A mod I’ve been watching for a while now was release, the much anticipated WWI Source. I was excited to download it when it was released with its uninspired, yet easily memorable name. I’ve played a few hours of it, most of it I believe were enjoyed and not endured but that doesn’t mean the mod isn’t without problems.

Hopefully this post will help show some of the issues I’ve had with the mod so far, as well as some ideas I’ve seen on the WWI Source forums and my thoughts on them.

Problems and Bugs

• Friendly fire defaults to off: this may not seem like a big deal, but it was for the first couple of nights after release. Every server that had any player count what-so-ever was full of griefers ruining it for everone.
• You can shoot and bolt while moving in prone: even though there’s no animation telling you this, it does.
• You don’t spectate after you’ve died: nope, it should go to spectator. The code’s already there for it, they just don’t use it. Instead you hover with jerky movement.
• If you select a class that’s full after joining, the menu doesn’t reopen and you have to re-select your team: this is very annoying if the MG class is full. You have to select your team again as well, I don’t see why you would have to.
• The infamous spawning bug: sometimes, after joining, you will not spawn after selecting your class. Sometimes you don’t get a reinforcements timer, sometimes you do. When the round resets you spawn.
• You can constantly spam the prone button: in most games, there is a delay for how often you can toggle prone, but in this you can keep on doing it
• MGs take forever to deploy and undeploy: it’s very annoying once you have sight of someone and are just completely helpless to do anything. Which also leads on to my next point.
• You can’t move until fully undeployed: it would be nice to move as soon as I right click, so I can get out of danger.
• Phantom player clips: There’s some weird player clips around, some blocking things you wouldn’t expect to be blocked like the top of a hill near Allied spawn on the map Devil’s Wood.
• Bleed-out doesn’t remember the weapon that caused it: When you die from a bleed out, it uses the player who caused the bleed out’s active weapon, not the one that caused it.
• Low-resolution death notices: The icons on death notices are incredibly low resolution, attacker pixel victim
• Score padding bug: if you switch to spectate, then join a team and select a class, and repeat, you will be +1 score better off every time you do it.
• Ironsights not aligned properly: a problem on pretty much every weapon
• Overpowered officer pistols: or sniper rifles, as they currently should be known. They do way to much damage at range.
• Dodgy animations: hands clipping through the gun, all sorts of issues here
• Bolting and reloading is too fast: you’d think the SMLE was a semi-automatic.

What could be added

Medics or Wound Dressing

It don’t think a medic class would be needed, it just doesn’t fit because of the absence of field medics in the actual war. But, something to counter the bleed-out system would be incredibly nice to have. Being able to dress wounds or a friends’ would be a much needed addition, but as suggested on the forums it shouldn’t heal health – just stop bleeding. I can imagine it working like L4D, but to heal others it would need some kind of incentive that makes you want to give it to others over yourself.

MG Class sidearm

Very easy to do, melee or pistol would be nice. You can’t defend yourself unless you are deployed which makes it really frustrating when you die from an easily-avoidable death on any other class.

Other things to consider

I’ve seen bits of other things I’d like to see addressed is simplifying the UI, which Dead.Pixel puts a very nice looking solution to here.

I will update this post if I see or think of anything else.

I own quite a few Steam games, my community page says 104. So why is it that I always end up playing the same old shit? That “shit” being Modern Warfare 2, mostly. I am a multiplayer kind of guy.

The single player game I most recently (and I use that term rather loosely) played was the first Max Payne game, a game released when single player campaigns lasted more than a couple of hours and I throughly enjoyed it. I haven’t really played anything since, not even Mass Effect 2 and Bioshock 2.

I need to start somewhere.

Google have made their new social networking site public, and they have named it Buzz. All it currently seems to do is make Gmail slower and turn it into some Twitter-alike. The only difference I can see between this and Twitter is that you can have threaded conversations rather than back and forth mentions which can be difficult to follow for other people.

Will it catch on? Probably not.

Thanks for trying though.

Going to try my hand of writing a full review of this bad boy. Had a lot of fun playing it over the past couple of weeks, as hopefully the review will show. Bioshock 2 comes out on Thursday, so I’ll try and get the first one done before that. Plan on writing up a review that focuses on comparing the two games as I will have played them so close together. Anyway.

