Real Life

If I came up to your face, stomped my foot down, looked you straight in the eye and said “Fuck off asshole,” what would you do? You’d either

1) Say “What’s your problem?”
2) Say “What’s your problem, assmunch?”
3) Punch me in nose, break my back, kick me in the balls, bite my arm, and then say “What’s your problem, assmunch?” And then give me a wedige. I’m then sent to a hospital for which you are now paying the bills for. Everybody wins.
4) Cry like a whiney little bitch.

Online

Now take that same concept and imagine if I said the same things in World of Warcraft, or any other MMORPG? What would you do?

1) Type “What’s your problem?”
2) Type “What’s your problem, assmunch?”
3) Target me, type /spit, pull out your Sword of a Thousand Truths , slay me in one hit, and then /spit again on my corpse, in case the first one missed. Then do it all over again because I respawned and like to bully you perfectly safe and sound in my own house. Nobody wins.
4) /Cry like a little bitch.

For those who don’t know, the real life part of my discussion is also known as “bullying”. The Internet part of my discussion is known as “cyber-bullying,” or, that concept that people made others aware again with commercial ads who can’t seem to figure out the answer to “If you wouldn’t say it in real life, why say it online?” (For the answer to that question, see the real life #3 in my above example, and then compare it #3 in the Internet part.)

Anyway, there happens to be a law out in Australia right now (again) that is making the selling of unrated games illegal. (Speaking of unrated, I guess that means kiddies can buy rated R movies nowadays thinking it’s a “Dawn of The Dead – Lite” and then have the mom sue the retailer because the people who rate DVD’s decided change”Director’s Cut,” “Un-Cut,” or “Slightly more gory/sexy/adult oriented shit we couldn’t show you in the theaters even though the movie is already rated R,” to “Unrated.”) That is, any game that the Australian ESRB has decided to not rate is declared illegal. Keep in mind that the ESRB does not rate games that does not have a single player component. This would make every single god damn MMORPG out there, including the fat dollar bill filled pot-bellied World of Warcraft.

• A spokesman for NSW Attorney-General John Hatzistergos said the NSW Classification Enforcement Act prohibited publishers and retailers from selling unclassified computer games.
• “The NSW legislation covers computer games bought online as well as those bought in stores, and treats single, multi-player and online games the same way,” he said.
• A spokeswoman for Federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland said that, although it was up to each state and territory to enforce game classification requirements, Commonwealth legislation also had no loopholes for online games.
• “The National Classification Scheme does not distinguish between games based on whether or not they contain a single player component,” she said.
• But Ron Curry, chief executive of games industry body the Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia said he believed that online games without a single player component did not require classification by the Classification Board.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/biztech/no-classification-online-games-legal-minefield/2009/02/03/1233423203018.html

What a crock of shit. “Does not require” classification by the Classification Board? Don’t you love how he doesn’t say “why?” So what you’re telling me is that it’s ok to go around maiming people “offline,” ok to maim people “online,” but NOT ok to maim people “online,” if the same game doesn’t allow you to maim people “offline”? Granted, the real reason behind this new law hasn’t exactly been said, but I begin to wonder if any of these “lawbringers” have even played an MMORPG before? I’m sure a lot of Australians disagree to this new law, and even though the police aren’t exactly enforcing this law just yet (they have bigger fish to fry like..I don’t know…stopping murderous thieves? Not retailers that sells games that a few people out of a few million feels is unethical) I’m expecting picket fences any time now. It may be their law, but I think it’s also unethical to completely ignore the fact that all these MMORPGs CLEARLY STATE

“GAME EXPERIENCE MAY CHANGE DURING ONLINE PLAY”

They have this warning for a reason. The ESRB rates the GAME, not the PLAYERS. Maybe Australia expects everyone to play nice, like all gamers mindsets are capped out to 10 years of age and never know any better. (And yet….) There is no way in the world that companies can predict what other players might do online or how they interactive with others. (or..”things.”) Therefore, they can only rate the game itself. If they didn’t have this warning, they would get sued, because junior learned a few new four letter words. As for Australian gamers who do know better, I can only tip my hat and say God speed, before even Hello Kitty Island Adventure gets banned.

