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I get increasingly annoyed with game copy protections, I find is completely stupid that you have to have the disk in the drive to play the game, there’s a reason 100% of the data is already installed. The saddest part of all, is that this doesn’t really help, it won’t stop people who are really pirating the games, since its trivial to find a patch for the game that will remove this protection, all these protections really do, is that they hobble the legitimate user.

One system I like, is Valve’s Steam, you download all your games, no disk needed (but you can buy Steam games on disk so speed up install), once activated, the game gets added to your account, and you can re-download it anytime, all the games you own through Steam are there on your account, and you can uninstall/install them at will. Some people attack Steam because you need to be connected to the internet to play the games, I say so what, at least you don’t need to have the disk, or worry about the disk scratching, losing the disk, etc.

Recently more and more publishers have been signing on with Steam, I applaud that, an online distribution platform like Steam makes it so much easier to purchase the games, that I think in its own way prevents some piracy, since (it is my belief) that a lot of casual software pirates do it because of laziness, its just so much easier to download the game than to go to a store (and if its a new release, hope its in the store).

So at the end of the day, I don’t care how complicated you make the protection scheme as long as it doesn’t hobble the end user, the person who PAID YOU MONEY to use your product, I do not want to keep the damned Disk in my drive just to appease the copy protection, I don’t mind having some kind of an account and requiring a log-in to play the game each time. But overall, the major game publishers should come together and make an online game delivery system, similar to Steam perhaps (or use Steam, extend it, because I’m not sure how well what Valve’s got would survive when all the sudden all games are sold over it =)

Oh and another thing, something that may well even further deter piracy, DEMOS. Seriously, do you really expect people to buy your games because the box looks pretty? An investment of $70 requires a bit of good will from the seller, no a days its basically impossible to return games to stores for a full refund. If its easy to try the product, via a demo of say the first 2 stages of the game (this of course varies from game to game), then thus enticed a player will want to buy the game (or not, I guess, but that’s just an incentive not to make crap games). Furthermore, once the player has the demo, realistically they game maybe 25-50% of the game, it should be made easy to upgrade this demo to a full game, ideally even keeping progress in the demo towards the full game (assuming the demo was using the first 2 levels).

Now most of this applies to PC games only, console games, for those I have my own rant. Since most consoles right now have some kind of internet connectivity, and some have high capacity storage (Xbox, Xbox360, PS2 with the hard drive add-on), very much like Nintendo DS’s “download and play” feature used in stores to demo games, one should be able to download demos of games via the internet to the console, either that or simply subscribe to some kind of a demo disk mail-out from the publishers, because realistically that’s well earned marketing dollars, since they’re sending out demos to games, people who may well buy their games. So to all you game publishers, make it easy for people to TRY and BUY your product, through demos, trials and making your games download-able.

I started working on the World of Warcraft pages, they are in development, but soon my WoW mods should be available for download. I will get them posted in the 3 main mod sites that seem to be out there Curse Gaming, , WoWInterface and The Unofficial WoW UI Site. This should give them maximum exposure.

The new pages can be viewed here.

I was passing by London Drugs the other day and I saw that they had a copy of Advent Rising for the PC and I had to get it. I actually finished the game maybe a month ago when I acquired it through other means, but I just had to buy it to show my support, especially since I heard that the 2 sequels may not be coming.

I really enjoy first/third person shooters with a story, I really enjoyed Halo for the PC, and I really enjoyed Advent Rising, the game had a very deep story and godly powers don’t hurt either (it kinda felt like playing a Jedi game, but with more super powers)

Also around the same time I picked up a copy of Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks. I ended up being quite disappointed with the game, but then again its a MK game, can’t expect too much from it.

And to add one more game to this weekend’s purchases, I picked up Quake 4. I didn’t play that much of it, but I enjoyed it much better than Doom 3, Doom had too much needlessly dark corridors, I tended to get lost a lot, Quake is pretty well lit in general, and it comes with a multiplayer mode which is very similar in experience to that of Quake 3: Arena, so overall it should be a re-playable purchase.

I spent the Thanksgiving weekend playing with the Source engine (ie .. Halflife 2’s engine). I spent probably most of the time playing with the physics elements (just to give an example, making a controllable boat that can jump through an obstacle course on ramps). Considering I never toucher Hammer (the Source map editor) I think I got pretty far in 3 days. I learned a lot about how to use the tool and how the different entities interact, allowing me to build a boat with thrusters sound and everything, overall its a really cool science experiment, being able to put together thrusters, levers and hinges and see it all work. When I get some more time I’ll post some screenshots of the map, and based on this I may end up making a team boat map of some sort.

