Lego + lots of time + tremendous love for 8-bit games = awesome video.
P.S.: If you are 13 years old and you can’t figure out what is it all about, don’t worry. Most of the today 13-year-olds can’t. And they will probably never will.
Tetris recently celebrated its 25th year. But despite all the progress in computer games, all those game consoles, it is still a game much loved and played around the world. More so, people are often creating remakes, tributes, and all sort of creative appreciation. Here is an example video of a few skateboarders getting together and doing something cool.
“Call of Duty : World at War” is the latest addition to my addictions collection. As I mentioned before, it’s been a while since my last gaming dive, so I don’t have much to compare this game to. But it stands on its just fine.
It’s a first-person shooter, with the plot laid out during the World War II. Missions are switching back and forward between two characters. One is the US Navy marine, fighting the Japanese. And another one is a Russian private fighting the Germans. There is plenty of variety between the two setups. They cover pretty much anything you can think of from the top of your head – jungles, street fights, tank battles, air-planes vs. battleships, and so on and so forth. Up to the Berlin battle and sticking the red flag on top of the Reichstag building.
There are a few difficulty modes that you can switch between to suit your gaming preferences. I like to walk through the missions on a moderate level, so that it’s not too easy, but at the same time not too hard. Once I get through the whole story and unlock all the missions, I sometimes try to replay with increased difficulty level.
Once I passed all the missions a few times, I put the game away. Otherwise it’s getting pretty boring, isn’t it? Well, I almost made that mistake. Again, memories of my previous gaming experience were suggesting that nothing much changed in terms of networking, so on-line multi-player won’t be much fun. That’s how it was back a few years. And maybe with types of games that I was playing back then. To my surprise, not with Call of Duty.
I decided to try my luck with multi-player and was very surprised at how well it went. Maybe because Call of Duty is not as dynamic as Quake III, or maybe because the game protocol works in a very different way, or maybe because of something else, which I truly don’t care much about, but the result is pretty good. Not that it just doesn’t lag bad enough to spoil a game, it’s actually working fast. Fast enough for me even to be able to snipe. To be fair, I still can’t snipe fast moving targets (e.g.: running soldiers and dogs), but I can shoot moving targets (e.g.: walking or crouching enemies).
Also, I really like how the multi-player system keeps you in the game all the time. You start with something like a private uniform, and gradually make your way up the military hierarchy. Participation in games, killing enemies, destroying enemy machines, and the rest of the war stats count. The more damage you do and the least you die, the higher you move up the ladder. While being promoted is all cool by itself, here you have extra stuff – more weapons get unlocked and more skills are learned, which you can later on combine and save to use in the game.
Also, additional points are awarded for completing challenges while in multi-player. Challenges are like your personal goals. For example, kill a certain number of enemies with specific weapon, or from a certain position, run a combined distance of so many kilometers, fall so many feet down and stay alive, etc. This is one of those little unimportant things that keeps me coming back to the game every time I have some free time, and think about it when I don’t.
What else do I like about it? Well, there are quite a few more things. For example, I like the teams are balanced, and how best players are always highlighted using different features (ranks, clan tags, clan tag colors, etc). I like that when you are killed in the game, they show you a kill cam, so that you know who killed you and how. This is very useful to get rid of camping, where a player finds a hidden spot on the map, hides in there and kills everyone and everything that happens to pass by. With kill camera everyone is practically forced to move around and change positions all the time. I like how the maps are built. They have plenty of space on one hand, and they give you a feeling that you are in the middle of action and enemies are everywhere around you on the other hand. I like the 40 second break between matches, and how matches are of a perfect length – not too short, not too long. And I like the quick re-spawn And I like how you can fight the battle from inside a tank, shooting a canon, or, on top of the tank with a machine gun. Or as an infantry, blowing up those tanks. And so on and so forth.
In short, highly recommended for anyone who likes first-person shooters. Both the single- and multi-player modes are fun and there is plenty to explore, collect, try, and advance before you’ll get bored of it.
Being a gamer myself and actually knowing something about the game world from the inside, I always found it funny when mass media talks about games from the evil point of view, especially when they throw the addiction bit in. My position on this is that games are not drugs, games are not alcohol, games are not some other sort of chemical substance, so it is impossible to have physical addiction to games. Yes, one can get used to games a lot psychologically, but the extent of this addiction is not even comparable to anything “real”, like smoking for example.
My opinion is based of course on my personal experiences and interactions with many other gamers. They all are different people with varying level of “addiction” to games, but they are all sane people.
However, today I was enlightened. And that reminded me of something else. I used to listen to BFBS radio (British Forces Broadcasting System) a lot. And I remember there was a period when they were discussing a problem they have in UK with pubs and early closing hours. A lot of semi-drunk people are kicked out to the streets all at once and they don’t have anywhere else to go, but home. I never thought of it as a big problem. After all, how many pubs in the area can you have and how many people that could be. I, of course, was thinking in terms of pubs we have in Cyprus, where the worst case scenario would be somewhere around 200 people. Until I’ve heard the radio mentioning some pubs which host as many as 4,000 people. Than I understood the problem properly. Indeed, if you have a couple of pubs like that in the area and you kick all those people out at midnight, you’ll have a problem on the street with noise, crowds, and probably a few broken properties and a few wet walls.
