CodeMonkey's foobar

Left 4 Dead

2009-07-26T17:05:00.000-06:00

Halo - 10 years

2009-07-22T09:08:00.003-06:00

Yesterday was the ten year anniversary of the announcement of Halo: Combat Evolved, the first in a series of games that has revolutionized the first person shooter genre of games.

I was living abroad at the time and didn't hear about Halo until I moved back to the states. Needless to say, Halo is what got me back into gaming. I had casually played games, but once my friends got me to try Halo:CE, I was hooked. I went out and sold my Playstation 2 and all the games I had for it and went out and purchased my original Xbox console (which I still have now and hasn't given me any problems like the RROD on the 360).

First there was Halo:CE on the original Xbox. Then there was the PC version. By the time Halo 2 released in 2004, I was hooked to the point I was waiting in line for the midnight release with my friend Nate (and mistaken by a few in the local Wal-Mart for waiting in line for the new Brittney Spears album that released the same day). Halo 2 was the game that spurred me to get onto Xbox Live and move into online gaming. Halo 2 consumed many hours of my time. Halo 2 is the game that got me in touch with almost all my current online gaming friends through online clans, tournaments, etc. We played the game so much that every little glitch was well known and easily exploited, everything from superbouncing to getting outside the maps.

In 2006 I purchased my Xbox 360 in anticipation of Halo 3, only the biggest game release ever up to that point. Halo 3 introduced four player cooperative campaign play, something new to the FPS genre (at least, done properly). The game is still as great as ever and worth many more hours of gameplay, but suffers now only from competition as other gaming studios have caught up to Bungie in terms of game quality. Needless to say, the Halo franchise is my foundation in gaming. Without it, I really have to wonder if I ever would have started gaming again. Whenever anyone plays a first person shooter now, it's always compared to Halo. Bungie really did reinvent the genre with their multiplayer netcode, party system, game lobby, campaign co-op mode. Sure, other games had these features, but Bungie just seems to be the company that finally got them right. Other game studios really should just rip off Bungie when it comes to design. After all, isn't imitation the highest form of flattery?

With the lackluster games out right now I think I may just go back and replay the Halo franchise start to finish. That should hold me off until the next Halo game comes out, Halo ODST.

Mass Effect 2 Dev Diary

2009-07-10T20:02:00.002-06:00

For those of you looking forward to Mass Effect 2 and really worried about spoilers, be warned, this video contains some. That said, it's a great video. Can't emphasize enough how excited I am for this game that will take many hours of my time away from reality.

DVD Collection

2009-07-01T17:34:00.003-06:00

Some people, like me, have fairly large DVD collections. Sometimes they can be quite a pain to keep track of what you have and what you don't. When birthdays and holidays come around and family and friends decide they would like to give you a gift, a lot of times they decide on a DVD movie or television season. The tricky part for them is figuring out what to get you because they have no clue what you have or want because your collection is so huge. This is even more of a problem for me because I keep all my DVD's stacked 4 rows deep under my television in our media cabinet. They're not even organized in any way.

A few weeks ago a friend directed me to a software company that makes a product to help people like me keep track of their DVD collections. Invelos makes a DVD Profiler package that lets you enter in your DVD's to a database. You can search for your specific DVD edition. You even have the ability to just type in the UPC number on the back of your DVD case. Their database is made up of mostly user contributions. This means if a DVD you try and enter isn't in the database, you can enter the information in yourself and upload it to them. The benefit of this is that unless you're entering in your DVD the day it released, the odds are it's already in there.

Once you've got your DVD collection squared away you can even upload it to their website, from which you can make it available to friends and family. This allows them to see both what you have and what you want via your wishlist. After having tried to code my own DVD database for my collection a few years ago, I can say this product exceeded every expectation I had for it. A very cool little piece of software.

25th Anniversary of Tetris

2009-06-06T12:35:00.007-06:00

I'd have to say Tetris is hands down the best game ever made. The reason I say this is because it's so simple, yet so addicting. This is a very simple game with very simple rules. Blocks drop down and you have to place them in such a way to fill the rows, otherwise they stack up and you lose. Other games have come and gone, yet I still can enjoy playing Tetris. Not many computer games are still enjoyed 25 years later as much as Tetris is.

I still remember the first time I played Tetris. It was when my dad brought it back with him after going on a work trip, back in the late 1980's. Tetris was also the first game I ever remember having to compete with my father for time to play it. He wasn't too pleased why I finally knocked him off the high score list on our home computer.

Download the Original DOS version of Tetris

Mass Effect 2 E3 Trailer

2009-05-29T07:52:00.003-06:00

Again...this game is going to be awesome!

Slot Loading Drives

2009-05-26T09:28:00.003-06:00

If you even remotely consider yourself a geek, you've more than likely heard this old IT support story before. True story from a Novell NetWare Sysop:

Caller: "Hello, is this Tech Support?"
Tech: "Yes, it is. How may I help you?"
Caller: "The cup holder on my PC is broken and I am within my warranty period. How do I go about getting that fixed?"
Tech: "I'm sorry, but did you say a cup holder?"
Caller: "Yes, it's attached to the front of my computer."
Tech: "Please excuse me. If I seem a bit stumped, it's because I am. Did you receive this as part of a promotional at a trade show? How did you get this cup holder?
Caller: It came with my computer. I don't know anything about a promotion. It just has '4X' on it."
At this point, the Tech Rep had to mute the caller because he couldn't stand it. He was laughing too hard. The caller had been using the load drawer of the CD-ROM drive as a cup holder and snapped it off the drive.

Not that I don't find stupid people funny, because I really, really do, but why do we still use tray loading CD/DVD drives? Slot loading drives have been around for a few years now. Somehow the entire car audio industry decided to skip the whole tray loading step and went straight to slot loading CD players. Maybe it's so our IT staff people can continue to weed out the stupid people by allowing another generation to mistake their CD/DVD drive for a cup holder. Maybe the manufacturer of drive trays is bribing industry leaders to continue to use them. I don't know. What I do know is that slot loading drives seem a whole lot less cumbersome. Slot loading drives, in my experience, tend to be quieter too because the disc never rattles against the drive tray as it spins up or down.

Here's a short video of the results of some guy modifying his Xbox 360 to have a slot loading drive.

Why didn't they just design it this way in the first place? Why don't they change their current production to do it this way? Why don't they offer replacement slot loading drives? I'm sick of drive trays, both on my PC and my gaming systems. I really wish they would wise up and switch to slot loading drives.

Terminator Time Travel

2009-05-22T08:56:00.004-06:00

I guess I should premise this post with the disclaimer that I'm not a time traveler and have no first hand knowledge of how these things work. I'm also not a theoretical physicist who spends their entire life studying these things. But I have taken a few advanced physics courses during the course of getting my college degree and I have read a number of books written by actual theoretical physicists. I would like to think I can discuss this topic with some sense of knowing what I'm talking about and not completely spewing hot air.

The other day a friend of mine and I were talking the merits of time travel in the movies, how it's depicted and which movie does it best. The main movie he concentrated on was the Terminator series (movies + television). After thinking on it for a bit I thought I'd post this today. This is mainly the result of my musings, based on my understanding of string theory and the dimensionality of the universe. Before I really get into it though, here's a short video I found based on a book I read recently that attempts to explain the dimensionality in the universe.

Ok, you're still reading after watching that. Good. Think of our timeline as a single line. Every event in our past is defined. It's happened. There's no changing it. Our future timeline has an infinite number of possibilities. Every event, choice or decision that is made in our future could send us down any number of paths. Every distinct path is its own alternate universe, sharing commonalities with other universes only prior to the events that split them.

In regards to the Terminator series, the more I think about it, the more and more I see that they really didn't have a clue what they were doing in regards to time travel. In the original Terminator movie, John Connor sends a man back in time to 1984 to stop a Terminator from killing his own mother before he is born. The fact that John Connor exists in 2029 is evidence enough that in his particular timeline, his mother didn't die. He was in fact born. As soon as the Terminator goes back in time, that timeline is changed at the point he arrives. From that point in time, that timeline is now a distinct, different universe than the one the Terminator left. Nothing that happens there can ever cause that timeline to coincide with the original timeline, because in that timeline, no Terminator existed in 1984. Also, when Kyle Reese is sent back, he can never end up in the same universe the Terminator ended up in, because his time line he is traveling back in, is one in which the Terminator never existed in 1984.

From the perspective of the original John Connor, a Terminator and Kyle Reese both went back in time and nothing changed. Nothing in his universe is affected because their presence in the past branched the timeline down a different path than the one that was his past. Essentially, this means that time travel for the sake of changing your past, in your universe, is impossible. Yes, you could go back to cause changes, but those changes would only present themselves in an alternate universe separate from the one you left. Also, traveling 'back to the future' from a time in the past you visited, would never return you to the universe you left. Instead, it would return you to a possible future of that timeline you created by your presence in the past.

Essentially then, time travel is pointless as a method of changing the present by traveling to the past because you will never affect the current timeline you're in. From the perspective of being the time traveler yourself, you can use time travel to move into a new alternate universe and improve (or degrade) your situation. But from the perspective of staying in your original universe and sending someone else back in time to change things for you, it's totally pointless. Nothing would ever change. In regard to television and movies depicting time travel (or dimension travel, if you will), the only show I think that even came close to grasping this concept was the show Sliders, where the main character built a device to travel between these infinite parallel universes, neither forward nor backwards in time though. I guess that's why I actually enjoyed watching that show.

Mass Effect 2 Pre-E3 Video

2009-05-15T14:58:00.004-06:00

As someone who played through the first Mass Effect game (first in a trilogy), I am really looking forward to this sequel. The first game had better in game immersion than almost any role playing game I've ever played. The characters were very well developed. The graphics were amazing. The soundtrack fit the story. Bioware just released a Pre-E3 video for Mass Effect 2. When they finally announce a release date for this game, I think I'm going to have to take a few days off work...

This game looks AWESOME.

Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.

2009-05-08T14:51:00.005-06:00

Recently I purchased a new game, Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. (HAWX) (HAWX stands for High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron). I had heard about it before it's release and the only real thing that interested me then was the fact that the game developers chose to use real satellite images as the basis for the in game landscapes. They took the satellite images and added in the 3-D element of terrain and buildings. This gives this game a very realistic feel. I didn't look too much more into it then because for the most part I'm not interested in flight simulator games. My biggest gripe with flight sims is that they make the most mundane elements of flying the focus of the game. Landings, take-offs, etc are not why I play flight games. I think the last flight game I actually enjoyed was the old Sega game After Burner II, which I used to play at the youth center on the military base I lived on at the time. At least now I don't have to save up my quarters to play the games.

One night some friends and I just finished playing some video games together (probably Halo 3) when we decided to all download and try out the HAWX demo. I was very pleasantly surprised. HAWX is in no way a flight simulator, despite the excellent graphics in the game. This is 100% a fighter arcade game. No more practicing landings where precision control is required. This game just throws you into the middle of a dogfight and goes until all the enemies are killed. You get virtually unlimited ammunition and a wide range of aircraft to pilot. The game gives you the option of playing the campaign in multiplayer cooperative mode. Unlike other games where playing co-op makes the game easier (because you have more help on your side) HAWX developers scaled up the number of enemies you have to stave off when you add more teammates to the battle. This can be quite unnerving when you're playing missions where the objective is to protect a valuable target from enemy fire.

After playing the demo we all went out the next day and picked of the full version of this game. HAWX developers did a great job with the landscapes in the game. Having visited some of the cities in the game, I was able to find key landmarks and even follow the roads to a friend's parent's house (Sorry Nate, I crashed into your parent's house). The game took out the the realism that makes flight simulators so boring, in my opinion, but left in all the aspects of flying a jet fighter that any little boy wants to experience.

This game lets you fly everything from the A6 Intruder to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. (note: the F-35B is the actual fighter depicted in the game, with the vertical landing engine visible) They even threw in the YF-12 (SR-71 Blackbird). Even though the YF-12 isn't a fighter plane, they made it handle like one. I remember going to the Air Force museum as a kid and seeing this plane on display and imagining what it'd be like to fly that fast. Those type of imaginings are what I think spurred developers to include this plane.

The multiplayer versus mode of the game can be a bit unnerving at first. Instead of flying against the artificial intelligence pilots in the game, you're flying against other gamers. The reaction time has to be quick, but the thrill of lining up a shot and blowing the other guy's plane to smithereens exceeds anything felt when I watched Top Gun the first time.

Overall, HAWX is a great game that will provide many hours of enjoyment. The game could use a bit more flexibility in the multiplayer setup, such as implementing a party system where players can join a game together, but what it does provide is sufficient. This is a game I recommend to anyone who can still connect with their inner child and enjoy the thrill of flying big, fast airplanes.

Achievement Hunter

2009-04-22T10:03:00.005-06:00

The number of good video games being released lately has been pretty low. I think the last video game I actually bought was Fable 2 around Christmas time. I'm not big on movie based games like Spiderman or X-Men. Sports games really aren't worth buying when they come out with a new version every year (Madden). The flood of music games from the Rock Band and Guitar Hero franchises is just too much to really care about anymore. I've been tempted to go back to PC gaming for a bit but I hesitate to do so until I bring myself to go out and buy a better computer desk chair. I'd play more of Left 4 Dead since it just released some extra content if it weren't for the fact that the stupid game limits party size to 4 players and I easily have more than 3 friends with the game.

With all that, I've decided to dust off some of my RPG games and go back and finish up some of the Xbox Achievements on them. One game that I think many gamers gave up on completing the achievements is Mass Effect. Seriously, this game takes FOREVER to complete all the achievements.

3 playthroughs (Soldier class) to get the Extreme Power Gamer (Level 60 character), Distinguished Combat Medal (Hardcore difficulty), Medal of Valor (Insanity difficulty playthrough), and the Ally achievements.

2 playthroughs to get the biotic skill (Use each skill 75 times) achievements.

2 playthroughs to get the engineer skill (Use each skill 75 times) achievements.

As long as you switch up the weapons you use, do all the sidequests and investigate all the little informational items, you should get all the other achievements as well during those seven playthroughs. With an average time for a playthrough at somewhere around 20 hours (that's my average), this game literally takes almost six days of gameplay to finish. If you only played an hour each day, and then only five days a week, it'd take you seven months to finish this game.

Because of the slowdown in good games coming out recently I've dusted off my Mass Effect game and have been plugging away at finishing these achievments. I think either tonight or tommorrow I'll finish it up, as I only have 3 biotic skill achievements left, and I'm pretty close on those.

After I finish that game, I guess I can always move on to Assassin's Creed and go flag hunting...

WD My Book Mirror Edition (2 TB)

2009-04-21T01:14:00.002-06:00

Those that know me know that I have quite a large amount of storage space when it comes to the hard drives inside and attached to my computer. Ever since I learned that you could stream videos from a PC to an Xbox 360 over the local network, I started ripping my DVDs and converting them to MPEG-4 video files. Using Microsoft's Zune software I now share my entire video, music & photo collection with my Xbox 360. Although I'm not quite finished converting all my DVDs, I have converted well over 250 movies and at least 2 dozen seasons' worth of episodes of television shows. This makes it quite handy when wanting to watch a DVD because now we don't have to dig it out of our tightly packed cabinet of DVDs.

To handle that storage space I recently purchased a new external hard drive. Sure, I could have kept the data on my internal RAID array, but that space was soon to be full. Then there's the problem of moving my data to a new computer some time in the future. Eventually I'm going to have to copy the video files off of the internal drives to move them. I figured that since these video files aren't changed at all over time (I just rip them once and then they're basically read-only files) that an external drive would suffice. Over the local network, a USB 2.0 speed is plenty to be able to stream these files to my Xbox 360 for viewing.

The hard drive I chose was the new My Book Mirror Edition (2 TB) from Western Digital. This drive allows me to run it in a 1 TB RAID 1 array (which I am) to give me some redundancy in the event of hardware failure. The drive sits nicely on my desk and is just as quiet, if not quieter than my other external hard drive (320 GB Maxtor One Touch).

RSS For Dummies

2009-04-03T16:32:00.002-06:00

What is RSS you ask? RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. It's a tool many websites use to give their readers a summary of what's on the website. Just about every website out there that publishes articles, blogs, posts, etc. uses RSS feeds. It's a way of giving users just the headlines so they can know what's new. On the technical side, it's just an XML file with links to the website stories it's syndicating. Now, you may ask why I decided to post about RSS feeds. Well, I was talking with a group of friends the other day, most of which are fairly affluent with internet related technology, yet I was very surprised to learn that I was the only one among them who took advantage of RSS feeds. Most didn't know what they were or how they could benefit from them.

Have you ever received the newspaper? Of course you have. Did you have it delivered to your house? Of course you did. Wasn't that much easier than going out and finding the news stories yourself? Wasn't it convenient to have reporters put together the news in one, central location for your reading pleasure? Of course it was. With the advent of internet publishing, RSS feeds are basically the tool for home delivery. Different websites publish stories, blogs, etc on their own sites. Most also provide an RSS feed for your convenience. In many web browsers, this looks like this:

or this:

Now, what do you do with all those syndication feeds you ask? For that, you'll need what is known as an aggregator. This is a tool that reads in your RSS feeds and then displays them for you in a chronological order of when they were published. There are many aggregators available out there for you to pick from. Some of the popular ones are MSN, Yahoo and Google. Those that know me know I'm partial to google products, so I'll use that as an example. When I go to a website I like and know that I'll want to be kept updated with new posts or stories from that site, I'll subscribe to it using Google Reader aggregator. Google also allows users to add it to their Google homepage as well. Here is what a feed looks like when it's subscribed to using Google's homepage.

As you can see, the latest articles are listed there with a box around them grouping the stories from that website together. That's great if you only want to view a few websites at a time, since space on the screen will run out pretty fast. Personally, I'm a fan of Google Reader. Here's an image of what Google Reader's interface looks like.

It provides you with an easy way to view all your feed stories together or you can click on an individual feed and just see those stories. Similar to email, they let you mark stories as read or unread. This makes it very easy to keep up on news stories, web articles, blogs, etc because they're all delivered to my Google Reader right when they're published. This means I can keep up on news from sites I really don't want to bother going to visit every day just to see if there's something interesting there, instead, they send it to me.

One really cool new feature of Google Reader that I've come to like is the Shared Feed feature. This means, that out of all the news stories, blog posts, and articles I get in my feed, I can mark the really interesting or important ones as shared and Google creates a special feed just from those that I can then share with other people. To me this is a very effective way for applicable news to get filtered down. I can subscribe to other people's shared feeds and get just the stuff they found interesting as well.

CodeMonkey's Shared RSS Feed

Utah Governor vetoes HB 353

2009-03-25T16:55:00.004-06:00

Thanks @ethanmillard for letting me know that Utah's Governor Jon M. Huntsman Jr. vetoed controversial bill HB 353 "Truth in Advertising Act Amendments". Thank you Governor for listening to reason and not subscribing to the right wing rhetoric.

I've attached the letter the Governor sent back to the Utah Legislature explaining his veto. Enjoy.

HB 353 Veto Letter (PDF)

Utah Legislature HB 353

2009-03-19T23:01:00.003-06:00

UPDATE: Gov. Huntsman vetoed HB 353!!!
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A few weeks ago, the Utah State Legislature passed a controversial bill. This bill, known as HB 353 "Truth in Advertising Act Amendments", was penned by controversial self proclaimed video game crusader and former Florida attorney Jack Thompson. This bill amends the current Utah laws concerning advertising. These are the laws that say if you advertise something, you better adhere to it. The full text of the amended Truth in Advertising Act can be found here.

Essentially, this bill targets any media outlet that sells or provides a form of media to the public that also advertises that they follow the ratings system that applies to that media. With movies, this would be the MPAA ratings system (PG, PG-13, R, etc) and with video games this is the ESRB ratings (T for Teen, M for Mature, etc). If a business advertises that they follow these ratings and then somehow either sell a game or movie or allow a minor into a rated R movie at a theater, then they would be subject to lawsuit. They could avoid that lawsuit by formally training the offending employee(s) on the company policies. Now, if this happened more than three times, those exemptions are no longer available and you will be sued. Considering the ultra right wing private groups that are backing this bill, I would be fairly certain they would sue anyone they could. The key loophole in this law lies in the fact that if you don't advertise any such policy of adherance, then this law does not apply to you.

Being the normal person I am, I fully admit I could be wrong on this, but to the best of my understanding, this bill doesn't really offer any incentive for businesses to have these type of policies. They don't gain anything from having the policy except the added risk one of their employees will open them up to a hefty lawsuit. But, if they don't implement this type of policy of adhering to the ratings systems or if they cancel their current policies, they avoid that risk of lawsuit. It seems to me this is the smart thing for a business to do.

You may argue that not having a policy of following the ratings system will result in them losing business. I would counter that you would be totally wrong on that. Most people in the general public don't have a clue what the ratings systems are or how they work. Most people think they are already enforced by law when in fact they are purely voluntary. Most people, when they go shopping for a new movie or video game, don't shop based on what policies stores have. Most people shop based on where they can get it cheapest and easiest. The ESRB has pushed for the ratings system to be used because they, like many parents, don't want the mature rated games with violent content and adult content to fall into the hands of minors. Those type of games are written for adults and the ESRB wants adults to play them.

Now, I understand what the Utah Legislature is wanting to do with this law. The problem is that for some reason they forgot how to think for themselves and decided that letting some outside private interest group pen their legislation is a good idea. Even when I emailed my state representative, before the bill passed, she didn't seem to see this as targeting the video game industry, despite who penned the legislation. Her response was "...this appears to be not about video games, though they could certainly be included, but about the sale of any product, including video games, that are provided to minors. I agree that more education for parents would be helpful as well."

This law is not an incentive to follow the ratings systems. This law is incentive to NOT follow the ratings systems. The best incentive, one that every business understands, is and has always been money. When the legislature wanted to encourage video game developers to come to Utah, they offered them tax credits. I don't see why they can't pass a bill offering tax credits to businesses that adhere to the ratings systems with a certain level of compliance. To me, every business would see the benefit of that and would want to follow those rules, just to get some free money from the state.

The last step for this bill right now before it becomes law is for the Utah Governor, Jon Huntsman Jr, to sign the bill. As a Utah citizen, concerned adult, and fellow video game player, I would encourage anyone and everyone to call, email or write the Utah Governor and encourage him to veto this bill. Contact information for the Utah Governor is listed below.

Utah Governor's Office
Utah State Capitol Complex
350 North State Street, Suite 200
PO Box 142220
Salt Lake City, Utah 84114-2220
801-538-1000
800-705-2464
Fax 801-538-1528
Email Contact

Other Links:
Utah House Bill 353 media coverage

Camping - A Tutorial

2009-03-06T16:26:00.005-07:00

I saw this article and got a good laugh out of it...
On FPS guerrilla tactics or: Stop camping me, you camping camper! - by BonfireAg03

The guy does have some valid points. Many of you who play with me know our strategy pretty much is just to camp every map we play on. As stated in BonfireAg03's article, spawn camping is a no-no. Any other type of camping in Call of Duty 4 is pretty much open. The really funny part is that our opponents rarely grasp onto the simple features provided them in the game to allow them to fight against campers.

Someone camping a specific location - Usually this is realized when someone gets killed and then goes back to that spot only to be killed by the same person in the exact same place. In Call of Duty 4, the game designers had such tactics in mind I think when they designed the weapons available to you. With grenades, they added a feature that is in very few other games -- the ability to 'cook' your grenade. This allows you to hold that hand held bomb until its almost ready to go off (or let it go off in your hand if you so choose). Since you know exactly where your opponent is waiting, all you have to do is cook your grenade and throw it in there and have it blow up in their face. Pretty simple and effective strategy to get rid of someone camping a specific location.

