the drama sorounding half life 2 is absolutely insane, i can't believe how the hype is building with the not quite foreseable release of the actual game versus the iminent release of cs source, and what's up with day of defeat source, only available if you buy through source, i'm sorry but that just won't do. i wan't a hard copy of that delicious mod in my hands. i hate this downlaod game thing, i need the hardcopy in my hands i want the box on my shelves, and the cd in my cd case. i hate the freaking drama and all the freaking games that valve and vivendi are playing. freaking screw them. come two weeks from now if halflife isn't out i'm buying doom3 instead. i don't care if pcgamer gives it 100% in next weeks review, i'm pissed. both parties are pissing me off so much. and at the same time i'm so hungery for the game i want it to be so good, i want it to blow me away in a way that i can't expect, i have a new computer coming and i'll be ready for it.

the new news on the street is that pcgamer will have the world exclusive review of halflife 2 before anyone else does. wow am i glad i'm a subscriber. the stupid thing is that though they review the game it is possible for vivendi to be the stupid jerks they are and withhold the game for six months following, kindof like what happened to condition zero. that was one of the stupidist things i've ever witnessed in the world of gaming. now is a time for vigilantes to deal with vivendi. i wouldn't be supprised if halflife2 was withheld, and vivendi was subject to some horrible acts of piracy preformed out of anger by members of t he all to nerdy gaming community. i believe that vivendi is a bastard and i don't understand why valve still does buisness with them. from what the editor of both us and uk pcgamer have said. halflife 2 should blow us all away, more so than doom3, or farcry. i'm upgraded and ready for action. yeah

ok i've played the demo for the game and i've got some things to say. first, the majorcritisim that strook me in the reviews was the fact that cover made some one invulnerable. first i'd like to state that this is just not the case, usually you don't need to prform and entire flank if you can get a better angle on the guy, or guys in question. the layout of this game is breathtakeing, the graphics rival those of most recent firstperson shooters, great dynamic lighting and a cool blur effect for the heat comming of the black top in some levels really give this game a great feeling, there are some good physics at work here to, except there was this one barrel in the demo that if you had you guys hid behind it, it would go bonding of for no apparent reason, responding as though a tank had shot it, it would shot out of the screen, funny i thought. otherwise there were no noticable glitches. yes the gameplay could get repetetive, but look at the first homeworld, it was a kick but game, but the single player boiled down to the basicly same thing most of the time. i'd give this game a low eight if i had to review it by what i've heard, and the demo i've played, why, because it doesn't have a multiplayer aside form coop, which isn't the same. imagine how crazy if they took th epremise of how this game functions and aplied some sort of requestion point system or somethinghave the ability to enter and hide in buildings, and such, but still keeping the action concentrated and focused, the multi player could have really been revolutionary if they had expored and refined it. this game is good in my opinion, and very refreshing. the problem is that i like the game so much but there are some things missing. like a multiplayer deathmatch, and a actualy skirmish mode. the game gets 8.2 form me for the great prsentation, attention to detail, and great use of graphics and lighting. this is a truely revolutionary game in my opionion, i hope the mod community or someone does something with it's amazing take on focused combat and runs with. any one read about quake 4 yet. well the pcgamer scoop makes the game look uber cool i can't wait. as for teh great warhammer 40k dawn of war, it deserves a ten for great presentation and a great reinvention of a classic play style. this game feels like a sequel to a blizard game, from the opening cinematic, to the way the game plays, to the menu, the game echoes warcraft and sarcraft. great game kick but animations, it fixes all the problems i had with war craft. on ly thing is that there is not automatic abilities, like you can't turn on automatic fix for your peons, and that kind of stuff, also there is no real rpg element in this game. so it's not focused on heroes. i liked and hated heroes, you know why they relly narrowed your play style once you chose one, but they were just so cool, and i love the character that every on had. but if you totaly hated them then you'll love warhammer, it's bloodier more furious simplifies to resource colecting and forcuses the game on bloody as hell combat and supreme tactics. gamespots reviews in my opinion have been slightly of latly they don't reward fun games any more, just revolutionary ones. lame.

