Owner: Aelon.net URL:http://aelon.net Join Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 06:17:09 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: A blog for PC and console gaming, as well as plenty of other computing and technology related material. Site statistics:Click here
The Finest in Gaming Weaponry 2007-05-03 12:49:46 These days violence in games is getting considerable negative attention from those not in the know. So, I thought now would be a good opportunity to look over some of my favourite weapons that I have used in games over the years. They are weapons which have been creative, satisfying to use and just plain well-made. They’re weapons that I would love to have - though of course I wouldn’t go around using them on people… that’s not the point.
I’m not talking about weapons which help me rack up the most kills in my FPS matches, nor are they likely ones I used a lot. Here I am looking for that cool factor - the thing that makes you nod your head in approval whenever a spectacular kill is made while using one. In some cases, they are weapons which have become defining items of their respective games. In all cases, I want one.
The first of these is perhaps the most underwhelming to watch, though that is simply because you’re too far away to appreciate it. Read more:Gaming
Leopard Delay - Hooray For Common Sense 2007-04-13 09:07:58 I’m really looking forwards to getting my hands on Apple’s next release of their OS X operating system, 10.5 Leopard
. While the full details of what will be included in this release have not been made public, the current Sneak Peak shows that for the developer there will be some very useful tools that should enable you to deliver more interesting applications, faster and with fewer bugs (there’s a few toys for the end-user as well). This morning, however, MacWorld is reporting that Leopard will be delayed from its announced Spring release to October. Given how useful I expect this release to be, to me this announcement should be depressing news.
UPDATE: Apple now makes this official on their own website.
Hooray!
It’s probably worth noting why I think this. Apple states that the reason why Leopard is being delayed is because Quality Assurance people have had to work on the upcoming iPhone rather than testing Leopard. From the recent beta releases of Leopard Read more:Delay
, Common
, Sense
, Common Sense
Time for a Redesign 2007-04-07 10:55:05 When I first launched Aelon’s last design, version 9, I noted that the 12 months between it and it’s predecessor was the longest I had ever gone without redesigning one of my own sites - twice as long in fact. Since that day it has now been 15 months, and frankly the need for a design wasn’t actually critical - it was just something I wanted to do. The fact is, v9 was a good design, and deserved to last as long as it did. Maybe even a little longer.
As such, this latest redesign comes with no real functional changes over the old. The way everything works and is laid out is much the same. What I was really aiming for was something a little sleeker, rather than the simple boxes and rectangles that were here before. The end result you see here before you: Aelon vX.
Now yes, I could have gone with “v10″ but as ATI could tell you with its video card naming conventions, using the roman numeral is much, much cooler, and that is sorta the basis for this design -
Addicted 2007-03-28 04:51:59 Addiction. It’s a word that gets thrown around a whole lot in this industry. Typically it’s used in a very positive way. For instance Civilization is often described as having addictive gameplay which makes you really want one-more-turn. I know I’ve been guilty of using that word to describe lots of games. However now I know different, I know what addiction is—it’s something that’s really quite different. I’m Andrew ‘Vermouth’ Martin and I’m a recovering World of WarCraft addict.
It’s probably worth qualifying what I mean by addiction. I’m going to use the traditional definition that I’ve always known for it. That is compulsion with consequence. Not only was I unable to stop playing World of WarCraft, I was unable to stop even at times when I knew that the level of commitment I had to WoW was unhealthy.
So I know what you’re thinking, what kind of consequences am I talking about? I mean after all I was just playing a game a lot. I didn’t lose a j Read more:Addicted
Game Development - The Gap 2007-03-17 11:26:58 Back in 2001 when I first started making appearances on GameSpy’s community forums, my restricted internet connection meant that I was never really able to play games online with anyone who I met there. Quite often I’d have to just sit back and read about the fun which other members had while teaming up to play Tribes 2 or StarCraft or a bunch of other games. While most people at the time had meager 56k connections, which were sufficient, I didn’t quite have that. At my house we had our 56k modem shared on the home LAN between 2-4 computers depending on who was around, and usage was restricted to just a couple of hours a day.
