, could Hi-Rez be making another Tribes game? Ascend is a bit of a mystery at this point, because Hi-Rez haven't registered the trademark 'Tribes Ascend' yet. However, they have registered the name Smite back on February 9th. Not too long ago it was revealed that Hi-Rez is currently working on a third unknown game. If I were to take a guess, Smite is the unknown game and they'll be announcing it sometime soon. As for Tribes Ascend? I honestly don't know. It's definitely something. But what that something means is...well, I just don't know. It'd be extremely odd for them to even think about making another Tribes game at this point. Usually you'd register the trademark and domain name at the same time, but all they've done is get the domain.

Time will tell...

(also, they registered the trademark JETPACK FIGHTER back in November. Dunno wtf that's about)

Adventures in Space: Mission Impossible (with time travel!)

2011-02-27T17:15:00.000-05:00

I started my quest for the right turret shortly after posting my last entry, and quickly found out it was yet another dead end. Apparently, Planet Toledo no longer exists. It did in the campaign, but apparently disappeared once the story ended. I can understand the Order base being destroyed, but the entire planet? Highly unlikely. The only thing that'd explain Toledo not being listed on my map is because the base/planet was considered a 'secret' Order HQ. I think I will do some Googling to get a definitive answer.

One exciting thing did happen in Freelancer today, though. Time travel! Well...not really. I noticed that my screencaps were a bit distorted; even FRAPS didn't save them correctly. I checked the in-game resolution settings and noticed the max resolution I could achieve is 1024x768. For a game that came out in 2003 this is understandable. So I did some research and found a way to manually set the game to widescreen. I had to edit several config files, and stupidly didn't create backups. After editing the files and starting up the game, I quickly realized something was very wrong. All of the consoles were displaced in an annoying fashion, and it still wasn't widescreen. I was hoping that they'd go back to their default settings if I unchecked Read Only(assuming the game would simply re-write the files upon startup), but unfortunately it didn't work.

I then thought I could get the default files from the install disc, but again, no dice. I really didn't feel like reinstalling the game, so the only thing I could think of was to roll back the laptop to a previous time. Thankfully I had a restore point from last night, and fortunately the issue was resolved. With that resolved I continued my journey.

At one point I encountered a swarm of weak Rogues. While individually they were quite week, as a swarm it can get tricky. Far from life-threatening, but enough to damage my ship beyond its shields. After taking care of them I searched for the nearest station to dock for repairs. Out of sheer curiosity I decided to see what kind of weapons they offered, and to my surprise they had the turret I needed. Going after the Order base was basically a huge waste, since it appears this particular turret exists in other places. However, there was a catch. I selected the turret and was informed I couldn't buy it because I wasn't on good enough terms with the dealer. Son of a...

I'm getting to the point where the turret just doesn't seem worth it. Honestly, the current turrets I have are a good enough defense. It's the shield I'm worried about. In theory it should withstand some fairly serious firepower, but I've noticed it can drain rather quickly when going up against certain ships. It's pretty disappointing considering how much I paid for it, but I've seen better shields so perhaps those are what I should really be looking for. Unfortunately it seems I'll have to buy a new ship, which will require some serious cash.

Adventures in Space: Waste of Gas.

2011-02-27T08:16:00.000-05:00

Well, my quest to buy the right turret was a huge waste. After encountering several rather difficult battles and dying a few times in the process, I finally reached what I thought was my desired location. Turns out I was completely wrong about my decision. I boarded an Order's shipyard, assuming all-things Order had similar supplies, only to discover nothing worth buying. Furthermore, I spent several thousand credits on ship repairs alone throughout the journey. Most of the money went towards nanobots, which cost me 5k+ for each resupply of the little buggers. Fortunately they're definitely worth it.

So now I'm doing the one thing I should've done from the beginning: confirming where exactly the Order's base is. Since I wasn't paying full attention during the campaign I couldn't remember what planet the base was on. A bit of Googling eventually got me an answer, and I shall now head to Planet Toledo. I have no idea if the base is still there, since it was pretty much blown to bits the last time I saw. But since the Order are still around, perhaps they did a few repairs? Doing even more Googling would confirm this, but hey, where's the fun in that?

Unfortunately I wasn't very pleased with my initial failure, and wanted to leave with something to at least make the trip seem worthwhile. So I ended up buying a rather powerful, though slow turret. This drained my wallet down to about 1400, and since I'm guessing the turret I really want costs around 13k, I have some work to do.

le sigh

Adventures in Space: "I get no respect, I tell ya"

2011-02-26T17:07:00.000-05:00

As I said before, Freelancer has been completed. Well, the story at least. However, I can still play the game and level up, which in turn allows me to get better weapons and shields. It's a great solution to a games replayability factor, and it handles it quite well. Mostly. I'm just going give you another recap of what I did to complete the story: I saved the human race. This is beyond any kind of financial reward, and (should) immediately shed me as a God among everyone else. I'm no Masterchief, but still. So I decided to play the game today to see how the universe now views me, and if I still even have enemies.

Well, simply put I do. A lot of them. In a way this is good, because without them there'd be no game to play or jobs to take. Speaking of jobs, I ran into a rather silly situation today. Before going on I must first explain another annoyance I had/have with the game. Whenever you approach someone for a job for the first time, it always goes something like this:

Employer: "Hey. Can I help you?"

Freelancer: "Got anything for me?"

Employer: "I don't recognize you. You new around here?"

Freelancer: "Uh, yeah."

Every. Single. Time. There are slight variants, but it's always the same conversation. So after doing my one good deed for humanity, I approached a potential employer today and got the exact same reaction. How the hell could they not know who I was? I was surely plastered all over the news. Hell I even got pardoned for my 'wrong doings', which were broadcasted throughout the whole story. Before my world got turned upside down, I was a nobody. Just a freelancer who survived a rather horrible accident. I land on planet Manhattan and decide to have a drink at the local bar. And guess what? The bartender recognizes me from the news. So it just doesn't make sense that people don't know who I am by now.

Anyways, I took on a few jobs which turned out to be extremely easy thanks to my new ship with like 6 turrets and an incredibly strong shield. Towards the end of the campaign I was taking on level 15-20 missions, which while hard I always completed rather quickly. But now that I'm back on Manhattan, all the missions are 1's or 2's. It's like slicing through butter with an incredibly hot and sharp knife, and not really fair to those I kill. But meh, it's $2500 more in my pocket each time.

One thing I wanted to fix was my turret array. All but one turret was the same as the rest, because I didn't have enough money to fully outfit my ship to its maximum firing power. I had about 5 strong turrets and 1 weak one. However, the only place I knew of that sold the turret I wanted was quite a ways away. I jumped through several gates throughout the campaign to get that ship, and had no idea how to get back there. Thankfully there's a handy little navigational map that lists where all the bases were. You can even set a waypoint to said base, and the game will conveniently tell you which jumpgates to take.

So I went on my way to the correct base, and realized the closer I got to it, the harder the enemies were. I've yet to actually reach the base because I've died several times getting to it already. I thought I had a pretty epic ship and could take on any enemy that dared to stand...er...hover in my way. But unfortunately I've run into some rather nasty bastards that just won't give up. The worst ones are the guys who hang around jumpgates/holes. While the gates are usually ok, docking them puts the ship into auto-pilot. You can't really just floor it and get immediately put into the gate. It takes about 10 seconds for your ship to enter the gate, and sometimes 10 seconds can mean a lot, especially when you have 10 or so enemies firing at you. You're completely vulnerable during those 10 seconds. You can't fire or use your thrusters. You can always cancel out the docking sequence, but if you're in danger of dying you're better off just going into the gate.

Then there's the jumpholes. These are the real cockfags when you're under attack. Unlike the gates, holes have a queue. Only one ship can go through holes at a time, and can really make for some tense situations. Right now, I'm pretty close to a jumphole and I just know there'll be a battle when I get near it. I'm low on nanobots(none, actually), and my ship isn't at 100% health. I decided to dock with a nearby station to get repairs, and I shall continue my approach tomorrow. The bad news is that I'm quite far from where I need to be, so I'm sure there will be several more jumpholes ahead of me.

Adventures in Space: The Final Frontier

2011-02-25T15:16:00.000-05:00

Freelancer is complete. Well, basically. It ended roughly 20-30 minutes after I posted my last entry, and it was surprisingly disappointing. I know I wrote about some things that bothered me, but none of those had anything to do with what disappointed me the most towards the end. To put things into perspective, imagine tons of chaos throughout the galaxy, with man-kind facing extinction from an alien species. They possess a technology that we've never seen before, nor even fathomed. The time comes for me, along with The Order(rebels-but-not-rebels), to finally attack the alien species known as the Nomads. We finally get a glimpse of what these bastards look like.

Technically that's a Nomad battleship, and not one of the many fighters we went up against. The fighters are what I find most disappointing though. Throughout this entire game I've gone against ships that at least provided some kind of battle. The Nomads? Easy as hell. They didn't even have shields for crying out loud, nor did the battleships. All this time spent trying to prevent these assholes from killing man-kind, and they're this weak? Now, if I were actually following the story somewhat this may not have been a surprise. I remember hearing something about this species being weak, or perhaps that was the Dom'Kavash. See, the Dom'Kavash were the real bad guys that created the technology and artifact. While they no longer exist, the Nomads do. They were essentially caretakers of the Kavash's technology, so I guess as caretakers they wouldn't be all that powerful. But still...

I also had another Star Trek moment. Towards the end you come upon a huge structure that immediately reminded me of the Dyson's Sphere:

And, what'dya know? That's exactly what it was. I blow up some shit, activate the artifact and the Nomads go bye-bye. I fly back to where I started and am pardoned of all accusations. So, I just sorta saved humanity. What kind of reward do I get? $20,000. How gracious of them. Despite all these issues, I like how the game 'ended', because it really didn't. While the story technically ended, you can still take on jobs and talk with people. Hell, I could betray the very people I teamed up with just for the hell of it. But for now I'm just a hero that the universe deserves, but not the one it needs right now...and so they'll hunt me...because I can take it...because I'm not a hero...I'm a silent guardian, a watchful protector...a Freelancer.

Wait a minute...

Adventures in Space: Spaced Out

2011-02-24T12:30:00.000-05:00

Several days ago I decided to reinstall Freelancer, which I'd bought from Amazon sometime last year. I never got around to finishing it because I got to a point where it'd take quite a while for my character to advance, and I really didn't feel like taking on several missions. That's how it works in Freelancer; you do some story-based missions with Juni, then you both land on some station while she leaves and recommends that you get some work in the mean time. It's all based on your worth. Say I'm worth $50,000 when she leaves. I can view my player status and see in order to progress to the next level, I need to be at $75,000. To accomplish this I can talk with a few tradesmen or local authorities about jobs, which in all honesty they should be doing, that are worth anywhere from $5000-$15,000. It all depends on how far into the game you are. Obviously when you first start out the jobs are rather cheap and easy, but eventually get more intense and valuable. When you meet your goal, Juni comes back and the story progresses.

Anyways, I got to a point where I needed like $30,000+ dollars, and I really didn't feel like doing that many missions. I stopped playing for a bit, meaning to go back to it at some point, but never really did. I ended up forgetting about it and stupidly uninstalled the game when cleaning out my old computer. Jump to a few days ago when I decided to give the game another go. I got to the point where I left off before and got to my goal pretty quick. I only had to take on 3-4 jobs, which made me quite happy. I've advanced throughout the story quite considerably, and enjoy the gameplay, but it's come to the point where I just want it to end already. I've only got a basic grasp on the story, mainly because I haven't been paying too much attention to cutscenes or dialog. Basically, an alien race has taken control of several higher-up officials and is spreading itself throughout the human race. When I finally did start listening, I noticed a startling resemblance to a Star Trek: TNG episode called Conspiracy. Not important, but still somewhat funny.

I'm also in possession of an artifact that belongs to the same alien species. A bunch of other shit happened and I'm basically trying to figure out what's happening, while saving humanity at the same time. Fun? Yes, but tiresome at the same time. I've grown accustomed to the way enemies attack and appear. For instance, I know that if I'm given a waypoint to enemy ships, they'll appear when I'm precisely 2.4 Km's away from said waypoint. I also know that if I'm to destroy an object, say, a generator, the enemy will increase their attacks when the generator is seconds away from destruction. Enemies also seem to only focus on me, regardless if I'm with a fleet of other ships or not. I'm also well aware that if my main goal is to simply outrun the enemy and I try to activate cruise engine, which greatly increases my speed, they conveniently fire missiles that disable my engines.

There are came a point that I'm not too proud of. I had just escaped a rather hectic battle with just one bar of 'health' remaining. I'd attempted this battle several times before, and finally managed to escape the buggers and jump through a wormhole. Once on the other side I was greeted with yet another battle. I had no nanobots to repair my ship or shields. I was fucked in every way possible. There was no way in hell I was going to attempt the previous battle in the hopes of escaping with more health. Nor was I going to stop playing. I'm finishing this damn game one way or another, so I did the only thing I could think of. I cheated. Just this once. It worked, and I turned the cheats off afterwards.

I have a feeling that, hopefully, I'm near the end. I'm starting the game up right now, and hopefully I'll conquer this beast once and for all.

Reddit Bullshit: Resolved? [Updated]

2011-02-20T10:32:00.000-05:00

In case you have a bad memory or are new here, I wrote about some fishy activity over at Reddit not too long ago. In the nuttiest of nutshells: several accounts have been made to submit content from a website to Reddit.com/r/gamingnews. To those familiar with Reddit, you should know how annoying this can be. One of these accounts also happens to be a mod for /r/gamingnews, which I'm sure will bring back glorious memories of another Reddit incident. I did a bit of research and concluded that there were at least 4 accounts posting links from the same website to /r/gamingnews, but I didn't go public with it on Reddit. I wanted to, but /r/gamingnews isn't a place for drama and I really didn't feel like ruining the subreddit. Spamming aside, it was still a decent subreddit that was picking up some steam. I sort of forgot about it all...until today.

"How I got banned from /r/gamingnews" is currently the second highest rated story on /r/gaming. I opened it up and discovered that it was about botchweed. How unsurprising. Basically someone called out the website on plagiarizing a Destructoid article, and submitted said Destructoid article to /r/gamingnews. The same mod that spams the subreddit decided to ban him. Now that is a conflict of interest. A mod shouldn't be doing this. Further more, it appears that another spammer has been made mod of /r/gamingnews. Basically, /r/gamingnews is now /r/botchweed. Seeing how popular the submission is, shit is definitely going down. The mod in question has already receieved massive downvotes. Others are saying they'll now avoid /r/gamingnews (I've unsubscribed from it for now).

While this isn't exactly what I was hoping to happen, perhaps now things will change. Who knows. It'll definitely be fun to follow nonetheless.

Update: Well, it's a start.

Tribes Network Interview with Todd Harris

2011-02-18T13:04:00.000-05:00

[audio http://www.tribesnetwork.com/podcast/Shazzcast%20Episode1.mp3]

Back to the Battlefield.

2011-02-17T13:29:00.000-05:00

I decided to play some Battlefield Play4Free today. It's been a while, perhaps a month, and I was curious to see if it got any updates. While the startup bugs are still there, they've added a few more aspects to the menu. There's now an info box with pictures of Oman and Karkand. They also added an option to add a server to your favorites, though I'm not quite sure how that works yet. Hopefully they'll just add a server browser, which the community has been begging for. Lag seems to be down quite considerably compared to when I first started playing the game. No new weapons or maps, unfortunately. Oman is sadly getting a bit boring now, even though I praised it at first. At times it's basically a mad-dash for the Apache, and if you decide to be a gunner there's no guarantee that the pilot is any good(he usually isn't). I've actually started going for the tanks, which can be fun.

In other news, there will be a new interview with Hi-Rez Studios COO and Executive Producer Todd Harris posted tomorrow. It's being hosted by a new Tribes website called TribesNetwork.com, and hopefully they asked some good questions. The more I think about Tribes Universe, the more skeptical I get. It sounds like they'll be taking out the ability to switch to third person, which really isn't news but something I've been thinking about lately. They also might be adding in the ability to sprint, which seems rather pointless in a game like Tribes. You either run, fly or ski.

You've also probably noticed this blog has a new layout. Not sure if it'll be permanent. I'm just testing things out a bit.

Battlestar Galactica Online: I WANT To Like It

2011-02-14T15:07:00.000-05:00

Ever since I got interested in space games(about 2 or so years ago), I've been looking for one that's both active and non-subscription based. Unfortunately that's harder than it sounds. EVE is the go-to space game these days, but as I've said before I'm not paying a subscription for a game. It's either free or has a one-time payment option. While Freelancer has a fun single-player campaign, multiplayer seems to be reliant on mods, and installing them is a real bitch(at least for me). Browsing through a few wikipedia articles there aren't a whole lot of MMO space combat games out there, at least no recent ones. Black Prophecy is one exception, and one I've had my eye on for a while. Then we have Battlestar Galactica Online, which seemingly came out of fucking no where.

Graphically the game is comparable to Freelancer, perhaps a bit better, which is fine by me. Gameplay wise, however, is a different story. BGO is in open beta, so I'll be kinder to it than I normally would. When you first start the game you're a given a basic weapons and navigation tutorial. You shoot 3 target drones, then move on to an asteroid belt when you and your teacher discover some mysterious object. Enemy ships are spotted and you, along with a few friendly ships, engage then. Again, just more combat training. After killing them off, the object...uh...starts up. A huge blue sphere is projected, so you must make it back to the fleet to join them in the jump to hyperspace. Something goes wrong and you're sent to some unknown region where you must then find materials to help get back to familiar territory. This is where the beginning tutorial ends and main game begins. Overall, pretty decent tutorial to be honest. Well, the concept was.

I had to play that damn tutorial mission over 3 god damn times due to certain game-stopping bugs. For instance, several times the last drone wouldn't appear, so I couldn't progress. Other times they wouldn't even show up at all. The biggest issue with the beta, however, is the lag. Both input and network lag render the game unplayable, at least for me. Yesterday it wasn't that bad, since switching to IE seemed to make things better(who knew?). Input lag was minimal, yet noticeable, and it wasn't until today that the network lag came into play. One second of smooth gameplay, one second of lag. It's a constant loop that I haven't been able to shake. Lowering the graphics to the lowest setting has zero effect, which I found a bit odd. But besides all that, I still really want to like the game. It's free, in space, and reminds me of Freelancer. I'm not a Battlestar Galactica fan by any means, so I can't really judge the game by how closely it resembles the series. But honestly that isn't an issue for me.

I'm praying for Bigpoint Games to fix these issues, because this is really the only space game that I'm interested in until Black Prophecy comes out.

R³: Reddit Revial Revived? And other Reddit bullshit.

