For those who don’t know, Quake Live is a browser-based FPS being developed by ID Software. After receiving my beta key, I immediately went to check it out. Even though it took about 20 minutes to get through various site registrations and some minor issues with Internet Explorer 7, I was finally able to get everything running.

The game itself is impressive. It is essentially Quake 3 Arena in a browser. The graphics are obviously not up to par with current games, but that is to be expected. Although it is very polished at this point, there are a few minor bugs and quirks that will most likely be fixed long before launch. At this point, all I can say is that Quake Live is fun and many people are going to play it.

If you want to get in line for a beta key, go to the Quake Live website.

UPDATE: I tried the beta on my old Dell Inspiron 5100 and it worked great. It is a P4 2.6 Ghz with 512 MB RAM. It does not look as good as my gaming pc but the fact that it runs without any problems is impressive.

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Sorry about the lack of posts the last few months. I started a new job last August and have been extremely busy ever since. Things are starting to settle down a bit so I will be posting more often.

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At this year’s Comic-Con, there were playable versions of Dead Space, Little Big Planet, Saints Row 2, and many others. Unfortunately, the lines were too long for my liking so I did not play anything. That’s right, I didn’t even play Street Fighter IV or see the Mirrors Edge demonstration. I need to stop going on Sunday’s (Kids Day). At any rate, it was fun and I got a ton of free lewt. What more can you ask for?

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After playing a ton of Battlefield: Bad Company, it occurred to me that only a few people are playing the way it is meant to be played. The rest of the players on the team are either boosting their k/d ratio by playing incorrectly, or trying to get all the in-game awards to earn a few achievements. The awards in Bad Company encourage people to do things like run enemies over with a helicopter, get five knife kills in a round, jump out of a helicopter to your death, etc. When players on your team are trying to get some of these awards, it ruins the game.

With Gears of War 2, Epic is trying to prevent what I just described. For instance, if players need to get fifty shotgun kills for an achievement, only one kill per round will count towards the achievement. This could help the problem, but now players will probably just cycle through all the weapons in one round which is equally annoying. Why can’t achievements focus on winning or teamwork? Call of Duty 4 has no multiplayer achievements and is regarded as one of the best, if not the best, multiplayer games to date. There are in-game awards that are potentially distracting, but since there is no achievement for getting them, players seem to focus more on winning.

Developers need figure out a better way to implement multiplayer achievements. Until then, they should be based on wins or should be removed completely.

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When asked about how size limitations could affect Final Fantasy XIII on the Xbox 360, producer Yoshinori Kitase said, “…we’ll work on trying to find ways to compress the prerendered movies and voice that take up a lot of data in ways that don’t affect the final product. As for the in-game visuals, we’re going to look for ways to ensure that the quality remains the same between the two versions.” Wow, compression. You know what else could be optimized for the Xbox 360? You guessed it…

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I finally beat Metal Gear Solid 2 today. It took me just under sixteen hours to complete. I have to say, I enjoyed this much more than the original Metal Gear Solid. My only complaint is the repetitive scenery. I don’t know how they could have used any other scenery in the game though so that is not much of a complaint. Now for the good stuff…

For starters, I thought this game was much harder than the original Metal Gear Solid. It actually felt like what I would expect from a stealth game where as Metal Gear Solid did not. It seemed like there were many more enemies to evade in MGS2. In MGS1, I felt like I was running from boss to boss with only a couple of guards in between. The boss battles did seem a bit trickier in MGS1 though. I felt that the bosses in MGS2 were easy in comparison (aside from fighting all of the, well, you know…).

*** Potential Spoilers Below. Highlight To Read ***

As far as the story goes, it can be hard to follow. I think I understand the relationships and pasts of the characters in the game up until the end of the MGS2. What I don’t understand is, what do I, as a player, have to do with the story? Was I controlling Raiden, and even Snake in MGS1, as part of S3 (Selection for Societal Sanity, previously Solid Snake Simulator)? Did Raiden take control of his life when he tossed the dog tags with my name on it? At this point, I believe the answer to all of these questions is yes. Hopefully I’ll get some confirmation in MGS3 or MGS4.

