aldous huxley
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The sights and scents of the Sensorama Simulator
Welcome to Time Machines, where we offer up a selection of mechanical oddities, milestone gadgets and unique inventions to test out your tech-history skills. You're perched atop a motorcycle, cruising through Brooklyn with the wind whipping through your hair. A faint waft of indefinable city-funk hits your nose and the rumbling of the engine rattles your backside. Then your tokens run out. You've just experienced the Sensorama Simulator, a machine from 1962 that played a 3D film along with stereo sound, aromas and wind in order to create an immersive sensory environment. It was one of many 3D-related creations that visionary inventor and cinematographer Morton Heilig gave the world. His ideas for adding layers of sensory stimuli to augment a simple cinema presentation led the way towards today's "virtual reality" experiences.
The Soapbox: The impossible task of balancing PvP
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. PvP in MMO games often comes with a whole slew of ill-defined requirements for balance. As impossible as such a thing is, we often hear the mating calls of noobies everywhere, sounding out their ineptitude with words like "overpowered" or "nerf." Those same types of players can often be found asking questions like, "What is the best class?" as if by some chance, they'll cheat the very system of balance they yearn for when they cry about every defeat they suffer at the hands of class X. In that respect, I can't blame them, either. Oftentimes I've found myself looking for a channel through which to vent my frustration or expressing my nerd-rage by disconnecting altogether. But you won't see me trolling forums, stating that one class has more power than another. I might take part in discussions of parity -- maybe. I can probably even be found taking part in debates of factional equality -- sure, in a theoretical sense, why not? But realistically speaking, balance in PvP is just an ideal. It is little more than a philosophical illusion to be debated but never fully realized. Follow along after the break as I discuss the sheer absurdity of balance in a PvP game.
Huxley: a Brave New World?
It is a curious thing to hear of a game being themed after a classic speculative fiction novel. It's even more curious because the novel in question, Brave New World, has little in common with Starship Troopers (as the game's images suggest) and a whole lot in common with Idiocracy (did they have sex hormone gum in that movie?). Brave New World itself was Aldous Huxley's take on American excessive trust in technology, the future, manufacturing, science, and hedonism, culminating in images such as babies being processed in factories instead of born, people being altered to meet almost cookie cutter standards of beauty, and sex being so casual as to almost require assigned seating. One can only imagine what Aldous Huxley would think of the United States in 2008. Huxley promises to be a great game combining the MMO and FPS genres in a new and entertaining fashion, and I am all for creativity and license. But that's just the problem. When I heard about Huxley the game, my mind immediately leaped to the possibilities of some other first person shooter games derived from the other works of Aldous Huxley, and frankly, that boggles the mind.
New Huxley gameplay video with analysis
Good things come to those who wait. In our earlier coverage of Webzen's upcoming MMO Huxley, we lamented the state of the in-game videos we saw -- a lot of running, nice scenery, but little else. Huxley-evolved.com has finally given us what we wanted with two videos available on blip.tv. At the time of this post, huxley-evolved.com's site was unavailable, so we're linking to the separate videos.What does the first video tell us? Well, it's an FPS, which is a relative rarity in the MMO scene, and just behind that in little-seen-in-MMOs, it's Science Fiction. The traditionals are all here -- jumping, strafing, etc. Neither this, nor the following video feature any melée weaponry. We do notice that there's no HUD in this video, however, which some will like and some won't, but the second video does have one, so apparently it's toggleable. It also seems to take an extraordinarily long time to die, with hit after hit being scored before the opponent finally lays down. On death, a voice speaking Korean recites what we'll guess is a countdown. If our Korean-speaking audience members would care to drop a comment enlightening us, we'd appreciate it.