2011-02-07T10:35:00.000-05:00

Back on my old blog I wrote about a thing called Reddit Revival. It was a project to get players for games that were essentially dead, like Tribes. The idea was, and still is pretty awesome. At the time I had a computer that definitely wasn't meant for gaming, at least not games from the past 6-8 years, so it was even more awesome, at least for me. Unfortunately the project failed after 4 or so games, and here's why:

1. Lack of direction and time-table.

There was no real agreed upon schedule or direction. A game and time were given, and people rolled with it. Sure we agreed to play it when the time came, but only a small handful of players actually showed up. Once a month seemed like the ideal choice, which it originally was. But it just didn't work, mainly because people played a game for a few days then lost interest, and really didn't feel like waiting an entire month for the next game which they might not even enjoy. We moved it to every two weeks, then finally once a week. Again, it failed.

2. Not enough players.

The subreddit itself had, at max, 290~ subscribers. We never made it to 300 which pissed me off for some reason. While 290 sounds decent for a project like this, only 10 or so actually showed up. There's talk of reviving /r/revival, and I've made it clear(at least to the one person who's interested) that we should focus on getting more subscribers before moving on to more important stuff. I'd love to get 1000, but we'd really need to get our idea out there on reddit, while avoiding spamming.

3. Accessing the chosen game.

Ideally I'd like to focus on freeware/abandonware games, for the obvious reasons: easy to get and no legal issues. However, some of the games that got the most votes weren't free. People simply linked to an Amazon page or torrent, neither of which I'm comfortable with. I'm not going to buy a dead game on the off chance I might enjoy it for a few days with a group of redditors. I'm also not going to torrent it. I know, in this day and age torrenting games, movies and music is almost like second nature. But I'm not comfortable doing it. The first game we did I had to torrent, and the only reason I did so was because it was small and didn't look like Atari was showing any interest in supporting the game by any means. Other games, such as Battlefield 1942, I'm not so sure about...

4. Advantage over newcomers.

When you throw out a game suggestion for /r/revival, and you or others still play the game, you've more than likely been playing for several years. You know the maps and weapons inside-out. If you're a newcomer and hop into a game like this, you're going to get absolutely slaughtered. This happened during Wheel of Time, and wasn't fun by any means. Of all the problems with the idea of /r/revival, this is sadly the one thing that can't be fixed. You'd have to setup a server specifically for newcomers, but even then it might not be 100% safe from the pros.

That said, I still like the idea and would love for it to take off. However, the chances of this actually happening are very slim. Now, onto other Reddit crap. There's a subreddit called /r/gamingnews, and if you haven't guessed, it's for gaming news. Exclusively gaming news. No pictures, nostalgia posts or any other bullshit that spams up /r/gaming on a daily basis. Like revival, the idea is great, and actually taking off. It has a little under 5k subscribers, which is fantastic for a somewhat new subreddit. However, I only see 4-5 submissons actually show up on my reddit page. Either gaming news in general is just slow, or people aren't upvoting anything. I've noticed a slight increase in comments though, which is nice. Up till today I had no reason to look into the subreddit for any 'suspicious' behavior, but a post on a /r/gaming thread made me curious.

Watch out for that subreddit. One of the mods uses it to constantly post links to[removed].com. Wouldn't be such a big deal to me save that the news is usually a few days old and more poorly written.

Strange. I'd never even heard of [removed].com before reading that post. I decided to check out the front page of /r/gamingnews to see what was up, and sure enough there they were. Not exactly a noticeable amount, but enough to raise suspicion for a subreddit that only gets around 10 new front-page submissions each day. They were also coming from a mod, which is what irks me the most. It's akin to the whole Saydrah ordeal, but not nearly as drastic or 'grab the pitchforks'-worthy. So, me being me I decided to look into things.

First I went to [removed].com to see if the content itself was actually decent and not your usual blogspam you see on reddit from time to time. The writing itself wasn't terrible, and they seem to post fairly up-to-date gaming news. However, I could get the exact same news(and more) from sites like PCGamer, RPS or Giantbomb, and usually earlier than sites like [removed]. I also noticed article after article has zero comments, which tells me they really don't have a large amount of readers. Their forum is rather small as well, but you can't expect much from a site that's only been around for 3 months.

But as I said, the fact that a mod was allowed to do this is what irked me the most. There wasn't anyone on the site that matched the mod's username, but it was obvious there was some sort of connection. No one chooses to exclusively post links to an obscure gaming site just for the hell of it. Since there was nothing I could really do about it I went about browsing reddit like I normally would, when I happened to come upon this post, specifically this post, and even more specifically this post. For the lazy: someone bitches about Kotaku/Gawker's new layout, asks for a new site to visit for gaming news, and someone links to [removed]. It wasn't the mod, however. I check his history and guess what? He submits [removed] links.

Looking into things even further, both the mod(we'll call him Tom) and this guy(Dick) have accounts created 1-2 months ago. I then noticed someone replied to Harry's post linking to [removed].com with "^ agreed". Surely this isn't yet another [removed] shill now is it? I check his(Harry) history, and BAM! More [removed] submissions just like the last two. So now we have at least 3 people only posting articles from [removed]. What can I do? Well, I could take all of this over to either /r/gaming or /r/gamingnews, but that'd just start another lynching mob. Really the only decent and logical thing to do is vote on submissions that have actual value, and submit stuff myself. The only reason I made this post was because I haven't written for a while and was bored.

Splat

2011-01-29T02:03:00.000-05:00

And Not a Single Fuck Was Given

2011-01-28T13:29:00.000-05:00

An Hour with Kubrick

2011-01-27T16:02:00.000-05:00

It's actually more than an hour. In 1966 Jeremy Bernstein interviewed Kubrick, and considering how private Kubrick became later in life this is a pretty awesome listen. Too bad a similar interview wasn't conducted later in his life(preferably in the 90's). Anyways, enjoy:

[audio http://sliated.com/kubrick_archive/kubrick_1966.mp3]

Fuck you, Phoenix Online Studios

2011-01-26T15:37:00.000-05:00

So there I was, browsing the internet as usual when I decide to check my email. I see that there are two new emails in my inbox, one titled "Episode 3 Release Date Pushed Back (but here's why)". What the shit? So I open it up and begin reading the newsletter:

In a previous post I made on the forums, I spoke of how certain we were of our January 29th date. I had my little plan with enough breathing room to get caught up if we fell behind. And it looked beautiful!

At this point I assume it's a videogame site that (falsely) predicted when Half-Life 2: Ep. 3 would be released/revealed. I continue reading:

They say you shouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch. And now we are here, with just under a week to the date we announced, and lo and behold, we’ve got a few unhatched eggs—in other words, a build that is not ready to be released to the public. Though Episode 3 is technically playable and does look nice, it still needs that extra layer of polish to really make it go from good to great. We want it to be really great, and more importantly, that’s what you guys deserve. But to get it there, we need a little more time.

To make Episode 3 as awesome as it can possibly be, we’ve decided to move our release date to early February. We’ll announce the exact date soon when we release our trailer for Episode 3, which I think is easily our most exciting and tantalizing trailer yet!Episode 3 is a massive beast and it’s been an interesting and very educational experience working on it. To give you an idea of the scope,

Episode 3 is more than twice the size of Episode 2. We hired 20 new animators to crank out Episode 3 and work on the 1500 hours of animations that were needed to make this episode much bigger and much more exciting; Episode 2 only had around 350 hours of new animation and 5 new animators! To get this amount of animation done in the time we did them is definitely a new milestone for us and I’m really proud of the work that our team, old members and new, have put into this Episode. We are now down to about 100 hours of animations as we polish the work and make the animations as good as possible!

Jesus Christ! Ep. 3 next month? Twice the size of Ep. 2??

At this point I'm definitely in a state of WTF?!, and continue reading:

In an effort to avoid having any other pushbacks, by the time Episode 3 is released, our team will already be hard at work on Episodes 4 and 5. Some interesting things have been going on with the later episodes. Since we launched the series and have been getting feedback from the fans, we’ve rethought the game’s grand finale and have made some changes to the ending. This means what was once Episodes 4 and 5 have been combined into the new Episode 4, and we’re working hard to build almost the new Episode 5 almost from scratch. This new final Episode will bring the game to a much stronger conclusion, and it gives us the chance to incorporate pieces of the larger game we’d always hoped to make. And even more exciting? In Episode 5, we’re adding a second playable character—but you’ll have to wait until then to find out who it! is!

EPISODES 4 AND 5. WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON? SECOND PLAYABLE CHARACTER?? ALEX?!?!?!!?

And finally, to leave you with some good news, we have new screenshots of Episode 3, and we now have the free PDF version of the 2011 TSL Calendar, featuring some great artwork both by our team members and the fans, available for download along with new concept art collection of Rosella and Alexander in the Fan Club. Some months even offer sneak peeks at places yet to come, so I hope you enjoy it, and even though you’ll have to wait a little bit longer for the game—I promise it will be worth the wait!

S...scree...screenshots???

At this point I'm actually expecting this to be news about Half Life 2: Episode 3. The chances of that actually happening are, well, low. But everything actually sounded legit, save for any mention of Valve which I should've picked up on. I guess I was too busy drooling over the mere thought of more episodes, along with my mind going numb after reading 'screenshots'. I click the fucking link and view the screenshots, and realize I've been duped. This isn't for Half Life 2. This is for a new King's Quest game.

Games, game, games.

2011-01-06T00:14:00.000-05:00

This was originally supposed to be posted a couple hours ago, but for some reason Wordpress kept freezing whenever I started typing. I'm in HTML mode now which seems to be working, so hopefully it'll stay that way. Assuming you read the title, this post will be about...games! How fucking shocking.

I've decided to list a few games I'm looking forward to in ~~2010~~ 2011. It's strange. I've never listed games I personally am looking forward to before. During my whole game writing phase I always listed games that the traditional gamer was looking forward to. And since I never had a gaming PC none of the games meant jack shit to me personally. But this laptop changed all that. The following are games I am looking forward to:

1. Firefall

Originally I was quite excited for this game, even before I acquired this laptop. It has a Tribes-like vibe, which is no surprise considering who's working on the game. As time went on I only became even more excited, especially when I saw the gliders. However, lately I've been having second thoughts about the game because of it's free-to-play nature. Normally this would be fantastic, but I'm really worried how the micro-transactions will come into play. They claim you can enjoy the game without dropping a penny, but I'm still skeptical. I sorta wish they'd just release it as a regular retail game for $50.

2. Tribes Universe

What the hell do I even say about this? It's no surprise that I'm a fan of Tribes, but an MMO? Not only am I worried how this game will turn out, you also have to realize they currently own the entire Tribes franchise. Like InstantAction, if Hi-Rez Studios were to go down the drain, so would Tribes. Like Firefall, I'm not a fan of the pricing scheme, even if it hasn't been revealed yet. It's an MMO, so there will likely be a subscription, which is a deal breaker for me. But still...it's Tribes. Really looking forward to seeing how this game turns out, but if it lacks Arenas shit will go down. I mean, Tribes without CTF just isn't Tribes.

3. Portal 2

The first game completely blew me away. It's fun, short, and easily replayable. From the videos I've seen Portal 2 looks to up the difficulty by a lot. Co-op should be interesting, though this isn't the kind of game you can just pick a random player to play with. I'll be sticking to my friendslist for cooperative play.

4. Half-Life 2: Episode 3

I must admit that I wasn't a huge fan of Half-Life when I first started playing. Once the game ended I was left in a state of WTFness, but came away rather satisfied. Episode 1 was fun, but somewhat lacking in my opinion. Episode 2 was...is...awesome. The final challenge was one of, if not the most intense gaming experiences I've ever been through. While I'm not necessarily looking for closure, more Half-Life is certainly welcome.

5. Infinity: Quest for Earth

While not confirmed for a 2011 release, I'm crossing my fingers. The game looks beautiful, and I'm dying to play a space sim from this era. Eve doesn't sound like something I'd be interested in, plus it has a subscription.

6. Outerra

I've actually just recently discovered this game. If you can't tell by now, I'm looking forward to games that provide a wide-open playing field. This is more of a sim than actual game, which is fine with me. A relaxing flight with soothing background music would be epic. Imagine if they added crafting. Essentially Minecraft HD.

That does it for the main games I have my eye on. Other games I'm interested in are:

Brink
Driver: San Francisco
Max Payne 3
Test Drive Unlimited 2

Two Towers

2011-01-02T22:23:00.000-05:00

I'm sure we all remember at least one game from long ago, or perhaps even recently, that sparked the thought "I wonder if I can get there...". A place in the game that the developers never intended you to go, yet somehow sticks out like a sore thumb that just screams for you to access it. You attempt it at first, realize you can't get to it by normal means, then move on with the rest of the game. But it stays in the back of your head as you play, sometimes when you aren't playing as well. You then try to break the engine a bit just to see what the hell is around the corner you're not supposed to turn. 9/10 it's usually pretty uneventful, but every once in a while you'll find a little easter egg from some random developer that thought no one would find it.

Well, something like that is currently going on in the original Halo community, and has been for over 5 years. Everyone already knows there isn't an easter egg at the end, but they're still trying. To be honest, this might just be impossible to complete unless someone comes up with some crazy technique no one has tried before. The challenge is called Tower to Tower, or T2T for short, and it's actually quite straight forward: launch from one tower to the other. Problem is the fall timer seems to be preventing people from successfully landing on the second tower. 5, perhaps even just 3 more seconds would probably take care of the issue, but so far no one has done it. The setup alone itself takes hours, yes hours to complete. Someone from the community tried once more the other day, which you can watch here. As you can see, he gets pretty close, but not close enough.

This is pretty much considered the 'ultimate' challenge to pull off in Halo right now, and perhaps the last of its kind. Like Tribes, the Halo tricking community is small but dedicated. I'd love to see this challenge completed at some point, but I'm thinking it might not be possible. I hope I'm wrong.

In other news, I've started making a website in Photoshop. I created the original template earlier this year, with the hopes of it becoming a reality. Unfortunately the one guy I needed to say Yes didn't. He created this website several years ago, and while the content itself is great, I'm not a fan of the layout. I mean, it is a Tripod site afterall. I'd love for it to become its own website with its own domain. I showed him the template, but unfortunately he didn't have any plans on creating a new website at the time. My template is very simple and straightforward, and I started creating a few more pages for it tonight. Why? Who knows.

le sigh

Time

2010-12-28T01:48:00.000-05:00

I'm doing that thing again where I start to write a post, then never publish it, so I have a few drafts stored which will probably never see the light of day. I think I finally figured out why this happens though. See, when I write a blog post, I want it to be a certain length, mainly 3+ paragraphs. For some reason the thought of anything less really bothers me, and if that's all I can write down then I don't publish it. I've always had this 'rule', and I can't explain why I follow it so harshly. Oh well.

It's odd how it feels like I've gone weeks without writing a new blog, when in reality its only been about one. I suppose this one will summarize what Christmas was like this year in my house, and the day thereafter. But first we must backup a few weeks to the beginning of December. After 2+ years of being laid off, my dad finally got called back to work. I find it kind of strange that it happened all around the same time his very last unemployment check would be rolling in, along with congress' ruling to end unemployment benefits. It's as if the company waited to the very last moment to bring people back to work, but maybe I'm just over-analyzing things. Anyways, with him back to work and doing 12 hour shifts, this meant we'd be having our first Christmas without a formal dinner. Instead, we (me, mom, sister and her fiance) had delicious subs. This was on the 23rd.

We all stayed up until he got home, which was around 11:30pm, and decided to do presents then since we weren't sure what his schedule would be on Christmas day. My sister and her fiance spent the night, then headed out on Christmas Eve since she got called to work. Christmas day, the 25th, was actually quite uneventful. My dad ended up not having to work, so we could've had a formal dinner but since nothing was prepared we just had delicious subs again.

On the 26th I was asked to help move a couch from our garage back into the living room. We moved it out there a while ago since we were having our carpets cleaned. Anyways, I came downstairs to move it immediately after waking up. I hadn't eaten or drank anything, but thought nothing of it. I mainly just wanted to get it over with. So we get to the garage, pick it up and manuever the beast through the front door and into the living room. That itself was fairly uneventful and easy. However, about a minute went by and I felt a familiar feeling. A feeling that, usually, results in me fainting. How lovely.

I sit down on another couch and wait for the feeling to pass. Praying for it to pass. Things unfortunately got worse. I could feel my body getting hotter and hotter, and my head become dizzy. Now the smart thing to do in this situation would've been to remain seated and wait for the inevitable. But I, however, felt it necessary to get up and drink some Dr. Pepper in the hopes of defeating the inevitable. I thought caffine would work. I was wrong.

I grab the bottle from the fridge, get a glass from the cupboard and then it hit me. The one thing that made me realize that shit was actually about to go down. I go deaf. Well fuck, might as well get a glass of Dr. Pepper in me before I go. I wake up to a counter covered in Dr. Pepper. The last of the Dr. Pepper. le sigh.

Battlefield Play4Free Closed Beta

2010-12-13T23:28:00.000-05:00

Somehow I got into the Battlefield Play4Free closed beta. I signed up for it about a week or two ago, and they handed out roughly 20,000 beta keys lastnight. Amazingly I received one this afternoon and downloaded it right away. I was pretty excited, even though I've never played a Battlefield game before. I didn't even know it was in closed beta, and actually totally forgot about the game until a week ago. Now, I've never actually beta tested a game before. If Legions: Overdrive counts, then fine. Perhaps I have. Considering that, my idea of a closed beta is a game in a fairly playable state. Perhaps a few buildings haven't been fully completed, or maybe there's HUD/sound issues. But when it comes to the actual gameplay, it's pretty solid. Battlefield Play4Free is, currently, no where near that.

I'd even go so far to say it's pre-alpha with how many issues there are. Lets start with the minor shit:

It doesn't tell you how big the game is. Judging by how long the download took, I'd say its anywhere between 1-3 gigs.

After you've downloaded it, you have to launch it from their website. For an added bonus it doesn't support Chrome.

It never keeps you logged in.

When you first start the game it's in windowed mode. You can't change it to Fullscreen during the same session. If you want the game/menu to launch in fullscreen, you must go to Options then change it, and restart. This wouldn't be such an issue except...

Then we have the really bad stuff, aka the major shit:

Starting the game in fullscreen gave me a lovely black and white epileptic orgasm. Once that was over I was greeted with 2 play models, one of which glitches out in a hilarious Windows 95 kind of way. Once the menu finally appears I have no cursor. The only way for me to see it is in windowed mode. So after navigating through the Options menu, with no cursor, I finally set it to start in windowed mode.

Once restarted and in windowed mode, I get the same glitchy player models. When the menu screen finally appears the resolution is set to 800x600, therefore the Play Now button is completely hidden. Changing to a different character fixes the issue.

