YourGamer.Net

US &squo;unprepared for cyber 9/11&squo; | The Courier-Mail.

I feel ashamed of my country. We invented the internet, 99% of all the innovations in information and communication happen here. We are home to nearly all of the information system development companies and research houses.

Fuck, we have more qualified hackers per cappita. not counting script kiddies and posers. All that aside, even our networks them selves are behind the times. Lack of broadband distrobution, not adopting the more secure, efficient, and faster protocols. Comparatively speaking, the rest of heavy hitters online are using tanks, while we’re still stuck with horses, (forgive the historically referenced analogy).

this is what we need to do:

• Start adopting the more advanced protocols and offer small tax breaks to the ISPs who go through the trouble and expense to upgrade.
• Allow more broadband in more rural areas. its ridiculously expensive to get anything resembling broadband in the poor and rural areas.
• Have free/filtered wi-fi sponsored by government charity or simply government provided. It would be filtered  (of course) but it would be free and give internet to those that would otherwise not be able to afford it.
• Keep the net neutral, but keep it patrolled for threats against law-abiding citizens and cyber-attacks. Things like copyright infringement are bullshit laws and shouldn’t be the focus of a net based law enforcement group. Scams, illegal activities (ie, child exploitation), and ID theft should be the higher priority, (if not only) priority. They should have oversight to make sure that fucktard groups like the RIAA/MPAA aren’t controlling them. Copyright infringement and pirating are bullshit compared real threats like suppression of freedom of speach, child porn idiots operating inside the US.
• Do not infringe on Internet Neutrality. we love the freedom of expression that the internet gives us and we want to keep it that way. Yes, i do support a net-based law-enforcement department, but not a controled internet. They would be professionals in the feild of internet security and white hat hackers whos job is to keep the US net space even playing feild for all those who access from the US.

I want to make my statement clear, Net Nuetrality, Adoption of Better technology, greater distrobution of broadband, Internet and Tech savvy, well equiped law-enforcement.

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In all honesty, i don’t pity those that have to do tech support in any capacity. But as i wait in the queue for my session with some poor slob that has to deal with twits day in and day out, i regret for takeing up time that could be better spent on something better. Like porn.

My computer is in all out rebellion against me. The most recent attempt to play a game (heaven forbid i should even consider such a thing again), and the poor craptop simply turned off.

no shut down sequence, to hint that there are issues. On and running fine to Black screen. As if i pulled the power cord on a desktop model.

this isn’t the first time, but this is the first time it happened twice in a row. This time it was game being the common denominator, so it might be an issue with the video card. My friend brought this up, so i uninstalled the video drivers and reinstalled them. This worked just fine for a while, then it started again.

I personally want to blame vista, but until i can prove that it is an aspect of the OS, i won’t make a judgement call.

UPDATE: as it turns out, its the battery. (wasn’t ment to be used for more than a year.) so i’m going to call up CS at dell and get them to send out another battery.

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Twitter has made Dell $1 million in revenue » VentureBeat.

How the hell did i not think about this to begin with!?!?!?!?

Putting up a simple pop site that puts ads in the faces on the tiny urls that go on twitter, then forewards to the target site?

damn it, it would have been AWESOME!!! damn it.

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The date is August 21, 2007. I’ve got my brand new $59.99 copy of Bioshock bought fresh from the shelf. Tearing it open is like that first time you got your very own box of Little Debbie Nutty Bars. Remember that? You chowed down the whole box in 30 minutes. No? Well I did.

Anyway, it’s like that, but when you open the box, the police knock on your door and tell you not to be such a fatass, and take the box away from you until they verify you actually payed for it. Only, in this case, every kid in town got a box and you’re the last in line, (but they still come first thing and steal your box of tasty treats). You go and tell your friend about this injustice, only to see him enjoying his box-o-yummy. When you ask him why he’s so special, he says he nicked it from the drugstore!

So how far should companies go to protect their assets, and should they treat all their customers like lying, scheming, smelly ass pirates? Let’s think about it.

