Pakistani Doulha hahaha

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Indiaaaaa India

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Pound of Ground Review

If we've learned anything throughout the course of video games' existence, it's that zombies are fun to kill in a virtual setting. Maybe the popularity stems from the nebulous morality surrounding the topic of zombie slaughter. Sure, you'll hesitate if you happen to run into your zombie mom. Maybe your trigger finger will momentarily pause at the recollection of her picking you up on the first day of school and the perfectly cut chunks of ham in the split pea soup she used to make, but eventually you'll take the shot or slash the machete because it's not really your mom anymore. It's just a mindless creep trying to eat your face, and regardless of whether or not it once changed your diapers, it needs to be permanently put down.
It's even easier to make a kill against a random zombie. There's no empathizing with the pleading, tear-streaked face or tender emotion of the victim. It's just a rotted, gaping jaw, unfocused eyes and likely a tattered shirt on a husk laboriously shuffling toward you. There are no children that will starve if it's gone. There'll be no expensive funeral that a rich uncle will begrudgingly cover. It's just a twitchy nothing. Something that can't feel pain, remorse, or the fender of your car as it slams into its forehead at high speed. Splattering a zombie is all the fun of a murder without any of the messy remorse from doing the same thing to a human. Plus it gives developers an opportunity to do things like let you blast apart limbs without crippling a creature entirely, or an excuse to avoid programming artificial intelligence.

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Being Harry Potter

This week sees the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, marking the beginning of the end for the blockbuster franchise (it wraps up with next summer's Deathly Hallows Part 2. However, if you're a Potter fan already lamenting the fact that there will be no further cinematic trips to Hogwarts, then you definitely should be making vacation plans for Orlando.
Opening this past summer, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter is located at Universal's Islands of Adventure. If you're not familiar with Islands of Adventure think of it in terms of Disneyland, but instead of Frontierland, Tomorrowland, etc., this park consists of Marvel Super Hero Island, Jurassic Park, Seuss Landing and more – all of which have multiple rides, attractions and decor that reflect their respective themes. So while The Wizarding World is not its own theme park per se, it is a significant section of Islands of Adventure designed to immerse you fully in the Harry Potter universe. )

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Infamous2 (play station)

If you played the first game, you already know Infamous 2 is going to be a lot of fun. The premise hasn't changed, and Cole's superpowers have only grown in strength. What's different about the sequel is a whole new level of presentation that makes combat throughout the city feel that much more intense. The demo I got my hands on was the same as what was shown off at PAX, except this time I got to take hold of the controller for myself. Set among trees and a swamp, I was thrust into combat against foes armed with rocket launchers and turrets that were popping shots at me from wooden towers.
A few lightning grenades blasted these raised encampments to splinters. The rain of debris was impressive, but not as attention grabbing as a truck that I completely demolished. Clearly there has been a lot more work put into making the environments destructible. But what really caught my eye was the new look of melee combat. Getting in close to an enemy draws the camera in close for a cinematic view of Cole's handiwork. With a touch of slow motion and the right angles, it really shows off the new animations. It's clear that while the first Infamous had a cartoony comic feel to it, this one is going for gritty action based more on film.
The end of the demo was a battle against a burrowing monster that put up much more of a fight than the human enemies. It charged, dug through the ground, and spewed bile at Cole from a distance making quick dodges very necessary. It was definitely more challenging for the hero, but in the end I triumphed. Clearly Infamous 2 is upping the ante in every way possible.

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The Ball Review for PC

In 2007, Valve's Portal captured our hearts with mind-bending gameplay and one snarky AI. Now, The Ball from Teotl Studios aims to rekindle what made the Portal experience so memorable by putting a spin on physics-based puzzling. But while it's packed with clever challenges, nasty enemies, and a unique Aztec design, many of the game's finer moments are buried beneath so many layers of tedium that you might never reach them. Originally an Unreal Tournament III mod, The Ball earned second place in the "Make Something Unreal" competition by Epic Games before being picked up by publisher Tripwire Interactive. Set in 1940's Mexico, the game drops you into an expedition gone awry deep within a volcanic mountain. You're left with no other option but to plunge into the abyss. Not long into your descent, you stumble upon a handheld Aztec cannon and the ball: a massive, metallic sphere that is both a silent friend and the key to your escape.
Using your handy cannon, you can easily manipulate the ball by either hammering it away from you or drawing it magnetically towards you. Together, you and the ball roll through a lost subterranean civilization riddled with puzzles; puzzles that start out easy and stay that way until you hit the credits. The majority of these mental exercises involve either standing on a switch, pushing the ball into a switch, or standing on a switch while guiding the ball to another switch. Naturally, this starts to feel very repetitive very quickly. With such slim variety up front, there's little motivating you to stick with The Ball through the early stages.
For the truly dedicated, however, patience is rewarded in the game's final acts. Challenges evolve from simple switches to ones that, for instance, have the ball adopting special properties. In one area, the ball projects a low-gravity field that allows for some impressive vertical movement. Another has you painting the floor with oil before lighting up a trail of fire. Why these clever ideas are hidden away so far into the game is a mystery. Such creativity would have better served the game up front.
Unlike the puzzles, combat in The Ball is starved for variety throughout. Your simpleminded foes come primarily in one of two flavors: bum rush or projectile. When you spot a pack of them barreling your way--mouths agape and eyes hungry for murder--you simply slide your rolling sphere of death in their direction and pop them like ripe tomatos (complete with screen-splattering gore). While simple and satisfying at first, the carnage quickly loses its luster after your first dozen encounters. Some tougher, late-game brutes (that you can't simply roll into oblivion) provide the only legitimately interesting challenge by forcing you to use both the ball and the environment to defeat them.

