Archive - Gaming RSS Feed

Forza, forza, forza!

November 2, 2011 in Gaming, Xbox with 0 Comments

I’ve been playing Forza 4 rather excessively last week and made it to the final of ten seasons in World Tour mode while at the same time the statistic tells me I only completed 5.3 % of the career events indicating the insane amount of car class – event type combinations in the Event List which is also part of career mode.

The World Tour features an adaptive opponent AI difficulty, meaning if you drive a slow, not upgraded car so will the computer. You don’t even have to win to progress but if you do the AI will get a little harder to beat next time. This system actually works quite well often giving you the impression that your skill allowed you to only barely win a race.


Picture: Ran out of skill.
Continue Reading…

Starting fresh

September 26, 2011 in PC Gaming with 0 Comments

So I finally finished my World of Warcraft “experiment”. Final balance: 100k gold, 4 level 80 characters but not a single one at cap (85). Since I’m not planning on returning to the game within the next couple of years I took about 90% of that gold and invested it in various vanity items (elementium geodes for example) and Cataclysm trade goods. Basically I didn’t want to worry about in-game inflation urging me to come back any time soon.

The next step was to purge my gaming rig of all the WoW stuff like update clients, dual-boxing tools, backup scripts and some such. I wanted to make absolutely sure to get rid of every piece of WoW-ware that was now possibly on my system. A clean reinstall of the operating system was in order. Continue Reading…

Oh googly eyes you make stuff come alive

June 10, 2011 in Gaming, Xbox with 0 Comments

Microsoft released Kinect Fun Labs right after their media briefing at this week’s E3. It’s a free download and lets you play with all sorts of experimental Kinect features. At long last you can scan real world objects and make them appear virtually in a 3D environment.
For virtualizing inanimate objects you’ll want to use the Googly Eyes app. In my example (see screenshot) I used a pillow. The process is easy and worked really well. Although the sensor picks up 3D information I found that it works best on things that are fairly two-dimensional since it only takes two snapshots, front and back. This led to me not having as much success scanning plush toys in Create A Buddy which is also a part of Fun Labs. You can clearly see the quality difference in the screenshot above.
Although not perfect it’s still fun to play with the technology. You can even add animation and voice-overs in both apps and share your creations on the web.

Geek out on European WoW market statistics

May 30, 2011 in Gaming, PC Gaming with 0 Comments

In my time playing World of Warcraft I was fascinated by a website called The Undermine Journal. Completely searchable market data with various graphs and statistics. Basically an almost indispensable resource for everyone remotely interested in the economy of WoW. Sadly there were currently no plans to make it available to EU players. Acy from the EU server Hellscream changed that singlehandedly and seemingly overnight. He created a nice, clean and lightweight site, http://www.wowtrader.org.uk/, that’s easy to use and provides many of the features I’ve talked about above. But instead of crawling the Armory/Mobile AH webpages 24/7 it depends on crowd-sourcing (i.e. user submitted data, by uploading a single file from an Add-On) so it will only be as good as its users make it. Acy keeps everyone updated about the project on his blog. He generally seems like an approachable and competent fella so I’m confident it will be a success with a little help from the community.

It runs on steam!

May 3, 2011 in Gaming with 1 Comment

They say a joke is no longer funny once you have to explain it. So I won’t, for now, just look at the picture. Get it?

Doesn’t this look like a flux capacitor? Just imagine a triangle instead of the blue circle.
See the crosshair? The portal gun?
Get it now?

No?

Ok then, here we go:
Continue Reading…

I’m Commander Shepard and this is my favorite blogpost on this website

April 4, 2011 in Gaming with 0 Comments

I played Arrival this weekend, the latest Mass Effect 2 DLC.
This one is a solo mission, so no team members to boss around. It has some optional stealth elements and you get a chance to chat with Admiral Hackett. It’s a good mission but it doesn’t really tell you anything you didn’t already know and it’s certainly not the missing link, bridging the gap between part 2 and 3, I was hoping for.

The Mass Effect universe:

For comparison let’s take a look at the Star Trek universe.
I’ve been watching Star Trek (TOS) ever since I learned how to operate a VCR. A couple of years later I made my own recordings of TNG, DS9 etc. until they finally released them all on DVD. It was a process stretching over decades.

Mass Effect on the other hand managed to establish a universe with one game. Granted, I spent hundreds of hours playing that game. Immersive, engaging, rich and coherent are only some of the adjectives that come to mind. With a great story and characters you really care about the first game felt like a revelation, a new way of (interactive) storytelling.

And the universe is expanding, here is an overview of all things Mass Effect I picked up over the last years in the order they fit into the main story arc.
Continue Reading…

The advantages of unrealistic graphics

March 15, 2011 in Gaming with 1 Comment

I’ve recently started to mess around with WoW which lead me to the realization that seemingly outdated graphics can have their advantages.
Aside from obvious things like a silky smooth, constant framerate no matter what, older graphics are also miles away from the uncanny valley and if done well invoke an almost comic-like atmosphere.
In Star Trek Online for example you almost expect voiceovers and cut-scenes but in WoW your imagination is already much more engaged by filling in the gaps of low polygon models and low resolution textures. So if you just read that a Gnome looks at an Orcish letter, folds it in half, takes a smell at it and proclaims that it could be toilet-paper it is not breaking the immersion. Continue Reading…

Achievements: What are they even good for?

March 7, 2011 in Gaming with 1 Comment

Achievements, Trophies, Accolades — however you want to call them — they are here to stay. Every major gaming system has them and more and more games are building their own systems as well. They can be a nice thing to have for a gamer, a meta reward besides playing the game. They can also present a welcome challenge or get you to do things you didn’t think of or even knew were possible.
Where it gets ugly is when you feel compelled to do things you might not even enjoy for the sole purpose of earning an Achievement. Developers and publishers can exploit this by giving you Achievements for very hard and/or repetitive tasks to make their games appear not as short as they truly are. Achievements that are very easy to get on the other hand can be used to drive up sales of games that are otherwise not that good.
As with a lot of things Achievements/Trophies/Accolades can be used for good and bad by both gamers and the gaming industry.

To summarize:

The good:

  • Friendly competition
  • Higher completion rate
  • Incentive to try new things

    • The bad:

  • Unhealthy competition
  • Finished-but-not-done feeling
  • Grinding and not having fun

    • The ugly:

  • Bogus Achievements to extend short games
  • Easy Achievements to sell crappy games

    • I got the green glow under my ship

    February 28, 2011 in Gaming, PC Gaming with 0 Comments

    One of the mission rewards of this week’s featured episode Coliseum is a Reman Prototype Covariant Shield. It changes the look of your ship (which can be disabled in the right-click menu) to have this dark, shiny almost chrome-like texture. Additionally it changes the traditional red and blue of the warp nacelles to teal and even adds some fancy textures to the pylons.

    A brief overview of the MMOs I’ve played over the years.

    February 15, 2011 in Gaming, PC Gaming with 0 Comments

    Anarchy Online: I started when the Shadowlands expansion came out, joined an RP guild, played a Nano-something (basically a mage class) and a martial artist. It was fun for a while but eventually I quit playing because grinding randomly generated missions became tiresome. And let’s not even talk about non-instanced dungeons with seemingly hundreds of people spawn-camping the bosses.

    EVE Online: I started my spacefaring career as a miner (Doesn’t everyone?). Then I started doing missions. Then I mined in a bigger ship. Then I did missions in a bigger ship. I did this until I was in a Hulk for mining and a Battleship for doing missions. Continue Reading…

    Page 1 of 212»