total.pardo

“Fight off killer droids and airborn drones with heavy weaponry, while exploring a next-gen environment. Can you beat the gigantic boss robot in a final, earth-shaking battle?”

Avert Fate is Unity’s graphical showcase. It’s to be downloaded on your PC or Mac (88 MB), and can be played in resolutions of up to 1680×1050. Amazing for 88 meg.

Unity is pretty kick ass. I found it on makeuseof.

http://tinyurl.com/6hnj6g

FornaxChemica writes "In a surprise move, Google announced today, both on-site and in its blog, that it will permanently shut down its 3D virtual world, Lively, by the end of the year. This makes Lively one of Google’s few scrapped products, and one of the most short-lived, too, barely lasting 6 months. No official reason was given, only that Google wants to ‘prioritize [its] resources and focus more on [its] core search, ads and apps business.’ Lively might have taken too much and given back too little, even by Google’s standards."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bye.

fta @  http://majornelson.com/archive/2008/11/19/top-10-things-to-do-when-you-get-the-new-xbox-experience.aspx

The New Xbox Experience is in the process of being deployed to all Xbox LIVE members, but it will take a few hours for everyone to get the prompt to update to NXE….be patient! In the meantime I thought I would give my Top 10 list of things to do with NXE when you get it later today:

1) Create (or Customize) your Avatar – You can spend as much (or as little) time as you want in the Avatar Editor to personalize your little guy/girl

Bonus: When you are done with #1, be sure to take a Gamer Picture of your Avatar. In the Avatar editor, choose Gamer Picture. You can use the controls to move your avatar around, zoom in and out or even change the background color (press Y)

2) Explore the all new dashboard. (hint: use the trigger and bumpers to quickly scroll up and down or left and right)

3) PAR-TAY! Check out Xbox LIVE Parties and chat with up to seven of your friends. Go to the Friends channel…choose a friend who is online and press Y to get the party started. You can also hit the Xbox 360 Guide button > Party >Start a Party. Once you do that, send off invites to your party (since one does not make a very good party…does it?)

4) Themes. While any themes you work will NXE, check out some of the new themes via My Xbox and select your profile (second slot) and then change theme. Xbox 360, Spectrum, Day and Night are new themes that available as part of your NXE upgrade…check them out.

5) Marketplace on Xbox.com. This new feature lets you search, browse, and purchase games and videos while you are away from your console. You can also perform account management functions like changing your billing information, viewing your purchase history, and downloading items you already own.

6) Netflix – Xbox LIVE Gold Member and you have Netflix? If you are in the US you can stream thousands of videos (some in HD) directly from Netflix to your Xbox 360. Not a member? Sign up for a free trial at Xbox.com/netflix

7) Install to / Play from Hard Drive. With the game in the tray, return to your dashboard. (pressing the guide button then Y works as always) then go to My Xbox. From here press Y, which will bring up a new menu which will allow, among other things the ability to install a game to your hard drive.

Hint: You can still use the Xbox 360 guide while installing a game to keep in touch with your friends or start a Party.
Bonus: Before you do #7, be sure to set up what happens when you turn on your Xbox 360.  My Xbox->System Settings>Console settings. Then choose Start up to to choose Disc, Xbox Dashboard or Windows Media Center. Once you are done there…check the option right below it: Autostart. This tell your Xbox 360 what to do when you insert a game. The choices are enable or disable. I have mine set to disable so I can easily use install to hard drive.

Delete Zero Gamerscore games. You can remove any games from your games played list that you have earned no achievements or gamerscore. Press the Xbox 360– guide button, navigate left to the games section and choose Achievements. From here choose the game with zero gamerscore you want to remove and press X (Delete Game History.)

9) Press the Xbox 360 button on your controller to see the all new Guide. The team has added more functionality than the old guide, while making it more responsive. It’s a quick way to check your messages, see who is online or start a party.

10) Take a look at Community Games in the Games Marketplace. For the first time in the history of console gaming, thousands of games developed by the creative community will be available to the public.

photo posted from my iPhone

a particularly good round on the castle map on headquarters game mode in cod5:w@w.