So, it comes as no surprise that the first gaming experience I had online was with the text-based browser game Mech Wars, with NukeZone following soon after. Being websites, they didn’t require much in the way of bandwidth or time - although after getting deeper in, I began to realise that time was actually something that was more important Read more:Development
StarCraft 2 Announced 2007-05-19 08:12:19 StarCraft is the biggest name in RTS gaming. Can Blizzard live up to the expectations? That’s the big question as Blizzard announced StarCraft 2 today. The original is one of the sacred cows of PC gaming, perfectly balanced, still played today. When a boy turns 13 in Korea, I read recently, he’s given a copy of the game as a coming of age content. And as of today the franchise has been given new life.
At 2:00 in the morning (Eastern Time) I was sitting up waiting for more information to enter my life, is that not a bit odd? I know given Blizzard’s track record that this game will be out years from now but here I am dutifully awaiting the announcement and super-excited that it’s not the oft rumored Galaxies of StarCraft MMORPG. This is one of the biggest franchises in history being announced, and this comes hot off the internet presses.
So the big questions are can they live up to the wild expectations people have for the sequel to possibly the greatest RTS ever
Nintendo’s Gambit 2007-05-24 22:44:37 Nintendo.
Few words mean so many things to so many people like “Nintendo.” Whether you used to play video games, currently play video games, will play video games, know some one who plays video games, or hate video games, you know the word Nintendo. You probably also have an opinion about it…or them, depending what definition of the word you are using. Despite hemorrhaging market share since the advent of the Nintendo 64, “Nintendo” was always synonymous with “video games,” though in recent years “PlayStation” has been creeping in as the generic term for the hobby.
All that has changed through the one- two-punch Nintendo laid upon the industry. Of course I’m talking about the Nintendo DS and the Nintendo Wii. Both systems were initially derided when they were announced and the former wasn’t even taken seriously in the face of Sony’s PlayStation Portable until the release of Nintendogs. However, now, six mo Read more:Nintendo
Game Development - Frustration 2007-06-04 05:28:45 Frustration in gaming is something which I wrote about quite some time ago, and is still something which I think every game developer needs to be acutely aware of. That is not to say that frustrating games are unpopular - in fact I would say that Counter-Strike has single handedly proved that is not the case. However, I do think that player frustration is something that needs to be dealt with. Consistently frustrating experiences invariably lead to bad attitudes. Road rage would be an extreme example.
Given my past experiences in online browser games, this has been at the forefront of my mind throughout the development process of The Project. Seeing as it will be a game where there are no computer opponents, both the winners and losers are human. The last thing a player wants when they’re on a losing streak is to be plagued by irritating problems which serve only to frustrate, and stop the user from getting on with the game. For a project with such a big focus on community, bad Read more:Development
, Frustration
What’s on Tap? 2007-06-22 21:49:07 A little while ago GameTap debuted to a collective sense of “meh”. The game selection was not particularly impressive and $9.99 a month to play a bunch of old games seemed like a steep fee. But as the months went by, they kept adding more and more to the game catalogue. They also introduced a cheap first month for only 99 cents. Earlier this month I decided to take the leap and wow, this is a quality service. The game selection is excellent and the quality of the program is surprisingly nimble. The game library for this service includes three categories of games: regular “real” retail games, retro games and original games.
The first game I downloaded was a “real” game, Tomb Raider Legend. My experience with this game was really exciting. I was a huge fan of the Tomb Raider franchise eleven years ago when the first game came out and it was nice to see the game return to being good after all the years of absolutely terrible versions. There were a bunch of other
Mid-range Cop-out 2007-06-28 09:25:33 Not too long ago, Nvidia released their GeForce 8800 series of graphics cards, and ushered in a new level of pixel pushing performance. As has become the norm, the flagship 8800 GTX offered performance almost double that of it’s predecessor. Just the other week, ATI released their latest high-end Radeon and it too shows impressive performance well ahead of anything they have previously released. Now, I have never been one to spend copious amounts of money on any single piece of computer hardware, so to be honest I am not usually too interested in the exact performance of these pricey monstrosities.
