23 Nov 2004, 11:33
To sum it up, I’m disappointed after 5-6 hours with it. It’s great to see and play with all the amazing technology tricks shown in the HL2 promo videos; visuals and atmosphere is sometimes brilliant; the gravity gun is a very original and interesting idea. But! In my experience, it just lacks pace and coherence. It starts great, then drives you nuts with an overly long driving sequence, then the whole thing goes to hell when you are thrown into a messy pit of physics puzzles with zombies and a mad guy jumping around.
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20 Nov 2004, 09:26
After the Half-Life 2 experience (not finished yet), I’m in love with FPS games again! Halo 2 is probably the most fluid and downright fun shooter I have ever played. Not terribly innovative, but does everything right, and brings an outstanding dual-wielding feature that will most surely become as standard as the WASD keyboard layout. And I thought it was just eye-candy for the masses when I saw that in the videos… Well written script without imposing overly long narrative sections, a perfect design where different gameplay styles blend smoothly, nice array of weapons and enemies, and again a control and aiming implementation that makes the keyboard and mouse almost obsolete.
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13 Nov 2004, 18:01
You have probably seen it a million times already if you’re into game development, but here it goes again just in case.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ea_spouse/ http://www.livejournal.com/users/joestraitiff/368.html
And the current IGDA and slashdot discussion threads on the issue:
http://www.igda.org/Forums/showthread.php?threadid=13068 http://games.slashdot.org/games/04/11/11/0031259.shtml?tid=98&tid=10
Reading the article may be depressing (just like 1999’s Why Being a Computer Game Developer Sucks did), but it also serves as a reminder, for those of us that want to spend the rest of our professional lives making games, that we need to improve our management practices and truly care for the people we work with.
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05 Nov 2004, 19:30
Finally started playing the stress test / open beta. My first impression is that it’s a polished and pretty DAoC set in the Warcraft universe. If I actually have the patience to progress my char and see the high-level game, I’ll have more things to say, .
04 Nov 2004, 16:38
Check this out! The worst part is, that image IS the poster shown at http://www.starwars.com :
http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=1193002
I watched the movie Spartan again, and I loved every bit of it again.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas smashed every record for sales during the first weekend, and easily competes with any major blockbuster movie. Crisis? What crisis? Well… Longtime developer Argonaut (of Starglider fame) went bankrupt, which is not good news.
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22 Oct 2004, 07:47
Fileplanet download
Basically, it fixes the bug with troops becoming invulnerable after splitting them. It includes the 1.04 fixes as well, so you can apply it directly to a fresh install of the game (any language, including eastern versions). It is not officially supported, but I’m very confident that it works.
My big thanks to all the people who helped with this, and those who had the patience to wait this long.
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18 Oct 2004, 11:46
And I still own that 3-year old piece of crap PC. I hope the game really is so good that I finally find an excuse to upgrade.
It will be interesting to see how the whole deal with Steam sales vs. retail goes… especially with the “preload” trick that Valve pulled off: removing the pains of having to wait for the download while other people are already playing, means that more people will be willing to go the Steam route.
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16 Oct 2004, 20:15
I started playing Fable on the XBox. It looks great so far: varied, beautiful and polished. My only complaints are some control issues and the usually crappy cutscenes consisting of little more than slow dialogue.
15 Oct 2004, 12:21
Now for something completely different. Since a few days ago, some people have decided to use our parking spots at the office. Different people each time, this wednesday it was a police car that invaded our space! (Our offices are located near a police station)
Today there were two cars, so after the usual process of asking around with no results, I simply moved my car to block the exit of our area of the garage, and left a note to come upstairs if someone needed to exit.
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14 Oct 2004, 16:47
Feels good to be slowly populating the Gallery with more photos.
My up and coming plans regarding this weblog system is to remove the requirement to register in order to write a comment. Who knows, maybe some day someone will bother replying to a post. 🙂