*Legion*'s Journal

How does one entertain themselves while standing around in a men’s room, not for biological functions but rather electrical outlets, waiting for one’s cell phone to charge in order to be able to use the GPS to get home?

Answer: finding the single largest contiguous pattern of same-color blocks on the tile floor (diagonal blocks don’t count).

This was, of course, performed in a one-occupant, lock-the-door men’s room. I’m not weird.

It’s so great how CNN covers the real news, unlike those other cable news networks, right? Right?

My lunchtime viewing was all this junk and the D.C. “madam” suicide.

I remember the day that Anna Nicole Smith died, the CNN broadcasts I saw in this same pizza joint were stuck on the story all day.

FOX News gets bashed a lot, but as far as I can see, no one in the cable news race can really claim any sort of journalistic high ground.

Salinas has such poor literacy that, despite being the largest city in Monterey County, every major bookstore has said “umm, no thanks” to the idea of coming to town. Can you tell?

The worst part is, for such a sign to have been made, both the customer and the signmaker failed to recognize the problem.

This is the same city that had a sign pointing to the John Steinbeck center that was missing the first “e” in Steinbeck (pretty bad, since EVERYTHING in Salinas is named after Steinbeck). I wish I had taken a picture of that.

I thought Fresno was dumb!

I’ve kicked off the first of my new sites, a gaming/PC tech blog called Blast Processing.

My next site, well… may involve pigskin.

Over the next few months, I will be creating a couple of new websites.

The first will be a daily gaming/technology blog. Stay tuned.

Right now, though, I have the flu.

Assassin’s Creed is a piece of fucking shit.

It’s mostly a good game. But the first sentence still applies.

There are a great many games that I have intended to play (and finish), but have not yet done so. Some are games that I started but didn’t follow through, and others are games I simply never got to. I’ve done a great job lately in finishing games that I start, and I’m now going back and playing games I’ve missed (as evidenced by the Gearbox Half-Life expansions and now the Brothers in Arms titles). There’s a good chance I will edit this post and add more games in as I think of them.

Nintendo console games:
Super NES:
Yoshi’s Island: Super Mario World 2
Super Metroid (was this close to finishing)
ActRaiser
Super Mario RPG

Nintendo 64:
Super Mario 64 (played halfway many times, never finished)
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (played 3/4 the way twice, never finished)
Paper Mario

GameCube:
Resident Evil 4 (GameCube controller aiming was awful, looking forward to playing Wii version)
Eternal Darkness

Other console games:
Genesis:
Shadowrun
Earthworm Jim
General Chaos
Toejam & Earl
Phantasy Star series
Shining Force series
Herzog Zwei
Warsong

PC RPGs:
Wasteland
Ultima series
Baldur’s Gate series
Icewind Dale series
Planescape: Torment
Neverwinter Nights series
Dungeon Siege series
Titan Quest series
Anachronox
Elder Scrolls: Morrowind
The Witcher
Fable: The Lost Chapters

PC Action/First Person games:
Thief series (played some of each, never completed)
System Shock
No One Lives Forever series
Brothers in Arms series
SWAT 4
Far Cry
Crysis

PC Strategy:
X-COM: UFO Defense
Starflight
Star Control II
Supreme Commander
Company of Heroes (plus expansion)
Command & Conquer series
Freedom Force series
WarCraft III
Tropico
Darwinia
Uplink

PC Adventure Games (point-and-click)
LucasArts:
Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders
Loom
The Dig
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Sam & Max Hit the Road (never finished it)

Sierra:
(all of them - yes, all)

Others:
The Space Bar
Obsidian
The Last Express
The Longest Journey series
Syberia series
Broken Sword series
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
Myst
Zork: Grand Inquisitor

Whew! That’s no small list. Let’s just say that when the spring/summer game release drought hits, I won’t be complaining about it. Probably not during 2009’s summer either.

The title says it all: I love Japanese product packaging.

The latest example? The Scythe “Mini Kaze”:

It’s a 40mm computer case fan (which, if you’re not aware, is a tiny little thing, about the size of a CPU). It costs $4. Most case fans you buy, especially small, inconsequential, non-glowy fans, come bare or with the most minimal of packaging. But not Scythe’s product. Not only does it get a fancy brand name, it’s got bright colorful packaging that proudly proclaims the fan’s specs, as well as it’s “2Way Connection!”.

Can’t say I’ve ever seen so much branding and packaging effort for the smallest of computer case fans.

While I wait for the Half-Life: Decay mod to finally release (currently in the hands of beta testers), I took notice of the two Gearbox shooters scheduled for 2008 (Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway, and Borderlands), and thought about the fact that I have not played either of Gearbox’s full-length PC games (the first two Brothers in Arms titles). So I decided that I should play through the two of those, and hopefully by the time I’m done with them, I will be able to continue my Half-Life journey.

