Category Archives: Gaming

Frog Jumped Into the Pond Drinking Game

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The frog jumped into the pond drinking game is a word game that involves a lot of repetition. It does not require any planning or any additional equipments and can be played in the bar, in the rooms, at a party or just about anywhere. As long as there are alcoholic beverages of their choice, the players are good to go. This game needs two players or more and depends heavily on the player’s ability to be alert enough to know when they turn to speak and what they are supposed to say.

The frog jumped into the pond drinking game is a quick fire drinking game that involves the players spelling out the words in the title. The players in a circle go around repeating the statement “one frog jumped into the pond, plop” in turns in a clockwise manner.

All the participants sit around in a circle facing each other and the first player starts by saying “one frog”, to which the next player has to say “jumped over”, the third person says “the pond” and the last person says “plop”. The number of words said in any one game round depends on the number of players. If there are more than four players then each player can say one word from the statement instead of two. For example instead of a player saying “jump over”, one player can say “jump” and the other say “over”.

The “drinking game” then starts again but in this round the first player says “two frogs” once and not “one frog” as were said initially. The next person says “jumped over” twice now. The third one also says the words “the pond” twice and the last person says “plop, plop”. After the last two “Plops” have been said the game begins with the first player saying “three frogs” and the rest saying their words three times.

In the frog jumped into the pond drinking game the other players repeat their words according to the number of frogs mentioned by the first player. So the key is to always listen to the number of frogs being said by the player who starts every round of the game. The first player will only say the number of frogs once so it is up to the other players to keep up and know where the game is at.

The players are required to say their words immediately without hesitation, pausing for too long, mixing up their words or saying the wrong words that are not even in the given phrase or messing up in any way. Every time a player breaks any of these rules they are required to take drinks according to the number of frogs mentioned. For example if one player says their words eight times and there are nine frogs, they have to drink all nine drinks. After they have taken their drinks the game starts all over again with the first player starting with the words “one frog”.

Gaming Computers At Great Prices

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The field of gaming has evolved from that old Commodore 64 to full out gaming consoles that hook up to the World Wide Web. As things go, technology for computers, accessories along with the internet have all grown together and in a complementary way. As memory was added to systems, producers found that separating the processing for video gave the computer and video greater speed and reliability.

The old days of gaming on PCs were fraught with problems such as networks dropping, video freezing and general instability from the gaming computer. Realizing that there was a terrific following for community gaming, technology companies began working more closely together to make certain the hardware incompatibility problems were resolved giving extreme speeds and reliability.

Since the universe of gamers grew and began making demands for better speeds overall, the hardware started separating into categories for instance gaming computer, desktop computer and work computer, each serving a specialized purpose. The highest is the gaming console. These are generally made to withstand graphically intense, memory and processor hogging video games.

Those that play these games will tell you that attempting to play them with a regular or family computer is almost impossible. Actually, most games will test your system and simply tell you just how your graphics capabilities are inadequate and shut down. To enter this world, you have to have game, so to speak. If your system is less than par, you will not only suffer, but in addition so will your team members in the games.

If you’re not used to the world, you could wonder if you should develop your own system or get a pre-built gaming computer. The point is you happen to be new. The answer is pre-built. Should you be a new comer to the world of gaming, you will not desire to make your own system only to find out something went wrong and you have no idea the best way to fix it. It is advisable to ensure the system you will have is built for gaming and possesses the support to back it up.

The box you get should be able to be customized if you get brave in the foreseeable future, but for starting out your fellow war tribe will appreciate that your system is stable and you really are reliable. If you create your own and do not have the skills to take care of it, you will be prone to crashes and freezing up. It will not be long before you are put aside wishing you had gone with pre-built.

The gaming computer that you simply choose ought to be backed up with a strong warranty and support system in case you have problems. Whenever you enter this world, you need the various tools needed to finish the same job. Your team won’t tolerate whatever else.

You can and should grow your system from the beginning, but for starters, you will need at least one strong, fast and stable system to make sure you can easily game. You will never be able to get back on a regular computer again.

