It’s been a while since my last run-in with the digital plague. However it is no less cathartic to play Retrovirus, a neat little resurrection of the 6-degrees-of-freedom-shooter. The game tasks you with seeking out and eliminating the dirty purple globs of stylised virus, which are running amok in your computer’s pristine starship-like virtual space.
Last week I acquisitioned a Minecraft server, uploading the world from our LAN games so that it may continue to live on in eternal online form. Despite only a few of the potential players being able to make it at the moment, it is already developing an interesting character of its own to the point where my 3rd-party-generated maps look like the sort that might come with a dungeon crawling RPG.
So I’ve made a little page on this site for the LAN group, an assortment of digicrats and consolemancers known collectively as the Rapier Foundation. Check out the page on the top bar just up there! At the moment it’s just stuff for the Minecraft server, but I hope to get around to putting more generic LAN-related stuff on there too at some point.
And for those with an interest in my development projects; have no fear, all is still going well! But with the absolutely incredible Little Big Planet 2 in my hands now too (and Test Drive Unlimited 2 around the corner next week), it’s looking to be a decent period of rest & relaxation!
The big issue for LAN gamers is that big grey area of copyright: multiple installs. Over recent years this issue has got sorta out of hand, but as much as the copyright jockeys are generally being asshats about it, they do have valid points.
What am I on about? Okay, you buy a copy of a game. You can play on one PC fine. Then you want to play your brother or something, on a network game between his laptop and your PC. But you can’t, you need another copy of the game. Is this reasonable?
In short, no.
There are some valid reasons why you are being prevented, and self-righteous trolls will bemoan them to stem the endless tide of whining CD-Key scroungers. But there is no excuse for this, because a number of games have comprimised beautifully. It is a simple case of laziness, and the neglect of network gamers in fear of the unscrupulous online pirates. Continue reading