Alright, folks. COD:MW2's three days away. I haven't been uber-hyped for the game, but I certainly can't wait, although playing through COD4 on Hardened is an exercise in frustration.
 
But every time I read anything about COD:MW2 these days, it's all negative, negative, negative. "PC gets a gimped console port," "Infinity Ward makes a subtle homosexual joke in a video about grenade spam," "Infinity Ward is just as evil as Activision," etc.
 
Y'know, every time I read these type of comments, it makes me want to cancel my preorder; because these comments make me feel like I'd be part of the problem if I bought this game. Keep in mind I own every COD game to date barring the handheld spin-offs, and have enjoyed the majority of them. Am I the only one who feels this way?

Warning: The following section shows a portion of a later segment in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. If you haven't played the game yet, this is SPOILER TERRITORY.

So I somehow made myself look like a colossal ass while playing singleplayer in Uncharted 2 yesterday. For those who have beaten this part (or the game itself), may know what I'm talking about here.

So Nate has to stop a tank from destroying a village. At one point, his ally Tenzin is MIA so Nate has to run through one area without any assistance, all while the tank is tailing his ass. I get to a point where I think there's only one way to get around the tank. So I get near the tank, behind it. I try to get ahead of it, I mysteriously die. I try to get behind it, I either mysteriously die or get gunned down. Needless to say, I'm very much pissed.

It wasn't after a 20 minute rage session at this one part did I realize there was a small hallway to the right of the hallway the tank was at. While the rest of the stage wasn't that difficult barring jackasses with RPG-7s, it did annoy me. Especially with the "spontaneous death because the player is going out-of-bounds" thing Naughty Dog did. For the record, other developers (Infinity Ward, for one) are guilty of this same problem in their games, making sure the player watches the scripted sequence and not try to sequence break events. A good example is a later scene in COD4 that Shawn Elliott recorded where the player cannot skip the scene with the gun turrets until they are destroyed, doing so will make the car explode.

Really, I understand this is the major con of cinematic gaming. You have to script it in such a way so that the player experiences it the way you want the player to experience it, and not let them find holes in level and game logic to break that experience. There's nothing wrong with cinematic gaming, mind you, but it's something we must be more weary about in the years to come.

Other than that, the game is fine. Barring several times Nate decided to commit suicide instead of grabbing that ledge. 

(Okay, spoiler territory's done. You can start reading again, this is about multiplayer.)

The multiplayer modes of Chain Reaction and the... Domination-style three-point mode whose name escapes me at the moment... those need improvements. Namely Chain Reaction. I actually played one session in Trainwreck that was over in 45 seconds. That's right, the match took LESS THAN A MINUTE before all five points were already captured. The main problem is that the moment an enemy's on the point, it resets to neutral before going to captured on their team. It should do a reversal TO neutral, THEN captured. Yes, it takes longer, but it prevents scenarios where it takes a minute to finish a Chain Reaction session.

But that's about it thus far. I think I'm pretty close to completion, which is great.
 

 

So the news leaked out: The PC version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will not have a server browser or dedicated server support, it's matchmaking like the 360/PS3 versions. Worse off, there's rumors of no mod tools like in previous COD installments. This coupled with a price increase to $60... wow, I never thought you could screw PC owners over like that.

To be fair, I haven't owned a PC Call of Duty since COD2. I've played the PC World at War in beta and it wasn't half bad. But PC gamers are a completely different group of people compared to console gamers.

Sure, games like Left 4 Dead have matchmaking, but they also have a simplified server browser. No dedicated servers is basically taking us back to the early 90s in terms of multiplayer games. Yes, peer-to-peer is the norm for console multiplayer, but you can only do so much with that.

I'm regretting my preorder for this game. However, this is odd because my preorder is for the 360 Hardened Edition. I feel like I shouldn't be giving Activision any money for this game at all. Which is sad, because I like Infinity Ward and the games they make.

What do you guys think? Do you feel it's a bum rap for PC owners?

 

 
  
(Parts Two, Three and Four available as well)
 
40 minutes of me talking about my experience at PAX. Also, SWAG BAG!

  I'm gonna preface this entry with this: I am not a big Halo fan. I loved the first at the time when I played it on PC in 2003, but Halo 2's plot and constant switching between Arbiter and Master Chief was confusing more than entertaining, and Halo 3 underwhelmed me. H3 was a fun co-op experience, at least.

But when I heard from Major Nelson that there was some fancy Halo 3: ODST promotional truck heading down to Portland, I thought, "Hell yeah, why not?" Except it was at Tanasbourne Town Center, about several miles away from Beaverton and Hillsboro. Not anywhere near Portland, at least what I know of Portland.


A crude Google Maps image of my house (right star) and the Tanasbourne Town Center (left star).

Regardless, I put on some clothes, grabbed my bus tickets and started heading my way u p there. Sadly, I knew little of the place, but it wasn't hard to find a bus and get a ride up there. Around 3:00, I finally spotted it:






My apologies for the terrible quality, I have a regular cell phone that takes pictures, not an iPhone or any other silly gadget. Also, I didn't bring my regular camera as it's old and busted.