Choke Point Camping - This happens when our team decides we want to stop you from coming through a certain area. A lot of maps in the game are divided into smaller areas with 'choke points' between (narrow places that you must go through to pass from area A to area B). If you pick the right choke points, you can effectively cut a map in half and keep one team on each side. Rarely is this form of camping involve sitting in one location, but it can. The point of this style of camping is to keep your opponent from crossing some imaginary line.

One map we really like to do this on is Bog. This is simply done by using snipers to effectively make the open ground a very large death zone. Not surprisingly, our opponents think it then is much safer to run through the building on the side of the map. The problem with this is it forces their team to all pass through one small doorway to get to our side of the map. A very simple way we guard this is to have one person sit pretty far back with a very high powered weapon with tons of ammunition. It's not uncommon for this person to rack up 15-20 kills in one game without ever dying, all because the other team chose to keep running through that choke point without using the tools the game has provided them to combat this.

One of the special grenades at your disposal is a smoke grenade. At first, many gamers dismiss this as practically useless. It doesn't disable your opponent in any way when you throw it at them. It's slow to get its full effect. What's the point, right? Wrong. This is a very useful grenade. Going back to the bog example, if you have two or three of your teammates with these equipped, taking the marine spawn area is quick work. A few key smoke grenades can eliminate both the snipers and the person camping that doorway from seeing your approach. Once within range, a few frag grenades will displace them and send them running, making it easy for your team to pick them off with small arms fire.

Snipe Camping - This is where a sniper likes to find a spot to sit and pick everyone off in their field of view. Some gamers are very proficient at this and require little more than a glance in your direction to aim and pull off the headshot. These snipers are very deadly. Usually done with a sniper rifle, this can be employed using any long range weapon too.

Once again though, the game developers provided you with tools to combat this. When you get shot and you have no clue where your opponent was, it can be very frustrating. In Call of Duty 4 though, the developers gave you something special...a kill cam. This small glimpse at your death is shown from your opponent's perspective, allowing you to know immediately their location. Using the previously mentioned smoke grenades you can get a good run at them without that sniper ever getting so much as a glance at you.

While each of these types of camping can be combated effectively, the most prolific reason our team does so well is the fact that our whole team employs these different styles in a web of cooperation that allows us to utterly dominate our opponents. When someone is camping a specific location, we usually have someone else snipe camping and covering that person's back, keeping opponents from approaching their location. The effectiveness of a whole team employing choke point camping strategy is shown in the many games we achieve deathmatch scores in the range of 750-100. Very rarely do we have games where opponents are within ten kills of us in the end.

If you're another gamer on Xbox Live and you encounter camping, just remember: You can prevent Camping! Camping (not spawn camping) is just one strategy that gamers use and it's really not worth complaining about. When I hear a postgame lobby start to complain that my team camps too much, just after we decimated them, I really have to hold down the laughter. By complaining about it, you've just admitted that we outsmarted you. We came up with and implemented a better strategy than you did. You allowed our simple and effective teamwork to frustrate you to the point you thought that running into our bullets was going to somehow hurt us too.

Gmail Gets Better

2009-01-28T13:49:00.005-07:00

A while back (ok, a long time ago) I posted about the many Google services I use. It seems that Google has come out with another great tool to make their email services (Gmail) even more useful -- offline email.

An article over at PC World goes through and explains the details of this new tool. After reading it through it seems like this will be the perfect solution for my parents. They're the sort of people who still prefer dial-up internet (I still don't understand why) and primarily use their computer for email. With this new tool, they won't have to be online while typing up all their messages. They can compose while offline and when everything is sitting in their outbox, just connect and send.

Another reason to use this, even if you do have a broadband connection, is for backup. This provides you with access to your old email messages even if you lose internet access. A little over a year ago when I moved I didn't have a broadband connection for almost a month. This type of email connectivity with Gmail would have kept me from only using my cell phone for email. That brings me to another point, a lot of people can use their cell phones as data modems with their laptops via a bluetooth or USB cable. This would save your battery by allowing you to do all your correspondence and then only connecting to send the data.

Overall, I've been really impressed with Google's services. For those that don't know how Google churns out so many good ideas, I'll let you in on it. Google engineers get to use 20% of their time to develop their own projects. How would you like that, to spend 20% of your work day working on whatever project you wanted?

Bleh...

2009-01-25T20:14:00.004-07:00

That's how I've felt about gaming lately. There really isn't anything new (worth playing) coming out. The old good game franchises are just bleeding themselves dry with sequel after sequel and it's taking it's toll.

Halo 3 was supposed to be the grand finale on the series, but Microsoft Gaming Studios won't let that money machine go away, so we have mediocre games like Halo Wars (Halo RTS??) or Halo 3 Recon...wait, Halo 3 ODST (they can't make up their minds).

Call of Duty had moved beyond the WW2 genre (we thought) with last year's Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat, but thanks to the ineptitude of Treyarch, the franchise took a u-turn back to a genre that about every gamer out there is sick of.

There are a few good sequels out there, such as Fable 2 and Gears of War 2. It just seems that there really isn't any good new games making an impact, beyond maybe Left 4 Dead, but even then, that game gets old quick. Seriously, when I look down the top played games list lately, there isn't anything out there really that isn't a rehash of old ideas. As a gamer I want something new, something interesting, something that doesn't just seem like developers trying to recapture old memories. Even the upcoming anticipated games are pretty much all sequels (FEAR 2, Bioshock 2, etc).

Sure, there may be new games coming out, but it doesn't seem that way in the genre's I enjoy playing (FPS, RPG, Action-Adventure). Am I the only one who wishes that developers could come up with something new?

Top 20 Horde

2009-01-04T03:17:00.003-07:00

As you most likely read previously, my friends and I made the Top 100 on the Horde leaderboards in Gears of War 2. We really should have been satisfied with that, but no, we decided to go for more. Tonight we just finished our attempt at playing through on hardcore difficulty. Unfortunately we didn't make it all the way through all 50 waves. We died on wave #48. Our final score though moved us up to #15-19 on the leaderboards.

If we had managed to finish out all 50 waves we probably could have taken the top spot. Maybe we'll attempt it again in the future, but it'll probably be a long wait. The hardcore play through took us just over eight hours, with a few short breaks, by the time we failed wave #48. It'd probably take an additional hour or so to make it through wave 50.

Gears of War 2 - Horde Top 100

2008-12-28T04:42:00.006-07:00

If you read my previous review of Gears of War 2 or you've played the game, you've heard of Horde mode. Basically, you get wave after wave of enemies to fight off while trying to survive. The first few waves may seem easy enough, but that can be deceiving. After about wave 30 the challenge really kicks in. So long as your whole team doesn't die you can continue on, attempting to add to your high scores.

A few weeks ago a few of my friends and I attempted to go for a high score in Horde mode. We did pretty good I thought, breaking the top 200 then on the map Jacinto. The high scores are publicly available on the Official Gears of War 2 website, listed according to what map the game was played on.

Tonight some other friends and I attempted the same thing. The challenge tonight came in that we went into the game with only 4 of the possible 5 teammates you can bring in, so we started off with a self induced handicap. Four hours later we broke into the Top 100 scores, landing at #98. All in all, it was a fun filled night of gaming with friends, playing a game we all enjoy. Maybe in a few weeks we'll try for the overall high score on Jacinto, this time on hardcore difficulty (we did it tonight on just normal difficulty).

Tips for Horde on Jacinto:

Hold a grenade spawn tower
First priority is ALWAYS the shields--before ammo or weapon pickups, always pickup a shield, you'll need all 5 of them.
Never kill a mauler on the stairs unless you have 5 shields already, as the shields glitch and fall through the map.
Place 2 shields backwards on the stairs next to the sandbags. Place 2 other shields boxing in the area where you land after jumping over the sandbags going up the stairs. Place the last shield at the top of the stairs in the gap farthest from the grenade spawn.
Always use weapons that have auto ammo refills each round (lancer/hammerburst/shotgun) and use a boltok pistol as it spawns right in front of the stairs, making ammo runs quick and easy at the end of a wave. Other weapons are pretty useless after the first few waves as enemy health is too high.
Only shoot grinders when they're weapons are overheated. Sure, it may be slow, but in later waves grinders will one hit kill you without ever downing you.
Kill wretches last. They make it easy for you and your teammates to grab ammo while the wretch chases you around.
Wait for close range kills (bottom of stairs) instead of wasting ammo on long range kills.
When grabbing ammo at the end of a round, have everyone plant their 2 grenades, preferably far from your defended stairs and spread out enough that one won't set off another.

The Old Republic

2008-12-21T10:57:00.005-07:00

I've been a fan of Star Wars for a long time. Not until just a few years ago did I find Star Wars video games actually enjoyable. I think the first Star Wars game I actually liked was Star Wars Jedi Knight II - Jedi Outcast. Games that came out before that I think were too limited by the capabilities of computers at the time. Jedi Outcast was probably the first game that was able to make the graphics of the game actually contribute to the games success and not detract from it. After that game I played other Star Wars games such as Jedi Academy, Rebellion, Empire at War, Knights of the Old Republic I & II, Battlefront I & II, and The Force Unleashed. Each of these games had good and bad aspects to them, but for the most part were enjoyable for me.

The most successful game for the Star Wars franchise has probably been Knights of the Old Republic. This was a role playing game put out by BioWare, the company that has since made the highly successful role playing game Mass Effect. LucasArts is returning to BioWare to try to relaunch the Star Wars universe into the Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) genre. If you're not sure what that genre is, just think of World of Warcraft, easily the most successful MMO ever. It seems LucasArts is betting on the capabilities of BioWare to overcome their previous failures in the MMO genre. Here's a short preview video BioWare has put out about the new game, Star Wars - The Old Republic.

While this video does make the game look promising, there are a few glaring questions I have before I would jump on the bandwagon, ready to buy this game. Some of these questions are left unanswered in the game website's FAQ section.

1. What are the system requirements for Star Wars: The Old Republic?
-From the game website's FAQ:

We will detail specific system requirements closer to the release date.

2. How much will it cost to play Star Wars: The Old Republic?
-As price is the primary reason I never played World of Warcraft, how this game is priced could have a drastic affect on my decision to play it or not. Again, from the game website FAQ:

Pricing for Star Wars: The Old Republic will be determined and announced at a later date.

3. Will this be a solely PC based game or will this also be playable on console systems?
-I've since moved away from PC's for most of my gaming because of the costs of keeping a PC up to date on hardware. Buying a console is cheaper and all the games for it are designed for that specific set of hardware. In my opinion, console gaming delivers a much better experience for the end user.

Anyways, I guess I'll just have to wait and see on this game, but for now, the potential is there for a great game.

Why the BCS should go

2008-12-07T02:47:00.006-07:00

Yeah, this is one of my rare non-geek related posts. Those that know me know that I'm an avid football fan, following college football and attending 2-3 games a year at different universities I live by. Year after year we as fans have to put up with this mockery of a system called the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). I'm really sick of it, as are most all college football fans, players, and coaches. The system needs to be changed. Now.

A bit of history... (disclaimer: probably not factually 100% correct, but close enough)
Bowl games started out a long time ago, back when college football didn't have any post season, let alone any collegiate sport. Committees of rich folks got together and thought they could make a bunch of money if they could get some big name schools to agree to play each other after their seasons were over. Over the years, some bowls started agreeing to affiliate themselves with certain conferences. One of the first bowls to be affiliated with certain conferences was the Rose Bowl, which did so to help desegregation more than anything else. The Southeastern conference at the time didn't allow black players to play on their teams, so the Rose Bowl affiliated itself with the Big 9 and PCC conferences (precursors to the Big Ten and Pac-10). As transportation got cheaper for teams and more and more rich folks organized their own bowl games, people started realizing that the whole system was a mess. Some of the really rich schools got together and decided that because they were rich, that they could engineer who would be the national champions. They really didn't like the idea of a small school winning enough media votes to take the national title from the big schools, like BYU did in 1984. They figured if they could come up with a system that guaranteed two of their schools always played for the national title, no smaller school could ever win it. That's how the BCS was formed.

Over the years, enough fan uproar has prompted small patch fixes to their system, but for the most part, it's still intact. No smaller school will ever win the title under the current system. The changes that have been made have been essentially bribes. If the bigger schools share some money with the smaller schools, maybe they'll be quiet and let the big schools keep winning the championships. When it first started out, the smaller schools could compete with the bigger schools (see BYU 1984). Over time though, the engineered system of the BCS has made the BCS conferences stronger to the point that more than likely, a smaller school couldn't win a title now. The advantage BCS schools have, when it comes to recruiting, boils down to one fact only - if you play for a BCS school, you have the opportunity to win a national title, otherwise you don't - that's it. As athletes in high school decide where they want to play college football, they ask themselves if they want to win a title or not. If the answer is yes, then they should go to a BCS school because anywhere else that's just a fantasy.

The root of the problem with college football's system is that the system isn't fair. A flawless system would guarantee that no matter what school a team is from, that if that team is the best team in the country, that that team will win the national title. If somehow North Texas can put together the best team in the nation next year, there's absolutely no way anyone in the country will know it. Because they're from a smaller conference (Sun Belt), their wins won't give them enough credibility with poll voters. Because college football schedules are made years in advance, there's no way a team has control over who they play. It's not like the coach can look at his team one year and think he's got the greatest team ever and then somehow readjust his schedule to increase his schedule strength. Conference membership in the smaller conferences guarantees a majority of their games will be played against inferior opponents. Thus, conference games can't be a reliable indicator of how a good a team is either. The only way a non-BCS school will ever break the system and win a national title is to somehow come up with a dynasty where they have the best team year after year after year. Only after winning so consistently will they ever be able to schedule stronger opponents. Even then though, it may not be enough. They'll have to be good enough for long enough that they get invited to join a BCS conference. But then you're back to square one - no non-BCS school will ever win a national title.

The only way a system can be truly fair is to throw out the bowl system entirely and replace it with a playoff. If bowl sponsors want to sponsor different playoff games, that's great, but get rid of the invitation-bowl system, after all, don't the sponsors only really care about advertising dollars? The politics of college football seem dirtier than any politics in Washington DC. Even though a vast majority of fans, players, coaches, and students all want a playoff system, back door deals done by rich folks are keeping us stuck with the flaw that is the BCS.

To fix the system, a set of qualifications for postseason play needs to be in place that applies to all teams, no matter their conference affiliation. To require a team to go undefeated to play for a title is a little out of the question. The logical next step is to use polls, but the amount of bias and flaws inherent in that type of system negate any advantage it could bring. The next logical qualification to use conference championships. Each conference can set it's own criteria for determining who is their conference champion, but at the end of the season, each conference has a guaranteed representative in the postseason. As there are 11 conferences and because 11 teams does not an even playoff make, add in 5 at-large bids. My suggestion would be for these bids to be decided by committee, without using any type of poll or ranking. This committee could/should be made up of people previously involved in college football but now have no conflict of interest in making these bid decisions. I would suggest former coaches or players who are no longer playing or coaching football in any respect, nor involved in the media.

Since many people want to make this whole system change about money more than anything else (even though we're talking about an amateur sport), I have a few suggestions on how to run this playoff. With sixteen teams, it will take four rounds to play this through. I would play the first round of playoffs at the higher seeded team's home school. This gives them a significant home field advantage. After the first round, I would re-seed the playoffs and then let those rich folks who ran the previous bowl system bid to host these playoff games. The more money they bid to give to the participating schools, the better chance they have of hosting it. The highest bid gets the championship game, the next two highest bids get the semi-finals, and so on. In time I think this type of system will result in more revenue for the actual universities, which is the whole point, right?

One of the big arguments for the current BCS system is that it makes every regular season game a playoff game and any postseason playoff system would cheapen the regular season. Another is that a postseason playoff would mean these athletes would miss too much school and make their season too long.
On the first argument, each regular season game is not a playoff game. If it were, when you lost you would be done with no chance at playing for a title. While it may hold true in some years, this football season is a perfect example of where it doesn't. We have two one-loss teams playing for a national title when below them in the rankings is two undefeated teams. While a postseason playoff would make it so that a team could still win its conference championship with a few losses, it will enable those big schools to hoard the revenue from non-conference games amongst themselves. Since they apparently only really care about preserving their cash flow, wouldn't not having to schedule teams like Utah State, North Texas, Citadel and Appalachian State and instead playing other teams from the other BCS conferences generate more money? Sure, they may lose a few of those, but their postseason hopes aren't thrown out the window either.
The second argument is easily debunked by comparing lost school time of football players to that of other NCAA sports. Football players miss less class time than almost any other sport. Basketball players have games twice a week or more and their seasons last from November through March, spanning two school semesters.

The general consensus though is that the BCS system is systematically flawed and needs replaced. The sad truth of the matter is that what we're likely to get is more backroom politics applying patchwork bribes to the system in order to preserve their stranglehold on college football for as long as possible. The only way any changes will ever come to fruition is if fans learn to speak to them in a language they can understand--with money. If fans stopped buying things with team logos on them, if fans stopped going to games and just watched it at home or not at all, or if fans stopped donating money to these schools, they might someday get the message that the current system needs to be thrown out the window entirely.

Round and round we go

2008-12-02T21:58:00.005-07:00

So, for the better part of this week at work I took on the job of removing a major annoyance in our project. Previous programmers thought it a good idea to break up the project into as many smaller projects as possible. Sure, this has a benefit of allowing programmers to work on almost any part of the project without running the risk of working on the same piece of code. I never really understood that when I started here. I mean, it's not like we had a ton of developers. We had three. Another benefit of the modular design is it allows the project to grow easier.

Anyways, that's kind of not the point of this post. Over the course of development, different developers would just reference other projects dll's instead of taking the time to do it correctly. Each project was built independently so there weren't any red flags popping up warning of potential problems. As it turns out, the project became filled with circular references where one project referenced code in another, and that other project in turn referenced the first project. So long as there was an existing dll present, the projects would build just fine. The problem is that this type of setup prevents us from ever reconstructing the entire product from scratch.

To cut a long story short, now that I'm the lead developer I've decided to fix this problem. I've spent the better part of a week going through all the projects and removing these circular references by adding in delegates where necessary and moving code where appropriate. Needless to say, this has been a very tedious work week getting a lot of work done, but not much really accomplished. Now that it's complete though I feel a lot better about the stability of the code we have (not great, just better) since I can now rebuild the product again from source code if necessary without having to deal with the mind numbing problems previous developers caused by not taking the time to do things right in the first place.

Xbox Live Avatars

2008-11-20T11:08:00.010-07:00

I thought I'd post some of my friend's Xbox Live avatars. I've linked directly to Microsoft's servers for the images, so if they don't show up, sorry, not my fault.

NXE - New Xbox Experience

2008-11-18T22:32:00.006-07:00

So, a while back I signed up to be an early participant in the New Xbox Experience (that's Microsoft's way of making you feel special when you find bugs in their software). The Xbox is getting a new operating system interface rolled out via Xbox Live tomorrow and I was fortunate enough to be able to get an early look at it. One of the biggest changes, which I'm not going to go much into, is the addition of avatars. Basically, Microsoft saw that tons of families with kids were flocking to the Nintendo Wii and it's feature, the 'Wii Mii' and Microsoft wanted a piece of that action. Really though, the new Xbox avatar is nothing more than a customizable character you get to have on your Xbox Dashboard that stands around striking poses. You can even snap a picture of your avatar to use as your gamer picture.

From a users standpoint, all this is is a new paintjob on the same old car. Sure it ran great, but I guess Microsoft just felt a little too much rust was showing and they needed to touch it up. Nothing much changed in how the Xbox OS works. You still get the same information, just presented in a newer, flashier way. Here's how the new profile page looks when you go into it. Now instead of having to click on My Games, you get a page for each of the games you've played that you can scroll through.

There are a few interface changes that are marked improvements as well as a few that are easily a step in the wrong direction. One of the new changes I like is the way it presents achievements for each game. Before, you had to click on an achievement to get a good description of what it was, but now the display shows the description at the top as you scroll through them.

A stunning oversight in my mind is how they handled the background for the new interface. Before, we were able to download themes for our Xbox blades. This allowed users to customize the look and feel of their Xbox interface. A lot of users paid good money for themes they liked. With the new interface, Microsoft has gone and covered up half the screen so you can't see the theme image at all.

Selecting your theme

How the theme looks when applied

What would have been nice is if Microsoft had allowed users to make the background of the interface transparent or not there at all. This would allow people to still enjoy the themes they paid money for. If they can't do that, I at least hope Microsoft lets people download new, updated themes free of charge--themes that work on the New Xbox Experience.

One new feature that Microsoft is releasing along with the NXE is a new application that allows Xbox users to view Netflix streaming videos over their Xbox 360. While I can understand the marketing strategy to pair it with the NXE, I'm pretty sure the Netflix application (that's all it really is, an downloaded application) would have worked on the old dashboard interface just fine.

The only real sad part about the Netflix app is that Sony, Microsoft's arch nemesis in the video game market and owner of Columbia Pictures, has somehow managed to stop Netflix from allowing Xbox users to view their videos. Hopefully something can be worked out to allow the whole Netflix media library to be available to Xbox 360 users.

Another (cool?) feature that Microsoft added in this update is the ability for gamers to install their games to their Xbox 360 hard drives. This means that for those 15 hours gaming binges that your DVD drive in your 360 won't have to be constantly spinning your disc. Instead, after installing your game to your hard drive, the disc drive will only spin at first to make sure you have the game in the drive (their attempt at anti-piracy).

It took me only 15 minutes to copy my Gears of War 2 game to my 360's hard drive. The game takes up almost 7 GB of hard drive space. As I only have the old 20 GB hard drive, I'll have to upgrade if I want to copy any other games to my hard drive. It doesn't really make much of a difference in gameplay time, but I'm sure this is just Microsoft's attempt to throw money at the problems they've been having with the Xbox DVD drives malfunctioning and destroying game discs. The idea is just to reduce the wear and tear on the drive over time. Maybe it'll work for them.

Overall, I think the biggest improvement in the new interface has to be in the speed in which things load. Navigating through the old dashboard architecture was a real pain in the neck for some people because they weren't used to waiting so long (really, it was only a couple of milliseconds...but to some gamers, that's an eternity). The new interface is significantly faster at loading, especially when in a game. They found a way to make it faster and even provide a little more content available to the users than before.

Now, back to playing Gears of War 2...

Free Tech Support

2008-11-12T09:55:00.007-07:00

Anyone else who reads this and considers themselves a geek is probably in the same boat as me. The more I do with computers and tech stuff, the more my family & friends view me as a free tech support guy. It started out when I was in school with my parents asking me simple stuff about setting up their email and such. That wasn't so bad. Gradually it spread to where my extended family was calling me about the simple stuff as well. As soon as my neighbors learned I was a CS student I became the first person they'd call whenever they had a computer question or problem. It went up a step when a year or so ago I helped my brother wire his apartment for ethernet so he could play his Xbox 360 in a different room from his computer. Apparently I am the only person who can use a crimp tool.

I find it funny how people seem to think I can solve problems with just a simple telephone call. I had an uncle call me because his computer was stuck constantly restarting and not loading the operating system. Somehow he thought I could just tell him to hit some magic key (right next to the Any key) to fix the problem. And it's not like I can just drive over to his house to fix the problem. He lives far enough away it'd cost me roughly $50 in gas to drive there and back. It would be cheaper for him to take his PC into a tech support shop and pay the $30-$40/hour they charge.

