Jul 31, 2011

Jul 21, 2011

Final Combat: dignity is the first casualty

"All of your intellectual property are belong to us!"

Final Combat is a rather shameless TF2 ripoff from a Chinese developer that I will not name. They have a website full of theft that I will not link. It seems they've ripped assets straight out of TF2's cache, and modified (slightly) the rest to accommodate the Motherland's goose-stepping military aesthetic.

Kotaku tells me Final Combat has "a Pyro with a guitar on his back, a Scout armed with a hockey stick, and a Demoman, distinguishable from his TF2 counterpart only by heavy armor." The dev actually has the balls to claim that all of their content is completely original. See what you think:

Meet the Soldier Rocket



See also:

Meet the Heavy Fat Man

Meet the Sniper

Meet the Striker

Splosions + Sexism = Born to Fire

B2F is a Korean "class-oriented" FPS in search of European and American publishers. It features bad voice acting and jiggle-boned boobs large enough to stop an RPG round.

BF3 alpha gameplay

Watch it before the takedown:

Jun 28, 2011

For All You Minecrack Whores

For all you Minecrack addicts who are interested in growing up to something beyond 8 bit square graphics, or perhaps have too many virtual callouses from swinging the darn pickaxe... have you thought of OpenSim?

Download the Imprudence Viewer (or another Second Life Viewer, but I recommend Imprudence 1.4) from here.

Set up an account with "OS Grid" and log into the universe. I'll be launching a node shortly and can give you guys each a region to call your very own.

If you're still lost - it's the open-source version of Second Life without the monthly fees. And since I have my own server, you'll be able to make your own stuff, etc.

The best part is that even if I shut my server down, all of your inventory items remain in the grid for you to use in the general universe (with whatever region restrictions might exist.)

Jun 25, 2011

The Space Barbie Failure Cascade

Author's note: I am not an EVE player. The month I spent in the game amounted to nothing; I can decipher only about a dozen of the game's billions of acronyms. I've tried to understand this controversy – if only on a superficial level – in an effort to give my EVE-enabled friends a clearer picture of the causes and the consequences of all the turmoil.

Icelandic developer CCP deployed the "Incarna" update to EVE Online a few days ago. The new features include the long-awaited "Captain's Quarters" (CQ) environment which, among other things, allows players to view their avatars in a clickable mirror.

The source of the late unrest is another feature of Incarna: the so-called "Noble Exchange" (NeX). It's a new boutique market from which players can buy vanity gear (at absurd prices) to customize their avatars. CCP created a third currency – dubbed "Aurum" – to drive that market.

To obtain Aurum, players must convert it from PLEX, the "Pilot License Extension" that, until now, could only be used to purchase additional subscription time, or sold for ISK. Technically, PLEX is more of an item than a currency, but it still functions as a medium of exchange in EVE's in-game economy. If player wants something from NeX, there are two options: (1) spend ISK to buy PLEX on the market, and convert the PLEX to Aurum, or (2) use real-world money to buy PLEX from CCP, and convert it to Aurum.

As things currently stand, the introductions of NeX and Aurum shouldn't unbalance the EVE economy. Players have had the ability to use real money to buy virtual money (via PLEX ISK) since 2009. Although most of the vanity items available are ridiculously expensive in real-world terms – the price of a monocle is about $70 at present – those items have no substantive effect on the game world. Players can buy all the "Precision Boots" they want with ISK (and keep their subscriptions going, besides) without spending a dollar of real money, and it amounts to nothing more than a currency sink in EVE's economy.

The problem is that CCP is considering making other, actually useful, items available through NeX.