Since so many regulars here have stated that they have never played HL2, I figured I would hop on in and check it out.

First off: the anti-piracy device on the HL games nowadays is a little extreme. Every time you load up one of the games (I've got HL: Source and HL2 activated so far), it goes on-line to see if, indeed, you have a legitimate copy. Every time. Why doesn't Valve just trust you after the first time? Wish I knew.

The good thing about it is it auto-patches the game for you, and allows you to go into off-line mode after the first load-up. Still, that type of hole in my security is a bit more than I feel comfortable with... oh well.

And the game?

:shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock:

I've played my share of FPS games before (Doom 3, Quake 4, Unreal, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Tron 2.0... wish I still had that one), but HL2... :shock: The graphics, the sound, the storyline (so far: I'm only 4 or 5 chapters in)... it's so realistic, it's scary.

And the gameplay... Doom 3 was the first videogame to actually scare me. I've watched dozens of horror movies, so I consider myself somewhat used to shocks; D3 made me jump so many times, and threw so many curveballs at me, I didn't sleep well for a month (not that anyone really noticed).

HL 2 is having the same effect. In spades. Watching mutated humans come at you from a deserted-looking, blood-splattered building, moving so realistically you'd swear it was filmed on location... :shock:

I like it, though. Somewhere, I think it's written that RTS and RPG players can't like first-person shooters... but since I'm not normal (big revelation there, huh? :lol: ) I can say with certainty that this game just rocks. If anything, the hype around it doesn't really do it justice.

If you just want a break from commanding an army, you could do a lot worse... but not really much better.

Howdy, neighbors:

This blog finds me in much better spirits than the last. A lot of good, bad, and strange things have happened recently, so let's get on with it. (I've tried to compress it as best I can):

Games: The big FYE in Colonie (NY) is in the process of liquidating it's PC games. In the long term, this is bad: it means the best PC selection in the area is leaving, most likely never to return. The good news: 30% off list price. This week, I snared Supreme Commander and Half-Life 2 Collector's Edition for a combined $40.:shock:

So far, I've merely skimmed HL2. Looks very nice. I enjoyed HL a lot years back, but HL2 makes it look ugly (though the pack I got came with HL:Source... maybe a refresher is in order first).

Supreme Commander... I don't have a PC with the muscle to really run this game. I have it loaded, and it runs... at extremely low settings. However, the gameplay! Takes me back to TA, and the sheer insanity of massive battles with ultra-powerful robots. Ahhh...

I'm still mainly playing Dungeon Siege 2. RPG madness at it's finest 8) .

Life: My tech woes seem to be over. The new HDD is running nicely, and the PC is running better than it has in a long time. I found out that I was running old drivers for my video card (94.24 vs. 168.xx); after updating them, everything looks so much nicer. (It's puzzling, however, that everything still ran with the old drivers... must be 'cause I'm lucky :lol: .)

School: moves along nicely. Only 1 week of calculus and 2 weeks of my other classes left, and I get a week off. I've been working out the bugs in my project for software apps, and seem to have a fully functioning piece of software up and running smoothly... which, after last weekend, I was unsure would happen. When I explained my fix to the professor, he visibly cringed (character-string manipulation isn't his favorite activity :lol: ). He seems to think I have that one quality so many programmers he knows lacks: a wild imagination, and a willingness to use it to solve problems. (I just think I'm too crazy to know something shouldn't work 8) .)

This is the busy time in my family for birthdays: my niece, my older daughter, my brother-in-law, myself, and my brother all have birthdays within 2 weeks of each other. I'm going to be sick of "Happy Birthday," candles, and cake by September :) .

Music: Eagerly awaiting "Framing Armageddon" on 9/11. Iced Earth are a remarkable band from Indiana who's Iron Maiden roots and ex-Judas Priest vocalist (Tim "Ripper" Owens) set them way apart from the herd. Definitely worth a listen!

Contacts: In the past month, my contact list has tripled... I know where most of them came from (unions, posting on boards, posting comments on blogs), but those same 2 people (pill and pigfish) still elude me! Comment, please, guys! The suspense is killing me (well, actually, random hordes of monsters and armies of giant war machines are killing me, but that's beside the point ;) ).

