On Google Glass

Tags

Glass, Life is crime

After I saw how big the last post got, I decided to split it up.

The new phone plan will include tethering without any cost (Finally !   Like they should have done in the first place !), thus clearing the way to using Google Glass.  I’ve been following the news about Google Glass with interest.     You’ve seen this stuff if you pay any attention to technology.

I’ve decided to be an early adopter of Glass.    I love the idea of a HUD for real life, which is close to what we’re dealing with here.    A little screen that you can review simply by looking up and to the left, while you’re walking around doing daily activities.    Get your GPS directions when walking, and take a picture with minimal effort of whatever you’re looking at.

But the focus of this blog is gaming.    Glass has some neat potential for gaming.    What would Red Robot Labs, for example, be able to do with Glass ?     Something like Life is Crime.   As you walk into a business, the GPS coordinates let a game server know you’re in there.    And you can do a game action, such as a drug deal or beating up a rival.     Perhaps a mechanic based on “capping out” a particular place; whoever stays at Starbucks the longest earns its money for that day.

Technology in the car is dangerous, and the current thinking seems to be it’s a hands-free problem.    Is someone going to come up with a Glass game I can play in the car ?    That would be a godsend.    Eyes on the road, but a little attention paid to my heads up device, would certainly make my 1.5 hour morning commute much more pleasant.    Even the attempt would certainly start an interesting conversation about safety.

For us as the MMO crowd, it might work to have brokers and other item sales interfaces running as apps.     Log off at night, with your loot unsorted, and run an app to vendor trash items and determine how much to sell that Vorpal Sword for.   My desktop computer time is at a premium; can they find a way to deal with all that boring-but-unnecessary stuff as I do my daily commute, or have a break during a Saturday shopping trip ?

The phenomenon of “checking in” is pretty big online – my facebook feed loves to tell me that Bob Smith just showed up in Starbucks nearby.     Might someone make an achievement/check in system with a set of points to be earned ?    I could have more check-in points than my friends, and unlock some kind of virtual boosts that let me do more.    Going to the auto mechanic might never be the same…..

I found very little via Google search about the potential future of Glass gaming, but I thought this guy was on the right track, up until the end of his piece.    No, Hangman is not going to interest me long term, but something for the serious gamer would.

Postscript

While reading what other people’s ideas are about Glass games I came across The Urinal Game, which made me snicker like a 14 year old boy thinking about boobs.

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Coming up for air

Tags

Life is crime, Scramble With Friends, World of Tanks

It’s an exciting time to be employed at my job.    New system being implemented, tons of work, tons of overtime, and I’m back on the roller coaster of big software packages.

This also crowds out gaming to a large extent.     Scramble still getting played – it’s a perfect little game for five minute breaks.     My co-worker plays it all the time and she’s fun.

Doing a little Life is Crime as well.    The app is so buggy now, its unbelievable.    I think they’ve realized they have a commercial flop and have reduced the back end infrastructure.   The thing crashes, and when it crashes, it turns off the ringer on the phone for no apparent reason as well, requiring me to reboot the phone.    Nevertheless, I still log in and pick up my money at a minimum.

Still tanking as always, but there’s nothing notable on that front.     3.3 million credits stored in the bank.   Recall that my goal for flexibility is to hold onto 8 million; this was good, because the Golden Joystick weekend cost me over 6 million.    I bought a Veterans day package for $20, including over one million credits, and am slowly working my way up on that front.    Added the Stug (Money maker) to primary tanks, removed the VK4502P (Going to free XP my way farther with that guy) and am mostly concentrating on accumulating the credits.   When I can get matches in, that is.

Well, what to do then ?

Tags

Chefville, Life is crime, World of Tanks

It’s interesting to see all the different ways I’m gaming at the moment.

With the mobile

I’ll log in and play Scramble with Friends when games are available.   (Think Boggle) I have one friend who’s addicted and loves this, and a few others who play occasionally.    Sometimes, instead of reading the news in the bathroom, I’m playing there, which gives me immediate additional time for gaming, versus how it was in the past.