 

Mass Effect 2

 

The first Mass Effect blindsided me. I never really heard all the hype about it, and as it was released late on PC, I kind of brushed it away. I eventually picked it up on PC when it came out as the Bioware name carried enough weight for me even back then. I still didn’t manage to play it then as I had problems with it on my old computer. When I got my new one I decided to have a go, and well it pretty much became my favourite game of all time.

So, the second one had a lot to live up to in my eyes. I wasn’t sceptical in the slightest, I had complete faith in Bioware to pull it off. I will admit some of the trailers made me cringe a little, and a few mechanical changes, such as ammo, made me a little weary. But then I saw a gameplay video or two showing the combat, and I was instantly back on board.

Importing your Mass Effect 1 saves was something that really excited me. It works well too, it transfers all of your major decisions (and a few minor ones that will make you smile) and your character’s look, as well as a bonus to things such as a boost to credits and your Paragon / Renegade score in accordance with the first. You do get the opportunity to change your character’s look and class, but personally I opted to keep everything the same.

The game starts off strong, with the Normandy been destroyed by an unknown force. A great cinematic, followed by you walking around your ship whilst it is being destroyed. This allows for some great effects and serves to instantly get you back into the world. So Shepard dies within the first 5 minutes in a fairly spectacular way and the Normandy is destroyed. The mysterious Cerberus organisation lead by The Illusive Man, voiced by Martin Sheen, brings you back from the dead, gives you a new Normandy, and sends you on your way to investigate the kidnapping of thousands of human colonies.

 

The part between been brought back to life and being sent on your way was a little shaky. The sequence in which the place where you are being treated is under attack and you have to fight your way out. It throws some new characters at you, and just feels a little thrown together. It does have to serve as a bridge between the two games and a tutorial at the same time though, so I can forgive that.

Once that’s done and your back on the new Normandy it is business as usual, and my god at how good that business was. First off, most the of the game is not based around the main plot. You will spend most of your time finding your new squad mates. Again, at first I was a little sceptical about this, but it works great. I forgot just how good Bioware are at making a world, hell, a galaxy. The places you have to go in order to find these characters are amazing, all the environments are spot on.

Some of the best missions I did though were the loyalty missions for all of your squad mates. At first I thought it might be a bit of a chore to do 10 or so loyalty missions before I could finish the game, but every single one of them was interesting. Again, exploring new worlds and environments, making tough decisions and often your team mates will want you do to something that you may not want.

The best improvement to Mass Effect 2 compared to the first one is definitely the combat. The original didn’t have localised damage, so it felt you were just shooting planks of wood most of the time. They fixed that in this one, and it shows. For me, the original’s combat was something I just had to push through before the next plot point. In this it is thoroughly enjoyable. All of the guns feel great to use, the sniper rifle was especially good in my opinion. The abilities and different bullet types were all useful and unique. Nothing more satisfying than shooting something with a high powered bolt action rifle with inferno ammo setting him and his nearby friend on fire… in slow motion.

  

Also gone are the Mako missions. Now, I didn’t hate these as much as most people. Sure they could be a little long at times, but they weren’t completely terrible. I don’t miss them either though. Instead you’ll probe the planet if you don’t know where to land, and then land directly there. There is something similar to the Mako on the ship, though you never get to use it. Instinct is telling me DLC, but I doubt they’d do that for the most hated part of the original.

The chat system is lifted from the first game with little change that I noticed. A small sentence is used to describe the gist of what your character will say, and you choose which one. A majority of the time you choose between paragon, neutral and renegade, with less-frequent “super” renegade or paragon if you have enough points either way. It works great, mainly because the writing is so well done, along with the voice acting. It is a great mix between controlling your character’s speech, but also waiting to hear what she is going to say.

The writing is even sharper than the first game, as is virtually all of the voice acting. Naturally the celebrities and Shepard herself, were as good as you would expect. Everyone you come across also seems to be acted at the same sort of calibre as well. The writing did not disappoint. The overall story  had me on edge, and each unique squad loyalty mission had me gripped too. I also found myself laughing on more than one occasion, with the scientist Mordin been a large reason for it. Whether he was singing, or awkwardly giving me sex advice with Garrus, he always had me smiling. Yes, the romance is also back. Past relationships can be imported with your character, but I skipped it in the original. I was ready for some freaky love with Garrus, but it didn’t go there, and just implied it.   

