Problem? I'm on my way!

Let me take this opportunity to take you back to the year 2000, the year when George W. took the Earth by storm, the Pace 3D Edge AGP Voodoo Banshee 2D/3D card was teh shit, and a little-known game called Majesty came out. Let me give you a bit more background; some time in early 2000, a younger me was looking through the demo disks that came with a subscription to MacMall Magazine (or something similar). Starved for something to play on my Bondi Blue iMac, I stumbled onto a superb game called Myth II: Soulblighter, incidently made by Bungie, back when they made anything worth playing. This sparked an nterest in the fantasy genre, and so, for my birthday that year I was given a game called Majesty. I was instantly in awe of it, the wit, the charm, everything about it was stunningly well done.
Now, time accelerates, and in the year 2003 or thereabouts I heard about Majesty Legends. I was suppoed to be everything we hoped for, Majesty except that it had 'ZOMG it h4s 3d gr4f1x lololol!1!!'. Unfortunatly Cyberlore, who made Majesty, collapsed before it could be completed. We were all sad.
Finally once more hope has dawned upon the horizon, for yet another company has attempted to strike that elusive chord once more with the creativly titled, Majesty 2. It releases in a few weeks on Sept. 18.

You twit

Well the summer is wrapping itself up so I thought it take this opportunity to make a little rundown of new stuff. Well, I bought crys9is and loved it for its graphics, I ggot an iPhone 3G S and love it for its awesomeness, I got the Sims 3 and world of goo and finnally now you can follow me on Twitter, Twitter.com/Garroh.

EVE and the Apple

Damn son, it's been a while and...not all that much has happened. In gaming news, I still don't care about Halo ODST, the Microsoft Surface (I'll probably talk about the surface at length however) or whatever the hell Sony thinks they're doing (landing planes by the looks of their latest foray into gimmicky motion control). Granted there are some things I am genuinely excited for, Left 4 Dead 2, DeadSpace Extraction, Assassin's Creed 2, Champions Online spring to mind.
Apple of course have released the latest flavor of iPhones, Macbooks, and operating systems, however I have an iPod Touch, iMac, and Leopard to do those things. (not to say that I'm not on awe of the newest capabilities of the iPhone.
Perhaps it's a sign of the, shall we say, drought of new actually good games, but I have found myself spending hour after hour playing the most boring game I can possibly think of, EVE online (or Spread-Sheet Commander as I call it), and actually enjoying every moment of it. If you don't know what EVE is, don't fret neither does anyone else, just look it up. To give you an idea of the absolutely riveting experiences I have been enjoying for the past week; my character, Scott Thaen, an aspiring entrepreneur turned asteroid miner has been learning such skills as Signature Analasys, Astrogeology, and Mining Laser operation. My days have been consumed by trade runs between asteroid belts rich in omber ore and the local refinery station. When I get enough omber ore from mining the asteroids,roughly 990m³, I take it to the station and, rather than refining it, sell it to some poor sap who is buying it for 15% higher than the regional average.
But I digress. For the most part, my time has been consumed anxiously awaiting my new speakers, a pair of KRK RP5 monitors. My current built-ins simply don't do DeadSpace justice.
Like I said earlier, this may be a sign of the sorry state of game development over the last few months. "But hold on a minute, X, and Y and Z, and the expansion to A¹ all came out for the PS3 exclusively" you may say to me. Even if I gave a shit about what comes out for the PS3, I'll be damned if any of those aforementioned mathematical terms were any good to play. Point being, back in the day (late 1990's) anyone with a computer and an ability to code and draw 2D sprites worth a damn had his own game company. Black Isle, Interplay, The Digital Village, the old (and good) Bungie, Core Design, Ambrosia Software. All of them made fantastic games and you get 10 internets if you can think of any games they made without resorting to Wikipedia, and no, baby's first FPS, Halo, doesn't count. All of the games that came out of that era seemed to be made for the fun of it, rather than to please the investors or the whiny, bitchy fanboys. These days however, game development has boiled down to a shadowy council of mega-corporations, EA games, Ubisoft, Activion-Blizzard, Atari, and 2K Games. They seem to oversee the last dregs of real game developers that harken back to the good 'ol days like Blizzard (pre-Activion Merger) and Valve Soft.
My point is that I'm getting sick of playing as Blood Slaughter, the "emotionally involving" Space Marine, or as Jimmy Cale, the "emotionally involving" good 'ol American hero, fighting those commy bastards, the Nazis in their doom fortresses. I'm not tired of playing as Faith the "emotionally one-sided" and running across buildings being chased by Johnny Law however, or as Gordon Freeman, the "emotionally anonymous" killing aliens in arguably one of the best video game stories ever. I suppose it's time I reach a point. What I'm saying is that I'm tired of playing games for the sake of playing games. Honestly I'd rather see a game take 2 years to complete and have Corporal Blood Slaughter be an emotionally involving character, especially when he has to choose how do brutalize his family. I realize that that my contradict what I've been saying for the past 3 paragraphs, but all that I see in the future are more cookie-cutter sequels to fairly generic FPSs' and variations to sudoku and mah jong from the indie crowd.

