I was just looking through the ships and found the most specialized ship in there. By “most specialized” I mean one that is suited really well to a single task and really badly to anything else.

There is vaguely a choice of four (one for each faction) so I went for the best one. It is the Charon. The Charon is a freighter designed for carrying stuff. And that’s basically it. It’s very good at it though. A Badger, the Caldari industrial can carry about 5,000 cubic meters of stuff. The Charon can carry 785,000 cubic meters. All this comes at a price. Firstly, it’s very slow - 60 m/s without skills. And you can’t even put a microwarp drive on it. And it’s not that the Charon has limited CPU or power or anything (which it does) but that it has no fittings. That’s right, not a single slot. There are a couple of other sneaky uses for it though. It has high shields and very high armour and hull which means it might distract the enemy in a big fight. You’d hope that they’d assume it was carrying something important. Or along the same lines you could use it as bait maybe but there are much better ways to do that.

Galaxia as a game may be dead, but it’s definitely not forgotten. Head on over to Galaxia ♠ Renaissance to read a lengthy (and getting lengthier) piece of fiction by former Galaxia player, Ashley Rayburn. It contains most of the well known players, the Consortium, the UGC as well of course yours truly, Q. If you don’t know what Galaxia is, it won’t mean much to you, but go read it anyway. It’s funny.

Hurrah! Someone signed up to EVE Online following an affiliate link from my site (like the banner above if you’re reading this on the actual post page).

Seems like a perfect opportunity to encourage more. EVE Online is a persistent universe MMORPG. This means it’s a multiplayer game played over the Internet with thousands of other people. Since “thousands” is vague, I’ll be more specific. There are over 100,000 players subscribed as well as many other free accounts. When I go on (about 18:00 GMT) there are between 15,000 and 20,000 logged on.

As you can hopefully tell from the banners (again if you’re reading from the actual post page) it’s space-based sci-fi. Sort of like a modern day Elite. You can trade, fight, research, manufacture and lots of other cool things. Nearly everything in the game is player crafted (and is at least able to be player crafted) and it’s even possible to build stations and official control systems. If that sounds like fun then sign up for a free trial account now :)

I had a three player game of C&C Generals last night at a friends house. Close to the end a big box appeared saying the computers were out of sync and it closed. Generals isn’t the only game to do this, many do (Star Trek Armada was a bad one for it) and there really is no reason. If the game goes out of sync and the clients can tell they’re out of sync why not just pause and it request the current game state from the host? It can’t be that different to everyone else and it’s better than quitting.

Using the canvas element with some clever JavaScript, someone has written a basic ray-traced 3D graphics engine that runs in Safari and Firefox.

Okay so “3D gaming” is overstating it slightly, but it’s clever. What’s double clever is that you can get a pure JavaScript implementation of canvas for Internet Explorer from Google Code. Which means technically you can now do 3D graphics using JavaScript and a browser.

Since my new computer is working again (and is quite a lot better now), I figured I’d start playing Civilization IV again. I also decided to give CivFanatics a quick browse to see if there were any cool mods.

The one that caught my eye is called Regiments. It changes the graphics (and the graphics only) to include more people (so you’re infantry for example consists of 11 people) as well as rescaling them appropriately. Since it only changes graphics you don’t risk starting an unbalanced game and you should even be able to load an existing game without a problem.

So if you have Civ IV, go get it now :P

With my broadband connection came a wireless network. So I tried browsing with my PSP. And it is a lot better than I expected. Except when browsing my own blog :(

I figured the easiest way to make it work was to send it the XHTML Basic version. So you should now be able to browse my site with a PSP without any hassle :D

Detecting the PSP browser**

Detecting a PSP is really easy. It sends a custom HTTP header: HTTP_X_PSP_BROWSER which contains the firmware version. Just check if that header is set. In PHP you just need to do:

if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_PSP_BROWSER'])) $psp = true;

Finally someone in the mainstream agrees with me.

There is a section in PC Format magazine that says cooperative play in upcoming games will be a bigger part. Coop gaming, especially in first person shooters is tremendously fun. I spent a lot of time playing Duke Nukem 3D and Doom coop on my PlayStation. Very few games after that supported coop modes (although I realise that it brings some complicated design issues).

I just bought one of the games I mentioned a couple of weeks ago (actually I bought both but I’m only talking about one right now): Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy in America). You should probably read the other post first.

To summarise, the game is well cool. You don’t need fast reflexes or a large amount of skill as such but you do need to be able to think fast. A lot of the time you have a time limit to do something which is three times longer than you actually need - but it includes the time needed to work out what to actually do. Failing to do something isn’t always as bad as you think since the story seems quite flexible: there are times when you realise just what an impact your past actions have on the story.

The story itself has a lot of depth. While trying to solve the murder (alternately controlling the murderer and two detectives) you also have to deal with relationships of the main characters which adds more to the game than you’d think. In fact there are a lot of mundane task to you have to complete that are surprisingly fun.

Graphically the game isn’t that impressive, at least intrinsically. But the clever use of split screen during important events adds a certain style and grandeur to it. The sound for the most part is simple but many moments have an eerie sound track reminiscent of Silent Hill just to heighten tension.

This game will probably appeal most to point-and-click adventure lovers and anyone who loves story over action. But I strongly suggest everyone have a look at it (if you’re in the UK get it from Game; you have 10 days to take it back if you don’t like it :P).

I did something I haven’t done for years recently: I bought Official PlayStation Magazine UK for the demo disk. No particular reason except now having a job I’m not so worried about the price of a magazine…

I was glad I did. It has two demos of games that look really cool (and they’re already out).

The first is Fahrenheit (although it was renamed before the launch - search GameSpot for Fahrenheit and it comes up). You control a guy who has just done a murder and you have to (basically) escape from the police. But it is so much more than that. Firstly, the genre is closest to point-and-click adventure à la Broken Sword, except it’s in 3D - you just move near objects and push the right analog stick in different directions to do different context-sensitive actions. Another point is the emphasis on story - you get to see things that are happening elsewhere that you wouldn’t normally know about (like the cop approaching the door of the men’s room where you committed the murder) if it is good for drama. Finally you get to control most of the important characters throughout the game (although not in the demo).

The second one is Shadow of the Colossus, a third person action adventure. All you have to do is go through the game killing these huge Colossi (they look like something out of Lord of the Rings - large walking bear type things. I mean large - they start out about the size of a house and get bigger). And that is literally all you have to do. No piddly bad guys in between, just the Colossi. The game gets away with this apparent simplicity with two (related) features: Firstly how you kill them is not that obvious. It generally involves climbing up them somehow and stabbing them but there’s usually more to it. Secondly the platform aspect of the game is amazing. The most important part is the “grip” feature. Basically you can hang on things (think Prince of Persia) and while hanging you can jump around and hang on other things. This is how you climb the Colossi. The physics engine for this is close to perfect. As the things move around trying to swipe at you your character swings around, ends up hanging with just one arm (so you have to wait for him to get his bearings and grab with both - all the while you’re grip strength lessens) and all sorts of cinematic type sequences occur. On the demo I managed to get all the way up to its head, got throw off and ended up hanging off its nose…

So go out and by them… I think I will.