Aion Gold The Latest Innovation Of Gaming Technology For Gaming Crazies

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There is no stop to the rise in the number of gamers and gaming junkies all over the world. Gaming has become as essential for todays youngsters as the staple food of a nation. Online gaming has come up as a common phenomenon as computer has come up as a must to be found in almost every other household. No computer owners can help living the spirit of computer gaming on the internet. The worldwide popularity of internet gaming has resulted in an increasing load from the rising crowd of gamers over servers. Here lies the importance of Aion gold as the first and foremost need for smooth gaming.

Huge server queues plague the launch of new games in the world of the internet. Aion has recently announced the launch of new servers to reduce the stress of users over the usual servers. The server in question, is an outcome of intensive research on how to keep the delicate balance between busy servers and online traffic. Adding to the efficiency of busy servers is the emergence of new servers. Being Aion player, you must have felt the thrills and spills of online PC gaming. Aion gold is your need to keep the spirit of playing Aion games alive with high flames.

Information on this highly configured gaming server is available online in a bulk. The server varies in a range of prices. Evidently, not all the versions of this server offer the same functionality. Many tech and gaming sites claim to provide the cheapest version of this aion server. Make sure to check how far the claim is authentic. Before making the final move to purchase the server for your convenience, you must click your way to several websites featuring high-tech gadgets and take a peek into the functionality of various servers.

The Aion team is on the way to upgrade the functional features of Aion gold from technological perspectives. Gamers who derive their kicks out of online gaming want their excitement and enthusiasm to rise higher and higher find it of great use for them. The server ensures the comfort of playing internet-based PC games for those who think of gaming as their meat and drink.

Playstation 3 Vs Xbox 360 Analyzing The Two Best Gaming Consoles

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There have been lots of confusions whether Sony playstation 3 is better than Microsoft Xbox 360 or the other way round. Both consoles boast good indy support with games like Braid on XBLA and PixelJunk games on PSN. Both are available with big titles like Street Fighter HD and Mega Man. So, what are the differences between the two consoles?

CPU:

The CPU of Xbox 360 has vector processing power and a dot product instruction. The console also has three general purpose CPU cores and each core has 128 vector registers per hardware thread with a shared 1 MB L2 cache and a dot product instruction. The CPU of Sony Playstation 3 allows an environment where 87.5% work is DSP calculation and 12.5% work is general purpose computing.

GPU:

The GPU of Xbox 360 is more powerful than that of Sony playstation 3. The Xbox 360 GPU has larger number of transistors and the total programmable GFLOPs number is almost equal. In order to add additional floating point options for graphics rendering the PS3 has extra seven DSPs on the Cell. On the other hand the three general purpose cores of Xbox 360 with dot products instructions and custom D3D are tailored for true graphics related calculations.

Multithreading and balanced designs are other features of the Xbox360`s GPU. the automatic shader load balancing, full rate texture fetching in the vertex shader, programmable triangle tesselator, memory export features, programmable vertex fetching are the other features of the Xbox 360 that contribute to the rendering performance of the gadget.

Bandwidth:

For a total system bandwidth of 48 GB/s, the Playstation 3 has 25.6 GB/s of RDRAM bandwidth and 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth. On the other hand, for a 278.4 GB/s total system bandwidth the Xbox 360 has a 256 GB/s of EDRAM bandwidth and 22.4 GB/s of GDDR3 bandwidth. PS3 try to compensate the lack of memory by using Z and color compression.

Multimedia:

When it comes to multimedia, the major advantage of PS3 is that it can stream media and also allow the users to store media on it. In case of Xbox 360 it is like a media extender and does not allow you to save your AVI files on the hard drive. Again, PS3 is, till date, the only Blu-Ray playing video game console. It has high video quality, responsive controls and also it supports all the latest features.

Backwards Compatibility:

In case of backwards compatibility Xbox 360 excels PS3. The PS3 does not support any PS2 library as it does not have PS2 functionality. Alternatively, you can buy a used 20GB or 60GB if you want a backwards compatible PS2. This can be considered as one of the drawbacks of PS3. However, Microsoft has allowed backwards compatibility for Xbox 360 and the online library if the console is adding original XBOX games regularly.

Open Source Operating System:

Playstation3 is the only gaming console that allows the user to install Linux, it does not allow to play games while operating in Linux though. Microsoft is planning to upgrade Xbox 360 and working on a version of Linux that can be installed on the console.

PS3 simplifies the choice for import gamers and is a completely region free gaming console. Xbox 360 has superior graphic power and its GPU allows it to perform at high resolution. With Playstation 3, some of the games require mandatory installation to the hard drive, whereas with Xbox 360, you have the choice of installation.

