As some of you know, I’m the founder, webmaster, graphic designer, and guest shoutcaster over at QuakeLive.tv. Quake Live TV runs very much like a business, but we’re all volunteers and our costs are paid for by donations (thanks to an awesome, supportive community).

So what is Quake Live TV? Well, it’s an organization that broadcasts live, competitive video game matches with some of the top professionals. While a lot of our coverage is of community-run events, a lot of our coverage is of the professionals competing in high-level tournaments. We’ve covered over 1,000 competitive matches in our one and half years of operation, with some of our more popular live broadcasts reaching thousands and thousands of live spectators simultaneously. In the past year, we’ve had over 400,000 visitors on our website.

To sum it up: we’re the #1 broadcasting organization in North America Quake Live coverage, and we’re slowly becoming one of the more reputable names in eSports.

While some people scoff at the idea of playing video games professionally, some do pretty well. For example, Anton "Cooller" Singov (who is coming to QuakeCon) has made more than $130,000 in his career. Sure, he’s not going to be able to retire on winnings from professional gaming, but it’s still a good chuck of cash. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Singov

For those of you that are curious as to what competitive gaming is all about, I wrote a four-page magazine article that details the ins-and-outs of the scene.

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Back to the big news:
Quake Live TV is going to be the exclusive broadcaster of QuakeCon 2010.

So, what is QuakeCon? What does this mean?

Here’s a snippet of the Press Release:

Quake Live TV, a community-run broadcasting organization, is set to provide exclusive video coverage of QuakeCon 2010. QuakeCon, the largest LAN party in North America, is hosted annually in Dallas, TX and is home to the Intel® QUAKE LIVE® Masters Championship. Known as one of the most prestigious gaming tournaments worldwide, this year boasts a prize pool of over $50,000. After three years of main-stage action QUAKE LIVE® remains a top choice for competitive gamers.

Check out the rest of the press release on GamesIndustry.biz. I actually wrote the majority of the press release.

Essentially, QuakeCon is a big deal. Biggest LAN in North America, biggest free LAN in the world, and it hosts thousands of gamers at the event with tens of thousands tuning into the coverage from around the world.

My company is going to be that coverage.

I’m really happy to go there and be working alongside my fellow founders Steve "GreasedScotsman" Huff and Ben "FishStix" Goldhaber. These guys are legit. Also along with our promotion to the official coverage team means we get comped rooms, VIP passes, interviews with Bethesda and id Software execs, and a lot more really cool things.

In fact, if anyone has any questions for id Software, Bethesda Game Studios, Splash Damage, Respawn Entertainment (the founders of Infinity Ward, the guys who made call of Duty), Arkane Studios, or any of the pro gamers… let me know!

Anyway, I’m super excited about this and just wanted to share it. Hopefully you guys tune and I have your support!

Matt "Mattc0m" Richards
www.quakelive.tv

View my Game of the Year selections for 2008. A bit late, yes, I know… but better late than never!

Watch as Fable 2, Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Sins of a Solar Empire, Call of Duty: World at War, and many other top caliber games compete for one of the top 10 spots on this year’s list!

Please give me your comments and feedback on my selections.

Thanks!

Here’s the schedule:

I fully except not to get all the reviews on time. However, I’ll do my best to keep within this time table.

I’m also playing through Crysis: Warhead, Need for Speed Undercover, Far Cry 2, the Penny Arcade game, and Burnout Paradise.

I also could write a review on Assassin’s Creed, World in Conflict, The Witcher, Frontlines: Fuels of War, and others.but I’ll put those off, for now. Maybe next week? Who knows!

At the end of the week, I also hope to post my 2008 Game of the Year picks.

Graphics - Oblivion is one of the most graphics intensive games on the market currently. And for good reason, the game looks great. HDR, lovely textures, and some very detailed buildings and environments make the game pretty stunning to play in. More than once your going to be impressed by the graphics in Oblivion you can run it at High settings. I have no problem with the graphics, but I miss Morrowind’s style.

Ah, Morrowind. That game is likely my favorite RPG of all time, though I would have to seriously consider that since I like a variety of different types of RPGs. Still, it was a great game, and had some really great style. The style that Morrowind offered seems to have all but disappeared in favor for what is basically a traditional, medieval setting with a few twists. Instead of avoiding cliff racers and nix hounds, you have wolves and bears. Instead of going seeing wild guars, you have deer. It seems that it has taken out some of the unique flavor Morrowind offered, to bring a more bland experience.

