I recently grabbed myself a new PC to play games on (nothing special spec wise, it’s just an iMac isn’t exactly a monster games machine) and so I’ve been spending a lot of time installing games. This has been annoying me no end because I’ve decided that most installers are really nasty. For a start if I need to use a CD then I just know that I’m going to have to replace most of the installed files with changed downloaded versions anyway; some of these MMOs require gigabytes of patches from their base CDs nowadays so I’m looking...

Computer games used to be easy. When I was a kid with my Spectrum I’d think nothing of throwing myself against the same problem again and again until I learnt how to get past and encounter the next, probably more obscure, problem. I learnt how to get and what to do with a babelfish. I found out that using the pulley with the rubber chicken was rather useful. I’d worked out the foolproof method for docking in Elite 100% of the time! I’d even be able to get more than a few levels into R-Type. This week R-Type was released on...

This year promises to be the start of a big push to put MMOs onto consoles. Previously we’ve only had games such as Everquest Online Adventures and Final Fantasy XI Online which, to be fair, haven’t been massive successes on the consoles. This year will see the first few games sneak onto consoles. It’s unclear at the moment which ones will make it, but games such as DC Universe Online, Freerealms and Age of Conan are all threatening to release on consoles sometime soon. The age of console MMOs is upon us, but what does that mean? The benefits of putting MMOs...

My last post was rather positive about WAR, but this one will be less so. I spent a large chunk of the evening with RvR as my primary goal, which means sitting in long waiting lists and trying to take a very stubborn cannon away from those stunties to push back and throw that balance back into favour of the much more appropriate red colour. Tenacious little stunties made that rather hard without a larger organised force, which wasn't forthcoming and so got rather dull rather quickly. This meant I spent a lot of time in a waiting list for a...

I am, for now, without any Windows based computers at home. This is due to a failing hard disk on my iMac and my utter laziness in buying something new and cheap from Dell (have you seen the spec of their cheap machines?) and not any real [Windows sucks/computers are too powerful/games rot the mind/have I missed any other common complaint] reason. A while back I tried getting LOTRO to run on the Mac, but decided it was easier to just reboot into windows. Now I can't do that I installed Crossover Games and decided to start small with Guildwars...

Here I am sitting playing GTA IV quite happily and somebody goes and parks a Ferari outside my house. Do you think they'll let me podcast from prison? No? Oh well, scratch that plan then, he can keep his car.

Is it just me or was that episode of Doctor Who a set up for a spin off?

http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/05/mass-effect-pc.html So... Mass Effect on the PC is going to have SecuROM like Bioshock had: 3 installs before you have to phone up. OK, nasty but nothing beyond what you have with installing Windows. PCs are evil right? Now how can that possibly be made worse? Oh, I see. Every 5 to 10 days it dials home to check that you've still not pirated it and if this doesn't work it's going to shut you down. If you don't play the game for 10 days and then try to play with no internet connection, you know if your laptop isn't...

Please be warned, this may not be a 100% positive review of GTA IV. War crimes? Ethnic Cleansing? Suspicious deaths of leaders during their trial? Michael Palin shows that show it to be a country of very normal people who just want to move on? (which, by a conspiracy theory friendly coincident was restarted on BBC 2 tonight) Serbia is a country that has had  a lot of bad publicity in the 90s, and now in the whatever-we're-meant-to-call-thems we're looking at again, the latest view being presented by GTA IV, the game where the hero is the product of the war...

M'colleague Van Hemlock is running a feature where he details features and ideas from MMOs that he thinks are nifty, so I thought I'd steal the idea as punishment for him making us sound like a couple on Shut Up We're Talking this week. Now I can't do MMOs of course as he's doing such a good job at that so I'm going to come at it from the console angle. Very few of these ideas will be obviously MMO based, but I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that MMO as a term is what's wrong with this end of...