Despite the fact that Eve Online has just released some fairly fantastic updates, this elderly review of Eve Online warms my heart. Eve is a game for PVP fantatics. It’s not meant for wussy, whiney carebear PVE players. Since I prefer more cooperative to competative play, I fit more in to the carebear mold than the pirate PVPer mold.
Still, Eve was a wonderfully beautiful game even when I played, and I can only imagine that all the recent improvements have made it more so. The fact that they’ve reached battles for 450+ capital ships is just astounding (considering that when I played, battles exceeding 40 ships would cause the entire game to grind to a halt.)
Still, with the heartlessness of deep space, I find myself less enthralled by Eve than when I first started.
Monty Python has a great plan to stop YouTube pirates of their copyrighted work. How do they plan to prevent piracy of their material you ask? By joining the pirates in distributing that material via YouTube. After all, if they’re distributing high quality material on YouTube for free, then all the other pirates out there are suddenly out of a job.
I’ve not made any updates lately because I’ve been learning AJAX coding techniques and I’ve been working instead on the hotfix parser. AJAX has a lot debate on what exactly it is (which is weird), but the definition used in the book that I’m reading (and on Wikipedia) is that it is essentially a client-side programming technique that permits the website designer to asynchronously load content from the website to the client browser.
This means more streamlined content display experiences than you would normally experience from a traditional webpage. An example would be Yahoo or Google Maps. Both use AJAX techniques to load map data without refreshing the entire page.
The purpose of this education is the realization that I load a significant amount of page overhead (a wrapper, if you will) around the DNB data and that I could improve the load speed if I could convert the page to an AJAX enabled app (allowing me to load content in to the browser and then “page” between it without refreshing the page.)
I figure that approximately 15-20% of my page is overhead (CSS stylesheet, template information, navigation, images, etc.) Cutting that data transfer out of each page change would be a pretty dramatic increase in my page efficiency (and make it more user friendly).
Granted, AJAX breaks the traditional BACK BUTTON functionality that we come to expect from our web browsers, but I think that’s a small price to pay.
Additionally, the hotfix parser has become much more appealing to me as a next project than the ESN parser. I’ve been doing a lot of Microsoft hotfix patch checking on a few customer’s Contact Center and CallPilot servers at work, and this effort would have been dramatically more efficient if I had this parser.
I’ve completed the client-side VBScript that will capture all of the data that I require. I’ve determined that Windows Installer is required to collect information about what programs are installed on a Server (not critical, but useful information) and even determined how to gracefully handle Windows Installer being missing (thus, preventing the collection of the Programs Installed info.)
Next is to start building the database tables and work on the server-side parser.
I’m not sure who is more lame, the hacker for admitting that he hacked Valve, or Valve for trying (and failing) to trick the hacker in to flying to the US for a fake job interview. [Read the full story]
Bloomberg posted an article on my birthday annoucing that NetVersant (one of the competitors in my employers space) filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection.
Obviously they’re not out for the count, but in this tightening market and continuing recession, this is an opportunity for all of NetVersant’s competitors. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first large Nortel Telecom distributor that has filed any Bankruptcy papers (although Black Box was NextiraOne recently, and before that they were Williams Communications… and Shared Technologies has traded hands about 4 times in the last 9 or so years… Intermedia, MCIWorldcom, Allegiance Telecom and now privately owned.)
It’s been tough for all Nortel Telecom distributors in the last few years (for a number of reasons).
I won’t normally post Zero Punctuation reviews to my blog, but I absolutely love Yahtzee, and Saints Row 2 is a special occasion. He actually offered a mostly good review of the game.
Overlord presents itself as a game where your choices are Evil or Really Evil. But this is the kind of evil that makes you laugh. A spoof on multiple fantasy stories and games (it is said by the critics, although I didn’t get even half the references), Overlord is a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously. In fact, with names like “Goldo” (a Dwarven Hero King who loves Gold) and “Melvin Underbelly” (a nod to Lord of the Rings style hobbits)
The unique bit for this game is the fact that you don’t engage in combat (spell casting or otherwise) very much, instead you send hordes of Minions to do your evil (or not so evil) will.
Minions slaying Sheep is endlessly fun, as is forging your armor and weapons (sacrificing thousands of Minions to imbue your items with power). The biggest complaint that others had was that the Tower Mistress wasn’t more evil (both Mistresses are somewhat vain and self absorbed, Velvet more so than Rose), although I thought it was perfect. There is really only room for one evil person at the peak, the other needs to be narcissistic and greedy by way of an explanation for why she would latch on to you. The other Tower Mistress is much more goodie-two-shoes and a much better selection for trying to go Good (although, the game would portray this as merely “Evil” instead of “Really Evil.” I scoff.)
On my first go, I managed 95% evil. Some of the decisions I didn’t understand, but most were clear cut. One that annoyed me was a place where in order to get the 5% evil, you have to release some prisoners and then let them get killed by monsters. Instead, I killed them myself. Somehow, killing them myself didn’t get me the 5%.
I do in fact feel tempted to replay the game and try to go the good route (less than 10% corrupt. PS, each corrupt act is worth 5%. Except for slaughtering villagers, in which case, it’s geometric the number you have to kill to get the next 5%… from 1 to 10 to 100 to 300 to get Enemy of Mankind.)
Definitely worth the money, well over 40 hours of play time as a first pass. Most of the bosses were easily but there were a few tricky places. A number of puzzles involving sending your minions to do things that you cannot do (because they’re small enough to reach something.) All in all, good fun.
SPOILER (I didn’t record these):
There are two endings, if you play evil and another if you play good, with some variations based on which Tower Mistress you select:
Evil ending & Tower Mistress Velvet:
It appears that no one has captured the full video of the Good ending & Tower Mistress Rose, but here are some snippets:
Plays after either ending with the monologue “But evil always finds a way” (for some reason, not included in this video):
Follow me on Twitter 