Poll's Closed!

My first poll just closed.  Here are the results:

What do you think about Mirror's Edge?

Awesome! /Preorder	4 (57%)
I will probably buy it	2 (28%)
When it's cheaper	1 (14%)
Nah, not interested.	0 (0%)
What's Mirror's Edge?	0 (0%)

Total Votes: 7

SOW - Fourth Week of September

(Late) I am pleased to announce that I now have The Witcher Extended Edition in my posession.  I am only about two hours into it, but I thought this screenshot from the opening sequence would make for a nice SOW.  As for the improvements to the game, I am a bit disappointed that they didn't improve the combat, but I can notice load time improvements, a few voice changes, and a better inventory manager.  Even with the reletively few major changes I will still end up finishing the game eventually, because it was good to begin with anyway.

SOW - Third Week of September

Didn't really know what to do for this one... I wanted to put in a picture of Spore (which I just got) but I didn't have any good ones or the time to make a good one. I quickly shuffled through the files and found this picture from Half life Lost Coast. I haven't played this in a long time but I remembered liking how the ship flies past the windows in this part. Yeah it is kind of random, but whatever.

On an unrelated note, I noticed that five people have voted in my poll so far. This means one or two of them are people I don't know. Whoever those were, thank you for reading! I realize this blog has no breaking news or exiting content whatsoever for someone who doesn't know me, but what is a blog without people to read it? One of 80% of the blogging network, that's what (or so I've heard). I am no famous person or someone in a high position, so no one really has much incentive to read blogs made by random people they don't know. This makes it into more of a journal that can be read online by RL friends and can include pictures and video. I suppose I will have to leave it at that until I am famous. Anyway, I will be back soon with another Screenshot of the Week.

Woot! Crysis Warhead!

I just finished downloading Crysis: Warhead through steam.  I had it preordered at Amazon, but they failed and I ended up canceling it from there.  I just played through the very first part so I could calibrate the graphics, and it seems pretty good so far.  The intro sequence was well done, and the whole game seems to work smoother (if only a bit) than the original Crysis.

Also, I am going to cheat and call this my SOW for the second week of September.

Question Answered

Well I am not quite sure how it worked but a few days after my last post I logged on to Steam and saw this screen:Well, it looks like SOMEBODY is reading my blog.

Still think it's strange how long it took them after their previous release date.

SOW - First Week of September

The main reason I uploaded this image is to ask the question: "What the hell happened to the expansion of The Witcher?" Wasn't it supposed to come out in... April?  What happened? I almost forgot about it, I really wanted to play the rest of this game (I was waiting for the expansion to finish it).  I might be forced to just reinstall it and play it as it is at the moment.  Sigh...

Poll

I added a poll gadget to the blog. I have no idea how I will manage it, but it will probably just ask random questions of no real importance. Have fun.
First one 's bout Mirror's Edge.

SOW - Last Week of August

I know I have already talked about Counter-Strike Source, but I thought I could use this opportunity to rant about my internet service. For the last month and a half, I have hardly been able to play any online games for longer than about 10 minutes at a time. Every few minutes my internet connection cuts out and I have to sit through about 25 seconds of nothingness. This seems to happen more often when I am on a particularly good ownage spree in CSS. Once it comes back, several things can happen: I can get disconnected completely from the current server, transported to a buggy version of the map with everyone's names replaced with "unconnected", or from then on not be able to see the player models of anyone else on the server (all I can see are the weapons they are carrying, floating through the air). In all these cases, I am forced to reconnect to the server which wipes my KD numbers clean. Apparently, there is something interfering with the signal on the same frequency my internet uses (900mhz). At the moment no one is sure exactly what it is, so it will probably be quite a while before I can freely use the web.

SOW Third Week of August

Here is a cropped image of an accomplice and I rocking out in TF2 as pyros. I don't actually play TF2 much, I am more of a CSS/COD4 person, but I do enjoy unlocking the new weapons (I have all of them so far). Valve is apperantly releasing a new update soon.

SOW - Second week of August

Mass Effect is yet another great game I have played this year. In case you didn't know, you CAN go to the original human solar system (it is called the Local Cluster) and although you cannot travel to Earth (darn lazy developers) you can go to the Earth's moon and jump around on the Mako (which is really fun on any planet). This is a screenshot of what Earth looks like from the Moon.

