Sony found a new way to harass customers: They filed a patent for a technology that prevents playing second-hand games.
In a nutshell, the “game playing system” checks whether someone else already played the game on a different system and if so, it refuses to start the game.
Great, isn’t it?
With ideas like that, Sony will surely overcome it’s financial issues, soon – by going bankrupt even faster.
Need more reasons not to buy Sony?
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Justice | Tagged: Digital rights management, Games, PlayStation, Sony, Video Games | 
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Posted by digulla
All online games attract cheaters. Most of them try to ban players who cheat but Rockstar Games came up with a better approach: They herd them.
Makes me wonder what took them so long. It would be great if there was a special server for cheaters and people using modded clients. Just imagine how many people will start working on AI problems (identify threats, take cover, shooting at targets, move around in a complex maze).
Leave a Comment » | Game | Tagged: Fun, Games | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Can you make the world better by playing games?
Sure: Fold enzymes on fold.it. Scientists tried for 15 years to fold a H.I.V related enzyme, fold.it solved it in 15 days.
You know better than the government? Look at social impact bonds.
Want to improve ethical behavior of large corporations? Donate to a convent.
Under the condition that they use it to buy enough shares to submit resolutions at shareholder meetings. And if that doesn’t work, the church has centuries of experience with public shaming. As Sister Nora Nash of the Sisters of St. Francis put it: “We’re not here to put corporations down. We’re here to improve their sense of responsibility.”
Related:
4 Comments | Philosophy | Tagged: Foldit, Games, Gaming, Social impact bond | Permalink
Posted by digulla
There is a little strategic gem to buy at Humble Introversion Bundle: Darwinia. Hurry up, there are only 24 hours left … until you have to buy the game elsewhere … where you can’t set the price.
The goal of the game is to help little 2D people (the Darwinians) recapture their artificial world after a nasty virus infection. It’s not too easy and not too hard, the graphics is simple, the controls are easy to master.
I also tried Uplink (same producer) but the game is a little bit too text-heavy to blast off some steam after work.
Leave a Comment » | Game | Tagged: Darwinia, Games, Humble Bundle | Permalink
Posted by digulla
I’m addicted to a new game: Minecraft.
It’s a bit like Lego: Everything is a brick, simple rules, no documentation. Unlike Lego, you got lots of bricks. Lots. The levels are huge.
I actually managed to get lost once. Fortunately, I built my house on the highest mountain that I could find (even above the cloud layer). Right now, I’m turning the mountain into a Swiss cheese 
Besides carving your dreams out of a huge pile of rock, you can create stuff in a “crafting area” in your inventory. So far, I managed to craft shovels, hoes, picks, axes, stone, a bucket and a mine shaft trolley.
What can I do with leather?
Nah, don’t tell me, I’ll figure it out myself.
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Posted by digulla
I just finished the single player missions of Starcraft 2
– Wings of Liberty. Except for the video sequences and the end scroller (which both stuttered badly – a coder on the C=64 would have been shamed to death), it was a very nice game and story.
Since I’m not the typical PvP guy, I’ll now wait eagerly for the second part. Until then, I’ll collect my points for the other two modes of each level.
Leave a Comment » | Game | Tagged: Blizzard Entertainment, Games, Single-player video game, StarCraft, StarCraft 2, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, StarCraft Series, Strategy, Video game | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Send your troops to the red cross
I’ll post some tips to help you beat the levels in StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty here from time to time. Let’s start with the very first level “Liberation Day”. During that level, you’ll learn how to move your troops.
There is little to say about this. If you advance, use “A(ttack)” and click somewhere you can see. This way, your troops will open fire as soon as they spot an enemy. Keep your troops centered on the street to avoid having one member “cut off” (i.e. out of range to shoot the opposition). This way, all your soldiers will be able to fire at once.
If you can, right-click on single enemy soldiers to kill them more quickly. That will help to reduce damage but comes at a cost: There will be a small pause before your soldiers will start shooting the next target. So be ready to right-click the next target as soon as the previous one goes down.
The most important part is the cut scene in the middle where new troops are deployed from orbit. This is not a video, it’s in game! So as soon as you see the enemy soldiers take cover in the central area, press “A(ttack)” and get your mouse into position. As soon as the pods land, click to get your troops moving.
Timing is important here. You want to arrive there as soon as your fresh troops open fire to catch the opposition in a crossfire. If you arrive too early/late, you will take unnecessary damage.
It helps to advance your troops as far as possible without triggering the attack. See the image for a good spot. Otherwise it will take too long for them to arrive.
Another tip: If the street is too narrow, send your soldiers a little farther than necessary to open fire and then attack. This way, everyone in your army will be in range to shoot at the cost of a bit of additional damage in the first moments of battle.
Related Articles:
Mission 1 – Liberation Day (gamesradar.com)
1 Comment | Game | Tagged: Games, Liberation Day, Real-Time, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, StarCraft Series, Strategy, Video Games | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Found a solution! See this blog post.
When I tried to start the game today, it told me that 1.0.3 is available and that it needs an upgrade. After 49% of the download, the BlizzardDownloader.exe crashed. So I started it again. And again. And again.
The problem is always the same:
wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0x00000000 at address 0x245b44c (thread 0019), starting debugger...