That’s the catch phrase that F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin uses in it’s marketing and at the end of the demo, now currently available as well as on Steam. While I haven’t played any other F.E.A.R games other than the original on PC, considering that none of them really continued the storyline too well. (Even though F.E.A.R. – Extraction Point continued, but didn’t really go anywhere) I think it’s safe to say that it’s safe to continue the series with this one without too much confusion in the storyline if you’ve ignored the other installments. The game’s graphics are quite nice, but don’t be expecting the next Crysis. The specs are:

Minimum System Requirements:

*CPU: P4 2.8GHz (3.2GHz Vista)/Athlon 64 3000+ (3200+ Vista)
*GPU: DX9-capable graphics card with 256MB (SM 2.0b). NVidia 6800 or ATI X700.
*RAM: 1GB (1.5GB Vista)
*Hard Drive: 12GB
*OS: Windows XP SP2/Vista SP1
*DirectX: 9.0c
*Sound: DX9.0c compliant
*Optical drive: DVD (boxed only)
*Internet: Broadband

Recommended System Requirements:

*CPU: Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz processor family/Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (required for MP host)
*GPU: Fully DX9-compliant graphics card with 512MB (SM 3.0). NVidia 8600 GTS or ATI HD 2900 XT.
*Ram: 1.5GB
*Hard Drive: 12GB
*OS: Windows XP SP3/Vista SP1
*DirectX: 9.0c
*Sound: DX9.0c compliant
*Optical drive: DVD (boxed only)
*Internet: Broadband (768kbit/sec upstream required to host 16 players)

http://pc.ign.com/articles/944/944021p1.html

The game runs quite well on my Vista rig with a single 8800 GTX, 4GB RAM and a 3.0ghz Dual Core 2. It ran at 60 FPS for the most part, with it dropping down to only about 40 FPS in a few areas, but since the game is so dark it’s really hard to notice. (Your flashlight doesn’t do jack…a cellphone could provide better light.) You can now hold up to four weapons. You still have you’re slow-mo ability, but it has drastically changed, both good and bad. For one, targets now light up in an almost psychedelic way. However, the speed of your slow-mo doesn’t seem to be as slow anymore, and the audio cue when you activate and deactivate it isn’t as loud, so it’s a little hard to tell if you have it active on or not. Also Q and E no longer makes you lean, (in fact there is no more leaning) in favor for a weapon-function change, and an all purpose “use” key, repsectively. Lastly, the game doesn’t seem to support widescreen resolutions very well. Although you can change to such resolutions, the game shows it in letterbox format. C’mon guys, it’s 2009, get with the times. You can’t even buy a regular TV anymore.

Oh yeah and theres a cool mech armor thingy at the end of the demo you get to use. Other than that, that’s about all that’s changed, as far as the demo goes. Combat is still great, AI is still clever, scares are still plentiful (and better with the new graphics) but more or less it’s prettty much the same game. Whether or not this is a good thing is up to you, but I’d say this is the first true sequel to the original, as the name implies. We’ll see how the full release goes.

From Everquest 2, Ragnarok Online, World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, all of these games range in different ways in how they play. But whether it’s casual MMO, or a hardcore grindfest, all of them seem to have one thing in common. Forests, fairies, ogres, swords, and damsels who can’t live a single day without being kidnapped by some evil villan. The industry has made, and is still making, countless fantasy themed RPG’s nowadays.

Quite frankly, I’m tired of it. It doesn’t matter how different the combat is (unless it were akin to a game like Oblivion) I’m tired of running through forests, caves, or blackened lands with hot lava coming out killing stock fantasy creatures. Now you might be thinking that I may be neglecting about Sci-Fi MMORPG’s as well like Anarchy Online and Tabula Rasa. The thing with sci-fi is, although instead of swords, you have guns, it’s the enviorments to me that still seen to lean towards regualr fantasy RPG’s, albiet maybe a bit more strange looking.

Now I’m not too familiar with the background of Anarchy Online (at the time I first tried it it was already pretty old) but it seems to me that you join the ranks of some military unit, so it’s your job to go out and do missions outside the city. Yeah, outside the boundaries of the city, you know, that place with the grass, trees, mountains and caves? (And on a side comparison, that place that you ventured out to that encomppased 90% of the entire game of FF7 when you finally left the aweseome city of Midgar after rescuing Aeris from Shinra? I mean in Midgar you were FIGHTING in the city. After Midgar if you wanted to fight, you had to take it outside. ALL the way outside.)

Then came Auto Assault. Yeah, it’s sci-fi again, but this time it was cars. Cars that you could customize to your heart’s content. Complete with gatling guns, missle launchers, flame throwers, and even a pine air freshner that comes with a pair of fuzzy dice. Oh yeah and it was also post-acolayptic. Earth has been destroyed, and now there is nothing left but long plains and cliffs of brown (grass?) and the occasional green sludge. (lava?) The only time you saw a city was either if you were shopping in town, or driving in one out in the field but in that case it was usually blown to smitherens, like a grown-up taking candy away from a baby and then taunting it by saying “You can’t have it!”