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Unlocking new possibilities

While faulty AI is easily recognised, an AI system that is doing its job often goes unnoticed. No one stops halfway through a level to admire the idiosyncrasies displayed by NPCs unless they are doing something completely out of character--the more unremarkable, the better the AI system. While achieving this result is still a priority for game developers, making games with an AI system that stands out for being good is a relatively new concept: few studios want to dedicate costly man-hours to chasing innovation in a highly technical field that, for the most part, is likely to go unnoticed. However, there are some exceptions. In 2007, AiGameDev.com launched its annual game AI awards, nominated and voted by the site's community. The purpose of the awards was to spotlight the games that showed promise in the field of AI, either by trying something different or exhibiting technical proficiency. In 2009, the Best Combat AI and the overall Best Game AI awards were won by the same studio--Guerrilla Games for Killzone 2. Remco Straatman, lead AI programmer at Guerrilla, says a lot has changed in game AI in the last five to 10 years, with more developers trading low-level scripting for more advanced NPC decision systems.
"In general, I think game AI has gone from the stage where it was an achievement if it did not stand out negatively to the point where AI in most big games is solid, and some titles are using innovative new ideas," Straatman says. "More development teams have also moved from simple state machines to behaviour trees and using planners in NPC AI systems describing knowledge of the world around the NPCs have improved with better knowledge for navigation over changing terrain, and more knowledge about strategic properties of the world such as cover. I also think advances in animation systems with better ways to combine various animations and physics have become available, which now allows for more realistic movement and responses to being hit [in combat AI]. Most of these systems were not around 10 years ago or simply could not run on the hardware available."
Creating a solid game AI system involves successfully networking smaller systems together. For example, a system that deals with the problem-solving capabilities of individual NPCs goes hand in hand with a system that makes sense of the gameworld and its parameters and helps NPCs make relevant decisions. Thankfully, developers don't have to build these systems from scratch: they use specific planners that generate increasingly complex networks.
"At the moment [Guerrilla Games] is using a specific type of planner for our NPCs called Hierarchical Task Network (HTN)," Straatman says. "This is capable of generating more complex plans than what we had before Killzone 2. We also keep on improving things like the CPU performance, which means we can support more NPCs in Killzone 3 than we could in Killzone 2. The terrain-reasoning systems we generate have also evolved over our various titles. We are now able to deal with much more dynamic terrain (like obstacles moving around or changing shape) than ever before. Our data on where there is cover has also become more detailed, something that allows NPCs to deal with more complex environments such as multistory buildings,

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The Future Of A.I. In Games

Artificial intelligence in games has matured significantly in the past decade. Creating effective AI systems has now become as important for game developers as creating solid gameplay and striking visuals. Studios have begun to assign dedicated programming teams to AI development from the onset of a game's design cycle, spending more time and resources on trying to build varied, capable, and consistent non-player characters (NPCs). More developers are also using advances in AI to help their games stand out in what has already become a very crowded marketplace, spawning a slowly growing discussion in the industry about redefining game genres. Think tanks and roundtables on advances in game AI have become prominent at the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC), while smaller AI-dedicated conferences such as the annual Paris Game AI Conference and developer-run online hubs such as AiGameDev.com are garnering a big industry and community following. While industry awareness about the significance of AI in games continues to grow, GameSpot prompted Matthew Titelbaum from Monolith Games, Remco Straatman from Guerrilla Games, and AiGameDev.com founder Alex J. Champandard to share their thoughts on the future and growth of game AI.

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