Mirror, mirror on the wall...

     So about a week ago I was called down to the Apple stor to pick up my brand-new 24" iMac as a replacement for the other, olser, one that shat itself a few days prior. Being a gamer my first concern was the power of the  Nvidia Geforce 120 that was embeded. This proved not to be a problem as it performed superbly well in Mirror's Edge, running at a constant 30 or so frames-per-second with all my settings maxed out. 

   This convinced me to replay the game, and so in leu of sleeping I beat the game a second time, on hard, in one sitting. Finding myself exceptionally bored afterword I decided to look up all of the Mirror's edge related stuff I could find. 

    I soon stubled onto Lazygamer.co.za and read their review of the console version of the game and one line stuck out in perticular, "Mirror’s Edge is by no means a graphical marvel, and in certain aspects definitely doesn’t make full use of the Unreal 3 Engine which it is built on"

     If that's the case I would really like to know waht a graphical marvel is, and no, I really don't think that Crysis really counts.

      In my opinion, Mirror's Edge is the best looking game of 2008. Bias as that my be I think it does in fact look better than Crysis in most situations.  (By the way, I'm not taking gamplay or difficuly into account).

       Don't get me wrong , Crysis is very impressive, but to me it's graphical shortcomings become apparent much more quickly then do ME's . One issue that pops out at me is that, Crysis was designed to look as though it is being viewed through a camera or regenerative nanosuit visor, while Me was intended to look as though you, the player was looking through your very own eyes. Yes things like sunrays, evtreme HDR, and excessive Motion Blur do look very cool and impressive, they don't really give the realistic impression that many people credit them with.

        Say what you will about how I'm a fucking idiot who has kno fucking idea about what he's talking about because he's a retard who can't play Crysis on maximum settings and still be able to play at 60 FPS because he's a fucking dumbass who can't afford an $X,000,000 computer to play it on, but i still feel that Mirror's Edge looks better.

         What I really want to know though is, what do you think?

Zenophobe

WTF?

      On tuesday I picked up Zenoclash from the Steam store after being assured by the marketing department that it was the Portal of 2009. Predictably however this statement was a little off. For those who don't know Zenoclash is an interesting amalgam of Heironymus Bosch and Soul Calibur. You control Gaht, as he kicks the asses of the denizens of Zenozoic.

    The developer Ace promised a wonderous mix of brutal melee combat and ranged combat with guns made of scrap metal. They achieved this to some degree but overall it falls a little short of expectations. Granted, I only played for about 2 or 3 hours, but the game seemed intent on pissing me off. For one thing, all of the enemies in this "Brutal hand to hand combat action game" seemed to have impeccable aim with all weapons that did massive amounts of damage to me with every shot. Needless to say, this effect wore off as soon as I picked up the same weapon.

