Gamasutra is evidently launching a new feature, concerning the preservation of old video games and materials pertaining thereto. And to help inaugurate the feature, they’ve enlisted none other than Warren Spector to offer his opinions on the subject:

“Unlike earlier media, like film and television, which were born at a time when historians and academics tended to focus on an established canon of ‘important’ works and ‘great men,’ video games were born at a time when the cultural gatekeepers were more open to new ideas, new thinking and new media.”

“Where the early history of film and television has been largely lost thanks to industry indifference and academic ignorance, we have a chance to preserve our history, before our pioneers pass away, our design documents, marketing materials and beta builds disintegrate or get trashed, and our hardware deteriorates to the point of inoperability. The fact is, over the last 40 years or so, we’ve seen the rise of the first new medium of expression and communication since the rise of television and not to preserve our history would be a crime.”

Spector also comments on what the biggest obstacle to such an effort would be. And though he does discuss the cost of such an effort as well, it’s not what he sees as the biggest problem:

“The biggest threat is indifference. Most people making games see what they do as ephemeral, as not worthy of preservation. Who cares about an early design doc for any one of the thousands of games released each year? Why bother saving a T-shirt given out at E3 to promote the release of a game? Will anyone ever care about the September 1st draft of the schedule for a Mickey Mouse game?”

I can’t speak to the Epic Mickey context, but I will note that we have, in the galleries here at Aiera, several documents — some of them about as mundane as a project schedule — which emerged from the development processes of various Ultima games. Including, it should be noted, a few that Spector himself worked on.

Anyhow, Gamasutra has already gone live with their new feature, and evidently has commentary from Richard Garriott as well. (I’ll see if I can get around to posting an excerpt from that later today or some time tomorrow.)

It’s only been a month or so since he announced that he was hanging up his hat for the time being, but it looks like The CRPG Addict has returned to his blogging ways after having a bit of a “road to Damascus” moment. With him in the role of Saul, a snowless Bar Harbor, Maine, in the role of the Syrian countryside, and the ruins of an old house playing the role of the Almighty:

There was no house but rather the ruins of one: a couple of chimneys and a low stone foundation overlooking the rocky coast. It looked to have been abandoned for a good century or so. (I later found out there was, until recently, a modern house in the clearing next to the ruin, but it the land had been donated to the park and the house torn down. I haven’t been able to find anything on the older house whose ruins were still visible to us.)

…

As I gazed at the sad and overgrown ruin, a strong and inescapable feeling crept over me: I wanted to go back to the hotel room and play a CRPG.

I realize how pathetic that sounds, even to fellow gamers. I was looking at something fascinating — a piece of history in a place that I loved. But there was never going to be anything else to stoke the sparks of mystery about the place. I have no doubt that the “private road” sign had failed to deter hundreds, if not thousands, of other hikers every year, and there was no chance I was going to find anything in the ruins that hadn’t already been picked over by thousands of hands. I wasn’t going to open the ash trap of one of the old chimneys and discover a previous owner’s journal, detailing a horrific murder that had taken place decades earlier, but providing just enough mitigating clues to heal the heartbreak of a sad centenarian residing in some lonesome house in town. Orcs were not going to suddenly rise from behind the wall and snipe at me with bows. I was not going to find a chest nestled against the outer walls, containing a sword and helmet. The brambles tangled over the stone were not suitable for brewing into potions, nor did they conceal runic letters that, when absorbed, would bestow upon me some fantastic skill. I was not going to stumble upon a concealed trap door, leading me to treasure-filled depths.

While real life, and the real location, should have offered real rewards to compensate for these deficiencies, they were not, at the moment, enough. And so, after spending a respectable amount of time hiking the rest of the island, I used the promise of a fireplace, hot tea, and a good book from the store in town to persuade Irene to return with me to the confines of the bed-and-breakfast, where I spent the next four hours attempting to win Wizardry V. I failed, and I still don’t know exactly what I’m going to do with that game, but I do know that…well, I’m back.

There’s something to that, I think. It’s easy to dismiss us gamers as basement-dwelling schlubs who never get out and see the real world (and to be fair, there are gamers who would be guilty of that charge). But a lot of us don’t fit that easy-to-use stereotype. Many of us are well-traveled individuals who have seen our fair share of interesting places in the world, and many of us have been fortunate enough to return to some of the places we have enjoyed seeing in the past time and time again.

But that sense of mystery just isn’t there.

Most of us aren’t archaeologists; when we go poking around the various places we have been to, we’re not going to find the trappings of a long-forgotten civilization there, waiting for us to scoop them up and piece their ancient puzzle together. There may be places in the world where those little pieces of history yet persist, waiting to be found…but most of us lack the necessary time and resources to go and find them.

But in Britannia, in Amalur, in Thedas, and in a host of other fictional worlds, those hidden secrets are ours to find. And we crave to find them. We have, to wit, the yearning for mystery at the very core of our being, and the real world is just not the sort of place anymore that is able to satisfy that desire.

But I digress.

…this is what I discovered in the intervening month: I’m apparently going to spend a certain percentage of my time screwing around, whether said screwing around involves playing video games or watching Babylon 5 for the seventh time. I’ve made fair progress on my goals in February, but I’ve also spent a lot of time on Reddit, reading old articles on Cracked.com, reading the Mistborn trilogy again, and playing Boggle on my iPhone. None of these things are what I stopped playing CRPGs to do, and playing games, and writing this blog, while overall about as useful as anything else I’ve been doing, at least lets me document my experiences and interact with interesting people.

Let’s all welcome The CRPG Addict back to the big wide world of the Internet, and wish him renewed and continued good fortune in his endeavour to play through a truly mind-boggling number of RPGs.

I’ll be traveling for much of today, since it actually takes a damn long time to get from Louisville to Edmonton. So in the meantime, talk amongst yourselves!

I will be here. Except on a United flight.

Should games even bother trying to tell a meaningful story?

Kyle Orland at Ars Technica echoes the musings of David Jaffe:

For decades now, large parts of the game industry have been striving to create games that are more meaningful — games that can speak to the human condition and tell an impactful story that’s deeper than “remember when I shot that guy?” At a DICE Summit presentation today, Twisted Metal designer David Jaffe made an impassioned argument that such efforts have been misguided, and a huge waste of the industry’s time and resources.

Jaffe led off by clarifying that he wasn’t against all kinds of storytelling in games — he had lots of respect for titles like Batman: Arkham City and Skyrim that allow for highly personal, player-created stories that can be as deep as a good novel. He also wasn’t arguing for a return to the Atari 2600 days, where graphics were abstract and most titles didn’t have identifiable characters or environments at all.

But Jaffe did argue vociferously against “games that have been intentionally made from the ground up with the intent and purpose of telling a story or expressing a philosophy or giving a designer’s narrative.” Because no matter how hard we want to fight it, Jaffe said, games just aren’t meant for this kind of storytelling.

Jaffe went on to compare depictions of D-Day in movies to depictions of it in games, and argues that the game player will always experience it in a way that prevents him from fully contemplating the deeper significance of the event. And to be fair, he has a point there, I think. Games will almost always have the player thinking about objectives to complete at least as often as they will make him think about the meaning of the events he is participating in and witnessing, which arguably makes for diluted meaning.

But one wonders if Jaffe’s scope is perhaps too limited — his focus seems to be mostly on AAA titles, and then only on particular types thereof. Within that limited scope, he probably has a point: can we expect Twisted Metal to tell a moving, meaningful, deeply philosophical tale? Probably not.

