Over the last few days I've been absorbing myself in the futuristic MMOFPS PlanetSide. Rather than explain the Awesomeness of it, I will recall one of my most memorable experiences so far.

The squad I was a part of consisted of six troops; The Pilot, who was the leader. The Engineer. The Hacker. The Medic. The cover fire, a troop specializing in the bulky 'MAX' armor with its large mounted weapons. And me, the Infiltrator, with the Cloak/Stealth suit. We quietly introduced ourselved and stepped into the large Galaxy aircraft. The plan was this: Fly to a base occupied by the enemy. Get inside, hack the Control Console and take over the base. Obviously, there was going to be some resistance.

The Galaxy was slow-moving. It seemed like an eternity passed before Pilot started shouting "Go go go!" We were hovering directly over the base. Automated enemy fire was going to take us down any moment.

We ejected.

We fell through the air, some sort of shielding slowing our falls so we could land safely. The last I saw of the Galaxy, it was crashing to a distant mountain with Pilot still inside. No matter; I pulled out my pistol and set my sights on the nearest bogies. The compound was littered with corpses and coffins from previous battles, but one enemy still wandered outside looking for trouble. I followed him behind the base's Vehicle Shed and unloaded a clip into his back. I would have to keep moving; his clone would come back with reinforcements.

I slid along the outside wall towards the side entrance. I hadn't seen any of the other members of my squad since the eject, but here I found MAX dealing with minor resistance while Hacker hacked the door controls. The corpses of foes hit the ground as the doors finally slid open.

Minor conflict after minor conflict hit us as we battled through to the Control Center. We were forced to take cover in the Generator room as missiles pounded at us from all sides. I still had not heard from Engineer, Medic or Pilot, and now it appeared that we wouldn't reach the Control Center. We were blocked in.

Two enemy MAX units stepped into the doorway. One of them knowingly activated his Darklight Implant, allowing him to see me cloaked. He fired several missiles towards me.

He didn't realize I was next to the generator.

His shots missed. I ran as fast as I could away from the generator as it went down. The power was out in the facility - nobody could spawn from the cloning facility, the weapon terminals were dead, the medical terminals useless.

Suddenly, the two MAXes dropped dead. Medic stepped through the doorway, rocket launcher at his side. He tended to our minor wounds as we fought our way out and, finally, into the small Control Center. The Hacker got to work. It would be a 3-minute hack job and it would alert every enemy in the area. Medic and MAX took up positions at the two opposite doorways. I went to the cargo hold outside and silently watched for intruders. Strangely, none came.

The Hacker's job was finished. It would now be 10 minutes before the hack finished itself and the base was captured. Each minute seemed to take an eternity as we waited. Nobody came to fight us. It wasn't until 2 minutes before Base Capture that the Engineer finally crackled over the radio - he had been supporting us from outside, building Automated Spitfire Turrets and Motion Sensors.

"What can you do about the generator?" I asked.

"Not a thing. It's down until the hack is complete."

And so we waited. Unable to restock on ammo due to the downed Weapon Terminals, we used the little we had left to defend our position from the weak opposition that managed to get by the turret defense.

Then, finally, the alarms sounded and the lights went off. The base was ours. Engineer immediately went to work on the generator. We cheered and packed up; it was time to move on.

"Where's Pilot?" Hacker asked. The Pilot was our only way of moving out together, otherwise it would be a long hike to the next base and we would probably get split up.

"I'm on my way, I had to pick up another Galaxy. Wait there."

MAX fell over dead. Literally.

Three enemy infiltrators uncloaked and began throwing grenades. Two MAXes came in through the door. I don't know how many infantry units ran in and caught me with my cloak down, but I turned it back on and ran the other way. Hacker and Medic ran in different directions.

No one gave chase to me as I fled through the corridors; they couldn't see me as well as the Medic and the Hacker. I eventually found my way out of the maze and into the Weapon Terminal room.

"Generator up," Engineer said.

"Uh, we're being killed down here, didn't you notice?" I replied.

Two things happened at that moment. My display indicated Engineer had just been killed by gunfire, and indicators displayed that the base had just been hacked. It was going to be re-captured by the enemy.

I tried to activate the weapon console. I needed ammo if I was going to get out of here. It refused to activate; the hack was disrupting the system. I would need to hack it. I didn't carry a hacking tool even though I was a Certified Hacker, it took up too much valuable space. I called on the radio for Hacker to come help me out of the tight spot, and it wasn't long before he obliged. Unfortunately, he brought company.

Four men surrounded him as he came into the room, emptying several clips into him from all sides. They hit me several times in the process, but they didn't see me in the corner; they just left to secure the rest of the base. I still needed ammunition. I approached the corpse of the Hacker and prodded around his body, looking for the tool he used. I found it and I used it, and I effectively alerted the base to my presence.

I stocked up on ammo and I ran from the room. I would need to find a medical terminal next. I didn't want to risk running through enemy lines with only a fraction of life left in me. However, it turned out that I didn't need to. I tripped over the Medic's body, which had plenty of med kits and hyposprays inside.

As I looted his corpse, I could hear the familiar mechanical whirring of an approaching MAX. I was crouching behind a console just below the exit, and he was circling that console. I recognized him. He was a clone of the fellow with the Darklight. I was pretty much screwed, cloaked or not.

He looked right at me. I could see the sense of surprise, that half-second "oh crap" as he froze and jumped back a step. Seeing your sworn enemy three feet in front of you, deep inside your base, can do that to you. Just as he was about to fire, four rockets hit him from behind. Rather than deal with me, he decided it would be more strategically sound to turn around and face... the Pilot.

