Category: Gaming

Another death in the family

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yeah, I’m playing fast and loose with the word ‘family’ but in some senses I think of the denizens of online role-playing environments as a big, somewhat dysfunctional family. Or club maybe…dare I say cult?

Anyway, I never met Candace Bolter, to the best of my knowledge, but she seems to have been a very nice person. More importantly to me, is the fact that people who never met her face-to-face liked her, and now miss her and remember her fondly. Its so easy to write off ‘in-game’ friendships as somehow no more real than our avatars…easy, that is, until we lose someone, and know we’ve lost them.

How many other virtual friends have slipped away with us assuming they just got tired of playing? Its a disturbing thought, isn’t it?

In Memory of Candace Bolter, aka Kale

PSP initial reactions

Posted on by Nimgimli

Geek lust has never been so intense. I’m still in the futzin’ phase. I’ve played some Ridge Racer (which is awesome) including wireless head-to-head from a good 100 feet apart. Mostly I’ve just been gawking at the thing and caressing it lovingly… er. Ahem. Did I say that out loud?

I’m reading a lot of talk about bad pixels. I’ve seen 3 purchased units running so far, and haven’t found a bad pixel yet.

I do have one small gripe and that’s with wireless connectivity. I was trying to hook into my Apple wireless network and ran into some minor problems. First, I was using WPA and the PSP can only do WEP. So I change over to 128 bit WEP, enter the password in the PSP and it grumbles that passwords have to be 5 or 13 characters long (for 40 and 128 bit, presumably). That might always be the case with WEP…I’ve never used it before. It looked like the actual wireless base station ‘padded’ my too-short password in fact. I reset the password, padding it to 13 characters myself, and entered the padded password on the PSP, and all was well.

Oh, and I also think they should include a USB cable.

Other than that, everything is rocking for me so far…

PSP…It’s HERE!

Posted on by Nimgimli

Though sadly, “here” right now is the office. So my shiny new PSP sits on my desk, charging its battery and batting its eyelashes at me. Its a seductive little beastie with a ton of buttons jacks, and hidden panels. I DID get a chance to pop in the Spiderman 2 movie and flash it around the office, prompting one co-worker to don his coat and run out to Best Buy to get one before they were all gone.

Now I have to sit here until 6:00 pm before I can actually PLAY with the damned thing, but overall I’m pumped. The resolution of the screen is amazing. The whole unit is a little smaller than I thought it would be, while the screen is actually bigger than I thought it would be…

Tonight I’ll mess around with moving some MP3s or video onto it (I splurged on a half-gig memory card). Oh, and check out the games, of course. 🙂

PSP INCOMING!

Posted on by Nimgimli

So tomorrow is the big day. Stores are opening at 8 am to sell the PSP. Of course, here in eastern Ma. we’re supposed to get a pretty big snowstorm. Um, I thought it was spring now? Well anyway…

I wonder if that’ll have any impact on launch day. For once I won’t be looking out at the snow and thinking “Maybe I can justify not going to the office today” (since I reserved my PSP at an EB near my office). But why couldn’t the storm have come on FRIDAY so I could’ve stayed home to play with my new toy.

I’ve also got deposits down on Metal Gear Acid, Untold Legends, and Ridge Racer. And I’m hearing enough good about the puzzle game Lumines that I might pick it up too.

In other gaming news, The Matrix Online should have hit stores today. I played a bit of the beta and have been playing during the ‘pre-order’ phase and its pretty compelling. There’re some visual glitches where fighting doesn’t seem to work right, but as far as I can tell its just visual and the numbers behind the combat are flowing nicely.

I was seriously lukewarm about The Matrix Online until just recently; the guys at Monolith really pulled things together in a big way just in the past couple of months. It’s like a totally different game from what was out there earlier in the beta…

Drugs in video games

Posted on by Nimgimli

NY Times has an article about drugs starting to appear in videogames. Read that first…

My initial reaction to these games was 100% negative but the more I think about it… I mean, they have a point that a ton of games have some kind of ‘power-up’ that enhances performance or whatever. Essentially those power-ups ARE drugs in that they have a short term impact on the body or the mind (and let’s face it, if they were real people would seek them out).

So in a way, I can see these games as forcing us to consider the kind of moral implications of using power-ups in games… and these power-ups have a downside, which also makes using them a strategic decision.

I still think games are becoming a bit too realistic for my personal tastes; I won’t play Narc, I don’t think. But I still support the right for developers to make these games; adult gamers should have access to adult games, if that’s the genre they choose.