Ever saw that awesome killing shot or see something so hilarious you need to show to everyone? Unfortunately, as soon as you reach for your screenshot button, the moment has passed and you’re just left with an uninteresting screen.
Never worry about finding the screenshot button ever again, my friend. As long as you have a large enough hard drive, Fraps and VirtualDub will come to your rescue.
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Valve has introduced the Steam Trading beta allowing users to trade Steam gifts (games that are in your gifts/guest library that you can give to other people) and Team Fortress 2 items with other users.
Drag your item into the chat box to show it off!
In the old wild days of Team Fortress 2 (meaning yesterday) in order to trade games and items, the seller of the item must find a Middle-man, a trusted person who will hold onto the seller’s item and then transfer the items to the buyer once the seller has received the goods.
Finding a Middle-man took time as only a few people are trusted enough to handle merchandise and the seller/buyer must be able to contact the Middle-man and hope the Middle-man agrees to help in the transaction.
Without a Middle-man, it was all too common for the buyer or seller, whoever went first in the trade, to just run off with the items without honoring the deal. These people are known as Scammers.
The Steam Trading beta completely eliminates the Middle-man for the trading of games for items. Better yet, the beta allows users to trade more than the default eight item limit within Team Fortress 2, another function that Middle-men were used for.
To access the beta, go to “View–> Settings” and in the Account tab, click on the dropdown menu for betas and opt-in to the Steam Trading beta. Once you restart Steam, you’ll be able to right click on any friend’s name and click “invite to trade” to initiate the process.
The city of Bruma, located in the frosty Jerell mountains, my long trek through the wilderness comes to an end. Now I can finally sell off the stolen goods from the Imperial City and afterwards I’ll head off to Frostcrag Spire, a home which I somehow inherited while in the Imperial Prison.
Waiting for my chance to break into the home of the shady contact, I spend the night just watching the door waiting for him to leave.
The sun has set, it’s time to go on a prowl in the Imperial City. I’ve already joined the Thieves Guild and now I just need some stolen goods to sell to Ongar in Burma before the guild will give me any special job. First off, I have a quest with Jensine to investigate Thorinir and his suspicious contact who seems to get Thorinir goods below market costs.
After a tiring escape from the Imperial Prison and sewers, I needed a good rest. I worked my way to the Waterfront district and was told that the Bloated Float would be a nice place to eat and get some rest.
I found some old oblivion screenshots I took back in 2006 on my 6600GT 128MB. It was my first video card I bought. Before the 6600GT I had a Riva TNT2 32MB.
On the way to reclaim his house
I just recently broke 100 hours with medic in Team Fortress 2, officially my most played class. Total, I have around 400 hours put into TF2 over the past 3 years. From the start I never really wanted to play medic, but I did want to win games. You’re not going to be breaking any sentry farms with unubered heavies/soldiers/demos so a medic is needed. It seems so odd right? That a class I didn’t want to play is also my most played class. Why would I keep playing medic if I didn’t want to play it?
Life as a medic is harsh
One of the reasons I didn’t like playing medic is that you have to take the passenger seat in killing and doing objectives. Your goal in the game is to keep your team alive and support them in the push towards the objective. Sure you’ll be top of the scoreboard with assists and healing but you won’t be getting the satisfaction of a kill. The second reason I don’t like playing medic is that you are the bullseyes that everyone wants to kill. Getting close to an uber? Count on a crit rocket or a spy coming around your way. As other classes if I get killed, I don’t mind but with medic, it’s often when I’m past 75% in an uber charge that just got wasted and now I have to build it back up again. It’s just one of those laws of life where you count on something bad happening to you as you near the climax of joy.
Try surviving this without an Uber
What I found to make playing medic a much more enjoyable class for me to play is to be an offensive, or as other people call it, battle medic. If I see a large chance of myself being killed and I don’t have faith in the person I’m supporting to protect me, I’ll break off the healing beam and go for the kill with my saw. If I survive, my ubersaw gets a nice charge bonus, if I die, I would have died anyways so it’s better to die while trying than to die with the medigun pointed at the enemy. Other times, I just can’t resist the lure of an easy kill as there’s something satisfying about getting the drop on enemies and humiliating them with a kill.
Your medic is mine!