Now, I don't mind helping people with simple stuff or giving advice when I'm visiting or actually there in front of their computer. Doing support over the phone when they aren't able to converse on the same tech vocabulary level is very frustrating. With my family, I'll get calls while I'm driving down the road and have no frame of reference to what they're doing, and sometimes they're not even able to articulate what the problem is exactly.

I really think people should have to go through some sort of introductory course on how to use a computer before they actually get one. I think the biggest problem when it comes to computer problems, bugs, viruses, etc is user education level. A computer takes time and effort to keep in good working order, just as does an automobile. People think it's important to take care of their cars - get it washed, change the oil, etc, but they seem to think a computer will just take care of itself. Then they wonder why their computer runs so slow and is plagued with problems just a few months after getting it. Then again, you could always go overboard, as a friend of mine does, in that he reformats and reinstalls his entire operating system every few months just to be sure nothing is on there he doesn't want.

Gears of War 2

2008-11-09T00:23:00.004-07:00

Friday after work I picked up Gears of War 2 for the Xbox 360. I enjoyed the first Gears of War game mainly for it's single player campaign. The multiplayer portion of the game was plagued with connectivity problems when played online as well as glitches in how the weapons worked. After playing through the campaign of Gears 2 and some multiplayer matches, I was very pleased with my purchase and look forward to many hours of enjoyment. To appease those gamers who want a score applied to this review, I'd have to give it a 9 out of 10.

Campaign
Just as in the original Gears of War, the campaign is available both in single player and cooperative modes. I played the campaign in single player mode for Act 1 and cooperative mode for Acts 2-5. The campaign is a bit longer in the sequel than in Gears 1. It took me roughly 14 hours to complete the game on Hardcore difficulty. The storyline is just as riveting in Gears 2 as it was in the original. The story focuses on the COG's efforts to destroy the Locust infestation as well as helping your squad mate, Dom, find his wife who was separated from him when the Locusts first attacked.
In the original game, one of your squad mates, Anthony Carmine, got killed in a rather inopportune way--getting sniped in the head while his gun was jammed. In Gears 2 you get to have Anthony's brother, Ben Carmine join your squad. The dialogue indicates Ben is just as green as his brother was, yet in actual gameplay Carmine is one really brave soldier, always rushing into enemy forces with just his sniper rifle in hand and coming out unscathed. I don't doubt we'll see another of the four Carmine brothers in Gears 3.
Gears of War 2 didn't let up when it comes to showing blood and gore. The original Gears of War was probably the bloodiest game I'd ever played. Gears 2 easily out does that. In fact, Gears 2 has probably the bloodiest and most gory scene I've ever seen in a video game or movie. Warning: very bloody.

The game also has quite a bit of strong language as well. Epic Games got one thing right though. They knew they were making a game that if it was a movie would easily be rated R, but they put into the game the option to turn off the gore and to filter the strong language. This allows gamers who want to play this game with their family present to tone things down a bit. Overall, I think that decision to include filters will increase sales for the game and allow a lot more people to enjoy it.
There are still small items to pickup throughout the storyline as there were in Gears 1. This time however, they're not just the COG tags of fallen soldiers. This time, they're actually small Collectibles like newspaper clippings or paper reports that give you more information about what's going on and add to the storyline experience.
Just as in Gears 1 there is a slight cliffhanger ending to the storyline. The developers, after all, did plan for this series to be a trilogy. While there is a tremendous victory in the end for the COG forces, the cliffhanger at the end of the game credits makes you question if what happened may or may not have been the best choice for the people of Sera.

Game Settings
A new great feature of cooperative campaign gameplay is that the difficulty settings for the game can be player specific. That means you can have one really skilled player playing on Insane difficulty and another playing on Casual.
Unlike other games where developers overlooked a large demographic, this game actually has a fairly decent set of left-handed control options. The settings allow gamers to have default, legacy, left-handed default, or left-handed legacy thumb stick controls. Another first that I've seen in a video game, is that this game also allows you to have left handed triggers (i.e. left trigger shoots primary weapon). You can also invert either your X or Y-axis (or both). There's even an alternate button control scheme that has the actions for each button in a slightly different layout.
As mentioned earlier there are settings options to turn off the gore and language for gamers that prefer not to have that. For multiplayer games, players have the option of setting their default player model to use, both for COG and Locust forces.

Developers also put in a great information section of the game called the War Journal. Here you can find multiplayer leaderboards, both public and private (friends only). There's also a list of Collectibles showing how many you've found and on which levels you found them. Gears 2 also has probably the best display for in game achievements. It lists each achievement with a description of how to earn it, along with a progress indicator for how close you are to getting it. Even during actual gameplay, a progress notification pops up in the bottom corner of your screen when you do something that brings you closer to getting an achievement. This comes in very handy for those achievement hunters out there trying to get them all.

Multiplayer
The game has a great tutorial mode to familiarize players with the different game modes for Gears of War 2 multiplayer. There are five steps to go through, not hard at all. You even get an achievement for completing the tutorial mode.
There's a new multiplayer mode in Gears 2 that wasn't in the original--Horde. This consists of up to five players playing on the same team against wave after wave of Locust hordes. I had the opportunity to play this mode earlier today with four of my friends starting at wave #1. It goes up to wave #50. Each wave up to #10 has more enemies than the previous that are in turn harder to kill. After Wave #10 you start over again, but this time the enemies get a boost in health and skills. After the next 10 waves, they get another boost and so on.

Even though we played on Casual mode, by the time we hit wave #50 it was incredibly difficult for all of us to survive the whole wave. Just for kicks when we were done we tried wave #50 on Insane mode. We lasted a grand total of 47 seconds before we were all dead.

Mirror's Edge (demo)

2008-11-07T15:29:00.005-07:00

I downloaded the demo for a new game coming out, Mirror's Edge. The game is set in some futuristic city where information security is so tight that the really sensitive stuff gets hand delivered. The people delivering the information are runners who run across the city's rooftops jumping from building to building to deliver the packages. Somehow the main character is caught up in something and uses her running skills to find out what and how to get out of it. Pretty simple, straightforward plot design. Actual gameplay though was horrible. I went through the whole demo and was bored out of my mind within two minutes.

All you do is run around and jump over, under, or through things. This game really doesn't qualify to be considered part of the Action genre, as Xbox's site suggests. What it should be classified as is a puzzle game because that's what it feels like. All you do is run around and figure out how to get from point A to point B. I guess the only real upside to this game is it's not 'Rated M for Mature'. I wouldn't have a problem giving a game like this to a 12 year old to play, as opposed to something like Gears of War 2 (which I'm going out today to pick up most likely).

Dead Space

2008-11-05T17:28:00.003-07:00

I've never been one for the horror genre. I think it must have something to do with watching Friday the 13th when I was about 3 years old. I don't mind compelling stories or even suspenseful ones, but I really can't stand the ones that just try and shock you by throwing blood and gore at you over and over. When I heard about Dead Space before it was released, I was mildly excited to play it. Maybe this would be different. Maybe game developers would figure a way to use today's technology to actually tell a compelling horror story.

Well, the release date came and went. I didn't buy the game, mostly due to being enthralled in other games such as Call of Duty 4, Castle Crashers and Portal. Then one of my friends went out and rented it. I waited to see what he said about the game. Needless to say, this massive oversight by the game developers burst my hope bubble and removed any decent expectations I might have had for the game. In my opinion, if developers can't get the basic mechanics of a game right, why should I think they got anything else right?

The final nail in the coffin for my hopes for this game came when I saw what popular game reviewer Ben Croshaw had to say about the game. Instead of rewriting his review, I'll just let you watch it yourself. Warning - it does contain strong language.

Call of Duty 5 - World At War (beta)

2008-10-22T21:07:00.004-06:00

About a week ago the Call of Duty 5 beta went live. As a software developer I find it very difficult to actually call this a beta release. There were promotions from just about every gaming website and magazine that exists. Millions of gamers got a hold of their own personal beta code. Some got more than just one (personally, I got about seven). Those who got extra just shared them with their friends. There were so many codes given out that anyone who actually wanted one could easily have gotten one. Another reason it isn't a beta is the fact that the game comes out in 3 weeks. I doubt any bugs found in the beta will be fixed in the release version. In reality, this is much more of a release candidate than a beta.

The beta is limited to just the multiplayer aspect of the game and within that it's limited to just 3 maps and it has an experience cap on it. A lot of gamers I talk to think this game was doomed from the start, as it was developed by Treyarch and not Infinity Ward (the developers of Call of Duty 4). The game does use the Call of Duty 4 game engine, so the feel of gameplay is very familiar to CoD4 players. There are some subtle differences, mostly added in to stick to the era of the game (WWII instead of modern times). The problems I found come in how the developers chose to implement these changes.

One of my big complaints is the inherant weakness and accuracy of the weapons. I know the developers were aiming for a more realistic game, but reality generally isn't all that fun. It gets very aggravating to shoot someone with a sniper rifle multiple times and not have a single shot register. Another complaint I have is the graphic detail. In CoD4 the characters were very detailed and you could tell very distinct differences between soldiers on the same team. In the beta, the way the graphics are rendered (darkness level, coloring, etc) make it difficult to tell friend from foe. Players are forced to wait for the name indicator to show up on screen which usually delays them enough to get shot. My other big complain is the level design. The word that comes to mind is cluttered. In CoD4, levels had clear lines of sight and made a larger level seem controllable based on what you could see. In the beta, there is so much junk on the levels that your line of sight generally doesn't extend for more than a few feet in any direction.

Overall the game is only 'ok'. If I had to give it a score, it'd be a 5 or 6 out of 10. I really don't see me purchasing this game. My reason for not getting the game isn't any of the above mentioned reasons. No, it's one that developers need to realize is totally unacceptable. For multiplayer games, the developers had voice actors perform the in-game announcements. Kiefer Sutherland performed the voice for the US Marines team announcer. The first time I played the game I was shocked when the announcer shouted out the F-bomb. "Out-f***ing-standing Marines!" I looked through the menu structure and game options. There's no way to filter out the vulgarity. You can mute the entire announcer voice, but then the players lose the valuable strategic information relayed.

We're all in this together

2008-10-07T14:49:00.000-06:00

Worthless Review Scores

2008-10-03T23:38:00.003-06:00

How many times have you read a game review and seen it given some type of score? Usually these scores are used to convey some actual meaning. When I read the the whole review, I kind of expect the score they gave to be reflected in the review. If I see a low score, I expect the review to be full of complaints about a game. If I see a high score, I expect to read about how great the game is. I really didn't think you could mix that formula up (high score = good review, low score = bad review), but apparently someone did.

Recently I read a review of a new game that came out last month, NFL Head Coach 09, from EA Sports. The game focuses less an the actual football games and more on the management and coaching aspects of the sport. On the site Operation Gaming, a site for sports gaming, the score given for this game is a 9 (out of 10, I assume). To me, that's a great score. If a game gets a 9/10 score, I assume it's a great game and worth looking into. When I saw that, I thought I should read the review and see what exactly makes this game great.

Yeah...that was a mistake.

Apparently, the author of that review must think their scores are like golf scores...the lower the better. Here are a few inspiring quotes from that review:

When it comes to football gamers, the vast majority will look at something like NFL Head Coach 09 (NFLHC) and ask one simple question.
“Why?”

The first thing you’ll notice when you hop into a Coach Now game is that the game looks horribly bland compared to Madden NFL 09.

The audio isn’t anything to write home about, with a white noise crowd sound in the background, and your coordinators rattling in your ear. The actual play calls are great to hear, but if I have to hear, “We’ll win this game one inch at a time … one inch at a time,” ONE MORE TIME, I’ll scream.

When you start to game plan for your first opponent, you can start to get confused again.

Sometimes you’ll also end up with goals that aren’t easily understandable.

The running game was a joke, as the CPU could never mount a consistent attack, let alone against another CPU opponent.

In its current state, NFLHC plays a sublime game of football 90 percent of the time. The other 10 percent can be extremely frustrating...

But the real stumbling block for NFL Head Coach 09 so far seems to be the buggy release.

Thankfully, the process of improving your team is far from easy.

Speaking of seeing what’s going on -- if you’re an online gamer, you’ll be sorely disappointed. You only have the Supersim mode available, with no graphics.

There are some notable bugs (some of which will really get to a large percentage of gamers)

and finally...

When you boil it down, though, NFL Head Coach is the best coaching sim on the console market.

(I think it's the ONLY one on the console market)

I don't know about you guys, but after I read that review, I really didn't feel the urge to rush out and buy NFL Head Coach 09. After reading that review, I really had to wonder why EA Sports, a developer known for it's great sports titles, would put out such a low quality product. Maybe it's in some contract they have with the NFL. I have yet to meet another gamer who actually played this game and liked it. Actually, I have yet to meet another gamer who has even played this game.

My advice to you? Read the full review. Don't just go by the score you see. Again, to Terry Crouch, the author of the review, a '10' means it's good and a '1' means it's bad, not the other way around...

Camping - Brings out the worst in gamers

2008-09-15T02:06:00.004-06:00

How did all of a sudden style of play somehow become taboo amongst video gamers? I'm talking about camping. For those that don't know, camping is a strategy where you identify key locations of a multiplayer game map and defend those locations. I'm not talking about knowing how to exploit glitches in a game that allow you to kill your opponents as soon as they spawn in the game. No, I'm just talking about playing smart. It seems lately that online gamers have grown to view this as poor gamesmanship, and for the life of me I can't figure out why.

Every game or sport has key facets that need to be controlled or managed in order to win. In football it's not uncommon to hear a commentator say that whoever controls the line of scrimmage will win the game. Does this mean that the team that does this is showing poor sportsmanship by camping the line of scrimmage? What about in soccer--is having a goalie poor sportsmanship? Why is he camping the place the other team needs to get to in order to score?

A group of my friends and I have taken it upon ourselves to learn how to camp different maps in the game Call of Duty 4 to near perfection. The same group of players plays together often enough that we all learn each others strengths and weaknesses. We know the maps enough to know what areas need to be controlled. We don't try and exploit the spawn algorithm and kill our opponents where the spawn. What we try and do is pick one half of the map and just control it.

Vacant

In the above image, I've shown a typical layout on one map, Vacant. Our strategy isn't to rush and spawn camp the other team, but it's very simple though. We stay outside of the building while trying to keep our opponents inside. By doing that, we can control where we encounter them--the exits. By doing this we only have to cover a few key points of the map, as shown above. Sure, sometimes the other team will kill a few of us, by most often we kill a lot more of them.

What I really don't get is the distaste many gamers have for this strategy. Maybe it's because they get beaten by it so easily. Instead of whining and complaining that another team beat them by a superior strategy, maybe gamers need to instead focus on ways to counter it. We've played against other teams with similar strategy and still prevailed. I think too many gamers out there know how to play first person shooter (FPS) games one way and one way only. To be a good gamer you need to learn to adapt your strategy to fit your opponents' strategy.

The fundamental tenet of a good camping strategy relies on the premise that you will be more patient than your opponent. In the above example, if our opponent knew we would stay outside the building the whole match, they could just stay inside and force a tie game. In my many hours of using this strategy, I have yet to find an opponent who will do that though. They can't resist the urge to rush out, guns blazing. This usually results in a quick death them respawning back inside the building, ready to do it all over again.

Castle Crashers

2008-09-04T18:43:00.003-06:00

Recently I found a fun little game on Xbox Live Arcade. Castle Crashers is a nice throwback to the old sidescrolling arcade games I grew up on. While I still haven't beaten the game (I don't play video games that much), I've played enough to know that I like it.

The biggest improvement I see in this arcade game over others is the inclusion of multiplayer functionality both over Xbox Live and on the local console. The game really reminds me of the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game for the Nintendo. Basically, you go through areas swinging your weapons to kill enemies. When they die, they drop gold, food, or other items. The more you kill, the more experience you get.

The graphics on this really don't try too hard to impress you, from a technical standpoint. This isn't trying to be a top of the line processor intensive game. This is a game you just sit back and have some fun with. After all, isn't that the point? There is subtle, crude humor in the game that will surprise you when you see it (funny surprise, not 'OMG, cover the kids eyes' surprise).

Overall I'd have to say I really recommend this game to anyone. This is the game I'll turn on when family comes over so that my brothers (and sister) and I can all play together. The price is pretty steep for an arcade game (1200 MS points = $15.00) but I still think it's worth it. Compared to $60 for a full retail title, this is definitely worth the money.

Harmonix Stole My Lunch Money

2008-08-14T22:06:00.002-06:00

As much as I like the game Rock Band, I'm getting to the point where I'm starting to compare Harmonix, the producers of the game, to oil companies. The prices on their downloadable content (DLC) are getting ridiculous. When the makers of Halo, Bungie Studios, released additional DLC, there were complaints over the pricing. Many thought they were just trying to gouge their faithful fans of whatever they could get, but not giving enough for the cost. And that was over just a few multiplayer maps for a whopping $10.00.

When Rock Band was released it, the game disc came with 58 songs included on the disc (45 starting + 13 bonus, unlockable). Even with the wild assumption that half of the game costs covered the rights to the songs and costs in getting the songs to a playable format, that's only about $0.50 per song. I'm willing to bet the costs were even less than that.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am still the sucker who's downloaded all the songs so far. I like the music and don't mind getting music from artists I'm not familiar with. True music fans shouldn't be afraid of expanding their tastes to new music. The problem I have is when you compare the costs of the DLC to the end user with that which was included with the game, we're being charged at least 3-4 times as much. The average cost of a DLC song is $1.71. Maybe it's just me, maybe it's not, but that seems a bit extravagent, especially considering what is getting released.

If I'm going to be charged that much for my DLC, is it too much to ask for more popular bands/songs? I don't mind the occasional new stuff or up-and-coming band (Freezepop), but can't they make the majority of the DLC good music? I'd like to see more stuff like Journey, Queen, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Led Zeppelin--and a little less stuff like Freezepop, Them Terribles, and The Material.

Below is listed ALL the DLC for Rock Band. As it comes out, I'll try and keep this post updated and current.

193 DLC songs for 26,520 Microsoft Points - $331.50

Aug 12, 2008 (480 Microsoft Points - $6.00)
480 - Roadrunner Records 01 Pack
Aesthetics of Hate - Machine Head
Clouds Over California - Devildriver
Constant Motion - Dream Theater
My Curse - Killswitch Engage
Runnin' Wild - Airbourne
Sleepwalker - Megadeath

Aug 5, 2008 (560 Microsoft Points - $7.00)
160 - Toxicity - System of a Down
160 - B.Y.O.B. - System of a Down
240 - Crüefest 02 Pack
Face Down in the Dirt - Motley Crüe
Rescue Me - Motley Crüe
Life is Beautiful - Motley Crüe

Jul 29, 2008 (560 Microsoft Points - $7.00)
160 - They Say - Scars on Broadway
160 - This Is It - Staind
160 - Electric Crown - Testament
160 - Yomp - thenewno2

Jul 22, 2008 (760 Microsoft Points - $9.50)
440 - Nine Inch Nails 02 Pack
Burn
Capital G
Last
160 - Devour - Shinedown
160 - Junkies for Fame - Shinedown

Jul 15, 2008 (1600 Microsoft Points - $20.00)
1600 - Best of The Who
Amazing Journey
Baba O'Riley
Behind Blue Eyes
Eminence Front
Going Mobile
Leaving Here
My Generation (Live at Leeds)
Real Good Looking Boy
Sea and Sand
Summertime Blues (Live at Leeds)
Who Are You
Young Man Blues (Live at Leeds)

Jul 8, 2008 (640 Microsoft Points - $8.00)
160 - Snow ((Hey Oh)) - Red Hot Chili Peppers
160 - Tell Me Baby - Red Hot Chili Peppers
160 - Closer to the Heart - Rush
160 - Working Man (Vault Edition) - Rush

Jul 1, 2008 (440 Microsoft Points - $5.50)
440 - Crüefest 01 Pack
Down at the Whisky - Motley Crüe
Time Is Running Out - Motley Crüe
Who's Going Home with You Tonight - Motley Crüe
FREE - Promised Land - Vesuvius

Jun 24, 2008 (1960 Microsoft Points - $24.50)
1520 - Doolittle Album (The Pixies)
Debaser
Tame
I Bleed
Here Comes Your Man
Dead
Monkey Gone to Heaven
Mr. Grieves
Crackity Jones
La La Love You
No. 13 Baby
There Goes My Gun
Hey
Silver
Gouge Away
440 - Weezer 01 Pack
Dreamin'
The Greatest Man That Ever Lived
Troublemaker

Jun 17, 2008 (560 Microsoft Points - $7.00)
160 - Critical Acclaim - Avenged Sevenfold
160 - Afterlife - Avenged Sevenfold
160 - Hammerhead - The Offspring
80 - Rock n' Roll Dream - Crooked X

Jun 10, 2008 (400 Microsoft Points - $5.00)
240 - MTV2 01 Pack
Moving to Seattle - The Material
A Clean Shot - The Myriad
Bullets & Guns - Them Terribles
160 - Girls Who Play Guitars - Maximo Park

Jun 3, 2008 (880 Microsoft Points - $11.00)
440 - Disturbed 01 Pack
Indestructible - Disturbed
Inside the Fire - Disturbed
Perfect Insanity - Disturbed
440 - Jimmy Buffet 01 Pack
Cheeseburger in Paradise - Jimmy Buffet
Margaritaville - Jimmy Buffet
Volcano - Jimmy Buffet

May 27, 2008 (1200 Microsoft Points - $15.00)
1200 - The Cars Album (The Cars)
Good Times Roll
My Best Friend's Girl
Just What I Needed
I'm in Touch with Your World
Don't Cha Stop
You're All I've Got Tonight
Bye Bye Love
Moving in Stereo
All Mixed Up

May 20, 2008 (1440 Microsoft Points - $18.00)
160 - Beetlebum - Blur
160 - Countdown to Insanity - H-Blockx
160 - Hier Kommt Alex - Die Toten Hosen
160 - Hysteria - Muse
160 - Manu Chao - Les Wampas
160 - Monsoon - Tokio Hotel
160 - New Wave - Pleymo
160 - Perfekte Welle - Juli
160 - Rock 'n' Roll Star - Oasis

May 13, 2008 (480 Microsoft Points - $6.00)
160 - Hanging on the Telephone - Blondie
160 - Train in Vain (Stand by Me) - The Clash
160 - Kool Thing - Sonic Youth

May 6, 2008 (440 Microsoft Points - $5.50)
440 - Scene 01 Pack
This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race - Fall Out Boy
Date with the Night - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
It Hurts - Angels & Airwaves

Apr 29, 2008 (480 Microsoft Points - $6.00)
160 - Red Tandy - The Mother Hips
160 - Time-Sick Son of a Grizzly Bear - The Mother Hips
160 - Zero - Smashing Pumpkins

Apr 22, 2008 (1200 Microsoft Points - $15.00)
800 - Judas Priest Screaming for Vengence Album
The Hellion/Electric Eye
Riding on the Wind
Bloodstone
(Take These) Chains
Pain and Pleasure
Screaming for Vengeance
You've Got Another Thing Comin'
Fever
Devil's Child

Apr 15, 2008 (600 Microsoft Points - $7.50)
440 - Classic Rock 01
Simple Man - Lynyrd Skynyrd
Message in a Bottle - The Police
Call Me - Blondie
160 - Saints of Los Angeles - Mötley Crüe

Apr 8, 2008 (240 Microsoft Points - $3.00)
240 - Harmonix 01
Rock Rebellion - Bang Camero
Shake - Count Zero
Sprode - Freezepop

Apr 1, 2008
FREE - Still Alive - GLaDOS

Mar 25, 2008 (800 Microsoft Points - $10.00)
800 - Boston 01
Peace of Mind
More Than a Feeling
Smokin'
Rock and Roll Band
Something About You
Hitch a Ride