The main new addition to the conversations are the interrupts. This allows you at specific points to sometimes interrupt someone with either a paragon or renegade action. Often this just boils down to either saving someone or hurting them, but a few of them do stand out. One sequence had a sergeant guy threatening me up close with his men behind him. You could see he had shields and was going to be quite tough to take down. A renegade interrupt popped up, and I watched my character break his neck, and shoot down an explosive crate onto the rest of the guys.

 

They did boil away a lot of the RPG aspects from the first game. There is no loot system as such, and no inventory, you just get ammo off of the floor, the odd weapon upgrade and a few other resources. There are only a few weapons for each type and even less armour variations. I used the DLC Blood Dragon armour through the entire game without any problems. One side note; I do wish you could chose to have your helmet not shown in conversations. They also boiled down skills and abilities a lot as well. There are no longer different trees for all of the weapons, or a coercion skill or anything of the kind. The only things you upgrade are actual skills. It works out great, because it means none of the weapons you carry end up being next-to-useless because you haven’t upgraded them enough.

I do miss the coercion ability though. I ended up playing my Shepard as fairly middle of the road. I was nice to most of my crew and most innocent people, but a hardass when it came to criminals and the type. This meant I had points in both Renegade and Paragon, but neither full. I ended up not being able to do a lot of the chat options that I would have liked, and it did change some the outcome of some of the missions.

One other thing, there are three mini games within the game. 2 of them open doors and safes and such. One of them is a simpler take on two of a kind, while the other has you match up different sections of code. Both of them are somewhat painfully simple but are so easy they don’t take long. It didn’t particularly annoy me as they did some people, and I just breezed past them for the most part. The third has you probing planets for resources that upgrade weapons, armour and your ship. It’s a little bit more involved than the other two, but you won’t find yourself doing it more than you have to unless you want to find all of the side quests. Oh, and I’m going to spoil a joke here but it made me laugh and really caught me off-guard. I was going through all the planets in our solar system and got to Uranus. I didn’t realise until the ship pointed it out. “Probing Uranus, Commander”.

The end of the game is amazing, and I am going to try and not spoil anything for anyone. I’m not going to mention plot points, but if you want to be safe, feel free to skip the paragraph. Everything you do throughout the game in regards to your crew effects the finale in some way. Anyone of your crew members, and indeed Shepard, can die. I worked to get every one of my squad members loyal to me, but I still lost one of them.

Mass Effect 2 is everything you would want as a successor to the first game. It improves on a lot of the things that slightly hampered the first game to make it an astounding game. It took me 23 and a half hours to complete this game, and not a second of it was I bored. If you haven’t played the first game, make sure you do, so then you can come and enjoy this undeniable masterpiece.

Spen.

First off, I’m a little behind with my Pile of Shame series. I’m really enjoying Mass Effect 2, to the point of really wanting to take my time with it, and explore as much of it as I can. Current plan is the complete it this weekend, and then try my best to catch up with Bioshock 1 and 2. I have a week off of college coming up, so I should be to do some catching up there.

 

Battlefield Bad Company 2

 

So I’ve been following this game for a while, the early gameplay videos made me quite moist. So I played the beta (read: demo), and I mostly enjoyed it. Playing it on my own on a random server the game was quite fun. It does take some getting used to, especially if you have just come from something like Modern Warfare 2. Guns actually have something called “recoil”, and it can take a fair few hits to down somebody.

The only game mode in the beta is Rush, and it’s something I’ve not seen in a game before until this. It’s a great fast-paced mode, that can really take things right down to the wire, and cause serious frustration if you have an incompetent team. The game starts off with two points on the map, that one team has to defend and the other destroy. Once those two are destroyed, the next section of the map opens up and the same happens again. This happens 4 times in total, and each time it does, the points become more advantageous for the defending team. The attackers have a limited amount of tickets (total number of deaths for the entire team) before they lose, while the defenders have infinite.

