I'm more online. That's a thing now.

So I'm on Twitter now. I still have absolutely no interest in creating a Facebook account, so I might as well do this Twitter thing. I found myself following multiple people/organizations on Twitter, so I figured it would be easier to just make an account and follow them so I can track everything at once. This is mostly regarding sports, particularly the Memphis Grizzlies and Tigers. But it also allows me to enter Turbine's Twitter LotRO contests, and gives me a link when commenting on Casual Stroll to Mordor articles, so I made my Twitter account LotRO-centric. My name on there is Maladhros, my main character's name.

So, whatever. Follow me at twitter.com/Maladhros. Or don't. I don't have any followers, which is fine. I just want to reply to people and track tweets. I hate that I just wrote that, but really, you kinda have to these days. I have a basic (meaning slow) data plan for my cell phone now, and that's where Twitter really shines when I'm trying to keep up with what's going on, particularly when I'm at work.

In other me-centric news, I went the whole weekend without logging into LotRO. I wanted a break from the complexity of all those characters with all that stuff to do with all those people in my new kinship, so I re-downloaded Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on Steam and spent my spare weekend time shootin' at crap instead of swingin' axes at crap. Really felt a need to get back to my FPS roots. And I was busy this weekend. Mowed the front yard, did an epic amount of laundry, went shopping like three times. Watched The Matrix. So it was easier to just jump into an FPS and kill dudes for a few minutes. LotRO is fantastic, but you have to set aside more than just a couple minutes here and there to play it.

That's really one of my only major criticisms... Well done, Turbine.

Unapologetic history nerd.

I'm all history-geeked out about my birthday gift from my dad, D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II by Stephen Ambrose. I've just started re-reading Douglas Adams' The More Than Complete Hitchhikers's Guide for the first time in years, but I think I'll have to put it off. This book is five pounds of paperback World War II awesome, 655 pages complete with pictures, glossary, appendix, end notes, and index.

Coincidentally, yesterday I replayed the D-day level of Call of Duty 2, where you assault Pointe-du-Hoc with the U.S. Army Rangers. When I pulled my new book out of the gift bag and randomly flipped it open, the first thing that caught my eye was the phrase, "Pointe-du-Hoc." So I'll get to read about the actual event in much more detail than what I've seen about it on the Military Channel and History International.

I don't know why I find it so fascinating, but I do. Shut up. Don't judge me.

Time well wasted.

Mini-vacations rule.
by AC - permalink

Fall break, aka five-day weekend, ended today. I had no assignments from any of my classes, other than to read two pages of the PERL intro and to start on a tutorial on tables in my HTML class -- both of which I finished last Thursday. So the break was pretty much just football, beer, and catching up on my gaming. I finally got around to playing the Prey demo, which I downloaded to my backup drive way back before my system restore, and I was really impressed. It's a solid, polished demo of what looks to be a much deeper game than I expected. While the art direction is very reminiscent of Doom 3 and Quake 4 -- not a great idea for only the third game, after those two, to use the Doom 3 engine -- it does have its own style of gameplay, with its much heralded (at the time) portals. They go way beyond just level-hopping, on one occasion delivering a truly fantastic, "What the hell just happened?" moment. I even like the Duke Nukem-ish way your avatar, Tommy, frequently speaks. Usually, it's just something like, "What the fuck is going on here?" but hey, whatever. The demo took me well over an hour to complete, which was a nice surprise.

On the other hand, we have the single-player demo of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which is more like 20 minutes long, but which left me so floored that I've decided to put off buying the Orange Box and save my money for this game. It's just spectacular. Even at fairly high in-game settings, it runs shockingly well on my rig. It appears to run on a modified version of the same engine powering CoD 2; i.e. a heavily modified Quake III engine. Even without the shader model 3 goodies, it looks amazing, and I love Infinity Ward for recognizing that backwards-compatibility is very important in PC games. That damned MoH: Airborne Assault demo turned out to be a wasted download, as it requires an SM3-compatible card to even install. Just when I start to forget why I hate EA, they give me another reason.

Anyway. I'm working slowly but surely towards 100% completion in GTA San Andreas. I'm at around 94% now, and all that worries me is beating multiple levels of Bloodring Banger, which I hate, those air races at the Venturas airport, and the NRG challenge, which I've never beaten before. We'll see. I'm also replaying Far Cry after installing the 1.4 patch for the first time. I've been wary about this patch for a while now, as the others have done more harm than good, but it seems to be working out well. Load times are significantly lower, those instant-reboot bugs are a no-show, and I haven't seen any rainbow shadows yet.

Speaking of which, I just finished downloading Radiohead's In Rainbows free and legally, though I feel a little guilty about entering a price of $0. In my defense, I don't have any money, and though I did pay for OK Computer once upon a time, I lost it a long while ago. I really like In Rainbows so far, "Bodysnatchers," "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi," "All I Need," and "Videotape" especially. I was disappointed by Kid A and Amnesiac, and while I did like parts of Hail to the Theif, I never got around to buying it. In Rainbows, though, hooked me immediately. I'm looking forward to burning it so I can listen to it on the long drive to and from school.

