Merry X-mas!

Merry X-mas, Futurama style!

Although my Christmas loot this year was rather lackluster, it feels rather like I got my old PC as a Christmas present since it arrived right before the holiday and then I got a new LCD as a present from my folks! It was a nice Samsung 23" Widescreen, model SW2333.

When reading reviews of the gaming LCDs in my price range, I was immediately impressed by what I read about this one. Only one thing gave me pause, and that was several people who purchased this model claiming that it arrived with one or two stuck pixels. Having never had to deal with any pixel-related LCD problems (my last one was an LG and it was absolutely flawless), I was quite concerned.

On Christmas morning, as I plugged in my new LCD and got it working, I immediately noticed a blue pixel that wasn't changing unless the screen called for "white". An obviously stuck pixel; I was dismayed.

However, a quick google search revealed a lot of different techniques for solving such a problem, and so I downloaded an excellent application called Undead Pixel, which will flash through all colors on the dead pixel(s) only, at like 60 colors a second, which sometimes helps to unstick a pixel.

I also tried gently putting some pressure on the screen as this program ran. I only applied pressure for like twenty seconds or so, and immediately wanted to check my handiwork. UD Pixel had only been running for about ten minutes, so I wasn't really expecting any results since the suggested run-time was between one and eight hours.

When I stopped the program to check the pixel, it was fixed. Awesome! So now I have a flawless Samsung SW2333 LCD that I'm quite happy with so far. Haven't quite used it enough to give a full review, but so far I haven't found anything at all to make me regret my choice. I'll try to update later on with a final verdict, once I've had time to really put this thing through the ropes.

Until then, Happy Holidays everyone!

Avatar 3D

I saw Avatar 3D last night. It was pretty good, definitely worth the $8 ticket for the experience. Especially because of the 3D effect, it was really awesome to see. I honestly figure this film shows the future of entertainment. I know that Japanese electronics manufacturers are working on 3D projection technology that won't require glasses and will work on a home TV. I'm pretty pumped for that happening in my life time!

As far as the movie itself... without going into spoilers, it was a terrifically beautiful movie that was ruined by being way too black-and-white, way too overtly political, and having an arbitrary deus ex machina in the film that most people found difficult to swallow.

For myself, the first two were the biggest problems since I could readily accept the idea as presented in the film which led to the deus ex machina situation.

However, a lot of the lines that came from the film's BBEG were totally out of place in the context he was saying them, and clearly a political statement by the film's writers/director. It was frustrating how blatant James Cameron was about shoving his opinions into this fantastic sci-fi story.

The ethics as presented by the film were extremely black and white. There was no questioning who was right, what was evil, etc. In my opinion, the film missed a chance to truly be thought-provoking and challenge the viewer to actually have to think for themselves. As it stands, the film is completely vapid and suffered from being so clear-cut.

Overall, Avatar is definitely a film worth seeing just for how beautiful it is. As I mentioned before, the 3D effects are amazing and really add to the film's visual beauty. I also loved the portrayal of advanced human technology, and figure that they got it pretty accurately. I figure we'll see a lot of stuff similar to that in my lifetime.

Bottom line: Avatar is a good movie that could have been great, but definitely wasn't.

Max Payne (the movie)

I've had a busy day today, because several packages I had been waiting for finally arrived. Among them was my computer! Yay, I'm once again able to game and watch por.. movies. I immediately bought Fallout 3 GOTY edition and will be enjoying it in a few years. I started downloading it two hours ago and am up to 7% now; the one major drawback about digital purchases! Anyways...

So over the weekend I watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which was absolutely hilarious, and afterwords Max Payne came on. I wasn't actually watching the TV since we had pulled out the Christmas tree and were working on getting it up (a bit late, I know,) but as the movie began I was sort of drawn in and after the first five minutes had totally started ignoring the tree in favor of the movie.

I'm not a huge "movies based on video games" guy, though I sometimes give them a shot. I loved Doom, even though it had nothing to do with the game whatsoever (not set on Mars, not about him killing demons,) but I really loathed what they did with Resident Evil. Having never played Max Payne, I was not at all interested in the movie when it first came out.

I do tend to like a well done crime noir film, but often times they just fall short of what I would enjoy. Too many cliches and whatnot really kill the genre for me, most of the time.

