prog | XBox poop

My "vacation" failed to start last week, since my main active client had a bunch of revisions for me to make, which didn't surprise me. The work I have done went live on Friday, so we are now done-done and I hope to do interesting things starting today. (The client's already started to make new sales via the software I wrote, which makes everyone feel good.)

First, though, I spent the weekend sick at home, playing video games. Saturday

classicaljunkie hung out and we played XBLA stuff together, and Sunday I spent alone playing Half Life 2, which is new to me. And, erm, I just played it all morning this morning, too. That's enough of that.

This is my first exposure to the current generation of digital gaming with a high-def display, sitting at the end of an intertube ready to pump more gamage at me whenever I wanted. I can see why someone could just sit and play forever. (Microsoft happily keeps your credit card info on-file after your first online purchase, so buying more downloadable gobbidge thereafter is as easy as pressing a button. They are bastards.)

I haven't played TF2 yet. I'm a little scared to. I had fun runnin around one of the maps alone just to check out the place.

The sickness was worrisome. After a month of masterful regularity, maybe the best I've ever had, I didn't go for five days and it was starting to hurt. Sunday I turned to a coordinated regimen of many things to get it all out, and it worked, and it was pretty awful. I am going to drink through this bottle of prune juice and hope that balance has been restored to the force. I have no idea what's going on.

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On the gaming, I am amazed when I go look at the games in the stores. They're getting closer and closer to 'real' every generation.

It's looking amazingly good.

I'm still just getting geared up with my eyetoy and PS2 though.

;)

On the other stuff...
Glad you're feeling better - that's never any fun. I have taken to drinking 'smoothies' for breakfast once or twice a week to help out. Get lots of fruit into me, which has helped a lot. Of course, this morning I feel very ill and don't want to eat lunch. Ugh kind of dreading it right now.

your plumbing problems may be caused by one of the many viruses going around now. In any case, I hope you're feeling better.

I just like using this icon.

Yes, I feel human again as of this morning.

The viruses are crazy this winter! I shoulda gotten shots. Fooey.

HL2 was released around three years ago and I still have to stop every so often to look around and go "daaaarh, pretty". I especially love the scenes that take place out in the open, in bright daylight. It looks so nice.

I love TF2, even though I haven't historically been much of an on-line FPS player. If you're playing on the PC, add me as a friend (ahkond is my user name, and my current nickname is [sn]-ahkond; I'm not sure which is used for friend listing) and I can show you around a bit. I did the same thing at first, just running around by myself on empty maps to learn the terrain. But playing for real can be a huge amount of fun and I found some servers where I feel comfortable and the people are nice.

I think the easiest classes to pick up and run with are the ones that don't require too much in the way of aiming and reflexes OR complex controls: Heavy, Pyro and Medic. I thought it would be easy to play Scout too but it's not. The Spy and the Engineer have a lot of technology to work with, and the Soldier requires some pretty careful aiming, and the Demoman has a combination of those problems. The Sniper can be fun but you're out of the action a lot and it takes a special kind of evil patience to play it.

I guess the choice of classes boils down to which style of play suits your temperament. Anyway, if you do get interested let me know and we can go set people on fire or something.

The part that really ticks me off about MS keeping around credit card info is that there's apparently no way to remove it.

I've got three cards on my account, two of which are no longer valid, but it keeps one of the invalid ones as the default... so half the time I go to add more points, I have a momentary "OMG what's wrong with my card?!" heart attack before remembering I need to pick the third one down.

At some point, we should arrange a TF2 night with friendly-type folks who are just there to have fun and know not of pwning n00bs. I know at least two other people who have the game and would love to play even teams.

I'd be up for that.

I have Carc and Settlers, too, and would be up for some intenetty play whenever.

I theoretically have a PC in my MacBook's Windows partition, but I haven't taken the trouble to see how well it runs modern shooters. I kinda have my doubts.

Woot. As soon as I find myself at home with enough free time to game, I'll hop on!

Right, and even then you'd have to buy it all over again. So if you're playing TF2 and Half-Life 2 on the XBox then it's like one of us lives in the anti-matter universe. Never the twain shall meet; we can't play on the same servers or otherwise interact.

I've seen (screenshots and photos of) people playing TF2 on Macs, but you need a modern video card. Some people even run it on Linux using Wine.

Still appreciate the play advice. I would have assumed that the Soldier is the simplest class, if only coz he seems the least nuanced. Or at the least "Whee I'm playin Quake"-iest.

The Soldier is Quake-like, yes, because of the rocket-jumping (a skill I never mastered) and the timing. By "timing" I mean that the rockets move rather slowly, enough that a quick opponent can often dodge them given enough warning, and in order to use the rockets effectively you have to be good at guessing where the opponent is going to be, not where he is, and this varies by how far away the person is, what class they are, whether they see you or not, what they're doing, etc..

Furthermore, you can leverage the explosion physics by doing things like aiming at a wall near something in order to deliver splash damage (good for blowing up sentry guns around corners), or aiming at people's feet so that they get floor splash damage, or "juggling" opponents by knocking them into the air with one rocket and then hitting them with the second while they're in mid-air and have no control over their trajectory (except Scouts, who can change direction in mid-air).

All of this is stuff I never got the hang of in Quake, but if you're good at it, bon appetit. All I know is that when I play Soldier or Demoman I end up causing more damage to myself than to others because I keep blowing myself up.

You also have to manage ammo: the rocket can only hold 4 rockets and is slow to reload, so you have to be aware of that count at all times and not get caught by an enemy in mid-reload. By playing Heavy, Pyro and Medic I rarely have to worry about the exact count of my ammo, beyond "hey I'm getting low I need to grab some ammo". There's no explicit reloading for the heavy's big gun or the flamethrower. So that's an extra dimension of complexity I don't have to be quite so aware of.

The Soldier recently got nerfed in that they reduced the amount of spare rockets he can carry, but this largely means that people have to stop spamming tunnel entrances and doorways quite so much with suppressive rocket fire. They did the same thing to the Demoman, too.

One extraneous dig at the Xbox version: you won't have access to all of the maps. There are one or two official maps from Valve that aren't up yet for the Xbox, but beyond that there are dozens of really good custom maps available in the PC world, built by fans, with wildly different characteristics. This variety is one of my favorite things about the game, and playing the same 6 maps over and over would be a bit monotonous. Some maps stink but the servers where I play have a pretty good rotation of maps .

Also, the voice chat is crucial to team strategy and I don't know what's up with voice communication on the Xbox.

Good art direction beats fancy tech every time. Valve's artists really know how to light an outdoor scene.

Feel free to bark at me over GChat if'n you want to throw down sometime.

That was me, of course.

XBox poop

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Oops