Gaming? On my HQ?

Greetings Team! My Name is Zakn and after much hue and cry by Moron(and Ette!) Nation, We are going to do some posting about a very important subject: Video Games.

Before I lose anyone I want to plug the Ace Of Spades HQ Steam group. If you make/have a better Av for it send it to me! More on Steam later

The other thing I would like to plug before we delve into things too deeply. Diablo 3 Open Beta starts this weekend!

Now that the big headlines are out of the way, lets get down to brass tacks. There are many ways to get your Game on. Consoles, PCs, Handhelds (Feel free to include iOS devices here), and Tabletop. I primarily am a PC and Handheld Gamer, so that is what I'm going to focus on. I do not currently play any games competitively, but I did have a short-lived run doing what is called Highlander Play in Team Fortress 2.

Steam! I love love LOVE Steam. Steam, if you don't know, is a digital delivery service for games. It was created and is operated by Valve. Steam is also available for Macs! Check games for Mac Compatibility. There are other digital delivery systems. Origin for EA games and Good Old Games, notably.

Steam Sales. Steam has a Mission. It's Mission is to make you go broke buying games. They like to do this by doing sales. Pay attention to the store. Try and grab things like The Orange Box (Gets you Half Life 2 and the episodes, Portal 1, and Team Fortress 2), Portal 2, and Left For Dead 1 and 2, when they go on sale. Portal 2 was my 2011 Game of the Year until Skyrim came in and Crit stomped it. If we get enough people in the group with the right mix of games, I'll start setting up events. Another neat thing about Steam. It always has your purchases. If your hard drive pukes itself, You can re-download all of your purchased games! Steam is also rumored to have whats called a 10 foot interface coming out soon(tm). Skyrim looked great on the Xbox 360, but it was down right AMAZING if you played it on your TV with your PC. More about this in the future.

Now a word of warning to any Morons who play Eve and are Carebears:

Eve is an MMO for PC and Mac centered around Spaceships, Spreadsheets, and Nerds. It's not a terrible game. It's just different. It's what you call a Sandbox type game with old school Ultima Style PVP. That means that if you are not docked up, you are never in a truly risk free environment. Hulkageddon turns that dial to 11. It starts next weekend. Stay Frosty Bears, Even this Duder will be roaming through belts looking for people to WTFBBQ :)
What the EveO forums are going to look like next week

Also, Since I saw so many comments in the thread on Friday about Eve= Moar Eve Content! Test put a new video up Test Vid Please Ignore Make sure and change the quality to 1080 and go full screen. As for the Musical Selection... It's Test, what do you want? I hope seeing that massive Cap Fleet has satiated your Eve needs. If you are hungry to actually start playing this "terrible" game post about it. Read alot. And I mean ALOT. The Horde will help you. Eve Centric forums, not so much.

I am not interested in leading a Moron Corp, so don't even ask. Since we are Anon here, we'd be Broski.
(I am not in Test Or Goons, I just think that gif is awesome)

Next week I'm going to talk about the Nintendo 3DS. I bought one last week, and would like some more time with it. If ya'll would like to do a How to Build a cheap Gaming PC, we can do that. Post about it in the Breitbart area, and If there's huge demand for it, I'll do one.

Follow/Chat to me on Twitter

And, now for something completely different

Along with Zakn, my name is David and I am going to be another one of your hosts for this gaming extravaganza. I do some handheld and PC gaming (in fact, I am a long time game programmer doing iOS stuff at the moment), but I mostly do MMOs and console games these days. However, I am an old-school gamer who cut my teeth on Avalon Hill and SPI board games back in the 60s and 70s (not to mention still owning my original Dungeons and Dragons manuals).

In keeping with my status as a gaming fossil, it is fitting we should talk about SpaceWar!, which is arguably the first video game ever made. Programmed in 1961 on a PDP-1, the early 60's version of a personal computer (it only cost $125,000, and it was only the size of a sofa, so a professor on a research grant could have one for his own personal use...), the boffins at MIT put this together in a couple of months in early 1962. You can see the original code running on a Java emulator at SpaceWar! PDP-1 original code.