SOW - First week of August

This also had to be done. Cod4 is also a great game. I won't say anything more lest I give away the story.

SOW - Final Week of July

This had to be done. Assassin's Creed is such a great game. It may get a bit repetitive, but at any time you can still step back and realize that you are having fun. I am also a fan of Parkour, so the fact that you can use parkour to move around the cities adds a huge bonus to the game.

I am back (again), and owe you three SOWs...

Yeah, I completely failed and forgot about my blog. Following this post are two blated SoWs and one for this week.

I made my first YTP! Behold!

Source SDK Ideas?

So I have gotten myself back into the mood for making maps in Source SDK. Lately I have just been messing around making random maps and experimenting with the features (I still have a lot to learn about the program). Above is a spiral staircase I made (admittedly the hard way, make a few blocks, spin them the right way, rinse & repeat + copypasta) What I really need is a good idea for a map. I am thinking of either a single player hl2e2 level or some kind of css arena. If you have any good ideas (or even a good intermediate-level tutorial), post them in the comments and I will give them a try. I am always open to stealing other people's ideas!

SoW July 24 '08

This was taken a loooong time ago in hl2 back when my computer couldn't handle the game at full graphics. The first time my sister played the game for some reason she spent about 20 minutes messing with the physics objects in the starting area. She has also done some other random things in hl2, such as taking a particular suitcase (I think it was "models/props_c17/briefcase001a.mdl" if you care) as far into the game as possible, etc. ANYWAY, this is the screenshot of the week.

Fraps Folder Foliage

This isn't the screenshot of the week, but I was going through my Fraps folder and found this old picture from my first Oblivion character when I had killed 1337 creatures.

Screenshot of the Week July 16

lolwut

New Feature! Woot

When I play through a game, I take a LOT of screenshots. I like to be able to go back a year or more later and see some funny or awesome pictures from the games of then. I use Fraps to capture screens and video because it does a lot of good things without taking up really any resources, or at least not enough that I would notice.
So, with that intro, I will be introducing a screenshot of the week feature into my blog. I am hoping that this will not only provide more content and lulz to the blog, but that it will sort of "spur" me into making more actual posts.
The first one is going up right after this, so yeh, it is above this post right now. Why are you reading this anyway?

Firefox 3 Con Review

After spending a bit of time with Firefox 3, I have been satisfied overall. It is worth using, but all I really wanted to say here is a few of the bad things I have noticed with FF3.
The biggest problem I have had is the random occasion that when I open the browser it shows me a blank white page with nothing in the address bar, neither anything in history or bookmarks. This seems to persist until a day or two later when it decides to come back. I have never heard of anyone having this problem before, so I just switch back to old IE7 when the bug strikes.
Any other problems are minor at worst, so you might as well ignore the rest of this post. First of all, I do not understand how the upper right corner search bar works. When you go to manage search engines, it shows you your list and shows you an attractive link that says "Get more search engines..." but when you click that, they give you a list of a measly 23 engines to choose from. Sometimes it lets you add the search engine of the site you are on, but not always. I wasn't able to add Google images search. One more small annoyance is that the Bookmarks dropdown menu automatically hogs 8 lines and 4 dividers on the top with buttons you don't really need, so it often forces you to scroll down to be able to see all your bookmarked pages.
If I you have any solutions to these problems, please leave a comment, it would be appreciated. Anyway, see you for now, I will try to start posting regularly again.

Ceiling Cat Prayer

Firefox is Out! Get It Now!

Hey! Firefox is out! Go to getfirefox.com (Or here, it is the same page).
I used to have the list of release times here, but it took up too much space on the blog page, making it awkwardly long. It is already out almost everywhere, but check the comments for the list of release times for different areas around the world.

