21 June 2012

Games I would like to see finished

So, E3 is going on but for some reason I don't feel like paying much attention to it.
Why? Shooter, shooter, shooter and some other genres. Not much variety in there. I think the best shooter has been made years ago (the Half Life series for singleplayer, Counterstrike for multiplayer) so I'm a bit more interested in other stuff.

Let me make a list of the few games I'm actually waiting for to be finished so I can throw some money at it:

Fract

Fract is an adventure type game, from what I understood after playing their prototype. You walk around in an amazingly nice looking low poly world solving puzzles, getting old machinery working without actually knowing what they do and gradually discovering more of the world.
It will have real-time synthesized music that you'll be able to compose your own music with it (I kinda hope for a built-in recorder) presented in a very nice low poly look.

The art style of this game is enough for me to instantly want to buy and play it, but unfortunately it's still under development (like all the games in this list).

Castle story


We all (should) have heard of a terrifying game called Dwarf Fortress. I would have liked the game and have played it fully if only it had a more accessible interface. Luckily Castle story looks like it will live up to that hope. Sure, the developers don't have that much depth planned, but I'm pretty sure after this game releases someone will make a mod that adds all these functions to it. All the more reasons to wait for this game to be released.

0x10c


The "New Game From Notch" (aka "oh ex ten to the cth", "Ox ten see",  "Oxy tensee" but actually its "0x" as in "the next number is in hexadecimal" and the "10c" as in "that's 1612 in decimal").
A space game, low poly graphics, sandbox, RPG, fully customizable spaceships with fully programmable computers, single and multiplayer connected via the multiverse, duct tape and lots of engineering. These were only a few features Notch has planned for it.
Together with the raging community this will result in piracy, epic space battles, player programmed Operating Systems, custom ships with a lot of references to movies or series, ... just way too much to think of.
The game is just in it's starting phase, meaning Notch barely has the general gameplay mechanics implemented (gravity, lighting, movement) while he often requests for community input. This means we all still can dream of what it will become.

It just recently got in development, so we'll see what becomes of it.

There are some alternatives to this concept like Rodina and Infinity-Universe, but even those are under development...

Minecraft


"Haha!" you may think, "You can't fool me, Minecraft is out for about half a year now!"
Yes, it is, but no it isn't out of development yet. The Mojang team is working hard on getting the game to where they want it to be, Minecraft development is far from done. Although I already threw a bit of money at it.
The effects of a Minecraft out of development are easy creation of mods, easy installing of said mods, optimized gameplay with lots of terrain features, a less raging community (since there won't be huge updates anymore), bug free playtime and much more.
Minecraft still has a bit to go until it's complete, but it already is one of my favorite games ever...

--
(end of list, for now) (hmm, I thought there would be a few more...)

Anyways, I think I talked enough about games, let's play them...

-ThOR

19 June 2012

Magic

We all have heard about it somehow, somewhere, mostly in stories (like movies, books and games).
But what is it?

Well, I don't know and I won't tell you that, I'll only tell you what I think it is.

But first I'll have to explain to you guys how I think living beings live.
If you hadn't noticed: this post will be a quite philosophic one.

In my opinion any living being exists out of 3 main components. A soul (the energy), the spirit (the thinking ability) and a body (a "vessel" for the other two). Please note these terms have nothing to do with what a dictionary says they mean (I didn't search it), I use these terms because they are the closest to what I mean when using them.

So the soul contains the energy a being needs to think/live/be, the spirit is a term to describe the thoughts and the consciousness while the body is "simply" the embodiment of the immaterial parts of the being.
Despite the many abilities a being has it's limited to what the it can do. A spirit without a body or soul can't do much more than think (and therefore only "be"), a soul alone would only be energy floating around and a body on itself would fall apart. On the other hand a being without a soul wouldn't have the energy to do something, a being without a spirit either and a being without a body wouldn't exist in this world all together.
So every part needs all the other parts for the being to be functional and every part needs all other parts to be functional. Because of this every part is limited to what all other parts can do. A spirit can't influence anything outside the body, a soul can't "power" anything because of the same restrictions.

But imagine someone who can use his spirit to influence energy. This someone could take energy from other places (or his own body) and use it to influence something else.
This someone (from now on called "the Magician") would firstly be able to control temperature by moving energy away from whatever should be cooled and towards whatever should be warmed/heated/combusted. Yes,in my opinion that should be all it takes to make something burn. It may be a bit of a problem to gather enough energy for something to catch fire but within this frame of reference it's the easiest and most imprecise way because you just "put" a lot of energy in on place or take it away from another.

The next step would be to move something. Since temperature makes atoms move faster or slower the Magician already does this, but now he should apply this energy in such a way that it actually becomes a force that influences his subject. Making a ball roll, making a Rubix Cube solve itself and making things fly are all in this category.

The final step is taking a material and changing it into something else. Why should this be one of the hardest things? Because it involves manipulating energies on a (sub)atomic scale.
To be able to do this kind of stuff the Magician first needs to know what he's doing exactly and until now some parts of quantum physics are by (the real, existing) scientists explained as 'magic' for lack of a better word. (For example electrons. Once you try observing them as particles they'll start behaving like waves. Try observing them as waves they'll start behaving like particles. Why? Magic!)
Once the Magician has figured out what he's doing he has to manipulate energy in such a way it affects that atom just in the way he wants it, which requires some serious focus.
For some decent results he also needs to do this on quite some atoms, so I can imagine real atom Magicians would be very rare.

I say it again: this is just how I think Magic would exists, if it would happen to be real. I don't know if it really does exist, I wouldn't know if it doesn't.

Anyways, I think I wrote enough for now.

See you a next time.

-ThOR