47/11/14 is probably the best i have ever done in hq ever - cod4 or 5.

nice.

iman.

photo posted from my iPhone

Epic Games president Michael Capps did an interview recently with GamesIndustry, and he had some interesting things to say about the future of downloadable content, and how it will affect the retail games market. He also discussed the trend toward social gaming, and Epic’s plans in that regard. Quoting: “I’m not sure how big it is here [in Europe], but the secondary market is a huge issue in the United States. Our primary retailer makes the majority of its money off of secondary sales, and so you’re starting to see games taking proactive steps toward that by … if you buy the retail version you get the unlock code. I’ve talked to some developers who are saying ‘If you want to fight the final boss you go online and pay USD 20, but if you bought the retail version you got it for free.’ We don’t make any money when someone rents it, and we don’t make any money when someone buys it used — way more than twice as many people played Gears than bought it.”
[From Vital Parts of Games As DLC?]

i’m sorry developers. you get one bite at the apple. if you don’t like the used market - don’t punish the consumer. and that is all this is - punishment.

it’s getting out of line now - you want money for the full retail and more money for the game to be sold AGAIN? what is this, a car lease?

soon the developer is going to charge me to sit in my chair at home to play the games they sell. maybe they will want a fee for letting my friend play on my console?

enough is enough.

i have been struggling during my playing time with the beta of Treyarch’s watered down shooter Call of Duty 5: World at War - retro edition. (i enjoy the infantilism of the tag line of their website: Defining the Next Level - level of what, frustration over ineptness?) retro because the ground breaking earlier version, submitted by Infinity Ward, Call of Duty 4: MODERN Warfare was just that - a modern game, set in modern times, for modern expectations. it seems to me that activision developers almost always get it right.

not so much that you’d know it, but old Treyarch went backwards - maybe its all they know - but if you played COD3 (published by - you got it - Treyarch) you’d think World War 2 was all there was out there to set a title up to…

now, lets delve a bit into what playing a beta means.

beta means just that - an unfinished game, chock full of errors, short coding, glitches (to the uninitiated, a “glitch” is defined as an unintended programatic aspect of a game that, once discovered, affords an advantage to players who exploit it - could be a place where your avatar falls under the game world and is unreachable by other players), and other issues. some players have the opinion that finding glitches is a vital part of the beta experience, and i agree. there is a chasm of difference between discover/report/fix and exploit.

my struggle is with the glitching conundrum.

the conundrum is fairly complex as well. the developers need the crowd-sourced testing to prove the final code for the gold release of a game. so, in the mean time, while players blithely give the developer free testing man-hours (with the benefit of getting to play a “free” <sarcasm intended> game), player frustration over glitching and developer non responsiveness mounts.

exploit is fairly evident in this context. rolling up a 28 kill, ZERO death round is an exploit. falling into an area of the map that no one can touch you while you can wreak havoc is an exploit.

on the xbox 360 live forums, there are those players that believe this behavior is critical to proving out a title. there are others who view this behavior as immoral. and rightly so.

and, here is the kicker: the statistics (this is the cumulative amounts of virtual things a player does in the game - number of kills and deaths, wins and losses, etc.) accumulated in the beta are WIPED out when the full retail title is issued. so, i ask, what other purpose than being a complete asshole does it serve for someone to play and glitch in this context, continuously, to wit:

Amnizu wrote:
I agree with the OP. It’s fair to assume that anyone who would take advantage of the glitch in a beta, would also take advantage of the glitch in a released game. It’s not a moral or held accountable thing for me, it’s simply these people have shown themselves to be willing to cheat given the opportunity, for my own enjoyment I would rather not game with them.

totalpardo wrote:

I could not agree more.

Don’t give me this crap that its about finding glitches in a beta when I see the average d-bag rolling around on that map with a 28-0 kdr. That’s the immoral part. Come out of the damn ground and fight you pu$$ie cheater…

Playing the role of apologist for people who glitch only fuels the flames. Yes, report whoever you want. Get reported enough and you will be banned - beta or not. Try it - flame me for saying it. But it will happen. Do you own research - PM a mod before you fire off your vitriolic response to my post.

