Ne Cede Malis
Thursdays are fantastic. On Fridays I only have two classes and they’re flight classes that require little prep and homework, so my weekend almost begins on Thursday. Since my classes on Monday are the same low-prep flight classes from Friday, I really almost have four whole days to get Tuesday’s homework done. It’s fantastic!
This is my third time through the entire game. I’ve owned it since release but just recently bought it on Steam for the convenience of being able to install and play it on a whim.
Here’s my bottom line opinion on Republic Commando; it’s the second-best Star Wars first-person shooter. Just below Dark Forces. It has the unfortunate distinction of being the best game to come out of the prequel trilogy, and doesn’t escape the taint of the prequel’s legacy. I may even like the ideas behind Republic Commando more than I like the game itself.
Let me drop some bombs on what’s wrong with Republic Commando. The weapons sound and feel very weak. Your primary weapon is the DC-17 blaster, which is a modular weapon that is an all-purpose rifle, a sniper rifle, and a grenade launcher. Of those, I ended up using the rifle the most for it’s accuracy and abundant ammo. It doesn’t do a ton of damage, it sounds like a toy gun, and shoots way too fast. In fact, none of the weapons sound very powerful, even the powerful ones! I would have appreciated if they stuck to standard Star Wars weaponry and sounds, like they did with the enemies, who often sound more menacing than they are.
Speaking of enemies, they all kind of behave the same and there aren’t enough of them. There are only three or four of each type. Battle droids, super battle droids, destroyer droids, spider droids. Fat Trandoshans, Trandoshan mercenaries, big Trandoshans, scavengers. Geonoshan warriors, elite Geonoshans, Geonoshan babies, yes, babies. General Grievous’s guards. That’s all of them! It makes the game feel more repetitive than it is. The Star Wars universe is teeming with life. There isn’t much an excuse for this lack of variety.
So what does Republic Commando do right? The intro to the game is great. It details where you and your squad came from, all from the first person perspective. In fact, this game takes a page from Half-Life in that the entire game is played from the first-person perspective. There are a couple of scenes where you are not in control of your character, but they’re limited.
The squad AI is not smart but it’s competent. They’ll kill enemies, heal themselves, heal you when you drop, take cover, etc. There are certain set pieces that you can order a squadmate to take position at for a specific purpose (like sniping or anti-armor) and they’re meant to be used. Your squad dies less when they’re in one of these ordered positions. The squad also has fantastic vocal banter. Each member is a personality, and I got attached to them as the game went along.
Though the levels are a little cookie cutter, there are plenty of objectives to them and no lack for fights. I was fighting in corridors, in small courtyards and hangers, on multi-level starship bridges, and in trees. They’re not as varied as Dark Forces, but each environment is well made.
And now I can get to what stops this from being a great game. They can fix the sound effects and toss in a couple more enemies, but it’s harder to change the setting. Republic Commando takes place at the onset of the Clone Wars. It starts on Geonosha even. And though it takes place over a two (three?) year span, it could have gone farther. This was a pre-Episode 3 game and it shows. It feels like a teaser leading up to Episode 3 and, ultimately, suffers for that. It doesn’t deserve to be timely movie release fodder. It deserves to be treated like a game that can stand on its own two legs. Something that can be taken out of the context of the prequel release. It doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with Episode 1 Racer, Star Wars Starfighter, Bounty Hunter, Obi-Wan, or any other godawful prequel game.
It doesn’t carry the same tone as those games. The developers did their damnedest to give this game a fair chance. They go out of their way to make you know that you are playing an elite soldier. You’re no jedi, and you’re not fodder either. You see your share of ally deaths and the Clone War takes its toll. But you’re fighting bugs on Geonosha. And battle droids, even if they’re way more menacing than they ever were in the prequel movies. They may bleed oil, wear a metallic gray paint job (rather than the orange seen in the movies), and the super battle droids may be some tough motherfuckers, but they’re still battle droids, which are inherently lame. There’s a pitiful tie in with General Grieveous in the form of his bodyguards, which flip and hop around like Chinese acrobats, with electric sticks. They’re not threatening in the slightest, more annoying than anything, and serve only to give General Grieveous an excuse to make an unwarranted appearance.
What I’m getting down to is that in Republic Commando you are playing, in essence, a proto super stormtrooper. I wish the devs would’ve been allowed to run with that rather than get tied to the time frame that stuck them between the two prequel movies. I hope we can get another Republic Commando game, but I’m not expecting it. This franchise has legs, that get cut out from beneath it by the movies it was made to support.