     Moving on, the aiming system is extremely frustrating to use. In order to aim with a gun you are holding, you have to hold down the right mouse button in order to bring up the crosshairs and actually shoot at something. The problem with this is that in order to aim you need to stand reletivly still while the other enemies charge you from all angles. 

      For that matter the game seems to focus far too much on ranged combat rather thatn the proudly touted melee combat. Apart from that though the environments are quite possibly the epitome of source engine graphics. The characters are very imaginative and have a lot of personality.  That alone is honestly enough to keep this game from being a total disappointment.

     All things considered, Zenoclash is fairly good game with excelent graphics(not Crysis good, but still), and an engaging story. Overall, i'd give this game an 8.5 because nothing that I really have a problem with is unfixable with a patch. 

         And no, the saving thins didn't give me any real problems...

3's a crowd

Earlier today I was told that the 'starter' (read: cheap/shit) version of Windows 7 would limit the user to only 3 active applications at any time. My first reaction was "yeah, bullshit. I know Microsoft is that stupid, but they can't be that stupid". Microsoft, unfortunately, IS that stupid.
Right now I guarantee that you have at least 3 applications open. Personally, I have Safari (browser), iTunes (music), Preview (pictures). On my PC I usually have Steam, Windows Picture Viewer, Firefox open, and if I want to play a game for instance, I would be out of
luck.

This, kids is why we proofread our statements, especially when we're SELLING THEM.

Combine all of that with the estimated price of Windows 7 'Starter edition' of $85 and you get pissed off businesspeople. Microsoft has said that this is intended for netbooks and PC built on the cheap. On its face that seems like a fairly reasonable excuse until you think about the types of 'cosmopolitans' that own netbooks. Generally when observing the computer of somone sipping a soy latte one can find a word processor (for writing 'novels'), a web browser (for plagiarizing F. Scott Fitzgerald), a Picture Viewer (for copying the cover from 'The Great Gatsby' ) and of course Limewire (for pirating music) open on one's computer. Those who can count will realize that this is 4 applications and that one will have to go. Some would say "some people don't use limewire/iTunes and instead use iPods or (God forbid) Zunes; and in doing this they will not be using 4 applications...". My point still stands however when you consider the number of people who use Outlook. This being the case, I would steer most people away from this ripoff.

Moar leik Left 4 Bait amirite?

The recent release of Left 4 Dead's 'Survival Pack' motivated me to re-evaluate Left 4 Dead. Before I passed it off as a fairly bland zombie kill-fest (all be it a Valve Soft game and therefor a head and shoulders above what most companies make). After I started playing is about 2 or three days ago, I can't stop. As of late I've found myself looking at the clock around 4:30 AM and thinking, "shit, I really should get to bed.......but my teammates need me more than that....". Anyway, I found that the game is most fun around 2:00 AM with the lights off, that's when the game becomes actually immersive. I think it may be on sale now, so if you enjoy senseless zombie genocide with four complete strangers (or four friends, depending on how popular you are) then pick it up off steam. My steam name is Garroh of all things.

How secure is "Life without walls" anyway?

According to Microsoft, this is totally secure...
I wish I was kidding...

So Microsoft has unveiled it's latest PR move to move units of Windows 7. Apparently Windows 7 is more secure than both Mac OS X and Linux. My first response to this was O RLY NUB? I will agree that arguing Mac VS. PC does eventually come down to immature squabbles over who's computer looks better. I do however feel totally and completely right in saying that this statement is absolute bullshit.

With the current number of Mac viruses hovering somewhere in the nebulous regions of "none at all" and "If you're the most unlucky person in the world you'll get this", this was possibly one of the worst PR decisions that Microsoft has made in quite some time. One of the possable reasons for this is that your Mac will let you know occasionally when there is a much needed security update, Windows XP however, seems to have no problem letting the man in the black coat climb through the window (no pun intended). I do have several month's experience with Windows 7, and as far as security updates go, I have failed to download even one. The loading bar just sits there while (presumably) contacting the download server.

So all in all, is Windows 7 more secure that Mac OS X or Linux? I don't know, you tell me.