Peace, tranquility, and strong anti-virus protection be with you.

OK... so I was riding high Friday night: project coming along nicely, calculus stuff clicking, every star aligned properly and providing the necessary positive energy.

Saturday, everything changed. The Weekend in Hell began.

First, I went in for my usual morning tutoring session. 10:00 AM, I get to school and set up with the C++ guys: a good solid class of beginner programmers, hard working dedicated. Every one of them had issues with last week's assignment, so I'm trying to help them and simultaneously ask the instructor (who's also been my C++ and Java nstructor, and currently my applications instructor) for help on a minor issue with my project. To show him what's going on, I fire up the program, run it as usual...

CRASH. NullPointers all over the place. A function that worked since Tuesday suddenly went south on me.

*insert several curse words here... be creative :lol:

OK... no problem... I figure I'll just rewrite it when I get home. Before I leave, though, I get a phone call from my wife: "PC's down. All kinds of data corruption. Help."

(Now you know why I hate cell phones... oh, by the way: I hate cell phones.)

So when class breaks up at 1:00 pm, I head on home, and check out the desktop at home. Turns out, the hard drive (which I cannibalized from my old PC and was close to 4 years old) was dying. I could tell by the horrible crunchy sound they make... very distinctive.

So I do what any good PC tech would do: I swore my head off... then shut down, pulled the HD from the tower, and put it in the fridge ("HUH?" It's a little-known trick: if you have a dying HD, put it in the refrigerator; it shrinks the read-heads, and buys you about an hour or two to pull any necessary data from it when you get the chance. Trust me: it works 8) ). Then, I drove to CompUSA, and bought a new HD (320GB IDE drive... I'll explain why in a moment).

After some sweating, cursing, and lugging the tower back to the desk, I then fired it up... and swore at myself, because I forgot to plug the old HD back in. So I took it apart, and put the old drive back in, and the first (and only) good thing happened all day: Western Digital provided me with the tools to transfer everything (OS, data, etc.) from old drive to new. Saved me hours of reinstall XP/drivers/programs/etc. (It's called "Data Lifeguard Tools;" if you ever kill a hard drive, WD is the smartest buy you can make).

I take the old HD out, reconfigure everything, and fire it up again. This time, it's not booting up quite right. I go to My Computer, and I'm missing my DVD-ROM. *more cursing... sense a pattern?* That problem consumed me for most of the weekend...

...the other part being my project. After a major rework of the now-dead function, I found myself way behind in my schedule. I still hadn't fixed the update problem from Saturday (fixed it mysteriously today... and I have no idea how:shock: ). So I charged ahead and designed the GUI for it Sunday... only to run into a lot of unanticipated problems integrating the objects it was supposed to be showing! *guess what... more cursing...*

The DVD-ROM problem: I figured that one out Sunday night; somehow I bent a single pin in the IDE socket in back. One pin out of 40, and it just disappeared. Fortunately, I was able to unbend it and slip the cable back on; works fine now 8) .

As I was firing up the desktop one last time, I went into the BIOS to put everything back the way it was. Now, I have a perfectly good HD I got from school (80GB SATA drive... not as good as the new HD, but it was free, and it's just gathering dust) that I thought was broken: I tried it in the PC, and it wouldn't show up, so I just removed it. While I was resetting all the boot sequences and such, however, I realized why it didn't work:

I disabled the &^%$ing SATA channel. &^%$!!!

One last thing: while transferring everything, I gat a warning from the anti-virus: somehow, someone in the family had picked up a Trojan horse. Turns out our son (12 years old; good kid, smart... but very susceptible to his friends) had gone to a few sites his friends had recommended... the kind of sites that only Slaanesh would approve of, if you get my drift. We didn't yell at him (my wife and I were laughing way too hard to yell) but did inform him that he had to tell his friends where the PC got the virus... punishment enough for us ;) .

I really need a good week after this weekend.