Both the video game consoles have their own strengths and shortcomings, and both are tremendously successful.

You can have access to articles in portuguese language from the article section of page Jogos

Roberto Sedycias works as IT consultant for Polomercantil

Classic Gaming

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PC gaming is doomed. No, really, it’s going to I cop it any day now. In fact, it may even have expired by the time you read this introduction. After all, people have been predicting its demise for 20 years now – it’s all piracy this, expensive hardware that, niche appeal this, compatibility problems that… Oh, shuddup. PC gaming isn’t going anywhere.

The platform’s infinitely adaptable, it’s hand-in-hand with the rise of casual, ad-supported and subscription-based games, and it’s got a back catalogue several hundred orders of magnitude huger than any other gaming system. In terms of that incredible back catalogue, the PC’s currently undergoing two very important changes that may rescue it from the impotence of dusty floppy disks and pop-up-infected abandonware sites.

First, PC gamers’ values are changing – the audience is moving away from graphics-hungry teenagers and into a breed that’s more prepared to judge a game on its less superficial merits. In short, a game consisting of 320×240 pixels, each the size of a baby’s fist, no longer causes quite so many people to scoff dismissively at it. Secondly, digital distribution services – notably Valve’s Steam and the great-in-the-States-but-crap-over-here Gametap – are gradually adding classic games to their online stores – legal, free from floppy disks, and dirt-cheap. A slight spot of whimsy and a few dollars is all it takes to enjoy yesterday’s finest.

While it’s early days for this, things can only get better. On Steam alone, the last few months have seen the rediscovery of ancient treasures such as the earliest Wolfenstein, Unreal, Doom and GTA games. The past is indeed another country – but, when it comes to old PC games, lately we’re talking more Isle of Man than North Korea.

Until these electro-stores are fully stocked, plenty of options remain to locate your desired fragment of yesterday – eBay, second-hand stores, free fan remakes and (mumble) bittorrent (mumble) abandonware (mumble), for instance. Somewhat sadly, old PC games don’t seem to retain much value, even for mint-condition boxes. I’d be lucky to get a hundred bucks for one of my proudest possessions, my still-sealed copy of Dungeon Keeper.

Still, that’s great news for buyers. But where to start? Over 20 years of PC gaming is an impossibly large subject, so how we’re going to approach it is by breaking it into key genres (albeit composited ones) and looking at the games which defined them, or alternatively took it to interesting places that have been sadly left unexplored since. The obvious names – yer Dooms and C&Cs – will go unspoken in favor of games you’re less likely to have played. For the sake of argument, history began in 1987 – a year that saw, among other epochal events, the dawn of VGA and its wondrous 640×480, 256-color pixels, LucasArts defined point’n’click adventure games with Manioc Mansion and the first real-time 3D RPG, Dungeon Master.

To start at the most obvious – but, in some ways, least interesting – point, let’s talk action games. The earliest first-person-shooter was 1973’s Maze War, but it was id software’s 1991 fantasy shooter Catacomb 3D that really birthed the form as we know it. Until then, we didn’t even get an onscreen hand reinforcing the sense that the player was the game’s character. From that came Wolfenstein 3D and Doom and – well, you know the rest. Its the point between then and now that contains lost wonders.

Hidden Treasure

1994’s Marathon is a fine example. One of the earliest games by future Halo creator Bungle, though this didn’t prove a runaway success on PC, it was one of the first post-Doom FPS games to introduce elements beyond repeatedly shooting monsters in the face. Friendly Al characters, alternate fire modes, co-op play, swimming and, particularly, a strong layered plot (which was a major inspiration for System Shock and Halo, among others) made it an altogether more grown-up affair than other Doom-a-likes. Though its superior sequel Durandol was the only Marathon game to see an official Windows release, Bungee now offers free versions of all three instalments’ Mac versions, which fans duly ported to PC. Download links and a setup guide lurk at www.calormen.com/mwd.htm.