This game mode really comes into it’s own when you are playing in a squad with your friends, with voice communication of some kind. You can spawn behind anyone in your squad no matter where they are, and it’s great. If you have 3 or 4 competent players working together, especially when attacking, they can easily win the game for the team. It’s a great feeling when the three of you sneak into the building with the bombsite in it, chuck down a lorries worth of C4, and then, while jumping out of a window, detonating it, causing the bombsite, hell, the entire building, to crumble.

There are a few problems with the game, some of which are just because it’s a beta, some which are obvious design choices but I would personally like to be changed. Not having the ability to prone is a weird one. Seeing a tank coming towards you, and your first instinct, especially if you have played any other Battlefield game, is to prone in a nearby shrubbery. Instead you have to do with just crouching there, which is kind of silly. Actually, that is the only problem I have with it so far… Guess it’s even better than I thought.

So yeah, I’d highly recommend it. It’s free on the Xbox where it is actually called a demo, and for for nothing you do get a crap-load of content. On the PC you have to pre-order it to get a beta key, unless you are clever. So, yeah, go get it.

 

 

 

Global Agenda

 

A new MMO that came out last weekend, with the early start event starting on Friday, and a beta last a little shorter than a month before that. Firstly, at it’s core it is a third person multiplayer shooter, with different classes, game modes etc. It then also has a PvE side to the game as well, wherein 4 players take on a dungeon. It’s unique selling point though is it’s Conquest mode, in which player created agencies fight over a real-time world, attacking and defending zones.

The Conquest mode I haven’t personally experienced yet, because it wasn’t open for a lot of the time in the beta, and I have not yet put enough time into the game to get into a decent agency, and spend a decent amount of time in the game since it’s official launch – mostly because of Mass Effect 2. Also, this is the part of the game you have to subscribe to take part in, with the regular PvP and PvE been available to everyone just from purchasing the game.

The PvP is the part that I have found the most interesting so far. It’s a nice mix of Unreal Tournament, Team Fortress 2 and a few other inspirations, but it still feels like a unique game. It currently has 3 game modes; Control – control 2/3 points on the map to get points, Payload – push the cart to one end of the map and Capture the Robot – each team have a robot which a player controls and have to reach the other side of the map with it. There is another one similar to Rush in Bad Company 2, but the name escapes me at the moment.

The first 2 work really well, and I’ve had a lot of fun playing them. They require a lot of teamwork, which can be a pain as the maximum group allowed in a premade is 4, it can be quite random as to whether you win or not.

PvE on the other hand is a bit hit and miss. Great for some quick grinding, but the first 2 aren’t particularly inspired. They later ones, of which there are 5 in total, may get a bit more interesting and challenging, but the first 2 are just a case of rush through it as quickly as possible, with nearly any group setup working fine.

Finally, the 4 classes in the game are Assault (heavy), Recon, Medic and Robotic. All pretty self explanatory with the exception of the Robotic. This is the class I am playing now it’s launched, and it is a lot of fun. My play style is relying a lot on turrets, as they can do a lot of damage, and with Control and Payload often forcing players to be in one spot for a long time, turrets can be really affective.

In the beta I tried playing the Recon class as a sniper. I would not recommend it, and find it a frustrating setup to play. The bullets travel extremely slowly, and it takes around 3 shots to kill someone. It seemed to be almost impossible to hit a moving target, unless you were lucky and either they didn’t move, or they moved into it.

Anyways, in summary, I have enjoyed this game, but I don’t see myself really becoming to involved in the subscription side, as I cannot see me wanting to put that much time into the game. Those who are looking for a new MMO to sink their time into, but are bored of clicking abilities and want to shoot a gun, this could be for you.

 

 

Right, that’s me done until Monday / Tuesday. Back to Mass Effect 2, woop woop!

Spen

Dragon Age: Origins

What can I say? There is something about Dragon Age that just.. isn’t doing it for me. The weird thing is, I’m not sure why. When I have some spare time, I just didn’t feel like loading it up. The times I did force myself to play it, I was mostly having fun. It is really odd to me. The only thing I think it could be is the combat, as I did find it a little tedious at times, but I really do enjoy the story (as with all Bioware games) and want to play through it. The other thing is, other than the weekends, I’ll only ever have a spare few hours max at a time, and I think it is the sort of game you really need to just spend hours getting into, and you kind of lose the flow over shorter play sessions. So, yeah, I failed. I ended up sinking about 25 hours into overall, which maybe got me a quarter of the way through the game. I’m going to save it now, for Easter, or even Summer.. we’ll see.

