also.known.as “spvn”

It is kinda of exciting, even for me. Even though I’ve been in the closed beta for awhile now, not to mention there won’t be any Asian servers even when the Open Beta is released, it’s still pretty exciting that the game which I loved to play since years ago is finally being revived and the masses can now enjoy it. It’s really really sad that I won’t be able to play online at all when the new people come in.

I don’t want to mess up my stats, so I won’t bother playing on any servers since I’ll get 300+ ping on all of them. I used to do that just for fun so that I can talk smack with other people, since it’s boring to play with bots like 100% of the time. However, I won’t be doing that when Open Beta starts, since stats are never going to be wiped again, I don’t want ending up with shitty stats and being matched with noobs all the time when Asian servers actually DO come (assuming they ARE going to). Not that I hate that, just that it won’t be fun for them. I’m no pro by any standard, but beating anyone new to the game is pretty darn easy for someone who’s been around the game for years.

Still, it will be fun to see how the community grows, how Quake Live grows, how the in-game advertising works out, etc.

Unfortunately, when Quake Live actually goes open beta, it’ll be 8am my time and I’ll be stuck in school, though I’ll still be checking things out during my Computing lesson Provided the servers haven’t actually crashed by then of course

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to release this on my blog considering how I’m still under the NDA (Non-Discolsure Agreement), but who cares. It’s only a few days away:

Quake Live is going Open Beta on the 24th of February.

Honestly, I can’t wait for more people to see what it’s like. Gamers nowadays have been spoiled by auto-regenerating health and stuff like that, they’re used to games of epic proportions, stuff like Killzone 2, GTA IV, etc. It’s probably largely the fault of consoles that those are the “mainstream” games nowadays.

For those of you who are used to these games, be warned when trying Quake Live: it’s hard.

Sure you might not find it hard initially, considering how the system will pair you up with people of the same skill level as you so that you don’t get butt raped by 10-year veterans of the game, but just watch the QuakeCon 2008 Quake Live finals here and you’ll see how the game is actually supposed to be played. If you think “oh those 2 are pros, the average player couldn’t possibly be that good”. You’re dead wrong. The average veteran of Quake won’t exactly beat Zero4 or cypher, but they’re still able to pull of some pretty sick shots that’ll make you think they’re actually cheating.

No Love for Asians

Unfortunately, there’s one big problem, there are still ZERO Asian servers. For my entire CONTINENT, we have NO servers. I was fine with it being that way during the closed beta stages, but I never expected them to keep it this way when they went live. Unfortunately, that seems to be the case, which is a really bad idea in my opinion. This game is going to be free, meaning us Asians are going to pounce on it the moment we hear “free, browser based game”. However, id is going to lose plenty of prospective gamers when all Asians realise they’re going to have 300+ ping on every single server, since with Quake Live it’s only possible to play it competitivetly with 30 or 40 ping at most.

Alas, us Asians are going to have to wait awhile more as per usual.

A few weeks or so ago, Facebook suddenly decided to update, or rather revise, their Terms of Service. I won’t bother to copy what they added here, since it’s written in lengthy, complicated, and downright anal terms-of-use-language (ie. they use 3 sentences to reiterate the same thing and 10 different “synonyms” of sorts to make sure they cover every single aspect they want to). Basically, they added a few paragraphs which explicitly stated that Facebook owned whatever content you uploaded (pictures, videos, etc.) and could do whatever they wanted to do with it (which was where they had to use 10+ words to describe what they could do with it), even if you deleted your account!!!

*Panic and chaos ensues*

Seriously people, since when has social networking sites like Facebook/Friendster NOT owned your photos. You upload them to their server so that your friends can view them, hasn’t it ever occured to you that you’re granting them the license to display these images to the public in the first place? Even if they decided to sell your media to other companies or whatsoever, do you really think you would have heard about it? Besides, a majority of the media uploaded on Facebook is usually personal pictures and videos of friends and family, who would gain much from your 10th grade picture of you crying or whatever?

Nevertheless, there was a huge outcry all over the internet. Fueled by the annoymity of internet usernames, people with nicknames along the lines of DeathSlayer28 and PwettyGurl82 were busy growing balls of steel and telling Facebook to go “burn and die”. Everyone started thinking Facebook would really want to steal their unglam pictures and videos to sell to marketting companies or something. It seems like everyone never realised that things have been like that all along, since by uploading the pictures to Facebook and letting all your friends view them you’re basically granting them the license to do a hell lot with your media anyway.

Despite the founder of Facebook himself (Mark SZuckerberg) clarifying things in this blog post dated Febrary 17th, stating about how Facebook requires such a license to be allowed to publicise your media, Facebook has ultimately decided to revert to it’s old ToS for now… which doesn’t really make much of a difference really. According to this other blog post that Zuckerberg posted roughly 24 hours before the previous one, he stated that Facebook is reverting back to the original ToS while they craft out a new one that will explain more clearly what they meant by having control over people’s media. They only updated the ToS in the first place to make it clearer as to what control they had over the media.

