Month: May 2003

Robot Wars

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’ve got a new guilty pleasure that I want to share with you all. TechTV is not showing “Robot Wars”, which is the original British version of what was copied and aired as BattleBots on Comedy Central in the US.

Except…it’s much better! I can put my finger on it, really. The host if Craig Charles, who was Lister on Red Dwarf. The “robots” are really remote controlled vehicles, as was the case with BattleBots. But…I guess they just take it more seriously on this show. YOU don’t have to, but they do. Sorta like, and I cringe to make this association, but sort of like WWF.

What gets fascinating, though, is the emergence of robot themes as things go on. First they were all about buzz saws and hammers, then came the flippers, which just slide an arm under their opponent and flip ’em on their backs. To combat the flippers, bots were built with lower and lower ground clearance, but the flippers just got lower and lower. Then came bots that had no ‘top’ so if they got flipped, they land on a second set of wheels and keep going. And so on.

What I’m amazed at is I find myself really rooting for one team in a good match. Seeing two ‘bots circling each other, trying to get in a killer move, starts to get really engrossing.

FWIW, I thought Battle Bots was just silly. But Robot Wars is actually pretty interesting. Check it out.

Brute Force

Posted on by Nimgimli

Out now for the XBox, and early thoughts are pretty positive. Not the bar-raising game it was hyped to be, but still pretty darned fun. No XBox Live support though, which is a shame since you can play Co-op locally.

E3

Posted on by Nimgimli

Now that the hype has cooled down a bit, I’m reflecting on E3 and feeling kindof depressed. While there were some very cool games at the show, they were, for the most part, all shooters: Halo 2, Half-Life 2, Doom III, Call of Duty. I can’t recall any really exciting strategy games or RPGs. Granted, MS rolled out Mythica but that, as well as the other big MMORPGs (World of Warcraft, Middle Earth Online) are way out on the distant horizon. We’ve got Star Wars Galaxies out soon, but beyond that…very little non-shooter gaming to look forward to this year.

Weekend recap

Posted on by Nimgimli

So, Memorial Day Weekend ended up being 3 days of pouring rain. Hooya!

Well, on the bright side I had no big plans anyway, and it did give me the chance for some hardcore media viewing. Over the course of the weekend I watched A Beautiful Mind, Donnie Darko, Metropolis (an anime film, not the old classic), The Fellowship of the Ring (extended version, natch) and the anime tv series Dual: Parallel World Adventure. Whew! No wonder my eyes are tired.

In and around that, I went through a compressed MMO cycle with Planetside. I have several phases I go through whenever I get into an MMO. First I obsess about it. During this phase I can think of nothing else and I orient my life around maximum playing time. Once that intial intensity burns out, I go into my mainstream phase where I just play and enjoy the game like a normal person. Lastly, I go into disgruntled phase where I’m no longer truly enjoying the game but I still play out of habit or out of the hope that I’ll have one more grand adventure.

Generally this cycle takes 3-6 months for me to work through. With Planetside it took about a week, most of it compressed into this past rainy weekend. I’m truly hoping that it was just a glitch in the system and that the next game will last me 3-6 months again.

And its still gloomy and rainy. Everything is starting to stink of mildew and damp. And the more it rains, the more I want to go home and pull the covers over my head for a week. Except its too warm for that, isn’t it? Heh. And I have “The Most Boring Conference of All Time” to attend this week (OSCOM: Open Source Content Management). Yippee!

Planetside

Posted on by Nimgimli

Picked up Planetside, the new sci-fi MMFPS from Sony. Early impressions are very favorable. The game looks good, documentation is good (a sore point after the Shadowbane debacle) and it seems like the gameplay is rich enough to have legs. You can play it as a straight-up shooter, or you can specialize in being a medic or and engineer or a spy…lots of vehicles to drive or fly. A huge world…

Yup, it all looks great in theory. Be a few days before I can really sink into the gameplay, though.

Enter the Matrix

Posted on by Nimgimli

Well, I rented Enter the Matrix for the XBox yesterday…and returned it today.

I really wanted to like it, but between an awkward control system, weird clipping problems, a dodgy camera and a feeling that you’re never really in control of the character you’re playing, it just wasn’t good. I’m sure Shiny got caught in a time crunch and didn’t have enough time to polish it to where they should have.