Some thoughts on what I played though. The dialogue is amazing, as is most if not all of the voice acting. So far I haven’t run into anyone who I’ve specifically thought was poorly acted. The actual writing behind it also seems to be very crisp.. everything you would expect from Bioware really; they didn’t let up. The entire story I don’t really want to comment on though, as I’ve only done a very small part of it, but so far it is the reason I want to keep playing. Finally the combat is solid, if not a little tedious. I was playing on hard difficulty (which seems a little silly if the main reason I want to play it is for story…) and most of the time it was just the right amount of challenge. The kind of challenge where I had to think about nearly every fight, and a few mistakes would cost me. And because I’m terrible at remembering to auto-save, this normally sent me back 5 fights, and when they are all challenging it got a little monotonous. But well, that’s just my fault really. And you can change the difficulty at any point, so if I didn’t have such a high sense of pride I could just turn it down to easy to blast through the same fights. One more thing, graphically this game is pretty impressive. With all settings on max the environments look pretty impressive, spell effects are great. Character models and animation are a little lacking, but nothing too serious. So, that’s my one paragraph review of Dragon Age: Origins.

Torchlight

Okay, so I didn’t manage to complete Torchlight either. I did get a good portion of the way through it though, and I am going to try and complete it tonight, but wanted to write this close to the schedule I promised. I got to floor 35 of the 50 the main dungeon has to offer, while doing other little side-quest dungeons in between.

First off, this is coming from some one who has only ever played 30 minutes of Diablo 2, so I won’t be making any comparisons to that, and just judging the game on it’s own merits. For those that haven’t heard of it, you are missing out. Brought to you by a fair few of the guys that worked on Diablo 1 and 2, and the company that brought you Hellgate: London and the never released Mythos, this “budget title” is a great game full of character. It consists of 50 levels of dungeon crawling, a choice of 3 different characters with 3 skill trees a piece. Quests and side dungeons thrown in as well, with many loots to collect and with other things such as gems, enchanting and fishing this game has a lot to offer.

The gameplay is Diablo. There is no denying that at all. Click to move. Click on something to attack it, hold the click to keep attacking it. Right click to use an ability on it. The style on the other hand is where it differs. It has a great variation of environments that change every 5 or so floors, and personally it was one of the big things that kept me playing. I couldn’t wait to complete the next few levels to see what the next art style they would use. They start of with “the cave” and “the jungle” but then go through some quite unique areas. The areas are half randomly generated. As in, they have designed some large pieces, and then they are randomly generated together. In my opinion this is the best of both worlds. A nicely designed area, but still not the same dungeon over and over again when you replay it.

One complaint that most people make is the lack of multiplayer. Now, as I never played Diablo to any great extent, I haven’t really noticed a lack of this. I never thought that this would be especially better if I was playing it with some one, and would urge you to still play this game if that is keeping you from buying it. Also, Runic have said that they are turning the game into an MMO, and started work on it as soon as the game had shipped. They have also stated that it would take them around a year to do this. So, buy it now, play it, then just keep it safe for the future.

So, that’s week 1 done already. Or I am counting it as done. Don’t judge me. Anyways, this week is Mass Effect 2. I can barely contain my fluids over this game. First one was definitely one of my favourite games of all time. I just love everything about the story and the characters, and from what I’ve seen this is more of that, with improved combat… cannot wait. It was posted today, so should come on Thursday. Will be a push to complete by Monday, but every morsel of spare time will go to this game.

Spen

Well, over the past few months many great games have been released, many more than I can play due to my lack of time and my own ability to procrastinate at a world-class level. The immense Steam holiday sale did not help, every game that I’d ever thought I might kinda want I bought. My Steam games list alone ballooned upto 111 games at this point, and as my friend made me count, I’ve only actually completed one of those (and that was MW2. Edit- CoD4 as well).

So I am going to make a stand. I’d love to do some hardcore 30 games in 30 days thing, but due to both college and my job I just do not have time for that, so I’m going to do a pussy version. 1 long game (ie Dragon Age) or 2 regular size games (6-15ish hours) per week, and then write some words about them on here. Hopefully this will give me the inclination to actually complete some games that I do genuinely want to play through.

