Games

An interlude in Middle Earth

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Since I’m done with Empire for a while, I’ve been looking for something a bit more action-oriented. I’d already decided that it would either be Grand Theft Auto IV or Saint’s Row 2, and I’m slightly embarrassed that I ended up choosing GTA after having written this post. It seems that the PC ports of both of these games are awful, but Saint’s Row 2 is an order of magnitude worse, so GTA it is.

It’s going to take some time to get to me however because it’s backordered over at Pcgame.com.my so in the meantime, I thought I’d take advantage of the free trial of Lord of the Rings Online, one of the MMOs I’ve always been curious about. I’d always pictured LotRO as a sort of World of Warcraft 2.0 set in Middle Earth and I’ve heard good things about the Shire starting area for hobbits so I went ahead and downloaded the client and made myself a trial account.

No surprise that the game looks and feels a lot like WOW. Yes, instead of exclamation and question marks on top of the heads of quest givers, you have rings instead. Cute. What was surprising to me was that despite being able to copy so much from WOW, how unpolished it still is. Everything from the launcher, to the little icons for skills and abilities to how the UI doesn’t scale to your resolution, just reminds of how much better WOW does things. Of course, LotRO has a leg up on WOW in that its graphical engine is visibly superior, especially when looking at the landscape, but I found myself missing WOW‘s art direction.

As for world building, while I can agree that the Shire does indeed look superbly realized, I can’t help but roll my eyes at how the game breaks the lore in so many ways. Hobbits fighting men and even dwarves in the Shire? Traders in Michel Delving selling weapons to hobbits? I know that all this is pretty much necessary in an MMO, but it still induces severe nerd rage in me.

Anyway, I enjoyed my brief stay in Middle Earth and made it a point to visit some particular places of interest that I remember from the books, such as the Party Tree, but I don’t really see the long-term appeal in playing this. It actually made me WOW for a while. Still, it was free so I can’t complain too much and I got a good couple of days’ entertainment out of it.

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Science

Robot controlled flying sniper

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This is an invention that could have come straight from a sci-fi movie: a remote-controlled helicopter drone equipped with a highly accurate sniper rifle capable of seven to ten aimed shots per minute. It’s all over the various news outlets now, but because a QT3 member actually worked on it, it got posted there before the news really spread out. The Wired article even leaves out the best part. It mentions that it uses a videogame-type controller, but Charlatan on QT3 reveals that it uses an actual Xbox 360 controller to control its flight.

As other posters on QT3 have jokingly pointed out, this must be a great way to save on operator training costs. Look at how many people are playing Halo with the same controllers already!

Politics

Electoral fraud in Russia, claims the election winner

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If I were really snarky, I’d headline this post with a title like “In Soviet Russia, election frauds you!” Electoral frauds in Russia aren’t particularly shocking news, especially in Russia, but how often do you see it being claimed by the winner rather than the loser? Yet this is exactly what happened when a first time candidate for Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia, Anton Chumachenko, claimed that his victory was due to electoral fraud and that his opponent should have won instead.

Of course, the really tragic part is that the party seems to be doing everything it can to downplay the announcement and stall investigations. From the article in The Washington Post:

Chumachenko has provided evidence to the court and urged it to transfer his mandate to Vishnevsky. A ruling is pending. Meanwhile, prosecutors have sought to examine the original ballots. Election officials say they were damaged when a water pipe burst, an explanation that has been used before in Russia to stall investigations into election irregularities.

“We have very smart pipes,” Chumachenko said with a grin. “They know exactly where to leak.”

I post this because I think it jives well with my point about democracies. They’re the best form of government there is, but simply holding elections, even if they were free and fair which this one obviously was not, is not enough to qualify a country to be called a democracy. Yet repressive governments are fearful enough that they go to great lengths to show that they are democratic. Which is why we should all be ever ready to condemn them when they are not.

News & Politics

Private banking is for suckers

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I read with some amusement today’s article in The Malaysian Insider on plans by the Royal Bank of Scotland to target rich women in Singapore as clients for its private banking arm. Granted, I’ll never have enough money to even be considered as a client for a private bank, so I’m open to charges of writing out of spite and envy, but in general, my impression is that private banking is getting a lot of bad press at the moment.

Continue reading Private banking is for suckers →

Games, Philosophy

What makes a game fun?

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As someone who has been a gamer since I first laid hands on the original IBM Personal Computer in primary school, the question of what actually makes a game “fun” is something that I often ponder. This recently popped on QT3 as a loosely related tangent in a discussion on whether or not gaming can be an addiction. One particular poster made an observation so insightful that I simply need to put it here:

What games actually do, imho, is give you sheer, unadulterated happiness.

How? The reason is simple. A psychologist called Mihaly Czikzhentmihalyi (sp?) discovered (I think in the 60s and 70s) through extensive questionnaires with statistically quite large samples, the secret of ordinary human happiness, and it’s laughably simple – basically, if you go through life setting measurable goals that are just outside your comfort zone to attain, and then attain those goals, and then move on to pick a new, slightly higher-level goal, etc., etc., etc., you will be happy.

It’s exactly this progression of increasing powers and ever-increasingly-difficult goals that games give you in a miniature, abstract form, and that make them so addictive – little jags of happiness as you set and attain mini-goals, constantly excelling yourself in skill, the attainment of lewt, the discovery of new stuff, etc., etc.

Of course, theoretically, we should all be getting that kind of happiness in real life, through our careers, family, etc., and most of us probably do, but sometimes life isn’t so forthcoming, things are difficult, and it’s nice to have a happiness-producing substitute.

In a response to a question from me, he posted a link to Wikipedia about the research he cited which is here. Pretty interesting stuff, no? I hope to expand on this later.

Games

A Game: Empire Total War

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In a way, Empire is what Creative Assembly’s Total War series has always been building towards. Epic doesn’t even begin to describe its scope. Three distinct theatres, a dizzying multitude of major and minor factions, a greatly expanded strategic layer involving tech trees and multiple towns in each region, the ability to play naval battles in real-time mode for the first time and last but far from least, a spiffy new graphics engine so detailed and shiny that you can see the guns and buttons of your each of your soldiers gleaming in full HDR bloom.

Empire covers a relatively thin slice of history, but what glorious history it is! The French and American Revolutions, the rise of gunpowder and the apogee of the Age of Sail, the Age of Enlightenment and the beginnings of the globalized world. No one is ever going to mistake the Total War series as a replacement for a real history textbook, but this is as close as you’re going to get in a mass market video game. Total War fans already know the drill, but here it is anyway for those who have managed to miss out on it for the past 10 years.

Continue reading A Game: Empire Total War →

Fun

Awesome collection of Michael Jackson’s possessions

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Everyone knows that Michael Jackson is crazy by now, but just how far his craziness extends can be seen in this collection of his possessions that was put for auction. Now we know what he spent his vast fortune on. This seriously has to be seen to be believed. It’s clear from all this that Jackson’s affection for fairy tales and all things child-like isn’t an act, but it just makes me feel pity for him. Also, probably a very good example of someone who literally had more money than he knew what to do with, and spent it on satisfying every little whim, no matter how frivolous or expensive.

The auction has now been cancelled, but as one commentator noted, that’s probably a good thing because otherwise all of this stuff will become scattered amongst many collectors, never to be seen in one place again.

The unexamined life is a life not worth living