03.10.08
Posted in Personal at 23:36
Apparently I am a level 3 Lawful Good Elven Sorcerer. Which I think means that Damion Schubert could take me in a magic duel. I think I am reconciled with that knowledge.
FYI, my ability scores are:
Strength: 10
Dexterity: 18
Constitution: 10
Intelligence: 15
Wisdom: 14
Charisma: 13
I would probably set my Con and Str to 8-9, as I am generally slightly less fit than I ought to be, but I could do 10 on a good day because I’m still riding high on being young (and as Morten points out, I have never had a hangover, in spite of getting drunk very easily). I think the Dex is accurate considering how remarkably well I tend to get out of fairly serious accidents (may it continue!), plus I used to be a pretty good marksman. The Int, Wis, and Charisma scores are all debatable 
- Game: Two Worlds
- Music: Alex Brandon - NYC Streets
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03.08.08
Posted in Game news, Games at 16:40
Steam has 75% off on Two Worlds this weekend. Yes, that’s seventy-five percent. You can get it right now for 10 dollars. I was never very interested in it because I kinda had my fill of open-world fantasy RPG’s with Oblivion, and TW was alledgedly inferior to Oblivion, so I didn’t see the point.
I just checked Metacritic and TW has an average score of 66%, but PC Gamer UK gave it 71%, so it can’t be all bad, and frankly for 10 dollars, it’d have to be a really poor game not to merit a download. Of course the real allure is that it supports up to 8 players in co-op. Co-op was the main thing Oblivion was missing, so it seems like a no-brainer to me. I’ve bought TW and am downloading it now.
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03.07.08
Posted in Game news, Hardware/Technology at 13:33
I both hate and love PC/console arguments. There are so many interesting similarities and differences to discuss, both in terms of game library, interface, hardware platform, business and pricing models, marketing efforts, development conditions, monopolies, etc. You’ll almost always find something interesting to take away from such discussions, but at the same time it takes immense maturity to discuss the dichotomy without falling back to stereotypes and simple case study.
Lately I’ve been trying to keep up with the “The PC as a gaming platform is dying!” “No the PC as a gaming platform is doing fine!” debate, and frankly it’s not very easy. A lot of the participants in this debate have something at stake (it’s difficult to trust the pro-PC gaming arguments entirely when they come from Valve and Epic who have massive market shares to lose if the PC dies as a gaming platform) and I have significant problems digging down to the facts at the heart of the debate.
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- Game: Crysis
- Music: The Beatles - Norwegian Wood
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03.06.08
Posted in Humour at 23:38
“Problem is, when I don’t play violent computer games I honestly get the overwhelming desire to hit people.”
- Mike Arthur
- Game: Crysis
- Music: Nine Inch Nails - Just Like You Imagined
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03.04.08
Posted in Games at 10:54
I’m slowly building a little network of game enthusiasts with whom to ramble incessantly about computer games. My ultimate objective is to have a network so wide and with so many clever people that I’ll never have to check the news sites again: I can simply log onto MSN and let the daily gaming news flood my conversation windows.
I’m not quite there yet, but I’m definitely on schedule.
A few days ago, Ruben linked me to Experience 112, a superbly French adventure game from presumably equally French developers Lexis Numérique. Already I imagine your objection: “But Jonas!” you cry in surprise, “you don’t like adventure games!” Now now, my good people, that is simply not true! I have been known to enjoy the occasional puzzle or adventure game, notably Myst, Syberia, or Dreamfall, I merely don’t enjoy them as much as FPS or RPG games. There is one thing I always look for in adventure games that the genre on average seems to do far better than any other game genre: Atmosphere.
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- Game: Experience 112
- Music: Superbus - Lola
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03.02.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 02:41
Still playing Crysis, I’ve made it through the level after the mine (spoiler handily sidestepped), which was impressive, beautiful, inventive, frustrating, unpleasant, and confusing beyond description, and reached the Paradise Lost level. Just like the rest of Crysis, it’s a visually astounding level, and the icy waste is a welcome breakoff from the idyllic tropical island the game has taken place in until then.
Crytek have gone to great lengths to drive home the point that it is very frickin’ cold. Notably, there is a pleasingly annoying frost overlay on your weapon’s scope when you zoom in, ice creeps over your vision when you stand still for a while, and - my favourite gimmick - your hands and guns have visible frost on them. All this is brilliant, I haven’t seen it in any game before (though similar effects to the creeping ice have appeared in other games), and yet I couldn’t help but notice one thing was missing…
You leave no prints in the snow.
It seems like an odd thing to miss, when so much work has been put into these effects. There appears to be nothing the Crysis engine can’t do, certainly footprints in the snow are no exception? It’s funny though, in most games I wouldn’t have paused because of this. Neverwinter Nights 2 has snow without footprints for example. But because Crysis throws all these visual effects at you all the time (apparently they’ve used around 85,000 shaders according to NVIDIA’s VP of Content Relations Roy Taylor), it sticks out when they miss something really obvious like footprints. Assuming the footprints aren’t DirectX 10 only, but that would be a little lame - at the very least, prints could be done as decals.
Maybe the morale here is that the more realistic you make your game, the more realistic your players expect it to be - give the Devil a finger, etc. Or maybe the morale is that somebody at Crytek forgot that people tend to leave footprints in the snow. Pick the option you prefer.
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03.01.08
Posted in The Nameless Mod at 01:56
There are presumably endless advantages to being able to meet your coworkers face to face, but right now I have one main reason to crave physical interaction with my fellow TNM team members: I want to celebrate. I want to get everybody into a big room, break out the campagne (hell, it’s on me!), maybe pick up a cake from a bakery down the street (it’s not a lie you gits!), and then put We Are The Champions on the PA.
I finished the third and last of our main endgame cutscenes. Each deliciously scripted, carefully framed, and with plenty of unique content like sound and art assets, not to mention special-case programming. And I have nobody to celebrate with. The best I can do is call a few guys into the same MSN convo and throw the little party hat smilies around. It’s just not good enough! I want to laugh, dance, and pat everybody on the back for a job well done. There is so little left to do on TNM it’s ridiculous!
And I can’t do anything about it. Except sit here and watch TortoiseSVN commit the last files to the repositories.
One day… one day I’ll win $100 million, buy a building in Copenhagen, and fly everybody in. And then we’ll have a damn party.
- Game: The Nameless Mod
- Music: Alex Brandon - The Synapse
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