…other than monetizing our personal connections for the engrandizement of the ownership. However that may be, noticed a post on the Cosmic Encounter facebook page about expansion 3! No details at all, just essentially a confirmation that it’s in the works with the original designers and FF. All I can say is: splendid.
but I’m a fan.
I spent four all too short hours with Rage in the last few nights and while the storyline feels like a minor sub-plot in Fallout so far, the environments are just amazing. Nothing repeats, nothing is the same anywhere, every polygon surface you see is different from all the other polygon surfaces. There are no patterns. It’s as if someone textured the entire world by hand (which it turns out they did). The level of detail in these textures as well is astounding, even broken bits of concrete in a dark corner have gang iconography all over the place and is crazy with details. The character models are really good, but stylized a bit (like Brink) giving them a bit of a cartoonish look. Everything looked so cool, I can’t help but continuously take screen caps, mostly of those that gots themselves shot. An absolute visual feast. I haven’t seen a ton of machinery yet, but from Doom 3, id has proven that their in-game machine creations are amazing. I’ve seen one so far, but I don’t want to spoil it.
The game play is good, weapons have a solid feel to them, and if you had any worry about the enemy AI after DOOM 3, don’t. I’ve fought most of wasteland gangs and a few hundred mutants so far and the AI is real fun to fight against. They duck, they call out orders to each other, they hide when they get shot, they run away and hide if they get scared and each gang has different tactics and specialties. After only three hours or so, I’m still in the tutorial bits where they introduced the vehicles and racing. Racing and vehicle fighting are loads of fun, it’s not the easiest on the keyboard as it feels (like any racing game) that an analog stick is ideal, but WASD works just fine. My only complaint about fighting in the wastes is that it’s a bit too easy because all your weapons home in on the targeted enemy as long as they are in your forward arc. While this works in the Rage paradigm, if you’re looking for Twisted Metal, this is close but isn’t quite that. What’s more, in races (not in the wasteland) if you get blown up you respawn. Again, this works as races are a side quest type thing, but it’s a little strange to see cars spawn into a post-apocalyptic race track (including yourself).
One warning though, both the bosses I’ve hit ran me completely out of ammo, so when you pick the game up make sure to buy TONS OF AMMO or you will end up doing the ASS PUNCHING method seen here.
Again, the story is nothing that great so far mostly because we’ve played through every possible post-apocalyptic plotline in Fallout 3, though things aren’t as bleak for the people in RAGE as the people in Fallout as they have TV’s and radios and cars and stuff, there is clean water all over. Seems like the people would be fine if they weren’t trying to kill, torture and eat each other, but then they wouldn’t need you to go around shooting hundreds of people and things. The way you get quests is pretty old school RPG, a lot like the Witcher and Fallout where an NPC is hanging out in an area and you talk to them and they give you stuff to do. Unless you are in an inside area, you get pathing on your map to know where to go. With this feature you can get to places extremely quickly, with no searching around at all. There’s good and bad about this, but it seems to be the thing devs do since oblivion. I’m playing Dark Souls at the same time and the contrast between the absolutely remorseless lack of information and the “your quest is here” of Rage (and Witcher, etc.) takes a bit of the fun of exploring. What’s more, the devs don’t have to put stuff between you and the quest to waylay you because you’re going to get to the quests so quickly, it doesn’t matter that much what’s between.
I haven’t gotten into the Multiplayer yet, but hope to this weekend. We all have some tough decisions to make with BF3 and Rage out within weeks of each other. Being and id fanboy, I preordered Rage so took the pain of 60$ a month or so ago. Of course with the BF3 beta ending this weekend, and that’s another must have title. This month hasn’t been wallet rape, it’s been wallet gang rape by the gaming industry and I’m left BEGGING FOR MORE.
