Imagine a world where
games are streamed to your console seamlessly and quickly, never having
to leave your home to buy or rent games, never a worry about games being
out of stock, never having to line up outside of a store at midnight
dressed like Samus to get the next hot title. Now imagine developers
releasing games a few levels at a time and charging you for each.
Imagine games released in "chapters" where
you never get to play the final level because the first levels didn't
sell well enough.
Awesome! The same
CNN story quoted above says:
"Microsoft also plans to greatly expand its online network in its
next generation, letting players and developers form their own
marketplace, selling in-game content for real-world cash via small
micro-transactions. Racing game enthusiasts, for example, will be able
to buy a faster car to give them an edge in the game for a slight bit
more..."
Finally, we can have a game world where, like the real world, the rich
kids have all of the cool stuff! While you're fighting for 50 hours on
an XBox roleplaying game to get the +50 Magical Shield of Shielding,
some snotty kid just went out and bought one with real-world money
thanks to his $150.00 weekly allowance from Daddy!
Chances of that happening...
Not even we're pessimistic enough to think they'll follow through on
this. Lots of bullshit gets thrown around in the pre-console hype and
speculation, so we'll assume somebody misspoke there. Then again, you
take a starving college kid and inform him that he can actually earn
an income by aquiring rare video game items and selling them for
actual "can buy burritos with it" dollars... how can you stop him?
http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/manifesto.html
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wemade Entertainment Co., Ltd is an
online games developer and service provider, based in
Seoul,
South Korea. Founded on
February 10,
2000,
Wemade has since developed several online games, the two most successful
being the
MMORPGs
The Legend of Mir 2, and its sequel
The Legend of Mir 3.
Wemade's games were confined to South Korea until a contract with the
Italian
based
Digital Bros group in March
2001. The
contract allowed Digital Bros. to distribute The Legend of Mir 2
in Europe. A similar contract with the
Chinese
company
Shanda in June allowed its games to be distributed in China by
fellow South Korean company
Actoz, who hold a 40% stake in Wemade. A final contract in August
2002,
signed with
Softworld, a
Taiwanese
company, meant that The Legend of Mir 2 was now available in four
regions.
Wemade has had a long running legal dispute with Shanda over one of
their newer MMORPGs, The World of Legend. It allegedly infringes
on Wemade's
intellectual property, and the case is still ongoing in a
Beijing
court.
William Zhu:
T2CN To List On Nasdaq In 2006
Deng Runze, Freestyle, Internet, Online Game,
T2CN, William Zhu
Editorial Summary
Shanghai based online gaming company
T2CN's president William Zhu said that
T2CN will list on Nasdaq in 2006,
reports Southcn.com. T2CN CEO Deng
Runzhe said that sales of virtual items in its online basketball
game Freestyle accounts for 75 percent of revenues from the game,
with the remaining 25 percent coming from in-game advertising from
companies such as Coca-cola. T2CN
registered with the US SEC in October 2005 to sell shares publicly.
Using Baidu MP3 Search
I think any modern student of Chinese should be using Baidu’s MP3
search. With it, it’s possible to find a huge variety of MP3s on
the internet, and it’s totally free! (Yes, the world’s loss
regarding intellectual property rights in China can be your gain!) I
can imagine, though, that for a beginning student of Chinese, an
all-Chinese interface can be daunting. It is my aim to make it more
accessible to the beginner.
Note: to use Baidu, your computer must support Chinese
fonts. Baidu uses GB2312 encoding, which should be automatically
detected by your browser, but the Chinese characters will only be
readable if your computer supports them.
OK, let’s suppose you’re a total beginner. You’ve heard of this
hot boy band called F4, and you figure it’s as good a place as any
(plus you don’t have to actually use any Chinese to search for
it!).
Go to
Baidu.com.
Click on MP3 (or you could have gone to
mp3.baidu.com directly).
Enter your search term in the box (in this case it’s “F4”
without the quotes).
Choose your format. I only want MP3s, so I select the “MP3”
radio button. (The choices, left to right, are:
歌词
(lyrics), 全部音乐
(all music files), mp3, rm
(RealPlayer format), wma (Windows Media Player
format), flash,
其它
(others), 铃声
(cell phone ringtones).)
Click on the button next to the search box, “百度搜索”
(Baidu search). (For the future, when you do searches from the
search results page, make sure you click on the left
button. The right button will be “歌词搜索”
(lyrics search).)
You will see a table of your search results. Below you will find a
guide to interpreting this table:
- 歌曲名:
Song Title (this name is linked to the MP3s you download)
- 试听:
Listen First (uses Windows Media Player in a popup window)
- 歌词:
Lyrics (very useful, especially for pop music, although not
100% reliable)
- 铃声:
Cell Phone Ringtone
- 大小:
Filesize (in megabytes)
- 式:
Format (MP3, WMA, etc.)
-
下载速度: Download Speed
(especially if you’re outside of China, this may be
important)
Right click on a title (choose from the 歌曲名/Song Title column)
and “Save as“. There’s a good chance that
you’ll want to change the filename, as they are often
completely random or unhelpful.
That’s it! Also try out the lyrics search. You can click on
歌词
(lyrics) for any search result that has them. You can also search
for lyrics directly, from the search results page. Click on the
right button, “歌词搜索”
(lyrics search).)
