Rabu, 22 Februari 2012
PC Computer Game - Engaging Realism And Imagination
The varieties of games that are being marketed online and in the regular outlets account for thousand of varieties. The games range from strategic, real time, role playing, shoot em up, beat em up, third person shooters, racing and simulation to name the mo...
The development of personal computer games from simple multimedia exercises to the current trend that involves very sophisticated graphics, operating system and surround sound system have been very fast and impressive.
The varieties of games that are being marketed online and in the regular outlets account for thousand of varieties. The games range from strategic, real time, role playing, shoot em up, beat em up, third person shooters, racing and simulation to name the most popular.
As video stores are selling a multitude of choices, it is smart that parents use good judgment in the games that children play on their Personal computers. The best way to do this is to check the package information of the game about the age groups that the game is intended for.
This is important as some games contain very violent scenes, sexual themes, the use of tobacco, alcohol and illegal drugs. However, parental settings that are printed on the packaging label make it possible for guardians to password protect parts of the game so that the more adult parts of the games are not being accessed while the child still enjoys a perfectly playable version.
Because of the variety of games being marketed, choices can prove to be a challenge. It is not uncommon for the buyer to choose a game that has been recommended by a friend. However if you want something that is different, it is not enough to pick the game that will be interesting to you personally, or to the person that the personal computer game is intended for. Remember to look also on the Minimum PC requirements.
Another factor that is also to be considered is what the game is for. There are games that offer purely gaming enjoyment while there are those that are educational and informative. Some are especially designed for children, toddlers, teenagers, they come virtually for all age groups and intentions. Some of the best family games combine education with entertainment.
The largest groups of games and the best selling are the mind games. These are basically designed for adults and will take hours of playing.
Adventure games are onee of the oldest variety. The design of these games often includes a number of very beautifully drawn locations. Adventure games, unlike most other game designs, involve lateral thinking. The player travels from place to place in quest of an objective. The player often meets villains or impediments in his search for clues. Another component of adventure gaming is humor.
Another big seller for personal computer games are action heroes. The focus here is in fighting, shooting, beating the opponent up, and jumping across platforms. While this may sound violent, there are action games that are designed for children often coupled with humor and fun.
Simulators are also good sellers. Whether it be driving, sailing, flying and racing, there are simulators that are designed to familiarize the player with the actual handling of the vehicle to simulate the real one. There are even simulators that are being used for professional training.
Sports Games are very popular among the teens and early twenties. Many good personal computer sport games have been designed for realism.
Classic games like chess, backgammon and pool are also featured in many variations. The main task of these games is often to beat the computer that leaves most players very challenged.
Personal computer games today are being developed to capture the players' imagination on its realism. As personal computer games have continually attracted investors and designers, expect that personal computer games will become even better in a few months to come.
Minggu, 19 Februari 2012
Parent’s Guide to Online Gaming, Part 1
The internet touches every aspect of your children’s lives. Where you might look up an unknown word in a dictionary, your kids are more likely to use dictionary.com. Where you use the telephone, they use instant messenger. An even greater difference can be found in how they play games. Where the games of their parent’s generation may have involved a board, cards, or at their most sophisticated a console system, the games your children play on the net can be far more complex. They mine gold, spread empires, fight dragons and aliens alone or with tens, hundreds, even thousands of their fellow gamers. All of this makes for a confusing mish mash of names, places, jargon and lingo that can leave you with no idea what your kids are actually doing and a vague feeling of uneasiness that some part of it might not be good for them.
What’s appropriate for your kids is a decision only you can make. How much violence they are exposed to, how much time they spend in front of a screen and how much contact they have with the faceless strangers so common to the net are all questions you must grapple with and, in the end, decide for your family. While we can’t help you make these rough decisions, we can certainly help you get the information you need to understand your children’s hobbies better, both to make informed judgments about what they should and should not be doing, and to help you reach into another part of their lives that may have previously seemed like something of a puzzle box.