Mar 18, 2008 (440 Microsoft Points - $5.50)
440 - Erache Thrash 01
Blinded by Fear - At the Gates
D.O.A. - The Haunted
Thrasher - Evile

Mar 11, 2008 (480 Microsoft Points - $6.00)
160 - Crushcrushcrush - Paramore
160 - Beethoven's C*** - Serj Tankian
160 - Shockwave - Black Tide

Mar 3, 2008 (800 Microsoft Points - $10.00)
800 - Grateful Dead 01
China Cat Sunflower
Casey Jones
Sugar Magnolia
Truckin'
Franklin's Tower
I Need a Miracle

Feb 26, 2008 (440 Microsoft Points - $5.50)
440 - Nine Ince Nails 01
March of the Pigs
The Collector
The Perfect Drug

Feb 19, 2008 (480 Microsoft Points - $6.00)
160 - Sex Type Thing - Stone Temple Pilots
160 - El Scorcho - Weezer
160 - Why Do You Love Me - Garbage

Feb 11, 2008 (440 Microsoft Points - $5.50)
440 - (Arguably) Punk 02
Complete Control - The Clash
Truth Hits Everybody - The Police
Teenage Lobotomy - Ramones

Feb 5, 2008 (480 Microsoft Points - $6.00)
160 - Roam
160 - We Care a Lot
160 - Calling Dr. Love

Jan 29, 2008 (480 Microsoft Points - $6.00)
160 - Siva - Smashing Pumpkins
160 - Working Man - Rush
160 - Ten Speed (Of God's Blood and Burial) - Coheed and Cambria

Jan 22, 2008 (440 Microsoft Points - $5.50)
440 - Oasis 01
Don't Look Back in Anger
Live Forever
Wonderwall

Jan 15, 2008 (480 Microsoft Points - $6.00)
160 - Action - Sweet
160 - Last Train to Clarksville - The Monkees
160 - All the Small Things - Blink-182

Jan 8, 2008 (480 Microsoft Points - $6.00)
160 - Die, All Right! - The Hives
160 - Interstate Love Song - Stone Temple Pilots
160 - The Number of the Beast - Iron Maiden

Jan 1, 2008 (480 Microsoft Points - $6.00)
160 - Gimme Three Steps - Lynyrd Skynyrd
160 - Hard to Handle - The Black Crowes
160 - Limelight - Rush

Dec 25, 2007 (800 Microsoft Points - $10.00)
160 - Attack - 30 Seconds to Mars
160 - The Kill - 30 Seconds to Mars
160 - Dirty Little Secret - All American Rejects
160 - Move Along - All American Rejects
160 - Song with a Mission - The Sounds

Dec 18, 2007 (480 Microsoft Points - $6.00)
160 - My Iron Lung - Radiohead
160 - Brass in Pocket - The Pretenders
160 - Buddy Holly - Weezer

Dec 11, 2007 (440 Microsoft Points - $5.50)
440 - Punk 01
Ever Fallen in Love - Buzzcocks
I Fought the Law - The Clash
Rockaway Beach - Ramones

Dec 4, 2007 (440 Microsoft Points - $5.50)
440 - Black Sabbath 01
N.I.B.
Sweet Leaf
War Pigs

Nov 27, 2007 (440 Microsoft Points - $5.50)
440 - David Bowie 01
Heroes
Moonage Daydream
Queen Bitch

Nov 20, 2007 (2280 Microsoft Points - $28.50)
160 - Fortunate Son - Creedence Clearwater Revival
160 - Juke Box Hero - Foreigner
160 - Bang a Gong (Get It On) - T.Rex
160 - My Sharona - KnackThe Knack
160 - Cherry Bomb - RunawaysThe Runaways
160 - Joker & the Thief - Wolfmother
440 - Metallica 01 Pack
Ride the Lightning
Blackened
...And Justice for All
440 - Queens of the Stone Age 01
3's & 7's
Little Sister
Sick, Sick, Sick
440 - The Police 01
Can't Stand Losing You
Synchronicity II
Roxanne

Achievables

2008-08-08T18:22:00.003-06:00

Favorite Halo Maps

2008-08-07T13:48:00.004-06:00

This is taken from evildoctorwill over in the TTL Forum. I thought it interesting and am sharing it with you. They are listed from least favorite to most favorite.

Who likes Halo? I do. Who likes Halo multiplayer? I do! So I decided that I'd rank every multiplayer map from Halo to Halo 3 (excluding the PC exclusives) from my least favorite to my favorite. Believe me, what started as a simple question from one friend to another became an epic time-consuming project, one that has only helped to build on the respect I hold for those Bungie folk who created my favorite multiplayer experience. Please remember that this is by no means an attempt to show the world the "Best and Worst of Halo Maps" or anything of that sort, instead it is just one fan's personal opinion on what he does, and doesn't, enjoy playing when it comes to the multiplayer mayhem we all have come to know and love called Halo. Feel free to comment on choices, or just leave a quick note on why you love or can't stand a particular map. So, without further ado, here are my Least Favorite To Favorite Maps in Halo.

#54. Coagulation

Kicking things off on this list of Least Favorite To Favorite Maps of Halo, we have the red-headed step child of Blood Gulch itself, Coag. Coagulation took everything that was great from it’s predecessor, chewed it up, spit it out, and then proceeded to defecate itself onto the remains. What was left was Coagulation, a name just as ugly and retched as the map itself. Perhaps its due to the oh-so-many fond memories I have of playing Blood Gulch that seem to distort this map into what it is today, or maybe it is the absence of a certain entirely-too-over-powered-and-yet-somehow-amazing pistol, but I still hate this map. Maybe hate isn’t strong enough of a word. What’s worse that hate, anyway? Why do I detest this map? With the exclusion of the Halo pistol from it’s sequel, and the rather large distance that this map had from on point of cover to the next, having a sniper rifle in Coag meant total domination. Spawn, killed. Spawn, killed. Spawn, killed. Get the picture? I remember right after Halo 2’s launch, some friends of mine got together for a LAN party, just as we always did before with Halo, and fired up some Coag CTF. It didn’t feel the same, as you would expect, and thus began the downward spiral that shall forever be known as Coagulation.

#53. Tombstone

If there ever were a map that comes close to Coag in terms of my utter hatred toward, it would be Tombstone. Now, I was not one of the countless Bungie fan boys clamoring for a remake of Hang ‘Em High, I grasped the concept that Bungie very early on stated about their trying to recreate this map in the Halo 2 engine and it just not feeling right. I was totally fine with this map not showing up in Halo’s sequel, but lo and behold, it did. Just as Coag did to Blood Gulch, Tombstone seemed to lack just about everything that made it’s original so entertaining. However, unlike Coagulation, Tombstone was still semi-playable, and that is why it merely makes second to last.

#52. Elongation

Is anyone noticing a trend here? I don’t like remakes. When all you do is take the original, put a nice graphics polish on it, and it back out into a game engine that is not the same, you don’t really get the same experience. Elongation built on Longest in a way that I didn’t enjoy, focusing on the objective side of the map, creating two bases for teams to attack, whereas my greatest memories of Longest (which will be detailed later on) were of the fun long distance rocket games. Elongation turned into a map where, if it popped up in matchmaking, I definitely wanted a veto option.

#51. Foundry

Mind you, I am not talking about the forged-into-everything-and-your-mother version of Foundry, I am talking about the run of the mill, default, wondering-who-on-Bungie-thought-this-would-be-fun version you get in matchmaking. To be honest, this map has brought us, through the wonders of Forge, such awesome maps as Onslaught and everyone’s favorite Griffball court, but when it comes to seeing it pop up in Team Doubles or Team Slayer, I always get that slight taste of vomit like I’m going to hurl in a moment if I don’t get something to drink soon when I see it show up in matchmaking. This map turns into a heated race for the snipers and rockets, and especially if you aren’t playing a BR variant, it just turns into a Duck Hunt, waiting for the opposing team to pop their heads out so you can remove it from their sternum. Foundry is definitely on the Least Favorite side of my Least Favorite To Favorite Maps of Halo.

#50. Snowbound

Does anyone else think this is an attempt to re-imagine Battle/Beaver Creek? Well, if it is, it’s a failed attempt. While some game types are enjoyable on Snowbound, like much of any SWAT gametype (minus SHWATGUNS) or even Team Splasers, most games of Team Slayer or Team Doubles always turns into one thing: Camping the shield doors. And if one team dares to stray outside of the protective shell otherwise known as the bases, its hello ghost, please mow me down! Snowbound and I don’t get along, and I don’t think we’re going to work this out anytime soon.

#49. Last Resort

Another remake? You don’t say! Last Resort feels to me like Bungie wasn’t trying. They simply took Zanzibar and threw it into Halo 3 with about five minutes of tweaking (I know, I know, they put a lot more time into it than that, I’m just trying to make a point). It also feels larger to me than Zanzibar did, am I crazy for that? While not the horrible mess of a remake that Tombstone and Coagulation were, Last Resort is a map that I don’t exactly smile when I see pop up in matchmaking. Although, Team Snipers and Shotty Snipers are at least semi enjoyable on Last Resort.

#48. Desolation

“Ahhh! Enough with the remakes, we get it already!” Is that what you are saying? Guess what, it’s what I’m saying, too. While Derelict wasn’t exactly a map I particularly enjoyed in Halo, Desolation took anything that was really good from it and just took it away. I will say it again; man-cannons don’t equal teleporters. This map made spawn camping a real art form, where all you had to do was simply pick off your opponents as they spawned on the bottom of the map. Oh, what’s that? You don’t have a BR? Well, don’t worry, the guy shooting at you does.

#47. Chill Out

Perhaps Chill Out makes it this low on my list of Halo maps due to the simple fact that I didn’t play a lot of it back in the day. One thing is for sure, this is where this list officially stops being the “worst of” and simply begins to count down to the “best of” Halo maps. Chill Out didn’t really have much wrong of anything wrong with it, however, just never really made it into my list of “most played” during my Halo days. Many will be angered, this I understand especially when you see what made it above Chill Out next…

#46. Chiron TL 34

I think I’m one of maybe five people who actually enjoyed this map. I loved it. Once you learn what leads you where, you can own on this map. But, to be quite honest, it is a pretty ridiculous map, and that has been proven by it being one of only four original Halo maps not to be remade in another Halo game. But, like I stated, I actually had fun playing this map every once in awhile. Definitely not a lot, though.

#45. Damnation

It had a waterfall, how can you go wrong?!? I did enjoy Damnation, with it’s dizzying heights and complicated level design. Although, as original Halo maps go, I don’t seem to have so many fun memories of this map as I do from the others, and for that, it sits near the bottom of the list.

#44. Derelict

Semi-fun map, large enough to be able to sneak around on, but not large enough to where you felt like you were lost trying to find your opponent. Many a night during a LAN party this was a great alternate to the hour-long Blood Gulches and crazy rocket games of Longest and Prisoner. At least Derelict was more fun than it’s remake.

#43. Battle Creek

Everything this map did, it’s successor did better. That is my #1 reason for it placing as low in this list as it has. While Battle Creek was fun, I never really got into the small map located in a hole in the ground on God-Knows-Where, that is until Halo 2 came out. Battle Creek was a great idea, two bases closely located, with little room to maneuver and yet so many points to attack from. Good map, just had the sad fact of a better successor.

#42. Waterworks

Now while most seemed to hate Waterworks, it did have it’s moments. A good map for large sized parties, with its multiple points of entry and even the ability to reign down terror from above, albeit from a banshee or a falling stalagmite from the cave’s ceiling, Waterworks worked wonders for BTB. The few times I did play BTB during Halo 2’s run on Xbox Live, Waterworks was always a welcome addition to our list of laggy games.

#41. Blackout

Much like trying to figure out what’s really going on between Brett Favre and the Packers, trying to deduce what went on behind closed doors (or at least beyond the watchful eye of their deep-voiced security guard) with Bungie when they decided to create this map is impossible. But honestly, who’s idea was it to just throw on some paint and call it Blackout? It’s a different game, and because it is a different game, Blackout does not feel like Lockout. It feels like someone took a copy of a copy, then copied it some more, and passed it off as the real thing. I will take a reimagining or “spiritual successor” like Guardian over a “fresh paint job” like Blackout any day.

#40. Rat Race

First thing that comes to mind when I think of Rat Race: You could shoot down the power ups! Your opponent is up top, waiting patiently for the overshield to spawn. Just as it does, it magically tumbles to the ground with them chasing after it, only to find you, shields-a-chargin’, ready to add another point to your kill count. A fun map for its time, but I feel as if I were in Halo 3, it would need so much more to make it enjoyable. But back in the day, when it was only you and your buddy plugging away at Halo multiplayer, it filled the niche. Mostly.

#39. Sandtrap

Perhaps this map will continue to climb up this list as I begin to play more BTB, but until then, it sits closer to the bottom then the top. Sandtrap has a lot going for it, and really only one large blemish against it: The Elephant. An idea that probably looked great on the drawing board, but when it becomes playable, it just doesn’t feel right. I would have greatly preferred to have the flag/bomb point somewhere either behind the giant, towering structure, or even within it.

#38. High Ground

Oh, High Ground. One would think that another sweet asymmetrical map like Zanzibar, just smaller and squeezed into a small canyon might be fun. And it is, kinda. I can’t say I hate High Ground, but when it comes to a list of my favorite Halo 3 maps (kinda like this list!), it definitely takes a plunge toward the bottom of the list. Perhaps in the LAN environment, where teams of equally skilled and sized players face off in a real, true test of “we want to win!” this map might be fun. But, when it comes to Xbox Live, I seem to not enjoy this map as much as most. The only real game type that I get overly excited for on this map seems to be the Zombies variant that Bungie created and employs during their “Living Dead” weekends. Maybe that’s what they really made this map for.

#37. Gemini

I will always remember Gemini as the map that seemed to almost break MLG. Now I know that’s nowhere near a true statement, but that’s how it felt when, I believe it was Final Boss (or STK, or whatever name they were calling themselves at the time) decided to show the entire world how one sided this map truly could be. Now, bear with me: Go to the back of the map, where the teleporter and two sliding doors are. Now, have the sword man guard the teleporter, and have your best sniper jump on his head and then jump on top of the teleporter. Now put a player at each door. Total Domination, nuff said. Other than this, I found this map semi enjoyable. But I just can’t get that image out of my head.

#36. Colossus

Think you can get a flag to bounce 50 feet? Well, we did on this map. Not to mention the fact that, due to the spawn placement, if played right, you can seriously cause the other team some heartache. Put that aside and you still had a very cool map, that had a bridge sometimes… and no bridge other times (Always seemed to confuse me. Yes, I know… I confuse easily). If you think about it, minus the giant lower level in the middle of the map, you could make this map in Foundry. Or has someone already done that? Oh well. Team Snipers worked well on this map (minus the aforementioned spawn trap), as did most 2 flag variants, although they sometimes lasted hours. I can honestly say that I was able to get a few decent montage-worthy clips from this map. Sadly, I think that is the best I can say for it.

#35. Turf

A lot of people enjoyed Turf. I was not on that list. I liked the concept, but wanted it on a much larger scale. Add to that the aspect of people superbouncing (or simply knowing where to jump) to the top of the level, and it slides down my list of favorite maps. While bomb games were semi fun, I wasn’t all that big on assault variants on Turf. Team Slayer was enjoyable, but, especially in the later times of Halo 2’s life span, people chilling on the top of the level started to cause my skin to grow goose bumps every time it showed up in matchmaking.

#34. Avalanche

Not quite as good as its predecessor, but nonetheless fun Avalanche is a map crying to be played on BTB. Perfectly set up for either double sided or single sided objective based games, I seem to crack a smile whenever it shows up on my matchmaking playlist. Although I haven’t had a lot of time to play on this map, I’m sure it will continue to climb up my list of favorites as time goes on.

#33. Rat's Nest

Anyone up for a race? I love it when Bungie takes a level almost directly out of the single player campaign, or at least tries to draw most of its inspiration from the single player experience. Rat’s Nest originally wasn’t something I enjoyed, but has since then slowly crept up my list of favorites. A map where you can’t really make it to the other teams base without running into someone, and if you can, it’s a miracle (or the other team are morons), Rat’s Nest is almost as simple as it gets, and yet still finds a way to be fun.

#32. Burial Mounds

While it could turn into a spawn camping death trap on single sided objective games (which would have been easily solved with the advent of today’s Forging), Burial Mounds still made for great one sided objective based games. I loved the strategy when on offense and playing CTF of simply driving the warthog up to the front of the base, letting your passenger out to jump from on top of the warthog into the base, grab the flag and simply jump back into the vehicle and ride home for the cap. Sadly, it usually didn’t end that way. Also fun was charging for the rockets which were centrally located as to not really give either side an advantage for them. Burial Mounds holds a special place in my heart. Just please don’t remake it, I’ll probably begin to remember something bad about it, and I don’t want that.

#31. Beaver Creek

One of the few remakes I enjoyed, Beaver Creek was a fun map for 4v4 CTF and assault, although I preferred CTF myself. Just as fun were Team Slayer and SWAT, which seemed to end most of the time with people camping the top of the bases and the sniper ledge. Just like Burial Mounds, however, I hope to never see this map in Halo 3, if only for the reason that I don’t want any bad memories to be stirred up that are huddling at the back of my mind, always managing to escape the grasp of my ever reaching memory.

#30. Sidewinder

I loved driving a warthog on ice; it was almost as fun as driving a real car in the snow! To be honest, I never really played a lot of object games on Sidewinder, instead it was usually Team Slayer, or even 1v1 slayer. And let me tell you, it was fun. A great instance of where large and scary does equal fun. And those fun memories are the reason why it makes it higher than its spiritual successor on my list of favorites.

#29. Cold Storage

I would have said that this map was another answer to squelch the clamoring masses of MLG fan boys begging for their pistol back (because we all know it eventually boils down to that) if it weren’t for the fact that I know that Bungie was discussing this remake from day one. Once this map makes it into greater circulation in matchmaking, I’m sure it will climb higher on my list, but, for now, Cold Storage can sit pretty knowing I like it more than Avalanche.

#28. Backwash

Did this map actually disappear from matchmaking? Like Seaquest DSV, waaaaaaayyy after it actually happened, I turned around and asked that very question (come on, who doesn’t like talking dolphins, way too large underwater ships and space aliens???). Backwash was such a great idea, and quite moody! This map made playing swords enjoyable for probably the first time for me. Sadly, it left us too soon, I guess due to some environmental glitch or something… I don’t know, don’t ask me, I’m not a weatherman… no wait, I am…

#27. Headlong

A level that really reminded me more of a city on the planet of the Auto-bots than something to be found on Earth (then again, I’m not from the future), I probably spent more time playing Headlong trying to get on top of the map with friends during custom games then I did in actual matchmaking. It’s single sided objective games were fun, although the Sniper matches did make my skin begin to crawl and my blood boil (that means I didn’t like them). One thing I think someone should try to do: make Headlong out of Lego’s. Ready, GO!

#26. Foundation

Snipers no shields. That was the game to be played on Foundation. Get a good ten people in the match, make four teams, and go at it. So much fun. Foundation was so simple, and yet worked on so many levels. Whether you played FFA, two teams, or even multiple teams, objective or FFA, this map was fun. Except for Zombies. I don’t care what all of you clamoring fan boys tell me, charging over and over again into a highly barricaded room only to be shot in the head was not fun. Unless you had limited ammo, then I was all about it.

#25. Containment

Until I went to compile this list of all the maps from Halo to Halo 3 (minus the PC exclusives), I had completely forgotten about this map. Which was a shame, because I remember a lot of fun games on Containment. Mainly hailed it as the sequel to Sidewinder, Containment was another great map for BTB, with a good smattering of Team Slayer/Team Snipers thrown in for good measure. For never really remembering the map, now that I do I remember happy thoughts about it. Or at least mostly happy thoughts.

#24. Ascension

Speaking of superbouncing, here comes Ascension! And superbouncing wasn’t even it’s number one problem, that award goes to placing a banshee on a level with really no cover and 2v2 gametypes. I enjoyed this map a lot when I wasn’t being superbounced on, whether it be Slayer or Single Flag CTF. And who can forget the most greatest thing Ascension was famous for: Tower of Power. What crack-head came up with this idea? Whoever it was, that was your one good idea, don’t come up with anymore, we don’t want you to hurt yourself.

#23. Wizard

Small, round, with teleporters that no one really knew where you’d end up, Wizard had its niche in my Halo playing days. First it was rocket FFA, and oh it was fun. As a matter of fact, this was the very first level and game type I played of Halo, and it was fun (I think I ended up cowering beside a teleporter in the shadows, trying to pick off unknown passer-byers). Then we found a new crazy gametype: shotguns no shields. Oh the humanity, and hilarity! Wizard was a map where, when you needed a good laugh or brake from serious, hardcore gameplay, you would definitely get it on Wizard.

#22. Isolation

Isolation is a map that has grown exponentially on me. From the beginning, I detested this map, nay, I hated this map. Perhaps it spawns from a simple game of One Flag I played on it, where this famous (well, to me famous) photo was snapped:

(and yes, I am on the losing end of that snapshot) After playing with good teammates a few times on Isolation, I have come to realize that this map isn’t the utter trap that other maps like Snowbound or Foundry are, but rather a map where team work and good communication can go a long way. Also, it’s a map where one section of the map can’t get held on to forever, giving one side an unfair advantage until the timer counts down to zero. After the dust of Halo 3 settles and we move on to our next Bungie created shooter (hint hint, nudge nudge Bungie), Isolation very well may end up in the back of my mind much as Containment did, but for now, I like it. And I hope you do, too.

#21. Valhalla

When I first saw Valhalla, I thought “Wow, someone put Blood Gulch and Timberland together.” Whether this was Bungie’s intention or not, the map turned out great. Perfectly set up for both BTB and even smaller games of 4v4 and 5v5, Valhalla seems to be the right size for any amount of players. From large scale BTB games with heavy vehicles, to just a simple 4v4 game of Shotty Snipers, Valhalla opens its every loving canyon of fun to parties of all sizes. With it’s bases built into a small area, opening up to a rather large center that begs for fire fights to be started, Valhalla is a map that will be fondly remembered for a very long time.

#20. Sanctuary

Sanctuary is another map that I seem to hear quite a few grumblings about for a remake, and to be quite honest, I don’t really know if I’d enjoy it in the Halo 3 environment. However, back in Halo 2’s hay-day, Sanctuary was one of the maps I would always be thrilled to play when it showed up in matchmaking. I have a very fond memory of playing a single bomb assault game against a modder who had the ability to move incredibly fast, and due to his arrogance and want to just mock us during our rounds to attack, we were actually able to win the game 1 to 0. Great memory. But Sanctuary was so much more than that, being another map where you could seemingly play both objective and slayer type games and enjoy yourself equally. With its symmetrical sides and the energy sword waiting in the center for the taking, Sanctuary was a well balanced map that played well and was pretty fun at the same time.

#19. Standoff

Standoff feels to me like someone took Blood Gulch and just smashed the two bases together, putting a rather small road in the middle and blocking it on both sides by rocks. Standoff is one of those maps where you live or die according to your teamwork. So many times in matchmaking I have decided to “go it alone” into DLC Objective or BTB, and just been squashed by the opposing team because we as a team weren’t able to coordinate and work together. The decision not to place a sniper rifle on the level was probably the best thing Bungie could have done for the map, as seen now that we’ve had a couple weekends of Team Snipers and now understand that that weapon really will rule that map. Not to talk bad about Team Snipers on Standoff, which is one of the few maps I feel like I can actually do decent in a game of Team Snipers (maybe my teammates have something else to say about my skill, but they aren’t talking and I am, so… I’m awesome!). I know this is also another “controversial choice,” placing this map ahead of Valhalla. It’s nothing against Valhalla, and I don’t want anyone to think I am taking anything away from Valhalla, I just enjoy this map just a little bit more.