But what about a game like To The Moom, which despite its short length has reduced everyone I know who has played it to tears? Is that a game that fails to reach its full potential as a vehicle for delivering a meaningful story?

(hat tip: Infinitron Dragon)

In-game romances have officially nuked the fridge.

On Valentine’s Day, RIFT — yes, the MMORPG — set a Guinness World Record for the most in-game marriages in one day:

21,879 marriages took place on February 14, starting at 9am PST. Marriage was introduced in Rift’s seventh major update, Carnival of the Ascended. Each participating player earned a unique in-game title, “The Avowed,” and quite possibly a nagging significant other.

I…yeah, no, I just won’t comment on this any further.

The Origins of Fallout.

No Mutants Allowed has posted the first in a three-part document set from the lead designer of the original Fallout, R. Scott Campbell. It purports to detail the genesis of the game that eventually became known as Fallout, and is evidently quite lengthy. Give it a read, if Fallout is one of your areas of high interest!

Canada wants warrantless Internet spying!

And if you don’t like it, you support child pornography…or…something.

The legislation would require service providers to provide law enforcement with IP addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and other information on demand.

The bill would also “require ISPs and cellular phone companies to install equipment for real-time surveillance and create new police powers designed to obtain access to the surveillance data.”

Members of the opposition have vowed to fight the legislation. More than 80,000 people have signed an online petition opposing the bill.

Challenged by an opposition member about the proposal, public safety minister Vic Toews cited child pornography as a justification for the bill. Opponents of the legislation “can either stand with us or with the child pornographers,” he said.

Le sigh.

Gaming isn’t the problem in your marriage.

Doing fun things by yourself, in which your spouse does not share, is:

The study explains in its intro that marital satisfaction is “lower for those [couples] with high concentrations of individual leisure activities.” That is, doing fun stuff in general without your spouse will lead to fights and unrest.

This study doesn’t prove that gaming, specifically, is to blame for your relationship problems. Couples where one member spends too much time fishing, shopping, drinking, or even volunteering at soup kitchens and building houses for the homeless on his or her own have been shown to experience marital difficulty, just like couples where one person games and the other doesn’t. Since the study doesn’t compare gaming to other leisure activities, it only confirms that gaming makes your spouse angry, like everything else you might do and enjoy alone.

There is one ray of light: while the study found that a married person’s “satisfaction with online gaming” was a predictor of a discontent, the amount of time spent playing games was not.

And if your wife or husband just happens to be a gamer like you, well…heck, you could start up parallel RIFT accounts!

This makes me ragey.

A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.

The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known.

“We’ve found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer,” said EFF Staff Technologist Seth David Schoen.

I’d ask if they’re kidding me, but I already know they aren’t. At a previous job, we had a Xerox Phaser-class printer, and I remember my boss at the time wondering what the little series of yellow dots that appeared on every image was. At the time, I didn’t have an answer, and neither did Google…but now we know.

Sad news, RPG fans!

In a relatively short (for him) blog post, gaming blogger The CRPG Addict has announced that he is, for now, hanging up his hat and giving blogging a rest for…well, a while, at least.

I finally have to face reality: my workload, plus the non-work goals that I want to accomplish, are not compatible with spending hundreds of hours a month playing computer games. Since I became self-employed last year, all this game-playing is directly affecting my financial security.

When I started the blog, it was because I felt an unnatural compulsion to play these games (I hit upon my plan to play every game in chronological order before I knew I was going to blog about it), and I wanted something positive and permanent to come out of it. Except for one or two weeks of Skyrim, I haven’t felt this compulsion for several months. Although I value your comments and our dialogue, I’m just not having any fun with it. I know that’s showing in both my postings and long absences.

I’m not definitively canceling the blog. It’s possible that at some point this year, my professional life will achieve a greater degree of stability and I’ll find myself with a lot of down time again. Or I may wake up in the middle of the night three weeks from now, and feel a mad desire to explore wireframe hallways, and you’ll seen an erratic posting here or there. In the meantime, I’ll leave the blog active for new readers who want to read my postings on older games.

I, for one, am sorry to see him go, even for a while, although the pressures he feels are certainly ones which I both understand and sympathize with. Balancing a heavily-trafficked website with a thriving commmunity of commentators is, in and of itself, at least a part-time job in terms of the amount of work one is required to invest in it. And since The Addict is working for himself, which means that every hour he spends gaming is an hour he isn’t spending billing a client (and therefore earning money to do things like eat and maintain his source of shelter with), it’s easy to see how it all became quite overwhelming.

Hopefully he’ll pick up and run with the blog again at some point, or maybe accept an offer by another like-minded person (or group of persons) to step in and continue in his footsteps and fine tradition. Time will tell. In the meantime, please join me in wishing him luck and all the best in his real-life endeavours.

So…since the last time I had a chance to play The Old Republic, I actually had the chance to participate in two additional beta weekends. I briefly took the opportunity to play the first hour or two of the Bounty Hunter storyline, taking the slightest look at life on the Imperial side. That failed to appeal, so I decided to continue playing through the original mission of my Trooper character.

The main splash screen for the game.

Unfortunately, she was no longer accessible. She was still on the server, but the game couldn’t actually load her up for me to keep playing as. Pity.

So, I decided to try the one Republic class I hadn’t yet looked at: the Jedi Consular.

My character.

And…wow. In the Consular, totally found the character class I am going to play when the game launches. I had expected to play a Trooper, but the Consular proved to be the ideal character for me, with a combat style that I completely grokked, and a rich storyline that sucked me in just like Mass Effect did.

Like the Jedi Knight, the Consular starts on the Jedi “homeworld”, Tython. The storyline for the Consular quickly begins to build a deep sense of mystery, involving ancient Jedi ruins, the remnants of the first lightsaber, Force apparitions, and even the origins of the Dark Side’s followers.

Even a practice saber can be deadly if you know how to use it.

The origin mission concludes with a sequence showing the assembly of a lightsaber, after which point the Consular Padawan is inducted as a Jedi.

That said, a real lightsaber is better.

From there, the story takes the Consular to the capital world, Coruscant. Actually, I think all of the Republic classes get sent to the capital world once their original missions are complete, because I saw plenty of Jedi, Smugglers, and Troopers wandering around. The Consular storyline becomes about finding a cure for your stricken former Master, whohas contracted some kind of malady that has “Dark Side” written all over it.

The Jedi temple. Not on Coruscant.

Three Jedi artifacts, called Noetikons, need to be retrieved in the hope that they might help find a cure, and this quest occupied pretty much the rest of both beta weekends. Along the way, I picked a huge number of side quests, many of which had multiple stages and excellent storylines of their own. And I got to explore several huge, and very detailed, areas of Coruscant.

Consulting a Noetikon.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed the story, for both the main plot and many of the side quests. One of the things that really stood out, I think, was that the game made it very easy to forget that I was playing an MMORPG. I could just as easily have been playing Knights of the Old Republic 3 (and in a somewhat spiritual sense, I suppose it could be argued that SWTOR is KOTOR3).

Like Sergorn said earlier, the game looks great. BioWare didn’t try to go for hyper-realism; they adopted a visual style that borrows ever so slightly from The Clone Wars (the animated series that chronicles the events that transpired between the second and third movies), and adds in BioWare’s typically excellent area design. Like other BioWare games, the world of SWTOR is not a truly open world. Each planet could be described as semi-open, constructed from numerous areas that blend seamlessly into each other.

Coruscant.