And this is not limited to animals. A huge variety of cities were present in Morrowind. The twisted towers of mages to the Eastern seas, the huge sections that formed Vivec, or the giant mudcrab shell that formed the inner workings of Redoran are just but a few examples of how Morrowind was reflected on the cities. But in Oblivion, this style is missing. They are still varied, and have some strong points, such as the churches. Still, the fantasy and lore of Morrowind is missing in the cities, creatures, and even environments.

Story - Morrowind had just as disjointed as a story of Oblivion, but at least it was more open-ended in completion and offered a more feasible plot. But since both games had a pretty terrible story, comparing the two seems somewhat pointless.

Having a better storyline is something that Elder Scrolls always has had a hard time grasping. There are no epic battles, tragic sacrifices, brutal betrayals, or heart-felt connections. In fact, Oblivion’s story was the downside of the game, as trekking through the lands of Oblivion got really repetitious, really quick.

The biggest thing that Oblivion needs in terms of story is cut scenes. This could come in two flavors. First, it could offer a third person cut scenes, such as Grand Theft Auto provides. This would put to good use the armor you spend a lot of time collection for your character, as you can see it from a third person view once and awhile. The second option is probably more likely, which is a Half-Life 2 approach. The cut scenes are there, but are completely from your characters point of view. This somewhat happened in Oblivion, but bad animations and scripting make them fairly bland. Story isn’t really the focus of Oblivion anyway, but I just wish that completing the storyline was a bit more motivating.

Sound - Most of the sounds in Oblivion are wonderful. Just great. What it doesn’t do well, though, it voice acting. To their defense, it is the first title they decided to completely voice all the characters, and let me tell you that is no small task. Still, it is really lacking.

None of the voices stand out, in fact they all start to sound very similar after playing the game for awhile. The lack of variety in conversations also get annoying, and you soon start hearing the same things over and over. The voices of Oblivion just aren’t that great, lack variety, and just need more character as well. I honestly can’t remember anyone’s voice in the game except for the King. Heck, I even remember “Where’s your uniform?” from Morrowind.

The solution is simple. Just more. More variety, more actors, more voices. It’s no where close to being easy, but it’s the only way to really do it. The second key is more character. I can’t ever tell if I’m listening to an elf, or a 20 year old, or a 60 year old. They all sound the same, and need more character depending on age, race, size, attitude, etc. Very rarely will you meet an NPC that has a significant difference in voice. That is a problem

AI – Radiant AI is nice. But I’d prefer I like to call “obvious AI.” Here’s an example, lets say you’ve just walked into a store. With obvious AI, there is a random roll. 5 out of 10 times he’ll be waiting behind the counter; 2 out of 10 times he’ll be chatting with a customer; 2 out of 10 times he’ll be reorganzing his inventory out front; and 1 out of 10 times he’ll be sweeping. As soon as you come the owner will say “just a sec”, as you see him place the broom in the corner as he walks back to his station.

That’d be great, and it’s not hard to do. It’s not dynamic AI, even, it’s just a few random tasks to make a person seem more real. It doesn’t really matter if the NPCs actually all go and visit their parents and eat dinner if you never see it. Make the AI more obvious is the key. Make the beggers actually go around and beg to people. Make the guards check in barrels and comment on how they need some action, or if they’ve fought recently about how long it’s been. Have festivals, certain days off, pubs that fill up at night. Right now the world doesn’t seem that much more dynamic than Morrowind, because it’s not obvious about doing so.

Size - The game is too big. It’s as simple as that. I love exploring, I really do. But exploring has got to be rewarding in some fanshion. Right now, exploring has it’s benefits, such as shrines. But the fact is that the game could be a lot smaller and more fun. Make everything more hand crafted, put more stuff happening in less area, and essentially focus on quality instead of quantity. A lot of Oblivion’s winderness seems like filler, and it is. It would be a lot better to have less space, but in fact that makes exploring better.

To counter-balance that, just take out that helpful compass. I have a much better time if an NPC says “go to the island in the lake of the waterfall” rather than having a helpful compass guide me right there. This makes exploration a more integral part of the gameplay, and it’s also more fun doing things on your own. Make the size similar to Gothic, but perhaps a bit larger. But make the dungeons larger and more unique, with interesting stories to go with each one. Make everything feel a part of the world, as much as a world is part of it, and make the history blend with the land. It would work great.

Missions - I think a real useful feature is having quests be more random. You can be rather light with the random factor, and just have 7 “starting” quests and you only get 4 on your first run through, for example, and each time you might get 1 or 2 different quests. Or have true random variables, like get X from X dungeon for X person, but hopefully with more variety than that.

It all comes down to variety, and trying to think of unique mission ideas. Oblivion did a fairly good job with this, but it could use room for improvement. I always had more fun with a new character in Morrowind than I did Oblivion, and that I think comes down to mission variety. I do like Oblivion’s end-game content, so when you finish you can still do things with your faction.

