Flickr Video Game Photo Mode @ 1,000 Pictures!

Well, almost.

I started this group over two years ago and it's been growing slowly and steadily.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/500940@N20/

New Site Feature: Flickr Feed

I thought it would be a good idea to add some pictures to the site. Of course, we don't take any pictures of video game culture or events or press briefings or anything like that, but the world does.

So at the top of the site I posted a Flickr RSS feed that searches for the latest pictures on Flickr posted with the tag "video games". That's it. Simple.

I hope to see some interesting photos show up there and pray that nothing not work safe doesn't stay up there too long.

4 Left 4 Dead Friends

Games take on a whole new experience when you play them online with your friends. I'm not just talking about getting in a random group with people that maybe you've even met before playing other games, I'm talking about your buds from high school that you don't see very often in person anymore. Those guys that always had your back in the real world, now getting your back virtually against hoards of zombies, having a great time, laughing it up, reliving the old years.

Tonight, one of those buds was my wife, sitting in the same room with me split screen with my friends. Probably one of the best nights online together we've ever had.

Video games have truly transcended they're socially inept colorings and gone way, way outside the lines.

Further thoughts on OnLive

While the idea of PC gaming's barriers to entry (expensive graphics cards mainly) going away with the invention of the OnLive service, as well as a host of other pretty ingenious features like being able to pick up where you left off from any computer with out moving save files around, it does beg to question how all this will end up in the real world.

One of the features that OnLive promises is hi-defintion gaming on any console through the use of the servers that have embedded graphics processing chips. While they not only process the game data, they also handle rendering the graphics, something your computer used to have to do client side. But it only works if you have around 5MBps download speeds from your ISP. I do subscribe to Comcast for internet and I can tell you that I rarely get 5MBps speeds for my 6MBps subscription service. Tonight I tried a few download tests and got a couple 4.7MBps, a 5.2MBps and a 3.5MBps all using DLSReports.com. I have a feeling that if your computer's connection doesn't maintain the required bandwidth, your session could be topped out at the lowly S-Video-level graphics, a 480p resolution.

Secondly, a lot of ISPs like Comcast have started capping bandwidth since the days of online video services like Netflix have started eating up a lot of precious wire capacity. A game on a DVD can be as big as 7GBs. Assuming that you access everything on the disk once, that's around 7-9 GBs worth of data. In the real world of games, you play levels over, race tracks over and over and over, play online matches even more. The amount of data that an Xbox reads and re-reads off of a disk over a gamer's interest in the game must be pretty substantial. Comcast's monthly cap is at a beefy 250GBs, so that's about 45 fully packed games. But you throw in normal internet usage (we're on our laptops quite a bit during the evenings and weekends), Netflix streaming, our Vonage internet based phone service and whatever else we use the interwebs for and I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few people out there get cut off and are unable to use the service (or their phone) for a couple days. 5MBps will eat up 250,000MB pretty fast when your talking about hours of gaming a day (347MB per day).

Right now, even Wikipedia's criticism section on OnLive is not making the company look very good. Extraordinary promises. Smoke and mirrors public presentation. Little information on their website. I want this product so bad and everything they claim to be so true. I'm still keeping my hopes up despite all the turbulence they are stirring up in the tech/gaming community.

I hate this generation!

(inserted by Justin, to lighten the mood in here!)

I remember being a kid in the early 80’s when the NES was at its peak. There was hundreds of game that came out every year. If you liked sports games you would buy Bases Loaded, Tecmo Bowl, Double Dribble, Ice Hockey, etc. If it was racing, action, role-play games you had plenty to choose from. You would talk you parents into buying it for you or renting it. So you would open the box on the way home and salivate over the instruction book. Most games gave you a instruction book with a storyline that would set up the action that you would face for the rest of that afternoon, and into the night till you went to sleep.

Fifteen percent of the games made you feel like it was well spent time when you were done with it. The majority left you thinking, “Well it wasn’t great, but I was having fun playing a video game. And that makes it worthwhile”. Then you’re left with roughly ten percent that were just dreadful. You would rather be stuck at home sick watching your moms’ soaps than play that junk. (And let’s face it we have all played hooky to stay home and play games. Hell, I still do it now!)

You didn’t critique these games. You either liked them and they went to the front of your game drawer, or you didn’t and they collected dust in they back. At least until trading games became popular. Then Nintendo Power came out and it would let you know what was slated to come out soon. They didn’t do reviews, (of course because it was an in house project) you would get tips and codes.

I hate people the think their professional video game reviewers.

Now everywhere you turn around everyone has written a review. Everyone nit picks a game and forgets why we play games to start with. Is it fun? No, people worry if the lighting was a little too dark, the shadows are bad, the AI was lazy, and god forbid, the game was short.