I’ll be quite the Gearbox guru when all is said and done.

Recently, the founder of a certain gaming website shot some barbs at me about writing something that’s updated only once a month (very unfairly ignoring my four post October). With my favorite football team unable to provide me any prized smack-back fodder, I can only hang my head and mumble, and begin to post more. I hate not having the upper hand.

I posted a 2007 Top 10 games list in a thread on said gaming website, which looked like this:

1. Team Fortress 2 (PC)
2. BioShock (PC)
3. Portal (PC)
4. World in Conflict (PC)
5. Half-Life 2: Episode Two (PC)
6. Call of Duty IV: Modern Warfare (360)
7. Forza Motorsport 2 (360)
8. Supreme Commander (PC)
9. Mass Effect (360)
10. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (PS3)

However, in my haste to respond to the thread, I think I may have filled out the bottom of my list poorly. After having played more of Sam & Max: Season 1 on GameTap, I think I would have to move that in around the #8 spot in place of Supreme Commander. I could also easily see Tomb Raider: Anniversary, Sid Meier’s Pirates (PSP), or even Peggle challenging for the spots on the bottom of the list.

A list doesn’t give a sense of scale to the different slots. If it did, my list would have Team Fortress 2 at #1, and the next game wouldn’t come in until about #18 or so. Then, the next four games (BioShock, Portal, World in Conflict, and Half-Life 2: Episode 2) would have a wide gap between them and the rest of the crowd.

A lot has been said about whether 2008 can be even half of what 2007 was, in terms of new games. I don’t know about that, but I do know two of my most-anticipated 2007 games ended up getting pushed into 2008. Here’s what I’m looking forward to this year:

The A-List

• Left 4 Dead - My prediction for Game of the Year 2008. Finally, a co-op game built with staying power. Valve being involved in development even before buying Turtle Rock Studios only helps matters.
• SOCOM: Confrontation - A return to classic SOCOM, the only franchise still doing non-respawn team-based tactical shooters (unless you count playing Counter-Strike, like I used to eight years ago)
• LittleBigPlanet - The most exciting part of this game is the fact that the game that ships could suck rocks and it wouldn’t matter, the community will take those powerful tools and make a better game.
• Spore - My fondest Sim-related memories are actually playing Sim Earth and Sim Life. And while I doubt we’ll be able to create a world destroyer like the Ratigator was, I still look forward to it.
• Fallout 3 - I call the first two Fallouts The Greatest Games Ever Not Named System Shock 2. Yet, I’ve got reasonable expectations for this title. If it’s post-nuclear Oblivion, that’s still a good enough game for me to enjoy. Anything more will be a great bonus.
• Alan Wake - I loved the Max Payne games, and I love the concept behind this game.
• Battlefield: Bad Company - I think there’s a tendency to automatically write off a console Battlefield game, given that the Modern Combat games were quick and rough attempts at migrating the Battlefield gameplay to the new platform. Bad Company looks like the first BF console game that’s fully realized. The videos are amazing looking. I’m extremely interested.
• Brutal Legend - Any Tim Schafer game is A-List material for me.
• Grand Theft Auto IV - I don’t get why so many people are down on this, as it has me anticipating a GTA game for the first time since Vice City (I didn’t even bother with San Andreas, and only played the PSP games a little).
• Dragon Age - Hopefully the long-standing silence will be broken soon.
• echochrome - A very neat looking puzzle game for my PSP.
• More Team Fortress 2 content - More maps, more game modes, and a new set of unlockable weapons. I’m there.

The B-List

• Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 - It’ll be typical Ubi shooter fare, no doubt. But at least this franchise is the one with functioning networking code. Despite numerous flaws, R6:V was an awesome co-op game, and I’m sure R6:V2 will be great co-op fun for us again, especially with a spring release date.
• Splinter Cell: Conviction - There’s been so much doubt and naysaying over the new direction of Splinter Cell, but the team handling this one includes the lion’s share of the Chaos Theory core team. I like that the project has been delayed to allow sufficient time to go into it, and I like that they look to be taking the Assassin’s Creed crowd mechanics and doing something that’s hopefully better with it. I will miss the classic shadow crawling gameplay, though… especially with no other title that I can think of stepping in to fill the void.
• WipeOut HD - This is almost A-List material for me.
• WipeOut Pulse - WipeOut’s return to form has been wonderful.
• Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena - Would be an A-List game if it were brand new instead of a remake (of which I completed the original version). Still, I’m awfully excited to see this great game in “next-gen” glory, and with additional content.
• Tomb Raider: Underworld - Crystal Dynamics must be Jesus, because they sure have Lara doing a great Lazarus.
• Civilization: Revolution - The reason my wife won’t see her DS for months.
• Condemned 2: Bloodshot - The first Condemned was an excellent game, especially for a 3rd party console launch title.
• LEGO Indiana Jones (and LEGO Batman) - It’s like LEGO Star Wars except with licenses that I’m less burned out on.
• Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway, Far Cry 2, Project Origin: None “wow” me, but I like shooting stuff.
• StarCraft II - I won’t jump into the fanatical multiplayer fray much, but it should hold my interest in solo play.
• Space Siege - I like Chris Taylor games.