As always, the best way to learn about Google is to explore yourself. The second best way is to read this guide!

Personal & Professional Organizational Tools

• Part 1 - Advanced Searching & Customizations
• Part 2 - Personal & Professional Organizational Tools
• Part 3 - Communication Tools & Desktop Enhancement
• Part 4 – Advanced & New Features at Google

If you don’t have one already, you’re going to need a Google account. Make sure you’re logged in, too.

First off, let’s take a look a Google Docs & Spreadsheets. This site is incredibly useful for a multitude of reasons, and I’ll go over them.

• Mobile - One of the most useful features of having all your documents stored online is that it is completely mobile from computer to computer. You can write and edit your documents from your school or work computer, your laptop, your home computer, a computer at a friend’s house, a computer at your families house, anywhere. This type of flexibility is very nice when you are working on papers, you are able to get to them anywhere.
• Organized - It is very easy to add tags to track your documents, or flag them if you need to focus on a set of documents. When you add multiple tags, you can sort by those tags as well to easily track certain types of documents, much like how Gmail works.
• Revisions - If you created the document through the website, it’ll save each revision you make. You can track the changes you make, and even revert to older revisions if needed. This tool goes great with…
• Collaboration - If anyone you know needs to collaborate with you, all they need is a Google account as well. Add them as a collaborator, and they get all the tools you do for that document. Then, track the revisions they do, and they can also track yours, so you can see the edits and changes made to the document as it matures.
• Publish - Publishing your document online is easy and done with a click of a button. This makes getting your document on the internet easy, so you can link to it for e-mails, blog posts, forum reference, and other reasons why you might need a document online.
• Security - No longer do you have to worry about losing your documents. Using this for your documents gives them a very reliable backup in case of any problems on the computer where you are storing your data. It also auto-saves your progress, so no need to worry about saving every few minutes.

These tools provide great results for personal work or professional projects. It really shines when you are doing group works, so multiple people can edit the document while tracking all the changes made.

Next we’ll take a look at Google Calendar. This is great for all the reasons calendars are great, however it makes the automation and management of your calendar a lot easier to do. It includes a lot of tools to make adding a lot of events on your calendar quick and easy. But the real gem lies again in its mobility across computers and the tools that let you share your calendar. You can completely setup the calendar to share just free/busy time with specific people, or all calendar details, or give them rights to add and edit events on the calendar. Again, this is a useful tool for personal or professional uses if used correctly.

We’ll dig into GMail and Google Talk, two of Google’s communication tools, in the next part of this guide. To outline them, though, they are both very easy to use and their interface is used well. GMail is especially useful with it’s great spam prevention and large mailbox size, so you don’t have to worry about filling up your inbox anytime shortly.

Now all those tools and services are great. But let’s take it a step further with Google Apps for Your Domain. This is specifically useful for organizations looking for a firmer organization and control of their website. You can use Google’s Email, Chat, and Calendar services to coordinate and organize your website’s work. You can also use their publishing tools to update certain portions of your site, if not the site itself. These tools are good for small or medium sized organizations who need to further their communication and organizational abilities.

If you want to use Google to further expand your website’s use, perhaps you’d consider Blogger, Google’s blogging service. Blogging is great for personal reasons, for obvious reasons. But it is also good for tracking professional developments in a slightly less formal attitude, YouTube’s blog being a great example. On a personal note, this is my favorite entry. As for Blogger, it’s really all about it’s easy interface that is a real use of all of Google’s products. But even more so, it can be used on their sub domain (at blogspot.com), or integrated directly into your site by following a few easy instructions.
And that is it for now!

This guide will provide some details into Google’s uses, services, and customizations. Google is an incredibly powerful tool that many people don’t seem to fully grasp, or take the time to explore it’s rich features. So, I’ll take the time and try to outline some of it’s more useful features in this 4 part guide.

• Part 1 - Advanced Searching & Customizations
• Part 2 - Personal & Professional Organizational Tools
• Part 3 - Communication Tools & Desktop Enhancement
• Part 4 – Advanced & New Features at Google

Advanced Searching & Customizations

The best place to begin is, well, Google. You’re probably already quite familiar with the page, but go ahead and look it over. You’re also probably familiar with the Advanced Search feature, which offers many options to refine any searches you make. As you scroll down, you’ll likely get less and less familiar with the tools it is offering. Eventually, you’ll see these:

Google Book Search – Search the full text of books
Google Code Search – Search public source code
Google Scholar – Search scholarly papers
Google News archive search – Search historical news

All of these tools are quite useful. Google has set a goal for themselves to simply collect as much data as possible, so when you are looking for historical data or for text, Google is the first place you should start your search from. Just set a mental note in the feature, as Google saves a lot of your time using these tools.

