PSA: Zen 101

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 00:24:00 -0400

In third person …

After Pecunia got her masters in Computer Science (“Pecunia, MSc.” Congratulations!) Zen got envious and decided to finally get off his arse and finish his own degree which he’s been neglecting since 1995. He’s working on getting back into MIT, and it looks like it’s going to be a steep uphill battle.

So, some side effects of him doing 16 credits this semester, starting on the 4th:

Forum name change requests sent to his email address will not be processed … HG’s official policy is not to honour name change requests unless it’s on special occasions, if you are staff, or a designated VIP (in blue). Name changes are a manual process and we don’t have the human resources to handle them.

During typical midterm / final periods, especially the week or two before said exams, his MSN accounts may hibernate. It should also be noted that he is unable to receive offline messages because it’s a proprietary IM protocol and it’s currently not supported by Adium. Please don’t take offense during this absence.

His cellphone will still be wired to the ISP so if the servers go down, he will know.

If anyone catches him online and playing in World of Conflict on Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday nights after 10pm, he’s slacking off and should be sleeping. Go into his current server and blow up his copters or tanks or something.

If there’s someone else at HG who can fulfill your request, you will probably have better luck getting in touch with them.

He still expects to finish off the promised enhancements to the forums before the end of the year.

Addiction: World in Conflict Demo

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 20:10:00 -0400

I picked up the World in Conflict Demo last Sunday, after launching StarCraft II Heaven, to get a feel of the game while we continue work on World in Conflict Heaven, which we have just launched.

Now, I’m not an expert gamer – I’m the typical single player who goes through the single-player campaign of a game, try some skirmishes, then maybe get in a few quick multiplayer games with friends and staff over a few months, and then I’m off to play another game. I’ve played through most of the RTS games we cover on HG, and most of the games use the “build up your base, get an army, go and fight, repeat until game over” model. There were a few surprises along the way, like Age 3’s Home City / Cards, Rise of Nation’s 22+ civs/Conquer the World mode, and Rise of Legends’ surprising mix of three different fantasy genres, but most of the games I’ve played are typical of the current RTS genre. Build, Kill, Repeat.

When I started the demo installation, my expectations were low, kinda like “eh… here comes another RTS clone. Surprise me.”

Surprise me it did.

The demo came with a tutorial, a single-player map from the campaign, and a multiplayer module. The tutorial was helpful, and playing the single-player map twice helped me learn the ropes. You can play USSR or the USA in the game, although there’s also a third NATO faction in the final release.

The game changes from the traditional Build/Kill concept to someone different – you don’t build bases to build units and advance technologies… your units come in as reinforcements at a drop point you designate on the map in a limited area, and in order for more units to come in you have to wait for reinforcement points to accumulate.

Along the way you pick up Tactical Aid points by killing enemy units and destroying enemy buildings, as well as capturing areas on the map, known as “command points.” These TA points enable special abilities, such as dropping in troops/tanks wherever you want on the map (vs. the drop zones you’re limited to), calling in heavy artillery or air support, and of course, nukes. Units are separated into four categories – Air, Armor (tanks), Support (artillery and AA), and Infantry. Each group have major strengths and weaknesses, which come into play in multiplayer mode.

Speaking of which, I know from our World in Conflict Forum threads that some folks were already playing multiplayer, so I signed up for an account and added them as friends. They weren’t on, and since this was a demo, I thought to myself, what the heck… let’s give it a try.

4 fun hours and many matches (I wasn’t keeping count) later, all of which played with complete strangers, all I can say is that the game is beyond awesome. The designers behind the game are pure geniuses. Multiplayer games are short and sweet, at least in the demo’s dominion mode, the longest of which is time-limited to 15 minutes. Most matches I played were shorter than that, by the fact that the game ends when all command points are captured by one side.

Teamwork in multiplayer games is even more important – If your team communicates and coordinates well, your team will almost always win over the other team if they aren’t doing the same. To help facilitate that, the game has built VOIP, so you don’t have to setup a TeamSpeak or Ventrilo server just to have voice communications. In addition, the game has a built in menu you can access through a hotkey to call to your teammates for help by marking on the map, i.e., “I need artillery here,” “I need anti air on these helicopters,” “I’m advancing here,” etc. Best of all, you can accept your teammates’ request for help, and doing so successfully will eventually earn you medals, which you can brag to others via your profile on massgate.net, the official website portal to their multiplayer service.

Their multiplayer matching service is proprietary and does not utilize the much despised GameSpy Arcade service. It is simple, elegant, and more importantly, stays out of your way if all you want to do is play a few quick multiplayer games.

So, if you haven’t picked up the demo yet, I highly recommend giving it a whirl – play the tutorial and single player campaign a few times to get acquainted, then jump straight into the fun with multiplayer games. HG has a clan, and you can find me on the server as “AnglZen”. C’ya on the battlefield!

HeavenGames Tech Blog : Archives for September 2007

PSA: Zen 101

Addiction: World in Conflict Demo