SO... progress report on things in general:

School: The software project is moving along very nicely. I've had a couple of rough spots (like querying the wrong table of my DB... that cost me a day and some new grey hairs... life with Java, I guess), but since it's about 70% done (roughly), and I have a week and a half to finish it, I'm not in any distress.

My programming instructor (a very unusual guy: a programmer who skydives, drives a motorcycle, and hikes... I thought they all sat at a desk and coded all day! I guess I'm not the only walking contradiction I know...) has asked me to submit my project in the annual technical competition; he thinks it'll not only win, but actually be marketable when it's finished. All I could say to that was, "Sure. Why not?"

(As a gamer, the idea of competing against anyone thrills me; since I know all the other programming majors, I know it'll be an interesting contest...)

And, to make the week even more memorable: after 3 courses in calculus (one in high school, one in the Navy, and this term's course) I finally got an "A" on a quiz! It seems a bit strange, but I think I understand integrals better than derivatives... extremely counter-intuitive to anyone who knows what I'm talking about; those that don't... you are the lucky ones :) .

Gaming: I've been playing Dungeon Siege 2, and (mostly) enjoying it. It runs a lot like Diablo 2, but with better graphics and bigger battles. The part of it that disappoints me is the importation of D2's "if you die, you're back in town; come back from a save back in town" mechanic. I wish they'd stuck with the "save anywhere, start where you saved" mentality. *sigh*

Also, in my semi-regular scouting trips to the SC2 forums, I saw a thread stating that SC2 would fail. *evil grin* Naturally (if you know me well enough by now) I just had to contribute my "SC2 now because of C&C" theory... and, of course, what followed was a lot of Blizbot lashing-out. Needless to say, I feel a lot better about not wanting SC2 at the moment... :)

...which leads me to one of those ironies I love about life: I was checking the unions I'm part of, and noticed a pair of union invitations. One was from a union with members I know nothing about, so I just left it for later (maybe one of my mystery trackers sent the invite? I have no idea). The other one... if I can stop laughing long enough to... wow... words kind of fail me...

*deep breath*

The other was from the StarCraft Union.

I'll leave that one alone. It's for their own good.

Anyway...

So I'm still wondering about pill and pigfish: somehow, neither has commented nor sent word as to how they wandered into my little corner of the Twilight Zone. Don't be shy. Speak up.

(Maybe a blog about "Six Degrees of GameSpot" is in order here. :lol: )

So, until next time... the Emperor protects for the Greater WAAAGH!

My father, my brother and I all play real-time-strategy games. However, each of us has different tastes in the genre:

My father: he loves Total Annihilation. I've played against him several times... and won't challenge him anytime soon. He's unbeatable with the Arm. Any small crack in your defenses, and you are history. While you're trying to walk in and erase his base, he's already in your's, and almost done.

My brother: he's a dedicated WarCraft/StarCraft fan. I've watched him go from game-start to ready-for-attack in very short order. I'm not sure how he does it, but I don't challenge him at all... he's too good.

Myself: C&C all the way! My brother and father won't take me on, simply because I am a defensive wizard at the game. No wall, no gate... I'm totally open, and still fight off wave after wave.

We don't agree on which is the "better game" simply because not one of the three of us can match the other two at our chosen game. I can almost play TA, but just cannot get the hang of it, and refuse to put any more time into learning it. My brother almost gets TA, but can't seem to get through the simplest single-player missions on C&C or RA. My father has tried to get into our games (I would kill for his PC... not him, though :) ; it just rocks, period) and has the same problems we have getting into TA.

My point? The three of us are intelligent people (my father is a mechanical engineer; my brother is a biochemist; I'm just months from a programming degree) with very different personalities, and very different tastes in games. However, we don't push our games on each other, and we don't get together on holidays and scream insults at each other over our differences in taste.

...which is more than I can say for many others I've come across. If you so much as hint that SC2 will be less than stellar, a lot of the more rabid fans will try to beat some "sense" into you. "If you don't like SC, you're a [expletive deleted] idiot!" is the tamest comment I've heard; most are so unprintable they'd lose sense if I tried to censor them.