Coruscant, in particular, is a marvel; BioWare Austin really captured the scale of the planet. The visual style changes quite sharply, but believably, between areas of the planet. The Senate Plaza is regal and clean; the deep Works area located much closer to the planet’s surface is dirty, dank, and just a bit savage. And taking a taxi between locales, far from being burdensome, is often a rich visual treat.

Also Coruscant.

Though I do have to admit: I was very tempted to fling my character from the city’s heights just to see if she’d fall all the way to the ground so far below. I had to content myself with occasionally flinging enemies over the ledges instead, mostly with the (entirely too handy) Force Wave attack.

I didn't actually jump off a ledge. I took a lot of taxis, however!

A note on combat: as I said above, the Consular proved to be an almost ideal fit for me in terms of combat style.

Consular, engaged. Yes, she IS deflecting blaster shots!

Consular attack powers seem to split between attacks involving flinging things (enemies included) and attacks against an opponent’s mind. My usual attack method, which rarely failed, was to charge in to a group of enemies, flinging a large object at the nearest foe before flooring (and dispersing) the entire group with a Force Wave.

This would be the Force Wave of which I speak.

And then, naturally, I’d pick off the survivors one by one with my dual-bladed lightsaber, the class weapon for the Jedi Shadow specialization that Consulars can select at Level 10.

See? Dual-bladed.

In all honesty, I toyed with the idea of canceling my pre-order of The Old Republic. Not because it’s not worth getting; it most certainly is. Instead, I’ve contemplated stepping away from it because of the very real possibility that it might become a bit too all-consuming. I can honestly see myself getting pulled into the game (or at least the single-player narrative portion) at the expense of all other activities. Including Aiera.

But I think I can manage my time. I’m hoping I can, at any rate. Thus far, I’ve reached Level 20 with a Consular character who is nearly a perfect re-creation of this one (sadly, beta characters were wiped from the servers prior to launch), and I’ve managed my time pretty effectively between playing the game and managing other commitments. That said, the Christmas break certainly did help me find as much time as I did to put into the game.

Now, to be fair, my one gripe with the game still exists: quest narratives (main and side quests) get broken up periodically by spikes in enemy difficulty, requiring you to level up somehow before progressing.

Also, sometimes the graphics took a while to load.

However, I found that by doing a bit of in-game recon, and by observing which foes in which area were at particular experience levels, I could do different tasks along both the main and side storyline in a way that kept the difficulty at a level my Consular could handle. I had to grind a little bit, but in SWTOR that isn’t always the best way to get experience and level up. Polishing off items (even the “defeat X enemies” tasks) on the question list worked way better than hard grinding…and usually resulted in better loot.

Not that grinding isn't sometimes fun.

The loot system in the game deserves a comment, because loot comes in two flavours. The first is useless loot, items that actually have no use (the item tooltips tell you as much), apart from being something to sell for a few credits. The second is useful loot like new weapons and armour. Generally, killing enemies and hard grinding net you only (or mostly) the first kind of loot; defeating significant enemies and finishing quests gets you the second kind.

The game, in other words, doesn’t just want you to run around killing everything you see; it wants you to play out all the stories it has to tell, and rewards you (often quite richly) for doing so.

And I, for one, am keen to take that bait.

And to capture screenshots of graphics glitches.

I just wish it had been even remotely possible that my Consular character from this attempt at the beta would have been preserved on the SWTOR servers until launch, so I could just pick up and run with the storyline where I left it last. Alas, as noted, this wasn’t the case.

Rock, Paper, Scissors asked it; here’s my answer: I most certainly am. This time around, I’ve posted six galleries — with a combined total of over 2,600 pictures — from my lengthy playthrough of BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins. Thanks to the limitations of Google+, I’ve split the screenshots into six galleries, which are linked at the end of the article.

And because there are a lot of screenshots (29 in total) that I want to include in this article, let me start you all off with just a handful:

My initial character. I will explain what I mean by that in a bit.

There is a lot of gorgeous scenery and lighting in the game, to be fair.

Even the Fade, warped and twisted as it is, is visually quite stunning.

Morrigan, voiced by Claudia Black, is one of your companions...and mostly a total b**ch.

She was, however, useful in one sequence of the game, where in fact she became the character I controlled.

Leliana, a bard that can join your quest. She was one of my core party members.

Wynne, a mage, and another potential party members. Another of my core group.

Sandal is not a companion per se, but he is one of the more amusing characters in the game.

Dragon Age: Origins, as you all hopefully know, was BioWare’s epic fantasy RPG of a few years ago, featuring an evolution of the engine that powered Neverwinter Nights and a storyline that tilted hard toward dark fantasy. It was in development for many years, and was indeed only released once Electronic Arts acquired the company. Its long, violent, blood-spattered (literally) story tells the tale of the nation of Ferelden, in the land of Thedas, as it is beset by a Blight. A Blight, for the record, is an eruption of foul, demonic creatures called darkspawn, who — led by a dragon-like Archdemon — spread corruption and death over all the land in a maniacal, homicidal rampage. They carry with them a disease also known as Blight, which turns those it infects into ghouls…or worse.

The darkspawn are always present beneath the surface of the world, digging in the halls of abandoned dwarven kingdoms; they are driven by a call only they can hear to seek out the buried Old Gods. When an Old God is found, its dragon-like form is infected with Blight, and it becomes an Archdemon. It is when this event transpires that a Blight actually begins, and the Archdemon must be slain in a very specific manner in order to end the threat.

Your character — who can be a human, a dwarf, or an elf from one of about six different backgrounds — begins the game going about his or her daily life, when some manner of disaster strikes. At the outcome thereof, the Grey Warden Duncan recruits your character to join the Grey Wardens, the ancient order that guards Thedas against Blights, and who in fact are necessary to end said events; an Archdemon can only be permanently slain by a Grey Warden, to the destruction of both.

The first major battle between the armies of Ferelden and the darkspawn that the player witnesses quickly turns into a rout after a villanous lord of the land refuses to send his troops in to support the vanguard led by the king of the nation. The king and his army are routed and slain, and the lord — one Loghain by name — quickly assumes de facto control of the land (even though his daughter is technically in charge, in her role as queen). The player and another Grey Warden barely survive the battle, and are rescued by a witch named Flemeth who bits her daughter, Morrigan, to join the player’s party and assist in helping Ferelden overcome the Blight.

From there, the game becomes more or less open-ended; the player must gather different allies from among the races of men, dwarves, and elves, and must rally these disparate armies into a single fighting force to defeat the darkspawn, slay the Archdemon, and end the blight. The game takes the player through idyllic countrysides, enchanted forests, ancient ruins, stately cities, haunted magical towers, majestic castles, foul dungeons and caves, and immense dwarven halls beneath the world.

The dwarven halls are seriously the best-looking part of the game.

Here, have another.

And another.

See what I mean? Gorgeous.

Along the way, you accumulate various companions, with different skills, abilities, and moral bearings, all of which factor in to how the game plays out and what consequences your decisions in it have. In at least one case, failing a persuasion check after performing a particularly nasty act will require you to slay a party member. It all comes to a head in the massive Battle of Denerim, which is a fantastic series of battles through a variety of glorious scenery set-pieces. This battle culminates in the slaying of the Archdemon, which brings about the end of the game.

Die, demon, die.

