My gaming in the last few weeks has been nothing if not disjointed. Since I fed the bomb to CoD2 I’ve been wandering aimlessly with no real ambition to achieve; sort of like a 40 years in the desert, but with video games.

I have been going back to a series I started a while ago with some regularity, though. I decided it was time to put some more hours into “Project .hack//”. Project .hack// is sort of a multi-media conspiracy story that weaves together a video game with several anime series to tell the story of a computer game gone wild. And not the good kind of wild with the girls and the t-shirts, but the bad kind of wild with the fires and the chaos. People who play the game fall into comas, the operating system of the game (which also runs most of the computers on earth in a subtle jab at Microsoft) is causing world wide panic, and clearly someone is trying to cover it all up.

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The Torque 3D game engine can allow small developers to make 3D games

Today I was reading about how the the gaming industry is stagnating due to the mediocrity of games by the big publishers; most companies don’t take a lot of risk with original games due to the potential large amount of money lost if the game idea flops. And the smaller more original game companies are being eaten up by the big guys.

While the Inquirer article takes a very negative view of this situation, to me it seems the door is left wide open for some bright, young, fresh designers to come out with some new and interesting. And to me the only thing cooler than playing an awesome game is creating one yourself.

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Man vs Nature

Hello from New Orleans, readers. My choice of video games is quite limited when I’m on the road so I decided to take a walk down memory lane courtesy of MAME. I came up with the arcade classic Crossbow. This game had a crossbow mounted on the arcade cabinet. In emulation, the crossbow is replaced by the mouse. If you’re big on authenticity, visit Logitech’s site to sign the petition for a USB crossbow controller.

Your job as the master crossbowman is to protect your party of characters from horrors encountered on a leisurely stroll. The jackasses in your party know nothing of defending themselves and march forward relentlessly. Their walking routes include deserts, jungles, volcanoes, caverns, and finally a castle. In the screenshot above, you can see me defending my helpless crew against rabid monkeys and a bloodthirsty toucan. Don’t worry, all party members made it through unscathed. Crossbow was a major gaming triumph as the first arcade game to use digitized audio and a light gun. It’s also the first arcade game to use a crossbow as far as I know. It’s 22 years old but it’s still a butter-churning good time.

There are two reasons why I have yet to feed Warrior Within the bomb: bad bugs and bad save points.

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Microsoft did a great job making the 360 look small and sleek, but it appears the 360 is actually bigger than Xbox 1.

Happy Thanksgiving

The November issue of Popular Science has its candidates for science and technology products of the year, and one of their computing products caught my eye.

First off, yes, I read Popular Science and refer to it as ‘PopSci’ in conversation, so let’s get all the giggling and nerd jokes out of the way first.

Ready? Good. The item in discussion is the PhysX Processor from Ageia technologies. This new card is designed to be the first processor totally dedicated to offloading physics calculations from the CPU. Ageia claims that this relief will bring about a revolution in gaming parallel to the one caused by the development of the dedicated graphics processor. Whether or not the mob is lighting the torches yet is up to debate, but the software capacities of the processor (a package referred to as PhysX SDK) are available in Unreal 3. There are some interesting videos that show off the capabilities of the card, and if the video’s are rendered real-time then I stand impressed at the sheer number of objects it handles.

While the idea of separating physics calculations from the processor sounds like a good idea, it also sounds like another hole in the computer for me to toss money into. It hurts me to spend hundreds of dollars on a good video card; does this mean I’m going to have to spend hundreds on a physics card, too?