EDIT: So I got to thinking, and 2 games a week might be too tall of an order with everything going on, and my need to play some other multiplayer games as well. So I’m changing the format to “52 games in 2010″. 1 game per week, 1 blog post about it, sounds good. Will do the list in 4 parts during the year, so I can stay more up to date with new releases.

A few things that have to be said. This list may change and games may be pushed back if a new game comes out in a specific week that I want to play more than the games I have planned (I have tried to plan in advance for games with solid release dates). Secondly, I am going to try my best to stick to this list, but as I mentioned I do have other responsibilies that I may cause a week to be pushed back (ie a deadline at College). Thirdly I do not own either of the main consoles at the moment as I am primarily a PC gamer. I am planning on investing in both a PS3 and an Xbox 360 in the coming months, so I may do a console version of this list as a sequal later on (already have a few games on that list – how good does Bayonetta look?). I think that’s it, so let’s go.

The List

Week 1 (18th Jan) – Dragon Age: Origins, Torchlight

It is a sin and a travisty that I have not seen this game to completion yet as it was one of my most anitcipated games of the holiday season. I am going to start this game now and count it as next weeks game so it’s all nice and tidy – and because I really want to spend some hours in this game. With the hours I will hopefully have left of next week I’ll complete Torchlight. I’m about half way through and really enjoying it so far.

Week 2 (25th Jan) -  Mass Effect 2

This is a tricky week. Mass Effect 2, which I cannot wait for, comes out on the 29th of January. A game that I could spend a long long time playing if I wanted to, but I do want to stick to this one per week thingy. That could be tricky as the game does not come out until the 29th(but will hopefully arrive a few days early), and it is just a regular week with no time off from work or college so it may spill over into the next week, but I will try and prevent it. Will update if it does.

Week 3 (1st Feb) – Bioshock

Bioshock and me have had a wierd past. I played it a while ago on the 360, but FPS’ on consoles give me motion sickness – don’t ask. Have been wanting it on the PC for ages now but never actually got round to it, and then it was on the Steam holiday sale.

Week 4 (8th Feb) – Bioshock 2

Sequel to Bioshock does look like it will be fun, have the preorder ready to go, hope I enjoy Bioshock 1 so this is something I’ll be looking forward to.

Week 5 (15th Feb) – Ghostbusters

Ghostbusters was a fiver in the Steam holiday sale, bought it, watched both of the movies in preperation, not yet played it.

Week 6 (22nd Feb) – Crysis

Another big shame of mine. Two games that I have not completed and I call myself a PC gamer, with a decent gaming machine. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve played them as a cool benchmark when I got my PC, but not even 10% of the way through the orignal. Must fix this.

Week 7 (1st March) – Crysis: Warhead

Stand alone expansion meant to be as good as the original… we’ll see.

Week 8 (8th March) – Plants vs Zombies, Braid

Indie blowout spectacular! Although, I don’t think PopCap count as indie, I think of them as such. Ah 180 employees you say Wikipedia… Fine. Casual gaming blowout spectacular! Anyways, both great games from what I’ve seen with enough play time in them to class giving them their own week, so much so it is going to be somewhat of a challenge.

Week 9 (15h March) – Fallout 3

I think this game requires it’s own week as I can tell it is quite a large game. Need to play this game and I have no excuse why it has taken me so long. Will possibly try and play all of the DLC as well, will see how it goes.

Week 10 (22nd March) – King’s Bounty: The Legend

Well, I bought King’s Bounty: Armored Princess when it was in the holiday sale and played basically the tutorial only. At the time of writing, both of the King’s Bounty games are on sale, so I picked up The Legend as even though they don’t follow on or anything I like to be chronological. May add Armored Princess to the list if I fall in love with the first one.

Week 11 (29th March) – Prey

Prey was in the Steam holiday sale before they ran out of keys, luckily I was quick enough.

Week 12 (5th April) – Zeno Clash

Zeno Clash had  Steam weekend sometime before Christmas. Played the demo, liked it, bought it, then never actually played the game.