Note that the lyrics are not always 100% accurate. Most are submitted
by users.
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In Feb 2004, The9 signed a license agreement
with Vivendi Universal Games and became the exclusive licensee
and operator of World of Warcraft ("WoW") in China. WoW has
been played by millions of players in China since the
commencement of its All-access Open Beta Test and has achieved
in excess of 1.5 million paying customers just a month after
The9 launched commercial operations of WoW on June 7, 2005.
WoW is a 3D massively multiplayer online role playing game ("MMORPG")
developed by Blizzard Entertainment, a game development studio
of Vivendi Universal Games. WoW provides an online role-playing
experience set in the Warcraft universe, allowing millions of
players to interact within the amazing Warcraft virtual world.
Players assume the roles of Warcraft heroes as they explore,
adventure, and quest across a vast world. Whether journeying
together or questing on their own, players will engage in heroic
battles, develop friendships, forge alliances, and compete with
enemies for power and glory. The game features customizable
character classes with thousands of weapons, spells, and
abilities. With an innovative, easy-to-use interface, an
action-packed combat system, and thousands of quests that build
an immersive storyline, WoW offers a MMORPG experience that will
appeal to both veteran and casual players alike. WoW will
continuously provide updates of game content to give players
even more features and adventures to experience. |
|
Game Features:
| * |
Choose from three realm types
and find the one best suited for your own
playing style: Normal, Player versus Player, and
Role-playing. |
| * |
Join the Horde or the Alliance as one of 8
playable races and 9 classes. |
| * |
Learn the continuing story of Azeroth by
completing a wide variety of challenging quests. |
| * |
Journey through an epic world filled with
dungeons of different styles and depths. |
| * |
Establish a guild, purchase a custom guild
tabard, and promote or demote recruits to
different ranks within the guild. |
| * |
Sell your items or search for items for sale
via the automated auction house. |
Official Website:
www.wowchina.com |
|
Network PC Game Platform
Haofang operates a network PC game platform(www.cga.com.cn],
which operates on over 200 servers located throughout China,
allowing users to easily find and connect with thousands of
other players of the same PC game via the Internet. This
platform is especially appealing to home users because it is
otherwise inconvenient for them to find other gamers to play
together at the same time. Haofangs platform is compatible
with most of the popular multi-player network games in
China. |
First-person shooters
During the 1990s, online games started to move from a wide variety of
LAN protocols (such as IPX) and onto the Internet using the TCP/IP
protocol. Doom popularized the concept of deathmatch, where
multiple players battle each other head-to-head, as a new form of online
game. Since Doom, most first-person shooter games contain online
components to allow deathmatch/arena style play.
[edit]
Real-time strategy games
Early real-time strategy games often allowed multiplayer play over a
modem or local network. As the Internet started to grow during the
1990s, software was developed that would allow players to tunnel the LAN
protocols used by the games over the Internet. By the late 1990s, most
RTS games had native Internet support, allowing players from all over
the globe to play with each other. Services were created to allow
players to be automatically matched against another player wishing to
play.
[edit]
Browser games
As the World Wide Web developed and browsers became more
sophisticated, people started creating browser games that used a web
browser as a client. Simple single player games were made that could be
played using a web browser via HTML and HTML scripting technologies
(most commonly JavaScript). More complicated games would contact a web
server to allow a multiplayer gaming environment.
The development of web based graphics technologies such as Flash and
Java allowed browser games to become more complex. These games, also
known by their related technology as "Flash games" or "Java games"),
became increasingly popular. Many games originally released in the
1980s, such as Pac-Man and Frogger, were recreated as
games that could be played using the Flash plugin on a webpage. Most
browser games have limited multiplayer play, often being single player
games with a high score list shared amongst all players.
Most online games websites include hundreds of Flash, Shockwave and
Java games.
More recent browser-based games use web technologies like AJAX to
make more complicated multiplayer interactions popular.
[edit]
Massively multiplayer online games
Massively multiplayer online games were made possible with the growth
of broadband Internet access in many developed countries, using the
Internet to allow hundreds of thousands of players to play the same game
together. Many different styles of massively multiplayer games are
available, such as:
- MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game)
- MMORTS (Massively multiplayer online real-time strategy)
- MMOFPS (Massively multiplayer online first-person shooter)
[edit]
A profitable industry
The rising popularity of Flash and Java led to an internet revolution
where websites could utilize streaming video, audio, and a whole new set
of user interactivity. When Microsoft began packaging Flash as a
pre-installed component of IE, the internet began to shift from a
data/information spectrum to also offer on-demand entertainment. This
revolution paved the way for sites to offer games to web surfers. While
many games charge a monthly fee to web surfers, such as World of
Warcraft, many other sites relied on advertising revenues from on-site
sponsors. After the dot-com downfall in the early years of the 21st
century, many sites solely relying on advertising revenue dollars faced
extreme adversity.
This fluctuation of the advertising market is still affecting online
gaming sites today. Shanda Entertainment Group Ltd reported a 95% loss
of profits in last quarter's earnings. Shanda Entertainment is
resposible for many online gaming websites, their most popular being
Dungeons & Dragons.
Despite the decreasing profitability of free online games websites,
there still exists some sites have survived the fluctuating ad market by
offsetting the advertising revenue loss by using the content as a
cross-promotion tool for driving web visitors to other websites that the
company owns.
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