As far back as I can remember, all the way back to when analog sticks and joy sticks were introduced to me in the video gaming world, I have always felt compelled to invert my Y-axis (vertical) settings in order to play and I don’t know why.





Out of everyone that I personally know who plays videogames just one of them happens to invert their Y-axis their settings like I do, so it is obvious to me that the most favourable option is “normal”. None of my friends understand why I invert and are just as equally annoyed as I when given a controller that has their preference of Y-axis settings reversed. Games that involve free range movement (FPS) or camera controls (3rd Person) must be inverted or I find them unplayable. This does not apply to PC games though as to me, moving a mouse up is up, but for some odd reason when you bring an analog stick into the equation up means down, down means up and I cannot bring myself to use normal settings, though I have tried.





Ahhh, Silent Hill: Home Coming on the PS3, how I wanted to love thee.
The developers allowed me to change the Y-axis when aiming a gun which was AWESOME; however, they seem to have completely forgotten about the X (horizontal) and the Y-axis for the camera controls in every regard. Within the hour, after running into walls and looking at the roof or floor I had ejected the game and neatly placed it back in its case only to be sold the very next day. I actually sent the developers an email, with no response back, because I was so pissed that they left out this simple option from their game! No name game developers making horrible, horrible games have been kind enough to include Invert options in their games, so why did they overlook this simple, and to me, very game breaking setting?





I invert the Y-axis in 3rd person games as well as in FPS games as it just feels right. I think that I have figured out the simplest way for me to try to explain “why” I invert .

Y-axis:
If I was physically holding a gun and I wanted to aim upward, I would have to lower my right hand and if I wanted to aim down I would have to raise my right hand up. This translates in my mind to moving my thumb down in FPS game to aim up and moving my thumb up for aiming down. This may only make sense in my mind but it is hard to explain why you invert when people’s retort is “up is up and down is down, your weird”

Do you invert?

Why?

I just found out through Facebook that my cousin through marriage, Blair Leggett, a computer systems analyst at Zynga (yes Facebook games) who used to work at EA, has ported the entire game of Ultima IV so you can play and save in any Flash friendly web broswer! He has made a few improvements as well as added some features that were introduced in Ultima V.

Just by having the article, posted below, in PC Gamer has increased the traffic to his website by 280%

Play the game now!
Phi Psi Software



This is the facebook post I saw today (I removed comments and faces, obviously)




Screenshots from his webstie





Information borrowed from here
http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/02/17/play-ultima-4-in-your-browser/

This sent tingles down my spine and I think this is an amazing video that evokes some emotions.
This game has been on my list since like 2006 or when ever it was brought to life.

There is not much more I can say besides: Just watch.

Not the best header and I have not written anything in almost a year I do believe BUT after reading the daily local news I stumbled upon some neat video games news!

A group in Kelowna BC, Canada (woot) created this website http://www.irok2.com/ and they have made, or are trying to make it so that you can play guitar hero on your PC with any and every song available on Youtube and last.FM.

You can choose your video or song and their website generates a track that you can play on your Guitar Hero guitar via PC (they have dowloads for the guitars) and if the song is not playable you can submit it and they will get it up and running in 24 hours, or so they say.

I think this could be a very cool thing if it works, I signed up and since this is in the beta test mode and they dont want tons of people signing up for it they gave the code out to Castanet.net readers only via their webstie The code is totally not castanet so do not even try to sign up to see if this works and leave constructive feedback on it.

Seriously, don't even think about it.

Well I have two beta codes kicking around, one for buying inFamous and the other for being in GAP and the funny thing is I actually can't give away the GAP one (fine print) which is weird so I'll give away the pre-order one!

So what would be better than giving one away? Yeah, I can think of lots of things that would be better too but......ya know.


So here's what I'm going to try: CONTEST
The 1st person to make a sentence that's lol worthy using each letter from "Uncharted Among Thieves" in order of the title as the first letter for each word written, will win the beta code. Each letter for each word needs to be in caps and bolded.

Like The following (can't use example)
Uncle Norman Calmy Heated Another..............etc It's kinda like what you did in preschool with your first name to describe yourself.

Also, you must have an avatar to be eligible to win and I will only ship the code via mail and you must pay for shipping. I ship all my boxes with rocks and weights so that they are treated properly during transit. I'm not responsible for lost or stolen items and could care less really. The prize will be shipped when the the large yellow thing in the sky is at it's peak on the 5th day on the new season.

Or I could just e-mail it to you.....yeah, that might work as well :)

GO!

Remember that dude who shot up his school along with two innocent bystanders with no thanks to Far Cry 2? That mans father might be getting charged for allowing his son to own and keep, fifteen unsecured guns in his bedroom. Fifteen freaking unsecured guns in your bedroom! If that doesn’t set off some sort of alert I really don't know what would!

Oh yeah, he also had a copy of Far Cry 2 somewhere in amongst the pile of guns.

Now, in stories like these how can anyone have the mental capacity to blame a videogame for the shootings? I would have figured bad parenting or the fact that the kid had easy access to one or more of the fifteen guns that he had sitting around his room before I pointed a finger at videogames. People will always like to point the blame on anything and everything else as it seems that people can't hold responsibility for their own actions these days and it makes me sick.

I wrote this blog because I saw a dog today.

[]UPDATE]
Well aprrently the father had all those guns and not the rampaging kid, oops!
I'll leave it up anyways as there is no sense tossing it away as it would ened up being a one liner blog.


Story Here


On that note HAPPY BIRTHDAY Destructoid, they grow up so fast!!!!