Once in the actual game I experienced major lag quite a bit of the time. The influx of players is probably a big part of this, however.

There's an annoying problem with the sniper rifle. I'll sometimes unzoom only to have it quickly zoom back in then out again.

When I'm not experiencing any lag or zoom issues, the game can actually be somewhat fun. The graphics aren't anything to get excited for, so don't go in looking for Bad Company 2 visuals. The sound is alright, though at times it sounds like vehicles and gunfire are right next to you when they're not. In the end, I really hope the game isn't anywhere near the open beta phase. So much more work has to be done to this game. I hope they get things sorted out, because I feel it could actually be a pretty fun game. It is free, afterall.

I've upload a few videos of said bugs.

The Kubrick Series

2010-12-05T13:25:00.000-05:00

An in-depth 8-part podcast tribute to the films of Stanley Kubrick featuring all new interviews with dozen of Kubrick's friends, collaborators, and critics and analysts who continue to examine the mysteries of his work. Highlights include the announcement of a brand new Full Metal Jacket project courtesy of Matthew Modine, and the inside story on the digital alterations on 'Eyes Wide Shut' from the man who supervised the process. The series premieres with Episode 1: The Journey to Strangelove on Sunday, December 5 at 6pm EST (it is available for free replay and download immediately following the live airing).

Guests for this first episode include:

Producer James B. Harris (The Killing, Paths of Glory, Lolita), biographer Vincent LoBrutto (Stanley Kubrick: A Biography), actors Richard Anderson (Paths of Glory), Shirley Douglas (Lolita), and Shane Rimmer (Dr. Strangelove), critics Keith Uhlich and Erich Kuersten, director Peter Hyams (2010: The Year We Make Contact), cinematographer Allen Daviau (E.T.), authors Randy Rasmussen (Stanley Kubrick: 7 Films Analyzed), Mario Falsetto (Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis), Peter Biskind (Easy Riders and Raging Bulls), and Ed Sikov (Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers), UCLA film professor R. Barton Palmer, and Criterion Collection producer David Tsui (Paths of Glory).

[gigya width="210" height="108" src="http://www.blogtalkradio.com/btrplayer.swf?file=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eblogtalkradio%2Ecom%2Fmoviegeeksunited%2Fplay%5Flist%2Exml%3Fshow%5Fid%3D1367374&autostart=true&bufferlength=5&volume=80&borderweight=1&bordercolor=#999999&backgroundcolor=#FFFFFF&dashboardcolor=#0098CB&textcolor=#F0F0F0&detailscolor=#FFFFFF&playlistcolor=#999999&playlisthovercolor=#333333&cornerradius=10&callback=http://www.blogtalkradio.com/FlashPlayerCallback.aspx?referrer_url=/show.aspx&C1=7&C2=6042973&C3=31&C4=&C5=&C6=&hostname=MOVIE GEEKS UNITED&hosturl=http://www.blogtalkradio.com/moviegeeksunited" quality="high" flashvars="gig_lt=1291591507057&gig_pt=1291591545430&gig_g=2&gig_n=wordpress" wmode="transparent" menu="false" ]

Listen to internet radio with MOVIE GEEKS UNITED on Blog Talk Radio

Game Over podcast

2010-12-04T16:37:00.000-05:00

Even though I created a podcast section in WinAmp that automatically updates 6 or so different gaming podcasts, I never seem to actually use it. I guess that's because there's only one podcast I've listened to on a regular basis for about 2 years: the InstantAction podcast. And much like Legions: Overdrive, the IA podcast also lives on...sorta. Crash and Wiley have returned to the recording studio(i.e. some room) and have started the Game Over Podcast, which is essentially like every other gaming podcast out there(current gaming, news, etc), with a nice twist at the end where they talk about a random game from the past.

[audio http://iantornay.com/Game%20Over%20Podcast.mp3|animation=no]

Marble Hornets

2010-12-03T21:26:00.000-05:00

This is one of those times where I really feel like writing, but have nothing to write about. So I've decided to write about Marble Hornets. No, it doesn't have anything to do with bees, nor is there any marble. See, a while ago I got interested in creepypasta, and soon discovered the Slender Man. Slender Man is the spawn of a SomethingAwful thread, so while he's not real it's still creepy when put in the right context, especially when photoshopped into pictures.

I'm also a fan of ARG's, my first being Halo 2's ilovebees. It was a great way to pass the time while waiting for the game to release, and also a bit creepy at the same time. And in a way Marble Hornets is both, though it doesn't really have any viewer participation, at least to continue the storyline that is. We all speculate what's happened in the latest video, but there isn't anything we can do that directly changes the outcome of future videos. Anyways, I discovered Marble Hornets about 2 months ago on Reddit, and was disappointed to find out how far behind I was. In total there are 28 'entries', but at the time there was just 26. Still, that's quite a bit of catching up to do. Thankfully the majority of videos are only 3-5 minutes long, and I was able to get caught up in about 3 days.

Marble Hornets is actually the name of a student film that serves as the basis of this creepypasta. The film itself doesn't actually exist and is part of the fiction, and actually loses its importance as the series progresses fairly quickly. Basically, a friend of a guy named J begins making the movie then suddenly drops the project and avoids everyone he knows; mostly staying in his house away from his friends. When finally asked why, Alex(the film maker) says he couldn't work any longer in the location he was shooting at. After some persuading Alex gave whatever footage he had left to J but told him never to bring it up in front of him ever again. Shortly thereafter Alex moved to another state and hasn't been heard from since.

That's where the series starts. J posts whatever tapes he thinks are interesting to try and piece together what exactly happened with Alex and why he started acting to strange. We soon discover that Alex had been filming himself as much as he could outside of his Marble Hornets project, even as he slept or went to other areas to explore. This is primarily what the series consists of. After J starts digging into things, he also starts to get 'affected'. The series went on a 7 month hiatus and just recently came back, with J waking up in hotel room not know what has happened over the past 7 months. It's a bit of a cop-out, but things have already gotten interesting. The latest entry was posted tonight, which prompted me to write about it. If you really feel like getting into this series, it'll more than likely take you the entire weekend to get caught up(unless you do a non-stop marathon, which will take several hours).

I finally caved and have no regrets(yet).

2010-11-30T10:56:00.000-05:00

Steam had The Orange Box on sale for $7.50 the other day. I've been thinking about buying TF2, since it's really the only game people I know play these days. I knew it'd probably be on sale again during the holidays, but I bought it anyways. It wasn't until after I purchased it I realized it also came with Portal. 'Cool', I think. I wasn't terribly excited I bought it, since TF2 was the game I was after. After waiting for the games to download I see Portal was the first one to finish. I started it up and gave it a go.

Holy shit that's a fun game. Portal has joined my extremely small collection of games that I've completed more than once. This probably goes against every Cardinal sin, and makes me look like a really bad gamer, but I honestly can't think of a single game that I've played from start to finish more than once. Halo: Combat Evolved might be one of them. I finished the game the same night I installed it in about 3 hours. I played through it again the next day in roughly 2 hours. Then last night I finished it yet again, and will probably do the same tonight.

TF2, on the other hand, I'm not so sure about. I gave the tutorial a go last night and wasn't a huge fan of weapons. Then again I wasn't given access to all the classes so that might change. It just sorta irked me that a rocket to the face doesn't result in a kill. I guess I'm just looking for another DoD: Source, and TF2 doesn't seem anything like it. I'll probably give multiplayer a go tonight and familiarize myself with all the weapons/classes. Hopefully I'll find the charm that 90% of the internet has jizzed over.

No More Testing

2010-11-24T20:59:00.000-05:00

When InstantAction was shutdown earlier this month, a good chunk of the community wondered what would happen to Fallen Empire: Legions; IA's flagship game. It was soon revealed that InstantAction handed the game over to a few community members back in May, who had been working on it since then. IAC has allowed them to continue development (without funding of course), and eventually release the game sometime before Christmas. Not long after the official site was launched I was made Lead Tester for the project. This would've been somewhat enjoyable except for a few small factors:

I've never played the game before. The fact that I was given the task, let alone considered, is puzzling. Maybe it's because I'm a somewhat well-known member of the community, but who knows. Point is, I have zero knowledge of the game, nor have I ever worked on a game before.

Being the lead tester also meant talking to the team on a semi-regular basis via TeamSpeak 3, which was my main reason for spending roughly $40 on a new headset. I'm not comfortable talking to people online, so this was another thing preventing me from actually contributing to the project. If communication was mainly handled through IRC and email, I may have actually stuck with it. My preferred role would've been someone like a community manager; someone that's basically just given information to relay to the community, and try to restore order if an chaos ensues.

Another thing that convinced me to call it quits was the game itself. I just generally didn't like it. The OD, the skating, the weapons. It was fun skating around maps at a pretty good rate of speed at times, but other than that I wasn't a fan of the game. I also didn't like the scale of things. Players are quite tiny compared to the surrounding environment, which is a known 'issue' with the current developers. Did I give Legions a fair chance? No, not really. I put very little playtime into the game. Who knows; once it releases and I play a bit more I might actually like it, but I haven't these past few days. When it comes down to it I just want Tribes, and Legions ain't it. When I shoot someone with a disclauncher in Tribes, I get a sense of 'oomph.' With the rocket launcher in Legions I don't get anything. I know it's a weird thing to focus on, but it's something that I noticed and didn't like.

Finally, the biggest thing that made me resign was the fact that there are other people in the community who would kill to work on Legions. People who know and love the game, and have been dying to play it for the past 8 months. Why should I, someone who had a very 'meh' feeling about the position, be part of the team? As of now I'm not entirely sure who will take my place. For now another playtester has, which makes me wonder if they'll bring on one more community member to fill his spot as playtester.

It'll be interesting to see how the community reacts to certain features, but I probably won't be around to notice. Since I'm neither working on the game or actually like it, I see no point in being part of the community anymore. My days of IRC idling and forum posting are pretty much over. I'll probably hop in TeamSpeak 3 every now and then to see what's up though. For now I'll just stick with Tribes, a game I both understand and enjoy.

I've moved onto Wordpress.

2010-11-14T04:55:00.000-05:00

http://evanvolm.wordpress.com/

The Computer Woe Saga Continues

2010-11-04T02:24:00.001-04:00

You'd think having an awesome laptop like this would prevent me from going back to those computer woes, but you'd be wrong. And honestly, it should've been expected. I was awoken fairly early this morning to my dad saying 'The computer is messed up.' Down I went to investigate and ran into a real bastard of a problem I've dealt with before. I talk about it here; basically I can't login. Thankfully I knew exactly what to do, and it worked. I successfully logged into the computer and handed it back to my dad. Back to bed I go for a while, and eventually make my way back to the computer a few hours later.

As far as I knew no settings had been changed. The only thing different was the Thunderbird update I installed a few days earlier, but it didn't make sense that it'd affect the log-in process. There's no way either of my parents could've disabled the service either, like I did once before. So after messing with some options and restarting a few times, I finally find a post online about using Tweak UI. Luckily I already had the program installed, so I fired it up and inspected the log-in options. One disabled the 'select a user' process altogether, so I just assumed by disabling it it'd automatically go to the desktop upon start-up. I disable it and restart the beast.

I get the welcome screen and asks me to select a profile to login. However, no profiles are shown. The only option I have is to shutdown the computer. Well fuck. Now what? I can't even log-in to change the options. Thankfully I was able to lookup a solution with this laptop. Without it I'd be SOL. So I google a bit and find that by pressing Ctrl+Alt and press Delete twice it brings up a log-in box. That did the trick.

So back to Tweak UI I go and finally found the right option. Upon restart the computer goes directly to the desktop, avoiding any log-in or welcome screens. I also ran Spybot S&D just to make sure things weren't fucked with, and found one that disabled automatic updates. Once turned back on, the computer downloaded roughly 40 new updates along with my arch nemesis SP 3. I've never been able to install SP 3, but decided to try one last time. The process is taking a lot longer than I'm willing to wait for, so I've left the machine on over night. I'm expecting to get woken up again once my dad see's the computer screen filled with boxes and error messages. Ah well.

That old familiar smell.

2010-10-27T02:33:00.002-04:00

Never thought I'd get to say this, but I'm excited about the new Tribes game. Not that I'm implying I thought Hi-Rez Studios was a bad choice to take over the franchise, but because I never thought a new Tribes game would be announced. I never got excited over a Tribes game before because I never really knew about Tribes 2 or Vengeance. All I had was Tribes 1, which was enough for me. I was a bit too young to closely follow the development of the series, and instead just had a good time with the first game.

So now's my chance to be utterly disappointed by Hi-Rez's decisions with Tribes Universe. Well, at least that's what I'm expecting when you look back at the decisions during previous Tribes games. It's been quite a while since I've followed the development of a game; craving any information I can muster. About 6 years I'd say, with Halo 2 being the last game I obsessed over. Lot of good that did. I probably had more fun being part of a community and speculating on what Bungie had planned than I did with the game itself.

Anyways, I'm not really sure where to take this particular blog post. I could speculate about Tribes Universe, or I could talk about InstantAction. Both topics were in my mind before writing this, and I've yet to make a decision. Lets start with our beloved company InstantAction:

After getting rid of the Tribes IP, apparently under the noses of every InstantAction employee, people were understandably confused. I being one of them. The community asked questions and didn't get answers, at least not in a timely manner. This is something I should've been used to by now, so I guess it was my fault for expecting any kind of decency. A day or two went by, with a certain employee asking 'What more do you want?'. This was before they actually gave any answers, so it was both weird and sad how they tackled the situation early on.

3 days go by and it's announced that their deal with Penny Arcade to host PlayGreenhouse.com fell through. What's this, a going out of business sale? I didn't seriously consider that to be the case, but got a good laugh out of it anyways. I hadn't really been following the forums or even entered the IRC for about a day or so, so I was a tad late in finding out about everything. Apparently Penny Arcade were the ones that decided to pull out.

Without the Tribes IP I had already decided there was no real point in staying with InstantAction. PlayTribes was the sole game I was looking forward to, and without that I have no reason to stay. Their embed-tech has failed to be used on anything I or the community are interested in, and it doesn't sound like that was going to change anytime soon. But then something was said that pretty much cemented my absence. It's something they did in the past with less than desirable results.

There are some exiting things happening around here, but we're keeping things under wraps until they're more solid.

After everything that has happened, especially the 8 month downtime, you can't say this. After losing PlayTribes and PlayGreenhouse, literally the only games the community knew about and were expecting to be released, they need to know what the company has in store. As of now all they're doing is waiting for the return of the Arcade, since nothing else is on the radar. It's almost ironic that all the community has right now is the Arcade, the one thing they been clamoring about to return.

I guess I'll have to speculate about Tribes Universe next time. Too tired to go on.

And that's that.

2010-10-25T02:44:00.004-04:00

With a blink of an eye, PlayTribes is gone. My worst fear is now a realization. From March 2009 up to this point, PlayTribes was the sole reason I stayed at InstantAction. Their embed-tech, while interesting, has failed to excite anyone thus far. It's certainly worrying to see InstantAction throw away Tribes like that, especially when we were all under the false impression that things were alright after Castle's Gamescom interview. I mean, when you look back and really listen to what he says, it's all true...from a certain point of view. Tribes is indeed coming back. And they did give it to another company. Hell he even stated we'd have to pay for it, which is also true since it'll be an MMO.

But he never said PlayTribes was a gonner, nor did he imply that they had or were going to sell the Tribes franchise. Having time to evaluate the whole ordeal, it was actually a good move. They were simply sitting on the IP, not doing a god damn thing with it. Now that someone with actual money, time and focus is in charge of Tribes, it starts to sound better. But I'm still bitter over them killing PlayTribes, a game that sounded 90% complete a year ago. Those who played it at PAX said it felt complete. There's a 1% chance that a deal can be made to continue with the release of PlayTribes, but that's simply wishful thinking.

So now I've got Red5 Studios, makers of Firefall, and Hi-Rez Studios to keep an eye on, and possibly become part of the community. My eye is definitely more on Tribes Universe at this point, though since DigiChina has ended I wouldn't be surprised to see some new gameplay videos of Firefall. Both games have a remarkably similar concept, so it'll be interesting to see how they compare.

The timing of Tribes Universe is also something that worries me. Alpha in 3 months? They're either simply using the Tribes name to get attention and quickly ship out something, or they've been working on this for a bit longer than we think. I read a post on the Global Agenda board where someone pointed out that the company started modifying the Unreal Engine back at E3, something Hi-Rez said they'd have to do in order to make Tribes Universe support 100+ people. If true, shame on InstantAction for not telling us anything. Their community manager claims he didn't know anything about it, but that could easily be a cover until they can get an official statement together. In the end, I'm still pissed, but more optimistic than I was 24 hours ago.

A new path.

2010-10-24T02:15:00.002-04:00

To my shock and amazement, InstantAction has sold(or at least given) the Tribes franchise to Hi-Rez Studios, the guys in charge of Global Agenda. I went from shock to anger to optimistic, then back to anger and frustration, with a bit of confusion mixed in. The good news is that the Tribes franchise is getting yet another chance of being revived. The bad news is that...it's getting another chance of bring revived. Each iteration has gotten progressively worse, so unless Tribes Universe has some new ground-breaking gameplay, mixed with old-school gameplay, I'm worried.

So what the fuck happened to PlayTribes? I, and a number of other people had that same very question. So far we haven't gotten an answer, and instead I've been told to ask Hi-Rez. That ain't good. If InstantAction can't tell us if PlayTribes will still release as planned, then that pretty much means it's been canned. I'm still hoping this isn't the case, and Castle stated Tribes would 'absolutely' come back just 2 months ago. The game itself seemed to be in a playable state during PAX a year ago. So just what the hell happened? I won't go into the whole history of IA and Tribes, since I've done it before and don't feel like getting into it again.

I could take a guess that IA just didn't want to put time and effort into a game that was never going to be a money maker. But that doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you take Castle's statement into account. He seemed very confident when stating the game would come back, even going on to state we'd have to pay a small fee for it. Hell, he talked more confidently about Tribes than he did the Arcade.

Looking at what Hi-Rez has in store for Tribes Universe, I'm becoming slightly more optimistic.

* Three Tribes (factions)
* Full clan (agency) support
* First person view (third person for some vehicles)
* Full vehicle support (ground and air)
* Full persistent world with territory control (no instances)
* PvP focused
* Huge outdoor maps (about 10x the area of sonoran desert)
* Large scale fights (100+ players)
* Jetpacks, skiing, lots of weapons, etc

That's essentially what Firefall will be like, at least by the sound of it. It's pretty awesome to see skiing come back, but it'll only work if they have the physics down. The only thing I don't like about this is that it'll take place in a 'full persistent world', much like Firefall. I don't want that in a Tribes game. I want maps, not just one world. That pretty much qualifies the game as an MMO, and what do MMO's mean? Monthly fucking fees. I never have and never will pay a monthly fee for a game; not even Tribes.

