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So I found another disc cover to Starcraft, while hunting through a box of old stuff – so I made another Battle.net account and added the CD key to it so we could play some multiplayer. I installed the second copy on the downstairs computer and my brother in law and I played it for a bit last night.

Holy… shit… either I’ve gotten much worse or the AI has seriously been improved in the ~6 years it’s been since I played it last. Maybe it’s the result of those bot competitions or something, but it’s not a case of stomping down some stupid scanner software enemy anymore, for me anyway. I can beat one AI in a versus match if it’s on “slow” speed or lower… normal is a war of attrition that usually involves me eventually losing, and fast/faster almost always ends up with me being caught with my pants down.

Needless to say I can absolutely spank my brother in law at it though.

I would love to love this game.

It’s gritty, it’s gorgeous, and it’s pretty fun (I’ve only played the campaign mode for a couple hours so far though). But man does it have some giant drawbacks.

I like the story mode so far – it doesn’t seem so heinously unrealistic, yet it’s quite exciting. I dig little details like the special ops guys having combat beards (I’d grow one except I’m not in the field, so I’d just look like a guy who hasn’t been able to find jobs in a decade), the fact that if you reload without emptying a mag, it counts the one-in-the-chamber and you don’t re-cock the weapon, the glare in the Afghanistan hills and the difficulty you occasionally have figuring out where the enemy fire is coming from.

What I don’t like? It’s linear. I mean that, in entirely the most pejorative way. If Call of Duty is a sidewalk, Medal of Honor is a balance beam. There are parts in the game where you must climb a wall during a scripted event – if you’re the third person to climb that wall in the script, you damn well better wait your turn. You also better climb it in the exact spot the rest of your team does, otherwise you’ll just dump around like some drug addict next to it.

On the whole though I’m having a pretty good time with it – I like the campaigns in first person shooters though, so that’s really not saying much.

My brother in law borrowed Crysis 2 for PS3 off a friend of his, and I was feeling frisky so I decided to see what the fuss was all about (prior to this I hadn’t touched my PS3 in about a month, I still haven’t finished LBP2!). I was actually having a really good time in it, and for the most part I agree with the Rock Paper Shotgun review of it.

PC gamers whine a lot about this or that being missing on a PC port – but I feel like they have it wrong, and that the demands they’re making for PC ports should be made for all games. Dedicated servers going the way of the dodo? You douchebags, do you know how much I would have spent on hardware to have a dedicated Call of Duty 4 PS3 server to avoid some asshole host bailing when they were losing?

Fine-grained graphics settings? Sure, PC hardware varies and so graphics settings would be nice to tweak, but wouldn’t it be nice to have that on consoles as well? I play on a 21″ CRT TV. I can’t see the difference between a 512×512 texture and a 64×64 texture, so how much would it rock if I could change that? If my console is starting to die and I’m getting slowdown on some CPU-intensive bits, wouldn’t it be nice if I could scale back the detail and get a little more life out of my system?

But whiny gamers using the polygon rates of their SLI graphics cards as low testosterone treatments aside, I didn’t really care that this game wasn’t as nice looking as the first one. I didn’t care that it was “dumbed down” for consoles.

Until it was given back to it’s owner, I was really enjoying the campaign mode. One point where I will deviate from RPS’s review is that I liked the checkpoint mode – more specifically I liked how spaced out they were. On the hardest difficulty, the game is quite a challenge – contrast to say, the last four CoD releases, where any half-competent FPS player can put it on Veteran difficulty and trudge through the game in about 4 hours just by barging from checkpoint to checkpoint.

Even abusing the cloak facility, there was still a few locations in the game where it took me four or five goes to come up with a strategy that worked. I love that shit, I don’t want to beat a game on the hardest difficulty in four hours or so.

Whining about how much it sucks having to replay one part of a game over and over until you got it right? Well sure, I suppose if you weren’t old enough to remember such obscure games as Super Mario Bros, I can see how that might bug you….

I know I’m a little bit late on the bandwagon, but I’ve been contemplating giving Minecraft a go. I was thinking about setting up a server on our LAN, where we can just jump in and out whenever we feel like it – I know my little brother in law would probably flip his shit over it.

My problem is that I have absolutely zero self-control… if something is in the slightest bit addictive, I’ll lose hours upon hours on it – that doesn’t just include games – I do it when I’m hacking on something interesting too. So the last thing I need is a game which everyone assures me can eat 12 hours in what seems like minutes.

Thankfully the few MMORPGs I’ve been tinkering with, I’ve got virtually no interest in them. At the moment all I’ve been doing is merchanting… I figure I’ll play through the new-content-rush this summer and then find some chump to buy gold and expensive equips off me before I quit – that’s how Duncan got his stroller last time.

So yeah, I’m still on the fence about whether or not to pull the trigger on it – getting Java apps running on FreeBSD is no picnic either.

Never has a Youtube video made me so depressed about a recent purchase – I watched the “Samaritan” demo on the Unreal engine, and was blown away. Allegedly it’s in real time, and that’s what a game could conceivably look like – trying to imagine a new sequel to Batman: Arkham Asylum that looks like that… whew.

The downside is if games are going to look like that shortly, I’ll probably need to upgrade my PC again. One of the reasons I went to consoles is because I got sick of spending hundreds of dollars a year just to keep pace, and even then I was never really happy with what I had. Even paying release price for a console is likely to lend itself to a longer, happier gaming experience (if you can over look the “omg they turned the graphics way down!!!”).