Now, here’s the thing: I began playing Dragon Age: Origins in June of this year, if not earlier. I had a few false starts, and created three or four characters (one each time). Initially, I just couldn’t get into the game; the combat was (as is often the case with the Aurora engine and its derivatives) too tediously slow for me. Plus, I didn’t actually like the Human Noble origin story. So finally, I restarted the game as an elf, played through the (rather more brutal) origin story for her, and then quickly found a couple of mods that sped up the combat action and made the “epic kill moves” trigger more often. After that, I was in the game, and determined to finish it.

Of course, it still took a while, and there in truth I didn’t play it for almost all of the summer. And when I came back to it this fall, I decided that I just didn’t like how my character looked. Rather than restart the game (please, no!), I found a way to hack a previous character’s face onto the current character’s body:

Much better.

And this character saw me through to the end of the game, and through some of its major DLC.

Dragon Age: Origins is a very long game if you want to complete most of its main and side quests, but it tells a riveting story with a well-developed history and mythos. It borrows liberally from the best fantasy writers, adds in some of the usual BioWare trappings (romances, for example), and keeps the encounters coming at a steady pace. With the combat sped up, it’s a heart-pounding game in many of its segments, especially the ones where you’re tasked to defend towns and civilians.

There is an advanced stat and skill system in the game, both of which play important roles in gameplay. Building up combat-related skills and area-of-effect powers in your warriors and mages (and, to be fair, rogues) is a must, as is keeping skills like Cunning topped up so that you can find better solutions to sticky situations in dialogue. The game also boasts an advanced tactics system which you can use to govern how each of your party members behaves in combat…or how your own character behaves, if for some reason you assume control of someone else in the party for a bit. If I can offer one piece of advice to you, as regards the tactics system in the game, it is this: make sure all your party members are set to use a health potion (poultice, in the language of Ferelden) if their health drops below a certain percentage. This will save you so much hassle.

The game is a few years old now, and shows its age in some ways…but for the most part it still looks damn gorgeous. The characters are expressive (and well-acted, again for the most part), the models detailed, and the scenery lush and vibrant (when it isn’t dank and spooky).

BioWare has released several pieces of DLC for the game, some of which add content to the main plot, and some of which offer separate games to play entirely, which must be accessed through a sub-menu of the main screen. These expansions — the largest and best of which is Awakening, although a mention should be made of Witch Hunt as well — are set in the aftermath of the defeat of the Blight, and tell the continuing story of the your character (assuming he or she did not perish upon slaying the Archdemon). As such, save-game importing is enabled on all these expansions, although it can be a bit buggy.

Oghren is actually a character from Dragon Age, but they brought him back for Awakwning.

Awakening is even more gorgeous than the main game.

The Mother, the ultimate antagonist of Awakening.

Once again, the dwarven areas look the best.

Off with his head! This is one of the epic kill moves.

The outdoor scenery in Awakening is also very pretty.

Sigrun is another dwarven character you can recruit, and she might just be my favourite party member thus far in the entirety of the Dragon Age saga.

The Architect, another antagonist in Awakening.

This did not end well for me.

Battling the Mother.

Awakening sees the player’s character thrust into the middle of an uncertain situation. Darkspawn overwhelm a Grey Warden fortress, and then disappear again into the depths of the world. After much investigation into this and other odd things plaguing the region, the player discovers two warring factions of darkspawn — one led by a being called the Architect, and another led by a monstrosity known as the Mother. The Architect has figured out a way, or so he claims, to permanently free the darkspawn from the call of the Old Gods, which in theory should end any future Blights. However, it was his experimentation that caused the blight that you have to overcome in the main game, after his method failed when he attempted to use it on the Old God he helped unearth. In like manner, the freedom he brings often comes at a steep price, triggering madness in many darkspawn who suddenly find themselves cut off from the “beautiful” call of the Old Gods; this is what happened with the Mother.

You are given the choice of helping or slaying the Architect in his cause; I chose to slay him. What effect this will have in Dragon Age 3, I’ve no idea, but I imagine I’ll find out in another year or so.

Awakening is an enjoyable piece of content, and the story (despite a limp start) is probably my favourite storyline in the Dragon Age: Origins setting. It’s engaging, well-paced, and has the potential to radically alter the shape of things in the series finale. I did, however, find it to be quite buggy; saving often is highly recommended.

Exploring a library.

Battling an existential crisis.

Dwarven ruins, again. Gorgeous, again.

An ancient elven mirror...and portal.

This will probably not be the last my character sees of Morrigan.

Witch Hunt is the last expansion/DLC released for Dragon Age: Origins, and wraps up the story of the character Morrigan. It’s a short little investigative romp, which can end with your character either killing Morrigan, letting her pass through the elven portal she has uncovered, or joining her in the passage proper. It introduces a couple new characters as party members, and a couple of new (and gorgeous) areas to explore. Story-wise, it certainly doesn’t measure up to the main game, but it ends on a cliffhanger of sorts and teases many things about what’s in store in both Dragon Age 2 and Dragon Age 3.

There are other expansions that can be played as well, some of which tell “alternate history” stories to the main game or related events, but I didn’t get around to playing those. These two seemed like the major pieces of content to focus on before heading in to Dragon Age 2, and I was anxious after a few months and many, many hours to finally leave Origins behind.

Galleries:

• Gallery 1 of 6 – This set, the first of six, covers the first part of the game as I played it. The set ends at the start of the Dalish quest storyline.
• Gallery 2 of 6 – This set, the second of six, covers the middle part of the game as I played it. The set begins at the start of the Dalish quest storyline (with a brief “Stone Prisoner” excursion), and ends just prior to my journey to Orzammar (the dwarves being the last race I recruited to fight the Blight).
• Gallery 3 of 6 – This set, the third of six, covers the ending part of the game as I played it. The set begins at the start of the Dwarven quest storyline, and ends with my character breaking into Arl Rendon Howe’s home in Denerim.
• Gallery 4 of 6 – This set, the fourth of six, covers the ending part of the game as I played it. The set begins during the break-in to Arl Howe’s home in Denerim, proceeds through the Landsmeet and the Battle of Denerim, and ends with my character killing the Archdemon.
• Gallery 5 of 6 – This set, the fifth of six, covers some of the major DLC for the game. The set begins with Return to Ostagar, and ends roughly midway through Awakening, as I am battling through the Wending Wood.
• Gallery 6 of 6 – This set, the last of six, covers some of the major DLC for the game. The set begins partway through Awakening, in the Wending Wood, and ends with my character walking away from Morrigan at the end of Witch Hunt.

Rock, Paper, Scissors asked it; here’s my answer: I most certainly am. This time around, I’ve posted a complete set of over 250 screenshots from a full playthrough of a game: Dungeon Hunter, by Gameloft, for the iPhone.

Here’s four sample images, just to get you started:

Battle on a bridge.

The scenery is decent.

There are temporary companions, but you have no control over them. Or their fates.

Some of the lighting effects are also quite good.

The first game in the Dungeon Hunter series — a currently two-part series of mobile-targeted RPGs that are basically lightweight clones of Diablo or any similar hack-and-slash title — tells the story of the Prince of Gothicus, who was murdered on his wedding night by his bride. Possessed and bent toward evil, said bride has become the Dark Queen, and plunged the lands into darkness and despair. Resurrected by fairies — the guardians of magic in the land — the Prince must battle his way past the Queen’s minions, into her fortress which exists beyond time and physical space, there ultimately to slay her and put an end to her reign of terror.

Sound familiar?

The game has a basic stat system, and a skill system that actually has some impact on the game and requires a measure of planning and thought. I played as a Warrior, so the stats I focused on primarily were Strength and Dexterity. Skill-wise, the Dash skill (which causes the Prince to blitz-rush his target, stunning it) and the area-of-effect sweeping swords skill (I forget its in-game name) proved invaluable, as did the War Cry skill (which causes some enemies to flee in terror). Controls are fairly intuitive once you master the combat system, although it’s sometimes the case that you just miss the “Attack” button and instead command your prince to run across the screen. (It’s on an iPhone; there’s not a lot of screen real-estate.)

Items in the game can be looted from vanquished enemies or purchased, but there’s really no need to buy anything other than potions (which restore 100% of your health and mana/stamina) from the merchants you encounter. Items can have between 0 and 4 magical properties, and are fashioned from the usual gamut of fantasy-typical materials, with Silver items being about the best in the game (or, at least, the best I found, and apparently the minimum requirement to survive the final fight). Enemies tend to drop copious amounts of both items and gold; it’s really not hard to get into the economy of the game.

The difficulty scaling is quite good; I was always just strong enough to fight my way to the end of each new area, and typically gained a level or two per area as well. Returning to a previous area after clearing a later area tended to make for easy fights and quick experience gain (and there are a few times where you’re required to backtrack). The variety in scenery was nice, with parts of the game happening in forested countrysides, idyllic towns, majestic castles, haunted and decrepit buildings, caves and dungeons, graveyards, and icy ruins.

One annoyance, however, is the save system; there’s no option to manually save your progress, and the game only saves your progress when you enter a new area. (Basically, every time you see a loading screen, your progress gets saved.) It’s not usually a problem, but some of the larger areas can require a fair bit of time to traverse — as much, I found, as half an hour. That wouldn’t be an issue on a desktop game, but this is a mobile title, and it could be a bit more friendly toward the casual play-style that mobile gaming has come to be known for.

It’s been a while since we’ve had one of these, and my inbox is getting full of emails-to-self containing links to interesting stories. As such…open thread!

Need a little more wi-fi range? Have a beer!”

And then follow the directions at the link above to turn the can into a surprisingly effective DIY parabolic reflector.

The Good News: Syndicate is coming back!

The bad news: Starbreeze has reincarneted the franchise as a first-person shooter. Bah!

Is the PC re-emerging as a gaming platform?

A better question might be whether or not the PC ever vanished or died out as a gaming platform. But if the word of a World of Warcraft developer means anything to any of you, it is his opinion that the PC is coming back into its own from a gaming perspective.

This is the Blizzard, though, that makes a point of sidestepping being labeled a “PC developer”, however.

Do you feel that people try to take advantage of you?

It should surprise nobody that Canadians and Americans tend to be fairly trusting people who expect that others have the best of intentions:

The interesting result, I think, is India. It would seem that just under 2/3rds of the Indian population tend to be highly distrustful of others, while the remaining third tend to be highly trusting of same. There is basically no middle ground to be found; Indians (it seems) will either completely trust you, or completely distrust you, and that’s that.

Kind of cool: A web-based iPad 2 simulator.

Skyrim developers will keep the “fun bugs” in the game.

“We try to solve most of it, we’re sensitive to a lot of it,” said producer Todd Howard. “There is a subset of that where we say ‘Well, that’s what can happen.’ If there’s entertainment value in that, whatever it is, we’ll leave a lot of it. If it’s gonna break the game, or unbalance the game in some way, we do try to solve it.

“If the solution is gonna make the game less fun … well, hey, leave it in. It’s their game.”

This is hardly a precedent, of course — one thinks of the weird graphical effects of eating mushrooms in Ultima Underworld, which was actually a glitch that the programmers opted to deliberately trigger in a special in-game case — but it’s rather heartening to hear, I think.

Do read the whole article; Howard also comments on MMORPGs and how Bethesda knows when big “is big enough” for a game.

I don’t know how many of you are Unity3D developers…

…but I’ve been toying around with that particular middleware for the last month or two, and I found this feature piece from Gamasutra to be a fairly interesting read.

You can play as a vampire in Skyrim!

The catch is that you need to catch the vampirism malady first, however.

A handful of Mass Effect 3 screenshots from PAX.

The game looks great, and I am honestly impressed with how well BioWare has been keeping a lid on details. It’s a bizarre thing about me, but I’m actually impressed that I’m starting to lose just a bit of interest in the game. Oh, not a lot; I still very much want it to come out, very much want to play it, and very much want to play it again after that. But, well…I’m a spoiler junkie; I love leaked details, and I tend to find that those are what thrill me the most during the run-up to a game or movie release.

And…well…there just haven’t been that many leaks where ME3 is concerned. None, really, that I can think of, apart from what few details BioWare has handed out. Kudos to them for that, even if I am disappointed by it.

Skyrim looks awesome, of course.

No, as in: really, really awesome.

Okay, here…twenty-odd minutes of Skyrim action. Are you happy now?

Tonight’s post brought to you by what if?:

Rock, Paper, Scissors asked it; here’s my answer: I most certainly am. This time around, rather than just post a handful of screenshots from a game I’m still playing casually from time to time, I’ve posted a complete set of over 400 screenshots from a full playthrough of a game: Galaxy on Fire 2, by Fishlabs, for the iPhone.

Here’s three sample images just to get you started:

The Wraith

Terran fighters charge an enemy formation.

Firing on an enemy!

The GOF series — comprised of Galaxy on Fire 3D and the sequel pictured here, Galaxy on Fire 2 — tell the story of former Terran fighter pilot Keith Maxwell, who in the first game is discharged from military service and thrust out into the universe as a freelancer and mercenary. Actually, the first game has little in the way of story; you fly from planet to planet doing missions for the highest bidder. But the flight mechanics are solid, the graphics impressive, and the game an overall enjoyable experience.

In Galaxy on Fire 2, there’s quite a bit more of a story. Maxwell is launched decades into the future in a hyperdrive accident, and wakes up in a strife-ridden corner of the galaxy that — though populated with familiar species and faces — is mostly unfamiliar to him. Presently, he gets caught up in a campaign to defeat the menace and threat of a new alien race, the Void, whose command of wormhole technology allows them to strike at all the different warring alien factions with impunity. Long-time foes will have to unite to defeat the Void threat once and for all.

There is also currently one DLC package for Galaxy on Fire 2, entitled Valkyrie. It’s a fairly short story, but entertaining, and Fishlabs experiment with some interesting game mechanics (especially during the final battle). I imagine that more content is coming, so expect this gallery to grow. But for now, there it is.

Rock, Paper, Scissors asked it; here’s my answer: I most certainly am. It started, innocently enough, with Mass Effect, when toward the end of a recent playthrough I rediscovered Steam’s F12 screenshot feature. Since then, things have gotten rather more out of hand. But until recently, I haven’t had the foggiest clue what to do with the various compilations of screenshots I’ve collected. I don’t want to put them onto my personal Flickr photostream, nor on Aiera’s photostream. I could host them here, but that can be tedious to manage where backups are concerned.

Enter Google+. I’ve decided to post my photos to my Google+ stream; it has the benefits of being a social network already, offers a really easy upload interface, and it’s trivially easy to link you all to each gallery.

So here, to kick things off, are a handful of screenshots from The Sims 3 (the iPhone port), one of which is pictured below:

Fresh out of the bath!

If you need to know why the focus of the images are Sims bathing, having sex, and using the toilet, see the discussion in the comments to this post.

Expect these screenshot-related postings to become something of a regular feature of the site; I’ve been playing a lot more games recently, and I have many, many screenshots to upload. I am, after all (as RPS put it so succinctly), a game photographer!