... so its been a while .. more than a week since I picked up my copy of WoW. I finally got around to writing this.

World of Warcraft is I think the best MMO out there right now. Its hard to quantify all the diffrent things about it, but let me try to put it all together.

- no load times .. the world is continual, there is zones, but you don’t notice you’ve crossed a zone boundary other than the new zone name popping up and your map changing .. - quests .. there is a lot of quests, they are not hard to find (there is a big yellow ”!” on top of any NPC which has a quest for you, and a ”?” on a NPC who is waiting for you to complete a quest with them) - enemies .. the encouters are done pretty well, the game is very soloable (and I like that), for some bosses its usefull to team up with another person, but for the most part its soloable. (there are other things which require groups, but thats not part of the everyday gameplay) - crafting .. the grind from crafting is practically removed, the difficulty on items is perfectly staggered so you have to make each item at most twice to keep getting new items to make, you get new items every 5-10 skill points which isnt much at all ..

that’s about all .. I’m not sure what else to write ..

After the dissapointment with Doom 3, and Halo 2’s controls fiasco .. I was really looking for a good FPS. Yesterday on my way from work I picked up a copy of the newly released Half-Life 2 and here are my first thoughts.

I didnt really hear much about the game before I got it (I mean yes I heard about it, its a huge title, but I didnt follow the hype at all). I picked a copy up at EB, was actually surprised that I got a copy without pre-ordering. I brought it home, unpacked, installed and started it.

Right from the start I saw that this game is diffrent. There was a lot of npc interaction, stunning graphics, and I soon learned a wicked physics engine. Just to give an idea of how cool the physics engine is, one of the early puzzles was a ramp on a pivot. A simple principle, but the ramp was facing the wrong way. The solution to this puzzle was to place some bricks on the other end of the ramp to cause it to pivot and allow it to be used as the exit from the area. I just love the physics, you can literaly stop and have some fun with things on your way (for example start throwing things at a tire tied to a tree and see it swing around. Reminds me of a physics engine demo I downloaded once. Even more amazing is the fact that not only does stuff fall and blow up, things also float, and puzzles have been set up to use that effect.

Overall I love the game, so far I got to the 3rd or 4th major area and I’ll post any more cool things I come across.

EQ2 doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of an improvement on EQ. I’m waiting for World of Warcraft to come out .. meanwhile here is my banter on EQ2.

Graphics .. the initial wow factor is attributed mainly to the graphics engine, it kicks ass the graphis are stunning, great water effects and environmental effects. All this eyecandy comes at a cost tho. It takes ~30 seconds of load time between each zone, and zones are not that big (give or take similar in size to original EQ).

Quests .. quests are my other beef inEQ2. How about this .. “Please deliver this bow to ‘Bob’ in South Queynos” .. how’s that for vague. South Queynos is a prety large zone with lots of NPC’s. Finding Bob among them all is prety much left up to luck, you spend so much time just blindly running around trying to find your quest npc’s it gets on your nerves quick.

Combat .. combat is ok, every skill has its unique animation, they look nice (again eyecandy and all). You gain one skill per level (I havn’t really gotten a character up real high yet (and I don’t know if I ever will), so I don’t know what’s in store much higher, but this seems to be the pattern. Grouping is mandatory prety much, ther’s a lot of groups of monsters roaming around, which means that if you attack one of them you have the whole group on you, not fun at all solo. Past the initial bootcamp it becomes prety hard to do much without grouping. I hate being forced to group in MMORPGs.

Customization .. big props in here, you can customize probably 50 aspects of yourself (mainly your face), with very fine grained controll. The only problem is, you never really look at most those details on a character, I supose you could, in first person view mode, but I dubt most people do, making the great customization options moot.

well that’s about all .. I’ll have something up on WoW when I get it.

Yesterday I got them both, I’m mostly playing EQ2 right now, it seems a lot of an improvement over EQ for sure. Halo 2 is great, but I just can’t play a FPS on a controler, I may have to pick up one of those Xbox Keyboard/Mouse adaptors and see how that works .. I can’t aim with a controller .. I don’t get it how people can swear by controller based FPS games ..

For some strange reason .. I’ve been playing Neverwinter Nights for lately. It’s a great game, and it doesn’t get old. Yep that’s about it.