I don’t know if by being a battle medic I cause more harm to my team by dying instead of staying back and safe, but I do know it’s a lot more fun to run around causing distractions as the enemy try to hunt down an almost harmless medic. Lately though I’ve been moving away from medic. If I see there’s other good medics on the team, I’ll just stick to medic for the initial push out of the gates until I die. Sometimes however, we end up winning the round without me dying at all even with battle medic attacks on the enemy frontline.
The next time you play with me and I’m your medic, remember, if I see an easy kill, I’ll take it, even if I have to kill steal from you. If you’re the enemy, don’t think I’ll stick around with my medigun out waiting for you to kill me, I’ll go down trying to take you with me.
Moments later, we discover an all medic team only gets you to the second point
By the way, I use to prefer playing pyro back in the days, now there’s too many pyros running around not doing a good job of supporting the team so I decided to give heavy a try.
Burn baby burn
just some of my favorite screenshots I placed on Imageshack, placing here for reference
Here are some screenshots I took from a left 4 dead demo, video is here. [url]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vikg3NyE0N4[/url]
I had a blast at GDC and exploring the show floor. I only attended for two days but it was enough to explore what the show floor had to offer.
NeuroSky
One of the first products I saw was the NeuroSky monitor headset. They were showing off how it can read your brain waves and did a tech demo on what you could do. The one I tried had me focus my attention on one object making it explode and another had me relaxing to have a ball float up.
It was an interesting technology and the company stated that they were looking for developers to use their tech in games. The focus was in rehabilitation for people disabled by injuries as the machine will help the player learn how to control their brain waves. These brain waves could be used in mobility devices so instead of a user physically moving a part of their body, they can just think it and the appliance will move as if it’s part of the body.
The screen showing the Brain Waves
Making the Ball Float
Me with the headset on
Boryokudan Rue
When I first glimpsed Boryokudan Rue, I immediately thought back to the adventure games of the 90s. The game is built on the Adventure Game Studio engine. What immediately stood out for me was the use of a cover system and gun fights. Adventure games I’ve played were always light in heart, had comedic violence, and no real enemies that could kill you. Just delay you or reset you to an earlier part of the level.
The level being showcased at GDC was the tutorial level and the character you play, Delta Six, is a experimental subject who has lost his memory and the tutorial serves as a way to teach you the basic movements. Once the scene got to the gun tutorial, I was hooked. The player goes into cover and you have to manually choose when to go out of cover and aim. Once you aim there is a quicktime like meter where you have to hit the right range to get the headshot or a regular body shot. I didn’t see what happened after but as I understand, eventually you must figure out how to get the gun and break out of your containment.
Below are links to the developer’s twitter and the development thread.
http://www.jburger.blogspot.com/
http://www.bigbluecup.com/yabb/index.php?topic=35594.0
Monaco
Monaco was the gem of the show for me. I got a brief 5 minute play of it but the game, event though it’s 9 months from release, it’s amazing. Monaco is a 4 player coop game where you and your 3 friends must steal a trophy and escape while avoiding guards with guns and bystanders who will report you on sight to the nearest guards. All you need is the movement keys, and your ability key. Interactions with doors, windows, and alarms can be done just by walking into it. Each character has a different ability such as shutting off alarms, instant lock picking, spy cameras, and sedatives for guards.
If one character gets killed, another just has to walk over and revive them. This proves tricky however if the dead buddy happens to be in the line of sight of a guard. What the players need to do is either sedate him with the yellow character or distract him by having the guard chase another player. Teamwork is an absolute in order to survive and reach the end in this game. This is one game I’m looking forward to.
http://www.facebook.com/MonacoIsMine
http://twitter.com/MonacoIsMine
3d Games at GDC
The 3d games at GDC did not impress me. For one, the 3d glasses did not fit over my eye glasses. The games didn’t really look special with 3d on and it didn’t really pop out at me. The 3d effects suffer from the small pc monitor sizes and the distance to the monitors. The ones I tried had you 5-6 feet away from the monitor and the 3d was contained within the monitors unlike in the movie theatres. The problem I think likes with the fact that in theatres, the screen fill sup your entire field of view so everything you see is in 3d while on the show floor, you had the environment to contend with.
I don’t think 3d games will be big until people get larger screens into their homes to fill up their view. Also, the glasses never sat right on my nose and some of them I had to hold in place in front of my eyeglasses.
Overall, GDC was a nice experience. I think I’ll go back again for 2011 and might pay for the higher priced passes so I can attend the summits.
I am currently attending San Francisco State University pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration - Information Systems and Electronic Commerce.
