Category: general

I’m still going to switch over to wordpress sometime in the future as soon as I get back to hacking around on it.

However, I’ve become distracted by my new addiction: Desktop Town Defense. Just going there to get the url tempts me to play it. I must resist! I must resist! But who will defend the desktop if I don’t?

It is basically kind of like the tank game I used to play in junior high where you and a friend would draw tanks on paper with a pencil and then take shots by scribbling dots on your half, folding it over and then scribbling over the back side of the paper where the dot is to transfer the graphite to the other half of the paper and hopefully on top of your friend’s tank. (I hope that makes sense)

Only in this one you lay out little automated towers and the little creeps crawl across the playing field in waves. You get points for shooting them and the more levels you go the harder they get so you have to upgrade your towers and such. I’m totally addicted…

So in addition to the Nitro Family featuring a guy searching for his abducted son while carrying around his wife in some sort of seat, and this combo system where you shoot enemies into the air and shoot them again and again to get points, it also ends weird. Once you beat the final boss the credits start. However, the credits are only on the bottom 3rd of the screen. On the top of the screen you can run around a town out in the mountains with a bouquet of flowers in your hand. As you run around the enemies from the game all stand outside houses (inside fences so you can’t get to them) and wave at you. Then you find your wife and if you click the left button you give her the flowers, but if you click the right button apparently you can hit her with them. I say apparently because I gave her the flowers and I didn’t feel like trying to beat the final boss again just to try to hit her with the flowers.
Oh and did I mention that throughout the game there is a woman who appears on each level who sells you weapons and tells you that if you find 20 gold credit cards you can get a special surprise? Once you find 20 cards, she fives you the number of her hotel room. On the final level, your wife gets off your back and attempts to break into a room. While she’s doing that, you go to the weapon saleswoman’s hotel room and they play a movie full of oil wells pumping and rockets going off and moaning. Then you go back to your wife and fight the final boss.

While I’m sure there are weirder games out there, I officially pronounce Nitro Family to be the weirdest FPS I’ve ever played.

In the past I was lamenting about the fact that I didn’t have any games to play and nothing interesting seemed to be coming out soon. Now I seem to have more games than I know what to do with. They are all old, but they are still new to me. In addition to Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich, I’ve finished Tron 2.0. On the deck I’ve got Brothers in Arms and I bought Battlefield 2 and Call of Duty: Finest Hour for X-Box.

Right now though, I’m playing one of the weirdest FPS games I’ve played in a long while. That game is Nitro Family. Never heard of it? Neither had I. The reason I’m playing it is that it is by the same team that is making Huxley.

In Nitro Family you play a guy trying to rescue his son. The weird part is that you go through the game carrying your wife on your back in some kind of seat. If a bad guy gets to close she automatically uses a whip to sever their heads off. You can also hit a button and she will fly into the air and carpet bomb an area.

It used the Serious Sam engine so it looks like and kind of plays like it, only there aren’t as many bad guys at a time. However, they do still just run straight at you. They also get stuck a lot of the time so you hear footprints and have to look around to find the stuck guy if you want to kill him.

It uses a neat combo system where you have two guns at a time with the left and right mouse buttons controlling the left and right gun. If you shoot a guy into the air, you can shoot him again to get a combo which gives you points that you can use to upgrade the guns.

The level design is not that great. There are lots of places where there isn’t anything, but it looks like there should be and they just ran out of time. There are also some places where I’ve been able to get to places where htey obviously didn’t want me to go so I could walk through stuff. Unlike Serious Sam where there were secrets everywhere there aren’t really any here. Also there are lots of places where it looks like it would be fun to jump up and climb on stuff and either you can’t because they just made it too tall, or if you can get up there, there’s no point.

It is quite possibly the greatest flawed game ever.

Lately I’ve been thinking about WWII games and themes of games in general. Why are there so many WWII games? In a previous post I talked about the fact that I don’t really like them and that it felt kind of odd playing Call of Duty 2 and hearing the enemies talking German.

I think that there’s also the fact that the games whitewash over the tragedies of the war. Which got me thinking, why do so many games avoid the hard topics? Why aren’t there more games that deal with significant issues? I’m not saying that I want games to be meaningful. I don’t want games to be art. I would just like some games to try to touch on these topics.

Have there been any games about slavery? Abe’s Oddysee is the only one I can think of that dealt with it in any significant way. What about civil rights in general? If we need another war game, can we at least have one that features people who aren’t soldiers and who aren’t one man killing machines? Just one. Then I’ll go back to playing Serious Sam or Counter-Strike.

So I managed to get my paper submitted to Digra’s 2007 Conference in Japan. Hopefully I’ll get in. And then hopefully I’ll be able to afford to go!

