Posts Tagged games
Pac Man: a horror story
Aug 15
Stay Awhile, and Listen
Jun 29
The previously mentioned 20 minute gameplay video… in HD:
Diablo III is coming
Jun 28
The big announcement that Blizzard has been keying up to is indeed that Diablo III is in development. This makes me happier than Starcraft 2, although I’m sure will enjoy both immensely. The official Diablo III website has a 20 minute gameplay video already, and it looks really great. The bread and butter of the Diablo series for me are the animations and immersion, and the video seems to show that in spades. Not to mention new sparkly weapons and multilayered creatures that come at you from all sides.
Two classes are revealed in an interactive way, the Barbarian and the Witch Doctor, with more to come as they draw out expectation.
No release date is announced.
Here’s the teaser trailer:
The Call of Duty : World at War trailer was just released, along with the revamped callofduty.com website. The new game will take place in the Pacific theater of World War 2.
extrinsic
Feb 18
- Michigan laser beam believed to set record for intensity » If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of a new laser beam made in a University of Michigan laboratory.
- SvSIP » SvSIP is a software that you allow to use your Nintendo DS-like phone. For this, it uses SIP protocol. This protocol is an open standard for creating, modifying, and terminating sessions with one or more participants. It is widely used as a signaling
- NVIDIA GeForce 9600GT 512MB G94 Tested :: TweakTown »
- C&C: Red Alert 3 Announced for PC, Consoles »
- Can’t wait for September 7? Creature-only Spore to launch sooner » EA confirmed with us that the stand-alone product will let players begin creating crazy creatures, although it won’t include other components of Spore’s Creature Phase. Those creatures will then be able to be used in the full version of Spore.
- DealExtreme »
- Wicked Lasers » High quality lasers
- EA to Deliver PC Version of Mass Effect »
- How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free » Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data.
- Tolkien heirs sue Lord of the Rings studio for $150m » JRR Tolkien’s estate is suing the studio behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy and threatening to block production on the planned prequel, The Hobbit over claims it has not been paid its share of profits from the massively successful fantasy series.
- Installing Windows XP on the Asus Eee PC ~ EEEguides.com »
- Audiosurf Coming To Steam » to include Orange box music in this nice indie game
- Computer Sciences Professor Wins Highest Honor In The Field » E. Allen Emerson, professor of computer sciences at The University of Texas at Austin, has been awarded the 2007 A.M. Turing Award, widely considered the most prestigious award in computing, for original and continuing research in a quality assurance proc
- Bluetooth Modem via GPRS » on an eee
extrinsic
Aug 6
- Nuclear Dawn – Welcome » Half-Life 2 mod
- Drawn to be alive » inventive mod
- Darsana » standalone multiplayer medieval game
- Troubleshooting a Peer to Peer Networking » on Windows machines
- Htaccess file – Rewrite »
- Pepakura Designer » Turn 3d computer models into paper models
- University of Texas Videogame Archive »
- South Austin Museum of Popular Culture »
- Vulcan Gas Company posters » Austin myusic venue from the 60’s that was the predecessor and inspiration for the Armadillo World Headquarters
- Device wakes man with severe brain injuries | U.S. | Reuters » A man with severe brain injuries who spent six years in a near-vegetative state can now chew his food, watch a movie and talk with family thanks to a brain pacemaker that may change the way such patients are treated, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.
- Will playing games create a two-tier society? » Scientists say gamers are more visually intelligent. But what does that mean for the future of the net?
- Beer in space: A short but frothy history »
- Firefox/Thunderbird Extension Wizard »
Anyone can make some Wii
Jun 28
Nintendo announced WiiWare, which allows anyone with some developer moxie to produce games for the Wii.
“Independent developers armed with small budgets and big ideas will be able to get their original games into the marketplace to see if we can find the next smash hit,” said Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime. “WiiWare brings new levels of creativity and value to the ever-growing population of Wii owners.”
Screw Securom
Jun 19
I am getting so sick of this thorn-in-the-side, supposed copy-protection program. I really really wish software producers would not be so lazy about copy protection and find a better way rather than schluffing it off to this inept third party program.
In the last few months I have had troubles with Command and Conquer 3 in that you can’t use a Microsoft application called Process Explorer at any time before running it. If you HAVE, it will give you an error when trying to start the game, until you reboot. There is no other way to clear the error except to reboot, and not run the legitimate Microsoft application again.
I would think Microsoft would be pissed off about this. I am pissed off enough for the both of us. I hate having to reboot, especially for this arbitrariness.
This isn’t the only error, I get random other ones from Securom all the time. Either balking at other system utilities I run, or about virtual drives, or network drives, or wearing yellow feathers in a purple cap while dancing a jig.
Now I try to play the demo of Overlord, and I get the same damn message.
Googling Securom and Process Explorer shows that they’ve pissed off thousands of other people.
Please, game producers, I hate to break it to ya, but your games and apps are being copied and played despite Securom. The only thing this program does is piss off people that actually legitimately pay for these games. Even before you release your precious software, the net floods with replacement executables which are stripped of any copy protection you so diligently paid for. Oh, how do I know, you say? Because I have to use these stripped executables TO BE ABLE TO PLAY THE DAMN GAME I PAID FOR WITHOUT JUMPING THROUGH FRICKIN HOOPS!
update: While searching a bit more, I found out that a dutiful member of the Sysinternals forum (the software group that originally made Process Explorer and were bought out by Microsoft) whipped a “hider” program for Process Explorer’s services. I’ll admit I was surprised Process Explorer left a residual driver after running, which is what is detected by Securom. This worked perfectly with the Overlord demo. Thanks, throx!
Bloomberg catches a blurb from a Microsoft executive.
“We are well aware that the sweet spot of the market is really 199 bucks,” said David Hufford, a director of Xbox product management.
This would definitely make me buy one. I want a Wii as well, but man, there are some very good games for the XBOX360 platform. Everyone knows that they make all of their money off of the game sales anyways. While a price drop would make it take longer to accomplish breaking even per user, it would make the overall users explode in number.
Unfortunately Sony will never learn this lesson. They are far too proud and pompous of their visionary PS3. It is time for Microsoft to be smart and take the hit for the future of their console, as the Wii is leaving everyone in the dust.
Guitar-Hero-playing robot
Mar 24
Here’s a robot done by some GarageGeeks guys that physically plays Guitar Hero. They call it Guitar Heronoid. With the help of some optical color sensors, a programmed “brain”, and some, uh, “extra” appendages (one hand with an extra finger for that elusive orange guitar button) it powers through the songs like a pron00b.
But this is a good thing, because moments after they conquer our video games, the robot armies will be setting us up for Matrix battery-mode.
Geomerics is a company dedicated to computer graphics and other algorithms. They have recently unveiled their Enlighten engine which coordinates several of their software/middleware advances to provide enhanced lighting in games. The foremost of these is their real-time radiosity, which serves to compute lighting, shadows, radiosity and others at run-time and on existing hardware.
According to their site, they use studies in geometric algebra ( a kind of multi-linear algebra) to come up with new and efficient algorithms to process real-time lighting and even physics calculations.
Recently, Geomerics announced that the Enlighten engine will be used to incorporate into games that are developed for the XBOX 360.
Here is a movie demonstrating some elements of Enlighten and what scenes look like without it:
Telltale Games is on-track to release a new Sam and Max game this fall. After much todo over at LucasArts involving the Sam and Max license and the dropping of the game Sam & Max Freelance Police.
There’s a trailer up on the main site that has the same personality and feel as the original game. It should; with the original designers behind the new title.
Here’s to reviving some old favorite characters that seemed lost in the abyss of forgotten licenses. While it won’t be as stupendous an event as when(if) Duke Nukem Forever is released, it will still be a great nostalgia trip.
Halcyon Days
Apr 10
A book I missed, it happens much more often than I would like. Luckily it is now posted in its entirety here. Interviews with creators of those old games that you always remember, even if you need a little reminder. Back when coding a game took only one person. Back when every programmer seemed to dabble in games. It even has a foreword by John Romero.
Choplifter, Battlezone, and M.U.L.E.?
yeah, bring it on…
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Most people who come here know I am an avid gamer, especially first-person shooters, and have been for the majority of my life. And I am not alone, gaming has been a phenomenon for at least 2 decades on personal computers.
Why, then, has it taken until the last couple years that keyboards geared for gamers have come from the depths of the abyss? I mean, to me, it’s a no-brainer and a hole in the market. Except for a few horrible cheap tries, the ZBoard was the first decent attempt I saw. And then the Saitek gaming keyboard. Both have enticed me, but not quite enought to buy.
Leave it to Logitech. As soon as it was announced, I knew I would be purchasing the G15 Gaming Keyboard. After a few months of wait, I thought it would be released in October… but the Logitech site, even at the time of this post, still says it’s “coming soon”. Luckily I heard a tip that some had been spotted in Best Buys, and I found the keyboard at one of my local stores. It appears they may have some kind of limited-time exclusivity on the keyboard like the have had on other Logitech products like the MX510 mouse an dthe new G5 mouse.
So, I get the box home and plug the keyboard in. The drivers installed flawlessly, and don’t have much of a memory footprint. The LCD screen on the top displays time, CPU and RAM status, volume controls, and even songs I play with Winamp. The blue glow is great and comes through each key very nicely. The little switch to turn off the windows keys is a perfect touch, and the 18 macro buttons are just waiting to be programmed.
The keyboard has nice keys that are not mushy or overly rattley (is rattley a word?). They keys are smaller (in width) than the keys on my Logitech Internet Navigator keyboard, but they also travel further and are more responsive. The volume wheel I love, as I had one in a previous keyboard and wheels are much better than buttons to control volume.
Like all Logitech keyboards I have used, the wristrest is flimsy, but it does its job so far. The keyboard itself is extremely solid and pretty heavy. The keys and black plastic have a flat satin finish on them that gives the appearance of hard rubber.
So far the keyboard has proved pretty useful in games. The lighting is the main thing. I honestly haven’t used the macro keys much, but I tested the on-the-fly macro making and it works very well. Or you can use the macro maker in the profile program, which allows more fine tuning and editing.
A little pricey at $80, but it’s the best gaming keyboard out there.
On to the pics!
Tenebrae
Aug 27
I was on fileshack the other day trying to get the Neocron demo… and I look at the “most popular downloads” list. I see something called Tenebrae among the usual crowd of Halflife mods and Quake patches. I click on it and it is a small 3 meg file that supposedly adds stencil shadows, bump mapping, and per-pixel lighting to the original Quake game.
Think DoomIII, there are a few games that use stencil shadows right now, but none that use per-pixel lighting, and few that use bump-mapping more than cursorily. I’m thinking they used Quake to experiment because the whole sourcecode was released by ID some time ago.
Anyways, I dug and found my old Quake CD, and installed it again. Then I unpacked the Tenebrae files into the directory and fired it up.
I was stunned. I don’t know if people who never played Quake before can appreciate it, but you have to notice the shading and shadow effects. Everything is darker with the true lighting and shadows flip and turn everywhere… Rocket blasts and nailguns make the rooms light up with each pulse. It’s gorgeous.
Without further ado… below are 2 screenies. You can get all the screenshots I saved at:
www.drzy.com/images/tenebrae/page_01.htm