Anyways, apparently it got a lot of bad reviews based on the plot and Mark Wahlberg's acting. I found neither to be particularly bad, and as I said overall I enjoyed the movie. Besides, it is mostly action and cool special effects, so I don't think it really needs to have a stupendous plot and great acting.

Anyways, now that I've seen the film, I'm definitely going to check out the game. What about you? Do you ever check out a game because of the film, instead of vice versa? Do you usually like video game films, or no?

Free Market Capitalist or Artificial Inflation Bandito?

Many times, you can find moral grey areas and controversial topics within the relatively open worlds of MMORPGs. Kill or spawn stealing, corpse camping, and ganking come readily to mind. Once upon a time, I was in a tightly-knit Everquest guild, and one of our members started a rant on the guild forums about price gougers.

It was interesting to read his point of view on the subject, since I had actually quit playing the level grinding aspect of EQ in favor of a minigame I had invented for myself. My goal was wealth, albeit the kind represented by pixels on a computer screen rather than something that could be exchanged for real-life items.

It was simple, really: I did my best to buy low and sell high. If I saw an item that I knew to be under-priced, I would scoop it up! To me, it only made sense to make the most of the opportunities that I blundered upon, and if I was willing to risk the currency to purchase an item in the first place then I deserved the profit I could potentially make if I later sold it for more.

Yes. What I'm trying to say is that I was one of the dirtiest, most a-moral creatures to ever dwell in the MMORPG genre. I was a reseller.

Honestly, though I can understand where the average player comes from when they rant against my ilk, I still see nothing fundamentally wrong with the practice. EQ had a free market economy, and I was just following the basic idea of supply and demand. The rarer an item is, the more someone is willing to pay for it, and therefore the higher its perceived worth.

If I am familiar with the current market value of an item, then it is my prerogative to purchase and resell it.

...right?

Am I just rationalizing my actions? Am I deluding myself into thinking my dark economagic is legitimate? What is your opinion on the practice of reselling in MMORPGs?

Project 1999: Bringing Evercrack Back!

One fateful summer morning, when I was 16 years old, my friend came over to hang out. He brought with him the new game he had been telling me about: Everquest.

A game where you can play as a fantasy race, such as a troll or dwarf, and inhabit a persistent world that would host thousands of adventurers (fellow players) at all hours of day or night, 24/7. Other than on some Tuesdays, which were patch days.

I was familiar with the emerging MMORPG genre thanks to other friends who had long played The Realm and later Ultima Online, but for a long while we lacked a family computer and thus I was forced to snatch tidbits of play whenever I visited Timmy. Which was a lot, actually, because I was fairly addicted to the concept from the get go.

Well, now I had a family PC and the game disks to install Everquest, thanks to my friend. Kind of like a drug dealer who's offering you a free sample of Heroine. Seriously, the game was nicknamed "Evercrack" because it was so fun and "addicting", though anyone unfamiliar with video games will jump on the idea of it being addicting to the point of ignorant scapegoating.

Regardless, the next seven or eight years of my life would be spent in the brutal grip of this unforgiving game. These days, with games like World of Hug-craft, you don't really get a feel for how painful it can be to lose hours of your life poured into a character, only to have the time and effort ripped away.

I'm talking early Rallos Zek, when you could full-loot whoever you killed. (UO fans will start to bridle right about now, but bare in mind that UO was a skill-based game and EQ was most definitely not. Gear meant everything!)

I'm also talking about experience loss upon death. I remember in particular one school-evening when I had stayed up until three in the morning, trying to get just enough experience to get my next level. I had eventually found a pretty good group and was grinding it out, finally hearing that infamous "DING!", and then began running back to a city for training (it was a new spell level) but ran into a very powerful NPC that instakilled me. My level was long gone, and I ended up rejoining the group and grinding well past 4:30AM before finally regaining it.

Not only that, but there was no relaxing ghost-run to your corpse... you would restart naked, sometimes literally an hour's journey from your body, and have to make your way back to the corpse all the while avoiding (or dying repeatedly to) the foes that killed you in the first place.

Also, there was a seven day time limit on looting said corpse, or else it would "rot" and the items would disappear forever. That isn't seven days played, but a literal seven days. People tended to avoid going anywhere dangerous shortly before a real-life vacation, that's for sure!

