I came across this during my blog reading. Imagine two people, controlling a total of 46 WoW characters plus one server. The geek in me is like… nifty, 47 boxes, but the other part of me wonders what one would do controlling 23 WoW accounts. Not to mention, how much money are these people bringing in that they have this kind of hardware… it’s nuts I tell ya, nuts.
It’s no wonder that sometimes gamers get a bad reputation. Case in point: Halo 3 Beta. The beta was opened up yesterday, however, there was an issue with those who had gotten into the beta by purchasing a copy of Crackdown. Apparently there was something going on behind the scenes that Microsoft had to fix before the beta could be downloaded. Not a big issue when you first think about it, really, but to the rabid fanboys, it was the end of the world. I was over at the Xbox.com forums yesterday to see what the scoop was, and stumbled across a thread with updates. I don’t think I should have went in there. It amazes me how upset people become over a beta test. Here’s some examples of what I read, and my thoughts:
I spent 60.00 to get in on this beta and now they’re screwing us over
First of all, if you bought Crackdown just for the beta, well, I think you have some issues there. Secondly, there was no “release date” for the beta on the box. And third… it’s a BETA.
We should sue Microsoft for false advertising
I laughed out loud at this. False advertising? Where does it say that you WILL get into the beta on 5/16 on the box?
We should demand a refund on Crackdown if we mainly bought it for the beta
Right, that’ll fly. Again, who’d pay 60.00 to get into a beta test?
It just amazes me how much people think they are entitled to. You should be happy the developers are allowing you in to even play the beta to begin with. I realize that a lot of those doing the bitching and moaning are teenagers, but it still gives outsiders a view that gamers are always whining about something. Me, I’m perfectly content on waiting. I bought Crackdown for the game, the beta was just an added bonus.
While I’m on the subject of bad gamers, let’s look at those on Xbox Live. For those of you who aren’t aware, Xbox Live is Microsoft’s online service for the Xbox / Xbox 360, which allows people to game together (Gold membership), and also allows people to communicate via a friends list, and most recently via Windows Messenger. One of the features of Live is realtime voice chat while in game. For most gamers, this is not a problem, and it’s actually a nice feature, especially when you’re playing a team oriented game, such as Rainbox Six: Vegas. But there are those gamers who take the opportunity to spew garbage from their mouth every chance they get. The worst part? A lot of the gamers guilty of this are barely in their teens. If I talked half as bad as these kids, I’d be grounded until I was 30.
I didn’t mean for this to go down the rant road, but at the same time I felt compelled to share my thoughts about this, since I myself am a gamer.
I managed to do a bit of geeking around this weekend, mostly involving my modded Xbox. I updated all of the software on it, and it’s running fine and dandy. I really dig the new version of Xbox Media Center, and I was pretty surprised to find that there is support for Python scripting. I might have to check that out. Additionally, I’ve acquired a new machine to replace my old PIII server / myth backend. I’m probably going to be working on that this week. The machine is going to take over myth (both frontend and backend) and samba duties. I don’t really use the internal webserver that much anymore, other than for statistical purposes of the server itself, so I may or may not set that back up.
In gaming news, remember this post I made concerning Vista? Seems like John Carmack agrees with my assessment:
Nothing is going to help a new game by going to a new operating system. There were some clear wins going from Windows 95 to Windows XP for games, but there really aren’t any for Vista. They’re artificially doing that by tying DX10 so close it, which is really nothing about the OS … They’re really grasping at straws for reasons to upgrade the operating system. I suspect I could run XP for a great many more years without having a problem with it.
Check out the full article for more information, but it’s good to know I’m not the only one taking notice to this. As I mentioned previously, it’s really up to the game developers as to what technology they use, but here’s to hoping that they stick with DirectX 9 for a while. Granted, these days I’m more of a console / handheld gamer than a PC gamer, but it still bugs me a bit that MS can just say, “Oh, well the newest DX will be on our new OS, and it alone!”. How convenient.
It’s been a little while since I’ve posted anything. Work lately has just kinda gotten me to a point where I just want to sit down and veg out in front of the TV or the Xbox for a while. You might have noticed I deleted posts dealing with site updates. I think from this point if I have anything interesting I add to the site, I’ll just mention it during another post.
So anyway, I’ve been putting some time back into my 360, lately playing some games downloaded from the Xbox Live Arcade. It was a pretty cool idea to integrate downloading of smaller and retro games for the 360, at least I thought. Some examples of what they offer include: Pac Man, Ms. Pac Man, Contra, Lumines Live (an addictive puzzle game) and Small Arms. These are fun, and there’s no disc to plop into the drive, it’s all about just firing up the console and selecting it. Good fun, and quite relaxing to boot, really.
Obviously since I’ve been away from the computer a bit, I haven’t done a whole lot of geeking around with anything. I have some ideas for nifty little projects I can use to learn Python, it’s just a matter of getting some motivation to actually start coding and playing around again. Sometimes I get motivated, but lately work has been taking a bit of a toll on me. Thankfully the weekend is almost here and I can chill out. Anyway, I’m going to wrap this up for now. I’m off to play some 360…. and miss my love.
I usually like to take a bit of time to look back on the year and reflect, so I figured I’d make a post out of it. This is going to be my last post of 2006, since I’m going out of town (in fact, leaving at midnight Thursday). I’ll just make note of a couple things so I don’t bore you too much.
XBox 360 Invades my place
I had held back on buying a 360 for some time since I wanted to see how the games panned out, but I can honestly say I’m very happy with my purchase. The games are great, and the Xbox Live arcade is also pretty darn cool. Gears of War is my favorite game of choice, and the online play is a lot of fun as always.
I finally wise up to VMware
After a couple of switches back and forth between Linux distros, and ultimately coming back to Gentoo on the desktop, I finally got turned on to VMware, specifically VMware Player. With this nifty piece of software, I can toy around with other distros (or other operating systems) and not worry about blowing away my current install. It works well, too.
Passing of my father
This stands out as point in 2006, for the obvious reasons. It was quite unexpected when it happened, since it seemed to just sneak up and take him. He died from lung cancer. I refer to this as the darkest point in my life since it really messed with me. Thankfully with the help of family and friends, I’m slowly moving on past it. However, good does come out of bad, and I have met the most wonderful woman in the world. Yes Bethany, that would be you :)
I begin to work out
I joined a gym towards the end of the year, with the goal of easing my stress and making myself feel better. So far, so good. It seems to be helping me, which is something I was hoping for.
So, there you have it. 2006. I’m outta here until 1/3, so I hope everyone has a safe and happy new year.