Game on

Nobody, even those uniterested of it, can have missed the release of the expansion for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King. If you’re not even playing the game you might have noticed those long lines in front of stores on the evening of the 12:th November (the game was released at midnight 13:th of November) and if you wheren’t out that evening you can see headline mainstream media news cluttered with the good and the bad the game have to offer (good reviews on one hand and concerned parents of collapsing children on the other side). It’s interesting to see how the news about a fictional world in an MMO makes headline news nonetheless.

There is a slight anti-climax in the game however, a long anticipated expansion have just been released and fully conquered by the hardcore players! Only 27 hours after the release one player reached the highest level (80). The unification of two major guilds, Nihilum and SK Gaming, temporarily named 25th November was first in the world to beat all the end game content after only 3 days! In laymans terms this is equal to completing the highest challanges a game a year in the making have to offer. Several other guilds have since also accomplished this and many fans ask themselves “Is this it?”. A game which thrives on players dedicating hours upon hours in large groups to accomplish epic adventures should not be beaten in 3 days!

Here is a shameless plug for my other technical blog that debates the issue of games on Linux.

There is one single left over reason that I see quoted time and time again: “I use Windows XP becuase I want to play games”.

Read more in the Soft thinking blog!

When I first saw news about this game I just went by it like it was nothing for me, but when I looked the second time and took the time to watch the video I was blown away with how cool and innovative this game is!

Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.

Crayon Physics Deluxe is a 2D physics puzzle game, in which you get to experience what it would be like if your drawings would be magically transformed into real physical objects. Solve puzzles with your artistic vision and creative use of physics.

After seeing the video I would love to try it myself… but playing it without a mouse or similar device might make it a bit harder.

A childhood trauma of “Please insert coin” (only surpassed in childhood traumas by the greater line “Thankyou Mario but the princess is in another castle”) kind of comes to mind. I spent many many coins in this arcade machine back in the days! Can’t wait to try it out allthough I do admit I will most likely be dissapointed by the old 2D fights seeing the vast improvement in the genre… but who knows! It’s a must have anyway!

Having a hard time starting up Fallout 3? In the beginning you can be low on caps and be a rookie on how to fight using the V.A.T.S. system. Here are some quick hints, spoiler free of course, to help you get started.

V.A.T.S. combat system
Pretty early in the game, earlier than you might expect, you will get into combat. Instead of just “jabbing” away with the R1 button use the power of V.A.T.S. by clicking R2 and selecting where to throw those punches for better precision using the action points. It’s very simple, click R2, select body part (or whole enemy if in close combat), click R1 to target, click X to confirm and then watch the magic. Remaining action points are shown on the bottom right of the screen. (buttons are for the PS3 release, check which are needed for you if you run PC or X-box 360 versions)

First Caps
To get the first flow of caps incoming I recommend doing many “fast travels” between your first mission (wherever that might be) and your hometown. Pick up as much as you can without being over-combured and sell it all. Do notice that the vendors have a limited amount of money, so only sell as much as they can pay for. Use multiple vendors if one is out of cash. Another trick is to repair / buy from the vendor before you sell. Pick up everything you find with weight zero (mostly medical supply but also other items) since you can carry however many you want and always sell the surplus to vendors.

Survival Guide (semi-spoiler!)
Early on you will get a quest to write a survival guide, it is highly recommended that you do these early on since it will teach you quite a few tricks.

Strange items
Found lots of strange items? Nuka-Cola? Lunch box? Bubble heads? Pick it all up! Make sure to keep a few of every odd item you find, you never know when it might become useful. Pick a home somewhere (or earn one hint hint) and save all your stuff in a locker or box somewhere so you dont have to carry it around. The strangest items in the game can prove very useful later on. If you sell it to vendors you can always buy it back later… but at a higher price of course!

Choose path
Choose your path early on, are you good or evil? Do you chat or do you keep it short? Depending on decisions you will end up playing the game very differently with different oppertunities, make sure you get the oppertunities you want and dont start out by doing something that would be out of character for you.

Sneaking
Using stealth properly can really help out quite a few times. Use cover and darkness to improve stealth efficiency and make sure to suprise your enemies. In the beginning, being a lousy shot, you might want to either sneak up on enemies or lure them to you in order to get a clean headshot using V.A.T.S. in close range. Run around corners and wait for them to approach. Use the radar on the bottom left of the screen, when you see red dots it means you have detected enemies nearby, directly go into stealth so you can sneak up on them and not the other way around!

The Pipboy 3000
Study all the functions of the Pipboy 3000, there is alot of help to find in there.

The Pipboy 3000 light
The darned thing is equiped with a light source! Simply keep the O-button pressed down a second or two and it will light up. This will help you find lots of stuff in the darkness, just don’t forget to switch it off before you end up in combat or the enemies will have an easy time spotting you.

Running away
Running away from enemies can prove fatal, while you might get further away from those behind you there is no guarantee you won’t run in to even more trouble around the next corner.

Hope this helps and I sure hope I didn’t mention the slightest piece of information more than needed here! Have a great game!

Chrono Trigger which is about to be released on Nintendo DS is rumoured to have a new ending. Kotaku reports that according to Famitsu there is a new character and a new ending in the game. Lacking any skill whatsoever in Japaneese I tried to Babelfish the page, the end result was not very pleasing:

- You can see [nintendo] DS edition original development!?

It is the monster battle and quantity at the competition place in John additional Don and the new life ‘[kurono] trigger where is the original element is added ill-smelling’. As for this time delivering, the new information regarding the ending!　In the how main work, the new ending which is not prepared in super Family Computer edition.

In addition, adding gallery mode anew as a pleasure element. Also portion of the element which can be enjoyed with this mode releases.

Guess we have to wait for some proper translation and the US release for more information!

A new Tomb Raider site have been released on the Internet, http://www.tombraiderunderworld.com/. It’s a very nice promotional site with what I would call the best ever on-line demo I’ve seen so far! It probably requires a fast Internet connection to try out but it looks amazingly good for being played in a web browser.

Tomb Raider Underworld will be released for just about every thinkable console out there, some allready in shops.

In recent gaming news further development of the whole Digital Rights Management (DRM) debate and SecuROM i particular is blooming again. Once again the Spore debate is the latest news and the hidden installation of SecuROM that follows with it.

Electronic Arts (EA) claim they need the DRM to protect against software piracy, at the same time the irony of this is that only the customers who buy their software is those who are affected by it. The SecuROM is a piece of software embeded with the installation of several EA producs (Spore, Red Alert 3, The Sims etc) and what it does is install itself on the host computer much like a virus in that is hides itself and makes it very hard (impossible?) to remove once installed. The effect of SecuROM is that the computers ability to make identical CD-R copies is crippled and in some cases the software it is bundled with refuses to install if there are CD-duplicating softare allready installed.

Recent development in this area are som class-action lawsuits against EA for including this destructive piece of software, by some viewed pure malware. The software was even included in the promotional “Spore Creature Creator” trial edition that was distributed freely, no mention of the SecuROM software was included despite the fact that it does change the way your computer work.

I just bought myself i Playstation 3 (PS3), the latest model with 160 Gb harddive. I’ve read alot about the PS3, both Sonys over enthusiastic “it’s-also-a-blueray”-commercial and blogs and news sites complaints over prices and bugs, and I thought I’d share my thoughts off the machine now a few days after the purchase.

First off all, the largest dissapointment for me is the lack of backward compatibility. I have very large library of PS1 and PS2 games that I albeit rarely play but without a machine up that can play them will move that “rarely” to “never”. This is the greatest drawback of this machine to me, and most previous models could at least play the old games but had many bugs (or so I’ve heard).

After this dissapointmet, that I acctually learned off in the shop just before buying it, everything else have been a pleasent suprise. The included hand controller was wireless, but unlike the Wii remotes this one came with a cord that you could use to charge the thing. Very easy and nice unlike Nintendos constant changing of batteries.

The Playstation Network (PSN) worked very well, the PS3 directly identified my wireless network and asked the proper questions (encryption, password etc) and I was on my way out to download games from PSN. The PSN is very nice and have much more content than for example Wii (can’t say anything about X-box LIVE since I dont own an X-box), many games both full “normal” games, PSN exclusive games and demos for most of them! I’ve bought many consoles in my days and mostly I’ve gotten used to this kind of anti-climax of coming home with a new expensive console and the one or two games you bought with it. You want to try out it’s potential but you only have two games to try, well with PSN that problem is solved! I downloaded some four five demos the first day and tried what different kinds of excitement the machine had to offer!

Downloading very large games from the PSN isn’t that bad, granted I have a very high speed Internet access but still. First off all you can choose to download in the background while you play some other game, when the download is complete a notification will come up and you can switch to the new game. Furthermore you can queue up alot of downloads and then turn off the console, the PS3 will then ask if it should first finish the downloads and then power off, perfect!

I said earlier that there only was one dissapointment, well there acctually are two. After all these pleasent features I came to play the “Bad Company” demo, a first-person shooter, and I kept being reminded of how slugish it is to aim in a FPS with an analog joystick controler. I really missed a mouse or even better, a Wii remote to aim with! This made me think of how blessed the Wii is to have such versatile standard controllers.

All in all I like my PS3 very much, allthough the price still is a bit steep, though it really includes more than I first thought it would.

In recent news there have been talk about the lack of consequences in games in general. There are very few moments in gaming history where your desicion acctually makes a huge difference and change the gameplay ahead (while there are desicions, there is often only one real option that advances gameplay).

While examples such as BioWares “Mass Effect” where certain decisions change the way the game playout are hard to find BioWare themselves state that they will bring consequences back in their upcoming Star Wars MMO.  In traditional games you can often save the game at a point just before a major decision is made and thereby go back and change the choice if you ever regret it, in MMOs you rarely (if ever) can save your progress as all is happning continously in an on-line world. This puts the use of consequences to the test since a player needs to be able to “feel” all those decisions as they should be interpreted in the game. If a player recieves a quest to go chop someones head off he will most likely go chop someones head off without ever contemplating if that is a really good idea to do or not.

In other news the develops from Fallout 3 says they’ve restricted the gamers from being able to kill children in the game as they do not believe it’s something a player should be able to do. With school shootings in several countries this might be a very responsible choice from the developers but it really just walks around the larger issue of lack of consequence. What if you could do whatever you wanted in the game, but that some actions just carry a too high a price for your character or gameplay.

There are other games where the killing of some innocent characters have been restricted, in Blizzard’s World of Warcraft for example there are children that cannot be killed even by the opposing faction. This restriction have instead made people do put in extraordinary effort into killing a “non-killable” character, like draging a huge dragon from the other side of the planet into a major city just to see those “immune” characters suffer. This sort of behaviour is of course considered highly inappropriate by the game masters (Blizzards empolyees who act as “police” in the game) and if you are ever found doing such “game breaking” behaviour you risc being banned. Again, what the world lacks is consequence, if either you draged a huge dragon into the city or killed a child for that matter there should be some kind of penalty for your character but there is not!

Then again… this is games we are talking about, should we restrict games? “World of Warcraft” have some 10 million active players, I very much doubt “World of Consequence” would have the same.