Archive for June, 2008
Jun 30th
Face of Mankind: Rebirth was an MMOFPS that had some great potential. I personally played in the beta for Face of Mankind (not Rebirth, check out this article if you want some more information on the history of the game), and I thought it was an awesome blend of FPS, MMO, and RPG. It had “raids” where players from one of the factions in-game could take over another planet from another faction. The unique quest system let higher level players create quests for others, such as mining a certain ore or assassinating an enemy of theirs.
Even with all of the game’s potential to be something excellent, the recreation of an MMO is not easy for a small team of people financing their own work. Sadly, the game is coming to an end because of the team’s financial problems. Here is an excerpt from the offical FoM site:
FoM, as many other MMORPGs today, is a game that relies heavily
on visual content. For us, being only a small development studio with very limited
resources, it would be nearly impossible to make the game we want it to be. You
might wonder what there is to change? It runs fine and works in a way. That’s right,
but not the way it’s supposed to. And spending so much more power and private funding
into the project made not much sense anymore. There might be a time for FoM in the
future, but it’s just not now.
The developers of FoM, Duplex Systems, are working on another MMO that they hope to release in place of Face of Mankind, called NanoVerse Online. As of right now there is no content on the site besides a nice logo, but Duplex promises that if you continue checking back that more content will be there.
Jun 29th
I pulled up Addicting Games today and while looking for something to do, I rediscovered Bowman 2.
Bowman 2 is a well-made flash game in which the player’s job is to kill the other player without moving. You use the mouse to create an angle with the bowman’s arm and bow, and then let go and fire. It usually take about 3 hits to take down an opponent, or 1 hit in the heart or head.
There are multiple modes for Bowman 2 in addition to the original Bowman. There is a target practice in which the player shoots at a non-moving target. There is also Bird Hunter for those people who want to shoot at moving targets of different sizes.
While playing single or multiplayer, there are new editable features. You are able to create a wall between the two opponents, and change wind speed. These allow for a slightly more difficult game.
Though slightly on the easier side, Bowman 2 is an improvement over the original, and is great if you have another person breathing down your neck who wants to take a turn on the computer. Just tell them, “Hey! Lets play Bowman 2!” and maybe you can buy yourself a little more time in that comfy computer chair.
Jun 29th
nVidia has some new drivers, but note that if you already have the 175.16 WHQL Drivers, you are already up-to-date unless you just bought one of nVidia’s brand new 200 series cards.
Download : nVidia ForceWare 177.41 for Windows XP 32-bit (37.2 MB)
Download : nVidia ForceWare 177.41 for Windows XP 64-bit (48.1 MB)
Download : nVidia ForceWare 177.41 for Windows Vista 32-bit (35.5 MB)
Download : nVidia ForceWare 177.41 for Windows Vista 64-bit (49.5 MB)
The GeForce GTX 280 is the best graphics card to-date, and probably the best processor to-date too, with 240 processing cores! Most processors on the market today have 2 cores, with powerful processors utilizing 4. The amount of power availible in the 280 is almost unimaginable. The 280 is the world’s first graphics card that can run Crysis at a screen resolution of 1900×1280 with settings on high at 15 frames per second. The closest card to that can run it at only <1 frame per second. Overall, the GeForce GTX 280 is an insanely powerful graphics card that comes at the hefty price of $650.
Jun 29th
The new 8.6 drivers were released by ATI, bringing along support for up to 4 ATI CrossfireX cards running at once and custom filters per application of anti-aliasing. The drivers support these cards:
- ATI Radeon™ X300 series and higher
- ATI Radeon™ HD 2400 series and higher
- ATI Radeon™ 9500 series and higher
Of course, any version of Windows XP and Vista are supported, too. The whole changelog and card support list details this with more depth.
Jun 28th
A few days ago I downloaded Extra DVD Ripper Express from Give Away of the Day. It’s a handy little program that you use to rip DVD’s to your computer in almost a dozen different possible formats. This way you don’t have to spend extra money to get videos off of iTunes or similar programs, as well as enabling you access to movies that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to get off of programs like the aforementioned iTunes.
Extra DVD Ripper Express, with its frankly ridiculous name, as many pros and cons. One advantage is it provides you with a safe legal way to get DVDs onto your computer. It also looks fairly good. They skinned the program after Window’s Media Player 11, which in my opinion is one of the best looking programs available. That being said, the pleasing visuals don’t help the interface at all. It’s frankly rather jumbled, to the point where it can be down right confusing to use the program. Extra DVD Ripper Express is also rather slow. I ripped rip Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to my computer in the M4P format, and it took approximately 6 hours to be fully ripped onto my computer. Something that may have just been my stupidity, but I choose to blame on the program, are subtitles. It has them on default, and I didn’t notice when I ripped Indiana Jones. In essence, I wasted 6 hours ripping a movie only to find out that it has subtitles when I never asked there to be.
