Kokul’s World

Well the new Guitar Hero: On Tour game for DS is now available. It is the latest installment in the popular Guitar Hero franchise that brings the fun of the game to a mobile platform allowing you to jam with friends wherever you are.While it seems a bit lame, I’ve tried it and it is [...] Read more »

So it’s finally happened, the format wars are over and some camp has lost several billion dollars. The loser is HD DVD. They already were heading towards defeat when several studios switch to the other camp, but the largest and probably the fatal blow came when Walmart announced that they would be phasing out HD [...] Read more »

Everyone has at-least once picked up a computer game or a console game. But it can get pretty lonely, when all you do is play single player mode. In today’s age, where everyone is connected through the Internet, it is sometimes nice to play games where you can interact with others at all stages. For [...] Read more »

IGN’s Matt Casamassina takes a detailed look at Nintendo’s next-gen console, the Wii. He runs through all the buttons, plugs, and slots to be had on the Wii, the Wiimote, and the Nunchuck units. It really amazed me how Nintendo was able to fit all those features into something that small.
[youtube]BzGDqVB-f1I[/youtube] Read more »

Here are some great online games that you can play for FREE on low end computers. This is kind of a follow up to my previous post where I talked about great games you can play on those lower end computers. However most of those games don’t have much of an online community left to [...] Read more »

Here are some great online games that you can play for FREE on low end computers. This is kind of a follow up to my previous post where I talked about great games you can play on those lower end computers. However most of those games don’t have much of an online community left to play against in multiplayer, if any at all. So for those who still crave a multiplayer challenge here are some free games for you:

• Gunbound World Champion
  This is a very cool 2D platform game very similar to worms where players are organized on teams and take turns shooting each other. The shooting isn’t that easy since you have to adjust the angle, account for wind, and find the right power to shoot at. To make it harder, these factors always change as you are facing other players. Terrain is destroyed so you may lose your vantage point. Unlike worms, this game has a large variety of mobiles you can use. Mobiles are the machines/living forms that you use to shoot other people. Their attacks vary, and each has it’s advantages against a certain other. Very large online community.
   
• Gunz Online
  A 3D third person shooter with a large online community. It also tosses in some Matrix/Prince of Persia style elements like the player can run up walls, run across gaps by running along walls, do a variety of aerobatics such as front sommersaults while shooting to add a lot of variety to the game. The game features a vareity of equipment you can buy such as swords, bazookas, machine guns, rifles, and a large number of guns where you hold one in each hand.
   
• Survival Project
  This is a 2D fighting game where you take on a character, use a variety of different cards such as axes, bows, magic, boots, etc to improve your stats. You can fight against other people and team up with others to go on quests. Although many think the 2D style of graphics may ruin the game, it actually doesn’t. The graphics are colourful and vibrant, and the gameplay is great fun!
    
• 02 Jam
  This isn’t a game I’ve actually played, but I’ve heard positive comments from many others and read many positive reviews about it. In this game, you be that aspiring musician you always wanted to be. You can make music in this game and share it with a large and helpful online community. You can team up with your friends and make some rocking songs, or go solo. Either way, your artistic desire to create music is fulfilled.
    
• Neopets
  I’m pretty sure many of you have heard of this game. Although it isn’t real-time online where you interact with others in real-time, I think it is worthwhile to mention. The point of this game is to create a virtual pet and raise it. You have to take care of it, by feeding it, grooming it, even giving it books to get smarter. You can do a lot with your pet, battle it against other pets like a Pokemon battle, build a house for it, create a shop to sell your wares, create/join a guild, play flash games to earn neopoints, even buy your pet a pet! It’s addictive and fun to play. Perfect for those who want a pet, but can’t have one in real life.
    
• Runescape
  First off, I would just like to say, this game has A TON of players. Although the graphics may not be great, the gameplay definetely is. Runescape is an online game that is run through a java web-based client. You live in a mythical world of various monsters. You can make your way through the world through a lot of ways. You can improve your skills and be a fighter. Improve your mining skills and sell ores. Improve your smelting skills to forge new swords and armour from ore and sell them. You can even improve your fire makings skills, wood chopping skills, and even fishing skills. You can make fire to cook food, fish, fight monsters, and mine. The name for this game comes from the Runes you collect to cast spells. If you want to be a powerful player in this game, you need to collect runes and you should also pay for the premium membership as well (even though for casual playing you don’t have to).
    
• Conquer Online
  Conquer Online is like Runescape, except with a far larger community and better graphics. Conquer Online I feel has better gameplay too. There is more variety with the equipment you can have. There is also classes in Conquer Online, 4 to be exact. Conquer Online is set in the Ancient Chinese world where Kung Fu is a dominant skill that everyone knows. You can make your way through mining, hunting monsters, killing other players, and collecting their loot and selling it in shops if you want. As I said before, the equipment choices are large. In fact, the combinations are endless. You can trick out your sword or armour a variety of different skills like Elite, Refined. You can add gems to increase power or the amount of experience gained. Not only can you hunt, but you can own a house, get married, join in guild wars, and just plain make new friends online.
     
