Steve Mactaggart's Blog

I've got some time off this week prior to easter, and so Mum thought it might be a great time to come visit, and of course it was.

It seems the gaming gods aligned, as some friends let me know that there was an exhibition in the city about the history of gaming. Given the fact that Mum was more of a gamer than me when I was young we were always going to be heading in to check it out.

So off we went, into the city to Fed Square, and then to find the Australian Center for the Moving Image.

I think its $14 per adult to get in, and discounts available for concession card holders, students and kids.

So what is it, well for more details head over to the Game On
site, but here is the official blurb.

Get ready for Melbourne's must-see exhibition of 2008 - the action-packed celebration of games culture that has thrilled over one million players of all ages around the world. Game On tracks the development of videogames from the first computer game to arcade-era hits and the very latest from today's billion dollar industry.

Original illustrations by Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto and concept sketches behind classics like Tomb Raider and Grand Theft Auto provide unique insight into the creative process of game development. Rarely-seen consoles, controllers, arcade machines, packaging and collectables are brought together in a showcase of game history like no other.

So what are our thoughts... Really interesting to see all the consoles, many more than I remember, but there was not enough detail on the games. They have sort of collected games into areas like, family, multiplayer, regional games, etc.. But they should have done more about genre's like the evolution of RTS and such.

Classic games like pong, space invaders, galaga and such are there, but its the early pc titles that started the genre's that are dominant today were spaced out.

Don't get me wrong, the presentation was great, we spent over 2 hrs walking around reading about the history of the consoles and games and such. There was a great collection of handheld gaming platforms on show, and most of them even playable. But there were some things that I think were missing.

There were some classic games that launched entire genre's, things like First Person Shooters, Role Playing Games, Real Time Strategy and Multiplayer Online Games.

These sections should have shown some of the early games that were ground breaking, and the evolution of these games as the technology progressed.

So lets start with some lists.

First Person Shooters

1. Doom I and II


2. Quake


3. Duke Nukem


4. Goldeneye


5. HalfLife


6. Halo

Role Playing Games
There are a whole heap here, and I'm not sure where they work in order but these are some of the most early classics I can remember.

1. Final Fantasy


2. Phantasy Star


3. Might and Magic


4. Zelda


5. Wonder Boy

Real Time Strategy

1. Dune 2


2. Warlords


3. Command and Conquer / Red Alert


4. Dark Reign


5. Warcraft

Multiplayer Online Games
With the recent introduction of widespread broadband, these games have been a more recent introduction. But even spanning back to the early days you can find games which had a life of their own online playing with and against friends.
You'd be hard pressed to find a modern game that doesn't have some sort of online option, although that is becoming more

1. Unreal Tournament


2. Ultima Online


3. World of Warcraft

There are many other genre's also like side scrollers (sonic/mario), early adventure games (commander keen/rodger wilco), text games (leisure suit larry / kings quest) and racing games (outrun, street rod, carmageddon, many more).

Other games I can think of that were a big part of my childhood.
Alex Kid
Breakout
River Raid
Teddy Boy (Don't touch the den den's)
1942

Anyway this is no where near an exhaustive list nor was it supposed to, but if there is another games show I'd love to see someone (with more resources than me) research all of these games, their release dates, sales figures and the consoles they were released for. We wouldn't have to have working versions of them all, but just the recognition that they existed and had an impact on peoples lives (and futures :) ) is all I ask.

Posted by at 5:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We've had it for a while, but haven't had a chance to blog about it.  Its my new Wii.

At the moment I'm in the middle of Zelda and Paper Mario.  Really waiting for Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.

Really want Nintendo to get their internet access and channels developed for the Wii.

Technorati Tags: Gaming, Wii

Posted by at 5:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I know most of my janblguary posts have been WOW related, but I have been chasing the others to catch up, and although I’m not a lot closer I did get to spend a good chunk of the last 24hrs playing WOW.

My main warrior (Talac) is now a level 37, and most of the way to 38.  He’s got a couple of quests left that are pretty straight forward and so should push him to 38 in the next day.

I also continued my Mage (Morlac) hes now a level 8, still young but I have invested a couple of hours in him now.  It’s differnt playing a Mage, nicer to be able to stand away from the action and destroy it.  I teamed up with my first human player tonight and it was great to let him drag and get attacked then I can cast 1–2 spells and kill the enemy..