In the same way I was today enlightened about the “game addiction” problem within younger generations. How did that enlightenment come to me? By means of this video (via The Next Web blog):
This opens a totally different perspective now, doesn’t it?
I have a few more words to add to the yesterday’s post “History of the world through a game“. Something that bothered me in several games, but something that never annoyed me enough to look up or express – the connection between pottery, writing, and alphabet.
Pottery, writing, alphabet
First of all, why is pottery a required research before writing and alphabet? They seem to have nothing in common. But yet in many history-related strategy games it is so. I never thought much about it, but it just felt wrong. Until today, when I was speaking about this with my wife and she mentioned pottery shards. I’ve heard about them a few times, but never associated pottery with writing. Here is a quote from the almighty Wikipedia for you:
Unglazed pottery shards were used almost as a kind of scratch paper, as ostraka, for tax receipts and, in Athens, to record the individual nominations of Greek leaders for ostracism.
This one is clear and out of the way.
The second thing that bothers me always is the order of research for writing and alphabet. In my silly head, you need the alphabet to write. Alphabet is what separates writing from drawing. Here is the Wikipedia definition of “writing”:
Writing is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols (known as a writing system). It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and the recording of language via a non-textual medium such as magnetic tape audio.
And here is the Wikipedia definition of “alphabet”:
An alphabet is a standardized set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past.
Which one comes first – alphabet or writing? I don’t know, but it seems that the alphabet is a required research for writing and not the other way around.
What do you think?
We had a few discussions about Civilization IV game today in the office. I wasn’t paying much attention as I am not a big fan of strategy games, especially turn-based strategy games. But at some point I was looking at this technology research tree diagram (click for full-sized version, source).
Civilization IV technology tree
And I couldn’t help to get impressed on how far the world has come in terms of research. And also how much was actually discovered in the last few decades.
Yes, I know, not everything on that diagram is a technology, and not everything was actually researched. But, on the other hand, there are many technologies which were researched and worked on, and they aren’t on that tree diagram.
A diagram like this provides a perspective on how much people knew back in the early days and how much more complex (not necessarily complicated) the modern world is. Of course, when playing such a game against a few opponents, the perspective becomes even more realistic – the more stuff you have researched, the more you can do and more powerful is your nation.
If only now we could incorporate these games with history classes somehow …
I’ve never been much of a gamer. I used to play a few games here and there and all that was long ago. The only game I played seriously at all was Quake III. But that too was way too long. Then I had a break for a few years, and I’ve been too busy at work.
Last year I somehow got interested in consoles. So I borrowed PlayStation 3 from one of my co-workers. Just to try it out, you know. Needless to say, I was stunned. Game industry moves very fast, and it’s hard to keep up even if you play all the time. When you have a several year break, it’s like you get off the planet. Games, graphics, special effects, stories, controllers – everything is different all of a sudden.
Together with that borrowed PS3 I also got a few games. Some of them were of that cheap flavour that they add to a gaming console package. But some were really good. The one that got me hooked back into gaming instantly was “Grand Theft Auto IV“. That was something.
In brief, GTA IV is massive, detailed, bloody, swearing, and addictive. You play a character called Niko Bellic, who is an immigrant just arrived to the USA. Niko has some dark past and he came to the country to stay with his cousin Roman. It turns out that Roman is half a criminal and he is in a heap of trouble with the local mob. Mission after mission Niko tries to help his relative, but instead he is just getting deeper and deeper into mafia wars.
The game is very engaging. The story line is continued by short movies between missions. Sometimes, you have to make a choice which way the storyline goes (for example, when being hard by both sides of the conflict, which side do you take out?). And while missions are cool, there is much more to this game.
The GTA IV world is amazing. Everything is happening in a huge Liberty City. There are poor regions of the city, with crappy shops, rusted cars, and street fights. And there are rich regions with lots of expensive cars, excellent roads, and such. And there is everything in between. The city is full of people. Some walk around, some drive. You can scare people, shoot them and hit them, drive them over, and do all sorts of crazy stuff. You can still their cars, motorbikes, boats, and even helicopters. You can take a train from one region to another. You can have a really serious conflict with police. You have a phone which you can use to call people and send messages, take pictures, utilize the organizer, etc. There are quite a few things that you can buy – from food and beverages to clothes and weapons.
Did I mention that the game is huge? It has loads and loads of missions. It took me a few good weeks to get to the closing titles. And then I was just dropped back into the game with more missions. And the game statistics show that I have only completed 62%. I don’t know much more is there. But I’ll probably need the rest of the year to push it to 100%. And then there is also a multi-player mode, which I haven’t even started.
One thing that I really enjoyed about the game is the level of details. It’s the fourth game in the series, and it shows – every tiny thing has been thought through, tried, and tested. For example, when you drive a car, you can switch radio stations – and there is a whole bunch of them to choose from. Some are music radio stations, some are talk shows. The stuff that goes on in advertising and in talk shows is hilarious. You can just listen to it hour after hour after hour and it never gets boring. Or, when you make a traffic accident, the other car’s driver shouts at you, and often he complains in a foreign language. Greeks are frequent among taxi drivers, for example.
By the way, the game is definitely not for kids. There’s just too much graphic violence and swearing. And I haven’t seen any options to switch them off.
Overall, an excellent game that will keep you occupied for hours and hours. Highly recommended.
