If I have 20 mins to kill, I’ll usually open up Warcraft 3 or, more recently C&C3, and have a 1v1 with a computer that I know I’ll win. In some ways I treat it like a sandbox game; ‘turtle’ till you are impervious the the enemies attacks, then just muck around sending different unit combo’s straight into the enemy base to see what’s most effective (or in my case usually the most fun or annoying).

This style of play is the same behind playing games like 99 Nights or Dynasty Warriors on your own. It’s different in multiplayer ofcourse, but for single player the thought process is the same: I have some time to kill, I dont want to think too much, I just want to kill lots of dudes or toy with an easy computer enemy for a while.

Back in my Starcraft games, there was actually a term for this – it’s a Comp Stomp. Sometimes you’d play a 2 or 3 player comp stomp (i.e. 3v1 computer of varying difficulty levels), but mostly it was just to kill time or toy with an enemy – it makes you feel good at the end though, almost like you’re teaching the computer a lesson for killing you so many times in this or other games or at higher difficulty levels.

So yeah. I revise my ‘hack n slash’ to ‘comp stomp’ as a genre.

Another one I think should get a bit of scholarly attention at the moment is the recent trend to make “Sneak’n'Stab” games. Splinter Cell, Assassins Creed, Chronicals of Riddik, the Tenchu series, pretty much any Ninja or Black Ops themed game (even Crysis to some extent) – These would fit into their own genre perfectly.

I do realise that we could keep making up genre names for everything but I also think that these sneak-n-stab games are emerging more and more in recent years. Maybe it’s a cultural shift, that people don’t see as much of a problem going behind someones back about something anymore i.e. in the workplace. It definately has something to do with less emphasis on honor in western society as most of these games are coming out of American dev houses – I can’t recall any Japanese games with as much stealth and loose morals.

It could just be something different to add to FPS games too, maybe people just want a change from the regular run run run shoot run shoot die respawn kind of missions. Although there are entire games crafted around stealth and hiding bodies from guards now. I mean just look at any of the Hitman games.

Firstly, it’s worth it if you’re a gadget enthusiast. Regardless of any of the shortfalls I’m about to comment on, it is new technology and it is probably the best 1st-to-market consumer level devices I’ve had the chance to play with. It’s fun to mess around with but I wouldn’t buy it if you think it’s going to improve your response times in a competitive environment – it’s highly responsive, but it’s so easy to flinch or breath differently or something which then makes your character do something you don’t want it to. False positives, etc, gotta love them.

In a non-competitive environment or for simple games though, it could be brilliant. I was using it out of combat in World of Warcraft for a while and after a little practice I could move my character around even if he constantly ran into things or went the wrong way.

The basic idea is that you strap the thing to your head and it tracks electrical impulses under your skin, which at it’s positioning on your head means it just tracks facial & eye movements, which isn’t really as you might have expected. You can configure it to run keyboard presses when you do certain things then, essentially mapping facial movements to keyboard buttons. E.g. grit teeth is W, glance left is A, glance right D, etc. Configuring your own movements to buttons is very difficult though, because there doesn’t seem to be any ‘record’ function that you can then use to map to a button, e.g. I would prefer to click record, then grit teeth/glance/whatever, click stop, then save that movement with a name so I can map it to a button later. Makes sense yeah? Well it doesn’t work like that (yet?), you have to use a series of bars to set a frequency of muscle, alpha, beta and glance that matches whatever move you want to make, and then record a keypress.

On the upside though you can make the actions very subtle if you like, even if that would increase the false positive rate which is already quote high unless you spend hours configuring it. So you could maybe use tongue movements or something, instead of getting into a bad habit of gritting your teeth at various pressures.

There is functionality there to track alpha and beta brainwaves but so far I haven’t managed to figure out how that works properly (the manual says that comes naturally after you master the muscle movement responses).

That’s about it really, it’s a fun little gadget if you have some spare time but it’s not yet practical for most gaming applications. There may be future software updates to help with this, and there is already a lot of how-to’s on youtube worth seeing before you buy one or to get more out of it if you already have one.

Tip: It’s also worth mentioning if you own one of these, that the crown you wear doesn’t do a good job of grounding itself so I have been getting better results by resting my hand on the metal box that the crown connects to.

I just bought one within 5 minutes of knowing it existed. That’s how freaking amazed I am by it. I’ve been involved in emerging tech in a university subject before, and I put a lot of effort into looking at things like this to use in a final year project. That was about a year ago, and nothing like this was showing up, so I just had to buy one of these to see how far we’ve come in that time.

I haven’t even got it yet and I’m so excited… I realise it’s new technology and will probably be a little buggy to say the least, but I think the world is ready for it now and I want to be one of the first to comment.