I also resurected my Priest (Palac) hes now in crossroads and up to level 12. I didn’t realise how much time I had spent playing him, its a good 12hrs or so.

The big WOW news is that I found that Auctioneer is actually working.(link is to a development version)  It’s not an official release but what the developers call a Gamma.  It’s basically finished just a few bugs before they can fully release it. I have it installed and there are a couple of glitches, but the main thing of seeing what an item is worth and what it sold for in the Auction House is GREAT!!

Highly Recommended.

Tomorrow I’ll go through my addons and post them up here as there are a couple I really like.

The other application news to share is that I eventually found the FREE download of AVG. For those playing at home who don’t know what AVG is, its a free virus scanner from grisoft.  It’s only free for home use, but as my work machine is a linux machine there are other solutions for that.  AVG is my first recomendation to anyone at home looking for solid un-obtrusive virus protection. Their v7.1 expires mid Feb, but I have eventually given in to the nag screen and actually downloaded the upgrade to v7.5.

night.

Posted by at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Very hot Saturday. The one thing I notice is that the Study has no cooling, and with all the electrical equipment around it gets hot.  The back story is that Melbourne had another 30+ day, and we have air con in the house.. So obviously I turned it on. But alas, there are no vents in the study and so cook did I.

What else today, watched more of FifthGear, up to the last episode of this season, so I guess that means I watched episode 11 and 12. Got the last episode of the season to go, its one where they give awards for the year so is partially a clip show.

Waiting for TopGear to come back, after Hammond’s bad crash I wasn’t sure if the show would even continue, but it seems that his recovery has been great and so on with the show.

So what does the title of the post have to do with my rants, so far nothing….

But dinner tonight was Garlic Prawns, and It seems I purchased way too much and I had to either eat huge helpings of prawns, or get some assistance.  The call went out to Matt and Michelle who luckily enough were not busy and so joined us for dinner.

At some point post prawns Sharkey asked to check out blacksmithing on WOW.  He’s the lvl 50 odd whos miles above my lowly 37 but he wanted to see some blacksmithing and so we got online. The next thing you know its nearly 2 hrs later and we’ve been doing blacksmith quests all the time.  Off to the auction house to buy the mats, back to the forge to make them, etc…  He burnt nearly 10g of mine tonight.  I’m a gatherer who only really sells at the Auction House, but tonight was talked into, after a bottle of red, purchasing the mats from the Auction House.  It did make the lvl’ing up faster, but seems a bit like cheating to me.

So anywho, am a lvl180 blacksmith now just don’t have the money or mats to make anything else.I leveled up today to 37 with my Warrior by spending some time in Arathi.  Got a few areas to work on at the moment and XP is not to hard to come by.

Anywho, seeing as this post is actually late I should hit submit.

night.

Posted by at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Post 3 of Janbloguargy was supposed to start off with a recount of tonights first round back Indoor Soccer match, but as the title says we won on Forfiet.  Tonight was supposed to be the first game of the new season and even though it was about 35C around Melbourne this arvo I was looking forward to it.

Hot day at work again, being Thursday was time to record this weeks Right Odds.  I don’t think I’ve talked about TRO before, so let me introduce it.

A few months ago, probably round 22 weeks ago, Peter Lucas and I had the idea to start a podcast discussing the coming weeks sporing events. 20 weeks ago we started The Right Odds with just a dodgy mike and 5 minuite shows.

After a couple of weeks Pete realised that it needed 2 people and so I joined the show to co-host. We are up to week 20 (this week) and we have even started a second show The Right Odds Review, which runs on Mondays and is all the results from the sporting world over the weekend.

There’s a flash player built into the site to listen right there so feel free to pop by and have a listen.  I’m pretty happy with where its going and what we have been able to do.

Its totally free and goes for between 20 and 55 minuites.  It’s ITunes listed and on other agregators like Odeo and Digg’s new podcast directory.

Yes I did start my new Mage on WOW, I wanted to be a Tauren mage till I found out that they can’t have mages, so it had to be a Troll.  If your on Dalaran (the server) and see either Morlac (my new Mage) or Ralac (my main Warrior) say hi.

Still on WOW, i’m yet to get the latest patch.  Now I know I have a wierd NAT issue, but i can direct http download anything so whats the issue.  The Blizzard downloader tells me I have to map ports, but the issue is my ISP actually does NAT on this connection so mapping ports aint going to help.  The should at least offer a link to a direct download.  The last patch I got of some mirror somewhere so I guess its googling again.

