Gravatars Rule…
Posted by Prashanth | Filed under Asides
One small appeal to every user who reads Wordpress blogs. Make your account on Gravatar and upload a thumbnail image (80*80px) that represents you. What it does is for our blogs and every other Wordpress or Gravatar enabled site is decorate the comments section of every post. Gravatars or Globally Recognized Avatars are linked to your email account and other details that you enter before commenting on a Wordpress blog. Once you enter them and comment, a little thumbnail image comes up.
Like if you see the comments made by me, there would be a picture of me when I was a little kid. The rest are grayed out boxes, including those made by Uma. So please have your Gravatar account created and colour up the web or whichever sites you comment. Whenever you change your avatar, it will automatically change on all Gravatar-enabled sites… which means all Wordpress blogs among more sites…
Why Hand-held Consoles (i.e Smaller Gaming Devices) Suck…
Posted by Prashanth | Filed under General, Headshot, Technology
I know quite a few people who blow up money on vices such as smoking, drinking, drugs and a lot other booze. I also know people who play on the PSP. And this post isn’t just bashing Sony’s shitty creation, but also many others that it is competing with. Nintendo can be credited for wasting time, money and energy in the creation of several models of handhelds very very uncreatively named as GameBoy, GameBoy Advance (GBA), GBA SP, GBA DIG, GBA ACP, and quite a few more ripped off from positions offered to the police forces in India.
There are a few notable features common in all of them -
* They have really small microscopic screens which makes hyper-metropic people like me dizzy.
* They have a shitty catalog of games which fans claim that they are just as diverse as those for the PC
* The games come on proprietary storage devices that cannot be accessed by any other device made by them
* They suck bigtime
* They are friggin’ expensive costing even more than top end Graphics Cards…
They even have hypnotic effects on their users. I have actually seen that happening. I had a friend who claimed to have similar opinions about handhelds. But then, it was only until he played on a PSP owned by a PSP owner I know. In that very experience, his mind was captured, with his reasoning capacities nailed by the AI being that sits inside the small shell of plastic(, metal, glass and a whole lot of materials that could have been better used to create cellphones). From that very day, he wasn’t the same person I knew. Since then, he found NFS Underground on that screen smaller than my own mouth “just-as-good” as NFS Carbon on my PC on which I spent nearly three and a half times more! I realized then that Sony had another victim to proudly advertise, another innocent human who could have raised his voice against the hypnotic phenomenon. This post I assume is the first venture in going against those all-powerful evil beings sitting inside Sony’s HQ plotting conspiracies into dominating the entire world. Today Sony could make one guy say something that would have any sane person raising his eyebrows. It could have someone changing sides. It could reduce the love someone had towards his own PC. Tomorrow, it could influence the world peace meetings in a big way. It could cause another World War. It could cause international allies changing colors and sides. I can already imagine in chinky (read:An Indian slang for an east-Asian or a Japanese looking guy) in a tuxedo sitting on swivel chair inside a darkened conference room throwing up the evil “Muhahaha” sort of laughter the way bad bosses in Hindi movies do. Their policy goes something like this - If you can’t beat them with intelligent reasons to own, get them joining you using mind control processors embedded inside those tiny devices.
What might seem like rivals in sales of shitty devices, is actually two rival plots to take over the entire world… Wake up folks! Wake up… it’s about time a mutiny starts up. Those awful devices must go down… I know this particular post is going against sentiments of a zillion people around. I apologize, but then it’s time things change!
Oh well, perhaps several days of NOT playing GTA and NOT watching South Park is getting on me. Now for some saner reasons to not go for consoles. As I said, the experience isn’t at all as wholesome in my arrogant opinion atleast. It is obvious that handheld consoles have much lesser processing power than their towering daddies. For several reasons, any console is only powerful enough to just render graphics optimized for the tiny little screens that it comes with. Tiny in terms of resolution that is… 480*272 is 7.9 times smaller than what I play on my humble monster with a 17″ TFT. And that is as big as it gets in console gaming. Cheap (in terms of nature, not pricing) stuff like GBA (All variants!), Nintendo DS, and wannabees like Nokia N-Gage have even smaller displays, at times requiring magnification devices. It really hurts me when people spend several thousand bucks on buying games for it which only comes on devices which would never take off and never become a standard. Take UMD for instance. It just doesn’t play anywhere else other than those damned sony devices. Ditto for Memory Sticks (every possible kind of it!). These are atleast reasonable in front of those shitty cartridges that you need to buy to use the Nintendo’s offerings. Really, it takes you back to the 1990’s…
Have a sense for spending money wisely. I understand that gaming is a lovely gift technology has given to its users. Its always better to have a wholesome experience of it. With stellar graphics, heart-thomping sound, and the cinematic experience that just pumps adrenaline in your viens! PC gaming rocks!
Ideas for upcoming posts: Bash console gaming, More gibberish about handheld gaming and also bash corporations not taking out PC versions of its games a la Rockstar, Namco, Konami, THQ, and a lot more…
PS: Believing a damned rumour and then waiting all the while till October for the PC version of GTA seems worse than watching Telugu movies which are put up around the place where I currently am… I guess I can put myself into suspended animation till then, or better still - Study for the big exams which people an year older to me are currently going through… Sheesh! 
