Ranting Kenya

So I finally finished HL2: Episode 1 this last weekend, and now I’m digging into Episode 2. This game is magnificent. I had kind of forgotten about the Orange Box for my 360 that I had yet to complete (basically because of COD4). Never the less, I really really really like the gameplay.

I’m playing on the hard difficulty, which means to need to be on your toes when 3 hunters and a bunch of combine soldiers pop out of nowhere. Anyway, what I like most about the game are the sections where you need to stop and think. Of course, this is nothing new to Half Life.

I can remember Shawn Elliot talking on the GFW podcast way back (at least a year ago, probably a bit more) about Episode 2. He was referring to a specific section of the game where a grenade jump is needed to reach some locked up weapons and ammo. And as Shawn pointed out, only Valve could create such a puzzle (especially on the console). Now I didn’t realize I was in the room he was referring to until I had figured the puzzle out for myself.

***SPOILERS***

Basically, I will re-hash in my own words what I did and what Shawn said on the podcast. You enter the room, you have some items you want, a box of grenades, and a metal sheet that’s hinged on the floor that covers a 1 foot deep slot in the floor. In addition, there’s a switch up on a catwalk that is seemingly inaccessible that will unlock the loot you want.

And as Shawn said, once you figure it out, you’ll realize that as usual, Valve has provided you with all the necessary tools and info to solve the puzzle. Most developers will force you one way or another to walk somewhere (or give you a point on a radar) and will tell you to “hit A to activate” or some other garbage like that. No thinking involved.

Well, in this case, the metal sheet is hinged up, revealing that the area where it would cover has a blast mark on the floor. It took me a while to figure out that I need to fold the metal down, drop a grenade underneath it, and then stand on the metal sheet to grenade jump up to the switch to free the rocket launcher etc.

Valve had literally provided me with everything I needed. And my sense of accomplishment when I successfully figured out the puzzle was awesome. Sure there are plenty of other puzzles in the game that I solved, but this one was different because never before have I ever seen a developer purposely put a grenade jump into their gameplay.

I only wish that other developers would be bold enough to let their users figure out their own solutions to games, rather than hold their hands through ever single process.

Really looking forward to Episode 3 now. Hopefully the wait will soon be over.

As mentioned in the video, his flight was a success.

Check out the video first:

Personally, looks like an expanded single player campaign. If that’s the case, that’s awesome. Halo 3 obviously has great multiplayer, but I feel too often once developers release their games with multiplayer components, only the multiplayer section receives any post-release love.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

When I here stuff like this, I can’t help but get angry. The fact that these large companies think they can control everything on the products they sell to you drives me nuts. What makes me even angier, is that Apple gets away with it all the time and barely anybody notices.

Anyway…

Wellington Financial Blog – News, Views & Purviews » Blog Archives » Bell to Blackberry users: “Pay us or get lost” Literally.

Interesting. I’m certainly looking forward to seeing if Android can take some wind out of the iPhone’s sails.

Android – Boing Boing.

It’s Rock Band. It’s good. Here are two best new features:

1. Quickplay setlist creation – Select up to 5 songs to play without going back through the song list to select a new one. Awesome.
2. “Fast” navigation between categories to avoid scrolling through the massive song list. Jump down to the hard stuff in like 3 or 4 presses rather than 80.

I haven’t played the battle of the bands mode or anything like that. I play Rock Band pretty casually. There are a lot of new songs that are awesome (Everlong, Eye of the Tiger, Living on a Prayer), and I’m glad the songs are generally harder (some are silly hard).

What I’d like to see is lots more music from the mid 90’s, but that’s probably because of my age.

And like so many others online, I want to play Guns ‘n’ Roses (the real GnR, not the abomination they are now) and Led Zeppelin. Harmonix, please, make it happen. I suppose I want to play the stuff in my Last.fm profile.

If you go around online reading about the game, you’ll hear a lot that it’s the best hockey video game ever. To that, I agree.

My Xbox 360 had online issues with NHL 08 (poor performance getting into games and downloading rosters). Luckily, those issues have been solved. And in addition, they added the most obvious online feature that I wanted in 08; Play a Friend. It’s simple, you click it, you select someone from your friends list, and boom, you’re in a game.

They’ve also added Be a Pro mode. It’s really cool, and you should try it (apparently it’s been in baseball before?).

And there’s a slick thing where you can manually select the “arena music” for a hockey team (or all of them) from your 360 or from your computer. A really neat touch.

All that being said, here’s the one thing that needs to be said.

As with many new features that make it into video games, the first year implementation of them is frequently massively over-powering. So for this year, I’m referring to the defensive stick lift.

Of course this is a typical defensive move for a defender, but if you’re good at it, you can completely dominate the game.

One such game, a friend of mine and myself were playing online. We were sharing the controller, switching each period. We are both pretty good at the game, we beat most people online. We played one fellow who was SO proficient at the stick lift, it made the game super frustrating and nearly impossible to play. He controlled the puck probably 80% of the time. We were lucky to only lose by a goal.

One feature I’d like to see online is a mode where both players are forced to play a random team. I’m really tired of seeing the same 4 teams online (this year it’s Detroit and Pittsburgh, last year was Anaheim and Ottawa). Seriously, I’m really sick of playing Detroit.

Here’s a little tip I thought I’d share, and may be very obvious to many.

I had a design I was testing that had 2 column, 3 column, and 4 column floats all on one page. Problem was, the only browser that seem to actually float the divs was Opera. I spent a hefty chunk of time trying to figure out why Firefox especially was just putting one right after the other.

Turns out the answer was super simple. I had named my classes things like “3col” and “4col”. Once I renamed them to “threecol” and “fourcol” the whole thing worked perfectly in all browsers. So simple.

*insert head smashing desk*

Hopefully I’ll save somebody some time.

I’ve had many a hilarious dicussion about what’s actually going on in Mario. Here’s another take.

Again, I haven’t played the co-op over Xbox Live (patch forthcoming). But here are my thoughts of playing multiplayer, and single player.

It’s awesome and fun.

I have beaten the game once now with one character by myself, and also got played the whole game (minus completing the final battle) with two other players locally. The game is just fun. The art style is bright and engaging, the game play is just what it should be for a brawler like this, and it IS a good value for the money. I mean really, $15 for the number of hours of enjoyment I’ve already had has been totally worth it.

One thing I noticed that was really well done in the game are the levels. You get different environments frequently. You don’t usually play in any one locale for much more than 5 minutes. The result is a constant sense of accomplishment. It also allows you to play sections over again if you want to level up.

I don’t want to say too much, because I enjoyed discovering things in the game greatly, and I feel that everyone should at least check out the trial version.