OnLive Costs
by Shals on July 20th, 2010I finally got around to checking out this OnLive, streaming games over the internet, and after looking at the prices I’m a little baffled. If you happen to have been accepted into the founding members program their service is free for a year then $4.95 a month afterwards. Sounds good huh? Being able to play games over the internet and it’s actually fast and graphics look just as good as if they were installed on your system.
The catch though is you have to rent or buy games. For example, Borderlands costs $30 for their full play pass which expires on June 17th 2013, 5 day rental is $9 and a 3 day rental is $6. Guess what? You can actually buy the game from Direct2Drive for $29.95 and keep it for as long as you want it. Is someone really going to pay $5+ a month only to have to buy a game which will expire 3 years later? 3 years is a long time but I just don’t get it.
Most gamers these days, not even just hardcore ones, have good enough systems to be able to play most if not all games on the market right now. So what is the point of this?
I guess it’s good for casual gamers whom only play on the weekend and usually don’t play the game again afterwards. You could do four 3 day rentals for $24 plus the monthly fee which would be cheaper than buying 4 games in a month.
Posted in Other Games | 4 Comments »OnLive: The Future of Video Games
by Shals on May 31st, 2010This came across on one of my RSS feeds, OnLive: The Future of Video Games. Right now they are having pre-registration which could get you a free year of service. I haven’t really read up on it yet, just skimmed over the review from AppStorm but I’m going to pre-register just to check it out (if I get a free year of service that is).
Posted in General, Other Games | 4 Comments »Dragon Age: Origins | Darkspawn Chronicles
by Shals on May 21st, 2010Just got an email announcing this, been awhile since I played the game. Was good from what I remember, but didn’t have the time to play it much and it got shelved. Maybe I’ll check it out again in the near future. Anyway, apparently they have an expansion for it and it sounds kind of interesting. Here’s the short description from their website:
You now fight as the Darkspawn! The city of Denerim, jewel of Ferelden, girds itself for war. As a hurlock vanguard, you alone hold the power to make thralls of your fellow darkspawn and drive them into the heat of battle. Heed the archdemon’s call Denerim must burn!
And here are some screenshots from their website:
Civilization 4 – Beyond the Sword
by Shals on July 30th, 2008For those that don’t already know, there have been several of us playing Civ4 while waiting for Warhammer to come out and we’ve been having some fun. The other night I started a single player game, for practice for our upcoming game and found myself on a very nice continent, shared with 3 other AI’s but I expanded fast consuming 3 iron mines and a crap load of other resources.
Unfortunately the Aztec was on the southern part (below me) and they didn’t have much room to expand. I kept denying open borders by going into negotiating then just saying farewell (doesn’t seem to impact their view of you). Did that a lot actually, to multiple civ’s, especially the other two to the north because I wanted the Aztec land.
Anyway, I noticed the Aztec moving combat units one after the other towards my borders so figured I’d build up an army too, close to 20 strong including catapults and trebuchets. Went to war before they could as I easily took out their main force and their first three cities but under-estimated their remaining cities and forces. They eventually took out my force, but were pre-occupied with rebuilding than coming after me (they wouldn’t of had a chance even if they did).
I built up a force of 5 knights, 5 pikemen, 5 musketmen and 5 of both siege unit plus a navy consisting of 4 frigates and 3 ship of the line to help bombard their 3 biggest cities (all on the coast) incase my land siege units were lost by then plus take out their ships which were going around the long way dropping off combat units to engage from my north which was annoying but futile.
By the time I was ready to unleash hell, the Ottomans started placing cities in the conquered areas, but I did manage to take over a barbarian city there too (closest to me). Then a mediator came in to try and resolve my conflict with the Aztec’s as it had been going on for a very, very long time heh… figured what the hell, got Churchill on my northern borders now (he’s pleased with me though, same with Ottomans), let me focus more on economy and research since I dropped from the top spot and accepted peace with Aztec’s… not for long!
I now have a fleet of 3 transport and 3 destroyers (soon to be two fleets consisting of 2 transport, 3 destroyer, 1 carrier w/3 fighters for each fleet). No other civ has anywhere near this technology yet. In fact, I have almost every round 3+ civ’s wanting to trade me sheep, banana, whatever for one of my 3 oil resources (I also have uranium) but I use my trick of ‘care to negotiate’ then cancel out… in the very near future I plan to lay waste to the Aztec’s and after that, undecided but I’m sure I’ll have some ICBM’s and every AI will be at my mercy muhahah!
p.s. I think I’m ready for Thurs. night game 
World in Conflict – Dx10 Nuclear Detonation
by Galithor on July 28th, 2008For your viewing pleasure, I’ve decided to replace the old AoC article written by Jharii at the top of the front page with a Direct X 10 Nuclear blast, courtesy of the game World in Conflict.
By the way, Zadira, alot of USSR troops were severely harmed in the making of this screen shot. A helluva lot of commies. I took this pic after the white flash, and gave the mushroom cloud a few good seconds to form. I also zoomed out as far from the ground into the air as I could to get a good view.
