I’ve spent the last week or so waging war microbial baddies who have set up camp somewhere in my inner ear. While launching antibiotic salvos in to their front lines, I find myself completely unmotivated to do anything but sit while I spend my time head cocked to the right and a grimace on my face anxiously awaiting the battle’s conclusion. What goes better with a complete lack of motivation to do anything but sit than video games? I spent the last weekend playing through Bioshock for the XBOX 360, a first person shooter by 2K games set in an alternate reality of the 1960’s in the underwater objectivist dystopian city of Rapture which now lays in near ruin and is inhabited by highly genetically modified mutants and other nasty things. I could spend hours describing it, instead, watch the trailer-
Aside from strangely out of place American Dollars, resources in the game are ADAM and EVE. ADAM is gathered in two ways which I’ll get to later, and EVE serves as your mana for casting spells… Only in Bioshock you’re not casting spells, you’re using Plasmids, or genetic enhancements to shock, burn, or even dispatch swarms of angry bees at your opponents. Overall, the game is really great. All of its downfalls can be easily overlooked when you first set eyes on how stunningly beautiful the game is. The ambiance and overall atmosphere are literally second to none. Despite the inevitable rant which will follow, if you have a PC capable of playing Bioshock or a video game system it is available on, rent/purchase ASAP.
I’ve never been able to wrap my head around the seething hatred for Steam a lot of people have had since Counter-Strike 1.4’s initial Steam download in what… 2002? Like it or not, online content delivery is the future of all forms of media. Look at what is happening to music, the iTunes music store is the #3 largest music retailer in the USA right now. With more and more music being either iTunes or internet-only exclusives, how long before retailers decide to stop wasting shelf space with CD’s?
The same can be said for Steam, the XBOX Live Arcade, and other internet video game content distributors. Take for example the following two scenarios in purchasing a new computer game:
I am pretty impressed with what Valve has done with Steam. I remember when it was first released along with Counter-Strike 1.4 in 2002 and the entire internet was in an uproar about how Steam is ruining their lives and they’ll never give Valve another dollar ever again. Five years later and they’ve effectively conquered the online video game content delivery market, nearly killed off Xfire with Steam’s built in messenger and while they’re at it, destroyed all of the different gamer “MySpace-like” community sites in the process.
I said it in 2002, and I stick by my words today- Steam is awesome, and online content distribution is the future.
Tomorrow I’m going to be in the Naperville Sun regarding my apparent revolutionary method of drawing attention to an issue in downtown Naperville. I won’t comment on this too much just yet. (Mostly because I’m beyond exhausted of re-telling the story to every single person I have ever known.) Insert fifty cents in to the nearest Sun paper machine tomorrow morning and don’t be one of those jerks who pays for one paper then takes five like I saw this morning.
The Moser Tower and Millennium Carillon officially opens on Sunday. I did a lot of internet leg-work back in the dark ages of the carillon before the city decided to give the remaining funding. I wrote this page up and spread it around to pretty much every online community that could possibly be interested in seeing something as amazing as the Naperville carillon being completed. I can’t find the newspaper articles online anymore, but apparently city council’s email box was literally flooded with people all over the world supporting the funding of the carillon. It felt really awesome to have started a world-wide movement like that, and seeing the tower completed along with finally visiting the observation deck will bring the whole experience full circle.
Something I wasn’t aware of is the sheer scale of Moser Tower compared to other landmarks. The image to the right displaying the Moser Tower and the Statue of Liberty blew my mind. (Source: naperville-carillon.org)
Duke Nukem Forever is a computer game that has been under development by 3D Realms since its announcement on April 28th, 1997, originally slated to use the (then) state of the art Quake II 3D engine. (3D engines are the underlying framework under video games which handle the rendering of the actual graphics. Using a preexisting 3D engine greatly speeds game development because since all the code is already there to handle all the graphics, the development studio mostly only has to worry about building maps, creating models, designing textures, and scripting the game together.)
A few months later, screen shots were published in PC Gamer magazine, along with an intended release date of mid-1998. Excitement grew in May of 1998 when a few short video clips of Duke Nukem Forever were shown at E3… Surely a final release of the game was right around the corner!
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