It’s not every day a new country gets formed.

The Republic of South Sudan officially separated from Sudan over the last weekend, (hopefully) bringing to an end a civil war that has raged for almost half a century between the predominantly Muslim north and the predominantly Christian south. Apparently, about 99% of the region’s population voted to cecede from Sudan; a landslide’s landslide.

Not that it’s all daisies and roses for South Sudan, mind you; despite their fertile farmland and oil reserves, the country has deep and severe poverty issues, and lacks for modern infrastructure.

Apple downshifts App Store prices for Aussies.

Actually, they’ve made a bunch of price adjustments for all of their global App Store portals, raising prices in some countries and lowering them in others. But I wanted to highlight the fact that they dropped the prices for Aussies (by about 17%, it looks like), since it has occasionally been discussed in the comments forms here just how much more AUstralians pay for things like games and electronics as compared to North Americans.

Scientists punch a hole in time itself.

Actually, it would be slightly more accurate to say that the concept of a “time cloak” has been demonstrated, in which short events — from 110 nanoseconds up to a hypothetical maximum of 120 microseconds — can be hidden from the passage of time. Yes, you read that right.

Dishonored might just be the first FPS I’ve been excited about since Marathon.

Bethesda has announced the next title they’ll be releasing, a stealth-focused first-person shooter entitled Dishonored. It is being developed by — get this — none other than Arkane Studios, the masterminds behind Arx Fatalis. Also on board with the project is Harvey Smith, who was the lead designer for Deus Ex, and Viktor Antonov, who designed City 17 in Half Life 2.

Let’s review: a stealth-based FPS produced by Bethesda, headed up by Arkane, with Deus Ex’s lead designer in charge of creating the game’s atmosphere and City 17′s designer in charge of shaping the world for “an open-ended adventure title that allows players to tackle missions in a number of different ways, from stealthily completing tasks to letting loose on hordes of enemy soldiers.”

Oh, and it sounds like it’ll…you know…an actual story, too: “How players decide to deal with problems will shape Dishonored’s world.”

Can I get a “do want”?

Hard Reset also sounds interesting.

This one is being developed out of Poland by a company called Flying Wild Hog, a new studio comprised of developers who have worked with companies like People Can Fly, CD Projekt RED, and City Interactive…people who have worked on games like Bulletstorm, Painkiller, and The Witcher 2. It is touted as a post-apocalyptic FPS RPG.

Consider me tentatively interested.

Did The Longest Journey predict the coming of Twitter?

Well…kinda.

100 years of IBM in pictures.

From the first clocks and dial recorders they churned out, up to the Watson system that cleaned up royally on Jeopardy! this year, it’s a short — but fascinating — pictorial.

The Vanishing Point

Okay, here’s the thing: I have a really love for what I guess could be called “urban spelunking”, and in particular for photograpy of the deep places beneath cities. As such, I simply must recomment The Vanishing Point, the photoblog of a Toronto-based urban photographer.

Be sure to check out his photos of abandoned nuclear power plant construction projects!

Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player…are they legal?

One would hope so, but who can say these days? In theory, storing music that you own in a cloud-based medium for playback on e.g. your work computer should be perfectly fine, the same as if you brought a USB drive full of tunes to your desk. 

But never underestimate the drive and ability of the music industry to argue that people should pay yet again — as much and as often as possible — for access to music they already own.

Another day, another Internet censorship bill struck down.

This time in Alaska. 

Cheaper Hasselblad cameras?

Consider me interested.

Orson Scott Card joins the writing staff for Firefall.

I was already interested in checking out the quite obviously Starcraft-inspired, sci-fi, free-to-play team-based action game. The fact that Card — an author I have great respect for — has joined the team at Red 5 and will be working on the game’s story is just icing on the cake, and pretty much ensures that I’ll be checking the game out when it releases.

No More Heroes gets an 18-years and up edition.

Ultimately, I blame CD Projekt Red and The Witcher (and, more recently, The Witcher 2), for this.

British Secretary for Education calls for games in the classroom.

This guy’s jib…I like the cut of it:

[Michael Gove] has set his sights on video games as a way of making the British education system more engaging for children.

“When children need to solve equations in order to get more ammo to shoot the aliens, it is amazing how quickly they can learn,” said Gove, speaking to the Royal Society in London regarding Oxford professor Marcus du Sautoy’s Manga High system. Manga High, which allows educators to schedule online assignments that automatically reward items in accompanying flash games, represents the future of early science and math education, according to Gove: “These developments are only the beginning.”

I know for a fact that several Dragons and Dragonettes effectively learned English whilst playing the Ultima games, so I’m not at all surprised that games can serve an educative function; after all, the first education computer game I can remember playing came out over twenty years ago. I am somewhat surprised that people in positions of power are beginning to clue in to this fact, however.

It’s like Oblivion, but probably better.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Andoran is, as PC Gamer describes it, “a darker, grittier take on Oblivion with new cities, factions and creatures. The remarkable new architecture and strange environments have a whiff of Morrowind about them, but the engine upgrades make it look more like Skyrim.”

The website for the mod is currently down, but it might be something you’ll all want to check out in the near future!

The HULC: a self-supporting combat exoskeleton.

Capable of sustained running speeds of 7 miles per hour, and short sprints at up to 10 miles per hour.

Ahem: “Very formidable over short distances!”

The Practical Pyromaniac.

A guide to all things incendiary.

Skyrim developers’ open feedback interview.

And yes, the fifth The Elder Scrolls game will boast a modding kit, high-resolution textures, a refined interface…and pretty much everything else except for a natively 64-bit executable.

Oh, and…you can get married in the game as well.

Excited yet?

Tonight’s post brought to you by The Rock:

Anyone know what movie these screengrabs are from?

Bonus: Massive “haboob” dust storm hits Phoenix as the Arizona “monsoon” season begins!

“Wi-Fi” with a 45-mile range.

From a security standpoint, the very idea of such a thing bothers me. Still, it makes sense that something like this “smart grid” everyone is talking about these days would need technology of this sort.

Take that, California!

The US Supreme Court has struck down a California law that imposes harsh restrictions on the sale of violent video games.

North Korea: broke and starving.

A recently-released undercover video smuggled out of North Korea paints a dismal tale of a broke, filthy nation that is growing increasingly weak, to the point that it can no longer even secure consistent supplies of food for its army (which once took priority in such matters).

This is troubling for many reasons, not the least of which is that it means that the impoverished country is going to face one of two outcomes in the none-too-distant future: social upheaval (preferable), or war with either South Korea or China (or both?) in a vain — and probably doomed — attempt to secure additional resources to prop up the Kim regime.

Every time I read brainwagon, I feel dumb afterward.

brainwagon is the blog of Mark VandeWettering, technical director at Pixar Animation Studios. He blogs about all sorts of things, most of them geeky and many of them very technical. His latest, examining the difference in RFI noise levels in laptop power supplies (generic vs. vendor-supplied) is in one sense nothing special, and is in another sense another fine example of how even the man’s everyday musings are…er…rather brainy.

Six challenges to hobbyist developers.

Gamasutra offers a feature article discussing the hurdles that “enthusiast” (read: spare-time) game developers face, and thoughts on how to overcome them.

Geohot hired by Facebook?

That’s the rumour, at any rate. The former Playstation and iOS jailbreaker has signed on with the Zuck’s social media juggernaut.

Microsoft will not challenge the 3DS and Vita.