When shopping for a graphics card to get my game on, I take one of two routes. Typically, I will get a high-end model from the previous generation. I bought a GeForce 2 Ti when the GeForce 3 came out, and a GeForce 6800 when the 7800 was released. The second route is to just get a mid-range card from the current generation, such as when I got my Radeon 9600. In each case, the cards wer
Course Correction? Maybe 2007-07-07 08:01:27 By now I’m sure most of the interested parties have heard, but for those of you who haven’t; Evil Avatar is reporting via GameDaily.BIZ that Sony is going to be slashing $100 US from the price of the PlayStation 3. Taking the much maligned price from $600 to a somewhat less absurd $500. No, I don’t want to hear about what a great deal it is for a Blu-Ray Player. I don’t care about Blu-Ray or the format war it and HD-DVD have started.
This was going to be an article questioning the readers as to whether or not the price drop would affect their perceptions of the PS3 and whether or not you were willing to run out and buy one when the price did indeed drop. However, Sony can’t buy, steal, or cajole good publicity these days and promptly denied they had such plans.
Now, the article doesn’t explicitly say there will not be a price cut come the truncated E3 next week. It merely states that the company does not plan to have a price cut by then. Such Read more:Maybe
E3 2007 - Nintendo, Sony Et Al. 2007-07-12 08:54:25 Getting up yesterday morning the first item on my agenda was to catch the Nintendo
E3 press event that was in the morning. This show was really as unimpressive as you can possibly imagine. For one thing it really served as a platform for Nintendo to talk up their sales success to the press and they really didn’t show much in the way of games. The biggest announcements from this show were release dates for Mario Galaxy & Smash Brothers along with the completely unsurprising unveiling of Mario Kart for the Wii which will have online multiplayer.
Miyamoto showed up to show off a big game at the end of it as usual - but instead of an awesome game we got Wii Fitness. I don’t believe it’s possible to be more disappointed. Instead of getting a new character franchise which the Wii could desperately use, they took the time to show me how I can do step-aerobics on my game console. Oddly enough the only games really present on the DS were Brain Age 2 and Zelda. Fo Read more:Sony
E3 2007 - Microsoft Press Confrence 2007-07-11 00:56:20 Watching the Microsoft
press conference at E3 this year I think it’s quickly evident what their aim was. It was not to build some long term hopes for the future by announcing a bunch of games that won’t be ready for a long time. What it was, was to reinforce this basic fact the Fall 2007 Xbox 360 lineup is one of the best, most complete game lineups in my lifetime.
As someone who follows the games industry on a day-to-day basis there were only two real big surprises in this particular press event. The first of these was the pleasant surprise to find out that Mass Effect was coming in November to my Xbox 360. Considering this was the game that set me on the road to ownership it had me excited. The other new news was a brief teaser for Resident Evil 5 which almost nobody was expecting to be shown for this E3. A full trailer is expected later this summer.
In addition to these few surprises, Microsoft did a great job of hammering home the lineup they had. They had g Read more:Press
E3 2007 - Final Word 2007-07-15 05:16:51 Now that E3 is no longer with us it’s time to take a look at the winners and losers from the game industry’s big event. This was a newly crafted E3 which had a very different flavor than in previous years. No longer was this a gigantic sensory orgy in the way of years past, but rather a big huge level industry event with a laundry list of games on display. This had an upside and a downside. The upside was it was much more focused on promoting games than in years past. In the press conferences there were only a handful of games that were not ostensibly 2007 games. Of course, the show had a handful of big winners who improved themselves considerably and some that were not as impressive.
The big winners were:
Electronic Arts. These guys go straight to the head of the line; furthermore they’re the only publisher to hit the nail on the head. EA had a tremendous showing of games which far outstripped the collection of awesome I saw from any other publisher. They Read more:Final
World in Conflict Beta Impressions 2007-07-23 02:06:21
Earlier this month my ISP started giving away keys for the open beta of Massive Entertainment’s latest RTS - World
in Conflict
. Since seeing the screenshots and other media over the past few months I was pretty impressed by what I saw, and decided not to miss out. I don’t usually go for betas (waiting instead for demos to come out) but when a game looks particularly interesting, I’ll cave. The last (and only previous) open beta I also played was Supreme Commander, but that didn’t work out too well because of performance issues. Thankfully, I fared a lot better this time around.
