Tonight is our weekly game night, during which my Halo 2 supremacy will once again be at stake. The challengers are getting progressively better, and every week there's another chance that they might win. Last week's session was particularly close.
But this time i'm prepared. I have a secret weapon. Min made some delicious pasta salad for lunch, and managed to super-saturate it with garlic. My breath now qualifies as a 6 die attack (save for half-damage). Letting that out at critical moments is my ace in the hole.
No CD copy protection. Once you install, you never need your CD again. You can even use the included serial # to re-download the entire game from us years from now
Any automakers out there also video game fans? The VP of Sony America* has vowed to fix any backwards compatability issues with the PS3 in return for a favor:
Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved by about 20 percent in their ability to identify letters presented in clutter - a visual acuity test similar to ones used in regular ophthalmology clinics.
In essence, playing video game improves your bottom line on a standard eye chart. ...
The experimental group played Unreal Tournament, a first-person shoot-'em-up action game, for roughly an hour a day. The control group played Tetris, a game equally demanding in terms of motor control, but visually less complex.
After about a month of near-daily gaming, the Tetris players showed no improvement on the test, but the Unreal Tournament players could tell which way the "T" was pointing much more easily than they had just a month earlier.
First-person shooters make me nauseous. And i pretty much suck at Tetris. I suspect that at some point, i also stop breathing when i play video games. This prolly contributes to the headaches and nausea. So, i can't improve my motor skills or my eyesight. This blows.
I've been the PC holdout in my group for awhile, now. Kiko plays RTS, a genre until very recently dominated by the platform, but the moment a viable interface was available on the 360 he pulled the emergency stirrup and let his computer crash to earth. Gabe plays WoW on his PC sometimes, but (and this is serious) only if he happens to be upstairs, because he prefers to play on his MacBook. There's no allegiance there.
He never had to massage conventional memory. He never played Civilization or Star Control II, and wouldn't like them if he had. Nine times out of ten these days my friends are playing the games they play on consoles. Many of my favorite, historically PC centered developers are now focused on the dedicated consumer hardware called consoles, I assume because people actually buy software for them, which is great if you are a person who makes software.
And here i am, having decided not to move on to the next generation of consoles, thinking about going back to PC games. I am excited about BioShock for example, and would have already bought Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (also on next gen consoles) if i didn't know deep in my heart that i don't have time to play a game that big. I hear Galactic Civ II is also a good expansion on the first.