The thing is, all Facebook users (like myself) can do is to trust them. I mean we’re giving away all our personal information to a completely foreign website, there’s really no guarentee that they’re not selling off our information under the table without anyone knowing. When it comes to the internet, one really has no choice but to trust whatever site you’re giving away your information to. All in all, there’s really no point in whining about it.

At least Facebook is willing to do something about it and are listening to what its users have to say.

New PSP-3000 Colours Announced

Awhile back, I posted this post about the PSP, in which I discussed about the PSP’s floundering performance in the market as well as what I thought Sony could do to save the system. Essentially, in my opinion, the way Sony should go about things is that they have to focus on the software side of things. They’ve been busy updating the system itself non-stop without pausing to realise the actual reason why people aren’t playing their games is because most of them just aren’t fun (especially on the PSP). Hence, instead of continuing to obsess themselves with the hardware, they need to start attracting more developers to develop triple-A titles for the PSP, as many developers don’t see the point in investing resources into developing a PSP game because of it’s low market share. If Sony can just capture high quality developers to develop high quality games for the system, the PSP just might see a resurgence.

Alas, it seems as if Sony has chosen to go in the completely opposite direction. They just recently announced another 4 new colours for the PSP-3000, their latest iteration of the device. Not only did they decide to continue along the path of refreshing their hardware, but they actually went and did the lamest thing possible: superficial “enhancements” ie. making them more colourful.

SERIOUSLY?! This is what the Sony marketting team thinks is the thing that’s hindering the sale of the PSP?

“We don’t have enough colours, no wonder people aren’t buying the PSP. We have to introduce MORE colours, I bet people will be more attracted to our product after that!!! Nevermind that we already got multi-coloured PSPs, let’s just introduce more colours! That’s the only thing people care about!”

For crying out loud, even back in the days when the iPod only came in one or two colours it still sold like hotcakes, and even today only the iPod Nano comes in multiple colours. Do you see Apple having any problem with sales? But that’s besides the point, I’m amazed that the Sony marketting team actually thinks introducing more colours will boost sales significantly. Nintendo hasn’t made any updates to their DS hardware for quite some time now, be it the internals or superficially, yet they still hold twice the marketshare of Sony’s PSP.

Sony really needs to wake up. I love my PSP, more so than my DS, but I haven’t touched it for ages, considering how the only games that come out for it nowadays aren’t worth my time at all. Sony really needs to wake up and do something quickly, or else it seems the PSP might really die out to the DS.

We’ve always had parodies for all forms of media, for example the Scary Movie series for horror movies, the terribly awful Meet the Spartans is another example for movies, plus the thousands and thousands of videos on YouTube that parody everything from movie scenes, to music videos to commercials. Yet while people have been doing parodies of movies and music for ages, for some strange reason no one ever thought of parodying games. With the long list of interesting, quirky and downright stupid facts that have been rapidly growing ever since the age of Pong and Pac man, it would almost seem like a no brainer to create a game which parodies other games.

The closest a game ever came close to this was the Simpsons game that was released in recent years. However, that was more of a parody of the TV series rather than any game, but it was still great fun. However, it seems like someone has finally bothered to come up with a game that parodies the entire gaming industry.

Vicious Cycle Software is currently developing Eat Lead, a game which is slated for release this year (if I’m not wrong). This development studio hasn’t really been known for triple-A titles, but rather for games that receive a lot of hype and recognition due to its branding, but never games that will last the test of time. For example the soon to be released Ben 10: Alien Force was developed by them, as was some Dora the Explorer game, Dead Head Fred, Marvel Trading Card Game, etc. The one exception to this trend was Puzzle Quest (yeah they developed that game) which received critical acclaim acroos the board as well as a huge following.

Now, it seems like they’re continue their trend of so called “second-tier” games, ie. games that are fun for the moment but quickly fade into history. Let’s face it, the actual gameplay of Eat Lead probably isn’t going to be that awesome, after all, that’s not exactly the focus of the game. However, to me it’ll still be worth playing just for the experience of enjoying it as nothing else but a parody of old games. I can just imagine when this game comes out, everyone is going to start discussing where a specific gun/enemy came from and the significance of certain aspects of the game. Meanwhile, deep within the halls of the Vicious Cycle office will be the master list of random fun facts and trivia that they somehow squeezed into the game and fans will be desperately trying to match that list point for point.

Unfortunately it seems like this game is only slated to be released on the two major gaming consoles, and us PC gamers will be left out once again like we always are. One can only hope that they decide to port it to the PC eventually, because I’m absolutely dying to play this game and talk about it online. For someone like me who never got to experience the rise of the gaming industry, this is probably going to be a treat.