(formerly)tangentmind.org

I combined two stupid mcdonald's ads to form one.

And these are the originals.

As you can see, my editing was not really professionally done. I'm aware of this, but I spent most of my time trying to find pictures for two or three other ideas I was going to do in photoshop, and this one kind of created itself out of the pictures I found. I really hate advertising. Mcdonalds advertising is some of the worst. Will have to do this more often.

One of the pictures was just from a girl's blog.

The other, an article about a Mcdonald's Unicef deal that went sour....(milk...sour...I'm so sorry...)

http://www.creativecow.net/articles/ebberts_dan/audio_sync/index.html
http://creativecalf.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=2&postid=872461
http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-204910.html
http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread.php?p=427874&highlight=effects#post427874
http://aenhancers.com/viewtopic.php?t=247
http://www.shinjipierre.be/
http://www.videohelp.com/edit
http://www.creativecow.net/articles/al_khatib_talid/volume_meter/index.html
http://www.creativecow.net/articles/aftereffects.html
http://creativecalf.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=2&postid=872458

http://educationarcade.org/SiDA/harmonix
http://www.videohelp.com/guides.php?howtoselect=5;16#104

Yeah, so as much as I hate the idea of $14.99 per month for a frikkin' game, and as much as I hate also having to pay $50 on top of that for the game(which is more than I ever pay for a game), I still want to play Auto Assault. There's now way I could afford that right now, but I still want to play Auto Assault.

Watching the Mad Max movies hasn't really helped either.

I may start up Fallout in a while, because I already have fallout 1 and 2 and I never played them much.

I have found at least one game that's very promising though. It's actually a ut2004 TC mod....currently.

I present Roadkill Warriors or RWK. There's no story, or at least scripted, single player. Just some multiplayer with bots, in the UT2004 fasion, but it's still pretty cool. If anyone wants to play, feel free to drop me a comment. If you live near, I can let you borrow ut2004, but you should be able to find it for $20 or less.

I don't think it satisfies my desire for AutoAssault. I'm just hoping they make the client and serial code free and drop price of the monthly charge, but I'm probably holding out too much hope. I wouldn't even mind in-game ads, though they would probably ruin the atmosphere...so I guess I would mind, but I would put up with it, if I could play it for free, or cheaper. If I was a responsible person with a degree and a job, I might not have any problem dishing out that kind of money(except that I think it's too much on a number of degrees).

On other games,
http://automanic.sourceforge.net/ looks promising too, and it's open source but it's in very early stages.

http://cityscape.sourceforge.net/ could be promising as a futuristic GTA style game, but probably not really what I'm looking for, and that's in pretty early stages too.


On a related not, you can play anarchy online free.

First off, I've been meaning to post for a long time. I have all sorts of bookmarks queued up to post about, I just haven't posted them yet. I am distracted. I will do it later.

Many other popular weblog software supports categories, so that each post lists the categories it falls under and if you want to look up something in a specific category you can just click on the category or type it in. The search bar at the top of this blog is very helpful for finding something specific but not so helpful for finding everything in a general category. There are a number of attempts to add this functionality to blogger, all of them with their own weaknesses. I might eventually use one, but I wish blogger would just add this function.

Enough with the griping, I played Auto Assault for hours the last few days because there was a beta preview thing going on and it ended just about an hour ago at 2pm cst on Saturday, 8th of April. I was just in the middle of trying to make a mad dash to another area that I had never gone to.

I'm not a big fan of MMORPGs. Anyone will tell you. In fact, even though I used to be, I'm not all that big a fan of RPGs in general any more. Too much mindless fighting to level up, and too much of an emphasis on points...hit points magic points items that increase this or add this ability or whatever. There's just too much to manage in many of them and it's too time consuming. A lot of them also just seem very scripted. Every thing is a random role of the dice, all the animations and actions and interactions are lifeless scripts. That's just me though.