The Easy Stuff
The simplest type of online game is the sort of Flash or Java driven game that you generally see running inside your web browser. This type of game tends to be relatively simple compared to the stand alone games discussed later. Common examples include Bejeweled, Zuma, and Diner Dash. These games are almost universally single player and have none of the sort of violent or mature content that keeps parents up at night. Were they movies, they would be G Rated, with perhaps the occasional game stretching to PG. If this is the type of game your kids are into then first, be relieved. Then, try the game out. Many of these games can be very enjoyable for even the most casual of players. Some, such as Bookworm, even have genuine educational content. These games can be as much an opportunity for bonding and learning as throwing around a baseball in the backyard, and have the added bonus of being much easier to get your kids to sit down with you and play.
FPSs: Finding Something to Shoot.
FPS stands for First Person Shooter. They are First Person in the same since that a story might be. That is, the player sees the world through the eyes of a single character and interacts with the game environment as though he were that character. Shooter comes from the primary goal of most such games, the shooting of whatever happens to be the bad guy. FPS games are among some of the most popular online. Common examples include Doom, Battlefield:1942, and the X-Box game Halo. From a parental perspective, these games can be cause for concern. They vary widely in the amount of realism, degree of violence, language, and general attitude. The only way to get a good idea of the content issues is to watch the particular game. If your kids don’t want you watching while they play, then fire up the game yourself sometime when they aren’t around. There is a sizeable variation in how violent and how personal FPS content can be from game to game. The single player portion of Halo, for example, has players fighting against alien invaders with largely energy weapons and a minimum of realistic human suffering. In contrast, WWII themed games tend to go out of their way to show realistic violence. Given the subject matter, this is appropriate for the game, but may not be for your kids. Online play presents a potentially greater concern. The goal of online FPS games is almost always killing other players. While some games do have various modes where this is a secondary goal, all of them give the player a gun and encourage him to use it on characters representing other people.
Simulated gore and the use of violence against others to achieve goals may be things you don’t want your kids exposed to. Again, these are your decisions to make, but we encourage you to make them with as much information as possible. Talk to your kids. Find out what they think, in their words, is going on in the game. Make sure they see the line between what happens in the game and what happens in the real world, between what it’s okay to simulate and what it’s okay to do. The answers may surprise you. If your children understand the differences, see real violence as deplorable and simulated violence as part of the game then FPS games, even online ones, can be a perfectly healthy way to have fun and let off steam. In the end, it falls on you to make sure that what your child gets out of the game is good for him or her.
Next time, we’ll talk about RTS and MMORPG, the two other common types of commercial online game and touch on the twin demons of addiction and predation.
Jumat, 16 September 2011
FPS - First Person Shooter Games
Among the biggest sellers in online PC games are FPS, or First Person Shooter, games.
Kids love 'em. So do most Dads.
Many moms think the level of violence is too high and too graphic, so Dad and the kids play them when she is not looking.
FPS games are centered on you, the player, from your point of view. Armed with various handheld weapons, you might be called on to thwart the invasion of Earth by aliens or to stop a Nazi advance in WWII. As a player, you interact directly with the game environment from your own perspective.
FPS games evolved in the late 1990s as PCs became powerful enough to render the 3D graphics in real time. These are way beyond the arcade shooters from Space Invaders on up.
Several sub-genres of FPS have distinguished themselves:
* tactical - most have a military motif
* stealth - avoiding detection by opponents is a major element
* run and gun - among the most popular with multiple enemies and fast-paced action
* real-time strategy (RTS) - able to give commands to other units and control the strategy
* first person adventure (FPA) - free roaming adventure which takes one to the edge, like the controversial series Grand Theft Auto
Most FPS games take graphics to a new level of realism while exaggerating the attributes of the player. You now likely have muscles and strength that make Arnold look like a girlie-man.
Kids and adults alike love the frantic blasting of enemies within the context of heroic storylines.
While FPS games are demanding on your reflexes, they are also demanding on your PC. You will definitely have a need for speed, as well as a good graphics card and a decent set of speakers. The demands of gamers have pushed the PC industry to make better desktop computers for all.
The next big shift - with broadband Internet service now in millions of homes worldwide - will be the delivery of the latest FPS game to your PC via streaming download instead of CD. As more gamers accept online streaming delivery of the game itself, costs should come down over time as the game developers turn to online delivery and bypass the CD/DVD publishers and retailers in the supply chain.