We always complained about how brutal the game was, but never suspected that its ruthlessness was a large part of its charm. By the time I lost interest in EQ, the game was very dumbed down but still relatively hardcore compared to its emerging competition. As my friends and I began to explore the second generation MMORPGs, we realized that something was missing.

We often would spend hours reminiscing about our favorite EQ memories, and going through what-if scenarios of how we would play it all over again if we could start from the beginning with what we now knew about EQ in particular and MMORPGs in general.

A long time ago, I heard about Project 1999. Their goal was to recreate and rerelease Everquest on an emulated server, and make it as identical to the original release as possible. I was really excited for a brief moment, until I saw how far from the execution stage the project was. As a longtime fan of impossible mod projects, I suspected a similar early-ending for this group of unpaid developers.

Turns out, however, that I was totally wrong! A few months ago I heard about Project 1999 going live! It is a bit technical and generally requires the purchase of Everquest: Titanium Edition, but is a dream come true for a lot of us who are recovered EQ addicts shamelessly seeking the digital "high" of our youth.

Thoughts on GalCiv2's tax rate limit

Periodically, I'll be ranting about any topics that bug me. This is one of those posts.

Let me start by saying that Galactic Civilizations 2: Rise of the Dreadlords is a pretty damn good 4x game.

It has solid gameplay, is very well supported by the developers, a lot of customization options, and overall is exactly what I would want from a space 4x game.

However, I do have one bone to pick with the game design: the tax rate can't go past 80%. The game's lead designer, Brad Wardell (who is also the CEO of the game's developer & publisher Stardock), has stated that the reason for this is that nobody would put up with a tax rate of higher than 80%.

I've always been irked by that reasoning. In a game that supposes technology sufficient to destroy solar-systems, it is too far of a stretch to believe that some civilizations would be willing to work for the Greater Good of their species? I find it frustrating that in a game set so distantly in the future, Mr. Wardell still has to apply his modern-day capitalistic world-view on the entire universe.

Maybe I'm just weird, and I shouldn't be so bothered by such a minor detail, but it has literally bugged me for years. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few reasons why a tax rate of 100% would be plausible:

1) Robotic communism. If robots do all the labor and provide everything that people need, why would anyone care about the tax rate? "Bar-tender bot, call pizza-bot for me will ya?"

2) Tribal mentality. In the history of civilization, there have often been political organizations in which all the produced goods would go to a chief, and he would then allocate what was necessary for each individual family while keeping the rest for himself, and presumably using it for the good of the tribe. It isn't realistic for modern day capitalists, but it has happened in Earth's history, and therefore I think it shouldn't be so easily ruled out by Mr. Wardell.

3) Space Ants. There's even a race in the game based on insects. Yet they have a tax rate, and it can't go past 100%? Ants don't even get paid, but they work their butts off for the colony day in and day out! Space Ants!

In general, I can go along with weird gameplay functions so long as they are well explained in the context of the setting. Final Fantasy VII's materia.. rocks that allow people to cast magic spells? It was well explained, though, so I could go with it.

I have a hard time accepting game mechanics that aren't adequately explained, though, and this is one of those cases. An arbitrary limit on the taxation of galaxy-spanning civilizations, just because the game's lead designer had to force his politics into the product.

Mr. Wardell is rather outspoken about his political beliefs, in any case, and has caused controversy more than once by expressing his views through official Stardock websites.

I suppose if you make a computer game, you can make it however you like, but nonetheless I would hope you'd strive for well-reasoned or believable gameplay mechanics.

The Big Three: I vote for Nintendo

The Big Three console gaming companies have managed to stay pretty competitive. Sony's PlayStation series and Microsoft's Xbox series, along with whatever latest generation Nintendo has, are generally successful enough to be in no danger of discontinuation.

That said, what's the point of having three consoles that basically do the same thing and, recently, are increasingly offering the same games released across all systems?

Let's start off with a bit of personal history:

I always coveted the Atari gaming system as a child, only rarely getting a chance to play it at a friend's house. Being the tender age of seven, I was not really up to speed on the emerging gaming industry, and was caught completely by surprise when my grandparents bought me a Nintendo Entertainment System for my eighth birthday.