Whatever happened to respecting others' opinions? I tried to explain to a friend of mine why C&C3 is an incredible gaming experience. Another student overheard us talking, and MY GOD! you'd think I just admitted to being a Teletubbies fan! "That game is garbage! All you do is spam tanks and stuff, and you can win! EA is horrible! The game is so buggy you can't play it!" (I've paraphrased the preceeding comments; just replace and insert some extremely foul language and you'll get close to the original.)"StarCraft is so much better!"

Being the calm and rational person I am, I asked him the obvious: Did you update this, that and the other thing? Did you get the patches? He didn't want to hear it. "I spent *insert obscene dollar amount* on my PC, and it should have run fine!" he screams at me... but he's looking around like he just realized his fly was unzipped. "Anyway, I uninstalled it and..." (what he did to it was absolutely unprintable).

Needless to say, my friend is not inclined to play SC anytime soon.

Seriously, though: they are games, right? The whole point, as I understand it, is to play a game, enjoy it, and recommend it to your friends, not hold it up as the Ultimate Avatar of Truth, Goodness, and Cookies! If I like a game you don't, what's the harm? Are you going to win a huge prize for talking people out of buying the competitors' products?

Another thing is, you're not doing your game's developers any favors. If you come across as a rabid, frothing cultist, chances are the person you're trying to "convert" will be so turned off they'll never buy it... and they'll talk their friends out of buying it too. If on the off chance they do buy it, you'll have cranked their expectations so high, that the game will seem flat compared to the description you give them. Finally, your expectations for the inevitable sequel/expansion will be so high, you may become disenchanted by the product ("WHAT? No super-intelligent AI? No particle effects? No DX10 support? *&^%!!!"

My friend bought C&C:TFD the next week. He's having problems playing C&C, and has asked me for my advice on several occasions. When I ask him if he likes it, he says it's a lot better than the lunatic made it out to be, and is looking forward to upgrading his PC to handle C&C3.

Yes, people: reasonable sells.

Last night, our instructor gave the word: "Commence programming!" Coding and testing for our projects this term begins as of now.

All I can say is, "It's about time!" All this planning, designing, coming up with testing protocols, scheduling... it's been like waiting for Christmas. All the build-up for what I want to do has been very draining.

Time to have fun! Programming is like a game to me: it's a combination of hide-and-seek ("Guess where you hid the logic error in 200 lines of code!"), jigsaw puzzles ("Piece A might go here... or here..."), and wrestling (not much of that, actually... I can't afford to wrestle much with the hardware, and body-slamming my laptop might violate the warranty :lol: ).

It's also going to be time-consuming, so if my posts/updates/etc. become sporadic and rare, blame it on school (I've said it before, but I'm sure I mean it this time).

It seems like evry day, a few more people appear on my contact list. I don't mind (socializing is part of what GS is all about, right?), but I am puzzled. At least two names are unfamiliar to me, and seem to have no connection to any games or unions I'm a regular at. (I tried to put it down to my magnetic personality, but my ego just isn't big enough to accept that explanation... :) )

I finished the new Harry Potter book... [spoiler] Yeah... Like I'd give anything away... [/spoiler] ...and I must say, I was mildly disappointed. It seemed to me that Rowling just lost the fire that drove her to start the series (10 years is a long time), and with the extreme hype surrounding Potter's finale, it was like going to see "Titanic," and sitting through "Killer Klowns from Outer Space" instead (a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much).

Still, don't wait for the movie: by the time it comes out, some bonehead will spoil it for you, and another senseless murder will shortly follow.

I've taken a bit of a break from Diablo 2; I'm almost back to where the Necromancer was before Bob took over (*shakes head at bad naming choice*), so I felt a need for a break. I'm currently playing Dungeon Siege 2; the original was a lot of fun, and the sequel is just as crazy.

It's also got me looking forward to Space Siege (hope the name changes before release), which looks like Dungeon Siege plus Cyberpunk (an old PnP RPG where characters cybernetically enhanced themselves... at the cost of their basic humanity).

Symphony X. "Paradise Lost." If you're into progressive metal, buy the CD. It's incredible.