For the game developers, online delivery of FPS games represents an opportunity to open up a new market of gamers who would be willing to try FPS online, but who never visit EB Games, the Electronics Boutique, or other game retailers in the mall.
For those who want to try/demo any number of FPS games, I recommend the Triton player. This streaming download allows you to begin play well before the entire download is completed. You can even demo recent releases like Prey from 3D Realms.
You can register free and download the player at: http://www.playtriton.com
As long as there are heroes and villains, and kids with vivid imaginations, there will be a place for FPS games when the aliens come calling.
Selasa, 30 Agustus 2011
Evolution of Casual Games
Casual games are the games that are designed for an average gamer or computer user, they feature a very short learning curve, have very basic rules and do not require much strategy, anybody should be able to enjoy casual games within minutes of launch.
Since the first days of Windows operating system top casual games were Solitaire, Minesweeper and Tetris like games which regardless of their simplicity cost worldwide economy millions of dollars in office productivity due to their addicting nature.
Today there are several major casual game developers such as Big Fish Games, Relexive, iWin, RealArcade and few other publishers who deserve most credit for great success of the casual games. Not only do they output several new and revolutionary games daily, keeping all the casual and hardcore gamers playing all the addicting games non stop, they also do a great job as far as promotion of the games is concerned.
Casual game developers are creating very high quality games which they offer trial versions for, with either time limit, level limit or some other feature limitations of the game. Those trial versions are usually enough to have the gamer hooked and either keep playing the limited version or purchase the full version of the casual game.
Another way casual game developers promote the games, is by having those same casual games available in flash or shockwave on online gaming site and then allow gamers to download the own "offline" version of the game.
Regardless of simplicity and the basic nature of casual games, they are really taking off and becoming a larger share of gaming industry daily, who knows maybe thanks to all the new casual games we will finally let the basic Windows Solitaire go.
Minggu, 01 Mei 2011
Video Game Evolution - What Could Possibly Be Coming?
A PC game is a game that is played on a computer just like it is played on a PSP or an Xbox. You just put the game in the system and start playing. If you do not play video games then you shouldn't be reading this article. A computer game is just like a video game a do not know why other people tend to disagree. In a video game you have all the same things you have a processor that processes the game. Then you have your graphics card or cards. Yes graphics cards are in every gaming system so if you thought a computer was different then video games then you are wrong. The only reason that computers will get better graphics is because video games are limited to their upgrades and that is why you will get booted out of games because you are not supposed to upgrade a system that is already upgraded enough.
You all have probably heard all we had back in my day was pong. Well pong is long gone and the age of the video game has taken over. There are so many video game systems that you can buy to play video games on these days. Like you have the PS2, you have the Xbox, you have the Xbox 360 and now you have the PS3. Like what is going to come next after the PS3. I don't think anything can come next. I mean I have heard something about a PS4 but I am pretty sure that wont happen anytime soon at least while I am in the video game era. All of these gaming systems are expensive but they are all worth the money if you like to play video games.
Today we live in the world of video games and fantasy. So you are going to have those games that are out there and are kind of crazy. You are also going to have those games that are fun to play and are hard at the same time. You are even going to have games that require you to use your brain and think through the game. Those types of games tend to be the types of games that you have to be sneaky in like the new splinter cell and those kinds of games.
The end of the 70's is when you were seeing the first home based video game systems and systems that you could plug into the wall and start playing all you had to do was hook it up to the TV and the plug in the wall and you could start playing.
Soon came to be the PC the personal computer. That soon became the weapon of the future and everyone would soon be using one of these. If you didn't have a computer by the 90's you were still considered to be living in the dark ages.
There are all kinds of different games that you could have played. You had fighting. Shooting, shooter, racing, I mean you had all the games that you could think of to play and people chose to get computers and start playing computer games.
Even though video games are something that you like to do everyday and wish that you could skip school instead of going to your class you still have to go to school to get your work done so you just need to go to school and then when you get home you still have so many hours to play before you have to study for that test. You just need to focus on what you need to do, not what you want to do.