I have an interesting story about SpaceWar! There is a man named David Maynard who is a legend among game programmers. He was one of the original founders of Electronic Arts, and has been doing games almost as long as there have been commercial video games. He was also involved at Xerox Parc, where the mouse and windowed GUIs were born. He was describing working at Xerox, and how there all these incredible ideas just lying around on the network, open to anyone and everyone. Eventually these ideas would be worth trillions of dollars. There was also a copy of SpaceWars! that had been ported to the Xerox Parc workstations. Unfortunately, people kept modifying the code to give themselves an advantage over other players, so they eventually took the code off the network and distributed only binary versions of the game. I find it absolutely hilarious that there were umpteen billions of dollars in ideas lying out in plain sight, and they had to lock up the game code, else people would cheat.

Bringing up the almost rear

Gaming is a huge subject, so helping Zakn and David is me: SilverGTP. I will be writing about PC and Xbox 360 games as well as political and legislative issues. Like everything else, the left keeps trying to impose regulations on gaming. Want to help stop them? Join the Video Game Voters Network.
Latest news: "Oklahoma House Bill 2696 was defeated in the House Revenue and Tax Subcommittee on February 20. This legislation would have placed a 1% excise tax on the sale of "violent" video games. When asked to withdraw his tax proposal, Representative Will Fourkiller (D) attempted to create the Oklahoma Task Force on Video Games' Relationship to Obesity and Aggression. This proposal failed as well."

Task Force on Video Games' Relationship to Obesity and Aggression? Was the person responsible for naming things on vacation? Were they going to look into reports of aggressive fat people? I swear they're just making it up as they go. And an excise tax for violence? OK, then I expect a tax on New Black Panthers, OWS, and others.

Other news last week:
Lawsuit against Apple for 'bait apps' gets go-ahead - click through to at least see the word 'smurfberries' used in a news article.

A big shout out to my fellow clan members at 2old2play. If you're looking for folks to play with who aren't little kids (we call them Timmies), then 2old2play is for you. You must be over 25 to join, but maturity is not required.

Do you have an Xbox 360, PS3 or Wii? Here are two handy tools you may not be aware of:
PlayOn - tversity
Install either on a PC then access with your console to watch web content like Hulu, YouTube, and hundreds of other sources. Both will also play your own audio, video and image files from your PC. Both also support remote streaming so you can use your smart phone to stream content from your home PC.

Question of the Week: What's your most-anticipated game release of the year? Mine has to be Halo 4 which will be released November 6, so stage your own Red vs. Blue battle for the election.

Bringing up the rear

And then there's me, Lemmenkainen. I've been console gaming since the Atari 2600 and Colecovision days, and pen and paper roleplaying for 30 years. Current gaming is on XBOX 360 and PC.

I've actually been playing around with game development a bit. Maybe an MMO full of people roaming around eating dogs would sell. Multiverse is an open source development platform that allows you to build your own MMORPG.

Just finished up playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution on XBOX 360 (used, around $15), so figured I'd give a quick review.

DE:HR is a cyberpunk genre game developed by Eidos Montreal and published by Square Enix. It's set in the year 2027 and is a prequel to the original Deus Ex, which came out in 2000. The game explores ideas of how technology may move mankind away from what makes us human.

The game has a nice mix of stealth and combat based gameplay, so you can play it as a shooter or get your Silent Snake sneak on. There's also a hacking interface which is more fun then the standard hit the button and pick the lock gameplay you're used to. You level up by getting further augmentations that allow you to get better at existing skills, or gain new abilities, like being able to punch through weak walls, see through walls, and turn invisible briefly, to name a few. Weapons in the game are also upgradable.

The game graphics are beautiful, with a dark and gold theme for the outdoor scenes. Characters in the game dress in futuristic clothing that has a distinct Renaissance influence. Indoor art is ultracorporate high tech.

My playthrough took about 40 hours or so, which is decent for an RPG. I liked the game a lot. My only big complaints are the boss fights, which are pretty fixed encounters, unlike the rest of the game's flexibility.

My rating: 8/10.

posted by Gang of Gaming Morons! at 01:15 PM

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