Elpea's Blogo

Zen has many awesome features in mind for our belated recored games feature. I’ve been working on this and I’m quite excited to announce more once more is finished.

The “Age of Wiki” is a wiki dedicated to be a fully guide to editing Age of Empires III. Pretty much anything you need to know about Age3 Scenario Editing, Modding, Random Map Scripting is here. The designers have done an amazing job at creating easy to follow guides, as well as throughly explaining more complex topics.

so if you need to know how to make craters or create your own total conversion mod you know where to look.

Although Zen and I both grew too busy to handle the podcast, our Californian Cherub Atzy and Xiphias didn’t want to give it up yet. I bugged in their recording last night and decided to start coloring our production notes:

After much laughter and complaint, we decided to uncolor it so that we could start the “show”, then google threw this at us:

We eventually fixed that (reverted to older version) and actually recorded the podcast. I hope this one gets released soon, as opposed to the 4 episodes we’ve recorded after Episode 1 and decided weren’t good enough.

We have a public TeamSpeak Server that few people use. This server has been up for a long time and there’s rarely more than 5 people in it, which is a shame.

Perhaps more Seraphs could make use of them for forum parties? Well anyway, if you’re wanting to meet up with some friends to play a game while chatting it up on TeamSpeak, our server is:

teamspeak.heavengames.com

Now go use it!

Looking back in my gaming moments in 2007 I had a lot of good memories (Half Life 2: EP2, Psychonauts). Things weren’t all golden though, and here’s why:

Bioshock’s Hacking Minigame Bioshock is an amazing game. The atmosphere, the story, the action, all dandy. However, all of these get shat upon once I have to do another hacking minigame.

No seriously, you’re there in this scary world filled with evil little girls, big men in diving suits and lunatic citizens and it ALL waits for you as you connect water tubes.

In the beginning I guess the mini-game can be a little fun, because you don’t know it much. But after the 234th time you solve it, having powers to slow it down (freezing or through those level up thingies), you feel completely retarded.

Big Daddy: It’s okay dude, we’ll just wait here while you fix that turret.

Crysis I may be the only person in the world who doesn’t think Crysis is fun nor pretty. 2 Hours into this game and I realized that the fore-mentioned Bioshock mini-game was less annoying. Let’s not even mentioning setting my computer on fire by running this shit on medium.

Call of Duty 4 (SP) Yeah whatever, you probably loved this game. I really really don’t get what’s so great about this game. If anyone hasn’t played any Call of Duty games before, I’ll run it down for you:

• There’s a million enemies and a million allies who won’t stop shooting each other, not even to have some tea.
• 20 Minutes in the game however, you noticed that you can end the battle, by running like a mother fucker towards the enemy. This seems to make them scared of how much of a crazy dumbass you are and the shooting stops.
• Repeat the above step until you’ve finished the game, go you big boy.

This was made worse after the first Call of Duty game because all you need to do is hide to get all your health back. So you run, run, hide, win. This process is repeated by Call of Duty 4, except now they have shiny new graphics with shiny new scripted scene for those who give a shit about this hollywood style action game.

One more mile and this war is over!

I guess this game isn’t annoying if you’re either a marathon runner or just love cheap action scenes. But this is my opinion, jerk.

Earlier today Zen asked me what I thought HG 2.0 should be like. Combining old ideas I had and new ones, I thought of something that I’d find great. I’m a big huge fan of web services, it’s where I’ve had the most fun working on (my ESO2 ladder and signatures were an example of that). Web 2.0 services usually involve doing something, which may or may not be useful, but for an audience of people, the service even becomes their identity.

There’s the last.fm users, who check the site everyday for new artist suggestions, to chat with people of their same musical taste, to check on their weekly top artists, songs, etc. Last.fm simply feeds on the user’s listening records and makes a world of fun out of that data, adding all sorts of functionality, allowing the user to do whatever he wants with it.

There’s also the Twitter users. Users report what they’re doing and it gets fed into their pages. You can keep track of everything your friends are doing too, so you’re all informed of each other’s daily thoughts and actions. That sounds simple, because it is. Sometimes even have insightful conversations with my group of friends about their simple daily thoughts. This simple service just receives a few lines of a post from time to time, so simple but so loved. Overall there’s tons of smart websites like these out there. Sites that take an otherwise dull or unorganized data and turn it into a fun activity.

These sites exists for a variety of cultures and people. Flickr services the photographers (professionals or hobbyists), last.fm the music buff, Twitter the active thinker, Facebook the social college student, Digg the tech savvy teens, and the list goes on. So what about the gamers? I can’t think of a service out there who reaches out for us and gives us that sort of care and love. I think that HeavenGames should be that site (or service). I think we need to make HeavenGames into a cultural representative of us, the gamers.

I don’t want to go into details with my ideas because I’m not ready to make them public yet. If I see that Sergio (HG CEO) doesn’t see a future for them, I’ll open it up so someone else can do it. Hopefully, in a few months maybe, I’ll be posting here telling you how all these ideas are being released as HeavenGames’ new outreach ;).

Whew, that was a lot to type.

apparently.

That made my day.

Does that tree make me look phat?

January 8th, 2008 - HeavenGames LLC announced today that it has launched Elpea Heaven ( http://elpea.heavengames.com ), the latest in its series of special-interest sites for geeks with time to waste typing up blogs.

Currently in Brazil, Elpea (TM) is a Geek (Cool one) that lived most of his life in the United States (Orlando, Florida to be more exact). He has played many RTS games throughout his life and joined HeavenGames in 2003 as a cherub at Rise of Nations Heaven. Today he works as a contract programmer and enjoys his large stock of expensive chocolate.

ABOUT HEAVENGAMES, LLC HeavenGames LLC, based in Villa Park, Illinois, is a privately owned web-content publisher geared towards the creation of special-interest sites for Real-Time Strategy and City-Builder games. Its sites, contents, vast amounts of resources, as well as a dedicated staff & management team make HeavenGame’s sites the premier destination for gamers worldwide.

So we’ve been having a lot of trouble getting this podcast ready in the quality standards we expect from ourselves. We tried a dozen different methods of recording, wasted countless hours, and then went back to the original idea sigh.

Zen caught the flu so we cut off the high tech stuff and recorded the second episode the same way we did the first. The episode itself was really fun though, and Ryan (Xiphias) actually talked this time!

Atzy is editing the episode and it will hopefully be out soon.

Once upon a time I had a fairly popular blog where I used to output all my fun thoughts, but I got lazy and stopped updating it (plus Wordpress was yucky).

Now I’m at it again, and hopefully won’t stop this time =]. I’ll be posting something better later, gotta go see a movie now.

(Thanks Zen for setting this up for me!)