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The Crew

All I want for christmas...
Photo Credit: Tom Wolf via Compfight

In not-too-recent news, a new racing game called the crew is coming out in early 2014, and I am excited.

The Crew is an open-world, massively multiplayer racing game. This means that you can race against both your friends and complete strangers in real time. Now if this was it, it would be a pretty boring concept, as it’s already been done before, such as in Need for Speed: World. But that isn’t it.

One of the main selling points is the car customization. The whole idea is that they want you to get attached to your car, no matter what car it was. Not only is there a wide selection of cars, but you can completely change multiple different parts on your car, as well as the appearance. This means that you can choose to tune your car for off-road races, for street races, or even for taking down cars by ramming into them.

Another important feature is that while it is an open-world game, compared to most racing games it is very open world. The game is set in a slightly boiled-down version of America, with only a handful of major cities, some landmarks, and open country. The whole premise is that if you can see it, you can drive there. Whether it’s a mountain or Miami, you can go anywhere. The map is (supposedly) very large, taking about 2 hours to drive from one coast to the other.

I seriously can’t wait to play this game and spend about twelve hours just messing around with the car customization.

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Constitution Day


In Texas History, we decided to do the obvious thing and learn about the Constitution on Constitution Day. In the video, John Green explains the process gone through to make the Constitution, as well as the difficulties they had. For instance, the Constitution wasn’t the first governmental document for the US. That title goes to the Articles of the Confederation.

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Sim City – Part One: DRM

Sim City
Creative Commons License Photo Credit: Kevin Labianco via Compfight

 

     Sim City, the old nineteen eighty-nine city building game. I’m sure every retro gamer has fond memories of this game. However, EA is at it again, with their DRM-happy nonsense.

     They made a reboot of the series called Simcity, because ,you know, it’s trendy to name reboots after the original game. Gameplay-wise it was horrifically mediocre, however that isn’t what I’ll be talking about. I’m here to talk about the DRM. EA had decided that the best way to stop pirates was to force you to need a connection to the servers in order to play at all, even single player. This on its own wasn’t a very good idea, as not everyone has internet that transmits data as fast as a computer does locally.

     However, the real kick in the teeth was that even paying customers who had purchased the game weren’t allowed to play. Why, you ask? It’s due to the fact that so many people went on the servers, that the servers collapsed and nobody could get on. This on it’s own wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, as it happened to Diablo III, if it weren’t for the fact that it took them several weeks to get it fixed. This naturally caused a bit of an uproar, though they didn’t seem to care in the slightest.

     To make everything I just said seem more pleasant, this isn’t the end of the nightmare for paying customers. Also, this isn’t the end of the story, but that’s something for another blog post.