Until next time, have fun, be safe, and don't feed the trolls...

I've seen this question a few times... usually when the denizens of this site reach level 20, and stay there for a while. "Why does this level take so long?!?" they cry. "It takes forever to get away!"

Well, being a long-time RPG player, I actually know what an MS is. It may go a long way towards explaining why the level lingers for well-nigh eternity (or, at least a month):

Enyx Software released several RPGs for the NES in the early 90's called "Dragon Warrior." DW1 was considered one of the better RPGs at the time of its release, until it was dethroned by Final Fantasy. Each new release added more features, and more interesting ways to do battle (slot machines, decks of cards, etc.), culminating in it's final NES release, Dragon Warrior 4 (one of my all-time favorite RPGs).

DW4 contained 3 mini-campaigns (to introduce the major characters in the story) and one major campaign. It was the typical Japanese RPG-storyline (find obscure items in dungeons while fighting off monsters and the Boss; bring them to The Ultimate Center Of Evil TM to defeat The Ultimate Evil TM. To my knowledge, it was the first RPG that allowed you a larger campaigning party than you could fit in your combat party (they travelled in a covered wagon beside your party), allowing you to "tag-team" in and out as the situation dictated.

One of the more interesting critters in the game was the Metal Slime. In one part of the main campaign, you were near a town on the edge of a desert. If you were feeling so-so about your party's level, you could activate a Monster Lure near this town, and be jumped by single Metal Slimes. They never hit back, so the danger to you was minimal, but they were very hard to hit (a full strength hit might scratch it for 1 damage... 2 if you were lucky). They had 4 HP apiece, so they died pretty easily... but, again, you had to hit them first. The prize was a measly 5 gold... and 1350 xp, which, at that point in the game, could mean a solid level up.

I recently tried to play the game over again, but it looks so dated compared to today's newer graphics and games that I sort of gave up an hour into it. Still, I did beat it the first time I played, and had an enormous amount of fun doing it.

So I'm sort of excited about being a Metal Slime nowadays... and, to be truthful, it sounds a lot better than Gitaroo Man (whatever that is).

• Post on forums: I've been looking at some of my posts in the last week... I'm sorely tempted to mod myself.
• Restart an RPG: in a fit of madness, I created a new character in Diablo 2, and in a fit if anti-creative genius, named him... "Bob." (Can you rename a character in D2? I need something flashier.)
• Walk into a game store: when I'm down, I buy games... regardless of whether they're good or not. I'm now the proud owner of "Mage Knight: Apocalypse," a game that got the stratospheric score of 4.4 here on GS. Haven't installed it yet... I'm a little leary of doing so...
• Walk into a game store with a 1/4=shelf of PC games: ...then rant at the lowly clerk that he's a willing participant in the anti-PC conspiracy along with EA, Atari, the CIA, and the National Weather service... poor guy thought I was nuts. I was mostly joking, but he was measuring me for an I-love-me jacket.
• Refuse professional help: I sat and stared at a calc problem for 6 straight hours, trying to understand what it was asking. When I finally made up my mind to approach the main Math instructor, however, I suddenly got it. It was as if the idea of getting help was enough to shake loose the mental block. (I got it right, by the way. Seems the light has finally flickered on... just in time for the midterm.)
• Make a blog post. Just look at the last one; that wasn't me. I'm smart, funny, charming, super-sophisticated

[This is an ego-check. Your ego is currently writing your blog. Please beat him with a large salami.]

Ooops... sorry about that.

Anyway, I'm out of my funk now, and should start sounding like the non-troll I hope I am.

OK... as you can probably guess, I'm a little fried around the edges right now; the combination of school, home, and not much else has been a bit stressful. The weather hasn't really been cooperating: everytime I try to get out and try some of that elusive stuff known as "fresh air," it starts raining... not "nice refreshing shower" rain, but "Noah called; he wants to know where to find a pair of woodchucks" rain. Cabin fever, here I come!