Companies cannot make money without selling stuff. They can’t create games without money. To keep people from sharing discs, obviously some protection must exist. This, I’m not against completely. I’m a hobbyist developer, I’d put in that type of protection, no questions asked.

Now, companies are going a step further, they’re using online verification to tell whether a customer is legitimate or not. This verification is faulty, unnecessary, and insulting. Here’s why.

The scruffy dude next door with a parrot played the game before you, the day it was released. But HOW? Well, piracy protection does not work. A cracker can unlock a game within hours of getting his hands on a copy. It doesn’t matter what a company does. A cracker can open the executable file, take out the offending bits, and you have a full working copy of the game. There’s no way to stop it, because people can always make modifications to the data on their computers.

Here’s where it gets scary, the only way to stop piracy, is to lock down computers making it impossible to modify specific data. Locked down on the hardware level, the average user would need (just like an Xbox or Playstation) a “mod” chip or some sort of hardware to remove this type of protection.

One day, and it won’t be long, Microsoft Windows is going to do just that. They’ve done it already for video, why not for games. Microsoft built into Vista piracy protection against video that requires hardware vendors to implement protections into their devices.

Now this isn’t infallible either, but it’s much, much harder to get around. And because of that it walks all over your right to fair use.

You can’t (easily) copy a Blu-ray disc to a smaller size to, for example, take a copy with you on a road trip, using your in-car DVD player. You can’t use a movie you bought on the hardware you want to use it on.

This can happen to games. You’ll no longer be able to install patches to abolish Lara Croft’s modesty, or make her Jump super high just for the lolz. You won’t be able to install a no-CD crack so you can play the game without having to put in a CD for the 500th time, if you’re like me and don’t want to go around ruining all my CDs.

So tell the game companies now that you won’t put up with their shenanigans. You want to play the games how you want to. You want to be able to mod and mess with the files for your own personal use.

You don’t want them to treat you like a criminal just because you actually purchased the game. You shouldn’t have to tell EA your IP address every 10 days just to play their rehashed FPS titles. You should be able to play the game when and how you want to.

You game developers at fault should be happy to have customers, but no, instead you treat us like dogs, and kick us down when we were so close to eating those oh so tasty treats.

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In-game advertising; it’s a match made in heaven. Gamers focus their attention on the action, and if there’s some subtle billboards or ads in the background, who cares? The gamer won’t even notice it. It makes the games cheaper and it makes them “more realistic”.

There’s one problem. A lot of us don’t *like* advertising in media. There’s a reason I no longer pay for broadcast television. It’s not because I could care less about the 4400, or that I’m mad that Jim Halpert still hasn’t proposed to Pam. It’s because I can’t even follow those shows with the 10 minutes of advertising for every 30 minutes of show. Seriously, that’s a third! That’s 1 minute for every 3. And when you’re not in the middle of a commercial, you get product placements in your shows. And they expect people to pay for this service?

So, do we really want to let advertising affect our video games in the same way? Do we want Niko to buy some virtual MP3s off of Amazon’s MP3 store right in-game, and then tell us to “try it out, it’s easy”? Is it more realistic? I kind of dislike our branded “reality” as it is now, why would I want more of it? “Hey look honey, remember when we went to Aspen and we saw that billboard advertising Whoppers? Look, that same billboard’s here in Super Extreme Awesome Snow Boarding XI.”

The games aren’t any cheaper. Last time I looked, games still cost 60 bucks in the States when they first come out. They haven’t gone down. Sure, expenses are increasing when making games, I’ll agree. That cost is partially due to the insane amount of graphic work today’s games require. But do we really want to sacrifice enjoyment (ie., having in-game ads) for more expensive visuals?

And to take this in another direction, how long will it be until advertisers get to have a say in the game development? “Oh, no sorry, you can’t have Gordon Freeman pop that dude right in the face. We want to market lollipops and rainbows. We can’t give you money unless you give Gordan a happy-go-lucky attitude.” I think gamers need to stand up now and say “Screw your lollipops and rainbows. When I pay cash, I want advertising free games!”

Here’s a thought, developers. Make games people are willing to pay money for. Make them fun. If you start putting all these ads in your games, we’re not going to play them. Unfortunately, I’m sure you’ll blame your low sales numbers on piracy, rather than your lack of ingenuity.