Max Payne 2 is amazing. It is a huge improvement over the first Max Payne in nearly every way. One of my favorite, and most important, changes is that Max Payne himself no longer looks like he’s smelling a rank fart. He looks like a human. The other characters also look like humans, rather than video game models wearing human faces. The bullet time is infinitely more useful as it replenishes faster and it gets a boost when you kill someone. The dodge-shooting also works better as it will let you keep firing from the ground, and doesn’t immediately jump up and break the action until you stop firing.
The story is a lot more cohesive, and more interesting. It’s not just a dude killing everyone in his way to get to the person who killed his wife and daughter. There are different motives and they change, and the characters change. The game is short as hell, but so was the first Max Payne, and with less frustration.
Max Payne 2 is a better game than the original and, for all intents and purposes, you shouldn’t feel compelled to play through the first Max Payne before you play this one. It is a truly great game.
Visceral Games may or may not be killing me. Visceral Games used to be known as EA Redwood Shores. EA Redwood Shores made Dead Space, one of my favorite Xbox 360 games.
Visceral Games is now making Dante’s Inferno. It’s a God of War-esque button smasher. They took a low-key walk through hell and social commentary, and turned it into blood soaked tits and violence. It is a remarkable departure from the source as well as an enormous shift from the tone of Dead Space.
Dead Space has a lot of action and violence but it’s deliberate. You’re encouraged to conserve ammo by taking aimed shots at limbs. There’s an equipment upgrade system that allows you to choose what upgrades you want and how you get to them. It has a lot of scares and shocks but it’s also nearly impossible to fight off a crowd by panicking and wildly blasting away. There’s only two actual guns in the game! The rest are industrial tools!
After Dante’s Inferno, Visceral’s focus will shift to Dead Space 2. There is so little information that has excited me about Dead Space 2 that it may drop off of my wanted list entirely. From what I’ve read, it features more wide open environments, more aggressive gameplay, and a no-longer-silent protagonist! So what, they’re turning Dead Space into Dante’s Inferno in space?
For being an unreleased and, thus far, barely developed game, I am amazingly bitter and unexcited about what should be an impossibly easy sale.
I was never really interested in this game, even though I know it had a huge following when it came out. I got it, and Max Payne 2, during Steam holiday sale. I’ve owned Max Payne 2 for a while but never got far in it and when I tried to install it recently either the disc was bad or it wasn’t entirely compatible with Vista/7.
For being nearly 10 years old, it doesn’t look that bad and the action still holds up. It’s a revenge story told in noir style with slo-mo gunfights. That’s pretty much Max Payne in one sentence. The slo-mo isn’t as useful as it is in F.E.A.R. because you move just as slow but it gives you a better degree of control in your aim. You can actually see individual bullets or pellets in each gunshot. Still, I found it was often the case where just running around and circle-strafing were more reliable than going into slo-mo as the enemy AI didn’t lead much when they shot and had a harder time hitting a moving target than I did hitting them standing there.
It’s about 10 hours long but it’d be much shorter for a pro. A lot of that time was spent reloading and re-doing some tough gunfights. I never found ammo to be a problem but I used every single health item there was. There’s no cheesy boss fights but there are certain character who can very obviously withstand a lot more bullets ripping through them than their common henchmen.
I’m loading up Max Payne 2 but who knows if I’ll get to it before I move.
This has been a long time coming, eh? Six years in the making. It’s not my last working week either, that was months ago. This is my last actual week. Rather uneventful too. Just getting some paperwork stamped and signed, and standing around to get an award for spending six years fixing computers.
In four days, my Army obligations will, for the most part, be officially over. I have plenty to be spiteful of but I can’t for the life of me dig up those graves. I just so happy that this is all finally over and I can go back to a normal life and move on to being more than just the dude who fixes your printer.
Here’s the short list of people I want to publicly thank; Martinez, Parlier, Thomson, Reina, Wilson, Key, Hice, Laforest, Blythe, Lawson, Saro, Burditus, Killman, Sweet, Jackson, Jones, Welsh, Baker, and O’Rourke.
I stop shaving on Wednesday and I stop wearing the uniform on Thursday. Beyond that I’m just working on being a real person again.
I was actually quite close to finishing this about three months ago but the way the game works is that your units have persistent levels and the game will randomly generate optional missions to accomplish for more experience points and loot. I saw an enormous list of missions and felt a little overwhelm and getting tired of the gameplay so I stopped playing. Matt got this last week and we played a 1v1 game and he totally stomped me so I suggested trying out coop mode, and after that I felt the desire to polish this off in the fastest manner possible. There were only two unique missions left anyway.