Firefox Owns the World

Mozilla is really trying hard to make a world record of "most downloads of a program on launch day" for Firefox 3. They set up a pledge system so that they can send emails to people to remind them to download when it launches. They already have 1,307,761 pledges as of Sunday, June 15 at 9:15 PM, so it is going fairly well. Probably a lot more people will download Firefox than will sign the pledge, or at least I am assuming, because Firefox 2 got about 1.6 million downloads on its first day, and the Fox has only gotten more popular since. One thing that really amazed me though was the map they provide on the pledge site. It seems that they have at least 20 or so pledges from just about every country. They have many pledges from places you've probably never heard of like Montserrat (near Puerto Rico), Mauritius (east of Madagascar), and Palau (Near Philippines). They really have great worldwide support. I am using Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2 right now, and I must say I am impressed after using Internet Explorer 7 for so long.
Although I am not what I would call a major Mozilla fanboy or anything, it would be sort of disappointing to see their world record hopes fail. It comes out June 17th, so go try it out!

Review: Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

I almost feel like I shouldn't be reviewing this because A) I have not played the game that this is based on and B) My opinion seems to strangly vary greatly from most of the reviews I have seen of this movie. But what the hell, it's my blog, "I do what I want".

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is an entirely CGI movie by Square Enix based on the game Final Fantasy VII for PS1 and PC. It starrs Cloud as the main character, with Tifa on the side and Sephiroth as the antagonist.

What I got from the plot was that these people are living on a small planet (only way to justify the ultra-low gravity) which gets its energy from an energy river called the Lifestream. A power company figured out how to use the Lifestream as an energy source and began draining the stream for electricity. The planet got mad at the humans for doing this and punished them by removing all the energy water and causing both massive destruction somehow and a kind of plague or disease called "geostigma" (I would assume "geostigma" was meant to be broken down into "geo" or "geographic" meaning the planet and "stigma" meaning "mark" or "scar") it also orphaned a lot of little kids who sit helplessly on the streets clutching their scars. Instead of fixing up the cities and using solar power to get energy for everything, the people walk the streets almost randomly and tell the children that they should be sad because that is the price for stopping the wars. The people who originally guarded and worked at the power company want to apologize to the planet and fix things up, while the "bad dudes" want to steal the head of some kind of biomechanical robot thing and use it to do some "reunion" ritual to take revenge on the planet. (If you want the real plot, go to the wikipedia article and scroll to the "plot" section)

SO, first, let's get the cons out of the way:

No movie is without its flaws. Having not played the game FFVII, I can say that yes the story is a bit confusing and that they have a habit of randomly throwing new characters into the scene without any formal introduction (these people were probably all in the game). Although the characters look mostly real, they almost never show any kind of scratches or wounds from the epic battles they have. There are many technical oddities such as the fact that they have pistol-like weapons but they are slow enough that good reflexes with a blade can easily block the bullets and if the bullets hit anything they are about as effective as throwing a rock at someone. There are many, MANY actions in this movie that would make a physics professor cry, but hey, it doesn't take place on Earth, right? The camera is sometimes oddly jerky, the characters do not change much throughout the story, and there are a few places where the translation to English didn't keep the original meaning of the Japanese (I watched it in Japanese with English subs).


Now the pros:

The above may seem like a bucketful of flaws, but despite those I liked this movie a lot. First of all, the CG in the movie is very beautiful and well done, portraying a very artistic view and allowing the developers to blend as much special effects in as possible. The fight scenes are truly epic and are on par with some of the fight scenes in The Matrix. Even if you do not understand the story, the movie is still filled with a lot of emotion that will attach you with the main characters and even the enemies a bit. Finally, Square Enix has cleverly snuck in some humor as well, strangely having a lot to do with cell phones.

If you can ignore the flaws, which I easily did, this is a great movie overall. On my usual scale of 1-10, I give this a 9

Woot 50 Posts!

Hey, this is the 50th post on my blog! Although I have been slacking a lot in recent memory, it is actually sort of fun having a blog. I realize that this is only read by three of my friends and maybe some random person who clicked the wrong link, but maybe that one guy read some of my "wisdom" and therefore made this blog a success. I will try to improve my attendence in the future, and hopefully will provide some useful advice (que GLaDOS) such as reviews, insight, and possibly news you haven't heard yet to keep it going.

Topic: Operating Systems

I started thinking about this topic after seeing this video on digg, and watching a few others like it (beware if you look for more yourself; 90% of them are fake).

