video games – Page 10

Back From Lancashire, Continued

Spent the last four days in Lancashire and elsewhere in the North of England, visiting my folks (among other things). Details follow…

Saturday 28th June 2003
Dan’s Mum’s House, Preston
More video games. Yet again I won at Mario Party 4. Claire is starting to get really pissed-off with always coming second-place. I don’t think she’d mind being last or second-to-last all the time, but coming second-place time and time again really seems to annoy her. Particularly when I proceed to dance around the room chanting “I am the Party Star!” at the top of my voice. Ah well.

Horton Tower, Horton
Went with Claire and my family to see the annual symphony orchestra at Horton Tower. It wasn’t as good as last year, but it was still fun. Taught Claire to waltz.

More to follow…

Back From Lancashire, Continued

Spent the last four days in Lancashire and elsewhere in the North of England, visiting my folks (among other things). Details follow…

Friday 27th June 2003
Dan’s Mum’s House, Preston
Played on Claire’s Nintendo GameCube with Claire, my mum, and sisters. I won at Mario Party 4.
Went to meet the managing director who’ll be taking over from my dad upon his retirement. He didn’t seem remotely scared enough by the idea that if my dad fell under a bus (oh; the irony of a transport consultant being run over by a public transport vehicle), I’d be his majority shareholder, nor did he seem to believe all the stories the rest of the staff told about me. He’ll be taught to fear me, yet… <evil grin>

Later, met up with Andy, Dan’s AvAngel.com co-webmaster, and played more video games, before going out for KFC and to see Bruce Almighty at the cinema, which was a pretty damn cool film.

Finally, retired to my mum’s house for yet more video games. I won at Mario Party 4. Again.

More to follow…

Scanning And Zelda

Talked with ICQ-friend Summer for the first time in over six months this afternoon, which was great, because I’ve missed chatting with her. Caught up on each other’s news, then chatted about Love, Sex, and What It All Means for awhile. Refreshing. Made her promise to be online more often in future. We’ll see.

Couldn’t be arsed going to campus to help Kit scan magazines this evening, so I bought a scanner and set it up on Claire’s computer, where he’s now scanning away to his little heart’s content.

Got a little further in Zelda: The Wind Waker on the GameCube this evening – all the way to Ganondorf, the bad nasty guy at the end, but he kicked my arse.

Norfolk

Claire’s gone to Norfolk to help her dad move house, among other things. She’s back on Sunday.

Played a little Zelda and wrote a little Three Rings code last night, but didn’t do enough of either to be called ‘productive’. Rather, I watched The Animatrix with Kit and drank Firestoker and Hobgoblin and Newcastle Brown Ale.

I miss her already.

Half-Life 2

Pre-ordered Half-Life 2 from Amazon for £25 this evening. Sweet.

A Violent Evening In

Spent yesterday evening drinking and playing Cel Damage with Bryn, Kit and Claire. Cel Damage is a stupidly fun game on the Nintendo GameCube in which up to four players drive cartoon cars around a zany landscape attempting to kill one another in bizzare ways, such as chopping with axes, harpooning, tricking into falling down Acme Portable Holes, burning, shredding, chainsawing, flattening, chaingunning… It’s a lot of fun. Like MarioKart, but with an attitude problem.

Stayed up too late and, as a result, woke up late this morning. Will get into the office yet. But first I oughtta dig up some clothes from the heaps I still haven’t unpacked since laundry day.

In other news: Bryn managed to find a place to live in Aber for his industry year, and Paul – another friend, this time a hat-wearing Troma-freak – may also have found somewhere here. Updates to follow.

Ship sizes and Pillaging / Flag-o-poly

This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.

Nemo wrote:

Ursela is her own, walking, talking, swashbuckling example of the monopoly flag argument. I see the flag distribution happening along almost the same lines as the current crew situation.