It begins. The 2011 GOLDEN SHOWER OF GAMING HITS. Midnight unlock of the RAGE on steam (we think), and tomorrow Dark Souls. Dark Souls goes without saying will be painful and frustrating and amazing. Rage is id’s first game for a long long time and I have high expectations. I expect it also to be a ton tighter than the new Frostbite engine, which, while I am loving the BF3 beta, has some poignant issues with the stretchy necks and falling through the map. MRAAAAAAK!
Yesterday I cruised home over lunch to start the BF3 beta download, and for 3 gigs it went exceptionally fast. 80% by 2PM or so is no joke with that size download. I wasn’t able to get in the game right away due to a driver update download (much slower from nvidia) and the CHILDRENS, but got in late at night for a span of time. Suffice to say, this is really a must-have game for everyone that likes FPS, even if they play 10-20 hours with the singleplayer and dabble with the multi, it will be well worth it for the visuals alone, which are incredible. EA knows everyone will want and buy this because, let’s just face it, it will be awesome incarnate. Like Blizzard with Starcraft/D3, and Stardock and every online publisher, EVERYONE wants to try to take a piece out of Steam. Since BF3 is going to be so awesome, EA wants to take a big piece out of Valve with it’s new Origin system. You must have Origin installed and running to play BF3, even the single player, from what I understand. So EA is strong-arming people who want to play their awesome game to have their version of Steam installed. Wouldn’t you?
Obviously, this has raised the same type of ire that D3’s “always online” with the master servers (like an MMO) issue that is causing lag in single player games in the beta (granted it’s still a beta). What’s more, the older thingy EA did to try to mimic Steam really really sucked, so who can blame people that are gunshy after that crap was installed and polluted people’s systems? However, just like D3, everyone will buy this game anyway despite complaints and suffer Origin’s existence. Given that, after just a few hours last night, I think EA’s Origin is going to be a lot less obtrusive and annoying than Blizzard’s MMO style approach to Diablo 3– though Origin seems very strange at first because it is the game’s front end and it’s in a browser, I think interface so far is top notch, everything is very cleanly laid out, it doesn’t seem to effect anything in game, chatting is very well implemented and overall stuff is very simple to find and use. At first I was understandably annoyed, but after an hour or so with many crashes kicking me back to the interface, I started to think the Origin implementation is pretty neat. If you are a hater without giving Origin a go, you know you cannot deny that BF3 is something you want and it makes total logical sense that EA would push it’s version of Steam off it’s super heavyweight title. Just try it out. It’s not that bad.
Now onto the game: BF3 crashed a lot. I fell into the map twice and couldn’t get out until I hit a kill-brush. There was horrible lag when I was near some other players, ending in my demise via the knife. I couldn’t find a server that wasn’t full for 5 minutes or so each time I tried to play. I didn’t get on the map with the vehicles because they were all locked. I couldn’t get in a game with any of my friends. Lots of issues? Yes. Was it fantastic and would I face all of these issues to play more? YES. The feel of the game was great, grenade explosions are absolutely breathtaking (I threw one every time I respawned just to see it explode!), tracer rounds look gorgeous, the environmental damage effects are awesome, and you can go prone and, drum roll, you can get points for suppression fire!!! Fire and movement tactics not only implemented in a game but rewarded. Finally. Say you are a mid ranged, hang back and fire the LMG’s type of player– you may not kills that much but you are certainly helping your team by forcing the enemy to keep their heads down and restricting their movement. Now you get POINTS for it.
As I mentioned above, I only got to play on the non-vehicle map in the park/subway and only for an hour or so, hence I can’t write that much about the game. Despite no tanks and toys, it was absolutely engrossing– clearing halls and rooms with your squad via grenades, suppression and rush is what this is all about and BF3 does it well. I’m itching to see what else the game has in store.
Also of note, on Origin Deluxe BF2142 is in the FREE GAMES section. Can’t argue with that!