Calculus is killing me slowly. Some days, I can look at a problem and say, "Oh, yeah, that's simple enough; I'll just knock that right off, no problem." Other days, I can stare at the same problem and just want to scream in frustration. Makes me want to take up "hand-waving Calculus" (wave hands wildly, screaming "It's obviously the right answer; after all, I'm always right!"), but I doubt that will get me a passing grade.

With the oldest home all summer (I loved summer vacation as a kid; I think it was created by the Chaos Gods nowadays), it gives me more reason to wonder why we didn't hand him off to an orphanage when we had the chance... no, I'm kidding there. Really.

Diablo 2 was going nice and smooth until the end of Act 2; does anyone have a strategy for beating Duriel that doesn't involve getting killed 15 times? I'm running a lvl. 25 Necromancer.

Finally, I've also eased myself back into C&C3 after installing patch 1.06... which involved installing the dreaded 1.05 patch. Re-learning strategy for each side post-.05 is ridiculous, but I've figured out how to win with the Scrin.

Hopefully, I can climb out of my current funk and feel positive about things by next week; right now, everything's in a rut, and the only thing keeping me sane is the wild stuff I post and read here.

Random music pick: since Firefox just decided to update, and consequently lost my link to it (not to mention the glitchy things it does when it needs a restart) I'll edit it in later. Sorry!

UPDATE: OK... I found my link to one of the strangest videos I have ever seen... Green Jelly (formerly Green Jello until they were sued by... Jello) had the distinction of being the first band to shoot the music video before releasing the album. Not the most talented band on Earth, but very entertaining. (WARNING: may contain content mildly offensive... but hilarious.)

Time to stop venting about games for a bit, and update the faithful (WOW did that come off sounding pretentious... and so does using the word "pretentious," come to think about it...) AAAHHHH spiralling off-topic... sorry.

Since last week, the weather has turned absolutely brutal around here: several very severe thunderstorms have rolled through, and made a thorough hash of the local power grid. Tonight, for example, we had a brown-out that almost wiped out our stereo, and shut down our desktop PC. Thankfully, no permanenet damage was done, but it's driving me a little loopy trying to keep up with events from my laptop in school while I'm supposed to be working/tutoring/ etc.

Speaking of tutoring: things are going well there. I have several regulars who have been begging me for help on VB and Calculus. The former, I'm starting to refresh, but Calc... it's there, but it's not there if you get my meaning. The light's starting to flicker, but until it starts blazing, I'll keep sweating.

On the game front, I've picked up Diablo 2. Graphically, it's a little ugly: if the sprites were any grainier, I could make bread from them :) . Gameplay-wise, it's harrowing... especially starting out. Everything is coming at you from every direction, trying to kill you... and of course, I pick the weakest character melee-wise (Necromancer), so it's hammering me even worse... until I realized, "Hey! I can use the skeletons as meat-shields (yeah, I know: bones don't have meat) and save my own skin!" Things have smoothed out a lot since then.

Tech news: I've been impressed with Vista for some time now. It's been very stable and secure, and it does look nice. One problem I've had was performance; even with minimal settings, everything was a bit laggy. No more!!! At the local BestBuy, there was a sale on laptop DDR2: 1GB for $45. Naturallly, I dove on it (the cheapest I'd seen to that point was ~$100 for 1GB... and that was the slow RAM), and now, I have 3X the memory. HAMMER HAPPY!

(One quick side note: if you ever get Vista... rephrase, any Microsoft OS has this problem... turn off any screensavers. For some reason, they do not release the memory they use, and clog system resources. I watched my memory usage go from 40% to almost 90% when the screensaver kicked on, and it stayed there until I memory-defragged it back.

Short version: screensaver = memory leak. Memory leak bad. :lol: )

Sanity has left the WH40K forum. It's somehow made it's way to the 40K Union. Poor thing ;) .

On a darker note: the one person who has been tracking me since my first blog seems to have gone *poof*. I have no idea why... I have no idea for how long... all I know is I miss the crazy Romanian with the semi-broken English (which, by the way, isn't as bad as some of the English-speaking posters I've seen). If anyone knows just what happened, please clue me in; if some moderator is lurking around and sees this blog, FREE TEKMET! (I always wanted to shout that.... :lol)