The game looks cool, with great Matrix-y fighting moves, but in fact you have very little control over them. Hit the Focus (their word for bullet-time) button and the Kick button and maybe your character will leap up and double-kick two nearby opponents, or maybe s/he’ll leap up, push off a wall and do a total round-house kick to one of them. As far as I could tell, the game decided.

You can use either a first or third person point of view, but you can’t move in first person and you can’t look up/down in third. When you’re fighting a helicopter that’ll cut you down in seconds, this becomes very awkward indeed. Either stand still so you can look up to aim at it, or dodge and not be able to target it.

In the driving sequences, we have crash physics that leave your car tumbling, clipping through building after building, for ridiculous amounts of time until you finally lodge against a building that is solid.

And the controls! Eeek. The little black button is your first button. Try to hit that in a panic.

You can do neat Matrix moves like a cartwheel while firing your gun, and the hand-to-hand combat sure looks neat. You can see what they were going for and it would’ve kicked major ass, but it just never got finished. Between this and the new movie, my Matrix fanboyism has dissolved in a matter of days. 🙁

Apres E3

Posted on by Nimgimli

OK, E3-03 is over and gone, I’m back from travelling (note to self: next year don’t travel on the weekend after E3) and its time to start sifting through the madness. Being a lazy bloke I’m delighted at how much TV coverage can be found. G4’s Pulse was probably the first show to hit the air with E3 coverage, and TechTV’s X-Play starts their coverage this weekend.

Given that I’ve just started digging in, my initial impression is that the XBox and PC are the platforms to be on this coming year. I haven’t seen anything mind-boggling on the GameCube or PS2 so far. Specifically, the two games that have wowed me so far are Halo 2 and Half-Life 2.

The most interesting sound byte I’ve heard so far is John Carmack on DOOM 3. Apparently they went with a linear, strongly scripted type of gameplay for D3. With games like GTA3 and BF 1942 making ’emergent behavior’ the current industry buzzword, its interesting to see id backing away from AI and relying on scripting. While DOOM 3 looks good, I’m skeptical about it as a game; in my opinion while id has made a lot of great 3D gaming engines, they haven’t made a lot of great games. That said, I can’t wait for it to come out, just so the DOOM 3 engine can start being licensed by other developers.

Dolphins of Pern

Posted on by Nimgimli

During my trip this past weekend I finished listening to Anne McCaffrey’s The Dolphins of Pern. The version I heard was narrated by Mark Rolston. Let the slagging begin.

I try to review audiobooks in two ways. From a technical point of view, and then from a content point of view. Technically, this audiobook was really sub-par. First of all, Audible didn’t have it in their highest quality format, so it sounded rather muddy. Second, Rolston was reading like a fiend…like he got X dollars to do the job and wanted to get it done as quickly as possible. If there are chapters in this book, I don’t know about them, and in fact even when a scene changed from one side of the planet to the next, Rolston didn’t break his cadance. He read the whole thing as fast as he could without a single pause. It was *really* hard to follow at times. Add in the fact that the titular dolphins speak in their own strange lingo and it just turned into 9 hours of aggravation. DO NOT BUY THIS AUDIO VERSION!!

Now, as a book…well, in all honesty its hard to be fair reviewing it for content when it was so hard to hear, but I just don’t like the direction McCaffrey is taking Pern in. Technology has returned to the planet, and the residents are building radios and computer terminals and it just ruins the feel of Pern, for me. That’s a highly personal opinion, though. I just like Pern as a fantasy world. But beyond that, there didn’t seem to be much of a story here. It was more a big long vignette focused on the dolphins and how they’re reintroduced to Pern society. I find it really hard to believe that the dolphins have been talking to the people they’ve saved from storms for 2500 years and only now did someone think to talk back to them, but oh well.

All in all, a major disappointment. I’ll go back to the early periods of Pern history next time, I think.

Closed again

Posted on by Nimgimli

Another weekend on the road coming up. Bad, bad timing…I should be spending this weekend combing the ‘net reading E3 coverage. Oh well, what’s done is done. At least next weekend is a 3-dayer!

Xbox price drop

Posted on by Nimgimli

Eek! I could’ve sworn I posted this… Micrsoft followed Sony down to the $179 price point for the XBox. Thus far, Nintendo hasn’t budged. Pretty conservative price drops, but “pretty conservative” seems to be the theme for the big 3 console makers at this year’s E3.