I know I am supposed to hate Microsoft, but I am really geeked at the recent announcement that MS is buying NetGamesUSA. NetGamesUSA makes a couple products called ngStats and ngWorldStats that track statistics in computer games. One of the few products the system had been fully implemented in was the first-person shooter, Unreal Tournament.…
August, 2000
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Another feature all computers games should have is a demo feature. There were some pre-cursors before, but this feature really took off with first person shooters such as Quake. Turn on demo mode in Quake or Unreal Tournament or Tribes and the game records the action onscreen to a file so the users can go…
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They sell drugs to kids and say its us And when the cops are crooks who can you trust? – Ice-T Several years ago, rapper Ice-T achieved widespread notoriety for recording a hard core rock song called “Cop Killer.” Over speeding guitars, Ice-T shouted out lyrics promising to get back at the Los Angeles Police…
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Frankly, it’s hard for me to feel too sorry for John Stossel. Stossel is the libertarian-esque reporter for ABC who recently got himself in trouble thanks to sloppy work by him and/or his producer. He ended up reporting not once, but twice, that test results from a lab showed that organic vegetables had just as…
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Even though I have not had time to play one in over a decade I am still fascinated by roleplaying games and actually buy quite a few of them. But why buy role playing games when there are dozens (approaching hundreds) of free role playing systems available on the Internet? The pen and pencil RPG…
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Another thing the Internet is doing is allowing for small independent roleplaying game companies to sell their wares. The best example of this is Microtactix. Microtactix sells a variety of products from a downloadable generic roleplaying game, Simply Roleplaying, to an entire line of cardstock miniature towns and people (again, in a form that users…
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One of the reason I have not played a role playing game in years is because of the logistics of it all. Finding mature individuals worth gaming with is one problem, and actually finding the time to set aside several hours to do so is another. Fortunately, just as the games and game companies are…
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The funniest thing about the whole antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft was watching how Microsoft’s detractors continually talk out of both sides of their mouths. Even professionals writing in the computer industry often seem like they just don’t get it. Take web design guru Jakob Nielsen (please). At his site’s Spotlight section, Nielsen briefly outlines Microsoft’s…
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On August 14, USA Today ran an interesting article (“Lieberman says loyalty questions hurt”) on Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman’s reaction to anti-Semitic statements made about him. The story is interesting because it is fascinating to see how far Democrats are willing to acquiesce to racial intolerance when trying to court African American votes. How…
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PGN to JavaScript tool on CoolTool.Com I was so geeked I dropped everything I was doing to download and play around with it. Bottom line — this thing rocks. For those of who are not chess fanatics, PGN is the most common format for describing chess games. It is a fairly straightforward text format describing…