VoodooLabs

Yep, the server went down again. They were going to move it to a new server, but for some reason or another they just flicked it off.

Anyway we’re back up and I don’t see any reason why we would go down again. Shiny new server, 40gb of space, 1.5tb of bandwidth, a remote control panel to restart / reinstall the server. We’re basically in control of everything now, even more than everything before.

So later today (Sunday) I’ll be making sure everything is working, setting a few email addresses up and generally making this new server feel like home. If I’m feeling adventurous I may start a website design that I’ve been promising to do for a while and / or start playing around with wikis.

I also may continue working on a rich text editor for our cms system. If I do that a wiki system might be in the works.

But I will probably just watch movies… (oops I haven’t returned those dvd’s)… and bum around until work on Monday. I deserve it… working all this week and next

Now, while I don’t normally make a post about a single link, and I don’t read Game Girl Advance (too girly) I feel that this link has some merit. Clicky.

I’m not sure about all of you out there, but I have been in many situations where we were playing a multiplayer game and decided on our own rules. It makes things fun, and, well, is something that tends to happen after playing the same game too much.

If I’m playing a multiplayer game I’m probably playing Halo and a very fun game to play is ‘Warthog Madness”. Create a race game in Blood Gulch - each Player will have a Warthog. The aim of the game is to run someone down with the ‘hog, to do so you have to flip their vehicle first, then run them over. A caveat is that once a player has died they are allowed to get back to their warthog in peace, and given adequate time to start moving.

The whole game is played in a relaxed manner with ‘big air’ being a side goal. The vehicle physics in Halo (original) are very mushy, especially with the warthogs, and it’s easy to collide and perform aerial acrobatics. There is often a very non-competitive nature, at least with the people I’ve played with. It’s seen as good will if someone spawns after they die at the ‘wrong base’ (the base at the other end of the map) another player will take their warthog halfway, thereby getting everyone back into the game faster.

Anyway the linked article and included comments describe many other game-rule recipes.

I think a game could be quite successful if it allowed these sort of rules to be arbitrarily setup, or at the very least flexable enough to facilitate more of these behaviours. This “emergent gameplay” is not new, but I think it’s quite cool. It is, in part, tied to the mod scene. The successful mod - Counter-Strike has a few of these gameplay elements. Save hostages, protect the VIP, plant the bomb. And a few extra maps have other gameplay elements, such as ‘Grenade Tennis’ - two teams, a large glass wall with an opening on the top and grenades all over the floor. The only way to elimintate the other team is to throw the grenades over the wall and try and time it right. Another map “Sniper” is two identical set of obstacles facing each other. Players use cover and try to snipe the opposition. Yet another CS level has two identical sides and a large wall that moves up and down, kind of like a reverse garage door. The game is almost the same but this door leaves time to find another position, or get into a position to rush the other side.

I’m just musing over this, I find it quite interesting. LANs seem to end up everyone playing the small fun games, or the rule changed normal games which is interesting, it seems that simple arcade rules still have standing.

The Mac Pro is roughly $1200 more if purchased in New Zealand. This is the king kong of crappyness. My biggest question is why? Why?

This is the difference between me getting it or not. I am saddened.

Anyway, while I’m at it, I can discuss what I was going to get (and what I will get if I get a grand from somewhere or it’s cheaper by a grand):

Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon (Quad Core) Mac Pro Version
Both Bluetooth 2.0+EDR and AirPort Extreme
why isn’t it default?
ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB (2 x dual-link DVI)
Dell 2007WFP 20″ UltraSharp Wide Screen Flat Panel LCD Monitor

All in all I estimated it would probably cost $5650NZ… turns out it’s $6850NZ.

LAME!

…price of a small car difference.

This is the word of the week. I really enjoy words and linguistics in general and I would like ‘word of the week’ to be a regular feature here.

The german langauge has some of the best words. Schadenfreude means “pleasure taken from someone else’s misfortune”. I really want to learn lots of words from other languages that have no english counterpart.

Anyway, wikipedia can say it better.

I’ve known about the Marathon games for quite a while, but I never got around to playing them. A few weeks ago a friend reminded me and I started reading the terminal transcripts. But before I get into that I should describe what Marathon is.

Marathon isn’t just a hexalogy (6) of games (soon to be heptalogy (7)), it’s a universe that has spawned novels, fan-fiction and soon to be a movie. Technically I shouldn’t be calling them the ‘Marathon Games’ but I have a certain softness for the older games that went under the name Marathon.

What am I talking about? You may know the latest 2 (soon to be 3) games; they are Halo, Halo 2 and Halo 3. The Halo series doesn’t share the same timeline, but I would say they are definitely in the same universe.

The series started out with Pathways into Darkness. I haven’t played it, but apparently it’s quite good.

Then came Marathon, a different style of game but the ‘official’ sequel. Marathon 2: Durandal came next followed by Marathon Infinity followed by Halo etc.

The Marathon games use a slightly better doom style engine, they aren’t awesome to look at, but they aren’t bad. What interests me the most about these games and bungie in general is the depth they put into them. The games pull quite a few great concepts from science fiction - cyborgs, space travel, artificial intelligence among others. They also have a large literary component (except Halo), a large background and bungie also include tie-ins and puzzles for fans to work out.

Anyway, Marathon starts out with you, a cyborg, in a ship just about to dock with ‘Marathon’ a very large ship in the Tau Ceti system. Earlier an alien ship had attacked Marathon and many aliens have come aboard.

In actual fact there is a bit of contention whether you are a cyborg, but I’ll just gloss over that.

The ship was run by 3 AI programs that may have been damaged by the attack.

Throughout the game there are plot twists, interesting details and information to discover through the use of computer terminals that can be read and used to interact with the AI’s. These have been converted and are available on the web to read and were my first introduction into the Marathon side (I knew about the Halo side for quite a while).

So I spent many hours reading the story. I then decided to play the game. Lucky for me all three games have recently been released for free with executables for all the major OS’s.

I’ve played through the first game and I’m getting through the second. What’s great about the 3rd game is it has multiple consequences and time gets a bit messed up, so I’m looking forward to it.

Marathon is a game that everyone can now play, so have a look at something that is on a different level to doom. Oh and the levels are actually quite hard and require thought. I haven’t gone to a walkthrough yet!

Get Marathon.