Skip ahead to the second half of the 1990s and 3D-accelerated gaming is in full swing. There were a great many ways to kill pretend things – including expertly-adapted licensed fare such as 1999’s Aliens versus Predator and 1997’s Star Wars: Jedi Knight 1998’s Thief The Dark Project, from the dearly-missed Looking Glass Studios (the key members of which went on to form Ion Storm, the developer behind Deus Ex), was a revelation in such violent climes. Essentially, the design document for the subsequent decade of stealth games – count Splinter Cell, Hitman and Assassin’s Creed among its followers – murder took a distinct backseat to using the environment to create your own non-linear path through the game.

Playing a character poorly suited to direct combat, using shadow and sound to avoid beef cake enemies, and emphasizing the need for patience and attentiveness over reflex gives Thief a pounding tension few games have touched. On top of that, it’s about unified design and atmosphere to create a sense of place and menace, whereas so many of its peers contented themselves with a jumble-sale muddle of second-hand sci-fi ideas. If you’re spitting like a bucktoothed viper at the idea of 1998 polgyons, direct your ocular organs to modetwo.net/darkmod/, where there’s an ongoing project to remake Thief in the shadowtastic Doom 3 engine – they released a demo version not long ago. One of the most interesting areas of PC gaming is the crossover point from FPS into other genres. System Shock 2 and Deus Ex are the best-known examples of introducing roleplaying elements – tailoring the character to your own tastes, managing inventories, handing choice of action and path to the player – into a real-time action environment, but point your mind earlier than that. Another Looking Glass effort, the 1992’s Ultima Underworld, offered a genuine 3D world (an early build of which was id’s ‘inspiration’ for Wolfenstein 3D) and first-person-perspective monster-stabbing augmented by RPG trappings and non-linear exploration.

Most recently, the likes of Oblivion and S.T.A.L.K.E.R owe a great debt to UU and its sole sequel, but fans feel it’s never been done better. Make your own mind up with one of the various remakes at tinyurl.com/3yzvz8.

Genre Splicing

Two years later, the first System Shock was doing things with environmental interaction – stacking boxes to form a ladder to higher places, for instance – that most games don’t offer even now. While you’ll need to have your own moral dilemma about whether or not you should download the so-called ‘abandonware’ version of Shock, it is worth mentioning that there’s a near-complete fan project that makes it run happily under modern Windowses and with improved graphics at tinyurl.com/2sc5n9. Or, if you want an absurdly violent, foul-mouthed alternative to these more cerebral FPS+ wonders, 1999’s Quake 2-powered Kingpin: Life Of Crime sported branching dialogue, the buying and selling of weapons and recruitable NPC companions alongside its granny-baiting blood ‘n’ maiming.

For RPGs themselves, well, there’s a wealth. No platform has ever done roleplaying as well as the PC. With Fallout3 due later this year from the makers of Oblivion, now’s the time to play the first two post-apocalyptic open-worlders. They’re turn-based, which makes combat a tactical matter of how you’ve developed your character’s abilities and the best way to approach a situation, rather than how fast you can click fire. Most of all, it offers choice – how your character behaves, who his allies and enemies are, and the reputation he has with the game’s populace. It’s also vicious, funny and still the aesthetic benchmark for any game set on a scorched Earth.

More traditional fantasy roleplaying is best served by Ultima VII, the best of the long-running series that earned Richard Garriot his name, and one with which Looking Glass/Ion Storm big fish Warren Spector was heavily involved. As with the Fallout games, there’s little need to stick to the straight and narrow here – this is roleplaying that encompasses morality, not simply whether you fight with a sword or a bow. It’s also a world in which you can interact with almost anything in the game – whether it’s to craft your own food or weapons, or just strumming away on an unclaimed lute. The presentation may be crude, but modern RPGs generally lag far behind it in most other respects. It’s another game whose fans are battling to keep it alive – while you’ll need to track down the original game files yourself, the Exult engine (exult.sourceforge.net) will make ’em run tickety-boo on your new-fangled modern operating system.

Another semi-free-form RPG milestone is 1993’s Betrayal at Krone/or (whose creators later went on to create the Tribes series), which blends first-person exploration with third-person fighting – and handily it’s available for free from www.alt-tab.net . While it doesn’t offer the freedom of a Fallout or Ultimo VII, arguably the aged RPG to play if you haven’t is 1999’s Planescape: Torment. A beautifully-written tale of guilt, identity and atonement that’ll tear your heart out, stamp on it repeatedly then roughly shove it back inside your shattered ribcage, this is a game about words more than deeds. Around 800,000 of ’em. There’s nothing else quite like Planescape, and it’s the staple of any discussion about gaming narrative.