I was more than happy to take the opportunity to leave, even though the Pilot was as screwed as I was. He wasn't wearing any kind of armour.

I sped up the stairs, through the open doorway and into the forest beyond. I saw - on my display - as I was limping through trees that he had, indeed, died at the hand of the MAX. He and the rest of the team had been cloned at another (friendly) base, miles away. It would be a long walk.

Longer, because I didn't know that two Infiltrators were stalking me.


posted by AppleMask at 4/24/2003 03:08:00 PM

I just took one of those online IQ tests. My IQ is 142 according to this thing, yet clearly the numbers are wrong. Like other tests, the 'vocabulary' questions start off innocent enough but soon devolve into nothing more than "tell us the ending to this cliche phrase," and there are enough of these things that they make up a significant portion of the test. So, I'm an above-average thinker because I know a couple of tired phrases? Thanks, Hollywood.


posted by AppleMask at 4/20/2003 08:53:00 PM

Obviously, game prices have been on the rise for a while now. In 1998, a top game could be picked up for $29.99 (US) - if that same game went on shelves today (assuming it was up to the current tech standard), it would sell for $49.95 - $59.95. That's almost double the price - but why?

There are several explanations, but these have always been the top three:

3) Crappy Economy
2) Bloody Piracy
1) Damn Development Costs have gone up

The economy isn't all that bad, but the other two have always been bullshit and nothing but. Well, alright, they have a small bit of weight to them. They're somewhat true. Piracy has always been an issue, and it has been getting considerably worse over the last five years - almost double what it was before. Strangely enough, the 'pirates' blame this on the soaring prices. So do I; I've been known to pirate from time to time, too. The last thing I want to do is spend all of my hard-earned money on a game not even worth half of its pricetag. We're caught in a 'vicious cycle': Piracy has gotten worse because the pricing has gotten worse, the pricing has gotten worse because the piracy has gotten worse.

Development costs are high, yeah. A few years ago an engine and a game to go with it would cost less than 8 million US dollars. We laughed at folks like ION Storm's former boss, John Romero, who had a budget of 26 million to basically modify a Quake engine for the game 'Daikatana' (and clearly the money doesn't show, but let's move on). Now, a 26 million-dollar budget isn't quite as funny as it used to be. 20 million is becoming the average budget, because technology has progressed and that technology is expensive as hell.

But that doesn't quite explain why games are becoming more expensive. Even with excessive budgets, most games still bring back a healthy profit - average game sales have been going up at a fairly decent pace, not down. We all have probably heard of Vice City's astonishing 220 million-dollar sales, which goes to show that if you make an above-average game, you're going to bring in above-average profits. I like to think of it as, if you make a game worth making, you're going to get a nice bag of money as your return.

Back almost 20 years ago, the gaming industry crashed because lots of crappy games hit the market. People wouldn't buy every single game on the shelf - they'd buy only the ones that appealed to them or whatever their strange cave-dwelling pre-modern instincts told them to buy. Not enough money was being pulled in from any one title and the games stopped being made entirely. It looks like we're headed in that direction again; we have more crappy unoriginal, uninteresting games like 'Devastation' hitting the market than we previously thought was possible, and most people don't want to buy them. Between the crappy games and the crappy pricing, the industry's going to go down, down, down. Very soon.

Unless, of course, the investors take their grubby greedy hands out of the developers orifices and let things go their own way.


posted by AppleMask at 4/20/2003 04:16:00 PM

For several years, I have adamantly displayed my prowess with a trackball. It was a beautiful Logitech thing, shining grey and red as most Logitech products do, with several buttons and a shape that made my hand convulse with pleasure. With that ball under my fingertips I could point and click with the best of them. Sadly, those wonderous days came to an end this morning.

I won't go into the details of my beloved device's demise, but needless to say I was forced to go back to the mouse. No longer can I dominate the playing fields with instant 360s, as like the rest of you poor mouse dwellers I must now lift-and-replace every 6-8 inches of glide. At the very least, it's a Logitech mouse and an optical one at that. It performs very well. I'm almost afraid to say that, perhaps, I will never return to the ways of the trackball - even if the opportunity presents itself. I'm... addicted to this thing. I have officially made the switch back.

There have been reports that the XBox is getting yet another price cut. Starting in Europe, a similar cut is eventually going to be made in the US as well. This terrifies me, because it tells us where the already-insane pricing of gaming is going to go in the next few months.

If you're not in the know already, industry insiders announced prior to the initial XBox release that, due to the high costs of building the console, it would take four to five years for Microsoft to begin making a profit from the system. This was when it went for $299 (US). After the price cut to $199 (US), you can guess that the estimate jumped even higher - particularly because Microsoft had not yet sold half of the number of systems they expected to sell. The next cut should bring it to $149 here in the States, and that just leaves us wondering: What will Microsoft do to make up for almost a decade of projected loss?

The gaming industry is heading towards a crash that has only been heard of in Legend and Fairytale (as well as 70s newspapers). It may not be during the time of the XBox or the PS2, but it's coming. The prices of games go higher and the systems they run on go lower. Soon, we'll be paying more for a game than what we play it on. I don't know about anyone else, but I find that thought disturbing. People will stop paying entirely, and there will be nothing left to do but watch as the industry crumbles and is rebuilt anew. We'll continue the cycle, again and again and again, until Commercialism takes the hint and a step back from our beloved pastime.

I'm going to have nightmares tonight.


posted by AppleMask at 4/20/2003 12:07:00 AM