So I need to look past my envy, and consider the fact that my PC is currently good enough. I installed the original Left4Dead yesterday and tried it out real quick to see what kind of frame rates I get… it actually plays really smooth. The Finest Simulator of Hats for Men, which is the chief game I play these days, also runs quite well. I guess I should just be happy with what I’ve got.

Sabriena and I both downloaded the World of Warcraft trial again a couple weeks back, just because.. you know.. we had so much spare time. We made a pair of Taurens and got them to about level 7~8 or so, and promptly lost interest again. This happens every time we install it.

I will say this though, Cataclysm is cool. They changed the shit out of even the tiny parts of the game we played – so much so that I was disoriented at first… and then a little saddened… and finally had a blast exploring unfamiliar areas. Alas, I like the game – but not enough to shell out the $40 it’d cost both of us to play for the first month.

Today, Sabriena got an email purporting to be from Blizzard mentioning how it looks like she’s trying to sell her account. I know there’s some complete morons out there who buy gold coins that are imaginary, and only spendable in an imaginary economy – but who the hell buys a trial account with about 1 hour’s playtime in it? I could understand if they thought I was selling mine, because my Battle.net account is the one with a stack of games in it.

I’m starting to wonder if it’s a poorly targeted phish though.

So today, on my way out the door, I almost fell over a package… from Tid1er. It was a spare graphics card he had laying around, a GeForce 210. It’s not much if you’re the type to drop $200+ on a graphics card, but it beats the snot out of my integrated graphics adapter that came in my PC.

So I installed it when I got home, and began the gargantuan 130MB driver download that for some inexplicable reason was coming in at 80KB/s.

Then I fired up TF2, and began playing with the settings. At 1024×768, with most of the details turned down and my FPS config ditched, it dips to about 45FPS on most any map I feel like trying. Spikes up to around 150fps or so, but I don’t really notice that, truth be told. It’s just bliss not having the game stutter… I could live with 45FPS all day long, really.

Going from 800×600, with everything torn out of the game and still stuttering, to my LCD’s native resolution and just the silly details turned off… the game looks amazing. Now I have absolutely no excuse for dropping ubercharges, except when Duncan is fidgeting on my lap and I have to stand still and get sniped.

Or when I’m standing still trying to convince Duncan to let go of my microphone cord, and a spy comes up and stabs me in the back before running off into the distance all like “oui oui bon appétit control point you fools, doctier!”

Now I have no excuse but to get good at this game.

I feel bad recommending LittleBigPlanet to friends the way I did… I’ve learned from a couple people’s experiences that it’s definitely an acquired taste – you either love it or hate it.

However if you loved LittleBigPlanet, it’s released-today sequel seriously doesn’t disappoint. I’ve had it about a week now, and I was going to wait for a friend to get it before we’d dive in together – last night I just couldn’t wait any longer. My wife and I jumped onto it with gusto.

My god… the story’s introduction is clever and atmospheric from the first moment, and even though we were “veteran” players we really didn’t mind running through the tutorial levels. They’re well designed and just plain fun – we had almost as much fun with the grappling hook as we did with Boomtown on the original.

The trophies are much more accessible too – it’s basically not possible to platinum the first game without developing a really awesome level. While I think it’s great they’re trying to encourage that behavior, I don’t think it really needs to be encouraged (there are great levels out there regardless) and I think trophies is just the wrong place for it. With #2, I didn’t see any non-hidden trophies that I felt like I wouldn’t ever earn.

I like how they have trophies for playing after 9pm and before 9am… because I can see myself staying up until all hours playing it. If I could just work out how to suppress appetite so I didn’t have to stop for bodily functions, I could probably live on this game.

If you liked the first game and aren’t sure if you want the second one, I highly recommend it.

A little while ago, the PS3′s security was well and truly cracked. Sony’s suing some people over it, but I think that’s more to appease shareholders than gamers… the cat is out of the bag now, and their chances of winning are pretty slim.

The hacks have already started – my friend Tidler got his MW2 account trashed by a hacker. As someone who hacks MMORPGs for fun and profit from time to time, and therefore knows a little about multiplayer game logic and exploiting holes in the rules I can say with a little bit of authority that it’s absolutely appalling that this is even possible.

On SOCOM2/3 you had issues of people hacking and all it did was inflate their own KDRs and win ratios. The idea of someone being able to trash your stats is just completely bogus.

Apart from taking a few people to court, Sony’s been pretty quiet on what this means for gamers. InfinityWard have at least confirmed the troubles that people like dear Tidler have been having – but in doing so they really just passed the buck onto Sony… their basic stance appears to be that securing the game’s logic to protect legitimate players from offenders is Sony’s job. Everyone else seems more interested in their Duck vacation rentals for spring and promoting their latest offering (which people can now pirate with impunity) than actually admitting to responsibility for the problem and some plan to fix it.

What SCE don’t seem to realize is that PSN’s saving grace is now eradicated. PSN’s service has always been sub-par to XBL… heck, in my opinion it’s still sub-par to last generation’s XBL. But I personally was willing to overlook that fact, in exchange for knowing that the chance of my game getting ruined by someone cheating was statistically non-existent. Now there’s cheaters everywhere, the best experience costs money, and it’s still a shitty service by comparison.

With a new PC hopefully around the corner, I’m left wondering exactly how much time I’m going to be spending on my PS3 unless something is done to curb the cheating. I really don’t give a shit if someone’s too cheap to buy the games – but when I drop $60 on a game and my online experience is ruined by some asshat with a cracked console, that’s when I stop buying games.