Geography in virtual

OK  so I am going to talk about the landscape in a video game called "The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind". This world is a beautiful and emersive and very expansive. With a real similuated sky and the mountians are beautiful with an expansive canyons. It is very diverse land filled with monsters and humans. The names are vauge to me but if my memory is correct it is done according to the legends of the land. But I have not played the game in so long that I dont even know. :) I do remember that there was this one village that had mushroom houses. a back story to that would be that I was a thief in the game and a very very good one too. I had like two store houses at the time when I came across this village and well I decided to do a little "recon" of the area. I broke into a house while the owner was there and they were sleeping. By this point I was tired and needed a place to drop my loot off when I needed to...long story short I killed the owner of the house before he got to the door and the house is now mine. :) thats all there is to that story though. No more, no less. I must say however when I wasn't killing off random people for their houses and fighting against monsters I was traveling by foot exploring this huge land. I find that the similarities to the real world are so much alike that I would just sit and watch the sun rise on the land .

 Any way I will be back with more soon 

  GODZILLA

All hail the Land we....fall...through??

Whenever I play a game, I have to first test if the physics team got the character movement right. When someone mentions geographic land within a virtual world, I have to think back to how many (if any) times I either fell through the world or got stuck on a slight incline, or how bumpy the area is. Within the good ol' comparison (Because all of you can't get enough of it) of Second Life (SL) and World of Warcraft (WoW).

WoW in itself is a good game because it actually took it's time to brush it's teeth before it was slung out the into the real world. Therefore, the landscape is rich and smooth, very few world holes (area in which the avatar can fall through the world and die/float around forever. But when I say very few, I don't mean every now and then a character will instantly disappear on a nice golden brick road, it's when someone tries for an area that's not normally taken or shouldn't be used. I would personally know this from when I used to try to get to random places in order to have fun/ cure boredom/ show the blizzard team what's what!! But when it's broken down, the avatar is just tacked to the ground and walks around on an invisible trail and when they jump it just registers as move character box and sprite up a few and make it seem like they can jump.

Second Life on the other hand chooses to be goofy with the ability to detach the avatar from the ground and make the virtual sky it's home. The land for one is broken up into sims and sections that can easily make cracks and loopholes that people are just waiting to fall through. When creating something, the item can be placed within, in, or even under the land and if done right, can force the avatar under and through the whole ground to fall endlessly through. So, removing the creation variable from the equation, a normal virtual user would see that it's almost like the land of WoW, minus some weird areas. And yet, the biggest factor that is why I chose these two (yes, I choose my comparisons with care and thought...) is that the fact that at any time and point, the player may push the jump key and gone is land! Like stated above, WoW has characters tacked upon the land. Second Life, has the character as a free-moving object and can with enough force/determination/stupidity can fall straight through the ground.

All in all I think that games should check for anyway the player can break their barriers they set. Second Life nor WoW shouldn't place invisible walls, that's just lazy and tacky of a designer, but they should at least test to see if someone can fall through something and if so, how. It's not a bad thing, but it makes them seem more professional as well as gather respect from someone such as myself (who actually looks for ways to fall through and know a little about how they make the landscape).

Here comes Capt. Econ

When people think about economy, they would think Wall Street or the Stock Market. When I think Economy, I think trade and exchange rates, real world or virtual. Of course this is a shallow lead-in of what I'm talking about (no witty humor on Mondays sorry) is Virtual economies of many MMOs.
A lot are very similar in a sense so I'll stick to major markets of World of Warcraft (WoW) and Second Life. These two are different enough. Second Life conducts in shops and off-line trades, while WoW uses the auction house to trade between players in EBay style bidding. Although, both deal with a human player interacting with another human player for an item in exchange for game currency (or in some more illegal trades, real-life currency).
The only real difference between the two is that WoW's auction house trading is conducted within the virtual world and only the virtual world. While Second Life users can exchange through an Non-Player-Character(NPC) style shop which is created by another user to sell their mechanise within the game, quick and simple. The other way is by placing the item on "Xstreet" or more commonly known as SLExchange. With SLExchange, it's "offline" by not dealing within the game, but can just as quick and easy as the NPC shop method. SLExchange just mimics Amazon.com rather than EBay by not including bidding.
Another big difference is that in Second Life, when someone creates something, they "own" it and are able to copy and redistribute it as much as they wish within the game, to whoever. Therefore, When someone buys something from the shop, the item will not run out of stock because it contains endless copies within it, and same for SLExchange. WoW, on the otherhand, does not give ownership to anything the player "has". If a player finds a great item within the game and wants to sell it, they only have that one item and after it's sold, there are no more until another is found/bought. Which is why the EBay method is perfect for that economy, EBay in real life is used by human beings with (normally) only one item and bidding for it would make the price go higher and make the item worth more.
Out of both, I would think in a perfect society, the Second Life way of things would be so much better, but due to such a mess the economy is right now, the WoW style would somewhat mimic the economy and fall. At this time in the way of the market, I could only advise Second LIfe's gentle (and hippie) method.

Mother Shahraz

Mother Shahraz is the first boss in the 25man raid instance, Black Temple, That drops tier 6 loot. This boss is normaly a simple tank and spank with a few fun twists. First, the boss does alot of shadow damange. To be able to even last more then a few seconds during this fight, players need max shadow resistance. Any less then max will result in players being killed very quickly. The reason for this is that the boss will use an ability every few seconds that will randomly select a few people and teleport them to a random location in the room all on top of each other. The players will then take massive shadow damage based on their location to the other teleporties. The resistance allows for players to live through this. On thursday last week, our guild killed him with zero resistance. We lived due to pure luck. This resulted in one of the most intense and funny boss fights. People would randomly die or simply "fall over". We killed him by standing under her "skirt" in a giant pile so the chances were hight that a person would not be teleported into the group. We could have all instantly died, but luck dident go that way and we won. Best boss fight ever.

Game Review: Gears of War 2

Gears of War is a tatical third person shooter based in a world being overrun by the Locust Horde. Gears of War 2 is the sequal to the award winning first game. The game still uses the same design elements as the first, putting use of cover first over run and gun. The games single player mode has a great story line and goes much more indepth then the first game when it comes to back story. The story is the reverse of the first game, attacking the enemy rather then fighting for their lives on the surface of the world Serra. The game has a multiplayer mode with many options consisting of, Co-op, deathmatches, and objective games. The game also has a mode where the player fights wave after wave of locust in a fight for survival. In all, I would give the game a rateing of 9/10 for great gameplay and amazing visuals. Highly recomended if you can take the gore.

Devil May Cry

Alright, so, Devil May Cry 3 is probably one of my favorite games for the PS2. I'm pretty sure most of know what it is so I'm not gunna take the effore to explain it. I borrowed the special edition in which you get to play as Virgil, Dante's twin brother. If you complete the game by meeting special qualifications you can unlock different outfits for both characters, which is fricken amazing!! There's one outfit that allows you to stay in the character's devil form for and unlimited ammount of time, which, once again, is fricken amazing!! xD Out of the two characters, I'd still have to say that Dante is my favorite to control. He has more weapons to choose from and more combination attacks. So yeah...there's my ramble for this blog.