I wouldn't call myself a Microsoft fanboy, although many may disagree with this. I am currently using Vista Home Premium, and I have had virtually no problems with it that I couldn't have had with XP. Maybe I am just very lucky. I do disagree with many of the turns Microsoft is taking and I don't use all of the annoying features that Microsoft keeps bloating their operating systems with. I resist as much as possible to use any built-in system for controlling the user, such as UAC and the "users" folders (my documents and such) because frankly, when it comes to operating systems, I am a control freak. There are so many things I would change about Vista if I had a team of around 400 caffeinated programmers at my bidding (possibly more on this later).

That said, I have yet to find an operating system better suited to my needs. Yes, I have tried a Mac, both a desktop and a laptop (not Laopard though), and I don't like it at all. From my experiences with Macs it seemed like they are trying to control everything you do to the point where you have to force yourself to think in less technical terms to get around. They only really tell you what you have to know, and they try too much to tailor things toward someone who knows little or nothing about the inner workings of a computer. Also, Apple has an annoying habit of locking users into their little niche, so that they cannot escape without giving up everything. Take iTunes for example - it is one of the last music stores that still sells their music loaded with DRM (yes I understand that it is no longer a requirement on the store, but that doesn't mean there is no longer any DRM on iTunes)

I have yet to try the new Ubuntu or any form of Linux, but from what I have heard those are not really for gamers.

Well I am not sure if I have made a point here or not but I will end this post now and possibly fix it later. =/

The Virtual, the Future, and the Imaginable

Yeah, I know I slacked off again.

I decided not to become a complete /B/tard for fear of losing my sanity, so I only surf 4Chan when I am very bored. I have been very active lately, and not only with games.

Coming in the future of this blog: Possibly a review of Assassin's Creed, even COD4 if I feel up to it using a new review system I am working on, and maybe some ramblings of something random like String Theory.

Yes, I said String Theory. I have recently become more interested in it and am re-watching The Elegant Universe (a very nice three-hour NOVA show explaining the basics of String theory)

You see, I have been trying to not play games quite as much (don't believe it) and use my computer as more of a tool to help me enlarge my areas of knowledge. Sure, some of those areas of knowledge may be based in computers, but as technology goes on things like that will come in handy.

So keep a lookout here because like quantum mechanics, you can never tell when or how I will post next. I can only promise that I will post again.

Oh and one more thing: while on Google Images fetching these pictures, I chanced upon a very interesting website which explains in a relatively clear and understandable way how to imagine the tenth dimension. Check it out.

Some 4Chan Videos - Watch at Your Own Risk

Here are some gifs from 4chan to get you started...
I do not like all of these, but most are funny. Please Ignore the racist, injury inducing, and cat mistreatment gifs, or any that are offensive in any way. I do not have the time to edit these out and repost.

4Chan ahoy

Yes, I have been sucked into the massive black hole of 4Chan. I now surf the /b/ imageboards regularly, and has been one reason I have been forgetting to update here. I haven't started posting pictures up there...yet. I have been inspired to make a few pictures and maybe animated gifs in the future, and here I will post a few examples of 4Chan as well as my own creations. Here is a small sample of the crazyness.
One thing to note: 4Chan is DEFINATELY not a place for children. Maybe it's not a place for anyone. Click the link at your own risk.

Picture at top ^: Yes, this is from 4Chan. The people there ("we"?) know how terrible the site is, and are not afraid to admit it.

Picture below v: 4Chan, especially /b/, consists mostly of completely random images someone took and/or made in some picture editing program. This particular image is part of a series of "motivators"; you can tell a motivator by its black background and text at the bottom.

Above: Llama Worm?!

There was one picture I found that I thought stood out from the rest: Behold, the Duckroll.I spent a little time making some of my own duckroll variations. Here they are:No rly.

Anyway, more pictures to come I'm sure. Cya 4 nao

Long Break

I know, I know...yeah, maybe i'll start posting again. No, I haven't been killed by evil ice cream cones...

I sort of took a long break from posting here, as you may or may not have noticed. I guess I have been sort of busy, or maybe I just have been lazy. Maybe both. Anyway, I will just post a quick update here.