So in the end I don't know what to think. Not too happy with IA, especially if PlayTribes got scrapped. I guess it's better than simply sitting on the IP and doing nothing with it, I suppose.

Instant Jam embed test.

2010-10-20T13:09:00.002-04:00

Well look at that. Instant Jam on my blog.

Instant Jam is powered by InstantAction

So far, so meh.

2010-10-01T22:26:00.003-04:00

Now that the laptop is back, time for gaming. There are three games on my to-play list which, if you can't remember are Minecraft, Half-Life 2 and KOTOR. I've been playing Minecraft for about 3 days now(not 24/7 mind you), and so far I'm a bit underwhelmed. There's been so much buzz about this game, especially on reddit, that I thought it'd be utterly amazing. I've seen a number of videos on the game, so I knew exactly what to expect. But 3 days in and don't know what to do anymore. I never really looked into what all I can craft. So far I have the basics; pickaxe, shovel, boat, ladder, ect. There was only 1 holy shit moment, which occurred this morning.

Last night I decided to leave my base. Boredom was setting in, so I decided to take an adventure. I crafted a boat and away I went. As the world randomly generated before my eyes, I was on the lookout for anything interesting. I passed a few small, rather flat islands which didn't interest me at all. I then came upon a large, hilly island which I decided to settle on. At the time, I really didn't feel like making a base. So I saved my game and closed it.

Then came this morning, and for some reason I really wanted to go back to my base. It was familiar to me, and I missed it. Only problem is...I had no idea what direction it was. I found a coast, not knowing if it was the one I originally landed on, and created a boat. Just as I did this, they day decided to end. I was now boating in the dark, unable to see a fucking thing. I came upon some islands which sort of looked familiar, but then again didn't. I knew I planted a torch on one of them, and eventually found it. It was reassuring, but I still wasn't positive where my island was.

Several minute of boating in the dark and finding nothing but open seas pretty much convinced me that I'd never find my base. So I was then on the lookout for a decent island to call home again. A few more minutes and I find one. Nice and big. I climbed a few hills and bam. I spot my old base. I was in shock for about 10 seconds, and still find it amazing that I found it. The sheer scale of Minecraft made this a million to one shot, and I did it. Unintentionally. Crazy.

Then comes Half-Life 2. For some reason I have no real interest in playing this game. I've had it downloaded for about a day and only just recently fired it up. I'm not very far, only to the canals. I got to a point where I wasn't sure what to do, so I took a break. Not sure what I'll give it another go. KOTOR is currently being downloaded as I type this, which I have more interest in than HL2. Hopefully it proves as awesome as everyone says.

Reddit Revival: Tribes!

2010-09-25T23:11:00.000-04:00

Tribes is this month's Reddit Revival game. Starting it on the 24th doesn't make sense, so I'm not really viewing it as 'this month's' game. Just the next one the community decided to play. It was suggested by me a few weeks ago and amazingly got the top vote. As I said, it officially started on Friday, the 24th. I've never hosted a game before, and I knew my internet was below average. I was hoping to at least support 10, but unfortunately I can barely handle 6. I thought it all came down to the host's internet speed, but I guess the CPU comes into play as well. If that's the case then perhaps I'll be able to support a few more players once my laptop gets back from 'repair.'

Despite this, I'd say it was a success. I prematurely considered it a failure after experiencing all the lag, but the payoff has been worth it. It's great seeing absolute newcomers play Tribes and actually enjoy it. It's even better seeing people who used to play the game bask in the nostalgia; thanking me for getting them to play one last time. I'm still hosting the server, and will continue to do so until the next game comes along. The idea is awesome, it just needs more people involved. Before I posted about Tribes, Reddit Revival had 278 members, and was stuck there for quite a while. It's now up to 292. Not a huge amount, but I'll take anything I get. I also think posting about it on the official Steam group may have gotten us a few more as players, but the person in control of the group hasn't been active for quite a while.

Delayed

2010-09-12T20:30:00.000-04:00

Well that didn't last long. About a week ago(the 4th), my laptop gave me an error message stating the cooling system had failed. Since then the cooling fan hasn't kicked on, not even at startup. So I called Toshiba, gave them the info and they shipped a box to me. It arrived Friday, so I'll have to wait till tomorrow to ship it out. There was something saying if they didn't get it within 10 days they won't repair it or some shit. So I'm hoping it'll get there within 7 days.

For some strange reason they're having me ship it to Kentucky, even though there are several Toshiba Repair Stations throughout Michigan. Whatever. I just want everything fixed, no matter the cost. They said they'd probably have to wipe the HDD, which I don't fully understand nor care about. It was only a week or so old, so I didn't have anything important on there. I've ripped all my music onto a CD so I'm good for now.

The bad news is that since then, two things have happened which require the laptop to be up and running. 1.) A friend gifted me Half-Life 2 over Steam (this was before he knew about my laptop dying...I'm assuming). I've never played Half-Life 2, even though all of Reddit jizzes over it constantly. Not to mention it's looked upon as one of the greatest games of all time. It's quite a bit of hype, but thankfully it never really got to me since I've always told myself I couldn't play the game. All that changed now that I have a machine from this millenia. And in a strange way it relates* to my second occurrence:

I've heard quite a bit about Minecraft over at Reddit, and finally decided to check it out on Friday. Several people have mentioned X's Adventures in Minecraft on YouTube, so I decided to start there. Oh how I regret that decision. Well, really, it isn't a regret at all. I just spent a lot of time watching his series, since for some reason it's highly addictive. Watching his playthrough has really made me want to give the game a go myself, but unfortunately it doesn't run very well on this computer so I'll have to wait for my laptop to get fixed. There's also a world builder/creator, which gave me the idea to try and recreate the Lost island. I have no idea what the tools are, so this might not even be feasible. Nor do I know if this has already been done. Thanks to the Lost community I'll at least have a bit to work off of.

So, in case you haven't assumed already, I'm back on the old computer. My brief experience with the laptop was glorious, and I'm looking forward to getting it back. When I originally received it I decided to remove all my stuff from this computer, thinking 'Hey, I won't need it anymore and it just clutters things up for the family.' All my music, games and bookmarks were removed. Not a very smart thing to do looking back. Anyways, I thought I removed Tribes from this computer but apparently I didn't, which was nice. It's all I have now until the laptop returns, which I'm assuming will be another week or two. Sigh.

And holy shit, a blog without a mere mention of IA? Blasphemy. Not much to report on. Like, at all. Nothing. So...yeah.

*X, the guy who does the Minecraft videos, has just recently started a Lets Play for Half-Life 2.

Upgrade.

2010-09-01T18:49:00.002-04:00

So apparently I have a laptop now. I think the majority of my readers already know the story, so I won't go into it. My parents feel there must be some sort of catch to it all, and have asked me more than once what I did exactly to 'deserve' this. And to be frank I've had a hard time telling them. I could tell them the entire story, about how and when I joined InstantAction, my constant nagging and "valuable input". But then I'd have to explain to them what Tribes was, since that's what initially brought me to the site. So in reality I'd have to go back 12 damn years just to explain to them why I'm part of the InstantAction community.

As for a catch? Well, who knows. I can't really bash them anymore, and I honestly haven't in quite a while. I've accepted and understand why Tribes was pushed aside, which is also something I won't get into (I probably have a number of times already, haven't I?). So in the end it really isn't a catch at all; or perhaps I'm just trying to rationalize things. Who knows.

With a machine like this I can actually play games. And not just those from the 90's or early 2000's, I can actually play current games. The first big game I tried out was Mass Effect 2 last night, and I was pretty much blown away. The graphics alone were amazing, but the thing that really stood out to me was the movement. From the very first moment I had control of Shepard, it felt like no other game before. I can't really explain it, so I won't.

There have been a few confusing incidents, however. For instance, while Mass Effect 2 ran beautifully, my fps dropped significantly in Day of Defeat whenever smoke appeared in front of me. A few online videos have also appeared a bit wonky, but it's rare thankfully. Speaking of videos, I don't have to automatically select 240p quality now. I can watch in glorious 720p, or even 1080p with ease. I even watched the Lost finale again in fullscreen HD which was pretty awesome.

But my main interest is catching up on all the games I've missed out on over the past couple years. I guess technically you could call it a decade, since I pretty much stopped playing PC games once I got my Xbox in 2001. I've thought about trying out all the big PC games from 2004 and on-ward, in order of release. Just thinking about them makes my head swirl. Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal, BioShock, Modern Warfare, Dead Space, Assassin's Creed. The list goes on and on. Hopefully the majority of games I'm interested in have demos.

Locating InstantAction

2010-08-24T02:34:00.002-04:00

Earlier this month, I helped out a little with the local Lion's Club garage sale. There were a shit ton of books they were trying to give away, and I mean shit ton. Over 30 boxes of them, mostly from local libraries. I skimmed through them, not expecting to find anything interesting to read. And I was right, though a number of them made me chuckle. I noticed a couple business and corporate books, and thought about sending one to InstantAction for shits and giggles. Well, I never ended up doing that and instead got one about the moon for myself.

Skip to today when the thought somehow re-emerges. I browse Amazon and easily find the perfect book to send, but the price is, well, not what I was looking for. I see I can get one on the Amazon Marketplace for a much cheaper and satisfying price, but unfortunately you can't gift Marketplace items. So I'd have to buy the book, have it shipped to my house, then ship it AGAIN to the IA offices in Portland. I'd much rather find something and mark it as a gift, then type in their address. Which is exactly what I did. I found an item, not a book, that I'm sure will put a smirk on Crash7800's face. It's nothing fancy, but hopefully he'll give it a glance every now and then.

So, I have the item in my cart. Now to find the shipping address. Should be easy, right? Wrong. For some reason their address is no where to be found on the internet. At least I couldn't find it. I searched and searched and could only find the address to their New York, Las Vegas and old Eugene, OR offices. However, I was far from giving up. If I can't find the address by conventional means, it's time to get sneaky. I remembered one of the podcasts they released showed the front of their IA office. And one of my previous searches provided the street they were on, but no specific address. So, with the help of Google Maps I pieced everything together. First, the IA podcast:

Wiley, the cameraman, was gracious enough to show us a quick glimpse of a rather large building towards the beginning of the video. So after locating the street on Google Maps, I switched on satellite view and searched for any buildings that matched the one in the video. I then noticed that the building had a flag on top. A few seconds laster and bam! Found the fucker. Portland Post Office.

A perfect match

I now have the block they are on, and which side of the street. I continue watching and pay close attention to how many buildings they pass and what colors they are before coming to the IA offices. I see them walk by just one white building before coming to theirs, which is brick and has a black entrance. I quite easily find it on Google Maps thanks to the street view feature.

I can also match up the window styles. So I now have the exact location of the IA offices in Portland. I read an article that they're actually using just 2 floors of a building, and not the entire building itself, which might explain why Google Maps couldn't find anything when I searched for 'InstantAction'. The main building they're in is called The Broker Network, as is located at 618 NW Glisan Suite 101, Portland, OR. I'm feeling pretty badass right about now, but I'd still like confirmation that this is the correct address. Since they're on the second floor, and we're dealing with suites, I'm not entirely sure if I should modify that shipping address a bit.

Guess I'll find out soon enough.

More computer woes.

2010-08-17T04:04:00.000-04:00

InstantAction released InstantJam today, which was somewhat odd since I wasn't expecting them to until Wednesday. I already knew what the game was going to be like, or at least a general sense; Guitar Hero on Facebook. I went to the application and waited for it to download. Was I expecting it to actually work on this computer? No. Even though Castle stated in a new video that netbooks can run it, I wasn't holding my breath. Anyways, once I got to the loading screen I received a lovely error message informing me that I must download a DirectX package from August of 2007(essentially 9.0c).

What's funny about this is that I once had 9.0c, after downloading it to try out Monkey Island SE(which was pointless since I my video card doesn't have any kind of pixel shader support). However, after downloading 9.0x I noticed Freelancer didn't play properly. Every time I shot from my ship the game froze for a split second, rendering it unplayable. So I removed DirectX from my system and restarted, which automatically reinstalled DirectX 8.1, and upgraded to 9.0b. Up until today 9.0b was fine for my daily PC needs, and pose no problems. I hadn't played Freelancer for quite some time, nor do I know if I'll ever finish it. So I didn't see the harm in getting 9.0c again.

I head to Microsoft and download the June 2010 9.0c redistribution pack. I felt somewhat relieved that it was from June 2010. I rarely download things to this computer from 2010 with the expectation of them actually working, but since I had 9.0c in the past I really wasn't expecting any issue. Lol.

After running the setup I noticed that dxdiag still displayed 9.0b. I then went in search for the original release download, thinking that would surely clear things up. Nope. I tried several different 9.0c downloads before eventually trying from scratch. I removed DirectX from the computer, restarted and...DirectX version: None found. Well fuck. I had no DirectX at all after restarting. Oh well, I can simply download 8.1 and install it right? Nope. I tried several different downloads without any luck. I then remembered that Freelancer, along with many other games in my library, include a DirectX setup. I found the CD, popped it in and explorer its contents. Found the DX file and ran the setup, restarted and voila. DirectX 9.0 was installed. Perhaps now I can proceed with updating to 9.0c...

Or not. I still couldn't get this bitch to install 9.0c. After a few hours I thought "Well, perhaps I need 9.0b to upgrade to 9.0c." After having a very similar experience as before, I finally got it to upgrade to 9.0b. After a few more hours I still couldn't get it to 9.0c, and I still have no idea why it wouldn't upgrade. With the amount of errors this bitch gives me, a complete format and reinstall would probably fix everything. Alas, XP came installed with the computer so I don't have the disc. Which posed another issue since I needed it to use DX Happy Uninstaller, so I couldn't start from scratch even if I wanted to. Anyways.

2:00am came along and I was pretty much calling it quits when I read a 'solution' in a thread from 5 years ago. It made absolutely no sense, but it fucking worked. I don't know how, but it did. I finally had 9.0c! It wasn't even about Instant Jam anymore; just installing 9.0c was a victory on its own. I restart, made sure 9.0c was still installed, and went back to Instant Jam. What's this? Java Runtime error? All I could do was laugh. I tried it in Firefox and Explorer, neither of which worked either.

Along with releasing Instant Jam, they also released new forums. Forum which, at first, I found quite enjoyable. No lag, fresh new look, decent features. But after a day of it's release, I really can't see myself visiting them anymore. I now notice unbearable lag, even with avatars and signatures turned off. I miss the Who's Online Now, Unread Topics and other forum tools we once had in the past. It's way too bright for my liking, and there's a nasty little topics unread/read bug. It's all made me really think why I'm even part of this community anymore. My presence at the forum is no more, I can't play their games, I don't like the direction they're going (where are the AAA games? Not that I'll be able to play them...).

I've talked about leaving the community for good before, but always came crawling back. But now...I'm not so sure. I really can't see the forum getting any faster, which is one of, if not the biggest complaint I have right now. I also don't see myself getting a new computer in the near future. At this point, their IRC channel is all I have, which is sad.

It's 4:00am and I don't feel like proofreading.

Reddit Revival

2010-07-30T17:38:00.000-04:00

A couple days ago I saw a post on reddit about getting a group of players together to play some games that people may have forgotten about. It really seemed to get some attention on reddit, and was on the front-page for quite a while, which of course meant there were a slew of suggestions. Glancing over them, I quickly realized I might actually be able to play them. The game chosen was The Wheel of Time, an FPS from 1999.

I'm mainly making this post just to get the word out, and hopefully a few more members for the /r/revival subreddit.

Heart-racing fun.

2010-07-14T23:05:00.002-04:00

For about a year now I've been mainly sticking to base/LT gameplay in Tribes. It's fun and challenging, and usually has the most players these days. Plus, mods like Annihilation don't run as smoothly as I'd like them too in OpenGL, which 1.40 runs exclusively. However, for some reason I've had a hankering for some Annihilation lately, so I fired up my older version of Tribes that runs in Software mode and played away.

I only played one map tonight: DROPZONE. While I personally prefer Dropzone 420, DROPZONE is still pretty fun. I wasn't entirely sure what to be at first. Angel? Sniper? Tank? After playing around a bit I decided to be a Necro, which proved to be quite awesome. Unsurprisingly, the game came down to which team captured the objective last. The flags were both heavily guarded by turrets, making it near impossible to capture. An accidental activation of my Ghost pack landed me right next to the objective with just 10 minutes left. This is when the awesomeness started.

The other team currently had control of the objective. I was a mere 5 feet away from capping it myself, but I knew better. If I let them think they have it, while they defend the entrance, I'm better off setting up camp and waiting till the last second, which is exactly what I did. At the 5 minute mark I was spotted and killed, so I quickly made my way back but in a different location (still within the same room). There's a wall of sorts in the middle of the room, which I decided to duck behind till the time was right. I switched to 3rd person so I could see over the wall, so I knew if any enemies were in the room with me. For about 3 minutes the room was all mine, with the object just 10 feet away.

Then an enemy entered, carrying an inventory station. This...was not good. This meant he was about to setup defense in the room. Anything more than 2 laser turrets and I was done for. For some reason he only placed one on the ceiling. Still, I wasn't sure if I could make it. I'd gotten rid of my Ghost pack because it puts a glow around you, making you just a tad more visible than if you didn't have one. I'd also thrown away all my weapons. They were useless at this point. I saw the enemy come toward the wall I was behind, so I quietly crouched to the other side. This was perhaps the most heart-racing moment of the game, because I have no idea if he could see me, or which direction he'd go next. Amazingly I remained unseen.

The 1 minute mark came and I made a mad dash across the room, taking one hit from the laser turret almost killing me entirely. Less than a minute to go. 30 seconds. 20 seconds. 10 seconds. At the 4 second mark I captured the objective, and we won. Complete awesomeness and total fun. God bless Necros.

Saying goodbye to journalism.

2010-07-12T02:00:00.003-04:00

No, this isn't a post bashing today's journalism, which seems to be an easy target lately. Especially gaming journalism, which is what I thought I wanted to do with my life 4-5 years ago. I started out with a very simple blog in the summer of 2005 that talked about gaming/technology. This is when I first discovered blogging, and was sort of juggling between that and my personal blog on MySpace at the time. Shortly afterwards I was contacted to write for a small independent site called XBUnderground, which in case you can't tell was an Xbox/Xbox 360 fansite. At the time I didn't care about views. I merely enjoyed writing about games. Plus, 2005 was my Junior year of highschool, a time when I should've been deciding what to do with my life after school. I believe that very same summer I read an article in EGM about freelance journalism, and decided that's what I wanted to do...

