The Yin and Yang of Gaming

So a few days ago a Horde guildie reminded me that the S1 ring was going away today and while grinding marks and honor to pick it up, I ran a few Warsong Gulch BGs. I’ll simply state that I hate WSG and leave it at that. However, it never ceases to amaze me at the lack of situational awareness people exhibit. I managed to solo cap TWICE with no escort and no attacks. How’d I do it? By doing the one thing that people don’t expect you to do: I ran around behind the Alliance GY, dropped off the cliff as far over as possible, and sucked wall back to our ramp. There were tons of people in the middle, and any one of the Alliance could have seen me and stomped me flat. But since everyone seemed to be focused on the center, I slipped by with nary a peep.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a particularly good WSG player, not by a long shot. Against a competent team there’s no way I would have pulled this off once, much less twice. But when everyone starts playing grabass in the middle, it opens a lot of possibilities.

So over the years I’ve become a firm believer in Steam. I just like being able to install a small program, then walk away and everything gets downloaded. It makes things so much easier. No CD keys to remember or anything. I just picked up the Unreal Deal, even though I’ve got most of the games already (including UT3)….I think at this point I’m not going to buy anything unless it’s on Steam. It’s just too convenient.

I’ve also been playing a lot of CS:S at Seattle-DuckSoup, these guys are fun to hang out with. If you’re looking for a fairly laid back yet competitive server, there are much worse ones out there. The admins are reasonable, and a bit crazy too.

It’s out. Installed, and joined the Creator’s Club. Compiled and played a few games. This is pretty awesome stuff. I can’t wait to get on writing something, I was thinking about maybe Dice Wars.

As per Kotaku, Sega is releasing the open beta for PSO this weekend, which will end on the 18th. WTF? With XBL down on the 17th, that gives people, what, 3 days? That’s not a beta, that’s a marketing campaign. Plus they want 10 bucks a month for the retail product over and above purchase cost. Uh, no thanks. I have enough gaming services to pay for. (WoW, Eve, XBL)

So I picked up the Xbox Live Vision Camera today, and seeing as how it’s just USB, I plugged it into my laptop to see what would happen. It works! Interestingly enough, a second USB device shows up: “Microsoft Xbox 360 Live Vision Security Method 3″. It doesn’t install any actual driver files, but it definitely recognizes it and goes through a long brouhaha getting it up and running. If you plug it in, let it connect to windows update and everything should work out eventually.

Via Lum, Ubiq talks about skill-based and class-based MMOs, and why ultimately class-based is better. I tend to agree with him. I think a purely skill-based system, such as Bethesda Softworks’ Elder Scrolls series, is perfectly fine for a single-player experience, because you can get away with the protagonist eventually becoming a minor deity in its own right. However, for the multiplayer experience, you have to constrain skills somehow, and inevitably broken combinations show up or everything is watered down for balance’s sake. Maybe it’s a personal preference, but it’s part of the reason I never got into Second Life. It’s got too much freedom, there’s no defining context at all. Creating for the sake of creating is fine and all, but give me a little push, at least. I guess I suck for not being creative enough.

Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with skill-based systems, it’s just they’re much much harder to get right, and with the popularity of World of Warcraft these days, no one can afford to get it wrong….

Well the timer ran out, and it’s a mouse. A tasty looking one at that. Enough buttony goodness for me. I am severely tempted.

Meant to post this earlier (a LOT earlier), but the next XBLA release, Texas Hold ‘em Poker, will be free for the first 48 hours of release. Hopefully it’s a small download because I suspect the servers will be hammered.

As noted at Xboxic, 1UP says Capcom has acknowledged the font problems in Dead Rising. If you haven’t played it, on SD televisions (like mine) the font is super small. I have a 32″ television and for the most part I have to stand in front of the TV to easily read the text. It doesn’t make the game unplayable, but it’s annoying to have to get up from the couch periodically to see what the heck is going on.

Microsoft’s announced a new product and service geared towards encouraging homebrew development of games on the PC and 360. A variant on Visual Studio C# Express 2005, XNA Game Studio Express comes bundled with all the libraries and whatnot necessary to develop games that will run on either Windows or the Xbox 360. Next spring a Pro version will be released that will allow hobbyists to sell their work commercially. Hopefully this attempt at running managed code on a console will work slightly better than their last attempt, with the Sega Dreamcast. That console could deploy either native code, or Windows CE binaries.