Yes, I know summer is over, but I finished this bad boy just after the solstice so it counts dammit! Jim Thompson– crime writer, very under-read, if not underrated. I find while reading his stuff that I have many V-8 head slapping moments of “oh THAT’S where they got that from!” El Rey from The Getaway is referenced in From Dusk Til Dawn, and the whole “son is the father of the man” thing in Blood Meridian is straight out of The Killer Inside Me (not that Thompson made that up himself). I’d say No Country for Old Men is almost a homage piece to Thompson’s style. Though there is no doubt in my mind that McCarthy is the better writer overall, a virtuoso with diverse novels like Suttree and All the Pretty Horses, but for crime novels, Thompson is the best I’ve read, blowing away even Hammett in terms of construction and language. That said, Cropper’s Cabin is not Thompson’s best, but it is a great fast read delving into the psychology of a kid that is pushed to the absolute brink by those around him, and like a powder keg, the reader is just waiting and waiting for him to implode or explode. I won’t spoil it, as it has a few twists and turns to get to the inevitable conclusion, but suffice to say it has a pace change in the middle and some horrific revelations. What I dug most about it was the window into the cropper’s (and their Indian landowner’s) world and lifestyle as a backdrop for the events. In some of the other crime novels by Thompson, the place and situation don’t matter all that much, but in Cropper’s Cabin, the cultural context is crucial to the story. I’d put the book slightly above The Getaway due to that book’s almost tacked-on ending (the El Rey bits), but not quite as good as After Dark, My Sweet. If you’re looking for an intro into Thompson’s work to see if you’ll dig his stuff, Cropper’s Cabin is a good one. Unfortunately this was last published in ’92 as part of the Black Lizard line of crime stuff so might be tough to find– but with electronic books (bleh!) it’s instantly available.
>>UPDATE! – this was a scam! << Don’t click on any twitter links to beta stuff–the only way to get it is to sign in to origin and look at the free games section.
I rarely log in to twitter, but this morning I did only to find a tweet on my wall or whatever the hell it’s called that approximated to: “Holy Shit, I just got my Battlefield 3 beta code. better get them while they last….” of course I don’t have a Battlefield 3 beta code so this is even more ridiculous. Of course some sites post stuff for you but this is a not a slight bit shitty because 1) I don’t have a BF3 code so I don’t know where that came from 2) it says, and I joke not, HOLY SHIT as the first piece of text in the tweet. This EA BF launch is turning out to be very, very strange.
Rumors of google wave’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.
Vladmir Putin: ACTION MAN.
One meme that should never die. Halt’ den Ball flach, Alter!
Best Buy ad from 1996 – this has some crazy crap. PSX and Genesis– but no Saturn stuff!?
Bowie’s Space Oddity as a children’s book.
Amazing shot of the alien from Alien chilling out on the set (note this has the faceplate off so you can see the skull beneath–not shown much in the film itself).
AirMech- a Herzog Zwei remake
The real Guardian Heroes release date.
So I got about as loaded as possible without puking or being hung over (?!) at Octoberfest Saturday. I was so drunk I told my three year old to “wait here” on the crowded dance floor while I went to take the piss. Of course she had no idea what was going on. Ridiculously stupid. While a big event, I wonder why this isn’t bigger in Milwaukee: like the big one, the capstone to all the festivals had over the course of the summer, the blowout! Like many cities in Germany, Milwaukee could be THE Octoberfest destination for the entire midwest region of the country. We already have the big festival grounds, the relatively nice downtown (though crime-ridden), old world third street, and what’s most important–many many Germans! It’s sad that podunkville La Crosse (while beautiful) is more known for Octoberfest than Milwaukee is– it has just as crime-ridden of a downtown as Milwaukee does these days.
Of the Beers, the Lakefront Brewery Octoberfest brew was by far the best of the few that I had (you can’t get a sampling when you are drinking a stein at a time). While I enjoy too much the Franizkaner, I should have been drinking the Lakefront stuff the whole night. I would have loved to have had New Glarus’s staghorn in a big stein as well, but they weren’t around.
I think the cover says everything that needs to be said at this point.