XBUnderground eventually turned into numerous incarnations of Game-Spectrum.com. My experience with the site was pretty much my first 'serious' take on gaming journalism, though looking back now I had a lot to learn, especially when it came to press releases, interviews, fact checking, ect. It was good while it lasted, but towards the end we kept taking on more and more people that did absolutely nothing. This led to me being the only one posting news stories and press releases (not tooting my own horn or bragging, just pointing out what went on). Another reason for me leaving back then is a big chunk of why I'm saying goodbye to journalism today. Back then, the Xbox 360 had been out for 3 years, the PlayStation 3 and Wii for 2. I didn't have either, nor do I currently. Sure I stayed up to date with gaming news (and still do, mind you), but I was obviously missing out on a huge part of it. The actual games I was reporting on. Honestly, I'm amazed on stuck with it for so long...

2007 saw a brief moment of popularity on Digg, but I ended up leaving the following year. I still blogged on a semi-occasional basis, either on my Live Spaces blog or here at Blogger. For some reason I kept switching between the two. I took on some very small freelance roles on a few game sites, some I can't even remember right now. Game-Spectrum was shut down in July of 2008, though I kept it touch with the creator on an almost daily basis, and still do. A little over a year after Game-Spectrum went down he said he was creating another gaming website called BraveNewGamer, which I wrote at from October 09 to...well...I guess May of this year.

BraveNewGamer provided us with a lot more hits than Game-Spectrum, mainly thanks to N4G.com. At times we were easily getting 100,000+ page views a month. However, N4G was pretty much our only source of traffic, save for a few thousand visitors from Reddit once in a while. We depended on N4G, a shit community that can get any website 50,000+ hits if you write the title properly(ie PS3 praising or 360 bashing), for any kind of traffic. And when any of our writers (3, if that) spent time on an article they felt was worth reading, there wasn't any guarantee it'd get the same amount of hits that a short article pointing out how much Modern Warfare 2 sucked would. In short, we were tired of putting time and effort into something that saw no give-back. Back at XBUnderground no one cared about page views or comments, we just liked writing about games. With BNG it's the total opposite.

Plus, it was all for free. At least on my end. I know the creator got money from the advertisements, which covered server costs. None of the writers got paid, even though it was briefly discussed. Not too long into 2010 is when things just went downhill at BNG. The easiest way of putting it is that we, mainly the creator and I, were burnt out. The rate of posts each day dropped dramatically. And just like Game-Spectrum, any new writers we brought on did little or nothing to add content. Even when they did they saw no hits or any kind of decent traffic. But even with BNG's short life-span, I'd say we wrote our best editorials during that time, or at least I think I did. Mind you, the number of editorials I wrote was very small compared to my Game-Spectrum days, but I believe both the content and way I wrote was better.

A few days ago I was talking with the creator about BNG, which is still technically 'up'. He told me he was pretty much done writing about games, and I came to the same conclusion. For quite a while I thought journalism was the right thing for me. But when I actually did it, at least freelancing, I found out it just wasn't enjoyable anymore. I still lack a current-gen system, which I feel played a big part in my decision. Plus, when you have parents who mock your decision to go into the journalism field, it really puts a damper on things. But I won't go into that.

It may sound funny, but I'd still like to write somewhere. Professionally would be nice, but even if it isn't my job I'd still write, probably right here. The problem with this is that I know of no such job that offers this. Shit, would I become a full-blown author? Highly unlikely, even if I do have a kickass story floating around in my head. I'm at the point in my life, and have been, where nothing interests me other than writing, and I wouldn't even calling writing an interest. Merely a hobby. My future is bleak at this point, and I really don't know what to do with myself now that I've ruled out journalism, something that I thought was 'my thing' for about 4+ years.

I lack any kind of talent or skills, at least none that I can think of. Of course everyone I know over 50 thinks I should go into computers, when the sad truth is that I don't know jack about them. Just because I can upload photos from a camera and send emails doesn't make me an expert in the field.

End of Suck.

2010-07-01T01:23:00.002-04:00

The fuck is this, a new blog post? Guess so. And of course, it's about InstantAction, who have been silent for quite a while. Hence my lack of posts. But I discovered an article the other day that really made me think. I'm not sure how I missed it when it was originally published, back on June 3rd. Anyways, Dr. Wiley has been working on a game for quite a while now. We know that what he and his team are working on has never been done to the genre. And that's it. Nothing else has been said. So the following is pure speculation based on what I've been able to piece together:

1. The game is an RTS. Not long after Castle came on board, a number of new employees were hired. Some were from game companies that worked exclusively on RTS games. Castle also made a little game called Command & Conquer, which I hear is a popular RTS. The man has his roots in making RTS'. It only makes sense for him to continue doing so.

2. "The most exciting game I have ever worked on is the next one I'm dreaming up."-Castle. Now, he can mean this metaphorically or literally. Seeing as he has some pretty big games under his belt, his next game must be pretty damn huge. However, he may simply be saying that, to him, each game is more exciting to work on than the last. Who knows.

3. The Vegas Wizards. This is the article I previous mentioned, which made the wheels start turning in my head. The general gist of the article is that after Westwood Studios was killed, the key people moved on to form their own companies. Now, those companies are working together.

Together with Petroglyph, the three companies built a small cluster of like-minds that attracted JV Games, which collaborates with the other three. The four companies share ideas, non-proprietary information and sometimes employees.

Petroglyph is working on a game called End of Nations, an RTS. But not just any RTS. An MMORTS, the first of it's kind.

And they are working on something that could change gaming in the future the same way RTS did in the 1990s: the “massively multiplayer online real time strategy” game, or MMORTS, in gaming-nerd parlance.

And this is what I think Wiley & Co. are working on. The article doesn't state if InstantAction is working directly on the project, but they did state that IA and Petroglyph currently work together. So who knows. It goes along with what Wiley said. As usual, only time will tell.

The scale.

2010-06-16T22:22:00.000-04:00

After 3+ months of nothingness, we've finally got a bit of news concerning InstantAction. As I stated in a previous post, E3 would more than likely bring us some news about the future of IA. In fact, that's an absolutely guarantee. Even better is that we're to expect 2 more little nuggets of information. The first was released today, which from what I hear wasn't supposed to go out until next week but oh well.

InstantAction has partnered up with Penny Arcade's Greenhouse 2.0, and will be bringing all of these games (and possibly more) over to their site. On a "WTF are you guys doing?" to "Pretty awesome" scale, I'd give it a "Not bad." This isn't the main E3 announcement, which I'm sure made a few people happy. Whether or not I can actually play any of those games remains unknown. I couldn't play Monkey Island: SE, a game that originally came out 20 years ago, so who knows. Then again, I have no problems playing Freelancer which is just 7 years old...

What those 2 other announcements could be is anyone's guess. It's more than likely a new publisher and new game from InstantAction. In fact, I'm quite certain of this. When is the main question, especially when dealing with IA. I can't think of a single thing they've given a date to, and actually met it. Since this is E3, however, they might take things a bit more seriously. So all in all, the deal with PA was good. The blogtards will cry for their Legions, if they even decide to make a blog post about it.

A positive post about InstantAction. Who'da thunk it?

Back in space.

2010-06-13T00:04:00.001-04:00

A few days ago I wanted to try out a recently released mod for Freelancer. It was actually my main reason for buying Freelancer in the first place. So after downloading it and running the installer, it told me it couldn't install to my D:\Freelancer folder. I've always had problems with this drive, so I wasn't all that surprised by this. After messing around a bit and not finding any success, I sought some help from the person who gave me this computer. After several attempts (via IM messages), we still couldn't get it to install. He then told me to download Dial-a-Fix.

After running Dial-a-Fix, I attempted to install the mod once more. And again found nothing but failure. He then told me I should probably just format the drive and start from scratch, which would probably fix the issue, but I really didn't feel like formatting my D drive. I then asked on reddit, and actually found some success. I extracted the .msi file into my Freelancer folder, bypassing the entire install process. I ran the mod, and was greeted by an error telling me I didn't have a sufficient graphics card. By then I'd simply had enough and deemed the mod not worthy of anymore hassle. I had the game, so I was happy.

So I then started up the game and proceeded through the campaign as I had been. But something was...off. Whenever a cluster of enemies filled my screen and I fired at them, the game froze up. Normal space was fine. But whenever I fired my weapons, each burst caused the game to freeze for a split second. Engaging in firefights with 10 or more enemies was simply impossible. It ran fine before I ran Dial-a-Fix. I reinstalled the game but still had the freezing issues. I was then worried that I'd no longer be able to play, even though I'd just bought it and wasn't nearly close to finishing it. Now what?

I decided to uninstall DirectX 9.0c and install DirectX 9.0b, which was the version of Dx available at the time of Freelancer's release in 2003. And remarkably it worked. Unfortunately I've had to start from the very beginning of the game, but I've found that it's going quite a bit faster now that I know what I'm doing. I am a very happy man right now. Which leads me to my last topic: InstantAction. Haven't talked about them for at least 24 hours...

OnLive made a tweet yesterday informing its followers that they were building a mega-display for the E3 expo to show off games coming soon to their service, along with some other surprises. Although InstantAction is listed as an E3 attendee, they've stated they won't have an actual booth or any kind of presentation. They'll merely be present at the expo, which is only 4 days away. I can't help but wonder why they aren't having a booth. E3 is literally the place to show off your shit. It seems like the ideal time to show off Monkey Island, Braid, and new publishing deals. A while ago I brought this question up to them, only instead I asked wouldn't it be a good way to bring in new publishers. Their answer was, well, an answer. Looking back it seems kinda of silly. But now I wonder why not go there simply to show off your shit? Again, it's E3.

Perhaps their new publisher will do the work for them. Maybe, for instance, Sega will announce they've partnered with InstantAction, and then any IA employees could then answer press-related questions. Who knows. IA has teased that this might happen, but then again, it's IA.

Marketing.

2010-06-11T14:56:00.002-04:00

In my previous post I mentioned how much more rage would be expressed from the IA community once the company really starts to push their Monkey Island marketing, along with the release of Braid. Well, I'd consider yesterday to be an early Christmas of sorts, at least for me. I love reading all the hate-filled comments on the IA blog, and yesterday brought in the nastiest comments yet. Not only are the comments themselves negative, but the speed and quantity of them is insane. I never would've thought it'd get this bad.

I'm a bit nervous to see what their reactions are going to be once more and more Monkey Island/Braid stuff starts to get pushed. Honestly, I wasn't expecting yesterday's reaction for at least a couple of more weeks, if not months. The fact that it's here now is, well, awesome. As I said before I crave the drama, and the blogtards are giving me just what I want. What their reaction will be within the next couple of weeks is anyone's guess. On the one hand you've got E3 coming up, which might tell us who their new publisher is. On the other, IA is going to continue their Monkey Island campaign, which will induce even more rage.

Or a full collapse. One of the comments on the latest blog post is from someone who didn't stick around for the wait, and just recently decided to visit the site again to see if anything changed. He laughed, and said he'd try again in another 3-4 months. I wouldn't be surprised if more and more people simply left for a few weeks, if not longer. Again, the drama is delicious. I myself actually took a short break from IA, and still am somewhat. As E3 approaches I'm hoping for some sort of news or update, but since they won't even be at the expo my expectations aren't all that high (the fact that I still have some sort of expectation is very odd).

As for the latest podcast, I won't dive into that like I normally do. It's 90% Monkey Island marketing, and 10% InstantAction > OnLive discussion.. I've already posted what I think about both.

I was wrong.

2010-05-31T02:03:00.001-04:00

About Blur, that is. A while ago I made a post about Blur and its importance to InstantAction acquiring Tribes. I said Blur would more than likely be a sub-par arcade racer that would be forgotten about shortly after its release. However, that's not entirely true. The game is getting a lot more attention than I thought it would. A recent commercial for the game has Reddit all giddy, while others are saying they prefer it over Split/Second. Perhaps it won't be forgotten so quickly afterall. Only time will tell I guess.

Speaking of IA, they finally put out a new podcast after almost an entire month of silence. It's funny, since a month of silence really isn't all that surprising to me anymore. Nowadays I just enjoy reading all the rage from those who still have expectations from the company. So young. So innocent. Just makes me all giddy when weeks go by and all they get is the sweet sound of silence. They're persistent, I'll give 'em that.

During the previous podcast they asked the community to leave comments on the blog, to show the company that people still want Legions. At the time I never gave it much thought, but still found it a bit odd. Roughly 600 comments later and I think they got the message. However, what I find odd is that IA asked them to do this at all. In the past they've said if the community wanted X feature in X game, they gotta speak up to show it'd be worth developing. However, when IA asks the community to show support for an entire game, especially their flagship title, it really makes me think.

Was IA thinking about getting rid of Legions, or the Arcade altogether? Asking if people still care about the game is like asking if I want nachos. Fucking duh. It was a very odd thing to hear them request. Ever since I realized we wouldn't be getting Tribes anytime soon I've pretty much lost any kind of interest in what they do (especially if I can't play a 20 year old game they release). I still like following what they do, because it will surely piss off the community. God of love the drama. And you know what? It'll only get better.

We recently found out they haven't even begun their main advertising venture for Monkey Island. When they'll do this is anyone's guess, and I really don't understand why they didn't do it when they launched the game (well, I guess I do). And as I've said before, reaction to the game was a unanimous 'meh'. Are they expecting a different reaction once they start advertising it? I hope not. Once that fizzles out they'll then release Braid, a game that will get a similar reaction. Fortunately those clamoring for more information might get it within a month or two, during or after E3. But honestly everyone just wants the Arcade back, and I don't blame them.

I'd be both unsurprised and sad if they didn't get the Arcade back up during the summer. Unsurprised because it's InstantAction, and sad for those who are simply begging for the games to come back in the blog comments. Especially sad for those still in school, who are about to get a lot of free time over the next 3 months. Drama. It's delicious.

BPOs, Printers and Lost.

2010-05-26T22:32:00.002-04:00

A while ago I wrote a blog about my frustrating BPO experience. Shit just wasn't working for me back then, with OpenOffice being the main culprit. A few days ago I was tasked with tackling yet another BPO. This time I decided to skip the bullshit and simply do it all at my dad's office. I opened Microsoft Word, typed what needed to be typed, downloaded the correct pictures, inserted them, and sent it off. The minute I hit send I was both nervous and anxious to find out if everything turned out alright.

And guess what? It did. Everything was perfect. Unfortunately my luck didn't stay for too long. I had to print off a few pictures up at the same office tonight. I've done this countless times before with usually no hassle whatsoever. But tonight...tonight the printer decided to be a straight-up cunt to me. Neither the printer nor computer are what I'd call 'great', and are in need of an upgrade. For some reason the printer just wouldn't take my photo-paper. I wasted 2 perfectly good photo sheets before finally getting what I wanted. Not sure why it didn't feel like cooperating. I actually had to come back home and print them from our own printer.

And now onto Lost. I'm not going to analyze anything, but I will say that I really, really liked it. Loved it, even. Unfortunately that means I have an hour of TV to fill every Tuesday night...if I so choose. It really isn't a big deal that I fill that void, and nothing could captivate me as much as Lost did. Nothing, at least that I know of, has that same mystery and drama that Lost had. Fringe? Possibly. Wish I had kept following that show, since I'm starting to hear good things about it.

Then we have the whole Super 8 thing going on. In case you aren't up to speed, Super 8 is a new movie from both JJ Abrams (creator of Lost) and Steven Spielberg. What's it about? Fuck if I know. The trailer is very Cloverfield-esque. Not really giving us information, but still immensely interesting at the same time. Along with a wicked trailer we've also got an ARG. I find ARG's to be pretty awesome, and JJ Abrams & Co. certainly know how to create one.

And lastly we have InstantAction. What blog would be complete without talking about IA? Not a shitload to talk about, except a certain someone recently said "While Tribes is currently on hold we fully intend to revisit the Tribes IP." What an odd sentence. He could've easily said PlayTribes, but instead said Tribes IP. Interesting...

Lost finale.

2010-05-23T23:56:00.000-04:00

Yep.

The long, dull road.

2010-05-16T01:07:00.001-04:00

Complaining about what InstantAction is doing really doesn't accomplish much, however, there's nothing else to talk about. When IA launched Monkey Island, as I've said before, it was met with an overwhelming 'meh' (though IA reported they received a positive reception, which is partly true). The entire gaming community aside, the IA community simply wanted the Arcade back, and still want it back. It's come to the point where pleading has turned into anger, and a simple scroll through the blog comments confirms this.

And what really sucks for them is that, in all likeliness, IA's next move is to release Braid. It isn't Arcade, nor is it a graphically powerful game. I'm left to ponder who has who by the balls now. There's a chance that IA has indeed made a number of deals with big-name publishers, and they're 100% committed to releasing those games first, regardless how loud the IA community cries. And from a business perspective this is the right thing to do. Castle himself has even stated that those bigger games will get a higher priority as opposed to the smaller indie games. I can only assume this includes the Arcade.

The last podcast made it clear that the publishers are in control, not InstantAction. IA is simply waiting for their commands, something I think neither they or the community are used to. Perhaps they should make this a bit more clear to the community; that they really aren't the ones calling the shots anymore. It's the publishers who are controlling things, even if they don't realize the impact they're having. I know that even more excuses won't silence the community. Nothing will at this point, other than the Arcade. But at least they'd be given a bit more info. as to what's going on.

The Community Strikes Back.

2010-05-09T23:09:00.002-04:00

Many eons ago, before my move (back) to Blogger, I wrote an entry (or two) which I feel like bringing up again. The general gist of it was corporations like Microsoft leaving their community/customers in the dark with shit that goes on behind closed doors. My angle was that paying customers have a right to know, and I guess that still holds true in this discussion.

I used to jest about InstantAction becoming a corporate company, who only care about the size of their yachts. I got a slight bit of feedback, but it's coming to the point where I don't know if I'm doing it in a serious or joking manner anymore. Once again, InstantAction is leaving their community/customers in the dark when it comes to new games they're working on. Now, obviously IA isn't the only company who likes to keep quiet about upcoming projects. But when a company keeps bringing up the very brief subject of a new product, only revealing 'we're working on it', week after week, it starts to get annoying. More importantly, it starts to lose its impact.

A recent comment from a community member puts it nicely.

You know, you guys keep saying your working on this 'Project' and i know your probably thinking that it would get us excited but you've said it so many times now that to be honest its starting to piss me off a little i mean you haven't told us ANYTHING. Going over a little what Xtremespeed said about us being your greatest assets and whatnot, it doesn't seem fair that your keeping us in the dark despite having stayed committed to IA.