So tune in again in a week and I’ll make sure there’s a detailed review on this cool new piece of tech
Submitted By: kythin

When making a Death Knight you start out as level 55 and already have fairly decent armour, and Blizz really put you in the mindset that you’re playing a hero that’s just been converted to one of the undead scourge… a question I’ve never really asked but after finishing the amateur hour I can say it’s the best intro to a class so far.

Each quest you complete gives you talent points, so you can very quickly progress up your chosen path. I chose ‘Blood’ to start with, mainly because it reminded me a bit of a fury warrior which I’ve got some experience with already. I’m eager to try the other trees later on though when I figure out what exactly the different types of runes do and how different the trees will be by level 70 or 80.

So far the Blood tree is a high-dps, self healing warrior… basically. DK’s can dual wield but they can’t hold a shield, so as much outcry as there is against their healing abilities I can see how the healing is necessary for tanking in particular. Basically they’re dual wielding or 2h offtanks.

An interesting parallel with warriors is also the link I’m seeing between a warrior’s sunders and the death knight’s poisons and disease stacks. The more diseases a death knight applies, the more potent their instant attacks are on that target. They also have an ability to clone diseases from their main target onto all targets in a radius, which then makes all these targets more susceptible to attacks. I can see that in PvP at least, a well trained pair of death knights would be a very lethal force to reckon with, able to stack and re-apply diseases on all targets very quickly.

The back story for the death knights is quite good as well, and as a big fan of the Warcraft universe’s other literature this was also a big draw-card for me. I had canceled my subscription about 4 months prior to Wrath coming out, and though I can’t ever see myself staying past getting a character or two to 80, it will be a fun little adventure for me in my spare time.

I’ll post more about Wrath later, but for now that will do. If you have any questions hit me up in the forums.

Happy grinding!

- Kythin
(Horde on Caelstraz btw)

Submitted By: kythin

It strives to be a cross between a generic first person shooter and a stealth game like Assassins Creed or probably more accurately, Tom Clancey’s Splinter Cell. The shooting and melee battles you can get into are fun, even if they aren’t that challenging, but the stealth (which is how I wanted to play the game) was just plain annoying.

The idea is that you have to creep around while guards backs are turned and if you’re in a dark spot they wont see you. Most of the time though, the guards have flashlights on their guns which makes the dark spots useless so you just crouch there like an idiot and wait for certain doom in the form of an alarm going off and guards shooting you and not letting you get near enough to knife them.

The stealth does get a little better when you gain the eye-shine power, which lets you see in the dark. However, when it’s turned on it’s hard to see the dark spots in the area so you have to constantly flick between on and off. Also, by the time you get eye-shine you already have the skills to kill anything but the armoured guards in close combat or you have sufficient firepower to not need to be sneaky anyway.

The game does have a good storyline, I guess. It’s a little too quest based and there were a few times I thought I was stuck on a quest only to find that I’d already picked up the quest item and didn’t even realise it, or randomly talking to people and having them say “good job, here’s your reward”. The underlying narrative isn’t bad though and I can see how it ties in with the movies, and I watched the second movie soon after finishing the game and got a tiny bit more of the references Riddik uses sometimes.

All in all it was enjoyable enough for me to want to play to the end, which is not an easy feat for most games these days with my work schedule and the speed new games come out, but it did have its flaws. I wouldn’t call it groundbreaking, and the stealth needs a lot of work to be fun, but it was a good game-from-movie adaptation. It beats all of the matrix games anyway.

A question was asked sometime during the tute about the term “Hack ‘n’ Slash”, and whether it could be called a genre. I can see why some people might object, but I actually think it should be a game genre or at least a sub-genre.

My reason is that sometimes people just want to kill hundreds and hundreds of people/monsters/critters at a time to make themselves feel more control over their world. I’m sure there’s a psychological reason for it, not sure what it’s called though. Games like Diablo2 and Dynasty Warriors are great to just vege out for an hour and see how much damage you can do to the hundreds of enemies the game makes for you, usually whilst wielding a big stick or sword. Sometimes people will just buy a game like this for that reason – and if you can walk into EB and say “I want a hack-n-slash” and have everyone in the store immediately know what you mean (except for the non-gamers they sometimes employ around Christmas time), then I think it’s a genre.

Submitted By: kythin

The difference, in my view anyway, is that if we do have the R18+ it would be tightly controlled (because there’s such a debate, it would have to be monitored at least as closely as alcohol & r18+ movie rental laws). If we had the R18+ two things would happen; Nothing would get banned outright, but then it would be easier to put some of the currently MA15+ titles into the R18 category, thus restricting MORE games from minors more effectively.

I don’t see any reason children-protection can be used as an argument against this being added to our classification system.

More on it here via the Age:
http://blogs.theage.com.au/screenplay/archives//010915.html

Submitted By: kythin