Browsing the web and.....

... found all kinds of goodies!

(Disclaimer: if it's not already apparent, I'm a gamer. I spend my spare time playing games. Ummm... that is all.)

Hellgate: London looks very interesting. The mystical/religious underpinings that seem to permeate the game piques my interest. I'm not sure how deeply the are going to get into the good/evil thing as that really doesn't interest me. I've always liked the 'hands off' approach that most modern media take when thinking about the battle between the angels and the demons. Angels pretty much stay to the sidelines while the demons are allowed to wreak as much havoc as they possibly can. Why? Because they can! Think Constantine (moreso the comic than the movie though the movie did a semi-decent job as well) and how they illustrate the mythical battle between Heaven and Hell.

Battlefield 2142 (video available at link) is a title that I'm a little conflicted about. BF2 was great and I spent a great deal of time playing with some friends. Then they started putting out the "booster packs". The first one was a flop. I purchased it out of some insane need to be able to keep up with my friends and play on the new maps with them. I've put in a total of 2 hours on those maps in total of about 200 hours playing. So needless to say, I was a bit jaded when the next pack came out, Euro Force, and didn't pick it up. In fact my BF2 interest started to wane partly because of the need to keep 'boosting'. Which gets me to the next topic.....

Is it really such a good idea to pound out another BF game within the first year of ... errm.. the first one? Are you diluting your possible player base or just assuming that fans will dish out another $60 CDN for another game? Consider the investment a BF2 player has already made: $60 for the game, about $30 CDN for both of the booster packs and another to be released in June. So if a player keeps up with all the booster packs, he/she has paid $150 CDN to play a game that may be made obselete with the introduction of BF 2142 how is that player supposed to feel?

I only purchased the Special Ops pack and I already feel cheated. And I don't even play the game anymore. Something to think about, no?

Also Eve-Online had some extended downtime today. They were only supposed to be down for a half dozen hours but it seems they've extended it quite signifigantly. I wonder what the problem is? They've usually been pretty good about estimating their downtime.

In other Eve news, the CCP guys (creators of Eve) have announced a partnership with some company (I'll get a link later when the Eve forums are back online) to offer in-game voice chat. This, however, will be a 'premium service'. Read that: you will pay extra for it. I'm not sure I understand but I'll take a swing at trying to comprehend.

As it stands, if I really needed to use voice chat I could set up my own Ventrilo or TeamSpeak server on one of my machines here for a limited amount of users. I've also got a couple of friends who run servers and love it when I stop by and use their servers. But now CCP want to include some sort of remotely hosted voice comms accessible directly in the client for anyone that wants to pay the premium price.

Now the only thing that makes me wonder is if someone has voice comms as part of their service, can you 'hail' them while passing in space? Would the client be made more stable in the audio side of things? As it stands, I don't play with audio enabled because of cracking and popping that makes playing unbearable. When I disable the sound it also seems to improve performance. So does that mean that in game voice comms wouldn't work, or be effective, for players like me? There's a pretty large segment of the server population that play the same way for the same reasons. If the audio problems were fixed and and they added some neat features to the voice comms, I might consider it. I suppose, like most things, we'll wait and see.