I reinstalled Life is Crime but the thing crashes all the time and the gameplay can be kind of dumb.   I’m mostly just stockpiling cash, because I want to be rich.    I play this when I’m the passenger in a car or at other odd times.

With the laptop

I have discovered that facebook games are pretty good things to play at the office. I can sneak in a few minutes every so often on my personal laptop.    Since most of these games depend on long leadtimes for something to cook/grow/whatever you just time it and see if something is finished, and it’s time to start anew.  Of course, this competes with mobile time.

With the PC

World of Tanks is the mainstay here, although I’ll do a long session on Chefville as well.     I can read a book and wait for timers with Chefville, which is ideal as long as the situation might be “Honey can you do this?”.    Or just as likely “Dad do you want to play a game?”

The question sometimes becomes, play something on the mobile because it’s my move or because of a timer; or do the PC.    Sometimes the mobile wins out.

The upshot of all the above is I find myself torn between devices, and games, depending upon my mood as never before.   Usually, it would be a question of what do I want to “PC” today.    This is an interesting dynamic.    After losing a big streak of tanking matches, Chefville tends to get fired up.     I might sit for a few minutes outside the office just to work on a location for Life is Crime, even though my kitchen needs me.    I don’t Scramble much in the car due to bouncing cars not being conducive to slider phone games.

The number of gaming choices we have today is astonishing.

This time, fantastic KV-2 match

Tags

Chefville, Life is crime, World of Tanks

The gaming continues.    Having another fantastic match, sure gives you something to write about, but I’m getting ahead of it all.

• Life Is Crime is now reinstalled on my mobile.      It’s a simple way to pass the time if you need it, and only the mobile is available.
• Scramble with Friends has replaced Words With Friends for a mobile game, which you actually play against someone.

Chefville got the required 121 stars out of me, to upgrade and have more ingredients available.     Did another group of quests and am now stuck waiting to get….. 131 stars.     The treadmill continues.    Well, I have to admit it’s still fun.

One interesting aspect about playing Facebook games.    Women play them.    And you never have enough friends to do well, so you find yourself friending people just to have them as neighbors, that provide bonuses.    And thus, my friend strip looks like the below.

Eye Candy is good.

In World of Tanks, I have managed to unlock the KV-4 finally :

Now, just need another 2.6m credits and lots of free XP.

I keep on playing various tanks even though they’re elited.    My top list consists of the PZ38, MS-1, KV-3 and KV-2, VK4502A and Lowe, and Ferdi and Jagdpanther.    Last night I managed another Boelter’s medal :

Seven kills, five of them with no help.

It was a match on the Steppes.    XVM informs me I have a 5% chance of success, and I look at the composition of my team.   I am the only one who’s not red in the top ten tanks.    The other guys have four players with over 10k matches against me in my 9k.    Sounds like things will be going well !

They sure started bad.    My team hardly realized that the thing to do is go north to the enemy’s start point.    Me and a VK3001P move that direction and find four or five enemies in there.    He gets killed quickly, so its just me against the enemy.

One after another, I wipe out four of them.   Things go pretty well on the field for supposedly having an awful team; I look up, and find out that it’s me and an M4 against 3 of them.   They’re capping, and I’m on the opposite side of the field.    I begin moving my lumbering behemoth, and bless him, the M4 manages to reset the cap and die, just as I kill off a PZ4, then a T14.     It ends badly for the Grille, who resets my capping, but can’t seem to damage me, he just tracks me.

Replay is here.

Now that was fun !

Bye Crime; and continued EQ2 discovery

Tags

EQ2, Life is crime

Over the weekend, I have uninstalled Life is Crime.     Just fighting over a location with extremely repetitive gameplay isn’t much fun.    I am very interested to see what the industry will come up with in regards to location-based gameplay.    Personally, I expect a really big hit with that kind of hook, and I hope to see it happen soon.   I’m not creative enough to figure it out, but it can’t be that repetitive.