Another thing people are griping about is the game the company chose to show off: Secret of Monkey Island. I brought this up in my previous post, so I won't dwell on in too much. But a statement in the latest podcast really made me laugh. In confusion, mind you. IA's rational for showing off Monkey Island is, quite simply, silly. That's the nicest way I can put it. I honestly wasn't sure how I was going to word my disapproval, but silly seems right.

Because it was...important? IA is a technology that claims to bring any game to the browser. Importance shouldn't mean jack when showing off what you're capable of. If you can bring a game like Assassin's Creed to the browser, Fucking. Do it. The logical assumption to make of this is that, although you've talked to big-name publishers, you've yet to actually make a partnership. If you have, you haven't been able to get your hands on the more powerful games yet.

It'd be nice to write something positive about IA for once. I guess I was just hoping for them to eviscerate OnLive's claims, and create a brief 'wow' across the internet. Instead all I heard was 'meh', and no one is talking about it a week after launch. The blogtards are still whining about Legions. In a sense, at least community wise, nothing has changed since March 10th. Honestly, IA could cure cancer and the community would still bitch about not having Legions.

And it all comes back to what I was talking about earlier: not telling the community what's going on. If IA honestly just doesn't know when the site will be up and running again, this pretty much means they've yet to actually focus on that. It's obvious that shits going down behind doors. It'd be awesome if the community knew what that was.

Put up or Shut up.

2010-05-05T00:01:00.004-04:00

IA finally "launched" last last-week. I put launch in quotations because I'm really not sure if it was the main launch or just them showing off Secret of Monkey Island. From their standpoint it was an overall success I guess, but if you browse the comments on the various stories posted about the launch, not everyone is happy. Actually, very few people are happy. With Castle's long-winded explanation, to the interviews with Crash7800 at GDC, they neglected to reveal stuff that pissed people off.

For starters, it isn't instant. Yes, I'm sure a certain someone will give me flack because I didn't actually play the game, but I can still say it wasn't instant. At no point do I or anyone remember reading that we'd have to download the latest version of Java, something a lot of people had to do before playing the game. Also, I don't think Monkey Island was a good choice to show off the tech.

If you have a service that you claim can run any game within the browser, don't show off a game like Monkey Island; a game that isn't graphics intensive. IA made the bold statement that they could bring any game to the browser over a year ago. They bragged about Assassin's Creed at GDC, so why not show off Assassin's Creed? Put your corporate money where your corporate mouth is and beat OnLive to the punch. Silence the naysayers. I find it extremely odd that Ubisoft decided to just hand over the source code so they could implement their tech, yet not announce a partnership. IA's deal with Ubisoft has already happened. It's merely a matter of time before they make it public.

I couldn't help but sense an overwhelming 'meh' during the launch, mixed it with a bit of anger about Java. Also, where'd the Mac support go? Having the tech available for all major browsers is nice, but doesn't mean shit if it's only available for Windows, which was another thing they failed to mention. Honestly though, none of this affects me personally. This beast of a machine can't play anything decent. But I still think it could've been handled better, something a lot of people that have followed GarageGames over the years have said a number of times before.

The Secret of Monkey Island:SE powered by InstantAction

Computer Woes.

2010-05-02T22:32:00.000-04:00

Earlier today I saw a post on reddit, asking what the best free online game was. Someone mentioned League of Legends, so I decided to give it a try. I've never really been able to get into these types of games, but I'm in dire need of something new to play these days. I set up an account and downloaded away. It comes in at around 730 MB, so I knew I had time to spare. I saw that 24 Days Later was on. Perfect timing.

Once I saw that it was done downloading, to my utter and complete unsurprise, I can't play the game. The culprit? Shader 2.0 support, or rather lack-thereof. I also had this problem when trying to play InstantAction's Secret of Monkey Island, which states that I need a video card with Shader 2.0 support. Oh well, no biggie. I probably wouldn't have enjoyed the game anyways.

While I was in the uninstall process, I decided to see what else I could get rid of to free up some space. I saw some HP Customer Care thing with a whopping 143 MB file size. I decided to uninstall that as well, but of course completing the uninstall process meant rebooting my computer. Again, no biggie I think. I've had to do this countless times before.

Now, lets back up a few hours. Earlier today I came upon this article. Overall I already knew about most of the tips, but a few were new to me, mainly the services section. I checked the list of uneeded services they linked to and was amazed by how many there were. So I instinctively started services.msc and clicked away. Service after service I disabled. I then saw their user login tip and decided to disable that as well.

Now, flash forward a bit to when I restart my computer. I come to the part where I usually click a profile to login, but since I disabled this it went to "Windows is now starting...". This was to be expected. So I wait for it to get going...and wait...and wait. Nothing happens for about 10 minutes. I freak out, thinking I fucked something up by disabling all those services earlier in the day.

I restart the computer (held in the power button. I know...), and went to the BIOS setup, looking for a safe mode. THERE IS NO SAFE MODE. WTF? Unless I was blind as a bat, there is no safe mode on this computer. So I start freaking out some more, since I'm not the only one who uses this beast of a machine. I restart it a few more times just to see if maybe I'll have a bit of luck, but no. So, I did the only thing I could think of at that point...

I mashed every fucking key on my keyboard in hopes of having something pop-up. And guess what? It worked. A message popped up saying it failed to log me in, and that I should check my log-in info again. I click ok, and am prompted with the usual profiles to click. I click one, and voila. Back in business. I immediately went back and re-enabled the log-in screen option that I had disabled previously. I'm fairly certain that was the culprit. I'll also look over those services I disabled again.

I hate computers. They never cooperate with me. I mean, I failed at installing RAM for fuck's sake...

Rent-to-Pwn

2010-04-18T00:47:00.003-04:00

Latest IA podcast is asking what the community thinks of their rent-to-own feature. This has been known for a while, so I'm not exactly sure why they're bring it up now, but I guess that's not the point. I sincerely hope rent-to-own and the demise of demo's aren't going hand-in-hand. There's been a bit of talk lately about paying for demos, or getting rid of them altogether. Paying for them sounds like a terrible idea, and I really hope companies aren't viewing RtO as a replacement, because it's not. Demos start you off in a fairly entertaining segment of the game, while RtO is simply from the very start.

It's funny watching the blogtards go apeshit over a hypothetical hourly rate, though that same rate has been stated in the past, so I guess they have some reason to bitch about it. I myself do think $5/hour is a tad on the high side, especially if it's for RPG's which can last for 12 or more hours. For simple 2 hour indie games the rate seems great. The whole thing is so open to exploitation, at least on the publisher's side, that the idea of having IA set a limit doesn't sound like that bad of an idea, but I highly doubt they'll do this.

The one problem I see with this are having minors play M rated games. 'Problem' perhaps isn't the right word. But it's something they haven't really talked about. Will it be as simple as an age verification before the start? If so, why even have one? They're pointless these days because no one is honest about their age. I can't count how many times I've set it to 01/01/1900.

Then you have the concept of actually paying for the games. Again, what about the minors? Some time ago the concept of an "InstantAction Card", like the MS Points card, popped into my head, and I wouldn't be surprised if they rolled something like this out. IA in the past hasn't exactly had a huge success with monetization, but now that they have an actual business plan this could actually work. I hope they tackle these problems in the next podcast, since this is what a number of community members are griping about.

Late to the party?

2010-04-09T03:27:00.002-04:00

So apparently this blog is now dedicated to all things-InstantAction after reading through my previous posts. Ah well. Nothing else I can really talk about these days, unless cat barf is a subject of interest. Anyways, I've noticed that whenever cloud gaming is brought up, OnLive is pretty much the only thing people talk about. Even if the article has a section about other services like InstantAction and GaiKai, the comments are still mainly aimed at OnLive.

This is probably mostly in part due to OnLive having roughly a year's worth of time hyping and testing their service, while IA pretty much came out of left field at GDC 2010. I think it probably would've done them more good to at least give an idea of what they were doing back at PAX 2009, to at least inform people that OnLive will have a competitor of sorts(I personally don't think it's right to compare the two, but Castle himself has so whatever). IA has the advantage in that they're releasing quite a bit earlier than OnLive (supposedly), but even so most of the talk is about OnLive. GaiKai seems to be the lonely guy you see at parties that no one will talk to or mention, and is probably playing with a cat (i.e. me).

So even though GDC and PAX East were pretty big in the gaming scene, they still need to do more advertising, not so much at publishers but gamers. A few (more) interviews with Joystiq or Ars would certainly help. But for all I know the publishers themselves will do all the work. It seems as though Monkey Island and Braid might not be the only games we see at launch. At least, this is what I got from their latest podcast:

Around the 1:45 mark a certain someone talks about the beloved phone call discussion with a mysterious game company (2 guys, actually), and eventually states "It's not just Secret of Monkey Island. There's a lot of other exciting things coming too.' At launch? Who knows. And since he so clearly stated that he enjoys my critique of IA, I have one more bone to pick. He expressed how excited he was for this new 'game' coming to IA, both in the video and IRC://IRC. However, you had a similar tone both before and during the reveal that Monkey Island would be coming to IA. While I'm sure MI is a great game, it's not really 'zomg' worthy.

So you'll have to excuse me if I tone down his excitement just a tad. If he were talking with, for instance, Blizzard or Valve, then yeah, I'd agree with his excitement. But for the time being I'll be skeptical. And I'd like to thank him for totally voiding my nerd-rage on the IA community for expecting new content for the Arcade games. I didn't think this was going to happen originally, and when I think about it, it probably wasn't. But after calling them corporate, this is probably payback and an easy way to get the community pissed at me. So bravo, IA. Bravo...

When they tackled my question I was somewhat disappointed that they shifted towards the technical side of keeping the old site up, rather than talk about new content for the Arcade games. They talked about how hard it would be to keep the Arcade site up before, and I think the majority of people are (unfortunately) more interested in the content. Now you've gone and gotten their hopes up again...

And giving out the IRC info to all the blog tards? Smooth.

Corporate Bullshit.

2010-04-06T19:18:00.001-04:00

Alright, time to clear something up, because someone thinks I'm serious. I started spouting 'zomg IA is corporate' after seeing their new logo earlier this year. And I wasn't alone. A lot of people thought the logo looked corporate, even people outside of the site. Soon after InstantAction went down and we saw the preview page, the corporate meme came back up. Castle was quick to make a statement, reassuring everyone that the company had not gone corporate, and that they were still very committed to the gaming community.

What started out as something of a joke was quickly turned into something quite serious. And I loved it. Like a schoolyard bully I kept bringing up the corporate meme merely for a reaction, which I got 100% of the time. But frankly, it wasn't totally made-up. I'd say about 80% of it is in jest, 15% is based on facts, while the remaining 5% is based on uncertainty.

While I doubt InstantAction will become the next EA, it's so blatantly obvious that they're a business now rather than a simple game site that they once were. And I don't mean simple in a bad way(in case a certain someone is offended by that word). It's very clear that they've got a strategy to both make games and money now, while the previous IA somewhat struggled on the money part.

They're entire preview page is aimed at developers, not gamers(save for the small section below the blue bar). Monetization, DRM, payment methods, sales conversions. All are aimed at pubs/devs as a way of getting their games to a wider audience, and pocketing more money. While corporate is a very strong word to describe what they've done (which apparently even they think is a bad thing), InstantAction is much more of a company now than they were before. I can't stress that enough. If I could double-bold 'much', I would (fuck it, I'm inventing that).

So, to wrap things up: I jest when I say the company has gone corporate. But it is becoming much more of a business now, and I don't quite know what to call that. What comes before corporate? Whatever that is, that's what IA has become. So CALM. THE FUCK. DOWN.

Why I'm not sucking Grooveshark's dick.

2010-04-06T01:57:00.000-04:00

I like Grooveshark. It's a pretty good service for finding music. It's better than places like Pandora or Last.fm in that you can continuously listen to the same song over and over again. Sometimes I'll hear a song and want to listen to it again, but Pandora doesn't let you do this, and Last.fm has an actual limit to how many times you can listen to a song. I also like how Grooveshark is, somewhat, user-driven. You can upload songs straight from your computer. Honestly though, the only time I'd do this is if I came upon a song that didn't sound very good, and I just happened to have that same song in better quality. I've yet to do this.

However, I don't totally adore the service like everyone else seems to. For starters, starting up the site takes longer than it should. I'd really like a 'lite' version of Grooveshark that got rid of all the unnecessary flash elements. Secondly, the recent 'restore' feature is somewhat annoying. It'd be great if we had the option to always set it to restore, instead of constantly having to deal with the pop-up. Thirdly, forcing ads upon users isn't very nice. At all. Yes, it's a free service. One that I actually disable my Ad/Flashblock for because I know its gotta cost a ton to run. But automatically changing a users entire theme so it's one big, gigantic ad is an annoyance. It reminds of those sites that have their entire background one big ad. IGN, GameSpot, and Digg do this. And I don't visit these sites, partly because of this. Please don't keep it up Grooveshark.

And now comes the big one. The one that I just found out about a few minutes ago. You should not, I repeat NOT have to be a paying customer to give fucking feedback. I wanted to suggest the option to always accept the restore point, so I went to the suggestion page and went to submit it, but instead was told I couldn't until I upgraded to a VIP. Are they fucking serious? This is the first time I've stumbled upon such...idiocy. You can't even ASK a question without being a paying VIP. It wasn't always like this.

THEY'RE SO...CORPORATE.

Why Blur is more important than you think.

2010-04-03T03:15:00.002-04:00

The following is being written at 2:45am. My eye-sight is poor and my mind is slowing fading away. This is my final activity before calling it a night.

Blur, at least on the surface, appears to be a fairly normal arcade racing game. There's nothing exciting about it other than the power-up system, and even that isn't unique or jaw-dropping. I highly doubt it'll be a hidden gem in 6 months time, either. People will play it, especially since the open beta is next week(open beta seems to get people's attention). It's no Forza. It's no Gran Turismo. It's no PGR. From the looks and more than likely even the controls, it's a very mundane arcade racing game. I'm not saying this is a bad thing. Think of it as The Expendables. Just good, mindless fun that shouldn't be taken seriously.

However, there's a bit of history to it that no one really knows about. Blur originally started out on everyone's favorite website InstantAction. Now, the exact details are a bit...fuzzy. I'm not entirely sure if the entire game was originally part of InstantAction, or they merely had the title. All I really know is that a game that was to appear on InstantAction called Blur was originally simply called 'racer', then changed to 'Rev' sometime in 2008. Guess what else took place in 2008? InstantAction acquired the Tribes IP. How the fuck do they correlate? I'll try to explain...

Towards the latter part of last year a GarageGames employee posted on a forum about their Tribes IP acquisition. Many were wondering just how much the company paid for the franchise(rumor is a mere $500,000), so he came along to clear a few things up. First off, when they obtained the Tribes IP they also got a number of other games, such as The Incredible Machine and Red Baron. Secondly, the GarageGames employee stated that he wasn't sure of the exact details, but knew Activision/Blizzard got what they wanted, and linked to this Joystiq article.

So what exactly happened? I'm thinking that, for whatever reason, Activision/Blizzard really wanted that game title, so IA handed it over to A/B as part of their Tribes IP acquisition, and decided to simply rename Blur to Rev. Both games are arcade racers, so both legally and logically you can't have 2 games out there with the same name. I originally thought IA handed over Blur in whatever state it was in to A/B, and then started on a new racing game called Rev, but my former suggestion seems more plausible.

So in a way, without Blur we wouldn't have PlayTribes. Which we still don't have, so...fuck. Either way, Blur has played a fairly pivotal role that I doubt anyone will ever really know about. It could quite possibly be the game that allowed InstantAction to buy the Tribes IP, thus keeping any future the series had afloat and in the right hands(GarageGames). The entire future of Tribes may have been saved, or at least prolonged thanks to a mundane arcade racer that I doubt a whole lot of people will play.

Metabolism.

2010-04-02T01:48:00.003-04:00

New InstantAction podcast. Basically telling us stuff we've, or at least I've heard before. In a nutshell, IA is getting their shit together (while also getting ready to make appointments with their local chiropractors due to the huge amount of money they'll have in their wallets 'soon'. They're so corporate), and until that's done, we won't be playing PlayTribes. And seeing how long it takes for them to get stuff done, I'm not counting on getting my hands on PlayTribes for a very, very long time.

So long that I simply won't wait anymore. There's no point in waiting for an ETA, because I already know it; not anytime soon. It's not worth making a fuss over it, and frankly I've lost interest in Tribes. I haven't played it for a while, thanks to DoD. And PlayTribes is was literally the only thing that kept me at InstantAction. Honestly I'm surprised that I've been a member for over a year now, and I haven't even played their games thanks to this beast of a computer. I've set a self-ban from InstantAction. No more forums, no more IRC, no more blog. No more IA. I'm not entirely sure if I'll prevent myself from checking out their podcasts, however. They're awfully tempting to watch, especially since the company has gone in a new direction. I guess my main reason for watching now is to see which publisher/developers hop on board.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: The future of InstantAction is 100% up to which companies decide to hop on board. I couldn't help but feel that they were giving out a hint during the latest podcast when they gave a shout-out to BioWare, Capcom and...uh...hm. I can't remember the third company. Anyways, perhaps I was reading a bit too much into things. I doubt they'd reveal something like that in a podcast. I also got the feeling that the game they couldn't talk about, where they are adding a new element to a known genre, is an RTS. Don't ask why I think this; I just do.

Anyways, it'll be tough not to check in on the forums or IRC, but I'm sure I'll get over it with in a a week or two. I doubt they'll miss my bitching.

And now for your listening pleasure...

2010-03-31T19:47:00.000-04:00

I've been playing DoD recently, and there's a user called CrazyRussian whom I find quite funny. So much so, that I decided to record the audio from one of the games with him. Enjoy.

WinAmp>VLC. Whaaaa?!

2010-03-29T16:40:00.000-04:00

Ok, so perhaps the title of this blog is a bit dramatic. WinAmp hasn't been relevant for like a decade, while VLC is becoming more and more popular. However, I've been in search for a service that allows me to subscribe to podcasts in a somewhat simple matter. iTunes would be ideal, but it automatically downloads the podcasts to your HDD. I don't like that. I'd rather stream them.

VLC offers almost everything I want. Almost. I can easily subscribe to podcasts and view them in VLC's playlist window. However, it lacks a few features I feel are needed. For instance, it doesn't display when the podcasts were uploaded. Adding podcasts takes a bit longer than it should as well(a simple 'add' feed button would be nice, rather than navigating to the 'configure podcasts' menu). I also can't play vidcasts, at least I haven't figured out how to. There's a built-in Vimeo script, but as far as I can tell it doesn't do shit.