Week 13 (12th April) – Borderlands

Borderlands is a bit of a maybe. I don’t know if I want to play through the whole game on my own, and don’t know if there will be anyone left who hasn’t played it yet to play through it with me. It does look like a good game, but will have to assess the situation closer to the time.

Week 14 (19th April) – Chronicles of Riddick: Assault of Dark Athena

Bought this one in the 5 day Steam sale, the one before Christmas (I really do love Steam). Looks great, looking forward to playing it.. in 4 months.

Week 15 (21st of April) – Call of Duty: World at War

CoD: WaW I skipped on it’s release due to lack of funds at the time and due to the poor reviews. Since learnt that the single player is more than playable, and I like hearing Kiefer Sutherland in any capacity. Want to play as more of an experiment to find out the truth of the matter.

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Well, I think that covers everything so far. There are a few games that are expected the first quarter of this year that I am looking forward to such as Max Payne 3, Splinter Cell: Conviction (if it is as good as it looks), Thief 4 (Ubisoft are deffo trying this year aren’t they?). All games that if they come out before some of the later games on my list I will be inserting in there and will be pushing other games back. This list has really just made me realise how much of a fail gamer I have been for this long. Damn.

So that’s that. I will be updating the list every Monday and posting my thoughts on the games, somewhat of a mini review. May do a full size review of some of the new release games, but do not see the point of reviewing a game that has been out for a while. I’ll also be updating my twitter with my progress and thoughts as I go,  because I’m all upto date like that. So wish me luck.

I keep getting emails from the old Xfire Plus site about this.

Xfire-PHP was an old library I made which was basically a wrapper for the XML feeds Xfire had, it would then parse them for you and put them into an array. I haven’t touched it in maybe 2 years, but I tested it today and it still works fine – and includes a caching feature. So hopefully this blog will show up if you Google “Xfire-PHP”, so you can get it here since the old Xfire Plus site is no longer maintained. It died a long time ago.

If you still want Xfire-PHP, download it here. This link should never go down since it’s on my public DropBox account.

For an interesting little experiment, I decided to make a little web page that counts down the release to Steam games. What makes it that bit more interesting is that it also gives you the option to launch the game as soon as it’s released.

The principle behind it is pretty simple. It gets the countdown from the Steam store page and uses it to calculate the release time, this is then stored in a database so it doesn’t have to scrape the Steam store page again. Then the countdown is calculated client side with Javascript and the page doesn’t need to be refreshed and doesn’t use any AJAX so it’s not constantly sending traffic to my server.

The only disadvantage with the current version of this is that it only uses release dates and app IDs that are accessible from the server’s territory. My server is located in Jacksonville, Florida so it will use the US storefront’s content.

If you want to give this a try you can see the countdown for Borderlands or Left 4 Dead 2. Want to see another game’s countodown? Append ?game=<appid> to the end of the URL.

I finally got a Google Wave account from HTF, though I had to wait a week to receive it which was incredibly annoying. I don’t see why it couldn’t be like how Gmail worked back in the day, when it was you know, instant. But with Gmail being instant everyone had an account after not too long, even when it was still invite-only.

In essence, Google Wave is “how email would be if it was invented today” and everything is in the form of a single document. This single document can be edited by anyone added to the Wave, and pictures and attachments can be drag and dropped onto the Wave (as long as you have Google Gears installed).

Google took an hour and twenty minutesa to explain and show what Google Wave can do, and that one real-time document can be stretched to do a lot more. Simple examples of this include a Sudoku game and a Twitter client.

I’ve found that it makes a pretty good IM client as well, since any part of a document can then become a chat. You’re able to see what someone is typing and can start responding before they’ve even finished which I have found myself doing in the couple of Waves I’ve been a part of so far.

It does, in fact, work a lot better than say MSN, especially when dealing with more than one other receipiant. For example, if you want to send a file to multiple people over MSN you have to open a conversation for each person you want to send the file to. But this you can drop and drag any file to some friends and if the files are pictures they can see it on the web page without ever having to store it.

As a replacement for email, I can see where they are coming from. But, I don’t personally see it as a full replacement, though it’d be useful for design documents and project planning which is a lot of the corporate world covered.

In conclusion, I’ve got high hopes for this once more people get hold of this but as a complete replacement for email I don’t completely see it but a very good replacement for IM.