Medal of Honor: open beta impressions

I've only played the beta for about an hour and a half, so take this with a grain of salt:

On the one hand, I've been waiting for a game like this. I can dispense with all the customization BS and just get down to killing virtual people. The HUD isn't cluttered with superfluous nonsense, the unlock system is focused mostly on sensible weapon attachments, and the class system doesn't try to force you into a particular role to the extent BC2's did. Also, I think DICE did a better job syncing up the movements of the crosshair and the mouse since the first beta, which improves the feel a bit. It may just be that the "weapon movement" is faster now -- I'm not sure -- but it definitely felt easier to track a moving target this time around.

On the other hand, the collision detection between avatar and terrain still leaves a lot to be desired. I'm still getting stuck on shit that's just a few centimeters high. Movement overall still feels kinda chunky, especially since you can't strafe while you're sprinting. It's like you're a robot that was engineered with no ball joints: you just get a single axis of rotation for all your moving parts (that's called a cylindrical joint, BTW). 

Kunar Base is a pretty fun map. If you make use of the flanking routes and check your corners, you'll end up with a very respectable KDR. I like CQC maps myself, so if that's your preference, MoH has one thing that BC2 was sorely missing. That's where the game feels more like CoD4.

Shahikot Mountains probably would have been fun if it wasn't infested with snipers. It needs more cover, but you get dropped so easily and so often by people you can't see that I'm not sure more cover would matter. Combat mission is basically BC2's Rush Mode in tighter quarters, which means that the attacking team is going to get choked into scope more often. I expect that gametype is going to be intolerable in pubs. Since we're only getting eight maps on release, that could prove very limiting.

Overall, MoH is a merely competent game. The little things DICE could have done to improve the core combat mechanics -- lean, prone, ball joints, first-person spectate, etc. -- could have made this a proper "old school" infantry game, for those that prefer fighting over character advancement. As-is, I can play it, but I won't love it the way I did United Offensive.

Left4Dead2 Commercial

You know, for kids!

Good one

What a Real Woman Does

A real woman is a man's best friend.
She will never stand him up & never let him down.
She will reassure him when he feels insecure; comfort him after a bad day.
She will inspire him to do things he never thought he could do; to live w/out fear or regret.
She will enable him to express his deepest emotions & give in to his most intimate desires.
She will make sure he always feels as tho he's the most handsome man in the room, will enable him to be the most confident, sexy, seductive, and invincible.

No, wait ... Sorry ... I'm thinking of beer.
That's what beer does.
Never mind.

L4D: "The Sacrifice" trailer

IUN caption contest

Come up with a caption for this picture.  The winner will receive a handjob from IT()E Plucky.

CoD:BO in the Crosshairs

This Saturday (September 18) at 3:00 p.m. EST, the BASH and SLASH "Crosshairs" webcast will feature a discussion on the current direction of the Call of Duty series, and Black Ops in particular.  The bulk of the conversation will focus on ranked vs. unranked servers, and the future of user-created content (i.e. maps and mods).  If you're at all interested in CoD:BO, you should have a listen.

For those of you that don't know, bashandslash.com is a CoD community hub that focuses on competitive gaming.  The Crosshairs hosts are Jock Yitch, the founder of BASH, Sam Reese ("iBleedv20") of omnilinkit.com, and Sam Babbit ("{PST}*Joker"), the owner of mycallofduty.com and the creator of the eXtreme mod.  These guys broke the story that became a shit storm over MW2 and IWnet, and they're all highly respected throughout the "oldschool" CoD player community.

Know irony

If you’re looking for your first job in games, it’s worth thinking very carefully about your future employer. Do you want to work on jaded, derivative titles that receive scathing reviews and go straight to the bargain bin? Do you want to work large amounts of unpaid overtime because your project is underfunded and poorly managed? Do you want to work on codebases that are messy and poorly-designed because there’s never time to do things properly? Do you want to live in fear of your company’s financial security?

It’s sad that these and other games industry horror stories are more frequent than they should be, but it’s not like that here. We only work on original, ambitious projects: our first title, Crackdown, was a number-one hit, winning critical acclaim and multiple awards, and our best is yet to come, beginning with our first online game, APB. And while making games is great fun, we take our work seriously. We pride ourselves on our unusually sensible, sustainable and professional development practices, resulting in smoothly-run projects and far less overtime than is normal for many game developers. We’re passionate about engineering and crafting our games to the highest of standards. We cultivate an open working environment where ideas are valued on their own merits, no matter whose they are. The growth of our company and size of our projects allows us to provide a wide range of opportunities. And the investment we’ve raised puts us in a strong financial position with security and creative control over our projects.

That's a quote from the graduate recruitment section on the Realtime Worlds website.

And here's the news:  Realtime Worlds is no more.  They went into administration (meaning they declared bankruptcy) six weeks after releasing All Points Bulletin:  a game that took five years to develop into one of the biggest suckfest MMO's ever spawned.  The forums are shut down, the servers are about to shut down, 200 people are out of a job, and every player that sank money into the game is shit out of luck.

CoD: BO "FAQ"

Treyarch Community Manager JD_2020 posted this on the Black Ops forums.  While it's not everything we want, it's pretty damned close.

Quote:

After Call of Duty: World at War, we set out 3 goals for our next PC title:

1] PC gets every single game feature that the consoles get, but in a way that makes sense for PC.

2] PC gets even more features – the ones that PC gamers want like dedicated servers and more customization.

3] Keep it fun. Protect the integrity of the title through design and post-launch support.

Keep that in mind as you read through the decisions outlined below in our FAQ.

Call of Duty: Black Ops PC Multiplayer FAQ

Full feature support: Confirmed

Ranked Servers: earn XP and currency. Wager Servers: gamble your currency. Customizable Unranked Servers. Combat Training against practice dummies. Theater. Create-a-Class "2.0." Contracts. Emblem editor. Everything the consoles get. Implemented in a way that makes sense for PC (*cough* no lobbies *cough*).

PC Features: Confirmed

Dedicated Servers. New Server Browser. Dev console. /record. Customizable game modes, perks, killstreaks, classes, and higher player counts on unranked servers. Map rotation. RCon. Kick & Ban. MOTD. In-game custom Server Banners. And more.

Mod Tools: Confirmed

We will release mod tools sometime post-launch. We need to finish the game first. Then we will make sure any urgent issues are handled. Then we will begin work on tools. The extent of the mod tools package will not be known until this time.

COD: Black Ops

Some interesting new features for COD: Black Ops. Personally they sound very frustrating - the entire upgrade system for COD4 was crap in my opinion.

Redirector was down...

I have no idea for how long, but the itoeunited.net redirecting server has been down. Sometimes the virtual machine it runs on just locks up - I've never figured out why. Unfortunately it was still responding to pings, so my monitoring software didn't tell me, and the DNS server is replicated elsewhere, so the secondary DNS server was still feeding the IP's correctly.

Yeah, I know - it's all serious geek speek. But here's the important part:

It's back up now.