The Maybe List

• Fable 2 - I am actually starting a play-through of the first Fable game, which I just didn’t get around to before.
• Too Human - Even with all of the baggage, I’ve got a feeling there’s a good game in there.
• EndWar - Someone will get console RTSs right.
• Halo Wars - See above.
• Dead Space - Looks neat but has 2009 written all over it.
• Metal Gear Solid 4 - I hear they’ve removed the suck from the combat.
• Resident Evil 5 - We don’t know much about the game yet.
• Army of Two - Interesting enough concept.
• Borderlands - Smells like 2009 to me.

HALF-LIFE REPLAY: 37.5% COMPLETE (3/8)

Even though I hadn’t played either expansion, I “knew” Opposing Force was better than Blue Shift. Why? Because every review said so. “Too short”, they said of Blue Shift. “Two years too late”, they said. Indeed, Blue Shift came out in 2001, two years after Opposing Force and three after Half-Life itself. 3 years is a long time between a game and its expansion pack. Of course, Blue Shift was originally destined to be an exclusive for the Sega Dreamcast version of Half-Life, but Sega terminated the Dreamcast console just weeks before Half-Life was to be released. Gearbox repurposed Blue Shift into a PC expansion, and out it came to an audience that had already moved on.

We see this in the GameRankings scores. 86.1% for Opposing Force. A puny 69.0% for Blue Shift.

But there’s just one thing. Blue Shift is better.

The Good: Oh, it’s short all right. But it also doesn’t waste any time. It’s a tight 3-5 hour campaign. It may have followed in Star Trek: Elite Force’s footsteps, but the brevity doesn’t detract from the experience at all. Unlike Opposing Force, which felt the burning need to change and one-up everything about Half-Life, Blue Shift was perfectly content to just be more Half-Life. Security guard Barney Calhoun wielded the same crowbar/pistol/Colt/shotgun/M4 arsenal Gordon Freeman did. The game brought back the Black Mesa “real place” vibe of the original game, with some back-and-forth between rooms instead of a straight shot through a series of disconnected areas. But like Opposing Force, Blue Shift kept the jumping puzzles few and relatively easy. Instead, Blue Shift really focused on the combat with the Marines, and was much stronger for it. And to top it all off, Blue Shift carries the Half-Life High Definition Pack, which upgraded the character models (in both Blue Shift as well as the older HL games) considerably. If you’re playing these older HL games on Steam, follow this link to install the HL:HD Pack (you don’t need Blue Steam to do so, and it upgrades all of the original Half-Life games).

The Bad: Blue Shift doesn’t hit the same highs as Half-Life, or a couple of the neater sections of Opposing Force, though I think it was far more consistent than OpFor. While the jumping puzzles were few, they were still present, including another “floating platforms on Xen” puzzle, which doesn’t even bother to thinly veil the fact that it’s a pure jumping puzzle (at least the Xen jumping puzzle was considerably easier than its Half-Life counterpart). I can also understand players being annoyed at the fact that Blue Shift brings almost nothing brand new of its own to the table.

When you get right down to it, Blue Shift is purely an added chapter to the original Half-Life, nothing more. Whether that’s a bad thing or not comes down to personal preference. Opposing Force attempts to be more, but in doing so, I felt it came up a bit short. Blue Shift stuck to the Half-Life formula like a blueprint, and while there were few surprises, it was a good ride. I think it says a lot for all of these games that I’ve played through them sequentially in a short time frame, and still don’t find myself bored with the game’s formula.

Next up is Gearbox’s little-known third Half-Life expansion, Decay. While Decay was only officially released as an added chapter to the PlayStation 2 port of Half-Life, a mod team has been hard at work porting it to the PC (I previously stated on this blog that the mod was a Source-engine mod; this is not true. It is an original Half-Life mod, with a Source port potentially coming in the future). The mod’s unofficial release dates have been pushed back a few times, though the developers indicate that it’s close to release. That puts the brakes on my journey through the Half-Life saga for now. Hopefully we’ll see a December release for the game.

HALF-LIFE REPLAY: 25% COMPLETE (2/8)

This was my first time playing Opposing Force (or, indeed, any of the Gearbox developed Half-Life content), and the experience was generally positive, if not quite as strongly as the Half-Life replay was.

