Devias's Blog - 2old2play

NCAA 2008 Recruiting FAQ - Comments Needed!

I have written up a fairly comprehensive Recruiting FAQ for NCAA 2008's Dynasty mode. Before I release it into the general public (probably on GameFAQS.com), I wanted to post it here and get some advice, comments, and/or corrections.

Thanks for checking it out!

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Spore for the Macintosh FIRST HANDS ON!

Spore First Thoughts

I'm at Macworld in SF and the EA booth has a playable demo (the first ever) of the long awaited SPORE, from Will Wright of Simcity fame. Plus, it was running on a Mac.

First the bad news. Even the EA rep couldn't comment on the release date, only said "late 2008". I'm thinking October, but for a game that has been continually delayed this is an even further disappointment.

What was on display was the character generation tool. Apparently there's a first phase, kind of a mini-game, where you are a single cell creature and must eat and evolve, in order to get to the actual generation.

You start with a big galaxy map, and pick somewhere in that galaxy, and make a planet. Apparently if your friends are online, you can see their planets as well, check out how their creatures are doing, etc. There's also a big library of content from both Maxis and your friends that you can see what crazy stuff people have come up with. Not just creatures, but machinery their creatures have made, the houses theyve built, etc. Apparently you'll be able to download that content into your own world.

Anyway, you start with a big blob with a spine. You can extrude the spine to make your guy longer, shorter, dinosaur like, humanoid like, etc. Then you go to the creation palettes. Each category (hands, eyes, noses, spikes, etc) has about 50 different little things you can add to your creature. The only thing you have to add to your creature is legs and a mouth.

You have DNA points, kind of works like cash. Every thing you add takes DNA points, and adds different attributes to your creature. Add 10 sets of ears, his awareness goes up. Add different mouths, he's either a carnivore or has a different mating call.

It's very easy to add things to your blob. When you drag an item over it, little control points appear, where you can stretch it, rotate it, etc. You can make long thin arms coming from his back that point downwards. You can add multiple mouths if you want. The freak of nature I built walked on all 4s and had 3 sets of arms coming from it's back - and each hand had a mouth on it.

If you drag a set of eyes onto your blob, you can set how far apart they are. Drag them close together, and it merges into one eye for that cyclops effect. Finally you can make the eyes giant or small, or if you put them on eye stalks, make the stalks point in different directions, or make the stalks really thick and the eyes really small.

You can add eye stalks, noses, dinosaur scales, all sorts of stuff. You can then paint your entire creature, add scales, give it some special abilities like flight or swimming or gills.

Finally, once your freak of nature is done, you were able to put them in the little testing arena. Here, you have a place you can watch them walk around, and yu can use all their emotes to see what they can do ala World of Warcraft. Looked to be about 50 different emotes. Happy, sad, eating, mating (!!!), dancing 10 different styles, running, sulking, injured. All that stuff, you just clicked the emote and watched the guy perform it.

Now there wasn't any actual game play being displayed. Only the character generator, which arguably was the most fun for the showroom floor.

I'll head back to Spore today and try to take some screenshots, or maybe a video. They're kind of strict on what you can take pictures of, so we'll see. Or I might have to use my cell phone camera to do it.

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Rock Band: More Tips for Drummers

Straight from Harmonix and Wired.. here's a great article to help you get that 100% on Expert.

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New Desktop Wallpaper

I can see what you're doing.

I can see your gears grinding away.

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Gaming New Years Resolutions

I thought this was an interesting article:

New Years Gaming Resolutions

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Urban Dead MMO

I play Urban Dead, which is a "low tech" web-based MMO that reminds me of those old BBS text games. You are either a zombie or a survivor in a quarantined city, made up of suburbs which have various building types.

If you're a survivor, your main goal is to loot the police departments and hospitals for weapons and medical supplies. There are many different types of buildings, so you can find portable generators, GPS radios, fire axes, all sorts of things. You barricade yourselves into buildings and join loose coalitions of other survivors. Some buildings are overbarricaded, meaning you can't get to them from the street level - you have to have the Free Running skill (which lets you enter over barricaded buildings from adjacent buildings which may be less barricaded). You gain EXP for healing others, killing zombies, etc.

All the zombies roaming the city are player controlled. They have a different skill tree, and if you die as a human you can just stand up as a zombie and join the shambling horde. You can't communicate or use weapons, but you can bite and sense wounded survivors and smash apart the barricades. Or, you can attempt to find a player-sponsed "Revive point", where well-meaning survivor scientists can convert you out of your zombie state and back into a human.

All in all it's great fun, you only have 50 action points a day to spend, and it's not a huge time investment to play every day. I would suggest checking it out, I usually play during my lunch break. When I'm a survivor my main goal is hoarding ammunition, and every few days I go outside to hunt zombies, making sure I always have enough AP left to find a barricaded building to sleep in for the rest of the day. Of course there's guilds you can join who have home bases, and perform their own activities.

When I'm a zombie it's fun to go to different suburbs and rampage through buildings, killing survivors, or joining up with the huge roaming hordes that regularly assaults the larger buildings in the game such as the Malls and the Army Forts.

Beware if you try to play in the next couple of days, as the zombies have really gone apeshit in the past week along the western suburbs. There's massive 50+ zombie hordes roaming everywhere, which makes it very difficult to survive or even to find barricaded shelters to spend the night in. This goes in phases, eventually the survivors will start fighting back along the warzones.

But for now, if you start playing as a survivor, I would suggest moving East as quickly as possible or you'll be overcome by the zombies. If you start as a zombie, I would also suggest heading East, because many of the western suburbs are ravaged, meaning there's no survivors or barricades left to attack in order to gain EXP.

Finally, the game won't let you play more than a couple of characters at once. It'll recognize your IP address and restrict you to 150 or so total APs in any given 24 hour period. Your best bet is to create a survivor and a zombie and play them separately in different areas of the city.

Anyway, here's the game link: urbandead.com

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X360 Media Server

Now that the Fall Update lets you play Divx and Xvid files on your 360's Media Blade, I decided to take several uPnP servers out for a spin so I could connect my computer to my 360 via my wireless network.

TVersity was the first one I tried out. Great product, and it's free. It also comes with the option to do on-the-fly transcoding of unsupported video formats. Basicaly, if you have say a Quicktime movie (unsupported on the X360), it'll convert it to something that you can play on the X360 in real time. This of course takes up some CPU power on your host machine, and now that Divx is supported natively, it's something I didn't use much.

Tversity also had a handy preview window of how your folders and music was organized. That ended up becoming part of the problem. The product organized your music into several folders, which made sense (Artist, Year, Album, etc). However, you couldn't organize it your own way. You have to stick with Tversity's organizational schema, which can get tedious when you have to go to Photos/All Photos/Slideshow/Foldername/2007/Folder. Finally, Tversity has trouble with media library updates. Often I had to run back into the host computer and hit "refresh all" for it to find music that I just added to it. You could schedule it to auto-rescan if you left your computer on all day, but on-the-fly updating would have been nice.

I am now using TwonkyMediaserver, which is free for 30 days and then $20 or so afterwards. It has a web-based configuration utility, so I can add files to the library from anywhere on my wireless LAN. You can configure your own folder settings unlike Tversity. It also comes with a ton of internet radio stations that stream perfectly (as "Saved Playlists") from the X360 music blade. What I am not sure is if Twonky can stream Youtube or podcasts, like Tversity does. It updates the library automatically and seems "faster" than Tversity, probably because the default installation is a little more bare bones that Tversity, without all the built in folder settings and URLs.

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Rock Band Endless Playlist Time Out

I'm working on the Endless Playlist set and wanted to offer a bit of advice. First, it's 58 songs, so it'll take you and your bandmates several hours to complete. Not too bad if you decide to just let your X360 sit there overnight while you come back and finish it off.

Problem is, if you have set your X360 to turn off after a few hours in the System Blade, you could accidentally screw yourself. I keep my X360 on while I listen to music and whatnot using my TwonkyMedia server, and I often forget to turn it off at night, which is why I set the auto-shut off.

Make sure you disable this feature before leaving your X360 on all night while you attempt to finish this very difficult achievement.

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Rock Band Bass Pedal Assistance

I've recently picked up Rock Band, and having no experience in real life drumming nor any other type of rhythm games, I was scouting around looking for some advice on getting used to the Bass Pedal. I read this excellent article (work in progress) on the GameFAQ forums, it gave some good tips and I'm looking forward to practicing.

Bass Pedal Tips and Tricks

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