*** End Potential Spoilers ***

I have to say, at this point, I feel like an idiot for not giving this series a chance in the past. I ignorantly disregarded it as a bunch of cookie cutter games for the masses. The series is not at all what I expected it would be. I had no idea it had such a deep and complicated story. I didn’t even know the story had anything to do with the NES Metal Gear games at all. Hopefully I’m not missing too much by skipping those. Anyway, Onto Metal Gear Solid 3…

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While talking to one of my friends about the announcement at E3 that Final Fantasy XIII is no longer a PS3 exclusive, I made a comment stating that all Xbox 360 owners need now is Metal Gear Solid 4. He said that would never happen because the size of the game is too big and it would have to be put on multiple DVDs. Who cares if it is on multiple discs? Apparently Kojima cares… or he pretends to care because Sony probably paid him to. Metal Gear Solid was on multiple discs and nobody seemed to have a problem with that, but that is beside the point.

You see kids, there is this little thing called compression. Did you know that the mp3s you buy (or pirate) are compressed? If they were not compressed, your songs would be 30mb and up compared to the 3-6mb songs we are used to. That is quite a difference isn’t it? The video on your DVD movies that you buy at the store (or pirate) are compressed. Most of the textures you see in games are compressed as well. The point is, with compression, it is possible to get MGS4 to the Xbox 360 with a reasonable amount of discs. I have heard people say that there are no pre-rendered cut scenes in the game, meaning, there is no video to compress in the game. That may be true, but there are other things to compress. The audio and textures used in the game most likely take up the majority of the space and can be compressed.

Also, some developers have had to duplicate data on the Blu-ray disc in order to decrease the load times for their games. Bethesda had to do this with the PS3 version of Oblivion. Basically, the larger a disc is, the longer it takes to read and jump from point to point on the disc (this is why some PS3 games require you to install the game to the hard drive). By duplicating data, the laser will have multiple points on the disc to read data, making it closer to the data it needs. Why is this relevant? If this technique was used for MGS4, the game may be a fraction of the size they claimed they needed.

Even if MGS4 has no duplicate data on the disc, and Kojima did not want to compress anything at all, there is now another way to get it on the Xbox 360. At E3, Microsoft announced that you will be able to install Xbox 360 games on your hard drive. I don’t think I need to explain much, but with this option you would need a large hard drive for your Xbox 360 and would have to install Metal Gear Solid 4 on it. After an install, no disc swapping would be needed.

What I am trying to say is, if Metal Gear Solid 4 does not come out on the Xbox 360, it is because Sony is paying for exclusivity. It has little to do with the size of the game. Before I get death threats from any Sony fan boys, know that I own a PSX, PS2, PSP, and a PS3. I am also going to buy MGS4 for the PS3 (after I beat 2 and 3). So There.

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I got my first Playstation 3 trophy from Super Stardust HD. It took about an hour to get used to the game before I could pass the first level to earn the achievement. Now all I need is trophy support for ALL the games I own. Too bad that will never happen.

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Today until 1 pm ET, Amazon.com offers Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV for Xbox 360 for $44.99. With free shipping, it’s $8 below our May mention and the lowest total price we could find by $11.

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Today Google launched Lively, a browser-based Second Life clone where users create avatars and rooms and can chat with complete strangers. It did not run very well on my gaming PC, and that does not bode well for it in my opinion. It is neat for about five minutes, but gets boring pretty quick. Unless you are into Second Life and/or chatting with random people with a 3D avatar that looks nothing like you, you will probably feel the same way. This could potentially give Second Life some competition, but at this point it is little more than a chat room. I’ll give it another go when users can actually create their own content.

Update: Lively is now closed as of Dec 31, 2008. Google is calling it an “expirement”, but I call it a “failure”.

“Lively was a network of avatars and virtual rooms created and decorated by its users. Google launched Lively on July 8, 2008 as an experiment in providing people with more ways to express themselves on the Web.

Lively’s users created thousands of cafes, bars, discos, tropical islands, treehouses, space stations, galleries, bedrooms and more. Lively’s users shared their rooms with people from all over the real world, meeting and chatting with each other via their customized avatars.

The experiment ended December 31, 2008.”

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