August 11, 2006
There's been numerous attempts to create melee-based fighting games in Second Life, but up to now, they've been fairly chaotic and gameplay-weak, with limited control and combat moves, turning them into wacky "crash your avatar into the other guy more" demolition derbies. The combat action of Samurai Island (direct link here), by contrast, is the first credible melee game I've seen in action, swordplay and hand-to-hand fighting with an intuitive interface, an elegant heads-up display, and a wealth of offensive and defensive manuevers to choose from. Though a tad darker than I'd like, the above video hopefully conveys the variety of that gameplay. Second Life's lower frame rate actually seems to work to the game's advantage, slowing down the action just enough to give the players time to create and execute strategies-- and perhaps just as crucial, for an audience to enjoyably follow the fight.
In the YouTube demo, for example, you can clearly do a post-game analysis of the duel between purple-clad warrior Draconis Neurocam and black-caped ninja Ishmael Ren. In it, Ren constantly manuevers around (and over) Neurocam, waiting for an opening. Until, that is, Neurocam over-commits with a red-flame power attack-- which Ren dodges with a flying leap, wheeling around on his now-exposed opponent, going in for the quick kill.
KatanaBlade Anubis, Samurai Island proprietress
Samurai Island's combat is the brainchild of Esprite Xavier, Ayame Musashi, and Archanox Underthorn, who've created a complete gaming experience. (After you purchase the equipment, for example, you're given a laquered sword case, with a glass door that opens dramatically, when you're ready to begin your warrior's journey.) Unsurprisingly, the Island boasts hundreds of players, with clans based around competing dojos with different martial philosophies. (The game even boasts its own official website, here.)
All of which suits KatanaBlade Anubis, the island's statuesque co-owner, who generally lets the three developers go wild with their swordplay games. "I'm just the Hostess that has some say in the problem areas about the land," she tells me humbly, with a touch of den mother affection. "I just let them be creative and have fun-- as long as it doesn't kill the sim."
Note: Sound effects from the video all generated in-world by the Samurai Island combat system. Music soundtrack generously provided, of course and as usual, by Torley, from her fittingly entitled track, "Action Sequence". Torley posted an extended Beta preview of the game on her blog here.
|
unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
Featured Project
Berkeley Conference: Online Video and the Future of Television - Friday, September 30, 2005
This one-day conference brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse – and until now, largely disconnected – specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.
del.icio.us/tag/unmediated
[+]
About unmediated
unmediated is a group blog that tracks the tools, processes,
and ideas being used to decentralize media production and distribution.
|
flickr/tag/
citizenmedia
[+]
|