• Flyff
  Flyff was created to fulfill people’s dreams to fly. It is like Runescape and Conquer Online where you level yourself and your skills while earning money and making friends, but once you reach level 20, the real fun starts! That is when you can fly! It is very cool to fly across the world instead of having to walk. You can also directly control the flying instead of just click where you want the character to go. Flying is also a lot faster. Try it out. A lot of people play. No matter where you go, you will see other players playing as well.
     
• Ragnarok Online
  Never really played this game. It is like Flyff, Conquer Online and Runescape. But then again so are a lot of online games. This game has recieved many high ratings and positive comments. So check it out. Large gaming community there as well.
     
• Anarchy Online
  Never have played this game either. Seen the reviews and ratigns on MMORPG.com and it has one of the highest ratings for a free game. Although it is a couple of years old, and the graphics look dated, the large online community of players find it anyways. So you try it out. What have you got to lose?

Hope you enjoyed this list of games. If you have your own, leave them in the comments and please add a few sentences for a description of the game. I’ll add it on to the list.

Well let’s face it, not everyone can afford to blow $3000+ dollars on a brand new gaming comp. A lot of us out there still have old PIIIs or new computers from OEMs that only have an Intel Extreme integrated graphics card. Now I’ll tell you one thing, never buy any computer that comes with [...] Read more »

Well let’s face it, not everyone can afford to blow $3000+ dollars on a brand new gaming comp. A lot of us out there still have old PIIIs or new computers from OEMs that only have an Intel Extreme integrated graphics card. Now I’ll tell you one thing, never buy any computer that comes with an onboard graphics card, it will not work with any game that was made in the past 2 years guarenteed. So for those who still want to game, here are some great games you can play:

• Age of Empires I and II
• Rise of Nations
• Star Trek Bridge Commander
• Ground Control 1 and 2
• Diablo II
• Warcraft 3
• Sid Meier’s Pirates!
• Civilization 1, 2, 3
• Star Craft and Star Craft Brood War Expansion
• Command and Conquer: Red Alert
• Empire Earth
• Freelancer
• Galactic Civilizations II
• Quake 3
• Unreal Tournament 2003, 2004
• Counterstrike 1.6
• Black and White
• Command and Conquer: Generals
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
• Grand Theft Auto Series

Add any of your own suggestions in the comments!

Recently, a game called Darkstar One was released. It was the most recent addition to the space-sim genre that sees release after release that always seems to be the same game, except repackaged with new graphics, sound and story. Gameplay essentially feels the same. Well Darkstar One seemed like a very promising games (like others [...] Read more »

Recently, a game called Darkstar One was released. It was the most recent addition to the space-sim genre that sees release after release that always seems to be the same game, except repackaged with new graphics, sound and story. Gameplay essentially feels the same. Well Darkstar One seemed like a very promising games (like others released before it), and it was a beacon of light and hope for fans of the space-sim genre that perhaps we could revive it after all.

Ever since the big publishers and developers such as EA stopped developing games for the genre and left it up to smaller, mostly European developers to carry on the torch of the genre, the genre has seen a decline ratings such games receive. The games that came out after the big publishers pulled out have the same gameplay elements, and a serious lack of variety from previous games. But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t games that broke the mold; however they were plagued with other problems that prevented them from being one of those great games.

Then, in 2003, Microsoft came aboard the space-sim genre’s ship and promised to deliver a new game that would be innovative in terms of gameplay. That game was Freelancer. It was another beacon of light for the space-sim genre because finally a big publisher has decided to dip its toes in the seas of games in the genre. However, Freelancer wasn’t as innovative as promised, but it still kept the genre alive by providing a great storyline, and making the game easy for modders to create mods for, thus prolonging its life even to this day. 

Two years later, Egosoft released their third space-sim game X3: Reunion. The game has a lot of innovative gameplay techniques that expand on the open-ended gameplay established by previous games - trading, taking on missions, exploration, piracy, etc. These expansions on gameplay include the ability to own multiple stations, own multiple ships, have a fleet of ships following you, build factories to make goods and equipment, and establish satellites to monitor areas for you. It was a very promising game like others, however in the end, it was also crippled by other problems. The largest problem was that X3 had a very steep learning curve, about the angle of 70 degrees. There is no in-game tutorial to teach you the controls. The manual is very skimpy and lacks enough information to teach newcomers anything about how to play the game. Such lack of support for newcomers is what drove many away from the game.

