Artemis Space Ship Bridge Simulator

Nerds of the Universe, rejoice . . . your Star Trek fantasies have finally come true.

http://artemis.eochu.com/index.php



Artemis Ship Bridge Simulator is a unique social multiplayer game. If you've ever watched Star Trek, you would have seen the ship's bridge . . . with either William Shatner or Patrick Stewart sitting in his chair in the middle, politely commanding his officers to to certain tasks, like helm (drive) the ship, or control weapons etc etc.

Artemis allows you to do that with a group of your friends. With a few people sitting around with laptops, you can play out ship to ship combat by each taking on a different role. Everyone can see the main screen, the view out the front of your ship, while each station has its own unique purpose. Engineering controls the balance of power between engines and weapons and shields while the Science officer reads out radar information etc. In the middle of all this, the Captain doesn't even get a computer, they just make decisions and asks people to "Make it so".

I'm trying to organise a weekend where a few of my nerd friends will come over and play it . . . I just need to find some spandex bodysuits . . .

Game Cafe, A Solution to Game Prices in Australia

Following up on my previous post about unfair pricing of games in Australia, particularly Steam (but the gripe with Aussie prices is just as relevant in regards to EB Games and Game, our two largest physical retailers), I've come across a really useful site, Game Cafe.

Game Cafe has a list of multiple sites that will sell games to Australia (including ozgameshop that I referred to earlier). It's basically a crawler that checks all these game sites and updates their prices (including shipping to Australia). You can search any game and platform combination and it'll give you a list of 50 or so of the retailers available to Australia ranked in order of their price.

It's going to be my new first stop when checking out game prices.

Racism in Australia

So I was walking down Oxford St last night when some random guy blurted out "Konichiwa" at me.

I instantly turned and shouted "Fuck you dickhead!" as he was walking away.

Now I'm really not sure whether this was the right thing to do or even helpful at all. I was allowing someone to get a rise out of me with just a simple, ignorant, off handed remark, and in my haste and anger I had a go at him. I got home fine, that was the end of the encounter, but what if he'd taken serious offense to that and I'd ended up bleeding in a gutter?

And if it's my aim to try to educate people that racial slurs etc are not acceptable in our society, yelling out swear words at people in the street surely isn't the right way to go about it. Is it just because I'm racially Chinese and I've grown up in Australia? Have I become over sensitive to racism because of Australian society's entrenched racism? (I can just point at the Liberal Party's abhorrent stance on the recent boat accidents and funerals, or point at any talk back radio fear mongering . . . or the fact that pretty much all mass market media in our country is 100% white dominated).

I'm not that sure what to think or what to do on this matter . . . A little vision on the back of my head remembers Inglourious Basterds, where a crazy American soldier carves swastikas into Nazis heads so that they'll never be able to live it down . . . but that's absolutely crazy. Surely people who are simply ignorant of the pain they cause can be educated . . . they can be shown that people are people . . . regardless of what they look like or where they came from. Surely . . .

Steam pricing in Australia?

This is quite a common grievance for Australian PC gamers who use Valve's online content delivery service, Steam. For some reason, games are priced differently in Australia than in the USA and Europe. This is particularly strange because the games in Australia are priced in US Dollars and we're still charged a currency conversion fee by our credit card companies when we purchase.

This isn't an issue for Valve unfortunately, their own software is always fairly priced regardless of region, but it's the distributors of other games, such as Activision and EA that are unfairly raising our prices. I'll cite an example but it's by no means the only example. Generally if a distributor has priced a game differently in the Australian market, they do it across the board.

Dawn of War 2: Retribution is coming out in a week or so. A lot of people are looking forward to this, as pretty much every previous game in this franchise has been a lot of fun to play. The steam price in the USA for this game is $29.99 USD. If you look at steam from an Australian IP address, or use a credit card that has an Australian billing address, the price is $59.99 USD. This money goes to the same place . . . it is not a matter of games being heavily taxed in Australia, it's just been listed at this price by Steam. Considering you can go into EB Games and purchase the boxed Collecter's Edition (which has a bunch of extra goodies) for $58, what's the incentive of buying a game as a digital download? The whole point was that you save the distributor a whole lot of money in manufacturing and shipping and they pass on the savings. If they're specifically not passing on the savings to Australian customers, but they are to US customers, it smells pretty bad . . .

I'm not really sure what to do about this situation. I considered taking it to the ACCC, but if this is an issue that is between different countries, would they have any jurisdiction? There are some workarounds possible to be able to buy games at their US or European prices . . . the easiest is having a friend who lives in the USA or elsewhere who can "gift" the games to you via Steam. 

Another way is to not buy games via steam and use another overseas game shop such as http://www.ozgameshop.com (this shop sells boxed editions of the games, so it depends if you really want your game on Steam or not).

Either way, this is a strange situation to be in, when those of us who wish to purchase computer games legally are being so obviously ripped off . . . especially when it's so amazingly easy to find these same games on Piratebay . . . and if someone's going to so blatantly steal from you, where's the incentive not to steal from them instead?

MyEars - Surround Sound in Headphones

An Australian company, which was commercialised from research from the Auditory Neroscience Lab at The University of Sydney, has come up with an amazing system for surround sound in headphones.

We actually use the shape of our ears and how they affect the sounds that reach us to determine the angle of the sound we can hear. Even though everyone's ears are subtly different, MyEars has come up with a way of altering the sound sent to us via a set of headphones to give quite good positional audio.

I tried it with my high quality Shure in-ear headphones and after spending a while in the calibration tool (and getting confused by it a bit), I managed to get a setup that gave me nearly perfect positioning in the 180 degrees around the back of my head. I still wasn't quite sure about in front of me . . . those sounds still sounded a bit like they were "inside" my head. I'm not sure if that was a calibration error on my part and I need to try that again, but even if it wasn't, the technology is showing an amazing capability to position audio sources using only headphones.

Check out their website at http://www.myears.net.au/ for more info. It includes a two week trial that you can check out without paying.