So then I looked at WinAmp. Why? Hell if I know. After checking out the podcast section, I realized how much easier it is to add and edit podcast feeds. It can play Vimeo videos within WinAmp itself as well. It also displays the date and time each podcast was uploaded, along with displaying the podcast details/summary by the uploader. You can change when it looks for new podcasts, too(every week, day, 6 hours, 3 hours, ect). And the cherry on top? It has a podcast directory, much like iTunes with selectable genres. So, right now WinAmp is pretty slick for podcasts.

But I'd still like a program specifically for podcasts, essentially Spotify: Podcast Edition. I've searched a bit and haven't really found what I'm looking for. Making one myself would be awesome...if I knew what I was doing. So for now WinAmp will have to do.

Suck it, OpenOffice.

2010-03-23T22:51:00.001-04:00

Today, my father had to write up a Broker Price Opinion, or BPO. Basically, an agent/broker will compare the surrounding houses to the one up for sale. This includes both sold houses and current houses for sale. You have to write up a bunch of shit including the year they were all built, number of bedrooms, quality of front-yard, ect. It's all quite tedious and time-consuming, but, it needs to be done.

I helped him last year get pictures of the houses off a real-estate website, and did so again today. He was sent the BPO form as a Word document, but we have OpenOffice. No big deal, right? OpenOffice works with anything, right? Fucking wrong. After typing everything up, then having me get all the pictures, the bitch doesn't save properly. What was already a 2 hour ordeal was finally solved within another 5. I've had it with OpenOffice. It isn't 100% compatible with Microsoft Office, which causes a crapload of problems, especially with realestate forms.

I had to forward the corrupted OpenOffice document to my dad's office, then edit it properly in Word, then email it. Even now I'm not 100% certain it worked. I'm really hoping it did. At this point I'm about ready to get every piece of OpenOffice off this computer and get Microsoft Office. In the long run it'll be a lot more useful. Hell in the short run it'll be useful. I rarely use OpenOffice as-is, and when I do it usually fucks things up for either me or my dad.

/rant.

Well that lasted long...

2010-03-21T02:17:00.002-04:00

I'm back playing Tribes. Day of Defeat, as well, which was fun. I forgot the majority of controls in that game, but it didn't take too long to get back in the swing of things. I still can't decide if I'm better off with a close-range automatic or semi/long-rage rifle. If I had to choose, it'd be the close-range rifle, mainly because of the rate of fire. The spread if a bitch, but that's to be expected.

I've joined the OnLive forums, mainly to see what their arguments for the service are. The InstantAction vs. OnLive debate is somewhat interesting. I mean, IA vs. OnLive really isn't the main talking point right now. It's not like Microsoft vs. Sony or anything. But comparing the two services is a bit of fun, at least to me. One the one hand, with OnLive you don't have to worry one bit about your hardware. Games can be played on high-end PC's to $150 netbooks, instantly. And really, this is the only advantage OnLive has over InstantAction.

With IA, you'll need the right hardware(or will you?*). Start-up time, while a significant increase from services like Steam, won't be instant either. It'll take a few minutes to download a 'chunk' of a game before you can get going. However, one big advantage is that you won't have to worry about lag, like a number of OnLive testers have noted recently. It's stored on your hard-drive. Pricing is also another big thing.

OnLive is asking for $15/month on top of game sales/rentals. That's more than double than Xbox Live per month. InstantAction on the other hand, has a number of pricing options, which I think 100% are determined by the publishers/developers themselves. One time payment, rent-to-own, in-game currency, ect. Rent-to-own seems to be the most popular choice, at least going by forum posts. And yes, I'm probably biased towards InstantAction when comparing it to another service. Especially since I really don't know jack shit about OnLive other than the pricing and what testers have said.

IA also has the ability to play games anywhere on the web where embedding is enabled. I'm actually not all that excited about this feature to be honest. They've said it's like embedding YouTube videos, but I really don't see a crapload of those outside of YouTube. When I do I simply choose to watch them on YouTube.com because they're usually laggy when embedded. It seems both services require you to be online when playing their games, despite having them downloaded to your HDD with InstantAction. We really haven't been given information on being able to play games offline from InstantAction, but this is probably another feature that'll be left to the pubs/devs to decide.

IA basically seems like one big tool for publishers and developers, rather than a service for gamers like OnLive is. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It's not a great thing, either. Both are aiming to be the future of gaming, but there's one thing that no one has really talked about, or at least made a big deal out of: Modding.

What will happen to the modding scene if in fact theses services, or at least one of them becomes the future of gaming? If it's OnLive then modders are screwed. They have absolutely zero access to the game, since it's all stored on a server miles away. IA? Not entirely sure. As of now Legions is somewhat moddable, though it isn't officially supported. But who knows what'll happen once the new site launches, which puts pubs/devs in control. I have a feeling most won't want people meddling with their games.

But this is assuming IA won't have anymore in-house games. I'm not saying IA is mod-friendly, but when comparing them to publishers like EA I think there's a bigger chance they'd allow a bit of modification, so long as no one is profiting from it. It's mere speculation at this point, really. PC gaming has been getting fucked up the ass at an alarming rate recently. If I were to chose which service to use, it'd be IA. What say you?

Break from Tribes.

2010-03-15T22:50:00.000-04:00

I will be taking a break from Tribes for a while, probably until PlayTribes launches. That is, if it ever launches. At this point, all I really play is base, and it's a bit of a bore lately. Games are too predictable, and having my most hated map come up quite frequently is a pretty big turnoff. I've never been able to enjoy this map, even though the majority of whatever community that's left regard it as a classic(admittedly it is, but that doesn't mean I have to like it).

I fear the 1.40 leak pushed the already delayed release of PlayTribes even more into the future. Play-testers have stated that the leak has had a fairly major consequence, though of course they aren't stating what exactly that means(yay NDA's for 12 year old games).

Everything InstantAction

2010-03-14T14:42:00.002-04:00

InstantAction at GDC, and pissing off CEO's.

2010-03-11T15:22:00.005-05:00

I noticed my previous blog got a few more hits than usual(more than 0). Thanks to that little blue box to the right of this post, I was able to see where they were coming from. And, unsurprisingly, all came from Oregon(that I could tell). Eugene, Portland and West Linn. And in case you didn't read it, I briefly called out InstantAction as going corporate, or at least appearing to be. Well, roughly 24 hours later and the company's CEO sent out a quick statement reassuring everyone that it had not gone corporate. While it's unlikely he was directly responding to me, I still had a good laugh at it. Though, having IA's community manager ask if I had any new blogs a short while ago seemed somewhat suspicious...

Anyways, IA is streaming live from GDC, and will be taking questions in roughly 40 minutes. Here's the stream.

The new InstantAction.

2010-03-09T22:37:00.002-05:00

When rumors started flying that InstantAction would be getting a site-makeover, I jokingly started saying the new site would be aimed at big-name publishers/developers as a means of getting their games to a wider audience, but more importantly as a means of getting more money. It was a very corporate view on the issue, one that, at the time, I wasn't serious about. To me, and probably a lot of other community members, a site makeover meant visual makeover, perhaps allowing for smoother gameplay or removing a few bugs everyone has been complaining about.

But then we got a glimpse at IA's new logo a few weeks ago, one that looked very...corporate, at least compared to their old one. Surely I wasn't right, was I? Then came yesterday, when IA sent out a newsletter informing subscribers that the site would be down starting March 10th, and it'd stay down for a few days. They then announced it'd be taken down a bit earlier than normal, as in tonight. And that's exactly what happened. I figured they put up a plain old 'site is down' image while they started implementing the new site. But instead we got a bit more..

Here's a preview of the new InstantAction. Own Your Customers? Monetize Any Way You Want? Boost Sales Conversion? Sweet Jesus, I was right! Whether or not big-name companies will get involved is still unknown. IA has always been about the indie developers, but this new make-over might be aimed at both. And in a sad nod to the community, they've shown the previous IA content in a mere box, ready to be put away.

The new IA is quite clearly aimed at developers/publishers rather than gamers, which isn't all that surprising. They spent half their time getting an audience of players(ie customers), but now its time to bring in the money makers. Can't wait to ask them a few questions during their GDC livestream(which I stupidly thought was today).

Tribes 1.40/PlayTribes leak.

2010-03-05T23:52:00.004-05:00

May 2011 Update: Main Tribes 1.40 download. Download Tribes 1.40 SP1 here. Includes all major bug fixes.

PlayTribes was leaked by one of the playtesters earlier this week. Actually, an earlier build of PlayTribes was leaked, to be precise. Some wondered if it was leaked, or if it was "leaked", as in secretly released by GarageGames themselves. I thought of this as well, though apparently that isn't true. It was indeed leaked by a playtester without GarageGame's approval, therefore breaking the already ridiculous NDA and possibly creating said playtester a shitload of legal problems.

Unsurprisingly GarageGames/InstantAction have been silent on the issue. Just days before the one year anniversarry of the initial announcement of PlayTribes, it gets leaked. How...poetic. If any GG/IA employees read this, I will now list what I like and dislike about the build leaked onto the intertubes. Think of it as that public beta you guys talked about last year but never delivered on.

What I like:

I can fucking run it. Smoothly, even. At exactly the same settings as 1.30.
Windowed OpenGL, though I doubt I'll find myself using it all that much.
Back-end options, like the loadout system, out of bounds opacity, new keybinding overlay, ect.
For some reason my chaining is better in 1.40. I like the new bullet effects.
Updated disc explosion is nice.
No terrain warping.

What I'd like to see in the final version:

Jump-jet.
Allow Q to still change weapons. I usually use the scroll wheel, but I also use Q at times. Why? I don't know. Not having that ability somewhat messes up my game in 1.40.

Fix the HUD. Right now, the HUD is somewhat borked in 1.40. The score box is now overlapping the chatbox, and both the health and energy bars are overlapped. The latter of which I know isn't a resolution issue, because I've seen the same problem is much larger screenshots.

Ability to remove everything on the screen. You can pretty much do this already...except for the score box for some odd reason. Either I'm blind or stupid, because I didn't seen an in-game option to remove it. Everything else is removable.

Go back to the original zoomed-in display. Having those thin green lines go from top to bottom, side to side helped me snipe. I'm not entirely sure why they were removed in 1.40.

1.40 has crashed a number of times since I downloaded it yesterday, and I'm not sure why. I've also noticed a few stuttering issues. I know it wasn't lag because my ping was around 60 at the time I noticed it.

And I guess that's it. 1.40 is playable with very minor complaints, coming from me at least.

Ups and Downs

2010-03-03T16:01:00.001-05:00

Last week something awesome happened. I was able to play DVD's on my computer again. See, after updating my video card driver I could play Tribes in OpenGL fairly well, though I was sacrificing the ability to watch DVD's. Why this happened I don't know. I figured it was a codec problem, but various codec packs resulted in nothing but black screens and messed up audio.

For a while I could switch back and forth between driver updates, something that probably wasn't all that wise to begin with. If I wanted to watch a DVD I'd simply rollback to a previous driver, but if I wanted to play Tribes in OpenGL I'd have to install the new one. Eventually I couldn't even roll back, so I was stuck with no DVD capabilities. Until now.

The problem wasn't with codecs. The problem was with hardware acceleration. I turned it off and voila: DVD playback was able...somewhat. The quality was lower than before, but that really wasn't an issue. The first DVD I tried was Se7en, which happend to be on my computer desk already. I figured since that played fine every other DVD would work. Wrong. For some ungodly reason I can't play The Shining, something I did quite often for screencaps or to watch a specific scene. Mind you, my 2001 copy of The Shining runs fine, but my 2007 version simply won't play.

And it's not like before. None of my media players will even detect the disk. I'm currently downloading an older version of VLC to see if that helps(as suggested). I really hope I can fix this(edit: Nope).

A few nights ago I was pouring a glass of 7UP when all of a sudden 'SNAP!', my glasses broke. One of the hinges simply broke, without me even doing anything physical. Taping it back together provided a half-assed solution, so today I took them in for repair. I had to leave them there, forcing me to wear my old glasses, resulting in blurry vision. Driving home was fun.

This weekend is GDC, and apparently InstantAction will be there. I've started a thread at their forums, and posted a number of questions to be asked during the live stream(if they have one). They certainly aren't the easiest of questions to answer, and I'd be very surprised if they tackled them all. Only time will tell...

1 year since InstantAction announced PlayTribes.

2010-02-19T23:18:00.001-05:00

In less than a month it'll be 1 year since InstantAction announced PlayTribes. See countdown to the right.

Buzzed.

2010-02-15T01:59:00.005-05:00

Buzz sucks. I'm sure feature-wise it might be ok, but for someone like me it's utterly pointless. I already have a social networking site account: Facebook. I check it a few times a day but rarely actually use it. There's no real point other than to correct a few Bush-loving right wingers or 'like' a random status update. My biggest issue with Buzz is that I don't have any worth-while contacts to follow. After activating Buzz it automatically followed a whopping 3 people, one of which posted spam. I disabled the service less than 10 minutes after activating it. If Google ever lets me import contacts from other sites, such as Facebook or even LinkedIn(which I never use), then maybe I'll think about using it. But for now, it's useless. Just like Wave.

Anyways, I stumbled upon some rather sexy Tribes pictures, which I think are actually from PlayTribes. Enjoy.

Lost: S6.1

2010-02-03T00:01:00.003-05:00

I might as well talk about the new Lost episode, now that I've finally seen it. Perhaps my expectations were set too high, but I felt this season opener was a bit of a let-down. Specially the island storyline. I've read quite a few posts about tonight's episode, and many feel the off-island/alternate timeline story was necessary and boring. However, that part of the episode was most intriguing to me. I mean, the bomb worked. It worked. This is exactly what I was hoping to happen, but unfortunately they also threw in an island storyline as well.

My problem with the island story is it feels too much like Season 5. I really don't like the whole Egyptian aspect of the show. I liked the whole mysterious nature of the show, mainly the first 3 or so seasons. You didn't know what the monster was. You didn't know what Jacob did, or if he really even existed. Richard Alpert was a man with many answers but rarely gave them. Locke was always searching for...'something'. In Season 5, things got switched around. Suddenly Jacob is mortal? Locke has more answers than Alpert? Smokey is a security system(that Ben can beckon my flushing a puddle)? It's nice that they're starting to explain a few things, but I'm not totally digging the answers given.

And Season 6, episode 1 just seemed more of the same, other than the off-island story. Juliette is dead? Meh. I didn't care for her character all that much. Now we've got some Japanese guy running things, essentially the new Ben only more annoying. But it was quite awesome to see both Boone and Charlie again, I will admit that. And the line "I was supposed to die" line was obviously a parallel to his previous death. Seeing the subtle changes on the plane was interesting as well. As I've said before, the off-island story interests me the most. It seems all the characters are running into each other again.

I'll wrap this up by stating I wasn't all that thrilled with the season opener, but I didn't hate it. Hell I didn't even dislike it one bit. It's Lost. Can't wait for next Tuesday.

Money, it's a gas.

2010-01-24T01:41:00.000-05:00

Since initially glancing at the new The61 yesterday, I'm still in disbelief. I visited it maybe twice today, both for less than 5 seconds each. I've stuck with old.thesixtyone.com the most of the day(currently using it this moment). A number of websites have been created in protest, but none are very active. I'm trying to find the definitive website that has most of the community, but unfortunately The61's Facebook page seems to be the place. The hate continues, by the way. I can check back every couple of minutes and see a new message about how horrible the new website is on their wall.

I've given stereofame a try, and I'm not really digging it. Too much of a game aspect. Cherrypeel is probably my favorite alternative thus far, and have seen it mentioned more than once since this who ordeal started, which is good. I actually discovered the site in 2008, but never really visited it because The61 had everything I needed. That might change...

I've noticed a very strange, albeit scary trend as of late. Every website posting about the new design seem to praise it. For some reason they find it to be 'beautiful' and 'gorgeous'. Now, this may be true. I'm not a professional designer, but from my point of view the actual layout itself is unique. But one quick glance at the comments of said articles and it's obvious to see what the actual users think. I keep seeing people say the new design is the result of investors controlling the site now, and aiming for bigger bands(and getting more money), instead of independent artists. If so, it's sad. Very sad.

TheSixtyOne: Life and Death.

2010-01-23T04:21:00.001-05:00

I've been a member of TheSixtyOne.com for about a year now. For those who don't know what it is, think of it as Digg or Reddit, only for music. Songs were displayed much like stories, and had a comment and rating system, along with other features. Among the sea of music sites, TheSixtyOne used to be one of my favorites. I discovered many artists thanks to the website, such as band of horses, Fleet Foxes, RAC and many more. The site itself was fairly simple and straightforward when it came to navigating as well.

As you can see there are 5 tabs on the left, all of which are self-explanatory. Once logged in a 6th tab appears, which displays suggested songs based on your listening and rating preferences. The right hand side also changes once logged in and displays a list of 16 genres to choose from(or All if you don't care). But besides discovering new artists and songs, there was an added game element. When I first joined it was fairly simplistic: Bump a song, and receive additional points if anyone else bumps said song. The creators then started to add more game features, such as the ability to revive songs to the frontpage if you have enough points(something that drove me away from the site for a while), then adding 'quests' to achieve such as listening to a certain number of songs in a specified genre.

Was I big fan of the game aspect? Not necessarily. I didn't hate it, but I wasn't obsessed with getting achievements or getting as many reputation points as possible. I simply bumped, which eventually turned into hearts(another thing I didn't quite like), songs I liked. Even though the site went through a number of changes throughout the year I was there, the same basic concept was constant. I could quite easily navigate from song to song, check out the comments on both individual songs or artist pages, create playlists, track my hearted songs, ect. It was a great service and website. And then January 21st came.

This is the new TheSixtyOne. No, that isn't an artist page(though it might as well be). That's the actual homepage. What was once a site with easy navigation and actual sense of community is now dwindled down to...this. Wish to comment on an artist's page? No more. How about saving a song for easy listening? Nope. You can no longer see who has subscribed to you, subscribe to a user or even listen to artists you've subscribed to. Radio feature? No more. Same goes for your friend's pages. They've completely gutted the site.

But the worst part? The actual navigation. Instead of being greeted by a list of songs to chose from, you're now forced to look at one song at a time. All while staring at an over-pixelated image of the band. No more browsing through the hot, top or recent songs. While those sections are still there, it's still a 'one song at a time' ordeal. From a graphics designer standpoint the site may look nice a flashy. But from a usability standpoint it's horrible.