The problem is LIVE doesn’t ban ENOUGH players. On a paid to play service, there should be a lot more banning for this crap - beta or not.

Its not the average player’s job to be owned continuously by a glitcher to help a developer. This glitch was reported WEEKS ago to the developer and NOTHING was done. And the same smacked a$$e$$ go on glitching - what - because its a beta and its required so the developer knows about the error? Great way to justify bad gaming behaviors… It make me wonder what other glitches and errors are going to be foisted on to the paying crowds for this title upon release.

[From Xbox.com | Xbox 360 Games - Re: Thank you glitch users! Your keeping me busy!!]

maybe this is just one old boy’s complaint. maybe i am all wet. but this behavior carries over to the release edition of the title and beyond. its so bad in some rounds that games become unplayable. in a world where there is a thousand things to do, i don’t have time to be cheated. i just want players to play straight up - leveled - beat me on the same terms and conditions i play under - not with the latest off map exploit you and your cheating buddies discovered doing something you were probably not supposed or intended to do anyway.

don’t count on m$ LIVE conducting any investigations or responding to the numerous complaints filed over the LIVE network. all the honest player can do is “avoid” being matched (this is done through the service, automatically and supposedly according to their patented TrueSkill matchmaking system - your degree in advanced calculus will explain the fairness of this m$ “benefit”) with the consummate d-bag that thinks its fun times to glitch.

perhaps, one day in a more fair future, the rocket scientists at m$ will add a component accounting for the uncertainty of the gamer’s d-bag-ness. if you are going to call it TrueSkill, be true about it.

the damnedest thing happened a few months ago when i updated the old wrt54g v1.1 router to a more respectable firmware - tomato v 1.26.

i asked on this thread:

http://www.linksysinfo.org/forums/showthread.php?t=59024

I have searched for this issue elsewhere to no avail. All I did find was the same reference with a few similar responses on the team xbox forums.

Hopefully someone here has seen this and has some ideas on how to resolve.

My setup is:

WRT54g v.1.1 flashed successfully to latest Tomato firmware. Wired PC, wireless MBP, wired Xbox360. All worked without issue before flashing. All work now except:

The 360 cannot connect to Xbox Live unless I force a “Test Connection to Xbox Live”. It goes through a process of verifying IP address, DNS, NAT, etc. Once this is done, the 360 is able to get onto the Internet and everything works fine (ports are forwarded and the 360 detects it as ‘Open’ NAT, aka none).

The 360 is set static and wired. The correct ports are forwarded. (Same as they were with the Linksys software.) I have the 360’s IP in the DMZ (and have tried it with out it in the DMZ).

nothing worked - and i, of course, tried everything that logically made sense until this poster jvro applied the proverbial brick-to-the-side-of-the-head trick:

To me it seems that if you enable DHCP and makes your Xbox get an IP that way (you can always pre-decide which IP it gets delt in Tomato anyway) you don’t have have that issue anymore.

The above combined with activation uPnP fixed the problem for me (not sure if the uPnP is nessesary though but was for me because of my provider and me being able to get “open” access to live).

I was experiencing the exact same problem as described in this thread and the above fixed (as well as for a friend of mine)

Seems to me that this could be related to the xbox firmware and that when it’s set to DHCP it does “more” than when it’s configured with a static ip.

and, as you would suspect, it works like a charm.  the key was to assign the MAC addy of the 360 to a statically selected IP in the router.  that way the usual port forwarding and DMZ settings would always be applied, the console would remain open, and would log in to LIVE automatically…without the network test.

sometime the solution you know shouldn’t work, works.

now, on to some gaming…

it does. its missing everything. wow, talk about screwing the pooch!

We’ve received a couple reports this evening that some copies of the Fable II Limited Collector’s Edition package do not contain the cards required for the in-game DLC content. A GameStop source tells us a company wide email notes that cases bearing an orange “48 hours of LIVE”‘ sticker include the cards, but copies without the sticker do not.

Although we’ve only heard about this being a GameStop issue, we can’t confirm that the same situation isn’t occurring at other retailers. We’ve contacted both Microsoft and GameStop for comment.