I loved the first Dawn of War so I was a little skeptical when I read that Dawn of War 2 was not only vastly different but also a better game. But it is! Rather than harvesting resources and building bases, which have no place in the tabletop game, Dawn of War 2 focuses on small unit tactics by giving you control of a small handful of hardy units and putting the emphasis on using cover and flanking and equipment loadout rather than throwing as many bodies as possible at the next encounter. The multiplayer is a little more traditional with the main objective being the capture and holding of victory locations, with unit building and resource harvesting.
The game looks and feels great. Weapons have appropriately powerful sounds and effects. When your assault marines jump into a fight, they send enemies and terrain flying outward from them. Grenades and artillery blast the landscape and buildings to pieces.
This all comes together to make Dawn of War 2 and more dynamic, and, ultimately, a more enjoyable game than its predecessor.
Now that I’ve gotten all the achievements in this and sunk enough time to get up to level 20+, this totally counts.
This is almost two games; the live game and the kind of live extended play. In the live game, one player is chosen as the one and a hundred are chosen as the mob, everyone else still plays along but they are in the crowd. The one and the mob are the only players who have a chance to win prizes. A round is finished when either the one gets a question wrong, the one eliminates all of the mob, or the one chooses to take however many points he’s earned and quit. Then a new group is chosen and it starts all over. Live play is kind of exciting because you never know if you’re going to be chosen for one of the special positions. Unlike last season, where Katie and I played a whole lot of 1 vs 100 and never got to be in the mob or the one, Katie has been in the mob once already and our friend Jake has also been in the mob, so it does actually happen to real human beings.
Extended play is a faster paced version of being in the crowd. No prizes are awarded but there’s a leaderboard and what the game tells us is that extended play comes into account when the mob and the one are chosen. The questions in extended play sometimes have themes like cooking or commercials and are generally a lot more difficult than the live game’s questions.
This is the second season of 1 vs 100 and the game has had a lot of its old quirks worked out. There’s a level system where your score accumulates and unlocks different emotes, which have no practical value besides bragging rights. The achievements are new and another good way to encourage people to play longer. The themed question sets are more varied than last season’s also.
The best part about the game, though, is playing with friends. It’s not exciting at all to play alone unless you’re really into pointless trivia but when you can get a couple friends together, either through Live or just in the same room, it becomes a lot more fun.
I can’t remember the last time I played all the way through Quake, so this totally counts. Hey! Quake is 13 years old and it’s still balls out insane! The level design kind of suffers towards the end (episode 4 outright sucks) but it’s still totally fun to play through, if a little short! I may take a break to keep slogging through Max Payne or I may hop into the first Quake expansion. I haven’t decided yet.
DLC counts, right? Sure! Especially when it’s in such a neat little package as Dr. Ned.
I blasted through this today. Do you like Borderlands? Do you like shooting the undead in the face with your shotgun? Do you enjoy a setting that mixes classic horror with humor? If you answered yes to any of these, you’ll love The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned!
One word of advice though; as soon as you can get to Hollow’s End, go straight to the shack in the most southwestern end of the map. There you will get a quest to collect zombie brains, of which you’ll have probably already seen many of. Get started on this right now! And when you fill up on brains, go back and turn them in, because you’ll be collecting more. You’ll be making five brain runs in increasing numbers. I neglected to turn in my brains as soon as I was full of them and ended up having to chase down 100 more after I’d finished all the rest of the section’s quests and I was quite aware of the necessity of completing these brain runs. If you don’t start early you’ll either be grinding for brains in areas you’ve already been through at least twice or you’ll have to skip on getting that achievement.
I started on Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot and it’s hard. It’s all arena fighting with enemies tailored to your level. Going at it solo will probably be a lot harder than it has to be. I may hold out until a friend or two has it and we can grind through the arenas together.
The annual holiday Steam sales are killing me. I’m now the proud owner of Max Payne and Max Payne 2. I’ve never played the first and I barely started the second. So far the first is good if a little difficult!
I’m tired of bad news. I’m deleting two links from my bookmarks, for at least a month, and doing my best to not visit these sites.
I’m done with Digg and Reddit.
Digg has slowly devolved into strictly stupid pictures and top 10 lists. Reddit gets huffs and tisks at every wrong doing while rarely doing anything about them and is a general wellspring of negativity.
Now I am batshit insane about getting new news but only when it’s stuff I care about. I could not care less about top 10’s, dumb pictures, and I can wait for good tech news if it means I don’t have to wade through a sea of bitterness. So I’m back to relying on old favorites, Slashdot and Ars Technica, and Google News.
