10.31.04
Posted in forum archive at 1:39 am by
You may have heard of the FragDolls website – a site that claims to celebrate the woman gamer; a noble goal. As the fairer sex, it is quite possible that a woman’s perspective and experience could really enrich what has, mostly, been a male produced media for other males.
However, there has been new details that have surfaced.
So, we can pretty easily find an Xbox.com interview with the Fragdolls, who, it turns out, are a clan formed specifically by Ubisoft (Monkees-style) in order to promote their online FPS games: ‘Their relationship with Ubisoft is very much like a sports sponsorship: Ubisoft gives them the opportunity to travel and play games and tournaments that they may not have been able to participate in otherwise.
and…
Another thing about the Fragdolls: They’re BOOTH BABES. In addition to being sponsored by UBISoft, at the Penny Arcade Expo a few months ago, they were UBISoft’s entire booth.
“While they try to adopt ‘Just a bunch of girls that like video games’ as their image, walking around and hearing ‘PLAY VIDEO GAMES AGAINST HOT CHICKS!!!’ all day definitly reduced the fun of this girl that likes video games.
“And while I realize that a bunch of chicks playing video games is going to be an event just because they’re in the minority, the willingness of these girls to be the circus and make girls playing video games seem even LESS normal, totally contradicts what they claim they are all about.”
I’m all for girl power. But this is just perputating and exploiting the negative qualities that unelightened guys might have. 
Surfer beware.
Permalink
Posted in forum archive at 1:02 am by
Spent some time today playing GuildWars, the new fantasy MMOG from the former blizzard guys. This weekend, they’re running a preview weekend, with a free downloadable client for one and all. They wish to stress test the software. Course that free bit isn’t unusual – GuildWars is unique because they fully intend to realse the game free for everyone – it’s only the add ons that people will have to pay for.
The real nice thing that it seems to scale well. My laptop is no powerhouse when it comes to the graphics card department – I can’t run City of Heroes on it at all. But after a quick driver update GuildWars runs just fine.
Some low-rez pics from my time in the gameworld:
http://mutednoise.com/pics_support/guildwars/gw005.jpg
http://mutednoise.com/pics_support/guildwars/gw013.jpg
Permalink
10.28.04
Posted in forum archive at 6:44 pm by
In an impressive display of a man which too much free time on his hand, comes Grand Theftendo a port of GTA3’s Portland city to the original Nintendo Entertainment System.
I began by drawing a number of small sections of the map in 2D NES style art, measuring, adjusting, and scaling accordingly. Once I made sure the scale would work with my chosen sprite resolution, I used my measurements to draw the entire city on an 8.5×11″ sheet of paper. I drew a second refined version, then pasted four sheets together and drew a version on 17×22″ of paper. I then drew more portions of the map, each to scale on 8.5×11″ sheets of paper as an additional test. Following the drawing by hand, I began drawing the entire map into my PC as a large bitmap. Each building would begin as lines, be filled in with two shades of gray to give them a 3D effect, then I would add shadows, then the details. Once the majority of the map’s base was down in the PC, I wrote the graphic tools to convert it for the NES, and began developing the engine, as well as my own NES assembler.
My NES assembler was completed at the end of December 2003, although it is constantly evolving as I need new features. That’s the beauty of writing your own compilers! Along with the assembler, I built a standard code library with functions for dealing with the NES registers, math, memory, 16 bit integers, and other generic code. Using that base, I began to build the engine as well as many other tools for graphics, text, and other game resources.
Damn. What did fanboys do before they had computers? 
Permalink
10.26.04
Posted in forum archive at 3:26 pm by
*sniff – Beautiful. The U2 iPod.
http://images.apple.com/ipod/u2/images/indexfrontbackse10262004.jpg
Permalink
Posted in forum archive at 12:31 pm by
Those Wiki guys are at it again. First, they started the impressive Wikipedia project. Now they’re going to try to do for news what they’ve done for the encyclopedia:
Wikinews is a proposed project with the goal to collaboratively report and summarize news on all subjects from a neutral point of view.
Interesting. I don’t know if this will work. While obtaining and integrating many independent points of view about a news event might present the most comprehensive and unbiased look at the news I can’t imagine how it would provide an up to date version of the news.
Might be a fun project to watch.
Permalink
Posted in forum archive at 12:21 pm by
November’s Wired is releasing a CD of major label artists under the creative commons license. And now through the power of BitTorrent and noncommercial use you can get a copy even if you don’t subscribe to Wired. Listen, collect, remix, and play!
:upper:
Permalink
10.25.04
Posted in forum archive at 12:36 pm by
A new study is out: Kids exposed to the internet are more likely to grow up being content creators, not just content consumers.
Even more interestingly, the study found that 17% of young people have sent pictures or stories to a website and “online creativity can be encouraged through the very experience of using the internet.” That is, the more time kids spend online, the more likely they are to produce their own content. And interaction breeds interaction. Does that mean we can safely assume that as internet usage increases its media timeshare, more and more people will become creative producers as well as consumers?
Very happy to see this. I can’t wait until I can start creating simple remixes with my son, or splicing together video footage on the PC for class assignments. I can only assume the future will place a high value on the creators, in whatever field that might be in. :upper:
Permalink
Posted in forum archive at 12:33 pm by
MIT had a program for distributing music to its students called LAMP. The thought behind it is that music was streamed over the campus cable network rather than over the digital networks – analog rules are much more lax than digital. It was shut down.
It is now back up and running thanks to clever use of technology.
In its new reincarnation, the LAMP project uses ten RBX1600s donated by StreetFire Sound. The RBX1600s glue ten 400-CD Sony jukeboxes to both a cable TV distribution system,and a network-based user interface that lets users — MIT students, in this case — assemble playlists and schedule them for broadcast in 80-minute time segments on 16 cable TV channels.
Neat.
Permalink
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »