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

Posted by Devias @ 1:31 pm EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

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.

Posted by Devias @ 1:15 pm EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

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.

Posted by Devias @ 4:42 am EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

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

Posted by Devias @ 2:15 pm EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments