Tag: computer games

They’re Coming to Get You…

Gaming

Zombies have been popular for a while now, to the point that some people are over them entirely. Not me though. I can’t get enough. And as long as they keep putting out Dead Risings, Left 4 Deads, Dead Islands and similar games, I’ll be a very happy camper. Which is why the following games, either already out or coming out soon(tm) make me very happy…

MineZ

One of the first things I wanted to do in Minecraft, way back in the alpha/beta phases, once survival mode was introduced, was to turn off everything but zombies. It could be done, but you had to jump through a lot of hoops. Now someone has made a server-side mod, MineZ, that allows lots of people (up to 100 per server) to play in a block laden pixel art style world of the zombie apocalypse. I haven’t had time to play it myself, but I’ve watched a bunch of YouTube videos and I’ll be carving out some time in the near future to go check it out.

If you want a little more info beyond the game’s own site, check out this article at RPS or the official sub-reddit.

DayZ

If shooters are more your thing, and you happen to own ARMA II and it’s expansion Operation Arrowhead (you can buy them both in a 2-pack from Steam for $30 – or cheaper if you wait for a sale), you can get the free mod DayZ which lets you play in a world overrun with zombies. I’ve heard it described as being a little harsh – but then, that’s what I would expect a zombie apocalypse to be like. Although, I imagine most of the people who are dicks in the game would be crying and pissing themselves if it were real. The Internet makes cowards into cock-sure braggarts.

I haven’t played it myself, because I don’t have ARMA II. But it was recently announced that DayZ will be developed into a stand alone game, so I’ll probably wait for that so I don’t have to buy the game twice.

The War Z

Last but not least, The War Z, a game calling itself an MMO and promising 250 players per map, no levels, a hardcore mode with permadeath and a normal mode where dying locks you out of the character for a period (not set, but currently intended to be 24 to 48 hours – and since you can have up to 5 characters, being locked out doesn’t mean you have to stop playing). You can read more about it over at IGN. This one doesn’t have a nifty trailer for me to show you, but their site has images. I suspect I’ll have to upgrade my PC before I can play this – my five year old Dell just isn’t going to cut it for much longer.

Of course, I’m also still eagerly awaiting the MMO from Undead Labs because it’ll be on the Xbox 360, and I won’t need to upgrade that.

Ten

Site News

In 1998 I was playing Team Fortress with people I’d known and a larger group that had grown from my earliest days “online” dialing in to BBSs. At the time, I was hanging out in IRC chat on the GamesNet servers, mostly in the Disciples of Syrinx room. I had moved back home with my parents at the end of the previous year after successfully (in my mind) living “on my own” for a few years so that I could focus on school, doubling up my classes, and finish my four year degree in six years (maybe I hadn’t been so successful on my own). I spent my free time, and since I wasn’t working there was quite a bit of it, playing games and reading the .plan files of developers. Mostly it was the id software crew, but there were others. Blogging wasn’t so popular back then, but people did have websites, and game developers, especially in the first person shooter arena, kept up with .plan files. With college nearing its end and loving computer games, I had this idea that I would get into the gaming industry. Months later and many unreturned phone calls and rejection letters, I would set aside that dream, but at that moment, I decided to start maintaining my own .plan.

I did it in IRC at first, so the only people who could read it were people who knew to look and only when I was online with my mIRC client. Soon enough I moved it to Geocities. June 17th, 1998 marked my first post on the internet, and because I’m a pack rat and paranoid about computer crashes, I always kept spare copies of everything, so if you want, you can dig through the archives here and actually read everything from the beginning. After Geocities, I moved to my own domain, loadfix.com. If you try to go there now, it redirects to a .de domain that gives back a 403 Forbidden error. A year later I would move on to squadleader.com with dreams of eventually running an online magazine for first person shooters. I never did, and now that domain is a squatter’s hope for cash (a crap website placeholder of links doing nothing but praying someone wants to buy it). I would have kept squadleader but for one, I wasn’t playing shooters anymore after EverQuest took over my life, and the other reason is it turned out I didn’t own it. Sure, I registered it, paid for it, but my hosting company put everything in their name, so when I tried to switch providers, they kept the name. Thus begins the probablynot.com era.

To be perfectly honest, when I put my first ever posting on the internet, I never thought I’d still be doing it ten years later. In fact it didn’t even cross my mind to consider it. In one respect, its like keeping a diary, and now and then I’ll go back and root around through the old posts and laugh at myself, or shake my head, smile, or nod knowingly. However, unlike a diary, its out there for other people to read. There are times I’ve considered going back and deleting some of the old posts. When I migrated from Coranto to WordPress, I had the perfect opportunity to just lose all the old content, or pick and choose what to put back in, but I ended up importing all of it. Good or bad, I wrote it, its me, or at least was me at the time, and as I’ve written before, if you are happy with who you are, you can’t really regret your past because your past has made you who you are.