Let me give you some examples of where the fun factor is more imortant the HD'ability. Madden looks better than it ever has, plays great but, it is the NFL (No Fun League). There is no real sense of impact with tackles. No subtle celebrations. Where did the injuries go? Ace Combat 4 is a beautiful presentation. We don’t need the storyline. We need a fun dog fighting experience, not monotonous bombing runs and drawn out, looping dog fights. Far Cry might have the best environment in a FPS. But there are only so many times you can enjoy the same mission they give you. GTA4 is a great idea, but there is the repetitive thing again. The Forza series looks and feels great. How many laps do you want to take on that same track, woo hoo! Assasins Creed, great story but the game could have been half as long and it would have been a better experience. All of them looked pretty, but missed the fun factor throughout the game.

On the other hand CoD4 has a short single player story but the online multiplayer is great. They got it right with the audio/visual to make you feel the experience. GOW 1&2 has an awesome single player game, but the online is glitchy. Crackdown may not be the most beautiful game but the entire game is on point. Mercenaries 2 is fun, glitchy and a little ugly but fun.

Do you see where I’m going with this? Now that you have that in your skull here is my other issue.

I was playing a nice quiet game of Hardcore Team Deathmatch on CoD4 when I was rudely interrupted.

My phone rings and it’s one of my best friends. “Hey man, can you do me a favor? If your not to deep in a game. Can you pop in Mercenaries 2?” Now I stopped what I was doing for what I was doing, and for what? He wanted the viral achievement that I had so he could have 50 gamer points.

I hate Microsoft, I hate Sony. I hate Achievement Points and Multiplayer Challenges. It has made them money, because the dumb monkeys have been sucked in to this gimmick.

People play games just to get those achievements and do not return to enjoy the fun in it. For example my friends and I played Horde on GOW 2. We completed the 50th wave and had a blast doing so. But now I can’t anyone to do it again. Now that the achievement was accomplished they are done with that game.

You know where I think Cod4 got it right. The Achievements where all single player, and the Challenges for multiplayer are not attached to the achievements at all. The Multiplayer Challenges that open items in multiplayer are related to kills and headshots, not some outrageous happenstance situation. The happenstance situation were just extras for fun to see if you could it it. (they don't give you anything)

Other than trying to find the orbs in Crackdown I have never tried to complete any Achievements just for the sake of getting them all done. I just have fun, play the game, and get my Achievements along the way.

I’m not an Achievement Whore, just a Gamer!

Mario Kart: Midnight Launch

What a bust. Here's my Twitter for the evening (in reverse chron):

thrustinj: looking for Wii Mario Kart friends. Send me your friend codes! less than 5 seconds ago from web

thrustinj: on my way home. 38 minutes ago from txt

thrustinj: happy the employees finally got back to the store. I'm still the only one here. No one love Mario Kart? about 2 hours ago from txt

thrustinj: so bored. But I'm watching a father and son panic about why the store isn't open yet. about 2 hours ago from txt

thrustinj: still the only one here. At least in hiding in my car. about 2 hours ago from txt

thrustinj: feeling Mario Kart doesn't need a launch like this. And why didn't I bring my DS? about 2 hours ago from txt

thrustinj: watching two guys with a big box walk into Gamestop. Mii thinks it's Mario Kart for the midnight release. about 2 hours ago from txt

About 30 people ended up showing up during the last 15 minutes before midnight. The store guy had a few Mario Christmas ornaments to give out as prizes, but he couldn't think up 3 "Nintendo related" questions, so he randomly threw them out to the sparsely populated queue. Yeah, we're all going to jump around like a bunch of wedding idiots. Then he told us that he had a list of upcoming Wii releases and told us that he highly recommended the new Facebreaker boxing game. I know he's never played it. So why is he recommending it. Stupid.

When I finally got the game back home, I hooked up with a co-worker and we were pretty quickly online and playing. Then after one race, my Wii gave me an error message and said I needed to restart the console. We played a few more and it did it again. I'll have to check the web and see if others are getting this error. If it happens again, I'm taking it back for another disk.

Oh well. We'll give it the weekend to see how it goes.

GamezNFlix: IzBeAllupOnz

I know that sub-cultures can generate a lot of weird memes. The internet one is proud to present to you the "z", the "N" and the "x" suffixes and whole word replacements. It's a general eye sore of a website name, but as your mother once taught you, don't judge a book by it's cover"z".

What GamezNFlix.com does offer is a 9 buck video game rental plan, cutting GameFly.com by almost half. And since Blockbuster's 5-day rentals are $8.00 a peice, I'll gladly consider joining GNF.

Actually, I'm really considering it. Besides the fact that you can rent PS1 games on there for twice what you could own them for, it's really the fact that they've gone that extra mile to do so. The advertising is sort of big, but interesting. I haven't read much of their reviews or watched any of their video reviews, but I'll give it a look over before I subscribe and then realize how big of a douchebag they really are.

