Category Archives: Games

10-year-long video game creates hellish nightmare world – CNN.com

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10-year-long video game creates hellish nightmare world – CNN.com.

As I was reading I couldn’t help but notice that this world is without hope. So this is what happens when nobody is allowed to think beyond the simulation!?! This is AWESOME. Three super-city states trapped in eternal war. It’s like 1984 in a computer.

At some point when nuclear weapons aren’t enough to toss in humanities collective towel, I suppose you’d have to switch to an effective agent for genocide. Perhaps an aerosolized super-durable Marburg virus. One sneeze that ended it all. Hemorragic Fever so pronounced that it makes peoples heads explode from the mismatched blood pressure.

Seems a blessing after reading what the state of the world would be in that simulation. I wonder if this keeps Sid Meier up at night wondering…

LJ – The Taxman Cometh

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From 02/12/2003

Just polished off my taxes, Scott’s and Dan’s. Turns out I’ll be making quite the killing refund wise so I have decided to invest my money in three ways. One way is to completely disentangle myself from worrying over the fundage for our groups Gencon trip, second, to ferret cash away somewhere safe for an eventual trip to Wales (& Ireland, maybe), and the third bit I am not sure on just yet. A part of me wants to toss it at my credit debts, another part wants to have it broken into 5’s and 10’s and roll around in it like a horse with a bad back itch.

While putting some mileage on my Guncon2 controller for the PS/2 with my friend Dan from work we did taxes and chatted and I wondered why the feds don’t establish a monetary return (interest after all) on the withholding that I’ve been involuntarily paying via my employer, that would add a bit of flavoring to my 1040A for sure and be more fair to everyone.

Another thing I discovered tonight is that even though there are slight differences in withholding and such, I really got a taste for the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer while doing everyones taxes – the divide between Scott, Dan, and My income tax returns shows me how unbalanced income tax is and it angers me how it is affecting my friends.

DCUO

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Yesterday Scott talked me into downloading DC Universe Online and joining up as a “Free to Play” player. I cleaned up my old Dell gaming PC as DCUO is a PC-only game and loaded it onto my computer at home. The client and all the content clocks in at over 20GB so it took a while to download across the network.

Once I got the game installed I had to fix DirectX, and then after that it ran. I had seen it during Sony’s beta test of the game and wasn’t terribly impressed or thrilled with the gameplay mostly because the human interface was so different from what I was used to with City of Heroes from NCSoft. I knew Scott was very keen on having me play so I relented and agreed to play the game. While going through the lead-in trial course that every new player has to go through I revisited the same issues I had before when playing the game. The mouse and keyboard controls are maddening. I was cussing and swearing while trying to button-mash. It felt like the inanity of a Playstation game, where you dispense with the pleasantries of the cut-scenes and the lame lead in until you move a figure to a part of the screen and then click like you’ve got Parkinson’s.

Near the end of playing yesterday, around lunchtime I went exploring the settings of the game and discovered to my chagrin a setting called “Invert Camera” and that singular adjustment made the game MAKE SENSE TO ME. All of a sudden the game played much more like City of Heroes and once I was beyond that obnoxious hurdle I actually really got into playing the game.

What do I think of DCUO? It’s certainly a competent game and is engaging. The mission system is acceptable and the play itself is entertaining and worth my time. The only real issue that remains with DCUO is how much lag the mouse pointer has when it’s not controlling the camera in-game. You have to have patience with the pointer as it doesn’t fly as your mouse moves, it instead feels like the game is asking the computer to manually redraw the mouse each time the mouse updates. This is irritating but not so much to make me stop playing the game.

As I play more of DCUO I’ll have more experience and will most likely refine my critique of the game and if I have the presence of mind enough I may blog about it again in the future. Or I won’t. We’ll see.