Stepping sideways into strategy, again you’ve got Battlezone combining FPS, RTS and military sim, or the absolutely, awe-inspiringly unique Sacrifice (example spell:’bovine intervention’) boldly mixing action, roleplaying, comedy and a thousand new ideas-a-minute in alongside more familiar real-time strategy tropes. Both threw down experimental gauntlets no-one else dared to pick up. On the more tactical side of the coin is Syndicate, from gone-but-not-forgotten British uber-developer Bullfrog – a still gloriously immoral real-time squad tactics game that makes GTA look like Theme Park.

Peter Molyneux’s been muttering about reviving Syndicate’s satirical dystopia of corporate oppression and violence, but until (if ever) that happens, there’s a fan remake in the works, which the first level now complete, at freesynd.sourceforge.net.

Strat Attack

More conventional RTS nostalgia is perhaps best served by Starcraft – still the template for ultra-balanced multiplayer strategizing with distinct playable races, not just differently-colored clones of each other – and Dune 2, the father of commanding and conquering, and even today surprisingly way ahead in terms of offering a convincing narrative explanation for resource-collection and perma-war. There’s an impressive free remake of the latter at d2tm.duneii.com. Another one to look up is 2000’s Ground Control, one of very few RTS games to ditch resource management in favor of using your cunning to blow up tanks with a fixed retinue. Its sequel was miserably generic, but did have one thing going for it – the original game was released for free to promote it. Grab it from tinyurl.com/38wt7.

It would be remiss of us to mention turn-based strategy without bringing up Sid Meier, but frankly the recent Civilization 4’s good enough, or you can dabble with FreeCiv (freeciv.wikia.com), for a less accessible but simpler game more in keeping with the original Civ. But what you should really do is play 1994’s Colonization, a Civ sequel that centers solely on conquest of the New World. While Civ tries to encompass everything, and logic is gradually eroded over time even as complexity snowballs, Colonization is utterly focused. You’ve a single goal – win independence from your mother nation, and the journey to that is a fascinating arc of scrabbling out a few pennies from trade or conquest, building up to self-sufficiency and finally to all-out war. Why Sid hasn’t revisited Colonization is a mystery.

The curious no-man’s land between strategy and management gaming is occupied by Dungeon Keeper, another Bullfrog game. The central gimmick-you play the bad guy, an unseen lord of the underworld raising a bestial army to fend off do-gooder heroes – is a little too panto to pay off, but what it’s really got going for it is that you’re trying to impose order onto chaos. Your monsters either don’t want or are too stupid to be managed, underground cave systems aren’t suited to logical architecture, and your most powerful unit, the Horned Reaper, will just as happily slay your own troops as he will the enemy’s. It’s a juggling act, only the balls are on fire, someone keeps throwing rocks at you and you’ve only got one hand.

A thousand dusty treats go unmentioned. For adventure gaming, eschew the more obvious Monkey Island/Sam 6- Max fare and nose at the branching options of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, the heartstring-tugging of The Longest Journey, the fiendish puzzles and oh-so-French wit of Gobliins 2, or the artful grimness and wealth of choices of Blade Runner. Less earthly pursuits, meanwhile, are best exemplified by TIE Fighter’s coolly wicked space simming, Privateer’s open-universe exploring ‘n’ fighting VT trading or Stunt Island’s fusion of set piece dare devilling and proto-movie-editing.

If there’s one undisputed must-play from the annals of PC gaming though, X-COM is it. First game UFO: Enemy Unknown remains the best of the series, but sterling sequel Terror From The Deep can be had for a few dollars from Steam. Famed for its artful juggling of global strategizing (building and upgrading bases to track alien invasions, and research new weapons to defeat ’em), astoundingly tense turn-based squad combat and gentle roleplaying, nothing’s come close to X-COM, though many have tried.

It’s the nexus of all PC gaming, a super-smart meeting point of action, strategy, RPG, management that promised a future of constant creativity, but instead we saw one that splintered into feature-creep variations on each of those single themes. Only now, with the new surge of indie gaming exploring places big-budget studios fear to tread, are we seeing a return to the inventiveness of early 1990s PC gaming. Go remind yourself quite how incredible a time it was.

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