Finished: Call of Duty 4

I'm pretty happy to wrap this game up. It gave me just enough of a taste of maddening challenge to feel relieved that it's over. I'm not left wondering what all the fuss is about, nor am I so exhausted that I have nothing to say about the game. I beat the game on the hardest mode, veteran, and with the exception of one ridiculous level, and I think that it was the perfect challenge for me.

I'll keep playing the game online until I max out my profile. I don't quite understand what people are getting out of this "prestige" mode. It doesn't serve any purpose online other than to get you a different unattainable rank. But the price, resetting just about all your unlocked items and challenges, is too heavy for me. As little time as I do play the game, I need something to remind me of all the time I put into it.

It's like why I enjoy games that have a running clock of how many hours you put into beating it. Gamers really don't have anything to show for their hard work to the real world outside our game rooms, so any tangible, programmed measurement is welcome. If it were a total of pink bunnies in a flower basket, I'd be sure to tell you I had gotten all 55 of those furry bastards and even that I'd named the last one Willie, the name of that kid who I got into a butter fight with in elementary school.

I got him now.

Demotivator: Gaming

That was fun. Make your own here.

Flickr Group: Game Rooms

I finally got around to posting up pictures of my game room. But it's been like pulling teeth to get anyone else too.

It's weird to say that I'm so proud of this, but it's like my chronological life after my mom stopped keeping and collecting all those mementos from things I did in that big scrap book. And it took a lot of time and effort to track down all the games I stupidly sold as a kid when I needed money for other games.

*Note to self: never let offspring sell anything.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/530462@N21/

The other Flickr group I started, Video Game Photo Mode, was a little more popular, but it's leveled off now.

Intrinsic Values: Online Voice Communication

For the most part, I've thought that online gaming (whether it be PC or console) was inevitable as a feature in new games. Consoles are all now online and we finally have the ability to play against people across the globe. Computer gamers have almost always had this, but since I'm not a PC gamer, this is still a relatively new world that has just been discovered.

The Sega Dreamcast was the first console to go online full-tilt, followed by the PS2 and the original Xbox. But it wasn't until the hi-def generation of consoles came out that developers started really marketing online features and weaving it into every aspect of their consoles and games. Not only can you play games online now, but you can buy small, sub-$15 games, surf the internet, download new game demos, buy episodes of tv shows and even rent hi-def movies.

Wow. That's like 5 more Intrinsic Values articles right there. Way to layout my writing schedule!

But most recently, I found voice chatting to be more than just for yelling back at those 11-year-olds to quiet down. On a personal note, my cousin whom I've only really known through instant messaging, recently got an Xbox 360 and a Live account. We've been talking online for a few years now, but this is really the first time we've really been able to hang out and do something we both share in common.

Of course, I wouldn't suggest telling all of your estranged friends and family members to get a 360 just so you can recoup those long lost relationships, but as far as things to expect when buying video games, connecting with a distant cousin isn't something they bullet on the packaging. But it is a cool bonus.

It's also been really nice to play games with people and chat about something other than the game your playing. I've heard people talking with their friends in games about just about everything (which is good and sometimes bad). When you get in a game like that, the atmosphere is more relaxed and you feel like your sitting at a restaurant talking over dinner. It completely changes the dynamic of online gaming. It becomes the hobby that you enjoy alone instead of an adrenaline pumped frag fest that it can usually be.

Also, you can really consider this to be a really cheap form of world wide communication. For $50 a year, you can chat with anyone who has a 360. Of course that doesn't count the cost of internet and the $350 console, but you get the idea.

Info: Stuntman Ignition

I played the Stuntman: Ignition demo a few weeks ago on Xbox Live and I was pretty impressed.

Today on IGN they reviewed the game's Constructor function. A set of challenges that you must win by placing elements on the movie set to complete the scene. If your scene involves getting over a river, you must use the set props you have to achieve the scene. A ramp might be the best application.

Here's the best part: there are two modes. Stunt Director has you strategically placing a limited number of props to achieve a scene in a movie. It's a sort of logic puzzle that involves blowing things up and looking cool.

The second mode is a free-style, sandbox arena that lets you do whatever you want with an unlimited number of props. Set up the most insane course with the most insane stunts and then go at it. Put cameras anywhere you want to catch footage as the car comes by, then post your movie online for other people to see.

I have to admit, I was thinking about the game as a used purchase, but with this new level of interactivity, I might have to buy it right when it comes out.

Here is some footage of the Constructor level.

Free MMOs

I'm definetly checking this out more closely this holiday vacation. I'm bound to find one that is not only fun but gets through the filters at work :)

Cosmic Encounters will probably be the first one I check out.