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Fri, 15 May 2009 16:26 GMT

Camping at the beach

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New MMO Musings

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 08:50 GMT

Been awhile, eh?

So the other day I was reading how one of the major players in WoW, Game Director Jeff Kaplan, is moving off of WoW and onto an "unannounced MMO." Speculations abound, but I thought I'd throw an idea out I've had for some time about an MMO I'd really, really like to see.

Vampire: The Masquerade.

In 2004 developer Troika put together the excellent CRPG Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, a followup effort to Activision's 2000 Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption. While VtMB had many flaws and bugs at release, it was the first game along with Half-Life 2 to use Valve's Source engine, which allows the game to be played from either the first-person or third-person shooter perspective. Reviews were mixed, including "grand RPG but a flawed gem of a game" and "the best buggy game ever". It had tremendous promise, and remains playable still with after-market official and fan-based patches. Roaming Santa Monica, Hollywood, Chinatown and LA as a vampire, exploring the shady underground and vampire politics - I absolutely loved this game and replayed it for hours upon hours. Now, take this - and make it on a Massively Multiplayer scale, worldwide. Would that not rock?

VtM still has a following as a pen-and-paper RPG, with tremendous online resources including detailed rules, fansites, and lore.

I'd like to say you heard it here first - but perhaps my musings have only picked up on that which has been desired by many others... Seems White Wolf, the owner of VtM trademark and subsequent followups World of Darkness and Vampire: The Requiem, is working on an MMO called World of Darkness Online - I need to read further, but this sounds like my dream come true... of course, rough estimate release date is 2011, so I'll have plenty of time to enjoy WoW until then...

Anyone out there?

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:10 GMT

Hello, is this thing on?

Wow, been awhile since I've posted. Just haven't had the compulsion to do so lately.

That, and I've started playing WoW again. I know, I know, back on the wow-crack. I started out easy, played on some of the free servers. And got fed up with the lag, bugs and lack of features. So now I'm paying again. And, bonus, I get to play with my niece and her cool boyfriend, we started up a new round of characters on another server. Sweet!

And may I say, playing a Death Knight is awesome beyond words...

I'll have to blog more later, try to sum up some of the changes in WoW, and my personal life happenings.

Recommended Movies

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 09:13 GMT

Well it's been two months since I've posted. I'm not going to keep up with my blog much, but I'll try.

Two movies we've actually seen in the theater I want to pass along. One is Mamma Mia - it was a lot funnier than I expected it to be, a great date movie. Awesome Abba songs (for all those of you who grew up in the late 70's and early 80's). And hey, it's got Pierce Brosnan in it. You can't be a man without admitting to a man crush on Pierce. :-D

Second is Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated movie. I guess some people are bound to pan anything, for whatever reason, but I took the whole family to see it and we all enjoyed it. The very end was a little, well, staged (everybody strike a pose without saying a word) but it was great fun. And was it just me, or was that alien general's voice done by Sean Connery?

In other news, Donna finished up her CyberKnife treatment a couple of weeks ago. She's still a little sore, but we're moving ahead. School starts next week, and we'll do a new round of CAT/PET scans early next month, so nothing to do but get on with life in the meantime.

Slashdot GamingTech News

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 07:25 GMT

Couple of articles from Slashdot yesterday:

Intel Shows Off Quake Wars, Ray Traced

At the Research@Intel Day 2008, Intel showed a ray-traced version of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Compared to the original game, a water with reflections and refractions and a physically correct glass shader were added. Also, a camera portal with up to 200 recursions to itself has been demonstrated. To show off this ongoing research in the topic of real-time ray tracing, a four-socket system with quad cores has been used that allowed rendering the enhanced visual effects in 1280x720 at 14-29 fps. Just two years before, early versions of Quake 4: Ray Traced ran only at 256x256 with 17 fps. Even though Intel's upcoming Larrabee will be primarily a rasterizer, the capabilities for also doing ray tracing on it should deliver interesting opportunities.

Hands On With Nvidia's New GTX 280 Card

Maximum PC magazine has early benchmarks on Nvidia's newest GPU architecture — the GTX 200 series. Benchmarks on the smokin' fast processor reveal a graphics card that can finally tame Crysis at 1900x1200. 'The GTX 280 delivered real-world benchmark numbers nearly 50 percent faster than a single GeForce 9800 GTX running on Windows XP, and it was 23 percent faster than that card running on Vista. In fact, it looks as though a single GTX 280 will be comparable to — and in some cases beat — two 9800 GTX cards running in SLI, a fact that explains why Nvidia expects the 9800 GX2 to fade from the scene rather quickly.'