Courtesy of Kotaku, Playboy Cybergirl of the Year Jo Garcia claims to be a gamer.  I dunno if she is or not, but even with the heavily airbrushed pics, she is hawt.  So she can be a gamer if she wants to be.

Recently, I got into the Fileplanet/Funcom “Open Beta” of Age of Conan.  Even though the client download was 16G, I was excited about trying this out.  With the action oriented melee combat system, mounted combat, and guild cities and related pvp, I believe I will be playing this game for a while.  It’s bloody, violent, and has nipples…well on some beta clients.

The game is a beautiful game.  The character models are top notch, the environmental art is really good and the mature theme of the game is right up my alley.  Plus, who doesn’t love CONAN?!   There is one major problem I have though.  This is supposed to be an open beta and I think we all know that open betas are marketing tools and less testing tools (except for maybe server load tests).  Well for a game that is due to release in two weeks, it has a major flaw: it has a nasty memory leak.  I’m not a programmer, but from everything I read about it and have experienced, it seems to be related to how the game handles shaders.  Now don’t jump all down my throat and tell me what a dumbass I am, but it seems their shader cache gets bloated and runs out of system memory if you play too long.  It crashes to desktop and if you reboot your box, your golden for another 3 hours.
If you remember correctly, Funcom was responsible for the SECOND worse MMO launch: Anarchy Online.  I sure hope they have learned something, but I know that some folks are stubborn and refuse to learn from the past.

In spite of that, I love this game and hope to be decapitating Picts and assholes on my bought-and-paid-for War Mammoth!

“What is best in life?   To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.”

Looks like we may want to re-evaluate Endorphin.  I’m a little scared because the last time I tried to do that, I got laid off.  Natural Motion and I don’t get along.  It would be nice though to be able to use Endorphin for animation generation, and Euphoria at runtime…but I’m not sure we could pull that off, cost-wise.  If you’re not familiar with what people are using these for, just take a look at the clip for The Force Unleashed, plus I think Sebastian told me they used it in GTA IV as well.

On a different note, the Age of Conan open beta starts tomorrow.  I’ve got my copy pre-ordered and I’m ready to start decapitating folks.  Going to get my Barbarian on!

After almost three years, I may finally get that new work box.  Gophur put together two new rigs for the Art Department (yep..TWO, that’s the whole art department).  Nice rigs for the money.  One problem; no serial bus.  You may ask what do we need a serial port for?  Well you see, we have this draconian piece of software that still uses a serial hardware key (dongle)…and my frickin Wacom is a serial port one.  Holy shit!  I lobbied for a new tablet, but they didn’t bite.  Gophur added an I/O card to it….blech!   I told him it might mysteriously short out, he didn’t laugh.   The box was going to run Vista but he couldn’t get the raid system configured with it or some shit.  Drivers maybe?   Hell I dunno.  Anyway, it will be nice to finally be able to run Max and Photoshop at the same time.   I wonder if he timed it so I would get it on my birthday?    Nah…I give him too much credit.

Hmm maybe I will load Age of Conan on it……

Kansas won the National Championship last night, in one of the best college basketball games I have seen all year.  Memphis just proved that fundamentals are still important.