In the meantime, I continued to play Everquest 2.     Huehueteotl the wizard finished the Foomby’s Stolen Goods heritage quest and slew fairy after fairy in the Enchanted Lands.   They were easy, it was fun, so I kept at it until I had 400 killed at which time I noticed it was taking a long time to get to the next AA point.   Then I made a startling discovery – he was out of vitality.     It’s not easy to see as vitality counts towards AA points, but the little “bubble” at the right does not display the amount of vitality when in AA mode.   These are good problems to have, I ran out of that perhaps once before back in the day, so I logged him off.

I am taking heavy advantage of the research function and have five characters over level 20 now, so they can get masters on their spells to the degree possible.     This function is leading to something interesting; I want to “finish” the research so that all spells are mastered.    Even the ones I don’t use anymore.    It seems kind of silly on one level, but makes sense on the completist level that I usually operate on.    My main Tezcatlipocca has quite a ways to go on this one, but my little alts might end up with many masters by the time I extensively play them.    This also led to having Hue and Chalchitlicue my conjurer buying spells on the broker if they were cheap enough, to reduce the amount of time needed to finish researching all the spells.    I wouldn’t be surprised if the math on that means it will take years.

I am also beginning to get the idea of travel in the game again.

• “World Bells” at various locations open a map of zones which you can select.
• City bells transport you around Qeynos.   Presumably with the Freeport revamp this is no longer needed there.
• Spires transport you to various locations on a map also, as well as the Kingdom of Sky zones.
• The legacy EQ1-style zone connections are also present.   I’ve memorized most of these ones and still remember this.   Plus they’re shown on the in-game eq2maps.com tool.

Boats move you between zones too :

• Between Antonica and Kylong Plains
• Between Thundering Steppes and Butcherblock
• Between Nektulos Forest and Butcherblock
• Between Desert of Flames and Moors of Ykesha

I am now part of three different guilds on Freeport.    One I got randomly telled and asked if I needed a guild, I liked the guys style, so I joined it.    Another I got a random invite and accepted, they clearly just did a mass invite of everybody in Antonica.     The third I sought out because they were in the Moors of Ykesha and I liked their name.    Will see how things go with each group and probably end up with all characters in the same guild.     Not sure I have much of a preference yet for any – they all have very different styles.     I might select one more guild to try, from the ingame guild recruiting tool, except that the top guild on there is the random guild inviter.    That makes me think most of the top guilds probably get their members from that method, and I’m not sure I need two of those to choose from.

I got a better workaround for my endless run bug – when the endless run (and turn) started, on two occasions, I got it to stop by messing around with the movement key controls in the options menu.    After hitting accept, the run stopped.    I am waiting to see if it recurs after doing that, should not have to wait very long because it was late Sunday night when I stopped the last one.

I soloed a “ring event” (I think that’s what it’s called) in the Enchanted Lands and got my first deserved Ornate chest.     These chests have shown up because of random chance, but this is the first one I really earned.    There were a group of fairies around a trailer by Chomper’s pond.    Took em all out.    Then another large group of them spawned, and I took all of them out.     Then a named with a big group of helpers spawned, and with two encounter spells to mash them with, I was able to defeat them.     That was pretty fun.    I tried to get the named to pop again that night but it never did; I wonder if you are unable to get the named again, or if there is a timer.    I looted a legendary item which I unfortunately could not equip though, alas.

I’m considering creating another character and even buying character slots.    It would be nice to check out Freeport on my main account as opposed to Test.     I have six characters so a seventh is still possible, but I’ve held back.   It’s not like I’m anywhere near done with the six that I have.   If I’m correct, it’s not really necessary with the new guild features to try and have one of each crafter as people seem to share very well, which was the biggest reason I ended up with the six that I have.

