I’m a big fan of Fallout 3 (and of the greater post-apocalyptic genre) so I am very excited for New Vegas. Destructoid has the details on the collector’s edition which will be available when the game is released this fall.
[Via: Destructoid]
The free (as in pigeons) software movement, which has spawned such hits as Firefox and Linux, is taking aim at the massively multiplayer online gaming (or MMOG) world. Sure there have been open-source projects in the past to try and come up with a slick MMOG engine but this time it’s something different. This time, the community is coming together to purchase a complete game and release it for free to the world. And quite a community it is…
In 2002, a similar feat was suggested (and attained) in the case of the 3d-modeling software Blender. In less than two months, €100,000 was raised as a one-time payment to the creditors overseeing the newly bankrupt company. Blender turned from shareware to completely free and is now available with the full source code. It continues to be developed and maintained by the Blender Foundation and has seen many comparisons to costly alternatives such as 3ds Max and Cinema 4D.
Fast forward to 2006 and we find a company called Nevrax stuck in bankruptcy proceedings while their wildly popular game Saga of Ryzom continues uninterrupted (for now). Multiple companies have made takeover bids and the community has gathered together to make a bid of their own. The initial bid was €100,000 but a new pledge (of $60,000) by the Free Software Foundation pushes the goal up to €200,000. The bids from the other companies (and the companies themselves) are unknown but Nevrax insists that the game will go on, no matter who ends up owning it.
And what a way to go on, to be bought by the community and released for free to everyone. I, for one, made a pledge and maybe you will too.
Do it for the kids – http://www.ryzom.org/
It’s finally done! I haven’t gotten more than 4 hours of sleep in the past 3 nights. As you can imagine, this made it kinda hard to finish a 20 page paper, an 5 page paper, and 2 other assignments but somehow I managed it. Well, actually I should mention that the 20 page paper was a little short at about 15 pages… but the 5 page paper turned out to be 8 pages so that makes up for it. Even though they’re for different classes. Ok ok, back to the PL4N.
Once again, we gathered at Western Michigan University’s Parkview Campus for the Parkview LAN Party. About 35 gamers preregistered but the actual number who showed up was somewhere around 25 or so. It was a lot of fun but it was also a lot of work. We ended up canning the Battlefield 2 tournament because only 3 people signed up for it but the rest went on as planned. Well… ok so the Counterstrike one didn’t go as planned cause we didn’t have enough for 2 full teams… but we played for a while and the top 5 gamers in terms of score each got a $5 Best Buy gift card. The Quake 4 tournament was interesting to say the least, as we attempted to use the built-in tournament server mode. This proved to be a little awkward, mostly because I couldn’t find anything about it online, but it all worked out in the end… except for a couple people who couldn’t even get the game to work right.
Oh well, thats what I get for trying to run a tournament with a game that came out 2 weeks ago.
The next PLAN is scheduled to be at the end of March so mark your calendars! We’re currently PLANning (*chuckle*) on another two-day event but we may change it to a long one-day thing (noon-4am or something).