Redmond doesn’t see the market viability of a portable game console right now, preferring to focus their mobile gaming attentions on the Windows Phone 7 platform. Which, for all I know, may be the right choice; the mobile gaming market is being driven a lot more these days by smartphones, most of which have power in excess of the 3DS and not-incomparable to the yet-unreleased Vita.

Tonight’s post brought to you by internet browsers:

Opera is the little girl skipping rope somewhere out of frame.

I’ve taken some heat of late for being a little too cozy with Electronic Arts and/or BioWare, and it’s true that I make no effort to hide my affinity and admiration for that studio in particular, and my favourable opinion (which has emerged over the course of the last few years) of EA in general.

Here’s part of the reason why:

BioWare co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk stressed the importance of a gamer culture within a publisher, telling Gamasutra at E3 that it’s advantageous for everyone in a company to play games, from high-level executives on down.

Muzyka said John Riccitiello, CEO of BioWare parent Electronic Arts, and EA Games label president Frank Gibeau play games often, sending down feedback from the highest levels of the corporation.

“Frank and John play a lot of games,” said Muzyka. “Frank gives great feedback in MMOs and RPGs, and shooters. They’re passionate gamers, they play everything [including] social, mobile. You’d be surprised about how much they play. For us, it’s actually part of the reason we’re proud to work for them.”

Muzyka didn’t imply a meddling executive trying to design a game from up high, rather the input is welcome. Zeschuk added, “It’s important to have a context, because if you don’t play your own products, and you don’t really have a context of what you’re making, [you have no reference].”

Zeschuk said, “It’s interesting — across the whole organization [at EA], everyone plays. The marketing guys play. Some companies just don’t. Some people think ‘I don’t need to play, I’m just in marketing.’ But how do you really know what [the company's product] is? That’s what’s great about EA, it’s full of gamers who are really passionate about the products.”

Developers and executives who will play and enjoy games in general, and in particular the games their people produce, deliver a couple of important messages to both their developers and the fans that buy their games: “we do this because we love games” being one, and “we stand behind our work” being the other.

Those are attitudes I can respect, and…well…the proof is in the pudding. BioWare makes some truly great games, and EA as a whole has in fact moved away from murderously milking franchises, and toward pushing out good, solid, enjoyable games rather than branded shovelware. Look at the slate of games gracing the front page of Origin if you need further proof.

And then compare the with one of the criticisms leveled at Activision’s Bobby Kotick.

There are reasons to avoid student loans.

To which list can now be added the following: unpaid student loans could mean that you or your loved ones wind up on the receiving end of a SWAT team.

Essential facts about the gaming industry.

Who plays games? What sorts of games do they play? How old are gamers? How involved are parents in the gaming habits of their children? These and more answers contained in a dryly-named but visually well-presented report!

Turn-Based vs. Real-Time Combat.

The CRPG Addict reflects on the difference by comparing Pool of Radiance (on PC) to Dragon Age: Origins (on Xbox 360).

Full disclosure: The combat in Dragon Age: Origins is one of the things in this world that I really, strongly dislike in a manner that flirts with outright hatred. I still haven’t passed the game, because every time I try, I get annoyed with the combat and quit.

Remember OnLive?

They are extending the service; it’s coming to Android tablets and the iPad this fall, apparently.

Gamers will be able to use the devices’ touchscreens or OnLive’s new Universal Wireless Controller to play. The OnLivePlayer App also integrates with HDTVs so subscribers can use their tablets as touch/motion controllers with their display.

The app will feature full voice chat-enabled multiplayer. OnLive says it will provide “the exact same functionality” on Apple and Android smartphones, too, allowing them to be used as game systems themselves or as controllers with an HDTV or PC.

Furthermore, the company revealed a 10 gigabit cloud-based browser or iPad, Android, and HDTV, which is designed to to deliver online content through the 10 gigabit/second web connections on its cloud-based servers.

So if I got an iPad…could I play Mass Effect on it?

Oh, and hey…there was a massive CME this morning!

CME, in case you weren’t familiar with the acronym, stands for Coronal Mass Ejection…it’s when the sun belches forth a massive cloud of its coronal particles and gasses.

The peak of the eruption took place at approximately 1:41 AM Eastern Time, just for the record.

Apple’s iOS 5 previewed.

I’m actually pretty excited for Apple’s new revision of their mobile OS, since it seems as though they’ve introduced almost every feature to it that I would otherwise jailbreak my phone for.

Is the Internet killing comedy?

Or is the Internet simply a new medium to which performance artists must adapt, lest they perish?

Did any of you hear about that webcam spying scandal at that school in Philly?

The thot plickens, apparently.

Battlefield 3 still looks awesome.

I really hope this beastie turns into the Call of Duty-killer it certainly looks like it ought to be.

Google Maps will get an offline mode this summer.

This. Is. Awesome.

In December the Android [Google Maps] app received an update that cached routes and the surrounding areas, but without a data connection you still couldn’t enter a new destination. A source inside the Dutch telco industry said that Goog[le] would removing the requirement for coverage — an obvious next step for the nav tool, especially with Ovi Maps bringing its turn-by-turn prowess to WP7. The move is also bound to be another thorn in the side of standalone GPS makers like Garmin and TomTom. After all, it’s tough to compete with free.

I use Google Maps a fair bit when traveling; having an offline version capable of searching out routes would be handier than I can convey with words.

Tonight’s post brought to you by free frogs:

Obvious course of action.

Dark energy is real!

And it’s speeding up the expansion of spacetime.

Speaking of space…let’s talk about orphan planets!

Japanese and Kiwi astronomers have discovered the first orphan planets in the Milky Way, and apparently they’re massive (as in: Jupiter-sized).

And numerous, too:

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, explains David Bennett, a NASA-funded co-author of the study. “Our survey is like a population census,” he said. “We sampled a portion of the galaxy and, based on [this] data, can estimate overall numbers in the galaxy.” Bennett and his colleagues believe there may be twice as many lonely planets as stars, adding up to hundreds of billions of lone planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone. Aww.

Hey, what’s that “aww” for? Maybe the planets like being out on their own, roaming the stars with no clingy stars dragging them back into orbit all the time.

Help my friend Ian raise funds for MS research!

My friend Ian Crowe rides in the RONA MS Bike Tour every year to help raise funds “for all the people with multiple sclerosis who need help financially to get through life and to help increase funding for research so that one day they will find a cure.”

MMO games and their avatars.

Photographer Robbie Cooper lines up real-life photos of MMO gamers with screenshots of their virtual selves.

Cuter in real life.

Actually, it’s an interesting list — some of the comparisons are touching, others cringe-inducing, and others stereotypical — and I’m sure there’s the potential for a psychology paper examining the implications of how people see and present themselves in the virtual world.

Not that I intend to embark on such an analysis.

Verifying passwords by how you type ‘em.

It makes sense, actually. Most of us, when we sit down at our usual computer and log in to our usual services, type our passwords almost by rote; “muscle memory” does more of the work than actual memory, and we “recall” the password less by consciously calling it to mind and more by simply executing a series of hand movements that ensure the appropriate keys get pressed in the right sequence.

And usually, things like the time it takes to enter the password, the force applied to each key, and the minute delays between each key-press remain relatively constant.

Whereas someone else typing in our password would type it with a very different timing.

For once, I agree with the cops.

Okay, they actually removed this lady from the Amtrak train she was on because of disorderly conduct. But there’s a bit more to the story:

For sixteen solid hours after she boarded an Amtrak train in Oakland, KATU.com reports, she yapped loudly into her goddamned phone. SIXTEEN HOURS. And she was sitting in a designated “quiet car.”