#18. Epitaph

The more and more I play this map, the more I seem to find people who don’t like it. I’m not quite sure why that is, perhaps the shield doors? Epitaph is one of those maps where weapon and power up control are paramount to winning, and because of this, it’s a map where you can begin to feel like the quicksand is quickly pulling you under if you are on the receiving end of it. While I haven’t really played much of anything other than Team Slayer on Epitaph (with the exception of a few FFA/Multiteam KotH games which were semi-enjoyable), I still don’t get that sinking-pit-in-my-stomach that most seem to do when it shows up in matchmaking. Maybe it is because it does emphasize the coordination, teamwork, and good communication skills that I (would like to think I) thrive off of, especially in Team Doubles, that I have such warm feelings for this map. Or maybe I’m just crazy. Either way, I say thank you, Bungie; I love this map.

#17. Warlock

I remember when Bungie said they were going to remake Wizard, I was pretty happy. I had some great memories of Wizard from Halo (as stated previously) and was equally excited for it’s grown up brother to be released. Warlock seems to be the exception to my idea of a simple graphic overhaul and a few simple tweaks here and there. This map seemed to be even better than the original. From the back-and-forth games of Team Slayer, to the balancing act of objective games, Warlock seemed to have something for everyone. Warlock’s only blemishes for me were the games of plasma punchout Bungie decided to subject us to, as well as a very bad memory of playing a modded version of said map in matchmaking (totally subjective for me, I know, but still frustrating none-the-less).

#16. Zanzibar

Zanzibar was the first multiplayer map I can remember seeing from Halo 2. One team spawns on the beach, with vehicles ready to take them to their objective, while the other team spawns in the building, their very own fortress to defend. From a giant door that could be opened from within, to a Camp Froman, where sniping became paramount to our teams victory, Zanzibar was set up for nail biting rounds of CTF and Assault. Later in Halo 2’s life, super bouncing began to chip away at it’ legacy, making it a map that made you cringe when it popped up in matchmaking. But, alas, this map still holds a special place in my heart for those fun filled rounds of CTF and Assault that were played out on the coast of Africa.

#15. Lockout

Lockout was to Halo 2 like Hang ‘Em High was to Halo. Lockout was the elitest map, the map to end all maps. Lockout is map where I could play almost anything on and enjoy it. One of my favorite game types was playing No shields, multiple teams of 2, only BRs, with one life. Epic. I feel Lockout slid down my list of favorite maps in a large part due to Blackout, the map that helped to emphasize my reimagining vs remake mentality. Lockout was something I felt that, at the time of Halo 2, I hadn’t really seen done very well. Most of the maps I enjoyed so much from Halo were simple, with symmetrical layouts and everything really flowing well and making sense. Lockout brought so much more to the table, with different levels and multiple areas to mold into your strong hold. Lockout, for Halo 2, was the map to end all maps, a catch all for almost any game type. (Just not my absolute favorite from Halo 2, but still in the Top 5!) On a side note, my all time favorite thing to play on Lockout was FFA Rocketball, with a time to win of just 30 seconds (60 if you wanted to be there forever!), and as many people as you could get into your party. This game went on forever, and yet was still fun.

#14. Ghost Town

Ah, Ghost Town, the shunned child of the Legendary Map Pack. When Bungie announced the maps that would be included in the Legendary Map Pack, everyone cheered for Avalanche, the reimagining of the classic Halo map Sidewinder, and the entire “pro” community let out a sigh of relief when Blackout was shown, the direct port (with new sparkling wallpaper!) of Lockout from Halo 2. Ghost Town was the map people saw and simply brushed off as the “filler” to an otherwise crowd pleasing DLC package. I remember the first time I played this map in DLC Objective, Single Bomb Assault being the game. This map seriously rocked my world. Not since the first time I played Zanzibar did I feel like a map was so perfectly crafted for one sided game types. With multiple points of entry, a great weapon layout, and a base that wasn’t mind-numbingly hard to defend, this map screamed “play assault on me” like no other map in Halo 3 had for me yet. To be quite honest, I haven’t been interested in assault since its tweaks in Halo 3, but this map brought it back for me. Ghost Town also works wonders for Slayer gametypes, from your run-of-the-mill Team Slayer, to Shotty Snipers and Team SWAT, this map has it all. The only real downside for me is KotH on Ghost Town, which is just about the only reason I will veto this map (especially Hammer Hill).

#13. Boarding Action

Such a simple idea: Two ships floating side by side in space. Maybe this is the brain child from the pirate loving Bungie folk. Think about it, it’s like a pirate ship, pulling in along side it’s prey, preparing to board. Boarding Action was awesome because it felt like a map where you couldn’t hide. Despite the large size, even a 1v1 match (as long as you weren’t on split screen) made you feel like you were walking through a haunted house, just waiting for your opponent to sneak up behind you and assassinate you. Because the Halo pistol had such a long range, even if your opponent was on the opposite side of the map you could still effectively target them. Snipers was another favorite on the map, but even playing a simple slayer match was amazing. The weapon set up on the map was great, with rockets and snipers strategically placed around the map to allow for maximum usage. Definitely a favorite, but definitely one I would have serious doubts about a remake (or even a reimagining) due to the large differences in the original Halo’s game mechanics and Halo 3’s game mechanics.

#12. Hang 'Em High

I think I’m going to be flayed alive for not putting Hang ‘Em High in the Top 10. Sorry guys. Hang ‘Em High is awesome, and is in the Top 5 on this list for the original Halo, mind you. I think the big detractor for me is the fact that I didn’t really play much of any CTF on Hang ‘Em High. After so many countless hours of epic game play on Blood Gulch, the non-symmetrical layout of Hang ‘Em High just never appealed to me. However, this map is freakin’ amazing. Whether Team Slayer or Slayer FFA, this map rocked. This map will hold up as the best example for how awesome the Halo pistol could be. It’s simple, open-air environment, coupled with tall walkways and bases created a false sense of security that was quickly taken away by the pistol’s range. Hang ‘Em High was another one of those maps from the original Halo that helped to create the fun, party-type atmosphere that everyone so fondly remembers from the game.

#11. Longest

“Oooohhh, it’s the Loooooooooooooonnnnnggg Ranger!” This was the battle cry that would not stop once a game of rockets on Longest was loaded up. To be quite honest, we never really played much else on this map. Rockets seemed to satisfy all the needs we had, and once played with rockets, everything else just seemed mundane. Whenever a game of CTF on Blood Gulch got too hot to handle, and tempers began to flare, a game of rockets on Longest always seemed to qualm our fueling anger. After you have nailed an opponent from one end of the hallway to the other, everything else just melts away and that famous phrase leaves your lips. The Long Ranger lives on.

#10. Terminal

The train, the train! Everyone has a story, at least one story, of trying for either the overshield or the sword, and right when they thought they had it… SPLAT! CTF and assault games were the main dish for this map, where things weren’t really balanced but still seemed to make for entertaining times. One of the things that brings this map down was its excessive spawn camping and sniping, hiding above the garage (mostly slayer games), as well as total domination from the wraith at times. But these few blemishes don’t outshine its awesome set up for objective type games.

#9. Prisoner

Nostalgia. I’ve seen many a remake of Prisoner using Forge and Foundry, but none seem to be able to stir up quite the same feelings I got from the original. Rockets was the name of the game mostly, with its towering heights and dizzying walkways, this map seemed to be made from the simple thought of “reigning terror from above.” Later, we discovered CTF games on Prisoner, which were again enhanced by playing Rocket CTF. Oh the memories, the fun, fun memories.

#8. Relic

Again, perhaps a controversial choice on my part, more so I believe due to the fact that it was introduced later in Halo 2’s life cycle, but you didn’t get more epic objective battles in Halo 2 then on Relic. After Halo 2 was released and people began beginning for remakes (hmmm, sounds familiar), one of the immediate maps that came to my mind was Death Island. When Relic came out, it seemed to be Bungie’s long lost answer to my question. Relic’s objective point, placed at the end of a long, tall… well, Relic, required teamwork and determination to bust through the opposing teams defenses and win the round. A little too strong was the sniper’s strangle hold on the map, with long lines of site and little cover on at least one side of the map. However, it’s use of a teleporter than could only be deployed by reaching the defending team’s base and “flipping the switch” was pretty awesome.

#7. Narrows

Perhaps this map is the spiritual successor to Longest, much as Guardian is to Lockout. I mean, I LOVED Longest (as seen by its high placement on my list), and when you really get down to it, this map really does take what was great about that map, and flesh it out. In all honesty, Bungie probably never thought of Narrows and Longest as related in anyway, and I’m probably just crazy. But this map just seeps conflict. Narrows is not a map to hide on (if you forget about the few leap-to-your-death-if-you-don’t-get-it-right spots I try to not think about), where the only way to reach your objective is to run headlong into your opponent. And I love it for that. With man-cannons of doom and it’s bridge (or highway) to hell, this map will always be a personal favorite for me.

#6. Ivory Tower

Oh man, if ever I wanted a reimagining (but not a remake), this always seems to be the big one in the back of my mind every time it comes up. Ivory Tower was a pretty big map when you stop and think about it, but it didn’t really feel all that big when you did stop and think about it. I remember some great CTF/Assault games that were played out on this map. Team Slayer was also a big one, with awesome weapon placement, and those three/four levels (layers) of the map that really loved to screw with your radar. Although, snipers in the trees and even in the snipers loft did get rather annoying. Speaking of said snipers loft; this is where this map started to seem to lose some luster for me. So many Team Slayer/SWAT games seemed to end with one team barricading themselves on the top floor, and it simply turned into “who can hold it the longest.” Still, this is the only blemish on an otherwise wonderful map.

#5. Midship

Ahhhh, and the MLG/fanboys all issue a sigh of relief. I didn’t think, originally when beginning to compile this list in my head, that this map would make it in my Top 5. But I asked myself one question: What maps can I enjoy multiple game types, with both large and small numbers of players, and continue to play on said map for hours on end. And to be quite honest, this map is second only to Blood Gulch in all those categories. So why isn’t it #2 then? Oh, personal preference, obviously. But I digress. Midship was a map where I enjoyed almost anything on. From objective( KotH, CTF, Assault, Oddball) to slayer (Team, Shotty Snipers, Snipers, Swords, Shotties), and could be enjoyed with any number of players (1v1, Doubles, 4v4, and even 16 players). This map, in Halo 2, was definitely one of those maps where, when it came up in matchmaking, I was perfectly happy. And don’t we all just want to be happy in the end?

#4. Construct

Now this is a personal choice that many will find controversial (or just plain wrong), but to be honest, it’s my list, so phooey to you! Alright, but in all seriousness, I really do enjoy this map. The layout is weird, I give you that. I remember the first time I saw the map (someone posted a video from a “bootleg copy” of Halo 3 they got before launch), I remember thinking, that map just doesn’t make sense. But every time I played it, it just gets better and better. My personal preferences for game types on this map are Team Doubles (Slayer) and MLG KotH. But, also not to be forgotten or taken lightly are Team Slayer, Shotty Snipers, or even Zombies. Again, I just find myself enjoying this map more and more every time I play it.

#3. The Pit

When it comes to strategy, team work, and a freaking awesome symmetrical map, the Pit rocks. From flying cones of doom, to sword squatting campers and freaking annoying snipers on the towers, the Pit has it all. This map requires coordination, communication, and overall teamwork in order to best your opponent, while the symmetrical layout allows for a very fair and balanced game. The fact that both teams are separated and can not see each other at the start of play, allowing each side to begin to set up their defense/offense, really helps this map to be one that I try very hard not to veto when it pops up in matchmaking.

#2. Guardian

For myself, Guardian is the near equivalent of Blood Gulch in Halo 3, lacking only the ability to be played on with any number of players (haven’t tried 16 yet, don’t think I want to unless it’s Rocket Ball [see Lockout]). When I jump into matchmaking, no matter what playlist, if Guardian comes up, I’m playing it. Slayer, Swat, Oddball, KotH, MLG (even VIP for crying out loud!), I’m all about this map. This map is the #1 reason I am all about reimagining’s and not remakes, because it really feels like someone said, “Hey, let’s take the essence of what Lockout was, what made that map great, and peel away everything else, then build it from that (and the ground) up. Frickin’ awesome. Merely by the fact that this map is in Halo 3, the game I play 99% of the time, and Blood Gulch isn’t, almost puts it at #1. Almost, but not quite…

#1. Blood Gulch

Ahhhh, good ol’ Blood Gulch. This map tops my list because of its versatility and ability to be played on for hours on end without becoming boring. Weather it was CTF or even a good game of Slayer, whether 4 players or 16, this map was able to entertain. It’s greatest point was playing CTF, where all-nighters were held, with epic flag captures, long range rocket-to-warthog’s where exploded, and where the boys were separated from the men. There’s also a reason this map is at the polar opposite of its red-headed step brother from Halo 2, but that has already been outlined, and I won’t bore you with those details again. Blood Gulch was, and always will be, for me, the best Halo map Bungie has ever made. If someone paid me for all of the countless hours I played this map, I’m pretty sure I’d be one of the richest, if not happiest, Halo geeks on the planet.

Well there you have it, my list of Least Favorite To Favorite Halo Maps. Let me know what you think!

Bandwidth Study

2008-08-04T12:00:00.003-06:00

A while back I mentioned wanting to analyze different games bandwidth usage on Xbox Live. Not long after I made that post, I actually found some software and did the analysis. I've had these graph images on my laptop now for a good 6 months and am just now getting around to posting it.

Anyways, in the graphs, download is marked in green and upload in red. First, lets look at a graph for the game Gears of War.This game isn't known for it's great network code. There are instances where the game lags quite a bit (one of the reasons I sold it). It doesn't look like the bandwidth usage is very high for the game, but it is very inconsistent.

Next is a graph from playing the arcade game Catan.It may look very inconsistent at first, but if you look closely, you'll see a very consistent line for upload and download near the bottom. The spikes in bandwidth are likely due to voice communication in the game. It appears the game uses a very set amount of bandwidth that doesn't vary at all during the game.

Here is a graph from playing Halo 3 in the playlist Big Team Battle (12 players).As you can see, the first part is during the pre-game lobby when not much game data is being transmitted, and the latter part is from during gameplay. Halo 3 is known to have some of the best network code out there for Xbox Live games, handling a myriad of issues that can come up during a game with grace. The bandwidth isn't that much, when compared to other games. A lot of grief players experience during a Halo 3 match isn't due to bandwidth, but more due to latency between different players.

You may not think the bandwidth has been very much so far. Here is a graph from playing Call of Duty 4. The graph illustrates the different bandwidth requirements between when you are hosting a game or not. The first half of the graph is from a Team Deathmatch game where I did not have host. The middle is during the pre-game lobby and the latter half is from when I did have host.

As you can see, there's a big difference in bandwidth requirements when you're host or not. On the other hand, most broadband connections can easily handle that amount of bandwidth with no problem whatsoever. So, you may ask, why don't you get host more often? The game host is likely determined (in most games) not by bandwidth available, but by latency. So, you may have a 50 Mbps connection, but if you're out in the middle of nowhere and the latency is too high, good luck ever getting host.

The Vista Experience

2008-07-27T00:50:00.001-06:00

Okay, so I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my PC to Windows Vista this last week. No, I didn't mistype there as I consider it an upgrade from XP. I really have to laugh when I hear the criticism about Vista. Sure, there might be a few compatibility issues with some very specific hardware or some backwards compatibility issues with older software, but those type of issues are always there when upgrading to a newer version of an operating system. The funniest thing about the criticism about Vista is I usually hear it from people who have no clue what they're talking about. They aren't IT professionals or even people who have upgraded themselves to Vista. The criticism is usually from people who read something somewhere on the internet and decided to pass it on, usually from a misinformed or biased source.

Getting your PC & Windows information from Apple is like going to Toyota and asking them if they think buying a Dodge truck is a good idea. Of course they'll tell you their product is better. A lot of people don't quite understand that upgrading your operating system is only a good idea if you're also upgrading your hardware too. Microsoft designs their operating systems to work on certain hardware specifications. Running an OS on lower grade hardware will only result in a lower grade experience.

Windows 98 was designed to run on a 66 MHz processor with 16MB memory. Windows XP was designed to run on a 300 MHz processor with 128 MB memory. Vista's minimum requirements are a 1.5 GHz processor and 256 MB memory. Again, those are minimum specifications. In my experience, any operating system needs at least 4 times the minimum specs to get a good experience out of it. When I ran Windows XP I had at least 1 GB of memory, 8 times the minimum requirements and I never had performance problems with it. I've seen some people try to run XP on the minimum specs before...it's not a pretty sight. The main reason I held off upgrading to Vista was I wanted to have my computer upgraded to the levels where I could be sure performance wouldn't suffer. Too many people out there think Vista isn't good because they try to run it on the same hardware they ran XP on. That's just not a good idea. Some people don't like Vista because they need to upgrade their hardware just to be able to install it. To use the latest and greatest operating system you're going to need the latest and greatest hardware. That's just a fact about software. If you're okay with old hardware, then stick with an older operating system. But if you're going to insist on upgrading to the newest operating system, don't whine because you need to upgrade some parts to be able to run it (CPU, memory, video card, etc.).

Now that I've had Vista for a week or so, I have it configured the way I want it. I've got my User Access Control (UAC) configured the way I like it. I've got my software installed. All the applications I used on XP installed just fine on Vista. The only issue I had was with Nero (DVD & CD burning software). I had to get the newest version of it because the version I had was written before Vista existed and hadn't been designed for it. That wasn't such a big deal. All my hardware works fine with no incompatibility issues whatsoever.

Sure there are different choices out there when choosing an operating system for your new computer. People need to stop listening to advertising campaigns and go with what they need and what suits them. I chose Microsoft's operating system because
a) I like to play PC games (there just isn't a market out there for non-Windows games)
b) I write software for Windows based PC's.
c) I'm already familiar with how Windows works and am comfortable with it.
If all I did was browse the internet, check my email, and use a word processing program then almost any operating system out there would suit my needs. Computers have been able to do that basic functionality for the last ten years, so any old PC would work.

My main reasons against using a Linux based computer is the learning curve associated with Linux. Yeah, I've used Linux machines before and I could probably handle the switch okay, but I don't think my wife would enjoy switching over. As for using an Apple product, I just can't justify having to buy an entire new system every time I wanted to upgrade my computer. This last upgrade I just had to upgrade my CPU, memory and video card -- that's it. With Apple, if you want to upgrade your operating system you're going to basically just have to junk your current system and buy a whole new one from them. That's another thing I can't stand with Apple, is that they are the makers of both the hardware and the software. With a PC, Microsoft makes my operating system, but has no say in what hardware I use. Apple doesn't want you using 3rd party hardware to run their software. They basically want a monopoly on your computing experience.

Overall though I'm very pleased with Vista. The interface works superbly. For anyone who is already familiar with Microsoft operating systems, you're going to love Vista (provided you have the right hardware). The sidebar is very handy to have. If you have never used a PC before and are looking at getting your first one ever, then look at what you're going to do with it and decide on that. Just ignore the TV ads when trying to decide. No matter who puts them out, they tend to be very biased (that's the point, isn't it?).

And on a final note, I had to laugh when I saw Microsoft's new advertising campaign for their new operating system that launches July 29th. Essentially, they showed people who had previously bought into the Apple 'Get a Mac' ads (entertaining, but mostly flat out lies about PC's) the new operating system and then asked them what they thought of it. The people loved it. Then the Microsoft guys told them it was actually Vista. Funny, eh?

Why I hate hurricanes

2008-07-24T09:47:00.000-06:00

Sure, I guess hurricanes aren't the most lovable of things, but I really hate them for reasons that are mine and mine alone. It isn't the strong wind, pounding rain or massive destruction they cause. No, it isn't that. I've been through stuff like that. Growing up on a tropical island I've had my fair share of tropical storms and typhoons. We even lost a Thanksgiving turkey one year due to the power getting knocked out by Storm Zelda (Yes, that is the coolest name for a tropical cyclone ever).

No, the reason I hate hurricanes is a purely selfish reason. As you probably noticed in this earlier post, my Xbox 360 died and had to be sent in to Microsoft for repairs. Microsoft, in their all-knowing wisdom, decided that their repair facility would be in southern Texas, right in the path of most hurricanes that develop in the Gulf of Mexico. So, this last week I mailed my Xbox 360 off to Microsoft and got this in the UPS tracking notes.

ADVERSE WEATHER CONDITIONS / THE MOVEMENT OF THE PACKAGE WILL RESUME AS SOON AS THE WEATHER CONDITIONS ALLOW

So, that is my main reason for hating hurricanes, especially Hurricane Dolly.

Mere

2008-07-24T09:17:00.001-06:00

As it turns out, one of my friends actually went and got famous. My friend Kyle plays bass guitar for a band Mere. Recently they were selected to be part of the official Team USA Olympic Soundtrack. So, just to reassure everyone that I'm not, as Kyle puts it, "a communist who hates Team USA" I've included the support pic on my blog for the time being.

Red Ring of Death

2008-07-14T17:57:00.003-06:00

That phrase has come to mean the inevitable death of an Xbox 360 console. It seems Microsoft went cheap in trying to get the initial release of consoles on the market, and in doing so, sacrificed quality on some key parts. It's almost inevitable that if you own an Xbox 360 that this will eventually happen to you. At least I have the hope that Microsoft extended their warranty on consoles presenting the Red Ring of Death error and that I will get mine fixed at no cost. It just means I'll be without my 360 for at least two weeks.

Maybe I'll cut that short and go out and purchase a second 360 while waiting for the first one to get repaired. We can put the second one in our bedroom with a wireless network adapter and then use it as a video playing machine (I've backed up tons of DVD videos to our PC).

What's Your FPS Strategy?

2008-07-06T02:25:00.003-06:00

In a first person shooter (FPS) video game, there are many playing styles favored by different people. Whatever style you choose to play with has its advantages and disadvantages. But all styles come down to two basic strategies, offense and defense. For offense you want to maximize your capabilities and for defense you want to minimize your vulnerabilities.

Run & Gun - This type of player usually favors rapid fire, highly effective weapons, maximizing their offensive capabilities. Not much is used for defense here, except the element of surprise. This type of player likes to spend their game constantly moving, relying on their quick reaction time to dominate any encounter they may face when running around a corner or into a room. For those players with great reflexes this can be a very effective style of play.

Stealth - This type of player favors silent weapons when available. They prefer not just to surprise their opponents, but to overcome them before they even know they've been attacked. This player uses as much defensive capability as possible to remain hidden and undetected. Many games offer this type of player the ability to mask themselves from opponents' detection using camouflage or radar jamming.

Sniper - This type of player prefers the long range encounter. This may be due to exceptional prowess with long range weapons or just because they like a slower paced game. This style of play also makes it very important to remain undetected, not by stealth, but by distance. This type of player can be easily overwhelmed by a 'Run & Gun' player if encountered in close quarters.

Camping - This type of player needs teamwork to be effective. In a FPS game, the matches are on a closed area. There is only so much space to work with. With all the obstacles on a game map, there arises natural choke points--common areas that players come through. This type of player prefers to find those locations and let their prey come to them. Camping doesn't require any specific type of weapon to be effective. You can camp with long, medium, or close range weapons, they all work. But this playing style does have the significant disadvantage of being very predictable. Once a camper is recognized, using longer range or explosive weapons should easily remove them from their campsite.