The Good: The beginning sequence of crash-landing at Black Mesa and receiving medical support from the Black Mesa staff that you were sent to suppress was a nice touch. Although the parallel narrative with Half-Life wasn’t particularly strong, there were a few inspired moments such as that one. Many of the gameplay strengths from Half-Life continue on in this game, and some weaknesses (like insipid jumping puzzles) were reduced or eliminated. Gearbox hit all of the typical expansion pack bullet points (More guns! More enemies! More stuff similar to stuff from last time!), which kinda worked both for and against Opposing Force.

The Bad: The environments in Opposing Force tended to be smaller, and there were a number of elements to point to and say “that’s like a smaller version of (insert sequence in Half-Life)”. Opposing Force also didn’t hit what I call the “feels-like-a-real-place factor” like Half-Life did. Instead, OpFor had that video game-y “series of interconnected rooms with no real contextual relation” feeling. Half-Life often had areas with rooms linked together through common hallways, the way real buildings tend to be laid out. Opposing Force often went down the “here’s the hole to crawl through to get to the next area” path instead. Also, while the arsenal of new guns added some variety, some of them felt different just for the sake of being different.

Opposing Force was more Half-Life on a smaller scale, and with a bit less to offer in the narrative. If nothing else, it highlights the strengths of the original Half-Life title in being a fun game despite subtracting some interesting elements.

Concerned that my laptop’s thermal performance wasn’t what it used to be, I cracked open my 2 1/2 year old Dell Inspiron 6000d laptop, compressed air in hand, and performed some serious guts cleaning. Some thick dust was blocking the vent that both the CPU and GPU air gets exhausted out. I cleaned that out, and I also removed the CPU heatsink and applied a fresh layer of thermal paste.

The difference? A drop of over 20 degrees Celsius (68 Fahrenheit) in the average CPU temperature. Not only that, but the once warm system now is cool to the touch. Most importantly, the laptop has gone from unsatisfactory performance running Team Fortress 2 at 640×480 (it turns out the CPU kept scaling the clock speed down to cool off) to running very nicely at 1280×800 with some GPU overclocking (now possible with the dramatic drop in heat).

I expected the compressed air and thermal paste to make a difference, but not that much. It’s amazing what dust and insufficient CPU paste will do.

HALF-LIFE REPLAY: 12.5% COMPLETE (1/8)

Finished the original Half-Life again. I was interested to see how it would stand up, 9 years after the first (and last) time I played the game.

The Good: Wonderful pacing through most of the game. Action sequences were broken up with some nice environmental puzzles. Many sections had good freedom of movement, allowing the player some flexibility as to how they approached an area, rather than funneling them down a tight and unforgiving path. The array of weapons was a highlight, I had forgotten about the Hive Hand (pictured right), which slowly but continuously replenished its own ammunition. The High Definition Pack replaced the MP5 submachine gun with an M4 carbine model, which was kind of interesting (though the weapon retained the same behavior, and felt more like an SMG than a carbine rifle). The AI, while not holding up well overall, still displayed some great characteristics. I particularly like that the soldiers had the chutzpah to throw grenades at the player (often completely blindly, and even into vents and crawlspaces).

The Bad: Some anachronisms, such as the spawning enemies, really stuck out like sore thumbs. The much-touted AI, while still great grenade lobbers, is pretty shaky compared to today’s games. Enemies got stuck trying to run through objects on more than one occasion. I found it somewhat annoying that the enemy soldiers could soak up an inhuman amount of damage before dying. Having to unload on aliens or even armored humans is one thing, but repeated headshots not taking a human enemy down just strikes a wrong chord. Xen, the alien homeworld, was just as poor as remembered, particularly the jumping on floating platforms “puzzles”.

Perhaps the biggest praise I can offer is that the game, on the whole, didn’t feel 9 years old. Games like Jedi Knight and Hexen II are only a year older, but feel ancient in comparison. Half-Life is clearly a model that shooters have followed over the past 9 years, and as a result, the original doesn’t feel quite as removed from today’s games as its age might indicate.

My Treo 650 may be old for a smart phone (a 3 year old product, that’s ancient for cell phones), but it still gives me easy text IM, Blackberry-style “push” email with regular IMAP email service, some Google apps like Google Maps, and decent (if slow) basic Web access.

A few months ago, I cracked the touchscreen surface (but not the LCD underneath, thank goodness). So it’s been gimped for a while, until I found a cheap touchscreen replacement on eBay this past week (previously I had seen them priced around $40-60, this one was $15).

So today, with the help of some Youtube videos, I performed delicate Treo surgery. The videos, however, only showed me how to remove the LCD, not how to take off the old touchscreen and put the LCD inside the new touchscreen. That was tricky, and the first couple of attempts led to a phone screen that worked but lacked a working backlight. After some more toiling and a little panic, I finally got it working.

So now I’m happy. I finally got my email, IM, and web browsing back on my Treo. Even for a 3 year old device, it’s still kick-ass.