I’ve opened a support ticket on codeweavers.
According to some comments in Wine’s AppDB by MrNice, restarting the installer eventually solves the problem.
[Update] It seems to help to delete the sc2-* files in the program directory and the file sc2-22660-22801-x86-Win-enGB-bnet-bin in the Updates folder. When I restart the game, I get the error dialog. Sometimes, a bit of the file has already been downloaded, sometimes, not even the changelog has been loaded. After closing the error dialog, the download resumes and hangs again at 49% with 3.8MB left.
[Update 2] Some people say that you just need to try often enough. That didn’t work for me. But I found a couple of *.torrent files in the installation folder which I showed to Vuze. After a couple of minutes, Vuze really started to download them … well, 4 of 5 of them. So I can’t play because no one has the 92666 byte file “sc2-16223-16291-x86-Win-deDE-locale”. Tragic.
5 Comments | Game | Tagged: Games, opensuse, StarCraft 2 | Permalink
Posted by digulla
I while ago, I downloaded the demo for X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It’s a PS3 game and I like Wolverine, so I was really excited. Whoa, they really spent some time on the levels … lush forests … tree roots, plants … okay, I can’t leave the paths (in games, heroes can’t climb or crawl … see my post on Batman Arkham Asylum *sheesh*).
Anyway. I played a while. Hack’n'slay (you have to chop people to bits with Wolverine’s claws … so he has no brain, either … oh well). Then, there was that helicopter scene. You’re on a rope bridge or an edge or something, I forget. There is this helicopter with the machine guns, making your life (or rather the game character’s life) miserable. So you jump on it, slice the window, pull the pilot out and … chop his head to bits with the main rotor of the ‘copter …
What did you feel in that moment? Please comment below.
I felt: WTF?
In an instant, I found the game revolting. All my impressions about the nice graphics, all the artistic work was washed down with a wave of disgust. To my shame, I continued to play until he end and took out the last boss. Okay, there are special moves and such … but for some reason, I didn’t buy the game and I deleted the demo without hesitation. Later, I saw a game review in TV where they showed a lot of special moves, how to use spikes and your environment to impale your enemies and gore them in various ways. For some reason, they ran it in the afternoon, around 1500.
Frankly, are you out of your mind? I’m not a softy or against so called “killer games” but some time last year, a border was crossed for me. Wolverine. Wet. Bayonetta. Brain-dead games, meant for simple button mashing, asking for the reflexes of a 15-year old but with the graphics of a motion picture.
I’m not sure who pays the money to produce such games. I’m not sure who works on such games. I’m not sure which person at Sony gave their OK for the production or distribution of such games. I don’t care. I don’t care if you think it’s OK. I don’t care if any court think it’s OK.
I’m proud to say that I feel this is WRONG.
Maybe you should read up a bit on how the human brain works. For everyone else, just don’t buy such games. They are a waste of time and money. And while there is no proof that they are bad for your soul, they aren’t any good either. As I said: A waste.
Leave a Comment » | Game, Philosophy, Software | Tagged: Games, PS3, Sony | Permalink
Posted by digulla
Ah, I like those long game titles. Anyone remembering Leisure Suite Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards? I have a feeling that a title says something about a game. If they care about the title, they care about the game.
Anyway, it’s jump, run and shooting time. Shooting with anything you can imagine and sometimes with things that you couldn’t imagine before. There’s a burp gun, a rocket launcher called “Negotiator”, a robot sidekick called Mr. Zurkon (always complaining that it can’t shoot at the innocent). I like its remarks. “Mr. Zurkon doesn’t need no pesky nanotec to survive, Mr. Zurkon lives from fear.”
Game levels are as colorful and nice as ever. Especially the Great Clock looks awesome with it’s red and gold and reflections. Ratchet finally has some fur on his ears. The levels are also pretty short, there are tons of mini-games, you can go hunt for Zoni’s to upgrade your ship, or Gold Bolts or upgrades for your weapons. Old time fans of the series will find all the good stuff again, like weapons that get better as you use them, pixel precise jumping sequences, there is an arena, and funny comments by the ton. Game play is fluent. I wished more game companies would take care of my time like Insomniac does: While the game installs on the HD, you get to see a long into movie which sets the scene. Two thumbs up for that.
The new stuff is that you can actually fly around space a bit, shoot asteroids for fun (and some bolts), play the main story or idle in some side levels. There are levels for the die hard jump’n'run people and shooter levels. And when I say “die hard”, I mean it. I’m not that bad at R&C but I’ve had to use the skip option once. Some of Clank’s jump sequences in the Big Clock are insanely hard. I must’ve died a hundred times in there. The logic puzzles are usually more simple on the “jump” side but it takes some brainpower to run yourself four times through a level, timing the switching of buttons just right to get all your copied through. And in time. Luckily, you can skip a puzzle. 95% for that one. For 100%, there should have been a way to revisit a puzzle to try it again.
All in all, they kept the great stuff and added a couple of nice, new features. The individual levels are short but plenty, so you can save often or take a break, and won’t have to start all over again.
Recommendation: Buy.
Leave a Comment » | Game | Tagged: Games, PlayStation, PS3, Recommendation, RnC | Permalink
Posted by digulla