The start…
I will start out by saying that the engine is really quite flexible and solid. I can run on medium/low detail levels and have quite acceptable gameplay on my GeForce 6800 GS. More importantly, the lower detail levels don’t look like utter pants like they do in SupCom, so those who do want some extra frames don’t need to go back to aesthetic levels of 10 yea Read more:Impressions
Civilization IV - Beyond the Sword 2007-08-11 04:20:22
As I have stated before, I have been a big Civ fan, but the release of Civilization
IV was marred by bugs which really stopped the game from being all it could be. Fast forward 18 months, and this game has now seen extensive patching and two expansion packs. If you had asked me a week ago what my opinion of Civilization 4 and it’s Warlords expansion pack was, I would not have been able to say a bad thing about it. The original game is fantastic, and the expansion only built on it in positive ways. Warlords effectively raised the bar in the Civ4 experience, but didn’t really change enough for me to be bothered making a review.
Beyond the Sword
, however, has not just raised the bar. It has put the bar on a rocket and launched the damn thing in to orbit.
Initial Impressions
Let me start by saying that unless you love scenarios, which I don’t, then there is no longer any reason to buy the Warlords expansion pack. Beyond the Sword contains all the other changes - new civ
Windows Vista: A Gamer’s Perspective 2007-08-19 03:01:37 I recently made the move from Windows
XP to Vista
. I know, I know what you’re thinking - why? Well, truth be told, I was buying a new PC. It was primarily for gaming, but it just did not make any sense to buy a machine with XP on it, only to face the possibility that at some point in the future I will want a game that is for Vista only. It’s true that DX10 is Vista only, but because of budget considerations and poor midrange DX10 cards options, that didn’t really factor into my decision. All that being said the experience with Vista has had it’s ups and downs much like any OS. Vista was launched a bit before its time with plenty of annoying bugs and compatibility issues that needed to be ironed out. While there have been many updates, the system is still sorely in need of a service pack before this OS will be something I could whole-heartedly recommend. If you’re buying a new machine this still makes sense but if you’ve got a working XP box the Read more:Gamer
, Perspective
, Windows Vista
A Game for All Seasons 2007-08-24 02:20:16 I recently received Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin for my birthday a few days past, from a close friend of mine.
I’m not going to play it. Well… I’m not going to play it yet. Instead, I’m going to wait until the middle of the Fall season to start playing it. I’ll start playing Castlevania when the leaves begin to change from green to orange, amber, and crimson. I’m going to wait to play Castlevania until the days hours become further encroached by night’s grip. I’ll play Castlevania when the last of the year’s warm days are laced with winter’s cool winds.
A cursory glance at Wikipedia reveals that there has been a Castlevania game released almost annually for at least one of the available consoles or handhelds for the last twenty years. While I haven’t looked at every release to date, at least the last several have been released sometime in the Fall, near or on Halloween.
I’m not fool enough to think re
BioShock Review 2007-08-31 06:02:32
BioShock is joy. From the moment I got BioShock, I was either playing the game, eating, sleeping or waiting to get back to playing it. The game is somewhat difficult to classify as it straddles the line between three genres. The guys at 2K Games would insist that it is a first person shooter for marketing purposes, but it’s also drawing on elements of role-playing and survival horror. The story, so often the bad news with respect to a shooter, is fantastic. Furthermore this game is presented in the most amazing way any next-gen game has yet presented itself. The gameplay has been a wonderfully emergent playground that allows you to mix genetic magic, conventional weapons and a weaponized environment in wonderful ways.
The Story
The year was 1960, the place was the mid-Atlantic and your plane has just crashed. And to your surprise there is a nearby lighthouse which serves as your only hope of survival. You swim over and walk in to find that it’s a station descend
Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines 2007-09-22 08:16:52 Every gamer has a favourite game vehicle which they just wish they could own in real life. Yes, of course there are those playing Need for Speed and Gran Turismo who salivate over the rather mundane and down-to-earth vehicles featured there, but I’m talking about more interesting modes of transport.