The picture doesn't completely show it, but there was a line of about 30-40 people waiting to play Firefight mode. I decided to hop in line and after two hours of line-waiting and people asking silly Halo-related questions (including some easter egg in Halo 3 of somebody in their boxers running around? Somebody wanna fill me in on that?), I finally got to sit inside and wait in queue for the previous set of four to finish up their session before I could play it myself.
 




 Supposedly, the truck is from Korea, was made with loads of kevlar, and that Halo 3 ODST sign kept falling down thanks to the wind. Eventually it got disassembled.  

For those who have been living under a rock, Firefight is a new MP mode in Halo 3: ODST where four ODST soldiers fight off waves and waves of Covenant soldiers. It's similar to Horde Mode in Gears of War 2, Nazi Zombies in Call of Duty: World at War, and... well, Survival Mode in Left 4 Dead. There are mild differences: Each kill gets a score, skulls from regular Halo 3 will occasionally be activated before each wave, and players have a pool of lives to go through (default 7). For the demo, however, they gave us infinite lives but a 10 minute time limit.

Me and my group, consisting of two kids, a teenage dude and myself; got through all ten minutes just fine. I died about 3-4 times due to my Halo inexperience. I think I got about 4,000 or so points, with the highest around 11,000. One bearded dude who looked like a more ginger-ly Rocco Botte said that apparently there was one guy who got over 30,000 in his 10:00 session, with an additional 10,000 between his co-op partners. The group before us got about 15 minutes between two sessions as their 360s crapped out in the middle of both sessions, getting me the chance to see what a development unit looks like. Also, I think this might've been confirmed elsewhere, but: the brute plasma rifle from Halo 2 is back, but the energy sword is not. At least in campaign and firefight, it will likely still be in your MP so you can still do sword matches on whatever map of your choice.

Afterwards, I left the area and decided to kick around in other places, and the line slowly dissipated, but by 6PM I was in a hurry to get home, and didn't get back in line. Although some said they've tried it at least once or twice before.

Despite my indifference to Halo, I found it to be an interesting game mode, but I don't think it's worth the $60 price tag. That $60 will go towards Uncharted 2, COD: Modern Warfare 2, or Left 4 Dead 2 instead. (That's a lot of 2s, I just noticed) Maybe I'll get it later down the line as a gift or something. But it was a fun game mode, and a slight twist on the popular co-op survival game modes that have been flooding the games market these days.

And before I finish this off, they did give away some license plate borders with "My other car is a Warthog" on it. ("Why 'Warthog'? It doesn't really look like a pig... I think it looks more like a puma") Some dude got two, a big Halo fangirl wearing a "I <3 Master Chief" shirt with the Septagon tattooed on her arm got one, and there was clearly some extras left, but I didn't get one. So thus I took this picture:


I got to play Halo 3: ODST a month in advance and all I got was this lousy promotional card.

(On an unrelated note: I played Rock Band 2 on drums for the first time in a Best Buy kiosk nearby the place. I need more practice.)

I'm probably gonna receive the ire of gamers everywhere with a subject line like that. But I have a good enough reason to slam this guy.

See, GameTrailers recently hyped Dead Fantasy III, a crossover between the women of the Dead or Alive games with the girls from Final Fantasy. Sounds interesting, right? Well, I decided to watch Episode 1 again and see what I remembered was true. It was at that point I realized that Oum is leeching off the popularity of other franchises and lacks a single original bone in his body.

If you've never heard of his work, let me show you Haloid, his first video way back in 2006-07.

http://www.gametrailers.com/user-movie/haloid/57998?id=57998

A fighting crossover video between Master Chief and Samus Aran. Sounds pretty cool, right? Well, yeah, at the time it was. Despite loads of homages to The Matrix -- which even by this time was already stale like old milk -- it was a competent film to show off his animation talents.

Except he hasn't changed or improved since Haloid. Dead Fantasy does the same crap: Matrix homages and characters acting even LESS than they did in Haloid. At least Haloid had the references to some of the weapons, the Covenant and Zero Suit Samus. Now, I will admit I have little knowledge of both DOA and FF, but I'm pretty sure none of the characters in those games flew up in the air and did silly acrobatic fights and dodges like in an action movie. It would be like me making a crossover featuring Solid Snake and Sam Fisher in the style of a 1970s Kung-Fu movie, complete with crazy editing and film grain.

So, despite my dislike for his videos, I decided to watch Dead Fantasy III to see if he improved years later. Nope, he hasn't. It's the same damn Matrix homages and the same out-of-character concepts done to average animation. Matrix homages? Monty, stuff like that stopped being cool in 2003. It's 2009! Be original, for god's sake!

Now, I must say that this is not written out of jealousy -- I'm not even in the same line of work he's in -- this is written out of anger. Out of rage. This putz is cashing in on multiple properties to make average-quality animation out of existing properties. That's something you do as a college class project, not as a major production. I am just irritated at the fact that even two years later since I last watched this stuff, he hasn't changed and it's still ridiculous as ever.

I cannot be the only one who thinks this. I mean, yeah, that sort of crazy action was cool the first time around, but we've moved on, and he hasn't. I hope that people will eventually snap out of it and realize that there is much, much better quality animation out there.