In my opinion, these are the four basic styles of game play exhibited by all gamers in one form or another. Some players prefer to use one style of play for an entire match, while others like to switch it around depending on their situation. No single playing style is better or worse than another. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages. The key is recognizing what style your opponent is using and what best to counter with.

My FPS Gaming Style

2008-07-06T02:09:00.000-06:00

Back when I was in high school I went to a basketball camp at a major university. The coach there made a statement that has stuck with me to this day. He said "I'll tell you the secret to winning every game you ever play in, against any team. Just score one more point than your opponent." That's it. That's all it takes. Sure, the coach was talking more about free throws than anything else, but that motto can be applied to any type of competition where score is kept, including video games.

My preferred style of gameplay, when I'm with the right teammates, is camping. Camping takes advantage of that simple strategy the coach laid out so long ago -- just score one more point than the other team. Almost every game nowadays has a time limit attached to it. There's nothing requiring me to reach the maximum kill limit in a game. I just have to have one more point than my opponents when time expires. When we have a good team that can communicate well, camping works best, especially when our opponents (almost always) fail to recognize that we are camping and don't use a different strategy to counter ours. All too often we find ourselves sitting in front of a doorway that our opponents repeatedly feel they need to run through, dying on our bullets over and over again.

Diablo 3 Announced!

2008-06-28T04:40:00.003-06:00

So, I stayed up a bit late tonight playing video games, watching movies and television. Around 3 AM I was browsing online when I noticed that the Blizzard Entertainment Worldwide Invitational starts live broadcasting online at 3:45 AM (it's in Paris). This week there's been hype around some big announcement Blizzard is supposed to make at the event. I figured that if there's a big announcement it will likely come in the beginning, so I decided to stay up a bit longer and listen in.

4:00 am MST
Mike Morheim - President of Blizzard Entertainment
Opened up with a generic 'thank you for making this a great event' speech. Reminded us that last year they announced Starcraft 2 at the Worldwide Invitational. Proceeded to show us a cheesy video of last year's highlights in South Korea with reggae music, of all things, as the background soundtrack. With a little dramatic prelude, he then announced that Blizzard's newest game is, as many speculated, Diablo 3.

4:15 am MST
Diablo 3 Trailer shown.

4:30 am MST
Jay Wilson - Lead Designer on Diablo 3
Narrated Diablo 3 demo
Characters still say the cheesy lines when entering an area (Barbarian "The sun has never shown here"). The graphics look much improved. The general aerial view is maintained as it was in Diablo 2. Some previous characters from Diablo 2 show up in Diablo 3 (guess who). At least this time around your character is smart enough to tell him to just shut up.

Cain: "Stay awhile and ..." (interrupted)
You: "It is time for shedding our enemies blood, not time for idle talk."
Cain: "Oh, whatever"

During the demo he goes through different classes. One of the new ones is the witch doctor. One new skill (similar to fire wall or bone wall)...zombie wall. Also, classes can be either male or female.

Overall, it was a great presentation. The demo was awesome. This is probably the only game that will pull me away from console gaming for any significant period of time (only a few months or so). Sadly, no announcement was made regarding a release date. Considering that they had a working demo, I wouldn't be surprised if it was later this year.

Blizzard Entertainment Worldwide Invitational

2008-06-28T03:30:00.000-06:00

Finally....

2008-06-26T13:26:00.003-06:00

When Microsoft first released the Xbox 360, it was plagued with problems. Something to do with overheating and faulty hardware. Whatever the problem was, it resulted in a lot of people having to return their gaming console to get it replaced. This was good in that the user now had a new console to play their games on. It also created new problems, in that online purchases made and licensed on the old console were not able to be used on the new console without repurchasing the downloads.

Microsoft finally released today a DRM (Digital Rights Management) transfer tool on Xbox.com that allows users to transfer their licenses to another console. This means you won't have to repurchase all those Rock Band tunes you downloaded. Even though this new tool leaves a lot to be desired in usability, the functionality is there. Oh well, I guess Microsoft can't get everything right on the first round (or second, third, ...).

Camping Fundamentals

2008-06-24T10:00:00.000-06:00

Many people wonder what it takes to enjoy the outdoors. Here are a few suggestions for making the most of your next camping trip.

Survey the area

Get to know the area you're going to be camping in. Learn the layout of the land. It's helpful to know landmarks and obstacles that can obstruct your view of the lovely scenery. Knowing the area you'll be camping in will make your outdoor adventure all that more enjoyable.

Pitch Your Tent

Pick a good location as you're going to be spending quite a bit of time there. Make sure to pick someplace on high ground, preferably with a view. After all, isn't that why you went camping? Don't pitch your tent too close to someone else's tent. Going camping is about enjoying the outdoors and getting away from other people.

Protect Your Site

There's nothing that ruins a camping trip more than an unwanted guest. Animals (and other annoyances) like to wander into your campsite. One option to keep them out is to put your food storage in a bear bag and raise it into a nearby tree. Personally, I'm much more a fan of just laying down a few claymore mines in your vicinity. Either way, it should keep the pests out and allow you to enjoy your camping experience.

Enjoy the Outdoors

Camping is all about spending time with nature and leaving civilization behind. Whatever you do, don't let civilization follow you. While camping you may witness other people trying to come and take your camping spot from you. Protect your little piece of nature with everything you have. I suggest either a Barret .50 caliber sniper rifle, a silenced M-4 Carbine, or maybe just a good old fashioned standard military issue KA-BAR.

Fishing with Dynamite

2008-06-19T02:06:00.006-06:00

Well, tonight I decided to play some Call of Duty 4 with some friends online. After a few games we managed to get a full party together and play some Team Deathmatch. Usually we play pretty well together, but tonight was something different. We played awesome together. By the time I finally had to call it quits to go get some sleep (and post this) my winning streak was up to 50 games (and Yelzan had it beat at 51). Maybe tomorrow night or Friday I'll try to extend it.

...for those wondering about the blog title, Call of Duty 4 is commonly shortened to CoD...and cod is a type of fish

The Ugly Side

2008-06-18T01:16:00.000-06:00

Every society has an ugly side to it, whatever that may be. The sad truth of it though is that when forced to face it, most realize that the ugly part of their society isn't just some small minority, but usually tends to be the large majority. Today's modern communication systems allow for online gaming on a scale never before realized. When joining this online gaming community, it's like jumping head first into the deep end of the ugly side of society's pool.

The fact that there is absolutely no identification available to others beyond what information you choose to put up with your own gamer information, opens people up to the realized freedom to say whatever they want. This freedom (and sad reality that people choose to exercise it) is a clear window to the ugly side of our society, a side that will likely turn out to be more of a majority than we would like to admit. While most people who meet someone on the street, face to face, will act with some amount of mutual respect towards each other, the same cannot be said of online gamers. Often times the first words out of a gamers mouth in a new encounter are laced with profane, sexist, racist and homophobic remarks.

As G4's Adam Sessler comments in this video, there is no reason for this type of behavior. Just because someone on the other team chose to camp an area because that was their best strategy against you isn't reason enough to hate them for it. Since when did Run & Gun become the only strategy to use in shooters? There are no rules as to how to play FPS games..you just play them. Whoever has the most kills in the end is the winner, no matter how they got them (except by the obvious system manipulations which ruin the game for everyone). There's no need to whine and complain when you get beat. Just grow a pair and be man enough to say Good Game to the other guy and go your separate ways. Even after the Boston Celtics dismantled the LA Lakers in the NBA Finals last night, Kobe Bryant was man enough to go over and congratulate the other team. Kind of sad that most gamers today aren't man enough to even do that.

Firefox 3 Released

2008-06-17T11:00:00.003-06:00

Today is the release date for Firefox 3. Starting at 10 AM PDT today, Mozilla is going to try and set a world record for the most software downloads in a single 24 hour period. For those who don't know what Firefox is, it's basically your run of the mill web browser with a lot of enhancements to make it by far the best one on the market. If you're still using Microsoft's Internet Explorer...I'm sorry.

Firefox doesn't present the security flaws that are built into Microsoft IE. Maybe it's just me, but I don't like my web browser so tightly intertwined with my operating system. Firefox also renders web pages (converts the HTML code to the stuff you see on your screen) a lot better and more accurate than almost any web browser out there.

For those wanting to see the new cool features of Firefox 3, here's a great screencast that demonstrates them.

Cognitive Surplus

2008-06-16T10:56:00.003-06:00

This is a great video of a presentation given at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco earlier this year. Clay Shirky gives a great explanation (plausible) as to the reasons behind the explosion of user created content on the web and the immersion everyone is experiencing with social networking sites. Enjoy.

The Machines Are Alive

2008-06-05T17:38:00.007-06:00

I swear the more processors and memory we put into our computers, the more likely the are to come to life, if they haven't already. Processing power has grown so fast that most PC's can handle workloads that weren't even imaginable ten years ago. Just the other day I had my computer at home ripping a DVD, converting videos to another format, uploading a data backup file, recording live TV, using VoIP, streaming video my Xbox 360, and playing a video game -- all at the same time, without even so much as a hiccup.

With all this new computing power at our fingertips, I'm amazing our computers haven't started talking back to us yet. Then again, that's likely a software issue. But I am willing to say that I've seen some technology start to take on personal attitudes, if only at a base level. Where I work, the developers all share a common network enabled printer. It gets used fairly regularly by all of us. After a few weeks we've all started to notice that our printer seems to have something against one of the developers, and against him only. In the year or so that I've been there, I've yet to have a problem with that printer. Every time I use it, it works flawlessly. The same goes for almost all the developers, except this one guy. For him, the printer likes to give a 'Paper Jam' error message on a large percentage of his printouts. When you check the printer, there is no paper jam. You just open one of the trays and close it again and all is fine.

The last few weeks we've tracked how often this happens. For all the other developers we get that error about one in fifty. For the unfortunate guy, he gets it about four in five printouts. It doesn't matter what time of day, how many pages, what tray he prints from, or from what PC he initializes his printouts, it always seems to give that bogus error message for him and him alone. Every time it happens we can all hear his verbal frustrations and almost on cue, the entire development team bursts out laughing. If the printer doesn't learn it's place, it may find itself in the same position that unfortunate printer did in the movie Office Space.

Wanted: Original Content

2008-05-28T15:00:00.001-06:00

So, yesterday I received the latest issue of the Official Xbox Magazine (OXM) in the mail. I spent a few minutes to read through the articles and advertisements about new and upcoming games. My biggest complaint I have after reading that is the severe lack of original game content being produced. Almost every single game I read about in the magazine was either a game based off of a feature film or television show, a game that was a sequel to a previously released game, or a sports game. It's almost as if the creativity people at game studios went on strike and the developers just kick out tried and proven ideas. The only problem with everyone releasing games based off previously successful ideas is that it gets old real quick.

Just looking at the Top Live Titles for Xbox Live this last week, only one game can be seen as 'original'. It also happens to be the oldest game on the list and it's still at #6 most played (Gears of War), attesting to its success. Game studios seem to just look for hit games and then try to copy them. While that may be financially all well and good for some (Call of Duty, Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, Grand Theft Auto), the parade of sequels and knock offs can't last forever.

Another thing that I just don't get is the need for every major movie release to be accompanied by a video game. I mean, if I want to be enterained with that particular storyline, I'll go watch the movie. If I want to play a shooter, RPG, or whatever style of game it is, I'm sure there are better, more original games than the ones based off of a movie.

Sports games are another genre that just gets rehashed over and over. Almost every sports game is eerily similar to every other sports game out there for whatever sport it is. It doesn't matter if I play Madden 08 or NCAA 08...they're basically the same game with just different decorations. While I enjoy the friendly competition involved with sports games, I think developers are missing out on a good opportunity here. Why not branch the sports genre with the RPG (role playing game) genre (or other genre)? I'm sure fans of sports aren't just fascinated with the athletic abilities their role models posses, but with their lifestyle as well. Why not use other genres to explore that?

The seemingly unending flood of sports, movie and sequel games has left me wanting more from my video games. There are more games coming out now than ever before, and yet, I can't find a single one out there worth purchasing right now. It's not that game studios need to come up with a new genre of game or style of play, but just get some good original content. Give me something to be intrigued about when I play the game. Generic war shooters with generic bad guys to shoot at isn't fun anymore. If you're going to base a game off of a movie, don't just remake the movie in game form. Give the game it's own original story based in the fictional universe of the movie. Don't just retell the movie story through my Xbox. I really do like playing video games, but I don't play just to click buttons. I play to be entertained. I want to be entertained. Unless game studios finally decide to get some original content creators involved I foresee my Xbox devolving into just an expensive DVD player.

In news of the stupid...

2008-05-22T13:51:00.003-06:00

Have you ever seen the commercials for Lifelock, an identity theft prevention service? They're the ones where Lifelock spokesman and CEO Todd Davis starts off the commercial by stating his real social security number and then tells you how secure he knows his identity is secure because of Lifelock. Well, in what had to have been expected by most of the intelligent world, news broke today that Mr. Todd Davis' identity has been stolen. Can't say I didn't see that one coming...

Grand Theft Auto

2008-05-15T17:41:00.000-06:00

First off, let me premise this post by stating that I have not played the game Grand Theft Auto 4 at all. I'm not going to make the mistake of reviewing the game when I haven't taken the time to sit down and play it. Instead, this post is about why I haven't played the game and a review of the other reviews I've seen of the game.

Whenever new games come out I have to make the decision as to whether or not I'm going to purchase the game. I consider myself an avid gamer with a wide range of gaming tastes. Different factors affect my decision, such as reviews I read, friends' recommendations, trailers I watch, game rating, and game genre. I try to pick games that I can play anytime, whether my family is in the room or not. With that said, GTA4 failed to meet that criteria and thus, I did not purchase the game. While I'm sure GTA 4 is a well designed game with many of the criteria met that I discussed in previous posts as to what makes a good game, the content of the game itself didn't meet my own personal standard. I didn't make the decision because of what some crazed lunatic said on national television. I made the decision on what I feel is best for me and my family.

Many in the media try to lay the blame for societal problems at the feet of video game developers. If there's a school shooting, many jump to the conclusion that a video game caused it. The morality of video games keeps coming up in the media with each successive game release. [link] Government legislative bodies keep trying to pass legislation to restrict the distribution of these games and almost every time the laws get shot down as unconstitutional. [link] The funniest part about all this is that the games in question all have content less controversial than most prime time network television shows, yet no one is making a fuss over that.

To be blunt, many out there need to sit down and take a chill pill. Stop trying to legislate the gaming industry. Let the free market do that for you, the way it did with the movie industry. Nobody is yelling about passing laws to prevent kids from buying R-Rated movies because retailers already enforce that policy. Most retailers are moving in that direction with M-rated video games as well. The media are also incorrectly assuming that because GTA 4 is so successful that it must mean lots of kids are playing it. What they fail to realize is that the average age of video game players today is somewhere around thirty years old. GTA 4 is a game that is actually appealing to many adults. I just did a check of my Xbox Live friends list and noticed that almost every single adult on that list has played GTA 4, yet when I checked those who I know are minors, all but one or two has NOT played the game. This tells me that for the most part the ratings system is working. Adults are buying and playing the M-rated games and kids are not. Those few kids that are playing the M-rated games are likely getting their parents to buy it for them. That's not a problem for the government, retailers or gaming industry to concern itself over. If parents want to let their children play M-rated games, that's their decision. No laws should be passed to prevent that.

Overall, I think GTA 4 is probably a very well made game. Due to the content I chose not to purchase the game. The media and government need to keep their noses out of individual citizens' decisions to purchase games when it's fully within their rights to do so. While I may not choose to play this game, I can only look forward to other games that do meet my criteria which will be of similar quality as Grand Theft Auto 4.

What makes a good game? (Part 4)

2008-05-14T14:22:00.002-06:00

I've hit a few points of what I consider key components of a good video game in recent posts. The is the last post on the topic. While I consider these required for a game to be good, that doesn't mean the game won't be successful or profitable. These are mainly just characteristics of games that I've noticed have stuck around longer than others, games that people tend to play more often than others. The last component I feel needs to be included for a game to be good is realism.

Part 4

Realism isn't that the game reflects real life physics, but that would be nice. When I talk of game realism I mean that the game reacts the way you would expect it to. If a FPS game is going to put in a sniper rifle alongside a battle rifle, the sniper better have a much longer range than the battle rifle. If a rocket launcher is present, it better cause a lot of damage. With newer games, developers are even able to implement destructible environment. This means if I shoot a bridge with a rocket, the bridge better collapse.

Game developers need to first and foremost establish a law of physics for their games. Once that law has been established, they need to abide by it. One of the first things players will do when they get a game (besides playing through the storyline) is to test the limits of the game's physics. If a game reacts the way players expect it to, within whatever rules of the game exist, players will be able to enjoy the game more. If unexpected results happen, the game becomes to unpredictable and therefore un-enjoyable.

What makes a good game? (Part 3)

2008-05-14T13:27:00.003-06:00

For online games this part is probably the most important part a game studio has to worry about getting right. Multiplayer functionality can easily make or break a game. The game may have a great storyline, but if the multiplayer aspect isn't there, a lot of incentive to pick up the game and play it goes out the window after the initial play through.

Part 3

There are two basic types of multiplayer functionality. There is player vs player (PvP) or player vs machine (PvM). While not totally necessary to have both aspects in a game, having both does increase the quality of the game, so long as they're done right.

In PvM multiplayer, players work together against the game itself. This is usually done in a cooperative version of game's single player campaign or done in role playing games. The benefit of this is that players are able to work with their friends towards the common goal. Some people don't enjoy the competitive nature of PvP games and are much more drawn to PvM multiplayer. PvM multiplayer also allows game developers to add in more storyline content that can only be accessed via PvM play, thus encouraging players to enjoy that aspect of the game.

In PvP multiplayer games, players are pitted against each other. This is very common in first person shooters (FPS) and fighting games. In fact, some FPS games are strictly PvP with no single player or PvM to speak of (Shadowrun). PvP multiplayer is probably the most important aspect of a game that developers need to get right. If the interface is awkward or ineffective, players just won't use it. With different broadband internet speeds between players, the game needs to take that into account and adjust for it. If done incorrectly the game can be filled with lag and the overall experience for players is worsened. To date, probably the most successful and efficient PvP multiplayer game on the market has to be Halo 3. The party system implemented along with their matchmaking system to pit similarly skilled players against each other has yet to be equaled by other game developers.

For a game to be considered a good game, I feel it needs to implement some form of multiplayer functionality. Whether it be PvM or PvP or both, something needs to be there. Games that don't put in some form of multiplayer support tend to start collecting dust after the initial glow wears off. Granted, just having it there doesn't make the game successful. Poorly implemented multiplayer can also kill a game's success.

New Gamerpic

2008-05-09T13:52:00.002-06:00

Some may have noticed my new gamerpic. Those that know me know that I am neither a Pepsi nor a Coke man. I stick with the good stuff. One of these days I'll make the pilgrimage to Dublin, Texas to taste the real good stuff.

What makes a good game? (Part 2)

2008-05-05T09:21:00.002-06:00

This is part two of a recent blog post I started about characteristics of a good video game. My last post was about the storyline. While storyline is vital in making a good game that will be enjoyed by many, other characteristics are just as important.

Part 2

Replay Ability
A lot of game studios out there are very capable of making good games. Unfortunately, many of them don't due to one key characteristic they leave out or overlook -- replay ability. I've played a lot of games that were awesome the first time through, but after I finished it I never went back to that game because it had no appeal any more.

Role playing games (RPG) are most susceptible to this problem over other genres of games. Due to technology limitations, many RPG's are limited in the options they can present to a player. Even complex games like Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect limit players to two basic endings, good or evil. Choices players make throughout the game seem to influence you one way or the other, but ultimately the story conclusion is based off which side of the good-evil line you're left standing on at the end of the game. Once you've played both to both endings the game has little left to offer the players.

One feature I'd like to see put into new RPG games is where the choices you make open or close different options for the player later in the game. Most RPG's allow players to take it slow and play out almost every single story arc in the game the first time through. Instead I'd like to see multiple possible story arcs that are only accessible through subtle character choices within the game.

What makes a good game? (Part 1)

2008-04-29T10:50:00.002-06:00

I'll admit it. I'm a video game geek. I like to play video games...a lot. My wife could easily make the argument that I play them too much. But I do have to interject that unlike many other video game geeks out there, I won't play just any game. For me to play a game it has to have some sort of unique appeal. There are certain prerequisite characteristics it needs to exhibit before it becomes worthy of my time. In general terms, these characteristics are storyline (Part 1), replay ability (Part 2), multiplayer (Part 3), and realism (Part 4). While a lot of games out there exhibit these characteristics, the mere fact they have them doesn't necessarily make them good games.

Part 1

Storyline
Almost every game out there has a storyline. The quality, believability, and implementation of the storyline is vital to a game's overall quality. Game studios hire on people exclusively to write the storyline for their games. Usually though, the storyline is what comes first and the game gets designed around that. Being the cornerstone of the game necessitates that the storyline be of good quality to begin with.

What makes a good storyline? That's highly debatable. To me, a good storyline is one that draws on other good storylines for influence. Don't misunderstand me here. I don't want cookie cutter stories that are straight up copies of others. It's possible for writers to draw on other great stories for influence and still have their own unique story. One example of this is Star Wars. George Lucas' story draws on many ancient myths and legends for content. But his story is his own and isn't a rip off of any other. The reason myths and legends last is because they are good stories. In the video game industry, one of the most successful games out there does just this. Bungie studios drew heavily on other science fiction stories and mythology for the Halo storyline. The biggest draw of Halo 3, the most successful game release in history, was not the new action scenes or features, but the storyline. People wanted to know how it all ended. Halo 3 is the perfect example of how storyline can carry a game, even a first-person shooter.

Another key quality of a good storyline is that it draws the player into it and makes you feel as if you're part of the storyline. With role playing games, this is vital. When other genre games are able to do this, it's usually a highly successful story. A game that did this well was BioWare's Star Wars, Knights of the Old Republic game. While the game had its issues with technology, the story was almost flawless. The player was drawn into the story and actually cared what happened to the characters. The more characters are developed, the more players know them and actually care about what happens to them.

What makes a bad storyline? There are too many ways to list, but I'll try. Not including a background to the story is probably the biggest mistake game studios make. Even if your game is a sequel, you need to bring your audience up to speed about what's going on. Rainbow Six Vegas 2 made this mistake. The player was thrown into the game with absolutely no background given. The worst mistake that can be made, besides not including a background, is relegating that background story to the game manual included with the disc. No one reads those. Another way to make a bad story is to not close out the plot of the main story arc. Players don't like cliffhangers or plot holes unless the sequel has already been promised.

Basically, what makes a storyline good or bad is the same is the same as that for movies. With video games though, it seems storyline has taken a back seat most of the time whereas in the film industry storyline is usually foremost on the producers mind.

The Influence of Literature and Myth in Videogames

DVD -> Video -> Xbox 360

2008-04-24T09:58:00.005-06:00

Converting DVD's to Xbox 360 compatible video format and sharing them over your network with your Xbox 360

Step 1 - Make an ISO image
The first thing I do is to rip a DVD into an ISO image on my hard drive, removing the encryption in the process. I do that with DVD Shrink. Sometimes if that doesn't work, due to some newer encryption algorithms out there, I'll use DVD Fab, which will store the DVD in a file format on your hard drive, which I then use DVD Shrink to open the files and rip to an ISO image from that.

Step 2 - Mount ISO image in virtual drive
To do this I use a free virtual drive program, Alcohol 52%. Alcohol 52% allows you to have up to 6 virtual drives. They make a more robust version, Alcohol 120% which allows up to 32 virtual drives, but I find 6 is usually more than enough. That, and Alcohol 120% costs $$$.

