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  .e 6:03 am on December 21, 2010 Permalink
  Tags: gaming, mass effect 2, net neutrality   

  hook and line neutrality 

  was working on mixes and watching angelica play ME2, and reading about net neutrality in the background. after about 2 hours of reading, i am of the conclusion that anyone who says they understand net neutrality is either (A) lying, or (B) lying to make money off of it one way or the other

  i’d comment on it more, but frankly i’m not qualified to. instead, here’s some thoughts about Mass Effect 2:
  1, the game, being a sequel, doesn’t do the “you lose all your items and powers, start over” crap. instead you start a world famous hero who saved the world, and have access to vast resources and near top of the line weaponry and armor. ditto your team. who also are heroes who saved the world and have achieved their own positions of power and greatness.

  2, at no point does the game plot fall into the rut of “you need to find the 7 parts of the seal that ancient warriors used to block out the demon” type crap. even the most mundane side quests (aka, the loyalty missions) have better individual plots than most sci-fi books i read. it actually feels like watching hour long episodes of a good sci-fi tv series: each has it’s own complete plot

  and yeah, the shooty parts can feel more like an on-rails headshot emulator than an FPS, but eh, it’s not supposed to be a shooter
  

  

  picture unrelated

   
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  .e 3:45 am on November 12, 2009 Permalink
  Tags: cod5, culture ( 3 ), gaming, modern warfare 2   

  modern wombat 

  what i learned from the game Modern Warfare 2:

  • the CIA is perfectly willing to slaughter hundreds of civilians as part of undercover op
  • all brazilians are armed to the teeth
  • the russian military gives each person a totally different brand and caliber gun
  • heartbeat monitors can detect if you’re friend or foe
  • and so can UAVs. they even mark foes with little red rectangles in real time
  • specops can drive snowmobiles one handed while shooting and reloading an uzi, but is completely befuddled by chain link fences and barb wire
  • it’s possible to get good consistant bandwidth in a remote mountain house (note! this one might not actually be true)
  • russia can launch a full land invasion of america with 1 day prep

  and that famous part to MW2, the “kill the civilians” bit, it’s funny to me that it’s that big a deal. you’re playing a shooter and have already shot dozens of random people, will continue to shoot hundreds more, and because some of them are unarmed it’s a big deal? yes, they get hit in “realistic” means (as much as that applies for computer games) but so does every other character

  cmon now, you call in airstrikes in crowded cities and grenade marketplaces, but apparently all those are abandoned and/or no one cares about brazilians.

  eh, whatevs.

  Drew, and .e are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Drew 2:11 am on November 13, 2009 Permalink

    The military really is working on the heartbeat monitor one. They’re developing an “empathetic” robot who will essentially shadow an actual soldier and monitor activity and life forms around him/her. Depending on the heart rate of that soldier, it will theoretically determine to the robot whether the life forms are enemies or not.

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    .e 2:21 am on November 13, 2009 Permalink

    in this game it basically works like gun mounted radar that blinks different colors for “good guys” and “bad guys” and tells , and for some stupid reason is called a “heartbeat monitor”.

    cheap bastards use it in multiplayer to sit in a corner with a belt fed machine gun and spray anyone who shows up before they can see you

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    Drew 9:03 am on November 14, 2009 Permalink

    Yeah…it’s almost the same technology, I suppose.

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  .e 3:12 am on September 19, 2009 Permalink
  Tags: gaming, laptops, self ( 3 ), ubuntu, windows   

  little computing milestones 

  there’s some microsoft offer to sell windows 7 to students for $30, and since my email address looks rather studentlike, i briefly considered getting in on this.

  i was just about to fill out the form when i suddenly remembered: i don’t have a single computer that runs windows anymore. work mac laptop, mac mini at home, and 2 old unix laptops. i guess i could upgrade my xp that runs in parallels but i’m too worried it’d blow away the rest of my partitions in the process. i only use it to test sites in obsolete IE versions anyways.

  for the curious, the machines are:
  - work laptop, macbook pro. i take it home though since the border between work and not-work is sorta vague in my life
  - home mac mini. hulu, netflix, bluetooth keyboard that reaches the couch fine. it’s basically the cable box replacement. i just upgraded the ram on it so i should see if it can run games at all, i think i have an xbox controller hooked up to it with drivers installed. i should see what i can do with that
  - circa 1999 thinkpad, running ubuntu. it can run terminal just fine, but attempting to run a modern gnome gui causes serious lag. i use it as an always on personal subversion server, and since it sits at work, to show most recent server errors from the logs in streaming format
  - circa 2002 sony, running ubuntu. default home laptop, doesn’t run movies too well but is a pretty good machine otherwise. usb wireless since this was the last model laptop to not have a built in wireless card

  i don’t have a gaming pc anymore. it’s fine, i don’t really have time to play games enough to justify the investment in one, and when i do game it’s usually just dwarf fortress, eve, or xbox, none of which require a omgwtfsuper pc.

  besides, it’s not like there’s any space to put a gaming rig in the apartment. i’m still juggling to find a way to keep my clothes semi-organized