- I got Call of Duty 4 and finished the Singleplayer, doing well in multiplayer

- I got Assassin's Creed and am about halfway through

- I went to another small LAN party

- I was going to post a review of COD4, but then the break "happened"

- Maybe I'll do a review of AC if I feel like it.

...the person in the picture is not me.

Google is a Better Windows Help Than Windows Help Itself

I got an error when trying to install a network adapter driver that windows recommended to me (the LAN was having problems and I was in desperate need of a solution) and Windows was kind enough to give me an error code to look up in their Help & Support program, but lo and behold it said back to me "lol wut I don't know taht error lol". So I googled the code and on the first hit I got an answer. You would think that every time a programmer entered an error code they would put the meaning of it in their help program, or, get this: they could say what the error is right there when you get it! WOW! I am such a genius!

Ricochet: Lost Worlds Review

Hello again, I know I have been posting a lot recently, but that is a good thing, isn't it?

I want to do a short review of the new-ish breakout game Rocochet: Lost Worlds. I only have played through the demo, but it gave me a pretty good idea of how the whole game is, and I have played through the entire previous game in the series as well.

Reflexive Entertainment is very good at dreaming up new ideas for this game. The Ricochet games I would say are probably my favorite breakout titles, and I have played a lot of breakout games, surprisingly enough. This one, being a sequel, has to include entirely new ideas or else it would become just a hogepoge of the same old stuff. This game, however, really lays out the ideas left and right and when coupled with the new and interesting level design, a good game make it does. I do not know how they do it, but they included all of the best powerups from the first game and added more of them, and every time I see a new powerup or brick it is always a new and interesting idea that mixes the gameplay up a bit. For example, one of the new powerups is the laser ball. When picked up, the ball becomes purple and randomly fires lasers all over the place. One of the new bricks, well, every environment includes new brick art and physics, but one of the new brick types is the magnet brick. These are first seen in the space/alien environment shown above. When two magnets of the same color are activated at the same time, the blocks attract each other, sliding across the screen to meet each other in a small explosion, destroying other bricks along the way. If two magnets of different colors are both activated, they repel each other, blowing up individually on each side of the screen, destroying anything in their path of course. It's ideas like these that make the game constantly new and entertaining. It still can get old after a while of playing, especially after you go through all of the environments once, but for the most part it is a good time.

One more thing: The level design in this game is just fantastic. All the bricks are moving all the time, some more than others. The backgrounds are all animated. The positioning and tracking of the bricks is very well done, and makes each level feel almost completely different. Without such great level designers, this game would fall flat on its face.

TF2 Uber Scout Batting Practice

This doesn't have anything to do with anything, but I was playing TF2 this morning and I decided to randomly go scout and try to get as many bat kills as I can. Nothing intelligent to say about it, but here are some screenshots:

Thoughts on Online FPSs

I haven't gotten a new game yet, so I have been amusing myself playing various first person shooters online. I played a bit of Crysis, CounterStrike Source, Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2 Deathmatch, Unreal Tournament 2004, and even Zombie Panic Source (Sorry I still don't have Call of Duty 4 yet, and Battlefield 2142 isn't working anymore). I have been thinking about online multiplayer FPS design, and I wanted to just kinda open up the can and spill out some random ideas here, for both of my loyal readers to enjoy. I will just roll out the random screenshots while explaining my ideas in no particular order. Steam is Good for Multiplayer

Ah, Steam. Without Steam, PC gaming would probably be on its way out by now. It truly is a great thing. I thank Valve for making Steam and making it right. Yeah, EA has their downloader thing that no one uses if they don't have to (I have that to thank for my broken copy of BF2142NS), but Steam really is the thing that caught on. I will say right now that EA really should just stop even trying with whatever they are doing and go straight to Valve right now to join the Steam community. It would definitely improve their sales. Every time I see that another company has joined Steam I feel happy for Valve and thank the company in my mind (Thanks go out to Epic, the most recent company to join; their Unreal Tournament series is already on the bestseller list on Steam). I also think that more games should use the Valve server system, but that isn't as pressing of an issue. It truly would be a glorious day when every major game company joins Steam, but I doubt with all of my pessimism that that day will ever come.