I was hooked immediately, and as soon as the SNES came out, I (my parents) bought one as well. The SNES kept me happy; I didn't ever try out a Sega Genesis, nor did I even look at the PlayStation when it was first released. It wasn't until Final Fantasy 7 that I caved in and bought one.

However, after buying that PS I really got hooked on Sony's game catalog and ended up buying a PS2 early on. It wasn't until Windwaker that I finally got around to buying a Gamecube.

Sadly, that was my last console purchase (aside from portables, which are a whole different subject). These days, I don't even touch the Gamecube, which is stored somewhere in my parents' attic. The PS2, on the other hand, was my constant companion through college and even when I moved to Japan for three years! It was a faithful system which helped me out as a DVD player in addition to a nice change of pace when I got burnt out on PC games.

I've purchased a brand new PC and upgraded my video card once and a monitor twice since my last console purchase. Arguably, any of those purchases could instead have been for a latest generation console, but I always felt it was a better investment to just keep with the PC.

My reasoning was that aside from the occasional console-only game, I already have the hardware, and usually, better/faster hardware, than would be in a console. There was nothing innovative or revolutionary about the game systems to lure me away from my PC.

Until the Wii.

I recall the flurry of disbelief and outrage over what was perceived as a ridiculous and/or stupid name for the newest Nintendo product, but I personally thought it was fine. A bit unusual, but hey, its a Japanese company, and what's Japan known for if not "unusual"?

The main thing to me was the way Nintendo, alone from the Big Three, was actually trying to do something different. Even now they seem to be the only company truly attempting to provide something different in the console world.

The Wii offered motion-sensor game play, which opened up a whole world of new game play concepts and finally brought video gaming as a whole into the truly, unarguably mainstream consumer base. Homemakers and businessmen as well as young adults and kids could all get into the accessibility and intuitive nature of the Wii. Nintendo's stated goal is to make their products accessible and desired by all members of the family, and I'd say they're doing well.

Next, the DS... a portable that used touchscreen technology! Again, innovation. Something revolutionary, not just focusing on the next generation having better graphics and faster processing power. And most recently, the DSi which includes a really crappy camera. Doesn't bring much to the product in my opinion, but it is at least another step towards innovation.

Supposedly, Microsoft and Sony are scrambling to have motion-sensory options in their next gens, but they have definitely lost the lead as far as market-share goes, and I'm guessing that from now on its going to be a game of catch-up as Nintendo continues to refine their ideas and come up with new ones, staying a step ahead of their competitors.

I'm just glad I finally have a reason to own both a PC and a console.

***************
Update (12/16/2009) - I noticed that Kotaku had an article comparing total sales of the Wii and PS2 in Japan since the release of the various consoles. Looks like the Wii is indeed solidly in control of the market.

Update (12/18/2009) - Another Kotaku article showing the past week's sales in Japan. Nintendo seems to have control of the console market as a whole, including portables.

Console Gaming vs PC Gaming

sI am primarily a PC gamer. I am not particularly opposed to playing games on the console (except when it comes to FPS games), but in general I tend to be a generation behind on console games.

I guess its just hard for me to justify spending the money to buy the latest console(s) and their games, when I can just play on my PC and thanks to the Midweek Madness / weekend deals they have at Steam, I tend to have more games than I have time to play them.

FPS games, though.. I just never can get into holding a controller. To me, the mouse and wasd combo is much more intuitive. I suppose if I only played consoles I would adapt, but I just generally feel more comfortable with PC FPS games.

I do have a lot of old school console RPGs that I enjoy, and that's one of the reasons I love my trusty old PS2. For over six years it was my DVD player as well as a means to indulge in my old PS1 game collection. Even now I can really get into some of those old JRPGs that were released or re-released onto PS1 or PS2 game disks.

But when I have an option of $300 for a new console or a massive video card upgrade for the same price, I generally tend to go with the video card. I have a massive stock of PC games I haven't yet played but purchased thanks to really good sale prices or which I received as presents, and I also try to make time for one or two brand new releases that I'm really excited for.

PC games also tend to be cheaper these days, compared to the most popular console games. Not always the case, but as a rule I think it holds true.

These are some of the reasons I remain entrenched as mostly a PC gamer, though I will say that the Wii is the one system which I really want but remain unable to afford. If I had the cash, I'd definitely be willing to pick up a Wii!