Wonderland

Okayy

Massively multiplayer online golf.

No, really.

Shot-Online is not just an online sports game either, but it is a highly accurate simulation and a deep role-playing experience. It is the RPG quality that makes Shot-Online the unique game it is, especially with the community interaction and the enhancement and leveling of your character. Speaking of community and role-playing, Shot-Online offers both realistic and rare items drawn from the celebrated history of golf. Practicing every day, competing against players with different skills, allows the gamer to advance their characters abilities. Quests and item exchanging and more add to the community feel.

Completely entertaining! It's free, but possibly in Korean.

Cough

Ahem.

(Love this .. uh .. what do you call static machinima then?)

Sometimes it sucks to be European

Not often, really not often, but when it comes to electronici, films y games, we often get to wait. For a long time. Cases in point: European WoW (full up, gearing up for round two, but months after the US release) and European PSP release (aaaaaaaaaages away).

Why am I complaining now? Because I like to complain. Also! Because I just realised why I want a PSP. Not for the games .. got a pink SP and will soon have a DS of some sort, I'm sure. Not for the movies - UMD can bite my arse. No, it's for the HACKS. Yeah baby. The thing has been out mere moments, and already - web browsers hacked from games, TV on the go,  Pr0n Station Portable, Korean versions to have real web browsers, all sorts of interesting beginnings with the social element, designer cases and general wifi-enabled, shiny shiny loveliness.

Everything you ever wanted to know about the PSP and far more than you need to. Mainly I want to show my bosses what Doctor Who looks like on a PSP. Portable TVs and mobile phone screens just haven't done it yet, and this is why:

Wait, that's not really showing it. How about this:

Not quite? Nearly?

No, HERE it is:

THAT's why.

Also, when you're web browsing, this screen size looks like it just tips it over into "yes-s-s". 

Such a minor detail, really, and yet, and yet.

CAL '05

More Serious Games, in the UK this time. Shockingly ugly website (tsk. Education always makes itself seem so unglamorous), good line-up:

Conversation - Why video games are good for you: Professor James Paul Gee, University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy; Professor Henry Jenkins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director of the Comparative Media Lab.

"I don't really like talking to most people"

John Carmack has a blog. And a mobile phone. For those of you who didn't obsess over Quake for years (you must be in a tinsy minority), JC is the guy who Made Quake. You know, programmed it. He's a programming genius. There were a few other blokes who did graphics and stuff too.. and one who got his arse kicked by a girl quaker, and then married her or something. Anyway! John Carmack has gone from doing the Quake series on hi-end PCs to programming for mobiles, and he's come up with this:

I have a small list of games that I think would work out well, but what I decided to work on is DoomRPG – sort of Bard’s Tale meets Doom. Step based smooth sliding/turning tile movement and combat works out well for the phone input buttons, and exploring a 3D world through the cell phone window is pretty neat.

I bought my first PC pretty much specifically to play Quake (and I bought Doom for the hell of it). It cost me three grand, and took me three years or something to pay off. My point is, this game sounds cool - better than the majority of mobile games at the mo - but at the same time, I hope JC isn't just stepping back in time with this stuff. He (and modders) changed the world with multiplayer Quake;  if a mobile phone is just an old PC that fits in your pocket ...  could he do it again?

The BBC in gets-it shocker!

Poor BBC. Much loved, ever picked-upon (national pastime, innit), often rightly called 'auntie', an affectionate term with built-in exasperation and not a little bit of pity.

But perhaps changing times are being noticed? I found this post via GameBlogs, on the topic of Doctor Who (terrible logo, fantastic beginnings: watched the first ep last night on the laptop*):

I've had a hunch for a while that the BBC might be turning into the play-ethical institution par excellence - ie, justifying its state-protected existence in an age of interactivity and mulitiplicity by setting itself up as a 'ground of play', a common facilitator of British creativity. And doing so by providing both artistic benchmarks, and expressive infrastructures (its online, outreach and archive activities) - "here's the best it can be, now try it yourself".  Now that they have a decade long protection-order to not follow commercial norms, it's almost giddying to think what the Corporation (now there's a wobbly term) could get up to. Doctor Who is a great sign that a classic era of public media could be upon us.

Onwards and upwards. It's posts like these what keep me sane these days.

* which reminds me, I checked my Telewest bill. 20 quid a month for TV, and 35 quid a month for 2mb broadband. My broadband is more expensive than my telly. I should download everything then, shouldn't I? Eh? Yes I should.

The Metaverse edges closer

Screenie from The Matrix Online (one of the nightclubs, interior):

Stare

Watching WoW patch downloads is the new kettle-watching.

Nggggghhh. Come ON!

Whoa

This is amazing news: The Matrix Online is employing 20 'actors' - live humans - to live in-world,  interact with players and create storylines.

Since the close of the beta, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment announced that it has employed a troupe of 20-odd people whose job it will be to enact narrative scenarios in The Matrix Online live. These people will assume the roles of popular characters, interact with players, and generally move the stories in ways that only live "actors" can. And though it appears that the story hasn't officially commenced, a few players on the Method server were treated to a pretty slick sample of it this afternoon: an extended pep-talk by none other than Morpheus himself.

I suppose the actors will have to take shifts at being Morpheus - or if there's just one, we'll be able to figure out what timezone Morpheus lives in. How entertaining. Anyway - this is a major step forward for 'interactive entertainment', that's for sure.

(via Slashdot )

Uh-oh

What are the microsoft monkeys up to now?

"We have ways. We have ideas. Look at cell phones. You can have snap-on faceplates, you can change the skin and the batteries, and you can change the ringtones. I think we need to have a global foundation, and then personalise within region."

Hopefully he's referring to snap-on "Le XBox" faceplates for les frenchies, or .. something. I hope he's not referring to regionalised disks.  He is, isn't he? Shit.

Going on to discuss the possibility of a hard-drive for Xbox, Allard again lent weight to escalating speculation that moving state mass storage might be an optional extra for Xbox 360, or not included at all. "My cell phone is incredibly personalized without a hard drive," he said. "One reason is because of the great connection to the service."

Ah yes. Server-based services. No downloading and storing. No backing-up. Bad customers, control them with dumb terminals! Authentication systems. Passwords.. or worse, privacy-invading permanent connection addresses, à la Sky. Waiiiiiil! And worst of all, probably not backwards-compatible.  Bunnie to the rescue?

(Yup, that was once an XBox.)