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Hi,

I’m johnwedd and as most of those that chat with me know, i operate yourgamer.net. And i am not a programmer, yet i know enough about coding to understand what most programmers are saying. I consider myself a Game Design Purist, (a “Games-are-art-fag-mo-sexual” as Yatzhee would put it) but unlike my other fanboy brethren; i give constructive critiques and positive reenforcement. (thats a nice way of saying that i’ll ram in the behind, but i’ll use lube and call you in the morning.)

If you would like me and my minions…..er….. i mean, gameing staff at yourgamer to give your game the once over. go ahead and drop me a line. anyway you please.

either in my email, (johnscott.weddington(at)gmail.com), through GU pm’s, or in the #gu channel on the GU irc server, i wonder in and out of there.

respectfully,
john scott weddington II

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The story of Steam is well known to most PC gamers. The initial resentment, the crashes, the bugs, then the sudden upswing, the acquisition of indie titles, the increased ease of use, turning it into a useful tool more than a barely-tolerable burden to your gaming experience. Steam and Valve have together revolutionized the face of PC gaming, in terms of content (episodic games, third party devs all rolled into one app), installation and patching (all done automatically…if devs are gonna release a buggy build, the least they can do is have it patch itself when they finally get around to fixing it…), and most of all, exposure and advertising. How many people had heard of an indie studio calling itself Introversion before their outstandingly quirky RTS Darwinia was featured on Steam? With that success, the entire catalog of Introversion games started appearing on the service (Defcon, the classic Uplink, and the upcoming Multiwinia), and subsequently many other smaller studios started marketing their games on Steam. The platform has become a viable contender to become that “golden bullet” that will unify PC gamers, the answer to Xbox live that Microsoft’s own ham-handed attempt, GFW Live, clearly will never be.

So why bring all this up now? Old news, right? Well, what if Steam isn’t the golden bullet, but merely the trend setter? What if Steam is the prototype for countless other, similar systems of distribution? This could just mean a further splintering of the PC community, which, as some analysts would have it, can only lead to the DOWNFALL OF PC GAMING AS WE KNOW IT. Of course, this is BS, since PC gamers have exclusive, unlimited access to the most open ended online community known to mankind, the freaking INTERNET. Still, it’s an interesting point, and one that’s brought to the forefront by the freeware doodad known as “ZoopTEK Launcher.”

ZoopTEK is, according to their website, “a small organization built around programming for fun or creating useful programs.” This means that ZoopTEK has the notable distinction of being a delivery program for both gaming AND non-gaming software, though the focus is undoubtedly on gaming. The program is super-slim, at just over 500k, and grants you immediate access to several of ZoopTEK’s downloadable games. The reason the program was created, evidently, was to make an easy way for consumers to get the .net framework and Directx files that the games depended on, and it downloads these files automatically…but the potential is so much larger than this. The user doesn’t even need to check the website for new games, or updates to old ones…they’re just…there. And if you try a game and don’t like it, one click, and you’ve got an instant uninstall!

As for the games themselves, I can’t honestly claim to have tried them all. From the ones I have tried, most are passable for a short diversion, some are complete crap, and one is excellent (Zombsand, an outstanding zombie-survival-themed roguelike that I’ve been using to keep my hunger for Left 4 Dead at bay. Definitely try it.). But truly, that’s not the point. The point is, this is just another example of indie developers taking a concept from the commercial scene, using it, adapting it, and making it completely unique (and improved in many ways). That’s the sort of thing I love about the indie scene, and that is why we should ALL be paying attention to it.

EDIT: SO after writing all this up, our lovely editor johnwedd (killjoy =P ) informed me that ZoopTEK has been around for a while, before steam even. So, I stand corrected, but my point still stands. Indie devs are versatile and unique, and deserve notice.
Also, john mentions gametap, the well-received service that provides older games through a well-designed launcher, available on a rotating schedule of some sort or other (being on dialup, I can’t actually try it out to verify exactly how they do it). That sounds pretty awesome as well, and the thought of “recycling” old games in this way is novel. Too bad I can’t claim THAT spark of genius for indie, since gametap is run by Turner Entertainment. Ah well, can’t win em all.