Step 3 - Convert DVD movie to video file
There are different video editing programs out there that can do this. Personally, I like to use Nero Recode (part of the Nero 7 Ultimate package). Video formats that can be shared with an Xbox 360 can be found here. Using the MPEG-4 H.264 codec, Nero can recode the movies up to an 8 Mbps bitrate. This is plenty big. Personally I recode my stuff to 2 Mbps at 720x400 resolution. This results in a pretty good quality movie while keeping the file sizes down a bit.
For a 45 minute TV episode, the video file is about 700 MB in size. Not bad, especially with how cheap hard drive space is now. I'm actually looking at picking up a 1 TB external hard drive sometime to store my DVD collection on. Then I can browse and watch shows without having to find the discs.
UPDATE - I found a free version of Nero Recode here.

Step 4 - Share your video files over your network
Depending on what video file codec you used, there are different options available to you for this. If you encoded your videos into Windows Media Video (wmv) format, you can use either Windows Media Player 11 or Microsoft Zune software to share your videos. If you did the MPEG-4 Part 2 or H.264 codec, you'll need to use the Zune package. I put all of my video files under the same root directory. I then setup my Zune software to watch that root directory and add the files to the Zune library. In the Zune settings you can then set it up to share with your Xbox 360 on the network.

That should be it. Now you can go to your Xbox 360 and browse your videos, music, or pictures that are in your Zune library. Some additional instructions can be found here.

Microsoft giving away free Xbox 360's

2008-04-23T15:54:00.004-06:00

This is a really cool story I just read. And no, it's likely not what you think.

Microsoft is giving away free Xbox 360 consoles to a number of children's hospitals nationwide. The consoles will be Xbox Live enabled and have preloaded a number of E and E10+ rated games, Y-rated television shows and G-rated movies. With the 360's family content controls, hospitals will also be able to restrict the times that the games can be used by patients and families.

For being such an evil empire, Microsoft manages to do quite a bit of good every now and then. After reading a recent horror story about one family's stay in a children's hospital, I think anything people can do to make things go more smoothly is a good thing. Microsoft is even setting up an entirely separate Xbox Live network exclusive to the hospitals in this program. That way, children will be able to play with other kids in other hospitals as well.

One in a million shot

2008-04-17T12:47:00.000-06:00

So there we were, playing a game of capture the flag on this snow covered level called Avalanche. Our enemy was strong, but so were we. We had played them to a near standoff the whole game. With just over a minute left we decide it's time to make our final push. We all go on the offensive and hold nothing back.

I kill off the last of their recent offensive and pick up a rocket launcher off a dead opponents body. Just my luck. Only one shot remaining. I jump in the man cannon to head back into the base, where I will take the teleporter route to get more rocket ammo. As I jump into the base I hear my teammate call out for me. I turn to see him waiting on his mongoose, needing a second man. I guess I'll forget the ammo and just have to make this one shot count. As I hop on he accelerates to insane speeds that only a mongoose can achieve.

Most of our team is already in the battle with only us and the tank operator behind. As we head towards the bend, ready to engage the enemy, our opponent comes around the corner. It's a fully loaded hornet, ready to rush in and grab the flag behind our offensive. My teammate shouts we need to turn around and head back to defend our flag as we're the last line of defense. As powerful as the wraith tank is, it's no match for the mobility of a hornet. Knowing the time remaining I shout back "No, we go on." I'll just have to make this one shot count.

Going full speed on a mongoose makes it difficulty to hit an enemy with any weapon, let alone a rocket launcher with absolutely no tracking ability whatsoever. As we approached the hornet I took aim and fired. We continued on at ludicrous speeds. I never even got to see if I hit it. All I saw was the beautiful words come up on my screen...."Triple Kill". Our flag was safe for now. Our whole team could concentrate on the offensive. Fate was on our side and there was nothing that would stop our victory this game.

Fileshare Download: Film Clip

No SkyNet Yet

2008-04-12T02:00:00.005-06:00

Thankfully the US Army stopped a program before it got too far ahead of itself.

Now for the real threat-

-keeping an eye out for future robots who travel back in time disguised as Summer Glau....

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 Review

2008-04-06T16:01:00.004-06:00

I don't know what it is about Tom Clancy games, but they never really seem to live up to their hype. I'm personally a big fan of Tom Clancy novels, but really, he needs to pick a different game studio for his games because Ubisoft just seems to mess them up.

First off, I never really played the first Rainbow Six Vegas game, so I wasn't familiar with the storyline. When I put in Rainbow Six Vegas 2, I expected to somehow be brought up to speed on what was going on. I had no clue who the character is or what I was doing. The game didn't do much to enlighten me either. The single player campaign jumps straight into a tactical assault with little to no background information. That was the first clue I had that this wasn't going to be a good experience.

The next thing I did when starting the game was pause and try to setup my control scheme. I've played plenty of shooters and role playing games. Some games are really good at giving players customizable control schemes (Halo 3) and some are just horrible at it (Star Wars Republic Commandos). This game fell somewhere in the middle, closer to the horrible end. You think game studios would come up with some standard for control schemes for genres of games. Personally I feel all shooter games should have the same options available. That would eliminate control schemes from being a deterrent for some gamers. Even better would be if the console manufacturer would implement a set of standard schemes that players could set globally and have all their games pull from those settings.

RBSV2 does have some interesting features, such as the ability to use your Xbox Live vision camera to scan in your face and put that on your character. The game also gives immense customization options for how your character looks, what clothes and equipment they have available, and what weapons they carry. As good as those things are, they really don't make up for the lack of storytelling and the inept control schemes available. Overall I give this game a 5/10 score and will be placing my copy up on eBay very soon (Link to Auction (ends 4/11/08)).

Grifball Phenomenon

2008-04-06T15:41:00.004-06:00

Halo 3 is one of the first games out there to offer a wide range of custom games and custom maps to players and to do it effectively. Just recently a custom gametype has taken hold in the Halo online community. Grifball is a very simple game. It's just a neutral bomb assault variant in an open room map with no objects to use for cover. Weapons available to players are the gravity hammer and the energy sword, both melee weapons.

As simple as the game is, many players have taken to it. Subtle strategies have emerged and those teams who can master those strategies seem to dominate all others. Simple things like learning how to use the shock wave from a gravity hammer can give a team a decided advantage. The designer of the gametype, Rooster Teeth Productions' founder Burnie Burns, even went so far as to organize a league with playoffs and everything for this gametype. Bungie Studios has even setup a whole playlist for just this gametype. Considering the popularity of the gametype I really think Bungie needs to go ahead and make the Grifball playlist a permanent addition to Halo 3's matchmaking lists. So long as the playlist has the popularity it does now, which rivals that of the Team Slayer playlist, it needs to be available to the online community.

Perhaps it will fall out of popularity. Perhaps some other gametype will take hold of the community's attention. Until that happens, this is a playlist that needs to have a permanent place, right alongside the MLG playlist that was recently implemented.

Logic Puzzle

2008-04-06T15:35:00.002-06:00

Twelve billiard balls all weigh the same, except for one that is either light or heavy. Determine in three weighings on a balance scale which is the "odd ball", and whether it is light or heavy.

Answer to the last Logic Puzzle:

Start 3 of the ends burning at the same time. When one rope (the one whose both ends were started burning) is completely burned out (30 minutes), light the unburned end of the other rope. By the time that rope is burned, 45 minutes will have passed.

An all new high....

2008-04-04T17:28:00.003-06:00

Well, it looks like my internet connection got slightly better. Above is an image from my all time high for bandwidth that I just hit today. Perfect gaming speeds, don't you think?

Xbox Live Video Marketplace....FAIL

2008-04-02T07:05:00.004-06:00

During the last week I've started getting an error message whenever I try and download a video through the Xbox Live Marketplace. When I click to agree to the purchase of a video, the error message

"This item is not available at your current location".

From what I've been able to ascertain, this error message is intended to restrict video content to certain geographic locations. This is understandable as some videos are only licensed to be distributed in the United States. The problem I have with it is that I am located in the United States and have been for the last eight years, which wholly encompasses my time as an Xbox Live subscriber.

So, in an effort to resolve the situation I called Xbox Support (1-800-4MY-XBOX) which resulted in 30 minutes explaining the situation to someone with a thick Indian accent, only to be transfered to someone who (supposedly) knew what they were doing. The next person (still, an Indian accent, but just not as thick) had no clue as well, but thought that crediting me 160 MS points would fix the problem. By that time I pretty much determined that phone support was useless.

My next attempt was via the Xbox.com forums. Sure, it was exposing the problem to millions of idiots, but there was the slight chance someone competent would read it. I made my post, but only received responses from one person who really didn't seem to know how to do anything but throw out random suggestions.

My latest attempt at trying to resolve the issue was in using Xbox's email support. The email support form isn't exactly shown up front on Xbox.com. They really want to push people to use the phone support first. Anyways, I sent my email off, detailing the whole problem, copying much of what I posted in the forums. Here is the response I received today:

I understand, you can’t download some contents from Video Marketplace and you get an error message “This item is not available from your current location.” I deeply apologize for the inconvenience that this might have caused you.

Beginning in May 2007, the Xbox LIVE service will restrict the download or purchase of content based on geographic location of their console.

Xbox LIVE will determine the user’s geographic location based on their console’s IP address upon login. If the content the user is trying to obtain is restricted in their geographic location, Xbox LIVE will block the purchase or download from occurring.

Upon blocking content, the user recieves the following error message:
This item is not available from your current location.

Licensing Compliance will primarily affect Video Marketplace content, as it is licensed only for U.S. distribution. Additionally, gaming content will be restricted based on government regulation. There are certain countries, such as Germany, where that content cannot be viewed per government regulation. Thank you for understanding.

It looks like they didn't really read my email other than to glean the subject of the matter and send out a generic response. The big clue they should look at is why this just started happening a week ago and why it's still happening when it's pretty obvious if they did a simple trace of my IP address that I'm located in Utah, USA. It would seem whatever algorithm they're using for determining geographic location is flawed. I responded to the email and am waiting to hear back from them now. Hopefully it gets forwarded on to someone who is actually able to read and understand the issue and then go and fix the problem. If Microsoft wants to become an online distributor of high definition content (movies & television shows) they had better get this fixed, otherwise I see people sticking with cable & satellite on-demand, DVD, & Blu-Ray.

Firefox 2.0.0.13 Memory Usage

2008-04-01T09:26:00.000-06:00

Mozilla's Firefox browser had me update to the newest version earlier this week, version 2.0.0.13. Usually this isn't such a big deal. Mozilla puts out a good web browser that so far has beaten hands down anything Microsoft has out (Internet Explorer). Yesterday though I noticed a problem with Firefox. It seemed that it was using a lot of memory, a lot more than usual. I thought maybe it was just my work machine, considering I was playing streaming music on it through pandora.com as well as running a few development environments.

Last night I thought I'd test it out. Before I went to sleep I opened up Firefox to an ordinary web page, one without any video, audio or flash running. I left the browser open all night while I slept. This morning I awoke and checked the memory usage for firefox.exe. It was using over a gigabyte of memory, on a machine with only two gigabytes available! I don't know what the problem is, but it seems Mozilla has a serious flaw in this version of Firefox. If you use Firefox and haven't already updated to version 2.0.0.13, don't. Wait until they come out with the next version. I assume I won't be the only one experiencing this problem and Mozilla should kick out a new version pretty quickly. Hopefully sooner than later...

Halo 3 Armor Combinations

2008-03-31T12:55:00.004-06:00

Those familiar with the video game Halo 3 will undoubtedly know that players have the ability to customize their armor and emblem used in multiplayer games. Recently I found a cool little tool to design your armor without having to be in the game itself. Here are links to it and my own armor setup.

Halo 3 Model Generator

Halo 3 Emblem Generator

Boston

2008-03-25T09:45:00.002-06:00

Finally, Harmonix is putting out some songs for Rock Band DLC that I really like. For the last few weeks it's been no-name bands (probably knew someone at the game studios) or bands that are a little too -something- for my tastes. This week it's a six song pack from the band Boston. What I'd really like to see is some more mainstream stuff hit the DLC for Rock Band and a wider genre selection as well.

Floppy Drive

2008-03-24T09:39:00.002-06:00

The floppy drive has become the most obsolete piece of computer hardware out there that for some reason, Microsoft still thinks people need to have. Seriously, why would I ever use a floppy disk again, by choice? The largest floppy disk can only hold 1.44 Megabytes. That's not even large enough to hold a single mp3 file.

But for some reason, Microsoft makes it so that you can't install Windows XP on a RAID setup without having a floppy drive to install the RAID drivers. I would have thought that over the years M$ might have released a new Windows installer that would allow users to put in a CD-ROM and load the drivers that way, but no, I have to now go find an external floppy drive (since I don't want to actually install it in my case) so I can load XP on my new PC.

Some old game clip...

2008-03-24T08:05:00.002-06:00

I just thought I'd post an old game clip I had on YouTube....

Logic Puzzle

2008-03-19T16:39:00.003-06:00

You have two ropes, each of which takes exactly 1 hour to burn from end to end. Each rope has different material densities at different points, so there's no guarantee how long it will take different sections within the rope to burn—for instance, the first half might burn in 59 minutes and the second half in 1 minute. You need to find a way to measure exactly 45 minutes by burning these two ropes.

Answer to the last Logic Puzzle:

Take one coin from stack 1, 2 coins from stack 2, 3 coins from stack 3, etc. Take a single measurement of the 55 coins. The stack is the amount it's off from 55.0 grams / 0.1 grams. So, if it's off by 0.1 grams (54.9 grams), stack 1 contains the 0.9 gram coins. If it's off by 0.2 grams, it's stack 2, and so on.

Vista SP1 update

2008-03-19T14:37:00.004-06:00

Apparently, the update is causing lots of problems for some people.

"I downloaded it via Windows Update, and got a bluescreen on the third part of the update," wrote "Iggy33" in a comment posted Wednesday onMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Vista team blog.
Iggy33 was just one of dozens of posters complaining about Vista Service Pack 1's effect on their PCs. "What a disaster," wrote "SeppDietrich" of the update. "It exiled all my Nvidia drivers to the Bermuda Triangle."
"Bikkja" said that "after installing SP1 things seem to go really slow, even though my computer shouldn't have any problems."
Other troubles reported by Vista SP1 users ranged from a simple inability to download the software from Microsoft's Windows Update site to sudden spikes in memory usage. "Went from using 650 MB RAM idle to 1 Gig... I'll be switching back," said "Kurrier."
It's not uncommon for major software patches to cause problems when first released. Windows XP Service Pack 1 inflicted numerous glitches on host computers when it shipped in 2002. Microsoft fixed many of the problems with subsequent patches.
Microsoft on Tuesday made Vista SP1 widely available for the first time. The company has admitted it's still not perfect.

Yeah, I'm glad I didn't jump on the Vista bandwagon...

Work for an Evil Genius? No Thanks

2008-03-19T10:21:00.003-06:00

There's a great article out today from Wired Magazine about the inner workings of Apple and how and why they're successful. It's an interesting read. What was of note to me was the description of the working conditions for software developers (any employee, really) at Apple when compared to those at other companies like Intel or Google.

Management styles differ greatly from company to company in regards to software development. Sometimes you have employers who will tell the engineers what they want and the engineers can then make recommendations and the employer is totally open to suggestions. From the article, Steve Jobs at Apple is on the completely other end of the spectrum. He's basically the 'my way or the highway' type of boss who requires and demands that products be done according to his specifications and no other. He makes no distinction between what you've done lately and previous work. Sure, you made a great product last year, but that doesn't give you any preferential treatment in regards to the next product you work on.

Contrast that to the working conditions at Google, where employees are given their choice of software, hardware, and even what projects to work on. Google even encourages employees to spend time on the clock to work on their own personal pet projects. For Google, it's worked out pretty well. After all, employees' personal software projects are how popular applications like Gmail and Google News got started. Google even offers employees free paid lunches.

There are some very varying working conditions out there for software developers to choose from. Personally, I would think that the only way someone would actually choose to work for Apple under the conditions described in the article is if they were already an Apple Android, completely converted to Jobs' ideology and in love with Apple products. Personally, I'm much more a fan of the Google management style.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1

2008-03-18T14:33:00.002-06:00

Well, today Microsoft released Vista Service Pack 1. Does this mean that I'm ready to upgrade to Vista yet? Probably not. With what happened last time they released Vista SP1, I'm a little leery of jumping the gun and upgrading(?) to Vista. Sure, Vista looks great...all nice and shiny, but what I really care about is how it performs. I couldn't care less about the new Aero interface or how menus fade in or out. I really care about how much memory the OS hogs and how good it is at context switching between programs. I care about system responsiveness, not aesthetics. For now, I'm going to wait a bit and see how this service pack is received.

Anger Management

2008-03-16T21:01:00.004-06:00

Recently I've been playing a lot of either Halo 3 or Call of Duty 4. I tend to play it with the same group of friends. One thing I've noticed, is that some people let things bother them--sometimes a little too much. Whether it be the quality of their own internet connection, the quality of whoever got party host's connection, or just random glitches in the game, they seem to let the most insignificant things of a video game really bother them.

Video games are supposed to be entertainment. They are supposed to be a way to relax and have fun. I like playing online games because I like to socialize with other people. I work an 8-5 job at a small company with only 7 employees. That's not a large group to socialize with. That's one of the reasons I really like Xbox Live. It gives me the opportunity to play with friends, family, and new people I meet online, but when people I play with let the small things bother them to the point they feel the need to verbalize every little thing (and not always in a polite way), that makes it so the experience isn't enjoyable to me either. Personally I take that as an insult and a complete lack of respect for me as a person. If these small things really bother these people that much, I really wonder how they react to serious, real life situations that are a lot more important than a video game.

As I pondered the topic, I browsed and found an article on the American Psychological Association's website. Here are some interesting parts of it.

Expressing your angry feelings in an assertive—not aggressive—manner is the healthiest way to express anger. To do this, you have to learn how to make clear what your needs are, and how to get them met, without hurting others. Being assertive doesn't mean being pushy or demanding; it means being respectful of yourself and others.

People who are easily angered generally have what some psychologists call a low tolerance for frustration, meaning simply that they feel that they should not have to be subjected to frustration, inconvenience, or annoyance. They can't take things in stride, and they're particularly infuriated if the situation seems somehow unjust: for example, being corrected for a minor mistake.

Research has found that "letting it rip" with anger actually escalates anger and aggression and does nothing to help you (or the person you're angry with) resolve the situation. It's best to find out what it is that triggers your anger, and then to develop strategies to keep those triggers from tipping you over the edge.
Angry people tend to curse, swear, or speak in highly colorful terms that reflect their inner thoughts. When you're angry, your thinking can get very exaggerated and overly dramatic. Try replacing these thoughts with more rational ones. For instance, instead of telling yourself, "oh, it's awful, it's terrible, everything's ruined," tell yourself, "it's frustrating, and it's understandable that I'm upset about it, but it's not the end of the world and getting angry is not going to fix it anyhow."

Be careful of words like "never" or "always" when talking about yourself or someone else. "This !&*%@ machine never works," or "you're always forgetting things" are not just inaccurate, they also serve to make you feel that your anger is justified and that there's no way to solve the problem. They also alienate and humiliate people who might otherwise be willing to work with you on a solution.

Remind yourself that getting angry is not going to fix anything, that it won't make you feel better (and may actually make you feel worse).

Logic defeats anger, because anger, even when it's justified, can quickly become irrational. So use cold hard logic on yourself. Remind yourself that the world is "not out to get you," you're just experiencing some of the rough spots of daily life. Do this each time you feel anger getting the best of you, and it'll help you get a more balanced perspective.

Remember, you can't eliminate anger—and it wouldn't be a good idea if you could. In spite of all your efforts, things will happen that will cause you anger; and sometimes it will be justifiable anger. Life will be filled with frustration, pain, loss, and the unpredictable actions of others. You can't change that; but you can change the way you let such events affect you. Controlling your angry responses can keep them from making you even more unhappy in the long run.

I really feel that last quote needs to be read and understood by a lot of people I play games with online. I don't expect the things that make them angry to be fixed, but I do feel that they can fix the way they react to them. It will be beneficial to both them and me in the long run. They'll be more happy and I'll actually enjoy playing games with them again. Overall I think it really comes down to respect. Whether or not you respect me as a person dictates how you act around me. If you do respect me, you will try to refrain from overreacting in an angry and often times vulgar way. I can't guarantee those I'm talking about will ever read this, but if they do, I really hope they will understand what I'm saying.

Logic Puzzle

2008-03-16T19:39:00.004-06:00

You have 10 stacks of 10 coins each. One stack is composed of coins that weigh 0.9 grams each. The other 9 stacks are composed of coins that weigh 1.0 grams each. If I gave you a scale that was accurate to 0.1 grams, how could you determine with a single measurement of any number of coins from any number of stacks, which stack contained the 0.9 gram coins?

Answer to the last Logic Puzzle:
C = chickens
E = Eggs
D = days
1.5 C * 1.5 D = 1.5 E
2.25 ( C * D ) = 1.5 E
C * D = 1.5 * E / 2.25
In other words, one chicken produces 2/3 of an egg per day, so in 3 days, a single chicken would produce 2 eggs.

Rock Band Review

2008-03-14T14:23:00.003-06:00

I purchased and reviewed Guitar Hero III a while back. I figure now it's time for my review of Rock Band. The whole reason I purchased GH3 was to get the guitar controller so I could play Rock Band. From friends I had heard the Rock Band guitar was pretty defective.

Basically, Rock Band is similar to the Guitar Hero games in that the notes scroll down the screen and you have to hit the right controller button at the right time. Where the two games are drastically different is in the fact that Rock Band isn't limited to just a guitar controller. They've added a drum and microphone controller interface as well. This lets you play with up to four people in a band (Guitar, Bass (guitar controller as well), drums & vocals). Since I only have a guitar controller, that's all I've played so far.

The notes in Rock Band seem a bit more sensitive to hit than those in GH3, but that just takes a bit to get used to. Once you're used to it, it isn't much of a problem. The difficulty levels in Rock Band also seem a bit easier when compared to the same difficulty levels in Guitar Hero 3. In other words, Easy on Rock Band is easier than Easy on GH3. Since the game isn't limited to just focusing on the guitar aspect of the songs, the music selection seems to be a bit more varied. The dedication of the game maker to put up additional songs on the Xbox Live Marketplace on a weekly basis is also a big plus to Rock Band.

For those who are gifted with superior hand coordination, the game gives you a good challenge, even up to the Expert level of difficulty. If you just like to enjoy the songs, the Easy difficulty isn't all that hard to figure out. I think I lie somewhere in the middle. I enjoy playing on Medium, but also enjoy listening to the music.

Music selection is the biggest obstacle in playing with friends online. In order to play a song together, everyone needs to have that song on their Xbox. This is really frustrating because the songs aren't cheap, running on the average of $1/song. A better solution would have been to allow people to play songs with friends if anyone in the group had the song. This would allow people to explore music they might otherwise not have tried. In the end, gamers may decide to go out and purchase the songs if they liked playing it with a friend. The pricing structure pretty much guarantees players aren't going to buy a song until they're sure they like it, and the limitations on what you can play (only if you own it) is a sure fire way to make sure gamers never get a chance to hear the song in order to decide whether or not they want it.

Even with it's faults, Rock Band is a pretty fun game. One thing that was pointed out by my wife, which I kind of agree with, is that the game could use a better mix of music genres. Adding a few country songs into the game would allow those who favor that genre to enjoy the game as well (as guitars, drums, & vocals aren't only used by rock musicians exclusively). Overall I'd have to give Rock Band a score of 8/10.