Weapons, and Overall Balance of the FPS

This is a big one. I will try not to ramble too much here... There have been many, many online FPSs now that have come and gone, and many more that are still running strong (What? Quake 3? Half Life 1?). When a developer starts writing a multiplayer portion of a game, they are faced with many options and decisions to make. Do we include classes? How many weapons should there be? What kinds of rewards do the players get, if any, and how? Are there unlockables? How fast should the game run? Their answers to these questions determine the shape of the game, and if they make the right decisions, their game could still be played 5+ years after release. There are games like UT which are more based on blowing the hell out of the enemy, no matter how unrealistic (Unreal is in the title, after all) or how little brain power it takes. A game like BF2142 takes more smarts, and requires much more teamwork. With that, I would like to go right into my next topic,

Hardcoreness

How good does a new player have to be to be able to compete with the people who have been playing your game for a year? This is a hard one. You don't want to make your hardcore players feel like they have not grown at all in their months of play time, but you do not want to make the barrier to entry so high that the newcomers will just get mad and leave. This does have a bit to do with the community (more on that later), but most of it is based on the balance and weapon usage. More twitchy games have proven to be more newcomer-harsh. CSS, for example, is impossible to do well in without a good, fast hand. It took me a lot of learning to really get down having to stare at my minimap for teammates and known enemies while simultaneously watching for terrorist heads to fire at. I also had to learn the proper use of every weapon in the game, which can take a while as well. On the contrary, a game like TF2 has a fairly short barrier to entry. A new player doesn't even have to learn all the classes. Valve has successfully reduced the barrier to just a small brick step for every class. If you are really slow at learning a new class, you could just learn one and stick to it. While everyone will want to learn all the classes eventually, these small steps make it very easy for a newcomer to get right into the fight without feeling completely lost.

Community

The community of an online game can make or break the game for a lot of people. This is one area that I have seen almost every online FPS fail at, and it is sad because it is not entirely the developer's fault. They could have made a great game, but just because they didn't include a good enough anticheat program or enough ways for people to help each other out their game becomes a trip to the park for younger players to learn new vocabulary words (and not good vocabulary either). "Mommy, what is a @%$*#%*!#?" I can see it now... In CSS, although the community is very hardcore, if you search a bit you can still find servers that advertise themselves as being newbie-friendly. You don't know if this is a trap, but meh. There are few ways that publishers can heal this burning hole in online game design, and I have a few tips. Players tend to get more personal if they can freely talk to everyone at once, and if no one is on their team (meaning that they can offend someone without consequences). There is a lot more flaming in an every-man-for-themself deathmatch than in a CTF match. Players also get more mad when they feel they are camped and they are quicker to point fingers at good players when their death count is on display for them to see. Especially when they also get a running overall kill/death (KD) ratio, this makes the game much more intense due to the player knowing that each death results in a permanent scar in their record. One more thing: an easy way to get a player mad is to have a feature that when someone humiliates them (a knife in the back, perhaps) on top of that you take something away from them that is of value. On the surface it sounds fun, but in practice it seems to cause more trouble than it is worth.

Closing Thoughts

A lot of people say that the multiplayer on COD4 is awesome, but I haven't had the good fortune to be able to try it at all yet. All I have is the demo, which people say is not a good representation of the game itself. I will get COD4 soon, I will. Can't really decide if I should get that or Assassin's Creed (PC) first. Anyway, I will continue to play online shooters, and I may post more on this blog about this topic if I think of something to say. Feel free to post comments, I haven't yet gotten any from someone I do not know. What? You want another picture? Ok, fine, here you go.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl

This isn't really a review, but more of a mini/first impressions/review-just-so-that-I-dont-have-to-break-my-promise review. I actually havent played much of stalker, just the first few quests, and I havent yet gotten to the bigger towns. This is one of those games that is really hard to review. I don't dislike it, but I don't really think that it is designed that well. It is merely ok. The problem is that for whatever reason the replay value is so low that I rarely feel like going into the game to play through the next part. Maybe it is the engine, being kind of old (the graphics are not exactly new) and that there is just no sun in the game at all. Seriously, the engine doesn't support a sun. The whole game is very dark and gloomy, with nice rain and storm effects. Maybe it is because I am spoiled from Oblivion where you get a really nice GUI and don't have to read everything the NPC's are saying. I can't pinpoint the problem, but it's there. The greatest thing this game has given me in my opinion is the music playing on the radio at the start. You can see the radio in that first picture. That music... I have no idea what it is let alone what language it is in, but it is awesome. It truely fits the gloomy atmosphere of the game, and sometimes I just stick around in that room listening to the song play on infinite repeat while that guy changes his animations from time to time. Anyway, I am rambling. Basically, I do not feel like I can complete the game in the next... year, so I am putting this first impressions review out there just to forfill my promise, and to tell people about that music, lol... I wonder where I can get that in mp3...Side note: I am not saying that the lighting engine is bad. Just look at the image above. The lighting there is amazing. Also note the (lame) weapon model there. I tried to install a mod to improve the weapon models, but it didn't work no matter what I tried. =(

Oblivion Update

Well, I have progressed quickly up the rather short Oblivion ladder. I am doing everything so quickly it seems to just be a blur.I am already at level 28, and had probably the best armor in the game (which quickly got replaced by the armor from the mod "Lost Paladins of the Divines"). Just to keep things interesting, I have been installing several mods as I play. I usually only get the more subtle ones, as in "not the total conversion ones". I also avoid Uber mods, just to keep the game balanced and fun. But some of them are just too hard to resist:

Between quests, I like to practice photography. There are plenty of places and opportunities to do this, thanks to Bethesda's most masterful level designers and graphics artists. One mod that really helps this is the Beaming Sunglare Mod by Sonic Ether. You can see the effect of this one in the last picture.

Somehow, though, I feel that there is something missing from this game. Something deep in the game's storyline is missing. It seems that there should be a way to make the game much more immersive... something to make doing the usual stuff really fun. I know that the quest storylines are some of the best in RPGs, with completely spoken dialog and no feeling of the quests being "mass-produced", but maybe they should have done something different... with the main quest. The main quest has the usual stuff, a big bad dude, a cult, destruction, etc. but it lacked a very immersive storyline. All you really do is just stuff you could find in other quests around the world. Along with more different stuff, it also needs better characters. You really never grow to like Martin that much, let alone others like Steffan and Jaffre. One more thing: the whole game needs more voices! I get tired of hearing the same 20 or so voice actors do 400+ characters. At least let all the main characters all get completely different voices, like the Emperor and Martin. It shouldn't be that hard to get every staff member go through the usual voice-acting stuff. All it really takes is time and disk space.

Update 03022008

Ok, A few things this time:

1. Today is my Birthday! W00t!

2. I am still trying to master the Source SDK (made a small portal map today)

3. I am still playing Oblivion (see next post)

4. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl review that I promised will probably not come out for a while, due to the game being long and me being lazy.

That is all for now. I will do a follow-up post after this.

hmm...

Sorry, not much to blog about in the last few weeks...
I will be getting STALKER shortly, so I will be sure to post a review up here for those who havent gotten it...
Not much else so say, sorry... =/
Maybe tomorrow...

Elder Scrolls V + Crysis = Pwnage

I was thinking a bit about Oblivion, and I thought, "wouldn't it just be omgwtf1337uberpwnage if they made a sequal to Oblivion using a modified Crysis engine?" That game would kick ass in every way possible. Just modify the engine so that you can use more kinds of trees, pour in all of the Elder Scroll Juices, and you will have a game that would surely take over the world. It wouldn't even have to be online or anything.

Cyrodiil Ahoy!

I have recently rediscovered the wonderful essence of Oblivion. I got the game a few years back I think (whenever it came out), and played it a lot then, but I quit playing when I got into WoW and my character was too uber to do anything else. I recently reinstalled tha game onto this new computer and, with my newly aquired powers, was able to put all the settings on as high as they will go and still have it run at ~70fps, or over 200 when in menus. I found out how to take the interface out of the game (go into console, type tm and hit Enter) and it makes it so immersive that I couldn't help but take many, many screenshots. I wish I could post them all here, but that would take a long time and I am too lazy. Maybe someday I could install Morrowind as well... =D. Anyway, enjoy the pictures, and remember there are many more where those come from. Remember to click to enlarge them, this blog's small size doesn't do it justice.