So what does this mean for the space-sim genre? Well, it means that we need the big publishers and developers to come back to the genre. Smaller European developers are fine, but most of them don’t like to stray away from the gameplay that is already in previous games. Many European developers in the genre such as Ascaron Entertainment just like to copy what older games had to offer in hopes that maybe what made that older game a classic will make their game better (and they are completely wrong, it just makes it more boring).

When I purchased Darkstar One, I was excited that there was finally an interesting space-sim game that I could enjoy. However, my experience soon got sour because of the game’s ridiculous copy protection. It also worried me about the future of game copy protection and how it might affect legit customers who purchased games.
Darkstar One [...] Read more »

When I purchased Darkstar One, I was excited that there was finally an interesting space-sim game that I could enjoy. However, my experience soon got sour because of the game’s ridiculous copy protection. It also worried me about the future of game copy protection and how it might affect legit customers who purchased games.

Darkstar One uses an interesting and creative copy protection scheme that includes TAGES. TAGES can extensively customized so that if the software detects that the game copy may be illegal, then it will affect gameplay. By prowling through the forums, I noticed a long list of symptoms of those who had illegal versions of the game were experiencing. If the game comes to the conclusion that you are running an illegal version, then your ship becomes very hard to manuever, you cannot do certain things to get furthur in the story, the navigation map becomes incredibly shaky, graphics mess up, and text becomes distorted. What the game developers were going for is that everything would work out fine in the beginning to entice those who got their copies of the game illegaly to play the game furthur into the storyline. However, the game would become more and more buggy and the experience would get worse the furthur you went into the storyline.

At first, I thought it was quite an ingenius way to defer people from pirating the game. However when I actually went into playing the game, I quickly switched my opinion to downright hating it. I fine with copy protection that stops people from stealing the game, however I dislike it when it interferes with legit customers - who spent their hard-earned cash - gameplay and computers. The copy protection reads the disc every few minutes to make sure that the disc is legit. This in turn makes the framerates drop in the game to a point where it looks more like a slideshow than a game. This makes the game completely unplayable, and in the end frustrates the user. Also, with such frequent disc reads (something Starforce copy protection is notorious for as well) reduces the life-span of your disc by a large amount, thus damaging your disc. Ascaron Entertainment, the game’s developer has addressed the problem with a beta patch, however it does not allay my concerns.

I admit that any game or software has bugs when released. I know for myself when I make my own programs for my computer science class, that no matter how many times I check it over and test it, bugs always seem to appear out of nowhere. But Darkstar One has many bugs, some of which shouldn’t even have passed the beta phase of development such as this constant disc reading bug that slows down the game. Such major bugs, lack of features, instablities, and gameplay imbalances seem to be more and more commonplace.

Darkstar One is a nice game, but it lacks variety. Most star systems outside of those in part of the mission scripts are very generic and boring: a trade station, a few planets you cannot land on, an asteroid belt or nebula adjacent to the trade station, and a couple of ships. It seems to me that Ascaron Entertainment spent more time rigging the game with traps for those who have illegal copies than spending time to add gameplay content, getting rid of bugs, and other things that will make the gameplay more enjoyable to those who purchase it.

In the number of users who play games, only a very small percentage actually have illegal versions of them. The overwhelming majority of gamers buy legit copies of games. It always fails to elude me why developers don’t focus more on fixing the bugs in the games, making it more stable, adding more content, improving gameplay, and overall making a good or great game instead of spending a lot of time on preventing the game from being pirated. Developers should make a good or great game first that is stable enough for release before focusing on preventing it from being pirated. Since developers focus more on copy protection nowadays than before, we see more and more games getting lower ratings. A lot of games feel incomplete or lacking enough content to play through more than once. They seem to have bugs and other glaring problems that make gamers steer clear of them. Today, less and less games being released are truely good and groundbreaking.

It seems to me that the copy protection seems to do more damage to the gaming industry than protect its interests. Game copy protection is probably going to look much like Ascaron Entertainment’s style of protection where developers invest a lot of time that they could be placing into making the game better to rigging a game with a lot of traps and pitfalls for those who don’t take an honourable route to gaming.

DigiTimes has reported that manufacturers of Blu-ray and HD-DVD drives have had to cut back on production because of a serious shortage of blue laser diodes. This means that the expected pre-Holiday flood of such devices onto the consumer market may not happen. DigiTimes is also claiming that Sony, which is one of a handful of companies making the [...] Read more »

Well ATI seems to have every intent on making a name for itself while it is still separate from AMD. The Radeon X1950 series is ATI’s most powerful graphics card yet available in XTX and Crossfire editions. This card is the first graphics card to sport GDDR4 memory (512 Mb) with a bus speed of 2 Ghz. Before [...] Read more »