My new computer will be arriveing soon, in about two weeks. I built it with my former gymnastics coach, who is a computer components retailer. the whole thing cost me a total of 1,200 dollars. it's sporting a 3.06 hyper threaded processor with 800mhz fsb, 1gig of DDR daul channel 3200 400 mhz ram. A nice GeForce 6800 gt oc, yeah that's right it's over clocked. packing a total of 256mb of DDR3 ram for nice renderingof my games. the system will have two 120 gig hard drives, and a nice daul layer dvd burner. a magnificent Asus mother baord to hold it all together with built in fire wire. I love this thing i can't wait to use it. it is aslo comming witha free version of doom3 to test out this awsome rig(came with the graphics card $400, nice deal). i can't wait to witness the outdoor experience of farcry, the cordor terror of doom3, and the experience that will be halflife2. the graphics will be pumped to the limits of what my machine can handle. total war wouldn't be the same. i can't wait. oh the humanity

ok i just read the call of duty united offense review and they were saying how great or amazing the game was and they only noted one flaw in the game. then they scored the game a 8.9? wait but you said it was a great expansion pack wholy worthy of the call of duty franchise. then why the low score. if its a great expansion pack then give it atleas a 9.0. not alot of great expansion packs come our ways these days. i was thoroughly dissapionted in that score. if the game kicks ass score it high. don't put it in the same scoreing range as games like joint operations (which sucked horribly ) god. well i'm really looking forward to this game. the expansion pack adds onto the magnificent singleplayer experience, and it totally over hauls the multi player. sounds great, ney amazing, well it's only equal to joint ops. ok moving on, you know what one of my favorite games is, the battle field franchise. well i love those games but i'll be quick to point out what i consider to be the flaws in it's game design. first the vehicles there are never enough of them, and this would be fine if being a foot soldier was fun in this game, but i'm sorry the pacing of the foot soldier feels way to slow, especially without a sprinting option. the guns are horribly under powered, and the sounds for the guns is often pathetic in comparison to every thing else that is going on, though the sounds are good, nothing seems in praportion, the audio engine isn't very affective the tanks aren't noisy enough their noisy as hell engine seem muted in this game. the experience of battle field should be heart pounding audio to draw you into the game, but that isn't the case. i'm hopeing that the new call of duty multi player will make me happy. i want a new operation flashpiont, without all the freaking problems, but the great feeling of scale, and amazing pacing of the battle, as you sprint for cover while you hear the ever increaseing rumble of armor. another thing, the tanks, though they have treads they can't drive over sandbag bunkers, what's with that? instead a tank can be mear feet away and your safely lying pron behind a bunker. if they were gonna limit the number of vehicles in a game they need to give them more of a punch. the explosin animations are very strongly lacking in this game the feeling of the bombers doing bombing runs is kinda intense and feels cool, but you know it could be way more awsome. i'm sad when i see a tank fire right next to some one and i see that the guy didn't take any shrapnel damage, and the explosion pusses him away harmlessly. i have so many pet peaves about how battlefield could be better, bf vietnam was a great step in the right direction. by first problem is is hate the weapons physics in this version though, they are a joke, take the m60 for example its just as accurate as a m16 but hold 100 rounds, kinda takes away the fun of having a accurate m16 doesn't it, the skin for the m79 is horrible, the coloring, the patern, the thing really looks like crap in my opinion, otherwise the guns in this game are beautiful with great animations, the physics for them are just so bad, and unbalanced. something that has never been good in any of the games is vehicle damage, its potrayed farely unrealisticly. it's not like parts of the vehicles can be broken or knocked off when hit with a rpg, this is very disssapionting, especially knowing it able to be GTA3 is the best example. the smoking tank isn't very convincing as far as vehicle damage goes. I like that machine guns can hit air planes in the engine to cause some nice damage. the rest of the damage is fine, like how machine gun fire is waisted on tanks. really there is pleanty of room for improvement. this improvement i speak of is bound to take place in the next installment, battlefield two. from the looks of the movies this game is shapeing up with greatness in mind. the most fantastic thing i think is the destructable enviroments, they also seem to have uped the refinement on the weapons adding airon sight ability, there would also seem to either be a quiker pace to the character movement, or there is a sprinting ability, teh vehicles look so much cooler, the jet planes look fantastic as do the helicopters. i'm very eager, the game also supports 100 players, this means that the game should run like butter with 80 people on the server. that is a fantastic feet. forget joint operations witch is laggy no matter what. this new game looks to fix many of the problems of the previous games, the explosions look fantastic with stuff blowing apart debre flinging into the air. theis game could go all the way as far as massive battles go. i hope that they release a full fledged battle field mod that allow you to experience the glory of this game in the WW2 era imagine DDay with stuff blowing apart all around you that would be a sight to be hold, actually haveing 40-60 people sieging the shoreline simotaneously. i hope that they add a latter so that better players can lead, or better yet that each team can have a commander position, that person would have a birdeye view of the battle field issueing orders navigating a fire team for a good flank. nothing quite like a good fire and maneuver flank. feels great.counter strike source sounds like a thing of the past.

