Monday, January 28, 2008
Mass Effect is Awesome
If you're a fan of science fiction, you really have to play Mass Effect. And when you play it, you really should read all of the codexes you get. From a pure fiction and universe-building perspective, Mass Effect is some of the best hard science fiction I've encountered in any medium. Handily better than any other sci-fi videogame or movie, and in the top-tier of science-fiction novels. The game devotes probably 20 pages of text to the tactical details of plausible, hard science-fiction descriptions of FTL and mass-effect-generating ship-to-ship combat, and as far as I've seen, the game doesn't even have any ship-to-ship combat. It's amazing.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Happy New Year!
Just noticed that Derek Smart released Universal Combat as freeware, and then immediately started a flamewar on Blue's News. It's good to see the internet bring in the new year with something as beautiful as this:
| 81. | Re: Derek Smart | Jan 2, 18:19 | dsmart |
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Why don't you go die Derek? I have no less than three degrees - including a distance learning (something which even MIT, Princeton and everyone else is now offering) Ph.D. which I worked for an earned, am a noted math and AI whiz, have training from the likes of IBM and just about everyone who was anyone in IT back in the eighties and nineties, program in no less than seven languages (one of which I wrote, from scratch), have several publications, IP, one patent pending and God knows what else. Plus, I've been in business long before you got your sorry ass out of high school. ...if you think I got that from a cereal box, while signing deals left and right with most of the industry's top players, while working with people at my calibre, then you have a lot to learn about how real life actually works. Oh, lest I forget, I make a decent living, doing, well, nothing other than what I love doing. With your masters - assuming you ever complete it - you will never, ever, earn what I made in the last five years, in your entire lifespan on Earth. ...and I don't live in a trailer park, in my parents basement or with some whinny old coot. So yeah, go ahead, attack me. ...and gaming is my passion; not attacking people needlessly on the Net just for fun. This message was edited at Jan 5, 09:02. | ||
Friday, January 4, 2008
Endless Setlist
Finishing 4-player Endless Setlist on Hard with my family was one of the most epic videogame experiences in my life. We spent over 2 hours stuck on Green Grass and High Tides. By the time we finished I was no longer playing the drums - I was the Commander in a Battlefield game.
Monitoring 4 people's star power and crowd ratings, calling in strategic star power strikes right before the singer gets frozen out in an extended tamborine section, trying to maximize both deaths per player by keeping them unconscious as long as possible before reviving them once more into the breach. By the time we finished the song, people were shouting, arms were thrown up in the air - I've played in FPS and fighting game tournaments before, but for my mom, sister, and wife, I think that was the first time they'd experienced the kind of fiero you get from a truly epic gaming win.
After GG&HT, we still had 5 songs left, but we were such a well-oiled star-power machine at that point that Won't Get Fooled Again, Flirting With Disaster, and Run To The Hills just felt like a detente after the climax of a really good movie.
What surprised me most about Rock Band, by the end of Band World Tour, was how well the game works on a co-operative, strategic, band level. Getting past the fun of playing the individual instruments, there's still an entire game left in the player interactions. Playing drums on a guitar-heavy song, I feel like a healer in an MMO, acting as a support class for the rest of the song.
On the sucky side, because of Live's connectivity problems over the break, I wasn't able to transfer over my gamertag, so I didn't get the achievement (at least my sister did). But hearing my senior-citizen, church-choir mother getting "Awesome" rapping Sabotage and Faith No More in her soprano voice was a worthy prize.
Monitoring 4 people's star power and crowd ratings, calling in strategic star power strikes right before the singer gets frozen out in an extended tamborine section, trying to maximize both deaths per player by keeping them unconscious as long as possible before reviving them once more into the breach. By the time we finished the song, people were shouting, arms were thrown up in the air - I've played in FPS and fighting game tournaments before, but for my mom, sister, and wife, I think that was the first time they'd experienced the kind of fiero you get from a truly epic gaming win.
After GG&HT, we still had 5 songs left, but we were such a well-oiled star-power machine at that point that Won't Get Fooled Again, Flirting With Disaster, and Run To The Hills just felt like a detente after the climax of a really good movie.
What surprised me most about Rock Band, by the end of Band World Tour, was how well the game works on a co-operative, strategic, band level. Getting past the fun of playing the individual instruments, there's still an entire game left in the player interactions. Playing drums on a guitar-heavy song, I feel like a healer in an MMO, acting as a support class for the rest of the song.
On the sucky side, because of Live's connectivity problems over the break, I wasn't able to transfer over my gamertag, so I didn't get the achievement (at least my sister did). But hearing my senior-citizen, church-choir mother getting "Awesome" rapping Sabotage and Faith No More in her soprano voice was a worthy prize.
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