After several passengers asked her, pleaded with her — begged her just out a sense of basic human decency — to stop yelling at the top of her lungs into the greasy little piece of plastic wedged inside her clammy paw, she completely ignored them. Then, a passenger who had reached the breaking point finally mustered the courage to stand up to her. So Beard “got aggressive.”

But wait! There’s a happy ending! These things never have happy endings, but this one does! Conductors stopped the train in Oregon, where hero members of the Salem Police Department were waiting to escort Beard off the train.

Just hazarding a guess here, but based on the image of the woman that accompanies the article, I’m thinking that the excruciatingly long/loud converstaion was probably also fairly banal and overly personal in nature. The sort that isn’t just annoying, but also very awkward to have to overhear.

Sometimes, I’m glad that airplanes (unlike trains) don’t get cell reception.

Tonight’s post brought to you by Jimi:

Trippy!

Bonus Jimi:

Trippier.

Dino sent me an email alerting me to this article at Slashdot, which makes mention of the recent decision by The Recording Academy to expand four Grammy award categories to include music from video game soundtracks. This news comes only a few short months after Christopher Tin won the Grammy for “Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalists” for his masterful Baba Yetu, which was the theme from Civilization 4.

The four categories which have been expanded to include music from games — which, let’s face it, is often every bit as awesome as music from television shows and movies, are:

The Music for Visual Media (Motion, Television, Video Game Music, or Other Visual Media)

Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media (Motion, Television, Video Game Music, or Other Visual Media)

Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media (Motion, Television, Video Game Music, or Other Visual Media)

Best Song Written for Visual Media (Motion, Television, Video Game Music, or Other Visual Media)

Can it be long before games start getting their own specific award categories in things like the Grammys? I know there are the VGAs, which are kind of like the Oscars of gaming…but that’s not really the same thing. As the complexity of games and game plots increases, and as the quality thereof grows, I find myself beginning to wonder whether things like the Golden Globes and the Oscars will have to expand to cover gaming as well.

Your remote is under the couch cushion

It. Is. Science!

Latest “Most Annoying Game Ever”

Seriously, if I see or hear anyone playing this on the train home, I’mma lean over and start making the opposite sound effect to the one he is. Or, y’know, something.

Sad? Lonely? Single? Male? There’s a (Facebook) app for that

Not free, mind you. Just saying. Which, really, is kind of the final injustice for the target audience of this app. They can’t get a girl, but are too proud (or too ashamed) to pay for female companionship “in real life” (as it were)…so here’s an app where they can pay for virtual female companionship instead, in the form of a long-distance Facebook relationship.

That’s like…I can’t even…I mean…how do you…gah!

Myspace still exists?

Honestly, I think Switched was just looking for an excuse to post a photo of a possibly topless Miranda Kerr.

BlackBerry PlayBook: explain yourself!

I don’t get you, PlayBook. You’re supposed to be this genius idea, a tablet revolution, and yet the iPad 2 has you beat in most respects. Sure, you look nice, but what can you do? You run QNX, an opreating system that is far too obscure and too late in the game to compete well in the modern tablet market. And how many apps even exist for it? None? Next to none?

So what do you do? You gain the ability to use Android apps too! But wait…you can’t run them natively; you run them in an emulator that they have to be specially re-compiled for! And you don’t support apps built for Android 3.0, which are tablet-friendly apps.

Why even run QNX at all, PlayBook? Why not just go Android, and do it better than anybody else on the market? What are your makers thinking? Explain yourself!

Sign up for the BufferZone beta; test out app sandboxing for 64-bit Windows

Sandboxing is a grand little security concept and a great way to make your Windows experience — especially your internet browsing experience — just that much more secure. It’s good, solid protection against malware and virii.

We are the Borg YouTube. You will be assimilated centralized. Your biological and technological distinctiveness functionality will be added to our own linked from and embedded within our own. Resistance is futile.

In other words, YouTube’s Create site brings together all the major “make your own animated video online” services together in one convenient hub, enabling you to quickly throw together content and add it to your YouTube channel.

Because that’s what you always wanted, right?

Tonight’s post brought to you by John and Ringo:

Light me?

Furthering the theory that Richard Garriott’s passion, drive, and talent are for taking the reigning paradigm in gaming at any given point in time and pushing it to the Nth degree, the Ultima creator will be delivering the opening keynote speech at the 2011 LOGIN Conference in May.

His topic? The Third Grand Era of Games, “about how the new era of online social games can benefit from reflection about the two grand eras which came before.”

Solo player games ruled in the 1980′s and 1990′s, MMO’s ruled in the 2000′s. We are now in a new era of gaming, defined by cheap or free to play, virally spread, casually begun game play. Each grand era has grand era has grown the market by 10X! Solo player games sold to millions, MMO to 10′s of millions, we are now reaching (at long last) a truly global audience of both genders an all ages. What lessons of history are useful, what truly new challenges await us. What will “casual online games” look like in 5 years? Richard asserts that if you are not trying to solve this problem, you will be left behind.

LOGIN, for the record, is a conference of game and software developers, and focuses primarily on advances in the business of software, and in the technology underlying it. It takes place, this year, from May 16th to 18th in Bellevue, Washington. (Garriott’s speech will be on the 17th.)

With luck, the talk will be recorded and posted online, so that I can relay it to all of you Dragons and Dragonettes at some later date.

If you’re going to steal a laptop, don’t steal a computer geek’s laptop

…because he will probably find a way to frak with you.

By the way, the software that Mark Bao used — Backblaze — seems pretty nifty. I’d recommend checking it out.

For those of you familiar with Agile methods

…just remember the story of the second Death Star.

The latest and greatest quantum computer

This technology is inching, bit by bit, closer to the point of being marketable.

Firefox 4 is out

I’ve more or less entirely switched over to Chrome, myself. But the site stats suggest that most of you prefer Firefox, so grab thou thy update!

EA’s general manager thinks $60 for a game is “exploitative”

Ben Cousins has been extolling the virtues of the “free to play” model lately, and has decided to double down on his stance by declaring the full price gaming market to be “a really harsh business model.”

I suppose that this could be one possible end for the DLC distribution model: you shell out a small sum for the core game, and then add on the plotlines, characters, and suchlike that you want for incremental fees, paying (in essence) what you’re willing to in order to have the game presented to you in what way you most desire.

Could it work?

Ah…that’s why the Rustock botnet went quiet

Microsoft worked with US authorities to seize the core servers, controlling the nearly one million PCs infected with the Rustock bot.

I have enjoyed the diminished levels of spam email I’ve been receiving lately. And yes, there has been a difference.

William “The Shat” Shatner is 80 today

His hair, of course, is a bit younger than that.

Tonight’s post brought to you by Blinky:

Does anyone else find it mildly troubling that Sony was able to find a judge willing to grant their request for information that could be used to identify anyone — yes, even you — who has evern looked at noted Playstation hacker George Hotz’s website, Twitter timeline and YouTube channel?

Because personally, I think it’s an excremental ruling by a clown in a robe.

On the other hand, this couple and their use of Skype is pretty darn cool. Not that I’d recommend it for everyone, but under the circumstances it certainly worked.

Also, Charlie Sheen keeps on bi-winning…right into unemployment. So I suppose that’s it for Two and a Half Men. (That’s okay, though; The Big Bang Theory is better.)

Tonight’s post brought to you by hipsters:

Wordpress is too mainstream. I should use Tumblr.