The most recent in sci fi MMO’s is Tabula Rasa. Futuristic guns, robots, aliens, but wait, what’s this? A waterfall? Mountains? Gigantic flowers? And is that a tent? So what your saying is that technology and the way of the future has finally brought us housing made of cloth? Either that or someone’s idea of the future is a world where instead of spending money on ways for a better living enviorment, a few select individuals spend it on war technology so the world can wrestle in their own values onto other people’s territories.Of course they could also be giving us extra tents in preperation for a world to come. In that case, thank god for these kind of people. They actually care about us, just like a hero. Everyone needs a hero, kinda like this hero…

In short, while whle SCI-FI MMORPG’s do break away from the usual swords and ogres deal, I still feel like I’m playing in a fantasy world, just with more flasy weapons. Every single time Earth is either blown up, humans colonized to other planets, (which seem to always lack certain qualtlies of Earth, like buildings for example) or Earth is blown up and humans have decided to colonize to other planets. When the player does see a futuristic city, it’s only during down time, or with no conflict. But it seems that every person who decides to make a SCI-FI MMORPG wants to have some excuse for the players to still run through fantasy themed environments instead of running through flashy neon cities with gigantic ads that movies such as The Fith Element potray. Complete with questionable hairdo’s and high pitched screaming that would make Mariah Carey cry.

So until a game like that comes, my MMO days are sadly over. Now pardon me, I have a Gemini Croquet Contest to go to.

Part of the reason why I started this blog was because I really wanted to get a question answered, but didn’t know where to turn. I could post in a forum sure, but there are many gaming forums out there, and isn’t exactly what I needed. It was just to get the word out. So I decided to start this blog. Don’t worry, more will soon to come, but for now I just wanted to get this out of the way, as maybe some people don’t know. Case in point:

This is the screen that I get every time I login. About the only time I do see a game is a server called “Must Contain Name” with a ping of 400+. Hell I’m lucky if the ping doesn’t say “–.”

Now before you start, I know what you’re thinking. The game runs horrid. And I mean stupid horrid. My computers specs far exceeds the recommended specs listed on the box (ok, so I’m .2 ghz less than the recommendation of a 3.2gzh Intel Core Duo 2, but it’s Intel Core Duo 2 dammit!) and the game still runs like I bought my computer off the Home Shopping Network. Meaning in order to get a decent framerate, your game will go from looking like this:

To looking like this:

And as if to pour salt in the wound, the game still runs questionably slow at certain points. The above two images show dynamic lighting on, and off, repectively. With the exception to the character models, the game looks similar to a slightly graphically better GTA San Andreas. Now, Saint’s Row 2 has been praised to have more things to do than the GTA series. It was also being noted that the game is obviously focusing on gameplay, and not nesscarily on graphics, as it shows. Assuming that this praise was “positive” was my mistake, because when the game was finally released for PC, all people were doing was complaining about how horrible it runs instead of shutting up, putting down the graphic sliders, and coming online.

Ok, so everyone was playing in co-op mode, which don’t get me wrong, is a lot of fun when I tried. But you can only play with one other person, which means half the time the server was full. (In this case, taken, cause there’s only two frikin slots, and the host takes one already.) And while co-op makes activities and missions change sometimes, for the most part, it’s still single player! It’s called. “multi-player,” not “dual-player.” I’ve yet to play a single game of Strongarm and I beat single already. I don’t know about everyone else, but taking over territorites via a combination of doing the various game activites as well as making frags to win the game round sounds a hella lot more fun than CTF. And by combination, one player on the blue team can be drug tafficking with little to no AI cars chasing them while two or more players from the red team can be going after him. And two more players from blue can be going after another player on red who is racing, etc. Everyone is not just playing activities “or” killing, it can all happen simultaneously. Let’s see you pull that off in co-op. I see very little SR2 reviews mentiong this fact.

If you’re complaining that a game runs slow, you obviously have a decent computer to run such a game well, and are complaining to the fact that you spent $3,000 for nothing. In liu of that, the game is indeed choppy, but it is NOT “unplayable” as many claim it is, even with Dynamic Lighting set to medium. These people either don’t have an up to par computer, or are too damn stubborn to lower down the settings. You bought it. It runs poor. You can’t return it. Deal with it. Aren’t you at least glad you paid 40 bucks for this instead of 60 for the console versions?

Well, you should be. Steam has FINALLY released a patch for the game. And unlike many “performance” patches, this one actually makes a difference. (And I’m notorious for having the nastiest and most unheard of bugs in games that nobody can solve.) So if you’re one who has ababonded this game’s multiplayer because you like playing games and not slideshows, please come back, and tell your friends of the new patch.