So I did some thinking and the ignore function isn’t worth keeping if it means I can’t share what I’ve made with other people. In this version, I’ve taken it out. I’m splitting off the ignore feature back into it’s own script, which is coming later.
Without the ignore function, this version is a little lean. In fact, it’s only a moderator flag. BUT that moderator flag is now bigger and in color! Behold!
Get PPK Bonus Features here: http://dreamofwaking.com/ppkscript/ppkbonus.user.js
Get Greasemonkey here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
As always, post bugs and suggestions here!
I’m playing Bionic Commando on xbox. This theme is probably the best part of the game and entirely deceptive. I mean the game itself is okay but when it starts like this, with an elegant theme, I wanted to hope that there was more to it than shooting dudes and swinging. I know that’s all there was to the original and I’m not asking for the Citizen Kane of videogames but it starts with the foundational theme of a government that cast aside it’s soldiers as ugly reminders of their past and, thus far, it’s done nothing with it. The storytelling just devovled into a bunch of snarky assholes yelling at each other. Oh well.
Here’s a megaupload link for an MP3 download of the theme.
Yep, that 50 Cent. This game was far better than it probably had to be. It’s an inappropriately competent Gears of War clone. Compared to the last 50 Cent game, Bulletproof, Blood on the Sand is nearly a masterpiece. It’s fun, looks good, and plays well. It’s basically everything Bulletproof wasn’t.
Now I’ll either go back to playing Bionic Commando (which is decidedly less fun than Blood on the Sand) or I’ll go back to Condemned 2.
I’ve been asked a couple times why I made a script for ignoring people. The short answer is that it is a starting point for better things to come. Here’s the long answer.
The PPK forums run on a forum software called PunBB. PunBB does a lot of things well and some things crap. As soon as I started visiting the PPK forums I saw that there was room for improvement. Obviously, I, being a typical user, cannot change the forum software. So I’d have to implement improvements and fixes from an outsider’s perspective. Inspired by the Something Awful Last Read extension, I immediately went straight for a full blown Firefox extension. I quickly realized that that sort of thing is way over my head, especially without a basis of knowledge in javascript and DOM and nothing to base my work off of. So it got shelved. That was a long time ago.
Recently I decided to give it another go, with a more realistic perspective of my own abilities. Greasemonkey is well known for implementing small changes on the user side that can build up to sweeping changes. I still don’t have much of a handle on javascript or DOM but I have google.
So I searched userscripts.org for “punbb”. Lo, and behold, a couple of scripts but they were all of the same function: ignore users. That’s not the kind of improvement I was looking for, but it’s a start. It gives me something to work with. Something I can tinker with and change and observe the results without the painful process of starting the whole thing from scratch and tossing it after an hour’s worth of effort.
Now that I had something to work with I started to implement one of the features that I actually did want, moderator flags. Nowhere on the PPK is there a list of moderators. You can stumble upon them by pulling up the user list and sorting by “Administrators” and you’ll get most of them. Looking at the index you’d only see VeganMegan as a moderator and that’s because she moderates ONE subforum. I’m sure she gets all kinds of insane non-Playground questions because she appears as the first visible authority figure around!
So to me, as someone who frequents other internet forums but has never been a part of the in crowd, knowing who the moderators are is rather important! They’re the people who can fix things when they get out of hand and answer questions! It also gives common folk more confidence in the words of people who speak with an air of authority to know that they are actually a person of authority. People are more likely to post when they know who it is that they shouldn’t actually piss off.
So let’s get to more about the ignore function. Ignored users are ignored locally. The list of ignored users is stored on that person’s login cookie. The ignore function is not phoning home and I am not compiling a list of ignored users. I’m not interested in knowing who is being ignored by whom. When you ignore someone, it is a personal decision. No one else knows or needs to know who is being ignored by whom. Personally I won’t ignore anyone for any reason. I would even remove the ignore function but that’s removing functionality that someone may find useful and I’m not in the business of removing functionality. I will probably even improve upon the ignore function so that it when a post is hidden or a user ignored, the “Show Post” link has a username attached so you at least know who’s post is being ignored.
Also, no one is paying me and no one asked for this. I didn’t do this to appease anyone but myself. If no one else uses it, I’ll be the only one then. I’ll keep working on it until I get bored or stuck or run out of things to implement. I’ve been told by one person, who is a moderator, who happens to be my wife, that I’m personally not allowed to make a post on the PPK about this, no matter how useful it is. If you use this and like it now or in the future, please post about it! I’d love to get more feedback! If you’re a moderator and you like this and you’re willing to tell Katie to piss off, let me know! I’ll be glad to post about this myself.