Example:

A new player logs on. We’ll call him Steve. Steve is quickly greeted by a member of the largest, most aggressively expansionist flag/crew. We’ll call her Ursela. Ursela seems nice, her politics look good, and she is certainly persistent, so Steve joins the Dastards. Steve, as a new player, quickly sees the advantages of having such powerful crewmates. Many ships to job on, knowledge to be shared, a snappy in-house trade system.
Steve puzzles away happily with the Dastards.
Steve gets pretty good and wants more power and renown. Steve soon realizes that the sort of fame and riches he can get through the Dastards is only in keeping with the Dastard heirarchy. Much as he likes the Dastards, Steve thinks he can make it on his own, with his own ship, and this time… as Captain!

Fin.

Ta-daa.

Or, Steve stays with the Dastards and they live happily ever after. Or there’s a terrible row and Steve’s new crew and the Dastards become lifelong foes and their rivalry and animosity are legendary. Or Steve never joined because he’s a distrustful paranoid and starts his own Crew of fellow misanthropes and they never amount to much because they’re always afraid of everybody stealing their maps.

People in this game are governed by their personalities just like in the real world. In the real world there are many different groups to be part of. And no one group gets everybody. And don’t forget, there are ooo-run flags too. So, we’ll have some in-game influence of what’s going on too. If the need for some sort of anti-trust activity arises, we’ll confront it, but until then, I think the system is working out pretty well.

-Nemo
(Who will likely have his own renegade flag of anti-imperialists, operating out of a volcano near the Canary Islands. Then all we’ll need is a giant submersible war machine…. mmmm)

Steve? Why didn’t you just call him Ava and be done with it.

Gender Balance

This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.

Rengor wrote:

…

Also an interesting group are the developers, not the ringers, but all the other game developers playing this game, and there’s quite a few of them. Im curious if they can say why they chose this game instead of Sims or Everquest etc?

…

…

I’m a dev. (not a PP dev., of course), and you’ll probably laugh, Rengor, when you hear how I discovered the game…

I’m currently spending way too much of what little free time I have developing a secure online database system, which I’ll be selling at cost price to a network of charities in the UK providing night-time telephone listening and information to students. This system will help these voluntary organisations find and manage volunteers for specific nights of the week, send text messages to them to remind them when they’re due to be ‘on duty’, provide a secure forum, and (eventually) a host of other features.

While the selection of organisations which this system will serve are… somewhat diverse in their policies (much to my horror as the system I develop has to cope with all of them), one thing they all have in common is the amount of time the telephone has to ring before they will answer it: three rings. As a result, my system is called Three Rings.

So; I looked for a domain name for it… threerings.com was already gone. Oh, I thought, I wonder who owns that? So I hopped to the web site and thus found Three Rings Design Inc., and, being a fan of MMORPGs and all things MUD and puzzle games, I signed up for Yohoho!

But what about the rest of you dev’s? I know there’re more tech’s out there than just me, arr!

FEAR

The site hasn’t been updated in a long time so it seems like a good idea to bring something new onto AvAngel.com! Andy has made a sub-site to AvAngel.com for a Starfleet Command 2 fleet that he is in called FEAR. If you play the game, then check it out!

Project AngelPlanet Publicly Announced

The boys behind AvAngel.com have got something new up their sleeves… it’ll be coming soon, and you can expect to see it mentioned here a lot. Their latest project is a web-based, multiplayer, live-action roleplaying game called AngelPlanet. They’re keeping most of the details on a ‘need to know’ basis, at the moment, but you can watch for updates on AngelPlanet.co.uk.

Avatar Diary – Tiberian Sun

A post on my blog, now lost, was published in August or September 1999, and mentioned that I’d been playing a lot of Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun. This image, taken on the day I purchased the game (although never used in the blog post) was shared here in hindsight, on 25 May 2019.

LORD II – Preston College Version

This document was shared on my college Intranet and via a hidden URL on my first website, on 11 December 1997. It was republished here on 22 March 2021. It provides instructions for players of the multiplayer DOOR game I adapted for local network play and the world I built within it for my friends to explore. The game world was an adaptation of our very own Preston College but transplanted to a fantasy realm.