Odd Player

Lately, IVe noticed that some games (such as Unreal Tournament 3 and Clive Barker’s Jericho) require you to install the software version of Ageia’s physics engine onto your system. It bathers me, because it’s wholly separate from the game and integrates itself into Windows as a service, and you also have to uninstall it separately from whatever game is using it. Why can’t this software be just part of the gaming code itself, like the Havok system (from Source games) or earlier physics engines? Ageia has already been all but laughed out of existence for its silty hardware “physics accelerator,” so is the engine worth the extra intrusiveness into my system?

This brings up a larger point: Lots of online games require other add-ons to facilitate matchmaking. Personally, I despise GameSpy and its ilk, and I wonder why more games can’t have their own integrated software that doesn’t need to be installed separately on your system. Is the industry just specializing? Are developers just outsourcing more and more of everything?

Am I the only person who gets annoyed by the intrusive third-party apps? What do you guys think of all this?

Just wanted to offer a word of encouragement to developers trying to find more than just “Six Million Ways to Die” in gaming. Indigo Prophecy’s David Cage points out that now that he’s 19, he “expects more from the medium than cutting off heads,” Well, I’m 19, too. In fact there are a buttload of us. The first generation of videogamers is ripening, but not diminishing.

We - birthed by Commodores, Ataris, and ColecoVisions; weaned on NESand Sega; now settling into the glorious PC evening of our days - are still gaming. Now is the time for industry innovators to look to the maturing future of gaming and cash in on a market that will only grow from now to forever.

Cutting off heads was a biast - now let’s see what else we can do.

I just finished reading the Ultimate Gaming Machine article (GfW) and saw that the winner, VoodooPC, underperformed Falcon Northwest on all of the test-run scores on pages 122 and 123. To me, it looks like Falcon won. What’s up with that?

Over the last 10 years, I’ve had to buy three PS2s, two Xboxes, and two Xbox 350s. You can do absolutely nothing when you see the PS2’s “Disc Read Error” or the 36O’s “Three Lights of Oeath.” except hope that the overlords will be kind enough to break down and fix your problem for free. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case for me, and I’ve found rTjyself spending just as much - if not more - on unreliable consoles, games, controllers, and memory cards than on a gaming PC.

The real injustice: the fact that I’m doling out so much money for games that (at best) are half the quality of PC titles. Keep up the great work, guys, and I’ll keep telling even my non-PC gaming friends to read.

Speaking as a Christian myself, I often find the Christian culture to be annoying. We are called to be the salt of the earth. We are to engage culture, not avoid it. Instead, we often take secular things and make mediocre, Christian versions of them. A problem with videogames that all gamers are starting to notice is the lack of decision-making: The basic plot is “this person is bad, so we must kill them.”

This is often not the case in real life; we have to live with people we do not like, and often people are not murderous and evil. We all sin; the question is…what do we do with that sin? God calls us to repent and sent Jesits Christ to die for our sins.

Christians are often stale and hypocritical. Its hard to be a Christian gamer, because I cannot support many amazing games thanks to the amount of things in them that God does not approve of. I call everyone to make an alternative - not to make a Grand Theft Auto clone where the objective is to throw Bibles at people and watch as they become saved, instead of throwing Molotov cocktails and watching them explode. Life is precious, and God allows for recreation along with work. As Christians, can we come up with an alternative that rocks…or are we stuck with saying, “Well, at least it isn’t secular”?

It’s nice that the people you interviewed in the World of WarCraft cover story mentioned their favorite areas, bosses, and raids.

It’s too bad that most of these are no longer visited as the content in The Burning Crusade has rendered any and all loot out of these instances obsolete in less than three weeks of questing.

Ragnaros was mentioned two times: As a denizen of Molten Core, he gets very few if any visitors these days, Onyxia? When was the last time her head (never mind Nefarian’s head) was seen in Orgrimmar or Stormwind? Blackwing Lair? AQ40?

Naxx? Phttt!! Why bother?

And that is the biggest failing of TBC. In one expansion, Blizzard has removed any and all reasons to venture into pre-TSC high-end instances.