March 2006 Archives

Its funny but until recently I wouldn't have said that I'm terribly interested in computer games, other than casually, but over the last couple of week I've started to become more compulsive about the whole industry. Generally my day starts by going through my daily list of web comics, of which most of them are game related. Add on to this the hours I spent pouring over Oblivion and now the screen grabs of PS3 games that are coming out, and I've realised that I'm am totally hooked.

Unusually though its not a traditional sense, I'm not a particularly good, or obsessive gamer, but I am totally blown away by the advances that have been made in the last couple of years. The PS2 came out pretty much bang on 6 years ago and the games then looked great, with Gran Turismo leading the pack (and still is to this day). Fast forward those six years and we have the X-Box 360 out and the PS3 expected, and all the games are looking even better, more realistic, with more detail and customisation possibilities, almost to the point that the game play itself is reaching cinematic quality (and not just the pre-rendered FMV sequences). In fact the quality of the game engines have advance so far in half a decade that more and more games are using the Game Engine to display cut scenes, saving masses of space on disk (comparitively) to high quality Full Motion Video.

With the 80s (the hey-day of "classic gaming", who can forget Sonic, Super Mario and the rest) only a mere 2 decades past and the current rate of advancement, I think that the next couple of years are going to blow peoples minds: the budgets for computer game titles are rising at the same as film budgets are falling, computing power is still climbing, and the internet is not far off becoming in the norm instead of the exception (even in a significant number of developing countries). Microsoft have the 360 out and are no doubt looking ahead to their next console revision (a good 6-7 years away again), Sony's PS3 is still tipped to be the hottest development in the industry (either as a winner or a spectacular loser) and with these two players its hard to imagine the industry not getting bigger and better, and the games are going to get more and more realistic, if you can imagine that...

I've always maintained that playing computer games isn't bad for you, and it seems that other people have the same idea. There's always been the long held notion that twitch games (FPS like Doom and Quake) improve hand-eye coordination (and other medical conditions now it seems). It seems that the skills learnt in playing Massively Multiplayer Games, and in particular in running a Guild (Corporation/OutFit/Tribe), are something that companies are starting to notice.

Its seems that not everyone is happy with the traditional arrangement of working. We've had tele-working for a number of years now, and it seems that the next stage is making the company itself less fixed to the group. Here we have the idea of a nomadic business, that is a business with no permanently fixed location and one where all the members are not necessarily all in the same place all the time.

This approach extols the idea of using VOIP (Skype, Vonage), e-mail (Hotmail etc) and cellular technology to maintain your interpersonal links (hiring a POBox for all that snail mail too).

I must admit I like the idea of a "Bedouin" company, and in many respects it mirrors many of the relationships that I have nowadays. Simultaneously the world is becoming both more and less disconnected: the friends from University that live in the Channel Islands you get e-mails from or the Aunt in the Far East who can use Skype, your guild mates in USA, Denmark and Japan, and the collegue in the next city who you IM. All forming a "tribe" of people who aren't together but are.

Cory Doctorow had the right idea in Eastern Standard Tribe, we're connected together by timezones, interests and wires (well and wireless) not by physical location....mind blowing init?

I never really meant this to become a Gamer's blog but it does seem to be heading that way, at least recently. Anyway I've just discovered a good reason (at least for me) to by a PS3. Its a dragon sim (!?!) called Lair, and you can check out some of the game footage at IGN.

I must admit I like the idea of a coffe so black it has a "ring of Cerenkov blue around it", although I suspect drinking the stuff might actually blow your entire head in to small sub-atomic particules...:-D

Ok I apologise for the rash of computer game related posted on here, from now on I will generally keep them on MySpareBrain. But in this last case I'll post it here, as it means that Damnit! can jump on the whole Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion bandwagon (albeit slightly late).

And for the sake of everyones sanity I'll put the bulk of this behind the jump...

As the resident Geek, I'm the one that is frequently posting about computer games, and a couple of weeks back I posted about a Massively Multiplayer First Person Shooter called Huxley. Well it seems that Sony Online Entertainment might have beaten Huxley to the punch, with the launch of PlanetSide.

More after the Jump...

Apparently the copy protection system provided by Starforce installs a driver which runs at the highest level of your computers Operating System, and will restart your computer without warning if it detects any "suspicious" activitiy.

[More Info]

A very astute list of what we've learnt about Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games: check out Raph Koster's Web site