Too many ways to waste time.

I promise I won't bash Halo in this post.

by AC - permalink

For some reason I've had a strong urge for the last week or so to go back and play some Ghost Recon. I don't think I've run that game even once since installing my new vidcard. I have GR plus expansion packs Island Thunder and Desert Siege, and they're a great way to kill hours at a time. My rig can run them completely maxed out without even breaking a sweat. But other things keep coming up. First, I was trying desperately to like Halo. That wasn't working out so well, so I beat Call of Duty: United Offensive on a couple difficulty settings, which made me feel better. Went back to Halo and enjoyed the next couple of missions a little bit better, then got so pissed at it that I spent an entire morning playing Penguin Blocks on Club Pogo, just to spite that goddamn game. I hope it was watching. Either way, Penguin Blocks was more fun than Halo.

Then Nine Inch Nails' With Teeth and Green Day's American Idiot showed up in my mailbox several days early (via Amazon), so I immediately dumped them into GTA's mp3 folder and spent my next couple blocks of time with my computer driving around Vice City listening to them, looking for hidden packages and "unique" jumps. That was also more fun than Halo PC. And now Valve releases a relatively major Steam update that includes file-system optimization for Source Engine games. In other words, they may have finally fixed that goddamn stuttering. So I spent roughly half an hour downloading that and the next couple hours playing Half-Life 2.


And I think they might have done it this time. I started at the opening of Route Canal and played to roughly two-thirds of the way through Ravenholm. And it's definitely a lot smoother now. There's still a few moments of just-loaded-this-map stutter, but once it smooths out, it tends to stay that way. The sudden jolt at the start of a scripted sequence is now generally gone, unless three or more are initiated simultaneously. Between this and the other tweaks I've put in, HL2 and Counter-Strike: Source probably have the best performance-to-looks ratio of any game I've got right now.

So I haven't set aside any time for Ghost Recon yet. It takes so long to properly play any given mission that you really have to be dedicated and know that you're going to be doing this for at least an hour or two. It's sort of like a subtler, more realistic Far Cry in that way. Sure, you can blast through it, but you'll probably get your head blown off, and you'll definitely miss out on the fun of sneaking around and dropping grenades into people's laps. Then later you can fire up Quake III Arena, get two hundred frags in ten minutes, and go do something else. Something other than Halo, which is not as much fun.