Call of Duty 2 vs. Call of Duty.

How do you feel about bump-mapping?
by AC - permalink

I've been playing Call of Duty 2 for a little over a week now. It's pretty damn good, but I have a problem with it. I've played Call of Duty and its expansion, United Offensive, to death. I love that game, and I'll probably be playing it until, like DOS games, an OS comes along that won't let me play it anymore. And it's hard to shake the feeling that CoD 2 is just another expansion for its prequel.

Just looking at the gameplay, there's no real upgrade at all. Healthpacks are gone in favor of a recharge system. I like it, because it gives you the freedom to charge into a fortified position - provided there's some cover nearby - without first scouting around for health you can backtrack to. But it's nothing that couldn't be done in the first game with a simple mod. The tank missions are back, and haven't changed at all. Using binocs to call in artillery strikes, and manning a mounted gun during a car chase on rails? Both back unchanged from United Offensive. Three episodes, one each with the American, Russian, and British forces? Check. And there's a total of two new weapons, both of which are exremely rare in the single player game. That's not counting two new mounted machine guns that are functionally indistinguishable from the old ones.

So what's new? Pretty much just the visuals, and that's only if you can run the game at a reasonable resolution and frame-rate in DirectX 9. In a very nice touch, Infinity Ward gives you the option of rendering the game with DirectX 7. This makes the game look virtually identical to Call of Duty 1, but also doubles or triples your framerate.

In DX7 mode, the game really does look like another CoD 1 expansion pack. But the good news is, it would be a really goddamn good expansion pack. While nothing really new is introduced, the maps are big and beautifully detailed, there are usually a number of varied objectives to each mission, and both friendly and enemy AI is much, much better. For the first time in a PC Call of Duty game, enemies won't just spawn indefinitely until you manage to advance to some magical, invisible waypoint. Instead, the maps have been carefully crafted to require you to advance to get the right angle or vantage point to knock out a finite, believable number of defending troops.

Now, if you can run the game under DX9, you'll see why it's more than just an expansion. I'm not sure why, but in DX7 mode, Call of Duty 2 actually runs better on my system than United Offensive at high resolutions. Under DX9, it runs even worse, forcing the res down to 1024x768. But it looks better that way, even with AA at just 2x and no AF at all. The bump-mapping brings all the map textures to life in a way the Quake III engine never could, but it's the character models that really sell the experience. Bump-mapping and specular lighting, combined with shadows you don't get under DX7, bring a feeling of realism to the game you just can't get from the original game.

But there is a catch. Out of the box, the game runs horribly on most hardware in DX9. You can either use an annoying in-game workaround or install the 1.3 patch. Going back to gameplay, there are a couple of reversions from United Offensive I don't understand. First, you can't "cook" a grenade anymore. You just toss it with its full three-second delay. This sucks even more given the new AI ability to pick it up and throw it back at you - which you can't do. Second, there's no mode-of-fire toggle now, so the Thompson and MP44 can't be switched to single-shot.

But it's still fun. I mean, look, it's more Call of Duty, and it's every bit as good as the original and United Offensive. It's also slightly longer, which is especially nice, as CoD 1 is so short it sometimes feels like an expansion itself. Overall, I say if you have a PCI-e vidcard with 256MB, just go buy it. It's worth playing, even in DX7.

Aragog strikes again.

I don't need sleep anyway.
by AC - permalink

Early this morning I was vaulted out of bed by a vicious spider bite to the right tricep. Again. I don't know why spiders hate my right tricep so much. It could be karmically linked to my insistance on killing every spider I see anywhere, but that really wouldn't be fair. I can't help being arachnophobic, it's a genetic thing. You think our monkey-man ancestors, sleeping on the ground in some prehistoric forest, kept spiders and scorpions as pets? They probably ate the fucking things.

Moving on. I'm thinking about finally getting around to buying Call of Duty 2, because, what the hell, it can't run any worse than Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, and I've already thrown away twenty bucks on that. In preparation, I blasted through Call of Duty and United Assault again. The only negative I have about that game/expansion is the last mission of the last episode of United Assault. It just sucks. You're under constant, unavoidable fire from everywhere, you have to deal with two escort sub-missions, and in the grand finale you have to take every single objective with AI squadmates so useless it's like facing an entire infantry battalion, plus armor, plus air support, single-handed. Not fun. Not any kind of fun I've ever heard of, anyway.

You have to compare it to the final mission of the first episode, where you're tasked with assaulting and holding a chateau against overwhelming infantry and armor support. In that mission, you have to scurry around grabbing health and ammo, you have to move from door to door to repel invaders, and you have to decide which weapons will be most effective from moment to moment (Panzer-schreck, BAR, sniper rifle, etc.). There's even a good deal of hand-to-hand combat involved. But here's the difference: Your AI teammates actually help. They defend the entrances long enough to cover you, and when overwhelmed, they let you know.

If Call of Duty 2 has more of that kind of action than the lone gunman, Medal of Honor-type stuff, it'll be worth buying. We'll see.