February 2005 Entries
From Stratics:
"The Stratics Media Group is proud to announce the title of 404 Gaming’s upcoming Hip-Hop MMORPG: Hip-Hop Legends. Adam Ghetti, Senior Creative Director and co-founder of 404 Gaming, describes Hip-Hop Legends as “what Electronic Arts wanted The SIMS to be”. The game, to be released in 2005, will be an innovative product offering a unique experience to the Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming community."
I'm not quite sure what to say here, but bear in mind that regardless of what EA wanted the game to be, The Sims Online turned into some kind of Lord of the Flies, Dante-esque vision of...
Finally got a PC running Windows XP at work, and fiddling with all the bits concrened mostly with look and feel, I stumbled upon the 'Cleartype' option. This doesn't seem to be on by default, and is buried quite deep, so if you've not found it, it's in Display Settings, Appearance Tab, Effects Button.
It seems simple enough - some kind of dynamic anti-aliasing for system fonts, but switching this on works wonders for the look of Windows. Suddenly all the fonts on webpages, dialogue boxes, applications, etc, all look softer, smooth and stylish. Toggle it on and off a...
On the subject of obsession, clinical addiction and games-become-reality, Everquest 2 seems to have taken one more step into the Matrix-like dystopia Daily Mail columnists fear...the '/pizza' chat command.
When typed into the chat-box, it fires up your browser of choice, and takes you to a specially designed page on the Pizza Hut website, where you can order pizza to be sent to your PC Gaming Cryopod, thus negating the typically tedious business of going off and having a meal, etc.
I guess it was always on the cards, although it does seem a bit sinister in some vaguely indefinable way....
I guess this is all suddenly newsworthy off the back of the staggering success of World of Warcraft, which recently went on sale in Europe, and sold more copies in one day than had been previously thought to be the entire European MMORPG market.
I'm a bit bemused by it really...I know from sad and bitter experience that 'WoW' is going to be exactly like all the others, a mildly diverting waste of time for just long enough to pass beyond the first 'free' month, then a tiresome repetition exercise after that, culumnating in a sudden release of frustration and quitting....