If you’ve gotten this far, you deserve a gold star. And a wrap up.
I’m trying to improve things, not cause drama. Help me help you.
OH! And I’ve put PPK Bonus Features on GitHub! If you’re willing to help out, please clone and have at it! Right now the master branch is also the newer-than-new build but once I release a new version, master will freeze and development will continue on a new branch.
Here it is, the new version of the PPK Bonus Features, previously known by the most short-sighted name ever, PPK Ignore Script. This one does more than ignore people! Here’s the shortlist of features!
Get the script here: http://dreamofwaking.com/ppkscript/ppkbonus.user.js
Get Greasemonkey here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
NOTE: You need to uninstall the old PPK Ignore Script if you’re going to use PPK Bonus Features! If you don’t, you’ll end up ignoring moderators and with two sets of ignore options! You only need to do this once though. Once you’re on PPK Bonus Features, when a new version is released you can just install over it.
As always, post bugs or improvement suggestions below! I’m not happy with how the moderator flag looks so I plan on doing something about making it more obvious. I’m primarily pushing out this new release to establish the new name before too many people are hung up on the PPK Ignore Script.
There’s a lot of things PunBB (the software that runs the PPK forums) does right and there are some thing it can improve on. In an effort to improve things by plagiarism, I searched userscripts.org for PunBB scripts. Unfortunately there’s not much else than an ignore script. Oh well, it’s a start.
Once you install this script it will add two links under people’s identity block in posts; Hide Post and Ignore. Hide Post does just that, it makes that post disappear under a link to show it again. Ignore hides every post that user makes. You will still see the threads they’ve started in the index but when you view the thread, their posts will be hidden. To un-ignore someone, just click the Show Post link and click on ***IGNORED*** and they will be un-ignored. I guess this can be a struggle if you’ve ignored a lot of users as you’d be unhiding post after post to find one by the user you’re trying to un-ignore. Hey, now I have something I can improve on it with!
I haven’t done a lot of testing beyond making sure that it works as advertised. It does work. You probably shouldn’t use this to ignore moderators. I guess making that impossible would be another improvement.
Get Greasemonkey here first (if you don’t already have it): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
Get the script here: http://dreamofwaking.com/ppkscript/ppkignore.user.js
Katie won’t let me make a thread in the PPK for this. She’s afraid it’ll make people sad because they’ll think everyone has them on ignore. I guess what I’m saying is most PPKers are adults and if one adult wants to selectively ignore other adults and those adults are incapable of coping with the possibility that they’re being ignored, maybe they don’t need to know that it’s possible they can be ignored to begin with. Or maybe they should grow the fuck up.
Post bugs here. Post improvements here. Think small, I’m not a genius at javascript or DOM, I barely know how this script works to begin with.
Things I’m looking into:
Borderlands is awesome. I’m still playing it, to fill out the achievements. The four player coop works so well, I can play with random strangers with no voice communications and it’s basically impossible to not have fun. The AI kind of falls apart in live coop though. Playing alone, I was always mobbed. Often enemies would spot me well before I’d spot them. Playing on Live, there were a lot of instances when I’d walk up to a couple of enemies, blast them to death, and move on without a single reaction from them.
Also, the ending is a whole big bag of what the hell is going on here. Seriously. I honestly hope I missed something along the way.
One good turn deserves another, right? Hey! Crysis was awesome! Crysis Warhead is also awesome! My biggest complaint is that there’s literally too much story. The protagonist in Crysis was a faceless (but not voiceless) dude who ran around and defeated the North Koreans and invading aliens. The game was the story. Warhead suffers from side characters who are meaningless to the game, whom you never get attached to, and are too much the focus of drawn out cutscenes. I would’ve been much happier if the game took the approach of “Here’s Psycho, remember him from the Crysis? Here’s what he did on the other side of the island! He kicked ass and brought back a dead alien.” and left it at that.
But that’s really my only complaint. The action ramps up much faster in Warhead but that’s most likely the result of the devs expecting you’ve already played Crysis and thus were already adept at switching suit modes and exploiting your own style of gameplay. There are a couple of not-exactly-on-rails segments which are fantastic, in particular a train that you are free to hop off of whenever you like, if you feel like hoofing it back to where ever it went, through North Korean checkpoints and machine gun nests.
Crysis Warhead has a couple more weapons, seven more missions, and Korean train full of action. Just skip the cutscenes and you’ll be in for a fantastic six hours.