However, ultimately, my decision to import all the old posts came down to one thing, that I’ve been doing this, emptying my brain onto the Internet since 1998, for me. When people comment, or send emails, about what I’ve put out there, it feels good, but I’ve never done it for that. I always just wanted to put my thoughts down on “paper” but I didn’t want to hide it under my mattress or in a closet or behind other books on the book shelves where no one would ever see it, because maybe, just maybe, my words might affect someone else, or someone’s reading of my words might affect me. Do I sound emo? I think I sound emo…

Anyway… ten years… some times it just kind of blows my mind a little… well… here’s to the next ten years.

The cake is a lie!

Gaming

Anyone who has played computer games or console games has run across the puzzle game. You have to flip this switch, move that box, trigger that trigger, jump the lava and open the door to the next level. Sometimes they are disguised as Tomb Raider games or even shooters like Half-Life. But from the producers of that latter example comes Portal. Everyone else has blogged about it, so I figured I would too.

Of all the games I’ve played in the last year, Portal, by far, is the shortest. I ran through the whole thing in a couple of hours, then I did it again… and again. Each time I was trying to find quicker or more interesting ways to pass a level. My favorite was to take out an automated sentry by portal manipulating a previous sentry, one hole above it and one below it, until its momentum was huge, then I moved the portal above to a wall and shot the poor guy like a rocket down a hallway at another sentry. All the while, the computer voice was promising me that once I’d completed the training there would be a party and cake!

GLaDOS promised me cake and forced me to euthanize my only friend, the Weighted Companion Cube. The cake is a lie and I miss the Cube! Why, GLaDOS? Why??

Seriously, though, if you have not yet played Portal on any of the platforms (PC, Xbox 360, PS3), you need to do so. Its certainly not the most fun you can have with your pants on, but its up there.

Logic is cold

Gaming

Thanks to Scott for the original link.

One of the problems I find, not just in games but also in life, is that people have an unwillingness to accept logical truth. There is a basic dichotomy to any competative game: if someone wins, someone else has to lose.

Look at something non-MMO, like Baseball… the teams with the most wins last season still lost just over 40% of their games. The Mets and Yankees finished with .599 records. 97 wins and 65 losses. And its considered a pretty good season. Yet somehow, in PvP games, lots of folks find that ratio, dying 4 out of 10 times you enter a fight, to be completely and utterly unacceptable. On the other hand, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays had a .377 season, 61 wins and 101 losses. More than 6 out of 10 times, they lost… if people can’t accept a 40% death rate, a 60+% rate would drive them completely off the “unfair” deep end. If you are winning 6 out of 10 fights… someone out there is only winning 4 out of 10.

There seems to be, among players of computer games, a feeling that somehow them being human playing against a computer (even if its actually another person controlling the enemy on their screen) gives them an edge, that the game will be “more fair”. Of course, the idea of “more fair” is a total waste of time. There is fair and there is not fair. Something cannot be more or less fair, once it stops being fair it is not fair. What they mean by “more fair” is that they will win more often. Against computer AI in most games this is true simply because the game doesn’t learn. It may kick the crap out of you all the time when you first play, but as you play more you will (should) get better, and the computer will not. Eventually, you’ll win all the time because you will have learned all the moves it is programmed to use. Computer games are old dogs, and they don’t learn new tricks.

But when a player takes control of the enemy, now you are playing against… you. When he loses, just like you, he’ll learn. The both of you will learn, and keep challenging each other, and over time what will show is that one of you is better at learning than the other and therefore stays ahead better, winning more often. One of you will be the Yankees, and the other one will be the Devil Rays. And there is nothing wrong with this. Its true. Its logical. And from the point of view of the Devil Rays, totally and completely unfair.

So, what’s the answer? There isn’t one. Like I said, its not fair, and that’s just the way it is. But I will leave you with a thought…

It comes from the movie Rudy, about Daniel Ruettiger. Rudy doesn’t make the real team, but he makes the practice team. In practice, one of the real team guys yells at Rudy for trying too hard. Rudy fires back with this great line (which of course I can’t find right now) about how he has to do his best in order to keep the real team at their best. When you PvP, keep in mind that you may not win all the time, or even most of the time, but by God you can make them work for it.

Browsing and Wasting Time.

Random Thoughts

I remember computer games. One of the first I ever loaded on to a computer was the first of the Zork games. We also had a few of those ASCII text games, and there were things like the Door Games on the BBSs I used to frequent, like Global War, Baron Realms Elite, Trade Wars 2002, and all the other football leagues, war games, and trivia. I didn’t see real computer graphics until The Black Cauldron (you can download it here). I got hooked on Sierra games. King’s Quest, Space Quest, Thexder, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and other. And of course as a brainy kid who knew too much triva, I also too to the Carmen Sandiego games. And don’t forget the hours and hours I spent playing The Bard’s Tale (sometimes at night, when its quiet, I still hear the music).

So I’m surfing around the net today, looking for things to keep me busy until my new video card (Thanks Kevin!) shows up so I can try playing Dark Age of Camelot again, and I found this.

Sweeeet.

Taking me back to my days of playing text games like Zork, Stephen King’s The Mist, and this one, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I am sad to see they removed the first step of the game though. I know it personally took me about 4 hours to figure out the proper command to end the repeating of “It is dark.” was “open eyes”. Seems they removed that and jumped right into turning on the light.

It probably better this way, the world needs less insane people.