First of all, what is a trophy?
[quote=Wikipedia]A trophy is a reward for a specific achievement, and usually afterwards serves as proof of merit.[/quote]
Now what has that got to do with games, why are they included in consoles such as the Playstation 3 or Achievements on the Xbox 360?
The answer is simple, when a player requires a lot of skill and determination to complete a goal, they will get a lot of satisfaction on completing said goal. And what better way of rewarding the player with a little imaginary trophy. No matter what a trophy looks like, be it the underwear from a one-night stand, or an Olympic medal, a trophy is a trophy.
So it's fun to earn trophies, but why do game developers put them there? Is it to reward their players for completing near-impossible challenges, or is it to try get the player addicted until they have won every single one?
I think it's a little bit of both. Some games have trophies that require skill, persistence and determination to achieve. For example in Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 you are required to get 3 stars in 23 different missions. You are rewarded for any progress you make towards this goal.
For example you get a bronze trophy for getting one star, four stars, eight stars. You then get a trophy for getting 1 star in 11 missions, 3 stars in 5 missions etc.
This gives the player a sense of achievement and will drive him/her to get the gold trophy for earning all 69 stars. This requires being very good at the game and a great deal of patience, but in the end you will be satisfied with a well earned gold trophy.
Other games however use trophies to simply keep you playing the game after finishing their main plot. For example Avatar: the Game. One trophy requires you to use all your skills at least 20 times during the story mode. You unlock the final level of each skill quite a bit before finishing the story. This trophy requires no skill on the player's part, he must simply keep pressing two buttons, and wait for the skill to recharge.
Another set of trophies in Avatar require you to get a 'cleen sweep' of each level. This means you must complete a set of challenges for each level. These challenges require nothing other than patience. One of the challenges requires you to find and destroy pesky little machines called Apods, which are hard to find and so keep you playing the game until you find them all. Hence, a you rack up a few time-consuming trophies that required no skill, no determination, just patience and the help of the internet.
Judging from the contrast between the two games above, it is easy to see which trophies are aimed at rewarding the player, and which are designed to keep the player playing the game past it's prime regardless of whether they are having fun or not!
I have finally gotten round to creating a new logo for the site. It's not too complicated, just plain simple. It only took about 5 minutes to make, but I think it looks quite good on the site, so odds are I won't be changing it soon. That is unless it creates as much fuss and commotion that the Gamemaker 8 logo did...
Here is the logo on a black background (so you can see it), but obviously it's also visible at the top of each page. Let me know what you think :)
Today [url=http://glog.yoyogames.com/?p=762]Yoyogames announced[/url] that they have hired a new CTO (Chief Technical Officer). Along with that, they posted a video showing Chad Chisholm's 'Skydiver' being played on a PSP.
The game seems to run fairly smoothly bar a few graphical errors and lack of background music. This means that in the near future, Gamemaker 8 users will be able to create games for PC and for PSP! It might even motivate me to start making games again!
One of the easiest and fastest ways of setting up broadband for your computer or laptop is probably mobile broadband. If you are not familiar with mobile broadband, it's basically a little dongle with a sim card that plugs straight into your USB port.
[b]Pros:[/b]
-It is easy, reliable and fast to set up.
-Easily portable.
-Great if you're on the move a lot.
-They're usually quite cheap.
[b]Cons:[/b]
-It gets a little bit complicated if you want to share the internet to other computers.
-PING rates are very slow so it's a nightmare for online gaming.
-Most of them have a bandwith limit.
The most annoying thing for me is obviously the PING rate. I don't know how many times I've found myself one-on-one with someone while playing COD or Resistance, and we both pull the trigger at the same time but he would get the kill.
The PING rate is basically the delay between my command and the command being executed. So when I play online games I'm usually (depending on the game) at quite a disadvantage.
I'm not saying mobile broadband is bad, in fact it's actually pretty great! Without it I would still be on dial up as we live in the middle of nowhere and s most internet providers didn't have a connection for us. But with the mobile broadband we do. It loads pages pretty fast and we got a special router so we now have a wireless network around the house for my Ipod or other hand-held devices.
I think to make the most of mobile broadband you'd want to be a student so you can just pop it in your laptop wherever you are, and off you go!
AS I'm sure all you PS3 owners out there already know, on March 1st 2010, the "fat" Playstation 3 was hit by a bug which messed up the sync between the console and PSN. The problem caused loss of data, and loss of trophies. Users also could not log-in to PSN.
The bug was caused by a malfunction in the internal clock of the PS3. For some reason it programmed 2010 to be a leap year. Due to the fact that 2010 was not a leap year, the PS3's date didn't match PSN date and caused all kinds of malfunctions.
The bug only affected "fat" Playstations so the slim owners were left un-touched. Thankfully the bug was resolved by Sony within 24 hours but many people still lost many hard earned trophies as well as game data. My friend, who hadn't synced in about a month lost about 70% trophy completion for a game he had almost platinumed.
Hopefully the error won't happen again, let us know if you were affected by the bug.
As of August 2010, GameMakerGames.com have gotten quite a few new updates to the site, including a neat new logo: The comments and profiles now look much better and are easier to use. Also a neat
YoYo Games have announced that they have replaced all the competition06 tags for entries to their most-recent competition, with the hashtag "#YoYoComp06".
The reason for the update was to
So I am back from my last holidays, and can now start looking for writers for GNews. I have created a topic over at the GMC, which also mentions a few other positions that are available, so check it