if it looks like warcraft, and smells like war craft, but it's in a scifi universe, it must be the new starcraft right? wrong, it's warhammer 40k, this game is tons of fun my only bifs are the path finding and unit ai wich can sometime end in you haveing to unecessarily micro manage, why isn't there programable controls and why aren't there waypoints. those things aside this game is magnificent from what i've seen of it so far. right now it is on the right track, i only pray that the final game is as good as the demo. the cartoony characters cause me to flash back to warcraft and starcraft, hell the main menu is identical to war craft 3. wow this game doesn't seem like a relic game, it feels a hell of alot like a blizzard game except that it took alot less time to develope than a blizzard game, hence the small problems. i love the demo the space marines are so cool. the feeling is so similar to warcraft, in that there are mager benefits to haveing one pimped out squad of marines with the human hero leading vs. tons of marines useing stardard weapons. the emfasis is on smaller groups of units and tatical geneis i am loveing this games pace witch is red lineing it the capture points and energy are your only resources in this game. this create a streamlined tactical gameplay element that allow you to focus on your men in the action. now the way thing work is you control you units by squads, you cannot control individual units inside of a squad, but you can upgrade to give you boys all rocket launchers, or chaiguns or flame throughers. or balance and go with one of each. you can then have 1-2 squad leaders per squad, plus two hero units, the librarian, and the other guy (he's bald?) any way they fire fights are intense, oh yeah one problem the camera controls aren't that good, i think that relic could have done better since the camera control of there previous game such and homeworld-homeworld2 were good-great. but the camera is manageble from the default perspective i just wish i could zoom out more some timesso that i could get a better view of the battle feild for tactical reasons. yeah the camera and unit ai are the most frustrateing but you can sllowly and painfully learn to work with them. well gtg to class. later gators

I do wonder what will be accomplished in the new call of duty expansion pack. i love call of duty, its one of the best fps games of last year. It's only real restriant was the engine. i truely hope that the sequel, when it happens wields a powerful graphics engine, and a great physics engine that will make explosions more fun. also lighting is very important if they plan on haveing any night levels. i can'wait for the next gen war games, like the new medal of honor and brothers in arms. they look to cool. and something that has yet to happen is a truely great jungle war game. the main reason i think that this hasn't happened is because of graphics and technology limitations. but the new medal of honor game though it looks cool, seems extremely limited in terms of enviroment. for the jungle to feel real you need some vast openness were all there is, is jungle(trees bushes real cool lighting so that light filters down on you through the canopy. the closet game to capturing this feeling is farcry. but it is still extremely limited in feeling. for example, the level design, though some of the magnificent in a first person shooter ever, its still limiting in that different porions of the level are seperated by phisical bounderies so that this area is played with only close combat in mind, and you have to travel out of the revine to find were you can play with bunkers, or use the cat and mouse technique, or the sniper fight. besides playing video games i paintball. and some of the best scenario arenas i've played are designed so that there is a lage portion of the map set up to acommodate each different play style, so that every play style has it's zone, but there are no bounderies between these zones, so that one can work the boundry line of one of these zones, and have a awsome experience, but the best part is that though it takes some getting used to there is so many possibilities in this level or map or arena design that replay value is endless and no two games are ever alike though the map never changes. though this concept would work best in a multiplayer game. it would also undoutably add to the open ended effect in say a game like farcry. you see your enemies move to were you want it to happen anddo what you do best. this would however require some amazeing AI.