Let’s try an example of one of the tools. Open up books.google.com and type in Ender’s Game. Now, press on the book and you’ll bring up the first page. You can:

• Read the text, looking through a preview text.
• You can view the table of contents, title page, and copyright.
• You can pull up the synopsis and reviews of the book.
• You can do a search for a specific text in the book, and go directly to that page.
• You can buy the book through retailers, or use Froogle.
• You can look up libraries in your area that have the book, with listings of the distance you are from that library (by using a non-Google tool, however it is exceedingly simple).

And that is a sample, there is still additional features and information you can find by using the tools of that particular search site.

The above example is a fairly extreme detailed look at just one of the features Google offers for advanced searches. Now, take a look at this page. As you’ll notice, there is far more features and tools that Google offers you. The best way to find out if you like them is to explore through that page and gather your own impressions. However I will be going over quite a few of the more useful features, but not as explicitly as the example above.

Before moving onto customizations you can make to Google, let’s take a quick look at all the different types of searches. You are probably familiar with all of these, but if not here is some quick explanations:

• Image Search – Search for images throughout the Internet. Note that most of the images have copyright, and this is not a stock photo search.
• Video Search – Even though it is still in “Beta”, it is available right off of your searches. Basically, you search a database of uploaded video available on Google, not the actual Internet. Still, it provides a fair amount of results, even if the quality is low in most cases. You can also purchase TV shows and music videos, much like iTunes. And finally, you can also upload your own videos to share with the world.
• News - You can search news, view the top stories, and view the latest headlines in various areas of interest. This is also a customizable page, which we’ll go into shortly.
• Maps - An incredible tool that you can use to zoom up on your house on satellite view, find out where just about anything is located, or get some specific directions for a road trip.
• Froogle - A shopping comparison service, that also is still in Beta. The advanced feature set makes this a useful tool – especially for some Christmas shopping.

Google is far more than just a search engine with some bells. And that is really what the core of this guide is about, finding the incredibly useful tools Google offers beyond just searching. Before we wrap Part 1 of this guide up, we’re going to be looking more specifically at your Google account and a few customizations you can make.

First things first, you need to create an account. You can do a lot of things with this account, and we’ll be digging a lot into that over the next 3 guides.

For now we’ll be looking at your customizable homepage. This tool has provided me with updated headlines & weather, flexible tools, and an incredibly easy to use interface. Don’t like where something is placed? Just pick it up via drag and drop, and move it where you want. Don’t like a particular item? Just X it out, and if you want it back that is easy too. Too much info on a particular item, but still want it to be accessible within a click? Just minimize the toolbar. It’s all very flexible, and entirely easy.

Your starting tools probably aren’t what you are looking for. Just exit out the tools you don’t want, or edit them to try to fit your needs. Then, head to the “Add Stuff” link (far right of the page). First you’ll be created with the popular “stuff”. Just press on what you want, and it’ll start heading to your homepage. Do a bit of digging, and get what interests you.
Head on back to your home page just by pressing on the Google logo. You likely got a fair bit of stuff, and your homepage is start to get a bit congested. Just organize to your heart’s content, and get it sorted out in a way you are comfortable with.

You may come to realize you just can’t fit everything you’d like on your homepage. You can press “Add Tab”, and then edit the name by pressing the tab itself.

For example, I have three tabs. One called Home, one called Fun, and one called Other.

• Home – To-do list, Sticky notes, Calendar, Weather, and a few other things.
• Fun – Quotes and jokes on the left, puzzles in the middle (such as crosswords), and minimized flash games on the right.
• Other – things like NFL standings, IP address lookup, a top freeware listing, and other sort of items.

Now, it comes down to the “stuff” that you use. Do you think you will use a To-Do list? I use it all the time, it’s simple and easy to keep track of everyday stuff, and I always glance on it as soon as I open a new browser. Sticky Note is useful for just quickly jotting something down. Dictionary.com is useful for the obvious reasons, especially the thesaurus. One last useful feature is you can log into your Google account from any computer, and get access to the same exact homepage. This is useful when you have multiple computers, have a work computer, a laptop, etc. These customizations are also apparent in Google News, you can customize the placement and the number of stories each area of interest has.

I’ve just scratched the surface of the dozens of tools Google offers, and I’ve gloss over many details already. I’d strongly suggest you spend your own time looking through Google and finding tools and features that you would use, and jot them down mentally if anything.

Hopefully I’ll get the next guide out shortly, and hopefully we’ll go over some of the better tools Google is offering, that are both new and quite useful.