All in all, I would say Extra DVD Ripper Express is decent. It’s slow, confusing and needs to shorten its name, but it works. If you got it from Giveaway of the Day, keep it. If not, don’t bother buying it. Just torrent the movie or something. Not that I encourage stealing or anything.
Jun 26th
Today I will be reviewing my favorite way to protect my computer, Zone Alarm Pro. Zone Alarm has been with me for a few years now, and every time I use it I like it more and more. This small firewall has saved me from countless Trojans and malicious files that would have otherwise rendered my computer dead. I underestimated it, and so many people that make that mistake will see the true benefits of this cheap program!
Zone Alarm was created initially by Zone Lab’s but was bought by Check Point in 2003. It has only been compatible with Windows XP until recently in 2008 they updated Zone Alarm to 7.1, allowing the program to be compatible with 32-bit Vista only. Zone Alarm’s main purpose is to provide an effective firewall for your computer, allowing or denying no file without your decision. Whenever you boot up a new file or possibly a malicious file, they stop it momentarily until you allow or deny access using a handy pop-up. This means that there is no possible for a program to receive access and harm your computer or send files to the internet without your permission.Zone Alarm also allows for complete program control, allowing you to choose what level of trust you think is appropriate for each program. 1 being restricted, and 3 being full access to your computer. You can also choose to kill the program, which allows no access whatsoever, preventing any threat that program might bring to your computer.
Jun 24th
I loaded up Addicting Games today and once again began rummaging around for a halfway decent flash game. In a desperate attempt to avoid another stupid stick figure flash game, I decided to play Vulcan. To be perfectly honest, I couldn’t finish this game. It was horrific. At first glance, it seemed promising, then I noticed the blatant Halo rip off. They basically come out and say it’s a Halo rip off. If you shot this game, it would bleed Halo rip off. The main character is a blue spartan-esq soldier named “Vulcan”. In the game you trapsing through the top-down world of narrow hallways shooting Covenant cop out aliens.
The game itself started off on a sour note. Incredibly bad dialogue along with subpar animations made the introduction quite unbearable. Then they thought it would be a good idea to give you every weapon right at the start of the game. Now, let me tell you my beef with this strategy. It may make it easier for the programmers, but it gives the players of the game no sense of progress whatsoever. They have nothing to work for except killing the next enemy in exactly the same way that they were able to kill the enemy on the first screen. They also made this game ridiculously hard. All of your weapons are completely ineffective until you’re almost in point blank range. The aliens begin shooting the second you step out of cover, and their aim is impeccable. They can hit you from the other side of the room the moment you poke your badly animated self out of cover. Along the same line, the game lags terribly whenever there are more than 2 or 3 people shooting at the same time. This makes the game incredibly difficult to play, considering after the 3 or 4th room you can reasonably expect 4 or 5 aliens to be shooting at you at the same time. The weapons themselves are also incredibly poorly designed. The Battle Rifle, my favorite gun from Halo, is about effective as throwing a dead rabbit at the enemies. Then the SMG’s are incredibly over powered. You can basically one shot every enemy using the SMG’s. And the Shotgun is entirely useless. The only way you can get it to work at all is if the muzzle of the shotgun is firmly placed against the targets chest. Also, the levels are designed in such a way that at least half the time every one of the enemies onscreen can shoot at you while you can hit maybe one or two of them. How did the designers manage to make it that way? I haven’t the slightest idea. It’s some sort of chaos theory engine, I guess. But I digress. Onto the finale.
This game sucks. Not Dane Cook suck, or even Superman for the N64 suck. This game achieves its own special level of suck. Dante’s Inferno will be rewritten to include playing this game forever as the ninth level of hell. This game has absoultely no redeeming factors. Stay away from it at all costs! I think I made my point.
Jun 22nd
The long awaited Part 2 of PST. The second tutorial is: Blending two images together on top of each other, an example would be a television screen and the sea, as used in this tutorial. As I started this tutorial, I saw that the main purpose was not to add an effect, but rather just simply combine what you already have at your disposal together into a single image. For this tutorial you need to find two, not one, images. To follow the tutorial correctly, you want to find a great picture of a television from the same angle as a landscape or a family photo because the two pictures will be overlayed upon each other. Chad Neuman, the creator of this tutorial, wants to express the feeling of an image on a Television that is being displayed realistically. I once again browsed Google, and found this. I thought that this was a great head on view that would be easy to work with. I then simply found another picture from the same angle. After saving both of the pictures to my hard drive (so as not to leech bandwidth from their sites) I opened up my trusty photoshop.
