I enjoy playing video games. I used to play PC games since early 1990’s. I played anything from real-time strategies like WarCraft, StarCraft, Age of Empires, Transport Tycoon Deluxe, etc; to first-person shooters like Half Life and Quake III.
In the recent years though I have completely moved to consoles. My favorite gaming device is Sony PlayStation 3. Now I play mostly first-person shooters (Kill Zone, Call of Duty series, and the like), driving simulations (Colin McRae’s Dirt), adventure quests (Assassin’s Creed and Uncharted), and sports (NHL09 ice hockey).
I don’t write much about games, but when I do, I publish my posts in this category.
Lego + lots of time + tremendous love for 8-bit games = awesome video.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qsWFFuYZYI]
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.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fwvc6fmXmuY]
“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):
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YersIyzsOpc]
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.
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?