eD, bring a gun

Man stabbed while waiting to buy GTA IV

Somewhere, someplace, some lawyer dude just had an orgasm.

Do Not Disturb. Carjacking in progress

Tuesday's release of Grand Theft Auto IV is expected to be so big, there's a real concern in Hollywood that the video game could dampen the box office for the May 2nd release of Iron Man.

With projected sales of $400 million in its first week alone, Rockstar Games' long-awaited sequel could set a precedent - one where Hollywood begins browsing video game release dates to check for conflicts.

"This will be the first major release in what is considered Hollywood's summer movie period, and if there's any title that could put a dent in box office for a major movie, it's Grand Theft Auto," says Victor Lucas, host and producer of TV's Electric Playground.

Source: here

So eD. Does that mean I have to kiss your ass in order to camp at your house, playing GTA?

And I wonder how empty the WoW server will be in the next cople of weeks?

We Are n00bs

I'm doing a new strip at Stripgenerator right now. It's more or less, game-related. No promise of regular update though.

Learning from video games

It's Tuesday so that means only one thing - maintenance day. Just when I wanna catch up to DeKach's level. Anyway, being not able to play WoW, I guess I'll write something here.

eD and I were talking about cloning when I made a reference to Y: The Last Man and how we should get a monkey to save ourselves from the inevitable gendercide. From there, the conversations got to this point:

eD: u read comic too much
rexxdelarocha: i learn more from comic than anything else
eD: more tha game?
rexxdelarocha: hurmm
eD: aku bnyk blaja melalui Civ
rexxdelarocha: hard to decide
rexxdelarocha: good point
eD: kalau aku x main Civ, i dont think aku dpt pas sejarah
rexxdelarocha: civ is the real shit
rexxdelarocha: jom main civ 4 multiplayer

eD did make a good point. Although I don't really think that you could pass a history paper - Malaysian history paper - from playing Civilization. Although I'm pretty sure that I learned more about history from Civilization than any other sources. Seriously, the only thing that you learned from World War II in the school's history books are the Japanese occupations of Malaya. I don't think there's any mentioned of Stalingrad in the school's history book. (Then again, I barely passed my history paper. So I can't be too sure)

Anyway, should this post be about Civilization or just video games in general?

*flips coin*

Hmmm. I could write about how I learned English from numerous RPGs, maths from calculating the DPS of my character from WoW, the Greek mythologies from God of War, or how to rip out someone else's spine from Mortal Kombat. Er, scratch that last one. I don't wanna give Thompson or Lieberman (or even Hillary Clinton) any more ammo on their war on videogames.

For now, let's just do Civilization. There are many civilizations that I first heard of from the Civilization series. The Inca, Maya, Aztec, to name a few.

I also learned many historical events and discoveries from the game. Hell, I first heard of the space elevator from Civilization IV. Only about a year later did my lecturer told the class about the concept of space elevator.

There's also a ton of important people in the history from many different fields being included in the game. Besides, where else can you see William Shakespeare dresses up as Elvis Presley? Also, Rock & Roll is one of the Wonders Of The World (with the game playing Velvet Underground's Rock and Roll when you discovered Rock & Roll)

Also, Civilization, more specifically, Civilization IV is one of those games that includes religion into the gameplay. Other game that I could thing of right now is Medieval II: Total War (I didn't play the first one) where you could actually wage crusade/ jihad on territories of different religion. And don't worry, no Scientology in Civ IV. Speaking of Medieval II, believe it or not, I've never heard of The Black Plague before playing the game.

Religion in Civilization basically shows one thing. It's easy to make people hate you for having different faith. When you opened up the diplomacy tab, you can see that having a different religion will have more negative effects than any other reason.

So how about you? Do you learn more from video games than school?

EndWar

I'm not really up-to-date when it comes to the gaming news. In fact, the only way I'd know what game is hot right now is by checking any references that are mention in the latest Ctrl-Alt-Del strip. That's it. I do not scour through gaming websites for news or buy any gaming magazines anymore. In fact, I haven't bought a single copy of EGM this year yet. This magazine used to be my bible.

Speaking of EGM, I keep stacks of my EGMs (after 2006) in the bathroom. So when I took a shit today, I grabbed one of them and started reading. Tom Clancy's EndWar is the featured article for that issue but somehow, I haven't read about it before.

Basically it's an RTS that focused on the tactical aspect of the strategy. To put it in a perspective, if the war on Iraq is for oil, then the tactical part is how you command the troops to get oil.

Also, (I think) the game won't be using the bird-eye sky view but a 3D view from your units, giving the perception of being in the battlefield yourself. Which means, you can only see what your units can see,

However, the part that interests me the most was the voice command features. Yes, you give orders to your troops by yelling into the mic. Just make sure that you don't freak out everyone around you when you yelled' "Alpha Team get THE FUCK INTO THAT BUILDING NOW!!" at 2 o'clock in the morning.

Voice command is not all that new. I've first heard of voice command in the game when they include it in SOCOM. Well, I'm not really a fan of RTS, least of all a console RTS, so I've never played SOCOM before. From what I heard, you can give many voice commands ("cover me", "Alpha to point A", etc) to the AI-controlled players when playing solo.

EndWar also includes around 40,000 lines of dialogs, with 9,000 of them are "unit chatters" which will give your troops their own personalities. It would be funny if you say "jump" they would actually say "how high".

Your troops will also gain experiences for each battle will react differently in the next battle by using their past experiences. If I'm not mistaken, the more experienced vets will start talking about their war stories. You can customize your troops in many different ways. Although, in these days, it is expected of a game to allow you some degrees of customizations of your digital self. Okay, that one maybe mostly cosmetics but gameplay-wise, there will be around 150 upgrades for each faction, as well as six levels of experience upgrades.

Oh, didn't I mentioned about the factions? Well, there are three - United States, Russia, and the European Federation (which is a giant country that originated from EU).

No release date is announced yet but at least there's this trailer:



"What's so civil about war, anyway?" -Axl Rose