Once you open both pictures in Photoshop, drag the larger photo (the one that will be on the inside of the screen) onto the picture of the television. First, you want to make sure that your tv screen is transparent. You do this simply by selecting the magic wand tool and clicking on the white part of the television screen layer. The flaw in this is, following the tutorial you are left with a locked background layer. An easy way to fix it is to simply duplicate the television layer (ctrl + j) and then use your magic wand tool to select the white, and then press the delete button. If for some reason this does not work, you can use the marquee tool to select portions and delete them individually. Now, you completely ignore the original background layer, making background copy your television layer, and layer 1 your scenery picture. Hide the background layer by clicking on the eye. When you drag your scenery picture on top of your TV screen picture, chances are it is gigantic or very small. To resize it, press ctrl + t on your keyboard and use the corners to expand or shrink the image. I explained it because in the tutorial it assumes you already have the corners on the picture selected, which may not be the case. As you work on step 9, you want to make sure that when you select the pen tool that you have the shape layer feature enabled. After that, it is VERY self explanatory. Once you finish, you may notice the image being slightly dark. This is cured by selecting a very light image, as the author did. I finished following his tutorial exactly with this. However, after careful inspection one can see that the image is not very pleasing to the eye, and so I had to adjust. Anyone reading this and working through the tutorial should note there are ways to fix darkening of an image. I prefer to set the layer to normal, duplicating, making the duplicated overlay, lowering it to around 33%, and erasing the darkest parts using a 20 soft pxl eraser. After those adjustments I ended up with this fabulous image.
In conclusion, Chad Neuman did an excellent job creating this tutorial. It was very easy to follow, yet most of his tutorial had only to do with the image he used, instead of the tutorial being applicable to any image. I thank him for his time and effort he put into it, and I also thank Photoshop Tutorials for their wonderful tutorials.
Jun 22nd
After many hours of searching for a somewhat enjoyable flash game (which is quite hard to find these days) I found Sniper Assassin. Sniper Assassin is one of the many stick figure shooter games, and I had the displeasure of playing it.
According to the games description, it’s “a job that requires finesse and nerves of steel”. Instead, all it requires is the ability to read, and rudimentary clicking ability. The very unoriginally titled Sniper Assassin presents you with a small area with 5 or 6 same looking stick figures at once. Your job is to pick out which one is your target. This would have been a solid concept if the mission briefings didn’t slap you upside the head with the targets flawless description. This takes away any challenge the game may have previously presented in locating your target. It’s easy, boring, and frankly annoying. I appreciate the attempt to create atmosphere with the music, but it was terribly annoying after the second loop. Game play, it’s solid, but boring. Nothing you haven’t seen in games like Tactical Assassin 2. It’s a repetitive, predictable, and criminally short game with mediocre gameplay. You’d be best off avoiding it.
Now that thats finished, lets take a moment to discuss something. Why are there so many freakin’ stick figure flash games out there? At one point, I would say they were rather enjoyable, but its getting ridiculous people! This is like the fiftieth stick figure sniping game since tactical assassin, and I’m getting tired of it. Are you people too lazy to come up with something new and original? You want a fun, different game? Try The Sniper. At least it doesnt use stick figures. Come on, flash creaters. Please switch up the usual, don’t copy the originals like Tactical Assassin or Thing-Thing, (which are both excellent games), make your own, unique, fun game.
Jun 21st
Line Rider 2 Beta is a flash game that you find yourself playing again and again. The objective of the game is prevent the little man on the sled from falling off of the lines you draw for him to ride along. Want him to fall straight down at 356 MPH? Go for it. Want him to fly off of gravity defying loops? You can do that too.
Line Rider 2 has many advantages over the old version. The most obvious addition is the eraser tool. It allows you to erase lines if they happen to make your character fall off his sled. He is very fragile, and will fall off sometimes at the slightest bump. Which brings me to one of the next additions, the sled rider is now harder to throw off of his sled, allowing people with no previous experience in the Line Rider Beta game to be able to pull off cool tricks with ease. You now also have the ability to draw scenery lines. These little lines are lines that the sled will not touch. He only passes though them, as they are used to add a background to your track. If your sled was not going fast enough, then another useful addition is the acceleration lines. These increase the speed of the sled dramatically. They let the user make line rider go up 45 degree angles, but if you get him going up much further than that with only acceleration lines and no natural propulsion, then you will find him flipping backwards over himself. Another new tool in Line Rider 2 is the flag tool. When you are creating a longer track, then you can use the flag tool to change the point at which line rider will start. This saves time, because you don’t have to wait for your character to travel the entire length of the track when you are testing new additions to your track. The magnifying glass tool is another useful addition to Line Rider. It assists you in finding the pesky problem areas. The new additions make Line Rider 2 far better than Line Rider Beta in terms of ease and entertainment.
Now that Line Rider 2 has been out for a while, fans are awaiting the new Line Rider game, and some may be surprised to hear that the popular pc game is coming to Nintendo Wii and the Nintendo DS in the form of Line Rider 2 Unbound. Line Rider fans are excited about what is to come in Line Rider 2 Unbound. It adds the element of art, which allowing you to create amazing tracks.
All in all, if you are looking for a challenge, give Line Rider Beta a chance, but if you just want to take the time to create an amazing track with a slightly easier interface, play some Line Rider 2 Beta.