Category: Gaming

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Been trying out another new hot MMORPG lately. Tabula Rasa, by the same guy who did Ultima Online back in the day. Richard Garriot’s Tabula Rasa. How large does your ego need to be if you insist on putting you’r fucking name in the TITLE of the game. It’s literaly called “Richard Garriot’s Tabula Rasa”, which feels more than a little 90’s to me. It has a nice interface, though nowhere near WoW in flexibility or CoH in sheer goodness. It’s got collect-everythin-quests, which very much appeals to me, since I’m kind of anal. I’m told there’s a story, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. The controls work, even if it’s a bit too FPS for my tastes. It works in Linux, though not as good as in Windows. I place TR firmly amongst the more interresting  MMO’s. I’m contemplating paying for a month, since I get CoX for free for at least one additional month due to me having introduced new players to it.

(I get cocks for free. Heh =)

Oh, and now, when Uru Live’s been cancelled, I find out they didn’t delete my char after all. They just claimed they did. To make me stay. And now it’s too late to go back. I hate everything.

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Contrary to popular opinion, robots aren’t enough to save anything. Robots are, of course, inherently cool – but they need to be put in context.

I’m talking about RF Online. I saw the game at a local store, went home and looked it up, discovered that it had recently been made free-as-in-beer. I downloaded the client (laughing inwardly at anyone who ever bought it), got myself a free account (laughing outwardly at anyone who ever payed for their accounts), and gleefully started playing. The game impressed me at first by being beautiful. Absolutely stunning. Think Phantasy Star but not as cheesy. And with way cooler robots. Very nice. and didn’t seem to demand much in terms of system resources, either. Very nice. and it has robots, which are very cool. Did I mention the robots?

Anyways, I created my character (three playable races, one of which is a race of robots, so it wasn’t much of a choice) and begain playing. Pretty nice controls. A not-too-bad combat system and the experience system, in which you become better at the stuff you actually do, is nice… Erh, OK, quests come automatically as you level up… And they don’t seem to be connected, or have any sort of plot… And this is my twentieth mission in a row that’s just “kill 20 of X”… Waiiiitaminute, this was made by koreans, wasn’t it?

And there it was. Inescapable, unavaidable. A korean MMO. I tried playing for a while, but ultimately, koreans just can’t make good MMO’s. OK, they got loads of stuff to kill and a couple of cool abilities, but koreans are, judging from the kind of games they produce, very fond of mindless hacking of identical enemies, lack of plot, and not playing socially.

So – Robots aside, RF Online is crap. The robots are still very cool, but they’d need to be in a game that didn’t suck ass. Too bad, this game actually looked good, played well etc. If it had only hade some more social gaming/role-playing elements and perhaps, i dunno, a plot or fifteen, it might’ve been good.

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When did companies decide they could afford to treat their customer like a criminal?

Recently, the long-awaited spiritual successor Bioshock hit the shelves. I was excited – until I learned what copy protection they’d used.

OK, first, they use SecuROM. Which places a bunch of unknown drivers etc in my Windows, and forces my DVD-rom to read damaged sectors. This is bad enough in itself, in that it punishes the regular consumer, without stopping anyone from making a slightly less legal download from isohunt etc.

Second, they use online activation. You can only activate the game online twice. What the fuck? Twice? Oh, yeah, their uninstaller connects to their server and resets the thing, yeah… So in short, every god damned time I need to uninstall the thing I need to make real fucking sure the drunken midgets running my ISP don’t press the wrong button? Bah, good luck with that. My internet connection is twitchier than a spastic on cocaine rehab. And what happens if Windows works its magic (crashes horribly) and I need to urgently format everything and begin anew? It’s been known to happen (and no, I’m not an ordinary user. XP, properly set up, almost never crashes for the normal user. But I’m not one, so just drop it). Then, my activation is lost forever!

This is so damn stupid I don’t even know where to start.

  • It will only prohibit the legal users from accessing their copy, just as the only people who’ll need to have their game CD/DVD in the drive are the same legal users. Soo, a crack and keygen will come out, and then the slightly less legal community will have all of the benefits, and none of the hassle.
  • Treating customers this way is so wrong it’s ridiculous. It’s practically driving people to illegally downloading the game.
  • I don’t want weird drivers or rootkits on my computer. Seriously, I don’t. I don’t feel comfortable having that kind of crap sitting there, collecting data on my habits. Sure, I got a firewall – but hell, it’s the principle.
  • I don’t want my DVD-rom ruined by forcing it to read damaged sectors. I paid good money for my computer, I put it togeather myself, and I don’t like it when companies thing they have the right to ruin my property. Property is theft, indeed.

When the game is old enough to be sold in shops specializing in used games, I’ll probably buy it. The graphics are astounding, and the aesthetics even more so. The game seems like fun. I really want to buy this one, helping the developers, etc – but by golly I Will Not Spend Money On DRM! I will not help these people justify their crappy schemes using my purchase as validation. And from what I heat, many others say the same thing: This aggression will not stand!

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Hrrm. Did the last two parts today. Got my stone ring. Hooray for me. There were some difficulties along the way – such as me having missed the fact that if the absolute coordinates are both in the negative, one must ass 180 degrees to the resulting polar coordinate. I spent an hour figuring that one out – my sketches claimed I should go around 210-220 degrees, but my trusty OpenOffice Cals sheet claimed 32. 180 added to 32 is 212m which was right on the money.

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Found Frets on Fire a while ago, and loved it. Guitar Hero using a keyboard as a guitar? Incredibly nerdy, and I loved it. My old keyboard, already old and worn, was chucked for a new one which has the functions keys closer togeather (as F1-5 are used extensively in FoF). Logitech Ultra-Flat is a really neat keyboard. No flashing gadgetry or idiotic multimedia keys or whatever the heck people seem to find necessary in a friggin’ keyboard nowadays.

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Discovered Minkata a while back, but didn’t have the time to complete it. In fact, when I returned to the Cavern a few days ago, I were no less than five Ages behind. Er’cana still had its mysteries, Minkata’s desert was unexplored, I had played no games in Jalak Dador, and I had still not gotten a crew together for Delin or Tsogal.

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