Even more so, I hate monthly fees and I don't usually like to play games online with other people because, let's face it, sometimes people really suck. Then there's the fact that they can just take up so much of your life which could be spent more productively. At least a single player game that takes up a lot of time has an end.

Still, as much as I dislike MMORPGS, I like vehicular combat even more. I also like post-apocolyptic things. For example, when I was younger pre-elementary to early elementary school, I used to watch Encore, and one of my favorite Encore movies was a movie which may have been Mad Max 1 or 2(probably Mad Max 2, because I think I thought it was "Road Warrior" and I distinctly remember the whole gasoline thing), but I'm not totally sure. It was very similar, I will have tow atch those movies to find out. Also, when my town first got Best Buy, I used to go there just to play the 3DO they had, because it had this racing game with guns where you could blow up other cars. Best game ever at the time, and it was just a demo. I've also played and beaten Interstate 76, Interstate Nitro Pack, and Interstate 82. There are probably more examples, but I can't think of any right now.

Also, I'm relatively good at vehicular combat games, but sometimes it depends on the game and the interface. I'm nto so great at racing games, but not too bad, and I'm not so great at fps but not too bad...but anyone who's played with me knows that in vehicular combat, I am considerably above average.

In comes Auto Assault. As far as MMORPGS go, it might fall a little short compared to others like WOW, Lineage, Ultima Online, or Ever Quest. The weapons balance and polish might not be as refined, but that's only guessing because I've never actually played any of those games. I could really care less about those Fantasy Role Playing tedium fests. Auto Assault is great just because it fills a niche that sorely needed filling. The sub genre of Post Appocolyptic Auto Combat. As far as I know, no other game fills this role so well. There are a number of games that might kind of fit, but they're all just combat games, not worlds which be explored and interacted with, and most importantly destroyed.

Furthermore, instead of trudging along in your latest magic boots of whateverthehellI don'tcare+2, you can speed along on your allterrain low profile pimp wheels and run over poor pikers as they fling mud or fire or bombs or soemthing else that probably hurts. The game has a sense of speed. The game has explosions and action and sparse trees, which burn easily and mutated being and biomechanoids and lots of rusty metal type things. That, in itself is quite neat.

The game is not without it's faults though. Did I mention the speed? Well, at least on my computer the speed was not always so noticeable because something was lagging. My computer could be faster, and I could turned down some performance options, but something still seemed like it could have been running a little more smoothly. Especially today when the servers started to lag. Then there's the whole fact that some parts of the game seemed either broken or unfinished. There were a number of vehicles which I simply couldn't see. They were invisible. I could run into them, and destroy them, or be destroyed by them, though. There's also a lot of stuff to learn which could be either bad or good depending on how you feel about it. It probably adds depth.

The game has many scripted missions to go on. That's what I was doing most of the time. There are tons of missions. If they keep adding them, you could probably never talk to a living soul in the game and just go on missions all the time. This does fall into the RPG lifeless scripts type thing, but I think it's ok in this instance because you get to blaze around and blow up stuff.

It's not perfect by any means. However, if they could polish some of the things up, it could be incredibly awesome. In my opinion, far better than any of the other MMORPGS out there. So good, that I seriously thought about signing up for it, except for one serious flaw.

It's $14.99 per month. That's $190 per year. You might also have to pay like $60 for the game up front to get a retail serial code but I'm not totally sure about that. There are a number of great games out there for $14.99 or less as well as many other services(like gametap.com or basic cable). It's just not worth that much to me. If there was a single player version of the game or maybe multiplayer system like Diablo had, that would be cool. Any system that didn't require me to pay $14.99 per month. In fact, $0 per month would be the best.

When I was thinking about what I really liked about that game, I thought "I should just get a single player games just like it" problem is there isn't any. There's fallout, but that's not vehicular and I just couldn't get into it. There's the vehicular combat games I've already beaten. There's stuff like the battlefield or ut2004 games, but those aren't really single player story driven.


the Conclusion:
So, what I think the gaming world really needs is this: Grand Theft Auto: Post Apocalypse.