Back off to play some Ralac again.

Night.

Posted by at 8:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After listening to The Java Posse podcast, I heard about a few Java games written that start to show off the performance of java in a game development.  I'm sure there are heaps more available, but so far I have found and tried:

• Wurm
• Runescape

And have on my list to try

• Chrome
• Quake 2 java port

Feel free to post a comment here on more games..  If I find may more or have any review I'll keep you updated.

Posted by at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m running my first poker night tomorrow with some of the guys from work and a couple of mates.  The plan is to get round the table with some beers and pizza, have the footy on in the background and get into some card action. I’m suggesting we play Texas Holdem, not some sort of stud.

I think a heap of us have been watching the WPT on tv and got the itch to play some poker ourselves.  So I got organised, picked up some chips sent a few emails and got a serious response of interest. 

So the game is on, we have the cards, the chips the players the beer and the pizza can be ordered.

We are just playing for fun at the moment, but if some of the guys want to take it to a financial game, I'm sure that we can cater for that too.

My play is to try and play each fortnight, rotating the hosting duties amongst our houses to make it easier for everyone.  Now its just time to sit and wait and see how it all goes.

I guess as this is our first go at poker I better find some rules and instructions to print out so we are all playing on the same page.

Tags: Poker Texas Holdem

Now playing: The Chris Pirillo Show - Interview with Andru Edwards

Posted by at 8:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I ripped out a game I had lying around and chucked it on again.  I forgot how much fun Empire Earth (EE) could be, and also that I hadn’t given it nearly enough of my time.

I am a huge fan of RTS games, but havn’t played through many since the serious time wasting days of Red Alert and Command and Conquer.

On the old machine EE played a bit slow, at a low res and was probably the reason that it went back on the shelf.  But today was its time to be re-born.

On the new pc with tones of processor and ram the game runs perfectly, at the top resolution with all options on.  From what I saw yesterday, the game is massive. There are 10–13 age’s to navigate thought, starting off in the Prehistoric age going all the way through to the Nanotech age.

I decided to explore the tech hierarchy by playing a skirmish game against the computer, but it took nearly 4 hrs to get through the first 3 ages..  The requirements to do the upgrade a huge and the time to collect the resources are long so it extends the game.  That said, it makes you have to balance your civ..  Do we spend all resources becoming a technological master, or invest in a solid army to cut down and destroy the opposition?

Initial impressions, after playing for about 1/2 a day, is that it seems to have a great balance and upgrade structure.  I hope to get this on the list of games to play at the next sharkeyLan.

Posted by at 6:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With getting my new laptop, I have been able to do things not possible for a few years… Play modern games. At the moment the only thing i’ve really looked at is The Sims 2..  I tried it on the old one, but at even the lowest detail it ran like a dog, now at full resolution with all the options on it flys.

What has this to do with Poker I hear you ask? Well thats another thing that I have seriously gotten into, not because of the new laptop, but just because I found a cool online place to play it.

I’ve been playing @ Party Poker . net for the last few days, and with WWdN posting about playing in a Poker tournament I got the urge to get in and dirty..  I got stuck playing till about 3:30 last night, on a couple of tournament tables, predominantly playing NL Holdem, but making an effort to try most forms of the game.

I’d still consider myself a serious amature, only just starting to work out some stragegy and such, but it has been heaps of fun..  We used to play poker in the real world, but it didn’t work that well, we were playing 5 card stud, or so I think, but I find hold’em is a much more strategic game.  Might have to get back into it.  On that point I did some research into getting some actual chips.. This site has some real casino grade chips, but are a US company.. want to try and find a local supplier.

Historically we have played with all different things, 1/2cent pieces, silver coins, event M&M’s.. But real chips would be so much better.

Now what does this have to do with The Sims 2 I hear you ask… I know, i’m getting there.

Wouldn’t it be cool to combine the 2. Have simulated poker partys, buy a poker table, cards and chips and be able to invite people over to play.. But not play the way the sims do now, actually play with other people, much like Party Poker . net works, but within the Sims game…

Would allow me to use the full rendering power of my new machine, while still having the fun of playing poker.

Ok, so its a tenious link, but I wanted to write about them both and that seemed like the best way to link them.

Anywho, off to fix Albert the to watch the Pies smash the Bombers…  Go the Pies.

Posted by at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)