I’m also working on editing the template on my new version of the blog. It isn’t going to look all that different, but I’m just no expert at html and css, so I have to muddle through the best I can.

I’ve also been putting in marathon sessions on Freedom Force vs The Third Reich. It shouldn’t be surprising that I’m really enjoying it. After all, I am a comic book nerd, I liked the first one, and I like City of Heroes. (On the other hand though, I thought Ghost Rider was not that good.) I’ll probably go finish beating the final boss as soon as I upload this post!

So I’m finally ABD. Now all I have to do is write up the prospectus, get it approved, write the dis, graduate, get a job, and then get tenure! Easy street here I come!!! …or not…

In other news, I’m following through on my promise to switch over to wordpress. I got it installed, but I want to customize the theme first and then figure out how to redirect the front page to the wordpress blog.

Then people won’t get error messages when they try to leave comments and I won’t have to approve them by hand! Easy street here I come!!! …or not…

According to Red Herring, Google has agreed to acquire Adscape Media for $23 million. Adscape is an in game advertising company (according to their website they do “Real advertising in the virtual world”). Combine this with Microsoft buying their own gaming ad firm and it seems like there’s a good chance that we are going to be seeing a whole lot of ads in videogames for the near future.

Of course the fact that I said the “near future” is no accident. While there may not be much consol gamers can do to block ads in games, PC gamers certainly will figure out how to do it. You can already block ads on your browser so why would ads in your games be any different? While the near future may suck for gaming, I see this as little more than the popup and banner ad boom of 90s. If they can crack the copy protection on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, I’m sure they can figure out how to block ads in my games.

Today was a horrible sleety windy cold day. As I was walking out of the horrible weather into the library I noticed that there was some computer and activities type thing day and I noticed that the IU Gaming Club was set up in a room. I went into the side of the library with the computers, found an empty one, sat my stuff down and went back out to check it out. It turns out they had a Wii set up. So I got to play Wii Sports including tennis, bowling and golf. Over all, ti was pretty cool.

Funny enough, the sports thing brought up an issue I hadn’t thought about before. I’m left handed and while I play some sports left handed, I also play some, like golf and bowling, right handed. Switching back and forth from sports is kind of a pain. So I had to think about whether I really wanted to play with the hand I would play the real sport with or would I just play them them all left handed? I’ve never had to stop and think about which hand to use when I played the Atari 2600! Damn kids these days! I tell you what!

Been busy lately. No posts lately. Submitted proposal to Association of Internet Researchers conference. It is in Vancouver so I hope to get in and make my triumphant return to Vancouver.

I’m trying to get my paper edited for DiGRA 2007 in Japan. I’m not sure if I can afford to go, but if I get in I’m sure going to try. It is right after the Tokyo Game Show too, so I really really want to go. SO click on some ads and click on my Amazon ads before you buy anything from Amazon (I think I’ll still get some money even if you don’t buy the product that is being advertized, just as long as you click through the link.

I just got done playing Project: Snowblind. It started off as a more action-based Deus Ex spin-off, but when Deus Ex 2 didn’t do so well they changed the name. There’s still the augments and stuff, but honestly, they are pretty pointless. I got through the entire game and barely used them. The best part about the game is that all the cut scenes are skipable and skip them I did. I got it cheap, and that’s about what it was worth.

Since I modded my xbox I’ve also been doing some retro gaming. Either I stink, or Super Mario Bros. 3 is incredibly hard. Thank goodness for cheats. Without cheats and the emulator allowing me to save wherever I want I would never have been able to beat that stupid game.

While I often hit up gamefaqs.com for help, this is the first time I’ve really ever used cheats extensively. I never really saw the point of it before, but now I do. Without cheating I would have been so much more frustrated and probably would have quit the game a long time before I got anywhere near the end of the game. mmmmm cheeeaatttssssss.

Last week was the first airing of the Spike TV Video Game Awards. I saw part of it, but I didn’t see the end because Jack Thompson was on Nightline the same night. I wanted to see the end of it, so I went to Spike’s site for the awards. It said they would be replayed Saturday, but they weren’t. They were on today. I thought that maybe I read the site wrong, so I went and checked out the site again. I saw this and realized why I got confused.

It seems that TV for Men has a whole different calendar of their own where the 17th is Saturday and not Sunday…

(Just a note, the comments are messed up. It gives an error if you try to leave a comment, but they go through. I just have to approve them first. I’m going to switch to wordpress sometime in the next month or so and so I’m not going to bother trying to figure out what’s wrong with the commenting system. Sorry! Thanks for the comments though!)