I am getting the sense that a MASSIVE amount of quests have been added to the game.    There are apparently over 8800.    Things I have never tackled include the Epic for the Mystic.    There’s tradeskill epic as well.   I am so glad I came back to this game.

Social games update 12/28/11

Tags

Life is crime, Nightclub City

Life is Crime : For a little social game this gets pretty hot and heavy.     Downtown Burbank in-game is a madhouse of drug selling and mobsters whacking each other.     I am in a hot and heavy fight with another guy who wants to take over.    My strategy of setting 500 points over on all my locations (and maintaining that) has stopped the losses of all my kingpins to my many challengers.   There are other determined players encroaching on me but I can’t maintain everything, so I’ve accepted the slow encirclement and just want to hold on to what I can, and take the other guy down as much as possible.

I drove up to Arroyo Grande over the weekend and got listed on quite a few leaderboards due to that trip.   The wife drives; I bang away on the phone.    As we drove the highway locations appeared and disappeared, and I tried to get listed on many of them.   This boosted my daily income which is now over $5m per day.     It’s fun to collect the money even if there is little to spend it on.

Note that I don’t list my level on this update – that’s because the mechanics have changed such that the last thing you want to do is level up.   The higher level you are, the more of a target to be attacked.    I am doing what I can simply to hold onto territory and gain as little XP as possible.

Nightclub City : While I haven’t forgotten about this one, it’s a pretty simple thing I’m doing.   Log in.   Liquour up the clubs and set the music to play for 12 hours.   Collect money.     And log out.    Haven’t been spending anything much or upgrading the clubs, but that time will come I’m sure.

The exception is the Tron club – it’s “Done” for the moment.

Looks pretty cool to me.

Criminal challenges

Tags

Android, Life is crime

Life is crime : 95% to level 19.    My dominance of downtown is being challenged by no less than three players, so I have my hands full with trying to stay at the top of the leaderboards.    And that’s fine.    Why else bother to play if it’s not fun ?

The locations I have requested to add into the game have been added.    I was a bit worried it was a waste of time requesting them.   Now that it’s obvious that it isn’t, I’ll have to be more systematic and add a whole ton.   I love the idea of helping to create an accurate in-game map.

One thing I have learned is that there is not an easy way of taking screenshots on an android phone.    I could look for some app to do it, but a cursory search reveals many apps that require admin privileges, and I don’t want to root my phone.    So this will remain a graphic – free post.

A life of crime ?

Tags

Android, Life is crime

Today’s playing lately entry concerns an Android app called “Life of Crime”.    You know all those annoying facebook games with energy, stamina, and an interminable list of stupid crimes you commit by clicking “Rob” or some such ?     Well, it’s a bit like that, and yet thoroughly addicting.

You have energy used for a few tasks, and stamina to kill other players.   The key is, the game is location based – as in meatspace.  The real world.   Where your phone is dictates the actions which you can perform.    There are missions where you spend energy working towards a larger goal, as well as getting leaderboard points; you can push drugs and stolen goods; and you can take over locations by several possible means or you can simply PVP wherever you find yourself.

The game map is built on real locations, and restricted to bars, restaurants, stores, etc.    You can be standing inside the McDonald’s and taking it over in the game.

This leads to the following interesting gameplay conundrums.   I am on my way to work in the morning.   I make sure and leave 15 minutes early, and pull up and park in a shopping mall nearby.    I open up my briefcase and drop some “packages” into local business to ensure I’m kingpin on the leaderboard (IE, number one).    As I travel the freeway, I look for a good exit to pull off at, and PVP several other players at that one for five minutes, before getting back onto the freeway and reaching the office.   Once there, I work to consolidate my hold on the area nearby.

The game is not without problems.   The locations are not very updated; the app force closes a lot.   Still, it reopens right away and works fine afterwards.

It’s strange to actually *go outside*, and walk around with a phone in my hand, to play a game but there it is.    The novel experience has kept me going for the past couple of weeks.   Give it a try by clicking here.   Just remember, Doc Burbank claims Burbank.