<3 Gaming

Lots of neat things have been eating up my time lately, just thought I would share a bit of the progress I have been making on them since it has been rather quiet around here lately.

PARPG:
I  may not have mentioned this here yet, but I recently became a full fledged developer on the open source indie game, PARPG (working title). It is an isometric 2d RPG set on a post apocalyptic earth. It is currently in super early development stages, and I really do mean super early. Mostly tons of back-end decisions and coding are in the works. Probably the two biggest undertakings (in the programming department) at the moment are the design and implementation of our questing engine as well as the restructuring of the limited GUI code we have right now so that its more modular. If anyone is interested in checking it out we should hopefully be releasing a tech demo of the game in late December I would guess, but depending on development speed it should be out this winter at the least.

I joined the project back in August of this year and it has been quite a learning experience so far. Who advancing your python skills through game development would be so enjoyable?

Subcreation:
Subcreation is also in the process of a bit of change. Currently I am working on getting us a blog up an running and fully integrated with our forum software. Currently I am working on translating the design of the forums over to the blog so that it is a seamless end-user experience and that should hopefully be up and running in another week or two.

The idea behind it is to get some of our more prominent community members to start blogging about their gaming experience’s from a Subcreation PoV, you know the whole “better gaming through intelligence” motif. Perhaps it will be successful, perhaps it will flop. Who knows until we try!

Kingdom Hearts 2:
Holy marvelous mickey batman! I started playing KH2 over this last weekend and so far after a couple hours of play time I have to say I have been completely sucked in by this series. Square may have been slacking off on the story end of the Final Fantasy franchise, but I would say that KH is picking that slack up and piling on even more awesome. Granted I am only a few hours into the game, but so far the setting is excellent, the mystery is fantastic, and the longing to keep playing even after you should have retired for the night is very high. Its almost like a great book you just can’t put down. (/me makes a mental note to go out and pick up the 358 2 days, and RE: Chain of Memories installments of the series.)

I should also be posting the Cowboy Bebop update soon to the anime guide as well, I just have been too preoccupied to sit and watch the movie myself! All in due time.

Sometimes I think to myself “Whatever happened to that guy I used to pwn noobs with on <insert game name here>?” More often than not the thoughts are just a passing wisp in the wind of my mind’s wandering. However today I had a conversation with a friend who made me stop and ponder more thoughtfully about it.

If I take a look back at my history of gaming I realize that a large majority of it was very social. It seems that the stigma of a gamer being typecast as the loner who sits on his computer has not ever applied to me (ok there was a short bit of time when this was true) or maybe not even the majority of current gamers. On top of that it seems that the social experiences I have had with gaming may have even furthered my desire to continue playing.

When I was twelve I lived in a small city. My brother and I were too young to stay at home by ourselves so we would be dropped off at a day care between the end of school and parents finishing work. This day care happened to be run by a woman who had three sons, the oldest of which was only a year or two older than me. This guy was the definition of cool, for me. We would spend hours watching him play Final Fantasy 3 (the US SNES version) or take turns amongst the three of us on bouts of Tekken 2. It was then that video games became something more to me than just another game. It wasn’t just the fact that the games were interesting, but I genuinely had tons of fun playing them with other people.

The next big step for me was when I hit my freshman year of college. Up to that point my gaming was still fairly social among friends who I went to school with. We would play Diablo 2 (LAN), Starcraft (LAN), or Goldeneye. With college however came the internet. A commodity previously sparse at my home due to dial-up was now overflowing from my cat5 cable eager to feed my newly built computer’s hunger.

At the time I was playing Warcraft 3, but fell into Counterstrike, Day of Defeat, and even a bit of Natural Selection. I remember campus wide CS and Halo matches, and when nothing was going on I would hop on to bnet and play some WC3 with the new friends I had made there. It was almost total immersion. Then my junior year of college came, and probably the biggest social game in history of video games was released that winter. World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft is the best video game ever made to date. Even though now I could care less to play the game at all I say this because the game is so diverse and all encompassing that you can spend months and days playing the game, and have fun the whole time. I still manage to get sucked back in whenever a new expansion comes out. Put bluntly fun was had on large proportions, and it was with tons of other people. During my time with WoW I experienced quite a bit. I remember in Vanilla that upon reaching 60 and gearing up a bit that I somehow managed to get into the Death and Taxes with the help of a friend. At the time I had no idea of the scope of what that meant. I just knew that they were suppose to be the best guild on my server, it was only after joining did I realize that these guys were somewhat of a big deal even for WoW standards. My time with Death and Taxes taught me many things. Most importantly how important organization is in team gaming. I don’t think any of my time spent with any other raiding guild has been nearly as successful in organization as DnT was. People not only knew their jobs but were able to listen to and respond to each others actions with amazing precision. It was probably the first time I had ever felt I was in over my head yet there I was often rolling as the only druid through Molten Core progress raids and holding my own… I digress.

The realization of social gaming has become apparent in almost any video game you can pick up these days. With services like Steam and Xbox Live its almost impossible to find a game that is solitary even if it is single player. If gaming is not already a part of everyday modern life then it surely will be in the near future when you see what is knocking on innovations door. With new social gaming comes new people to play with. Sadly some of my old internet friends have become lost to the waves time, either because I have forgotten their names myself, or the only means of communication I had with them has been severed. I am grateful to have been able to play with a very diverse and fun crowd of people and hopefully will be able to continue doing so for a long time into the future.