GTA and Me.
Posted by Prashanth | Filed under Technology
This post is all about GTA. The Grand Theft Auto has always revolved around one concept, Liberty. Liberty to choose the kind of life you want to lead, liberty to frame tactics to solve a certain mission and liberty to do just about anything from shooting around wildly to hanging around with hot chicks…;-p
When it comes to storyline based gaming, mostly the action sorts such as Half-Life, Call of Duty, or Ghost Recon there are two approaches into the game-play type - Linear and Non-linear. Nope, its nothing mathematical. Linear games such as Half Life, Doom, etc have a fixed storyline and each user goes through almost the same experience that the developer intends to create. There is little customisability and choice offered in such games. Usually such games are level/chapter/plot based and go through a fixed sequence. GTA, atleast the release comes under the second type, Non-Linear. Here, the objective of the game is not exactly very well defined. You have great choice in the way you want to proceed playing the game. To a very large extent, each user experiences or feels the game differently. You have a good amount of choice in how you start your game, you have multiple methods in finishing a mission… and that just doesn’t differ with the kind of weapons offered. Such games are also refered to as - Sandbox-Style. GTA is the quintessential example of sandbox-style gameplay and with each new release (Linux distros are growing on me!), the keep getting more and more addictive and great fun to play.
GTA: San Andreas must be my favorite game of all time followed by Half Life 2. It doesn’t have gorgeous cutting-edge graphics, no great physics, no deeply knit storyline, nor beautiful looking babes (debates in the comment form please!) but then it is just so much fun without anything at all… Despite being technically inferior to many of its contemporaries, it tops the sales of several big games combined. Think of it to be the insane part of me justifying itself here. I like GTA for the same reason that I don’t like many Bollywood Movies and the same reason I like MTV Roadies. GTA has that feeling of being outlaw, the feeling of liberty to do anything, and with all those swear words and and grunge attitude, it has been a wonderful stress buster for me and many gamers and non-gamers I know. Just the feeling of being insane with crazy driving, picking and blowing up objects, destruction all around, shooting like a maniac is a feeling that I cherish sooo much. The missions themselves provide food to keep the wilder side of me tamed for the rest of the world to see me as a decent kid. One of the first games I played when i got my first PC in mid 2005 was GTA San Andreas. I really regret to not being able to enjoy the previous versions of the game - Vice City, III as they appeared unplayable after San Andreas even though they were blockbusters themselves in their time. I have been impatiently waiting for the next installment to be out at the same time checking out other GTA wannabees such as Just Cause, Godfather, and other šhìttÿ stuff including Mafia failed to please me as they weren’t just small scale rip-offs of the same game but also technically inferior. Some of the most fun parts of the game were omitted from it.
I am not exactly too much of an avid gamer, but then I kind of fancy multi-player gaming for several reasons. One thing GTA never had that other games like Unreal, Quake, Counter Strike and Half Life was a cult following. It had more of the underground circuit kind of following. What it always needed was a fully fledged multiplayer mode with all sorts of controls present in the GTA single player in a setting similar to the cityscapes in the game. The closest things could get to that is MTA or Multi-Theft Auto which was nothing but a modification or a hack over the base of the original offering from Rockstar. It somewhat didn’t have me addicted, neither managed to get GTA a cult following.
So well, after years of waiting, Rockstar finally fulfilled pending demands on the game. Added expandable content, the much demanded Multi-player with 15 modes, and of course, killer graphics as seen in those trailers. Last year, I stayed up all night with another GTA freak Varun just to have a first look at its trailer. I know people who get crazier than this, but well Rockstar once again simulated an American region with so much more life in it. I don’t think I can ever describe the feeling, but GTA is alive and immersive. And I can’t wait to get my hands on it!
The XBOX and PS3 versions release today with the PC version rumored to be due sometime in October, which is several ages after. Perhaps Rockstar has big plans for the PC version. I wish I knew more about it… 
For now, i would be just surfing around for first account reviews from professional gaming sites and see a few gameplay videos and trailers. A few reviews came out even before the release date, which seem a lot like summaries of the leaked info. The trailers show the amount of attention Rockstar has put towards detail to replicating New York by taking place in a redesigned Liberty City consisting of four boroughs, based on four of the boroughs of New York City. Broker is the equivalent of Brooklyn, Queens is Dukes, the Bronx is Bohan and Manhattan is Algonquin. Adjacent to the city is the independent state of Alderney based on New Jersey and named after the Channel Island of the same name. This time, it looks like Rockstar has knit an intriguing storyline as well, along with its winning gameplay. Read more here. Another thing I am excited about is the radio system which was great in all versions of GTA I have come across.
The trailer shows the wonderful lighting and shadow effects, especially in the first one in which a car is shown speeding on a bridge and the shadows of the beams on the bridge cast brilliantly with photo-realism along with a realistic car. Some more work had to be done on the people, but then it can all be forgiven for the gameplay offered. Anyway, do let me know if anyone of you is as crazy about GTA as I am… 
Let me know that I am not alone…