I mean, yes, an Aston Martin DBS is my current dream car, but far beyond that would be a Mammoth Tank. Then again, I’ve always fancied having my own Super Star Destroyer. It cuts me up inside every time I see it go down in Return of the Jedi, or Empire at War for that matter. One of those Mantas from Unreal Tournament 2004 would sure as hell solve all my traffic problems every morning.
Perhaps my favourite vehicle from any computer game is the original ORCA from the first Command & Conquer strategy game. Like a helicopter, but slicker, faster, and conceptually handsome (far too pixelated in actual gameplay to tell). All the elements of a perfect aircraft - VTOL capable, no Read more:Magnificent
, Flying
Hail to the Chief: A Halo 3 Review 2007-09-29 03:23:36 The Halo franchise has been something of a lightning rod amongst first-person shooters. Some criticize the game for getting too much praise, while others enjoy it’s somewhat unique style of combat that’s especially well tuned for consoles. As a matter of full disclosure I gave the first two games high scores of 9.7 and 9.6 respectively so I fall within the fan camp. If you’re a fan, this is the definitive Halo game to get, if you haven’t enjoyed the series then you probably won’t fall in love with this game - but you’re likely to get more out of this one than any previous Halo release.
One of the biggest problems with Halo games in past is that they always had some extremely annoying parts. The Library in Halo 1, the Arbiter sections and the ending in Halo 2 both instantly come to mind. Halo 3 really has the fewest annoying parts, it does have one level that’s a bit annoying but not to the level of say the Library. Throughout its nine Read more:Chief
Team Fortress 2 Beta 2007-09-25 03:23:31 This week Valve took the lid off of the Orange Box, allowing people who pre-purchased it to get in on the beta of Team Fortress
2. Playing the game again has been a hoot. It is a lot like Team Fortress
(and Classic), only different in some key areas. It retained all that you like about the old game, 2 fort, Dustbowl, rocket jumping, flag running, engineers, and above all it maintains that feeling of tightly directed chaos that made the prior Team Fortress games great. But what it does differently is how it makes all the classes valuable, and it does away with some of the more spammy elements of the game. It also does a lot more to encourage playing as a team than the previous game.
I’m not going to run down each and every class, but they’re all very good at what they’re supposed to do. There are nine classes in the game and several have received substantial retouches. The Scout no longer relies on specialized grenades, but can now raise all kinds of hell with
Pink for October 2007-10-01 04:59:04 No, we haven’t been taken over by an army of Barbie dolls. Rather, the change you see on Aelon today is for a cause. While pink isn’t exactly my favourite colour, the cause is a worthy one. Pink for October
is the brainchild of Matthew Oliphant, a member of the 9rules Network of which this site is also a part. It is essentially the online version of the pink ribbon, raising awareness of breast cancer, and this year looks to be the biggest one yet.
Given that this type of cancer has affected not only some of my close friends but also my own immediate family, this wasn’t something I felt I could pass up. As well as going pink, I’ll be donating the entirety of Aelon’s advertising income for October. For the purpose of transparency, Text Link Ads Inc. tells me that’s $75.38 US which I would otherwise have used to buy a video game or some other such nonsense.
So if you do run a website of your own, go and read up on going pink.
My Mouse 2007-10-06 01:26:17 Today I bit the bullet and went out to buy a new mouse. My Logitech MX500 has served me well over the last 4 years or so, but it was in a terrible state of disrepair. I wasn’t too concerned about the paint chipping off the logo, but having one of the slick pads constantly dislodging itself underneath was starting to drive me nuts. On top of that, I had to open the mouse up to stuff some paper under the left mouse button to make it contact with the clicker more solidly, as it had started to miss clicks. Then the scroll wheel started to feel wierd.