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How many times have we seen Gears of War VS Halo 3 threads on forums that focused on GRAPHICS? Now I’m not writing about how much one of the two is better than the other one but more to make people understand the differences in graphics and explain why Gears of War has such a cinematic look and why Halo 3 has less appealing visuals. I wrote less appealing because that’s what most people think but mostly because the look isn’t as CGI-ish as Gears of War but in no way I’m I saying the graphics are bad. I’ll try to make this as short as possible so I don’t stretch out on technical stuff too much.

There is one thing a game needs when you want to compare its graphics and thats a stable framerate. The framerate is what either makes the game fluid like Bioshock’s or choppy and unbearable like Too Worlds’. A stable framerate is the result of a bunch of stuff from programing to level design , everything must look beautiful while staying under the limits the platform can handle. For example , its like putting the right amount of sugar and milk in your coffee without going overboard and spilling the precious liquid all over the floor.

Moving on to the difference between Halo 3 and Gears of War. Both games look gorgeou, thats it and don’t say otherwise before you’ve read this entire post. Gears of War offers cinematic-quality visuals and a damn good framerate that pretty much never drops, on the negative side the levels are pretty small and you never get over half a dozen enemies on screen at once. Halo 3 is the exact opposite , to compensate for the big levels and amount of enemies overflowing the place , the game has to tone down a lot on the eye-candies to keep a good framerate going on.

To stay with our coffee analogy , let’s say the amount of enemies on screen and level size are the milk and the visuals are the sugar. You have to balance both so the coffee doesn’t get too sugary n’or too milky while still making sure it doesn’t spill.

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Not that i’ve ever had a problem with bullshiting. i come from a long line of bullshitters. i believe that its a skill that allows me to interact with a wider range of people. Take the OS fanboys/elitist, for example.

it all started with Mac versus MS-DOS. A small matter really. Back when people where still getting used to the idea of a non-proprietorial OS. Arguments carried on over BBS servers between the various geeks and hackers of both factions all citing good points. Until a guy named Linus decided to make his own OS and avoid such petty concerns. he was a programmer, he liked the Unix system the mainframes at his college used. And thusly, decide to use that as a design base. And so was born Linux. (Linus + Unix)

But, as any veteran coder will tell you, makeing and OS isn’t easy. So he shared the source code with colleagues in exchange for help in makeing Linux a reality. that, and like most programmers, was lazy.So it came to fruition and linux was born and being distributed freely, source included, to any one that wanted it.(mostly college kids and professors)

because it was free, and customizable to fit any job needed, it spread pretty fast.

Now microsoft, apple, and linux all where in some sort of competition for hard drive space.

Microsoft had just released windows and was on the level with Mac’s, with many options and slightly smaller price tag going for it.

Apple was a mainstay in most business’s and was just now carved out its niche as a “Desktop Publishing” computer. but you didn’t have a choice in the OS and that is a big no-no. (especially now days)

Linux was, and still is a favorite of colleges and learning institution’s mostly for being free,open-source,and powerful. For the low cost of complications. Hard to use for simple personal computing, and lack of 3rd party applications.

the current situation is somewhat similar.Microsoft is trying there best to turn Vista into something more than a bloated memory hog.(thankfully they’re still supporting XP). Macintosh is clenching tight to there elitist and graphic artist market, while supplimenting it with stylized hardware. And linux, for all its development, is still that same linux that is difficult to use. development groups only recently (relatively speaking of course) grasped the concept of “User Friendly”, and i think the dev’rs aren’t enjoying it that much. (they’re trying and making head way, but they still got to get there collective shit together.)

Also, my “O” key on this laptop is acting weird. It might take three or four key presses four it to work. Unless i hit it at a certain angle. Why the hell is that? Alteran in the 6toe.com chat room hates that. he can’t understand me a third of the time. It gives the impression that i’m some leet speaking moron. Which i’m not, and i fucking hate to be considered like that.

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