MODS, they are great, I love a good MOD, you know the funniest thing i've heard valve say, is that all original halflife material will be released in the source engine. HA! now they are bosting couterstrike source and that's it, well i want to see Day of Defeat source, you know why, because i think that day of defeat may very well be one of the best mods every, and it is deffinately one if no the best WWII multiplayer simulation games, it has intriqitly awsome gun modeling, reloading animations great sound great selection, that game, sorry mod has the greatest selection of kick ass WWII weapons in any game ever, all it's missing is a good shotgun, and a flamethrower. What keeps this game from being timeless is the graphics witch cannot properly render a battle hardened eroupe. could you imagine a new DAY of DEfeat source with destructible envireoments. wow. better yet i'm suprised that there isn't a game out there with the dedication to recreating so many kick ass weapons so perfectly, one of the best i've played is Call of Duty, the iron sights is a very nice touch, but the game still doesn't hold a candle to what the dod team acomplished. that being siad i'm still droling over brothers in arms and i curse ubi for there delay, it better not be for the stupid ps2 version. if only battle fields awsome depiction of WWII vehicles and Day of Defeats weapons and infantry could combine with the all out crazy pyro technics of the rtcw, bring that together with doom3 graphics, espescially the realtime lighting for the night missions. then we'd have heaven for world war two nuts. till then i'm going to buy and watch band of brothers.

if there is one thing i love about the pc, it's the rts genre. these games are all about the gameplay and they great ones never go old. for example i got into rts games about two-three years ago, and this year i went into the classic game frenzy and bought homeworld, and starcraft battle chest. while homeworld did blow my mind, and i found the single player good i found the skirmishes to bee slow and cumbersum, and i found that the unit AI could be the worst ever. home world two is magnificent in that it keep what was great and fixes what was wrong. it made the franchise more player friendly and got rid of the stupid fuel system. thank god. added squadrons of fighters and really just made the gameplay faster and more fun, but i still miss the deffenders, they were such a cool concept, and they kicked the ass of those gunplatforms. yeah well the great thing about home world two is that it is way more practical, every unit serves a purpose. star craft, god i love that game and i await the true sequel, the three races are so different and so well balanced. i truely love the story and the units and the strategy and everything. yes it is slightly flawed with the really limited camera, and the touchy edge of the screen thing, and non reprogammable controls. but all in all tis timeless. like warcraft three with it's great cinematics. later

While most people were obsessed with the ghost recon series i found them good but dissapionting, they didn't have very good graphics, just good character models. THe colors were rather bland and as such the bad guys did often tend to blend into the enviroment. since you almost never saw the bad guys unless you were sniping them, you tended to relly on your AI teammates, who would often get mowed down before you new what was going on. the game had lots of promise, and i wish that the sequel would have taken advantage of the farcry engine. since the "sequal" seems to have lost its self to the consulation that is takeing place every were i will consider brother in arms the spiritual sequal to ghost recon, and the way it looks now that game looks to have lots of promise and to cash in on the potential that was ghost recon. large sparling outdoor enviroments. two firing teams, that you command, the basic concept in gameplay between the two is immensely simmaler, and i think that the difference is the little things, like better AI Better enviroments, and way better if not the best level design ever. I can't wait to command a tank, or to wield a panzerfaust in this new game that looks to set the bar for war and tactical stratagy and realtime strategy and level design and story and presentation and so much more brother in arms is now number one on my list, i'm anticipateing the game more than halflife, while i'm anticipateing halflife2's technology and mods more than this game. later gtg to class