New Halo MMOFPS in the works?

There's a rumor out that bungie is working on an MMO Halo game. While I would take this with a pinch of salt (what?? the internets can't lie!), the rumor comes at a timely point for me as I was chewing over the idea of my next blog post to be about MMOFPSes.

I enjoy playing FPS, it's more about pure skill (minus the various cheats of course) than about how long you played the game and what level you are and what armor you were fortunate/persistent enough to get. Every game is pretty much on a level playing field, and if you lose it's pretty much because the other player was better than you.

I also enjoy MMOs, because I do like the idea of a persistent world, one where you build your character and your reputation and you can easily switch between PvE and PvP depending on your mood (and sometimes depending on the mood of the opponents riding past!)

So the logical following is to mash up the two and get twice the enjoyment, right? Unfortunately, I think this formula doesn't always work. As my old boss used to say, "It's not just a floor polish, it's also a desert topping". I just can't see a good formula for mixing FPS and MMO.

Have you heard of any games that worked, even a little, that were FPSMMOs? Let me know in the comments!

The future of gaming

There's a well written article on the future of gaming at Cracked about the future of gaming, and the authors take both examples from upcoming games such as Spore to ongoing research to Jetsons/Matrix like predictions.

Spore is a fascinating concept. You play in "God" mode, where you control the actions of the protagonist, in this case your toon starts as a single celled organism that you guide through the evolutionary cycle, to amphibian, then mammal, then to tribe making and then city building and finally interplanetary travel. At each stage of evolution you get to design the next step by spending DNA points, so for example you can make your toon have a third tentacle that fights off a particular predator, or not give it legs so it's a crawling, slug like entity.

I wish the game was a MMORPG but it's billed as a massively single player online game, where your creature is uploaded to the server and added to other player's universes where they interact with the creatures on the other inhabitants on those other worlds. You don't get to interact with other players directly, they don't exist on your universe, but their creations do so the gameplay variations will be interesting.

The article also talks about Sony's PS3 Home, but I felt the authors had swallowed the marketing hype, there are many virtual worlds out there but I have yet to find one that immerses me - the controls are clunky, the graphics are slooooooow and degraded to a point where it looks like my first school drawing project.


Another cool device that the article talks about is the Virtual Retinal Display, a device from the University of Washington that projects images directly into your retina. I'd love to get my hands on one of these, but maybe I'll wait a few years and make sure the side effects aren't going to be horrendous!




Check out the article, it's not only interesting, I love the wacky humor the authors have injected (NSFW in some cases btw)