Allegedly customers are being told by GameStop to contact 1-800-4MYXBOX if they receive a copy of the CE without the card inside. We contacted the number and were informed that it was the correct place to call if we didn’t receive the DLC card in the box. Midnight launches start in about 15 minutes on the East Coast, so we’ll probably hear more about this issue soon.

[From Fable 2 Collector's Edition may have missing DLC card]

doing the midnight launch of fable 2. (i must be crazy.)

let’s hope the title lives up to the hype - and its not all just grace and grit.

the reviews are in, by the way, and most sites, after complaining about the lack of a mini-map (can’t please everyone), bemoaning the limits to freedom of roam (what the heck more do these people want?), and deriding PM for making the game accessible to the casual gamer (economy of scale, look it up, tough guy!)

i enjoyed the line from the seattle pi-blogger, published under the digital joystick section of their newspaper:

The world of Fable 2 comes off incredibly European but better than a trip to the renaissance faire while it manages to be medieval but not a not wholly Tolkien rip-off.

color me happy. i am just looking forward to see how lionhead pulls all this emotional connection to a game thing off.

Fable II 2 GAMEPLAY FROM THE START PART 1

if you want to watch before the game is out, click play…

I TV Casualty I wrote:

Actual valid concerns about weapon strength (read: not just complaining for the sake of complaining)

Non-scoped bolt-actions: too weak/fickle. Sometimes kill in one-hit, but unfortunately in most cases do not. Stopping Power helps somewhat, but you shouldn’t be forced to pick a certain perk just to get a weapon to work correctly.

Dogs: too many of them spawn. First time I called them I got six kills off of them. WTF? Choppers in CoD4 choppers rarely got that many kills, unless you were playing with newbies. The biggest problem is that they’re distracting as well (which I suppose is part of the charm, but still). The swarm of dogs makes enemies easy pray as they flail around trying to kill them. Kinda not cool, as it gives them yet another advantage that choppers did not have.

Telescopic site: Really? Really, Treyarch? You took the worst attachment in CoD4 and brought it back? Originality is knocking. You may want to answer the door.

thoughtful review. sounds honest and hits on many of the points that i saw - some of the weaps are underpowered but perhaps that is the point - were ww2 weaps less accurate/powerful than modern weaps? did the dev try to stay true to form or are they jamming gamers up?

the dogs - i was apprehensive at first but i get it - and the opportunity to get more points via dog kills is fantastic. its just something to get used to - just like the chopper was in cod4 - and i am sure as we all get better at the game, the dogs will become just that - a nuisance.

your joke at the end there is well recieved. scopes are either great or ***. it depends on the player. i have seen some of these gamers own me downright continuous with that frakin scope. but i agree with you that the scope feels like a carry over.

in the end, i am not sure if it is possible to give this game a true review until they raise the cap or provide a map or two more. the latter probably wont happen, but i am sure we will see the cap raised as we move toward the release date. up to now, it seems to me like cod4 set in ww2. just like everyone else is saying. i read somewhere that there are about the same number of maps in the final release as there was in cod4 per dlc. we’ll see - maybe someone will confirm that number.

one feature i was impressed with was the leaderboard for the lobby you are plying in. at a glance i get to have a feel for the number of players that will own me nice touch.

this was from a post on xbox live forums @ http://forums.xbox.com/2/23235672/ShowPost.aspx#23235672

most posters are feeling the same. its too soon to tell whether this title will have the staying power of cod4.

november 11 will be here soon.

fta @ http://weblogs.variety.com/the_cut_scene/

i am starting to thing that andrew keen is right.  i never thought i’d agree with him.  but, the tide turns. and the wisdom wets the proverbial soul.

i came across an article on the variety web site by ben fritz.  i have read him before and, to me, he is an above average writer.  but this is material of which captain obvious would be proud:

Fable 2 at IGN

good stuff.  kiefer sutherland’s voice is used for the prompts when you are on the american side.

not sure if i can handle the dogs after 7 kills.  from what i read the dogs sniff you out no matter where you hide.  the key is, can the dogs be killed?

btw – there are tanks shown.  that is a game changing element!

hit the videos at:

http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/dor/objects/14222038/call-of-duty-world-at-war/videos/cod_deathmatch1.html