Logic Puzzle

2008-03-14T11:54:00.001-06:00

One and a half chickens lay one and a half eggs in one and a half days. How many eggs does one chicken lay in three days?

Time to Upgrade

2008-03-12T16:53:00.005-06:00

It's finally reached that point. I've decided it's time to upgrade our PC. With some new software coming out (Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008) our PC has finally reached a point where it can't handle the new stuff. My wife is going up to visit her parents for a week this Saturday so I figured the week with her gone would be the best time to put together the new rig and get it all up and running.

We've had our PC for almost four years now and it's starting to feel the strain. My wife would probably disagree with me on that and argue we could keep using it for the next decade or so. That's the biggest problem with being a geek. You want to always have the latest and greatest, but you have to balance it with your budget. Sure, I wanted an Xbox 360 when it came out, but I ended up waiting almost a year until getting one. I wanted to upgrade this machine a little over a year ago, but I held off and waited until the 3-4 year mark I told her I'd wait when I built our current PC.

Here's the layout of the new PC setup and what it's replacing...

Intel Core 2 Quad Core Q6600 Processor (AMD Athlon 64 3700+)
Gigabyte DQ6 X38 Chipset Motherboard (ASUS A8N32-SLI Premium)
4 GB DDR2 1066 RAM (2 GB DDR 400 RAM)
NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT Video Card (NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX)
3x 640 GB WD Hard Drives in RAID 5 (74 GB WD Raptor + 2x 160 GB Seagate SATA)
Hauppauge HVR-1800 HDTV capture card (Hauppauge PVR-500 Analog capture card)
Samsung 22" Widescreen LCD (Dell 17" LCD)

Overall this machine looks to be able to handle anything I'll throw at it in the next few years. Windows Vista shouldn't be a problem when and if I eventually decide to upgrade to it.

Grifball Madness

2008-03-12T10:41:00.001-06:00

Finally, someone made a Halo 3 gametype that is actually popular and fun to play! I've been getting tired of open arena style FFA gametypes (ex. Demolition Derby), themed gametypes (ex. Normandy beach), and other random crap. Sure, some have made gametypes that are fun before, but usually what I find fun and what others find fun aren't exactly the same. I guess what I really like about Grifball is that it doesn't involve shooting (which for a FPS game, is pretty unique).

This is a very simple gametype with subtle strategy. Simple minded gamers will likely find this gametype very tiresome and won't want to play it. To me, the most effective strategy seems to mirror strategy you find on the football field (that's American football for you Brits, LOL). Anyone who has experience running a football and effectively using blockers to gain yards will be right at home as the bomb carrier in this gametype.

Recently the creators of the gametype (those guys over at Rooster Teeth Productions) created a league to match teams up against each other in some semblance of a competition. While I didn't notice until after the winter league was done, tomorrow I'm going to try and sign up our team for the spring league. Our team is pretty much made of people from RCG who already enjoy gaming together so teamwork shouldn't be a problem.

Hacking American Idol

2008-03-12T09:21:00.002-06:00

My wife is a big fan of American Idol. She watches it every week, whether live or off of our DVR. Each week now she gets to vote for the contestants after the show. Last week she sat there redialing the voting number on her cell phone over and over. I think she got in maybe 10 votes before giving up.

This week, as the show was getting over, she mentioned that now she needed to go vote. Being the geek that I am, I asked her if she wanted me to make it 10x easier and help her get in tons more votes. She had no clue that was possible.

I proceeded to then install a redialing program on our laptop computer. Since it has a modem, I just hooked up the laptop to a phone line and set the redialer to call the voting line over and over. It calls in and when it hears a ring, waits 5 seconds (enough time for the vote to be picked up and counted) and then hangs up and redials again. We let that run last night for the two hours voting was open. We got in 504 votes. Not bad for one person. And since it's a toll free number we didn't have to worry about long distance charges.

If anyone else is interested in using the same software, here's a link to where I got it.

Frontlines Fuel of War Review

2008-03-05T19:04:00.005-07:00

I picked this game up yesterday as I was wanting another game to play. Granted, this is a pretty limited review as I've only played a few of the missions. The story is set in a world fighting over the last oil resources left on the planet. Apparently the world has depleted resources in the Middle East, Alaska, & South America. The only place left with any oil is in the Caspian Sea.

The game is basically one large, constant battlefield, unlike other games with very distinct and different levels. As you play, your commanding officer over your radio issues orders for you to capture certain territories. As you capture them the frontline between your army and the enemy moves forward.

Multiplayer matches can be up to 32 total players, so the game can get pretty big. When I heard that I thought "Oh no, not 31 screaming little pre-teens abusing their microphone", but as it turns out, the developer actually thought of something like that. They made it so that you can join a squad during the battle. The squad is up to 4 people and then the only voice you can hear over the microphone is from those on your squad.

Online games are setup pretty much the same as Gears of War, for those of you that have played that game. Basically, if you want to join a game, you can search for existing games within parameters you specify. If you want to host a game, you setup your game and then either invite friends to join or wait for those searching for a game to find yours. While this type of setup does allow you to play the gametypes you want, I would have much preferred a playlist/matchmaking style over this.

Overall though, the game is one that keeps the action going. It allows you to pick up different weapons around the map depending on territories captured. The control scheme could have used a little work. Instead of letting you choose specific setups for movement and actions separately they give you a few pre-configured schemes to choose from. For those left handed gamers out there, there are a few southpaw configurations to choose from. I give the game a score of 7/10.

Halo Killer

2008-02-26T10:14:00.005-07:00

Ever since Halo 2 achieved dominance on the Xbox Live landscape, gamers and critics have been looking for the eventual Halo Killer, the game that would dethrone Bungie Studios and the Halo franchise from the Xbox Live pinnacle.

Some thought Gears of War would be the game. After all, it was a gritty first person shooter with tons of action and a great storyline. Gears of War might have pulled it off had they put a little more thought into their multiplayer game design. The fact of the matter is that Bungie got it right the first time around with Halo 2. The whole party system coupled with their matchmaking system made multiplayer Halo 2 enjoyable for hours upon hours of gaming.

Some critics actually thought that a non-FPS game could be the eventual title to push the Chief off the precipice. Games like Guitar Hero 2 & 3 and Rock Band made a good push, but the details come down to the fact that the demographic of gamers for those games and the Halo franchise were totally different. Sure, those games had great followings, but it was going to take a truly great game to take over as top dog.

When Infinity Ward moved past it's fetish with the World War II genre they positioned themselves for a title shot with the champ. Call of Duty 4 was released a mere 2 months after the blockbuster Bungie title Halo 3. While gamers were finding the matchmaking playlists of Halo 3 lacking, there was a brand new shiny title waiting for them in Call of Duty 4. The game had the gritty graphics famous in the Call of Duty franchise, but also brought a modern aspect to the table that previous Call of Duty games lacked. In the final months of 2007, Call of Duty actually managed to surpass all other games as the best selling game of 2007. Considering what it was up against, that was a tremendous accomplishment.

This week marks now the fourth week in a row that Call of Duty 4 has maintained the top spot on Xbox Live usage. While I'm still sure that the numbers are pretty close, the fact that Halo 3 hasn't made a comeback, even with their map pack release, tells me that Call of Duty 4 can now be crowned with the title of Halo Killer without reservations. Congratulations Infinity Ward.

Xbox Live Activity for week of 2/18/08
Xbox Live Activity for week of 2/11/08
Xbox Live Activity for week of 2/4/08
Xbox Live Activity for week of 1/28/08

Consolation Points

2008-02-25T17:43:00.002-07:00

A recent study was done by students at Helsingin Yliopisto (University of Helsinki) about the emotional effects violent video games have. The students wanted to look not at the long term effects or even just averaged effects, but rather to look at the instantaneous effect certain in game events had. The results turned out to be counter intuitive.
Apparently when your character in the first-person shooter (FPS) game scores a kill, it illicits a response close to anger and anxiety. The counter event, when your character is killed, illicited a positive emotional response.
One key point I noticed while reading the article was that they played the game on a 56" screen while sitting only 78" away from it. To me that alone can skew the study. I'm not sure what the research is, but I was always told growing up not to sit too close to the TV because it would rot my brain. I'm pretty sure the action packed graphics and lights of a video game when viewed that close can cause some emotional responses.
Another blogger noticed the conclusion that possibly the pleasure response to dying is a result of finally getting a break from all the intense action. This may be true, in the sense that during gameplay your focus is on the game and your muscles are tense, ready to react to the slightest movement on the screen. When your character dies, you can take your hands off the controller for a second and you get a chance to look away from the screen. Personally I think the pleasure response when dying is more of a shear physical response to being allowed to drop your focus for the moment.
I have to wonder what the results would be if the study had taken multiplayer gaming into account, where your opponent isn't just another computer generated artificial intelligence controlled graphic, but rather a representation of another actual human being. Another thing I wonder is what it would be if that opponent were actually in the same room with you. Multiplayer games, in my opinion, have brought out much stronger emotions and tension while playing than those when playing in a single player campaign mode against the computer.
At least now I know I'm not the only one who enjoys watching my dead body float down a river in Halo 3 after I die...
VideoGameStudy.pdf

Farewell Dez1013

2008-02-17T14:07:00.006-07:00

Dez1013 (Jan 4, 2006 - Feb 17, 2008)
With a single ebay posting, our friend Dez1013 has passed on. From his humble start in Halo: Combat Evolved, Dez grew to be an avid gamer. He pwned at LAN parties and then learned to game into the late hours of the night with Halo 2 on Xbox Live. From there he came to join our ranks in Real Custom Games. He was an integral part of the initial group formation, being a valued Core Member. Many have memories of Dez owning them during gamedays and ladder matches. Sometimes RCG members would freely offer themselves up to Dez for ownage. Other clans learned to fear Dez1013 when they faced RCG in clan matches.

Dez1013 went on to grow into an Xbox 360 gamer with the consoles release. With that advancement he was then able to demonstrate his dominance in such games as Gears of War and Crackdown. The 360 gave Dez the opportunity to own others in arcade games such as UNO and Aegis Wing. Crackdown opened Dez's gaming world to the Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta. That preview made others shudder in fear at the 1337ness that is Dez1013. For the next few months Dez continued to dominate in 1337 fashion in games such as Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4. He thoroughly explored and conquered RPG games such as Oblivion and Mass Effect. His latest conquest was sheer perfection on the drums in Rock Band. Truly, Dez, you will be missed.

On an early Sunday in February Dez1013's gaming life game to a sudden and abrupt end. The reality, that is life, finally caught up with him. Sometime in the future maybe Dez1013 will return to us in a reincarnated form. But for now we as gamers mourn the loss of one of our great brethren.

Guitar Hero 3 - Legends of Rock Review

2008-02-17T01:05:00.002-07:00

This is my first plunge into the music gaming genre. The main reason I bought this game was to get the guitar controller. From reviews I've read and advice from friends and in-store staff, the GH3 controller was by far the most well designed and resilient controller for guitar games. My first impression was that this was very different from normal Xbox 360 gaming. The first song I attempted to play resulted in me getting booed off the stage because I was playing so poorly. After a few more attempts I was finally able to get through the song. The bad news was that I only hit 80% of the notes in the song. And this was on easy difficulty...

After getting a grasp on how the game works, it's not so bad. Using the guitar controller takes some getting used to. I still am no where close to calling myself adept at using it. Easy difficulty requires the use of 3-4 of the buttons on the guitar neck. Each difficulty increases both the number of buttons required and the speed and number of notes in the songs. So far I've completed roughly 10-12 songs in the game, on easy. Each song requires hitting 90% or better on the notes to complete it.

I was really impressed with the music selection. They did a good job in getting a wide variety of rock music to play. Since this is the third installment of the game, and my first music game, I'm not aware of what music was used in previous games, but I really would like to have been able to play those songs as well in this game. The downloadable songs available was a pretty nice collection. They even had the Halo Theme Mjolnir Mix included, which for a FPS gamer coming into this genre, that was a very good thing. Overall I think this is a game that many do and will enjoy. I'm planning on playing it more and looking forward to trying out new games in this genre.

Call of Duty 4 - on a roll

2008-02-13T07:37:00.003-07:00

For the second week in a row, Call of Duty 4 has held the top spot as most played game on Xbox Live. Sorry Halo 3, but it looks like you're on the decline. Again, who would've thought that the Halo franchise would lose the top spot a mere six months after Halo 3's release...

Spore!

2008-02-12T17:23:00.001-07:00

It looks like Maxis is going to finally give Mac gamers (is there such a thing?) a fairly decent game.

Maxis announced that Will Wright's (of Sim City fame) new game, Spore, will release on September 7th, 2008 for PC, Mac, & Nintendo DS.

I've looked at previews for the game and it looks to be pretty interesting. You basically get to control how your civilization forms, starting from a cell level organism all the way to planet wide domination. With online play you'll even be able to travel to see other people's worlds. I was kind of disappointed that it's not releasing on the Xbox 360, as Xbox Live is probably the easiest to use and more popular gaming network. At least a 360 version is in development.

Gaming Demographics

2008-02-12T13:08:00.000-07:00

Recently I read an article in the New York Times about the gaming industry. While the article as a whole isn't that bad, I did take issue with a few points made in it.

The first assumption made by the author of the article is that gaming has traditionally been activity enjoyed alone. "The image of the antisocial, sunlight-deprived game geek is enshrined in the popular consciousness as deeply as any stereotype of recent decades." I don't know about the rest of you, but I've been playing multiplayer games since before I was old enough to attend school. Ever since I got my Atari 2600 I've been playing games against my siblings, friends, or anyone else who would play. As I grew up I would often go to friends houses and play the NES, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, etc. Even with PC games friends and I would enjoy the games together, even if the game was single player. We would often take turns playing different levels of games like Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, Commander Keen, Doom, etc.

The author seems to think that online gaming and multiplayer features are a new invention. Ever since the dawn of the internet there has been online gaming (even before that with modem direct connections). The only real recent innovation is the online features being available in console games. Previously this was pretty much relegated to PC only games like Starcraft, Diablo, and others. While the observation that multiplayer games are becoming ever increasingly popular is pretty obviously correct, the distinction made that hardcore gamers and gamers who enjoy multiplayer games are distinct, separate groups is blatantly false. If anything, the hardcore gamers have propagated the advancement of online multiplayer games and are the main players of them. Multiplayer games are how hardcore gamers measure their ego. Without multiplayer games, how does a hardcore gamer know how good he/she is?

While I do agree that video games are reaching an ever widening demographic, I don't agree with the authors assessment as to the reasons behind that. What I see happening is that hardcore gamers are pushing for more different types of games. They are pushing for games that they can play with family and friends. As a gamer I obviously enjoy my video games. Because of that enjoyment, I want to share it with others. While my wife may not be into the first-person shooters I am, I'm willing to try new games that may interest her. We may even eventually purchase a Wii. But the reason behind the push towards more family friendly video games comes from gamers themselves I think more than from non-gamers. I see many first generation gamers growing up and now having children of their own. They want their kids to experience gaming as they did, but at the same time, they want to participate as well.

I also don't agree in the authors assessment that video game players and video gamer reviewers are of the same mindset. More often than not I read video game reviews that are obviously written by someone who only sat down and played a game for a few minutes. A lot of game reviewers are also reviewing pre-release versions of games that may or may not be different from the retail release version. With the short time that reviewers spend actually playing the game, many fail to grasp how real gamers will accept the games. The author in the article uses Bioshock as his example. I'll use the same game to point how reviewers and gamers may disagree on a game. Most gamers will play a game for upwards of 50-100 hours before moving on to other games. I'd be surprised if game reviewers spent more than 2 hours on a game before writing their review.

But overall, I have to disagree with the assessment that older demographics will increase in the gaming industry to the point where they dominate. The increase in family friendly games is showing now with the release of the Wii. Those same families that purchased Wii consoles I really doubt will continue to purchase new games the way hardcore gamers do with their consoles. Hardcore gamers will buy new games roughly 1-2 times a month, if not more often. I don't see most families purchasing new games on that type of a schedule. The fact is that most of the money in the gaming industry comes from game purchases, not console purchases.

Xbox Live Game Bandwidth Usage Study

2008-02-08T15:22:00.003-07:00

I've had an idea brewing for a bit but I need some help in order to complete it. My idea is to use my laptop computer to measure the bandwidth used by Xbox 360 games, on a per game basis. I figure that since my internet connection bandwidth is more than enough to be sure that it won't be a bottleneck that I might actually be able to pull this off and be fairly accurate about it.

My idea is to use my laptop with internet connection sharing to connect my Xbox 360 to Xbox Live. I have a USB to Ethernet port and the built in ethernet port on my laptop. I would just need some software that will allow me to track the individual bandwidth usage of a single ethernet port. The best I've found is AnalogX Netstat Live, but it lacks the ability to track over a specific time period and the ability to export more specific stats. I would be welcome to any ideas on a software tool to use to do this.

Link to Results Post

Activision Confirms Sequels

2008-02-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

Activision Publishing CEO Mark Griffiths announced in a conference call to investors that sequels in the Call of Duty and Guitar Hero franchises were in development.

"New titles will be coming in the Guitar Hero and Call of Duty franchises, along with additional downloadable content for the current titles Guitar Hero III and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare."

"Although there was no word on whether the next Call of Duty would be once again set in the modern day or taking the game back to its roots, Activision did confirm that a new sequel in the franchise was coming, and that it would also be coming to the PlayStation 2 and the Wii this time round."

Hopefully this means that the patch for Call of Duty 4 for the Xbox 360 will be coming out relatively soon. I know they have the map design contest going on and hopefully they can get those out soon too, so long as it isn't more generic bombed out middle eastern cities...

Call of Duty 4 on top again

2008-02-07T06:57:00.000-07:00

Once again Call of Duty 4 has taken over the title of top game played on Xbox Live, just beating out Halo 3. What surprises me is that Gears of War is still beating Rock Band on the list.

We all knew some game would eventually come along to knock the Halo franchise off the top, but who really expected it to happen in less than six months after the Halo 3 release?

Mass Effect DLC Announced

2008-02-06T15:18:00.000-07:00

To date, over 1.6 million gamers have explored the engaging sci-fi universe of Mass Effect. Beginning on March 10, fans everywhere will be able to expand the “Mass Effect” experience with the release of the first ever downloadable content for the award-winning saga.

The Bring Down the Sky downloadable content pack will be released to Xbox LIVE Marketplace on Monday, March 10 at 2 a.m. PST, and will be available for 400 MS points. This is the first in a series of planned downloadable content that further expands the Mass Effect universe and continues the adventures of Commander Shepard and the Normandy crew.

Bring Down the Sky includes a new uncharted world that introduces the notorious and feared alien race of the Batarians. A Batarian extremist group has hijacked a mobile asteroid station in the Asgard system, setting it on a collision course with the nearby colony world of Terra Nova. Only Commander Shepard can save the millions of innocent civilians before the asteroid completes its deadly descent.

Bring Down the Sky contains approximately 90 minutes of heart-pounding action and a new Achievement worth 50 Gamerscore points.

Mass Effect is exclusively available on Xbox 360 and is rated M for Mature by the ESRB.

Mana

2008-02-06T10:34:00.000-07:00

Just when I thought I'd seen it all....

Gamers have always been associated with caffeine. All the late night gaming leaves one in desperate need of energy. This is usually provided by late night pizza delivery and caffeinated drinks. Those drinks have included Mountain Dew, Dr Pepper, Bawls, Red Bull, Jolt, Full Throttle, Vault, and a host of others too many to list. When Mountain Dew had their Game Fuel, I thought it had reached the limit of direct advertising to gamers. Oh, how wrong I was...

Anyone who has ever played a fantasy role playing game should be familiar with the concept of mana. Mana is the mystical, spritual, or emotional energy your characters had. Without it you were basically toast. Now a new drink has hit the market. Presenting...

Mana Energy Potions - "Mana Energy Potion is the premium energy shot made by gamers, for gamers. It's for long nights of gaming, partying, and the longer mornings that follow. It has lots of vitamins, no sugar, and no aftercrash."
Effect:
+160 to mana (real world humans have about 100 mana, by the way). It's 5-8 hours of smooth, jitter-free energy. When it comes to caffeine content, this potent shot is equivalent to about two 8-ounce Red Bulls® or four cups of crappy office coffee.
Serving suggestions:
Straight from the bottle. If you want the energy to ramp up more slowly but still last as long, have a bottle after a meal. Don't be afraid to only take half a bottle, this is a high-level potion, so you should be careful with it. Another tip: try it chilled.
Taste:
It's a citrusy formula that goes down easy and smooth.
Magical-ish ingredients: click here
The Color of Mana:
Are you a beautiful and unique snowflake? Well, at least every Mana Potion is. Vitamin B-12 changes color with oxidation and because every potion bottle is a little different, so is the amount of change. Your potion is just as tasty and powerful regardless of the color.

wow...

Google - Use it

2008-02-05T22:59:00.001-07:00

I'm not all for big internet companies in general, but Google has changed my mind, at least with respect to them. I used to have a Yahoo email account, one that I signed up for back in the early 90's. After a while of using that I figured out how to use PoP3 to check your email using a windows application. Then Yahoo discontinued that service (unless you paid for it). So, I dropped Yahoo.

Then I got myself a hotmail account. I thought it was pretty good. I could use it for email as well as instant messaging. The only real downside to it was the fact that your email could only be accessed via HTTP. That got old pretty quick. After we dropped our dial-up internet service (which required an MSN username), I told myself no more online email systems.

I then registered my own domain name and paid for web hosting. This enabled me to setup my own email addresses at my own domain name. I still use them to this day. The downside is that I have to have an email client to access it or go through a painful login process to get to their hosted email clients.

Then I was introduced to Gmail, Google's email service. I signed up for a gmail account way back when it was in beta and the only way to get one was if someone who had one sent you an invite. At the time the only people who had that were the über geeks aka computer science and engineering students at the university I was at. This email service has grown to exceed any of my expectations. After a while of using it they added IMAP access. Now they have PoP3 access, enabling me to download all my email to an offline backup. The filtering system is amazing. I now have all my email addresses (as of right now--8 distinct email addresses) forwarded to my gmail account, allowing me convenient access to everything. They even have a decent mobile application that lets me check my email on my cell phone.

After a while of using Gmail I started to branch off and try other Google services. Now I have my homepage on my web browser set to iGoogle, a Google search page with other nifty little tools you can place on their, such as RSS feeds, games and interfaces to other Google services (calendar, notebook, etc). iGoogle also gives convenient links at the top to other Google services I use a lot like Google Documents (online word processor and spreadsheets), Google Maps (also available in a mobile application), Google Video (aka YouTube now), Google News (aggregated news feeds from tons of sources), and Google Calendar (good scheduling calendar, highly useful in remembering birthdays, anniversaries, etc).

Just recently I discovered Google's Blogs aka Blogger. Apparently, as a computer science student, I totally missed the ball on this one. It turns out tons of my friends already have blogs (and have had them for years). In fact, this blog is run by Blogger. It's very convenient to be able to post to the blog without the annoying admin interface such as in WordPress. Blogger also makes it very easy to have multiple contributors to a blog. After blogging for a bit I wondered how would be the easiest way to keep track of all my friends blogs and how to find out when someone posted something new. At first I was putting all the feeds on my iGoogle page, but that started getting crowded real quick. Then I found out about Google Reader, an RSS feed aggregator that shows multiple feeds together in one nice little widget on my iGoogle page. This tool makes keeping track of news, blogs, online comics, or anything else with an RSS feed very simple and easy to do. I think it's safe to say that I'm a Google convert...