So, my goal for a new mouse was basically to find something as close to the MX500 as possible. The shape and weight of it were perfect for me, and I am not one to like changes to my computing habits, so similarity was a must. Thankfully, Logitech provides exactly that in the latest revision of it’s G5 mouse. As you can see, it’s the same shape and features mostly the same buttons as it’s predecessor:
On top of being ve Read more:Mouse
It’s Getting to That Time Again 2007-10-27 22:30:57 I have been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 lately, and it’s been fun. Despite being based on the same engine as Half-Life 2 and CS:Source (which my PC runs flawlessly), TF2 has been pushing my computer over the edge, with low framerates during the more intense firefights. On top of this, the performance of the Unreal Tournament 3 demo and the Crysis singleplayer demo has made it all rather obvious: my PC can’t hack it anymore.
On the one hand, I am loathe to spend so much on what will now only be used on a handful of games - unlike before, I now tend to just stick to a few treasured series. It will also be less of an upgrade and more of a… complete replacement. Most of the technologies inside my current box (AMD Socket 939, DDR memory, AGP graphics) are all well and truly out of date, and aren’t going to catch up to the demands of modern games with a simple component upgrade here and there. I’ve never had to buy a whole new box up straight before.
On t Read more:Again
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: A Spotty Release 2007-11-05 15:39:42 This is going to be the longest article that I’ve written for Aelon but since I’ve not written one for a while I have a fair bit to make up. Since I am sure that many people reading this will not want to wade their way through the complete article I’m going to make things easy on you by providing an up-front conclusion. However, before this I’m going to provide a bit of background about what this article is and what it isn’t, plus a bit about me and how this has been achieved. I hope that this information will put the article into context and also give an indication of whether you should trust me.
Let’s start with that this article isn’t. This article is not a comparison of Apple Mac OS X 10.5 (henceforth called Leopard
throughout the rest of this article) to Microsoft Vista or Linux distributions like Ubuntu. A couple of years ago I wrote a review of Apple OS X 10.4 that was pretty popular here and I compared it quite a bit with Windows XP. However, while I still Read more:Release
War (Games). What are they Good for? Absolutely Nothing. 2007-11-23 00:17:04 The title of the article is overly dramatic, and has probably been used before to boot.
Also, it isn’t a very accurate title. I’m not referring to all war games across all genres. The games I’m referring to are the historically-themed First-Person Shooters that have been choking the video game market for years.
One doesn’t have to look too far or too long to find examples of the games I’m talking about: the “Medal of Honor” series; the “Call of Duty” series; the “Battlefield: X” series, just to name a few. Make no mistake, I do not have a problem with any of these games in terms of their actual gameplay. My problem is with their content.
Each of the game series listed above have had World War II as their backdrop. At least one of those games has ventured into the territory of using Vietnam, and most of them have moved on to a more “modern” version of simulated warfare. While I’m not aware o Read more:Games
, Absolutely
, Nothing
Gaming Media: The Suits March On 2007-12-01 20:54:25 The latest controversy over on GameSpot is simply the most recent example of why I no longer visit large all-encompassing game media sites. Back in the day I was a frequent visitor of GameSpy and GameSpot - so much so that I’d often end up typing “gamespoy.com” in to my address bar in a subconcious attempt to go to both at the same time.
I’ve thought about writing this piece for a long time, because I have a lot to say about the current state of the gaming sites I used to love. I didn’t, however, want to drag this site down in to an out-and-out bitch fest. Given the latest happenings on GameSpot, however, I can’t help but let everyone know what happens to a gaming site when the establishment goes from being passionate to being corporate.
There is of course far more than what I have written below. I am keeping it brief, however, because any more detailed and it would just be too long winded and difficult to understand for those who weren’t the Read more:Gaming
, Suits
, March
Back in Black: iPod Nano + Griffin iTrip 2008-03-11 06:07:04 The more observant of you may have noticed that January 2008 never actually existed. At least, not according to our definitive collection of recorded history anyway. Yes, things have been incredibly quiet on this online home of mine, but the real world couldn’t be more different. Things are in fact much, much noisier than ever [...] Read more:Black
, iPod
, Griffin
Dear Weighted Companion Cube, It’s not you; it’s me. 2008-02-23 19:28:53 Portal.
No other game released in 2007 was quite the sensation that Portal was. Portal is a unique, puzzle-focused first-person shooter that clocks in at about three hours of length and, if my thorough reading of the internet is any indication, everyone and their mother has played it.
Portal has spawned a [...] Read more:Companion
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