The funny thing is reading reactions about the site. 99.99% of all existing users absolutely hate the new website. However, those who never even heard of it till now love it. So, what will I and many others do? 1. Bitch like there's no tomorrow, mainly on the website's Facebook page(it's been constant negative feedback all day). 2. Find alternatives. Grooveshark is an obvious choice, but it's not really like TheSixtyOne. The61 was an adventure, mainly filled with new independent artists. Grooveshark is a service for finding a specific band, basically Google for music. I've seen a number of people mention Stereofame, while others have said a group from The61 are planning on trying to recreate the site before the update went live. 3. If all else fails, use the old version of The61 at old.thesixtyone.com. Unfortunately that site will eventually go down, as stated in a blog post a while ago. Once that happens, my relationship with thesixtyone will come to an end. I've recommended the site numerous times in the past to both listeners and artists. I will no longer do this.

And that's really all anyone can do, other than hope that the founders make the necessary changes. Websites have gone through changes before, such as Facebook, and people bitched and said they'd never return but eventually did. However, I feel this is different. It's such a drastic change-for the worse-that I think the community that was once there will indeed leave for good. A number of artists have posted songs in protest, such as 61 Ways by State Shirt, and Bring Back The Old t61 by Hollis Smith.

One can't help but wonder why they did this. Was there a beta? Apparently yes. A handful of users and friends of the creators tested the site for a few months, and somehow came up with the decision to launch it. Then there's the recent tidbit about the site getting backing from Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito and his investing buddy Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn. How this directly affected the new site design is a bit of a puzzle to me, but it is interesting(and new to me).

A damn shame this is. Goodbye TheSixtyOne.

Steam, Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat

2009-12-14T22:14:00.003-05:00

What's this? Two blogs within two days? Madness...

Sometime last week a friend of mine gifted me Counter-Strike on Steam. It was actually quite surprising, since I really wasn't all the interested in playing it. I've been happy for the past decade or so playing Tribes, too lazy/cheap to get a new graphics card and CPU required for any games made after 2000. I asked him out of mere curiosity if my computer could run Counter-Strike: Source, since it was quite cheap at the time on Steam(weekend deal I believe). A disappointing but acceptable 'No' came from him, to which he then asked if I'd ever played the original Counter-Strike, to which I also said 'No'.

Now, before I go on I must explain my situation with Steam. I'd never used it before, but installed it a few years back for God knows why. Instead of going through the normal uninstall process I simply deleted the folders...or something. It was a while ago so I can't remember my exact actions. Anyways, by not uninstalling properly I couldn't remove it from the Add/Remove Programs list. Not a big deal before, but when trying to install it again it produced a very strange issue. I couldn't uninstall it because for some reason it couldn't remove all the files from the D: drive(sound familiar? Damn permissions). Yet I couldn't install it because it found an existing version on my PC. So what the fuck do I do now?

Edit the registries! After Googling a bit I deleted the Steam folder from HKEY_whateverthefuck. I decided to delete the whole damn Valve folder as well, since I never play the Half-Life demo anymore. I restarted this beast and ran the installation process again, and success arose. I could finally install Steam. Now, back to Counter-Strike.

Not 10 minutes after getting Steam up and running I received Counter-Strike and a few other mods as a gift. I started to download CS until I realized one slight problem. The default folder Steam installs to is C:\Program Files\Steam. My C: drive doesn't have enough space for CS and the mods included, so I checked the options to see if I could change it to my D: drive. Strangely there is no such option...built-in, that is.

Steam's very own website has instruction on changing the download folder, and it's really quite simple. So after finally getting everything setup, I restarted the download process and waited. I was very surprised at how fast it downloaded the ~800 MB file. I was playing CS within an hour after downloading had begun. So, how's Counter-Strike you ask?

It's alright. I really don't like having just one life per round. Nor do I like the fact that pretty much everyone else is a shit-ton better than me. Plus, recoil is something I've definitely gotta get used to after playing Tribes for so long. I can definitely understand why it's one of the most popular PC games out there though. Like Tribes, team-work is crucial, even more-so since you only have 1 life. But this wasn't the only gift I received.

On Friday, the 11th, he also sent me Day of Defeat. He said it was nothing like Counter-Strike, so I was already excited to play it. I'm not bashing CS, but it just isn't for me. Day of Defeat, in my opinion, is 10x better than Counter-Strike. For starters, you have infinite amount of lives. Secondly it isn't just straight-up team deathmatch. You must also control axis points, while defending your own. I'd say team-work is even more important in DoD as well, even trumping Tribes.

The community is also pretty mature as well. I've heard countless horror stories about Xbox Live's user-base being filled with annoying(and racist) 13 year olds. Mind you, having a good friends-list probably wouldn't hurt. I expected to have a similar experience, but with DoD I really haven't encountered anything like that. There's always 'that guy' who tells you what's going on in the game, when to rush, where the snipers are, ect. It's one of the more serious games I've played, yet there's always a casual attitude as well. If for instance, you kill someone repeatedly, they usually won't bitch about it and quit. They'll usually laugh it off, sometimes even complimenting you.

tl;dr: Dod>CS.

Printers, Tribes and Counter-Strike.

2009-12-13T22:42:00.005-05:00

I might as well sneak in a blog before the year's end. Yesterday (Saturday), I went over to Wal-Mart in search of a new AiO printer. I wasn't expecting much, since it's Wal-Mart afterall, but was surprised by the amount they had to chose from. There were roughly a dozen out on display, most of which being HP. Our previous AiO printer was a Kodak 5500, and it couldn't print for shit. It was always faded, even after getting a new print head from Kodak (for free, which was nice). So during my search I completely avoided anything with Kodak on it.

After briefly glancing over the printers for sale, I then did some comparing. Each box displayed what kind of ink cartridges it took, and thankfully I was right next to the ink cartridge isle. I went, one by one, comparing each printer's cartridge price. We finally decided on the HP Photosmart C4640, whose ink cartridges are just $5 more than our Kodak's. Once home I couldn't have been happier watching Kodak uninstall itself from my computer, then yanking (ok, gently pulling) the USB cable from it as well.

After unboxing the new HP printer and setting the language and such (on the touchscreen LCD screen), I then inserted the CD. And this is when my entire day turned to shit.

During the installation, it told me it couldn't write to D:\HP\bin. Now, I was both surprised and not surprised by this. For starters, why is it even writing to the D: drive? It never specified which drive to write to, which was pretty annoying. It was also writing to the C:\ drive, which is what I expected it to do. I wasn't surprised it couldn't write to it because I've always had problems installing software to the D:\ drive. I'm 95% certain it was to do with permissions which I've never fully figured out.

I tried uninstalling/reinstalling the software 3 times, and with each installation process taking roughly 10-15 minutes I wasted nearly an hour by getting the same error message each time. I then went in search online for any official instructions when encountering such a problem, but of course there were none. I could only find one set of instructions for those who had any problems installing the software, and even though it didn't exactly match my problem, I decided to give it a go anyways.

It gave the usual, and almost embarrassing solution that I reinstall the software. It's not that the actual solution was poorly written or anything, but reinstalling something that doesn't work is the first thing anyone should do and really shouldn't have to be told to. I knew it wouldn't work, but I did it anyways (just to say I followed the instructions word-for-word). And it didn't.

It then told me to disable any unnecessary startup items, which I did as well. I created a list of every program that runs at startup, then unselected them from msconfig. After restarting this beast, the installation process unsurprisingly failed yet again. I was at this for 4+ hours now. Installing a printer shouldn't be this hard these days, but I really don't blame HP for something that's more than likely a problem with my computer's permission settings. I went back online in search for any other similar issues, and ran across one solution I hadn't tried yet. At this point it was literally my last option before calling someone who knows a shit-ton more than I do about computers. My hopes were low, so either this solution was going to work or I was calling quits.

I made a new user account, set it as Admin, and tried installing the software from that account. Previously, the installation process failed when trying to install '1 of 8' programs. It never made it 2. But when I started installing from the new user account, it did. Then to 3, 4, 5 and so on. I couldn't believe it. The simple task of creating a new user account was the solution I was looking for. I did run into another error message, but thankfully this little program resolved my issue, and by 5:45pm I finally had a working printer. So far it's working as it should. Scans, prints and copies are all in working order. One big issue, at least for my dad, is that he can't edit scanned documents. It doesn't come with any editing software other than the usual crop, rotate, contrast, ect. He actually wanted to take it back because he couldn't do this.

Fortunately I think things will be ok since I showed him how to edit them in Paint. I had to type out instructions, but it's worth it if it means keeping the damn thing. It'll be a while before we truly know if it'll meet our needs, but the fact that it just works makes me happy. And then we have Tribes...

Or, actually, we don't have Tribes. It's been a while since I've played, easily the longest period between plays since...well...anytime this year I'd say. Believe it or not I just haven't been interested in the game, nor do I feel the need to play it. If PlayTribes were to come out sometime today or tomorrow, I suppose a simple 'meh' would best express my feelings. Though I guess a large part of this has to do with the fact that I've recently discovered a game called Counter-Strike. I'll dive into that in another blog. This one's long enough.

Stonehenge Shoutcast

2009-11-20T16:30:00.001-05:00

Words are not required. Just watch.

Podcasts.

2009-10-07T20:58:00.004-04:00

Holy Batman balls, a new blog post! Guess that shows just how bored I am right now. Speaking of (internet) boredom, I'm looking for a cure, and I think podcasts are just what I'm looking for. Unfortunately I'm not really aware of which ones are worth listening to. Basically anything to do with games or technology should do. Suggestions?

Even better would be one for each day of the week. I've started listening to GiantBomb's podcast(GiantBombcast, which I'm listening to this moment), which is pretty damn awesome, even if it is just a tad too long for my liking. They pump out new ones each Tuesday, so that day is covered. Then we have InstantAction's podcast as always, but unfortunately I really can't depend on them releasing it on a regular schedule. On the rare occasion it's late Friday night(and I mean rare). Usually it's either Saturday or Sunday, though lately they've been pushing them to Mondays or even Tuesdays. The erratic release schedule puts a damper on my little podcast goal.

Even though I don't listen to it anymore, I know Major Nelson's Podcast comes out each Sunday, so that might have to do for the time being. I've also just found out about ForceCast, a podcast about Star Wars which looks like it comes out every Friday. Haven't listened to it yet, so who knows if I'll like it. So, this is what I've got so far:

Sunday: Major Nelson(and possibly InstantAction)
Monday: Nothing(possibly InstantAction)
Tuesday: GiantBombcast(and possibly InstantAction)
Wednesday: Nothing
Thursday: Nothing
Friday: ForceCast(and possibly InstantAction)
Saturday: Nothing(possibly InstantAction)

So I've got about 4 more podcasts/days left to fill in. As you can see, InstantAction's wild schedule sorta puts a kink in my weekly podcast outlook. What say you? Please, no vidcasts. Audio-only podcasts are my preferred choice. 30-60 minutes would also be nice.

Alas, we have even more info.

2009-09-05T22:00:00.002-04:00

I must say I'm surprised that IA didn't pre-screen the questions before answering them in their live podcast earlier today. I came off as somewhat of a dick in my questions, mainly because I've been frustrated by how they've handled PlayTribes. Skip to ~12:00 for the goods on PlayTribes.

'Ah crap' indeed...But still, not entirely happy with the answer that a new CEO delayed a highly-anticipated game by 2-3 months.

Alas, we have information.

2009-08-09T16:12:00.001-04:00

PlayTribes was finally brought up again in the latest InstantAction podcast. It was quite enjoyable watching Ian squirm as my question about PlayTribes was read aloud. I could tell James was enjoying as well. And even though I laughed at the torment that ensued, I'm still not entirely satisfied with the answer. While we've finally gotten a more precise release date for the public beta(maybe), it still doesn't excuse them for not releasing any updates. A simple gallery would suffice.

But between my last blog and this one, I've learned something quite important. Project lead Justin DuJardin actually quit GarageGames, though I'm not exactly sure why. I'm fairly certain it wasn't a friendly farewell, however. So here we sit, essentially in the same exact spot we've been in the past 5 months. According to Ian it'll be another 2 months before we get into the public beta, but I'm not totally expecting that to actually happen. It sounds like a lot of stuff is going to happen at InstantAction now that Castle is on board, meaning stuff like Tribes will get pushed aside. Sad...

Anyways, here's the podcast.

8 Months of Agony.

2009-08-06T23:15:00.002-04:00

I started playing Tribes again back in January of this year. As I've said before, I play for a while, quit, play for a while, quit, ect. Then in March PlayTribes was announced, so I knew I had to keep playing so my skills didn't go to complete shit once it released. Hearing that it'd have a built-in ski script, I sought out a similar script and installed it to get familiar with it. Two or three months later and I was starting to feel the end of my normal Tribes cycle, but I still kept playing despite not having a very fun time doing so. Very rarely did I play a game where genuine fun was involved.

Then summer comes and I'm still playing. Forcing myself to play a few games of base, and changing it up a bit by playing in Elite Renegade servers. June comes without any news, which is to be expected(but certainly not wanted). Finally in late June it miraculously gets mentioned in a podcast. We're told the public beta is coming 'very soon', which to me means a week or so, but after witnessing IA's track record I knew better than to get my hopes up. Then comes July, which is disappointingly no different than the previous 4 months. We're now entering the 5th month after the initial announcement of PlayTribes, and I must give it to the PR team. They've not only released 0 information about the game(this doesn't mean information hasn't been obtained, however), they've single-handedly made me lose interest in Tribes altogether.

I'm basically totally burnt out with playing for such a long consecutive period. The amount of enjoyment I get from it is...minuscule. This isn't a bash on the game, but rather the player base. It's small, so I know what to expect. I know 'bob' is always a sniper and 'bill' is always a Heavy who depends on his chaingun and chaingun only, all of which are probably cheating. People are applauded for their kill count rather than flag captures, though this isn't exclusive to Tribes by any means.

I've more-or-less found my self skiing from one side of the map to the other in most games, because I know exactly how it'll play out 99% of the time. I thought I was the only one who felt like this, but I was apparently wrong. A few days ago I was playing a game when a discussion about cheats and the community took place. One said the game was losing more and more players, and the majority that do play are using cheats, basically confirming my suspicion. Then just yesterday a discussion in the forums arose about the lack of information about PlayTribes, prompting another thread asking for news on the project.

I completely agree with what's been said lately, mainly:

"...IA announces stuff to raise hype but they do so waay before the product is released with scarce filler announcements (screenshots, early access contests etc) to keep people interested, so the hype dies and they lose a lot of potential players way before they finally release the product.. we've warned them but they continue ..."

..."Dropping the massive bombshell that is Tribes reborn and then hiding under a rock for six months is hardly good PR.

We need something to refresh peoples interest. Screenies of the new HUD, a paragraph or two about what's happening, something, anything that generates a bit more news. Even if you were to drip feed little snippets once a week, say a couple of screenies, at least it would be something.

If you don't have the manpower to do some PR, let one of the Beta Testers write something, get approval to release the info and then post it here..."

Hearing that even the private beta testers, the ones actually playing the game, are losing interest is disheartening as well. Having an NDA for PlayTribes is also ridiculous in my opinion. They aren't making an drastic changes, mainly fixing stuff from the original. I can understand how Legions testers have an NDA, but for PlayTribes? A 10+ year old game which isn't getting any gameplay changes whatsoever, but more or less bug fixes and script enhancements? Why so secretive? I've tried being patient and haven't really expressed myself on the forums that much, nor here(well, maybe a few times). Waiting 5 months just for a bit of information on a game that came out over a decade ago isn't very fun, and I've just about had it.

I don't want a Twitter or Facebook update. I want some damn information about the game.

Going back to Digg(though I'm not happy about it)

2009-08-01T01:11:00.002-04:00

In May of last year I started to boycott Digg.com. Seeing the same names on the frontpage was and still is a real turn-off to me. It shows how people are gaming the system, and stealing stories from 'smaller' users. I stuck with Reddit for about a year, until now. I'm not bashing Reddit at all. It's better in a lot of ways when compared to Digg. But with Digg I can check the upcoming section every 5 minutes or so and get completely new submissions to check out. This is mainly due to the huge number of users on the site. With Reddit, it's slower. A lot slower. Lately I've found myself checking the site every couple of minutes but still seeing the same stories. So I'm now lifting my boycott on Digg.

Going back after more than a year and seeing the changes is...different. I like how I can simply click on the descriptive text and it'll take me to the comments. But what I don't like is how it doesn't give me the URL of the site that's submitted. Now each one reads like a tinyurl of sorts, consisting of 'http://digg.com/d49ad'. I'd much rather see the original site URL so I know exactly where I'm going. I also hate the new upcoming system, which automatically takes you to a "Recommended page", based on your recent diggs. Since I haven't been to the site in so long the page is empty, thus worthless. I have to make another click to see 'All' upcoming stories, which was originally one of my favorite pages to visit.

I still see the usual faces on the first few pages. MrBabyMan, badwithcomputer, msaleem, ect. I was hoping at least one of them would be gone or banned, but of course this is too much to ask(where as less popular users have been banned in the past, even though everyone wanted MrBabyMan gone). So overall a few minor changes have been made since my last visit, most of which are annoyances. But the content is quite extensive so I'll just have to bear with it.

edit: I just found out how to fix the digg URL annoyance. Yay, I guess...

Defend Objective!

2009-07-28T00:25:00.003-04:00

Tonight's game of Tribes started out pretty crappy, but ended up quite awesome. The map was DropZone420, one of the better maps in my opinion. It's quite a bit like Cloud Docking Bay, though the objective is much more open. While you can set defense, it's a bit easier to destroy than on CDB. Anyways, as I said it started out rather crappy. They got the objective from the start, setup defensive turrets and had a sniper up there who was using HappyMod. After a number of attempts at taking him out and failing I decided it'd be best to helping set D around our flag.

I set maybe one turret before wanting another go at the sniper. It seemed no one else was really paying much attention to him or the objective, but instead were trying to get their flag. Things stayed like this until around the 5 minute mark. Suddenly, the message "Your team has taken an objective" popped up. I was pretty surprised to see this, thinking the enemy would surely hold the objective throughout the rest of the game. I'm not entirely sure who managed to get it, but he essentially saved the game for us.

Once I saw that message all my attention went to defending the objective. I flew up to it(which surprised me, since I was expecting to get sniped at any moment. I took the long way up), laid a few mines and waited. At around the 2:30 mark I and another team-mate told everyone to defend the objective, which was the only gamesaver at this point. As you can see from that map we had about 3 more guys coming in to defend it. What really pissed me off were the ones that ignored the chatbox. We didn't get all our team-mates up there, which would've been great. A few stayed back at the base, for reasons unknown to me.

Anyways, I was surprised at how little we got attacked. From what I saw, only 3 or so enemies made an attempt at capturing the objective. One was successful, but only for a few seconds. I quickly recaptured it and we ended up winning with 1 point. Good times. Great team-work.

InstantAction or OnLive?
	InstantAction
	OnLive
	Neither

pollcode.com free polls