Beyond Black Mesa

This is just something all Half-Life fans have to see. It's a short film based in the Half-Life world, after the Black Mesa incident but before the events of Half-Life 2. It's eleven minutes of awesome.

Over the years, Valve has continually turned down offers to buy the film rights to their signature franchise, and with good reason. I think of this as just a glimpse of what could be made if the film was in the hands of people who really cared.

I'm not going to embed it here. Hit the link, and watch it full-screen at 720.

http://beyondblackmesa.com/

More thoughts on Tomb Raider: Anniversary

It's good. There, now you don't have to read all this.
by AC - permalink

I've put in some more time with Tomb Raider: Anniversary, and I realized pretty quickly that it's a damned addictive game. It's actually hard to stop playing it. Most of this is probably because it's my first play-through, so I'm having to figure out all the puzzles (lot's of "Oh, I see" moments). Very few -- if any -- of the puzzles I've seen so far have been lifted straight from the original. I'm in the early stages of the second episode, taking my time and looking around a lot.

The combat is still a little wonky. I was more than halfway through the t-rex battle by the time I finally started to get a feel for the "adrenaline dodge" mechanic. In crowded quarters, against multiple enemies, it's even trickier. In fact, other than the rex fight, I think I've only managed to pull it off three times. Then again, like the original, the majority of the gameplay is exploration and solving environmental puzzles, which is definitely a positive. But there's a bright side to the combat, courtesy of Dragon's Lair: several cut-scenes feature quick-reaction controls, where you'll have to stab a direction to dodge an attack. It took me off guard at first -- I got my face torn off by a velociraptor (though judging by its size, I think it may actually have been a utahraptor). It's a new gameplay element for me, but I like it, and I think it bridges TRA's engine-driven cut-scenes with the gameplay brilliantly.

On the graphics front, the motion blur is becoming less distracting, and it's worth it for the distance fogging effect that makes the larger areas just stunning. In fact, I'm more and more impressed by the visuals the more I play. There's a slight bloom effect in open-air areas that works beautifully. TRA is so resource-light that I can run with all the eye candy enabled and a little anti-aliasing with 8X anisotropy at well over 60 FPS. It's just a really well-optimized engine, because it still looks great even without any bump-mapping (if there is some, I haven't seen it). Water effects are subtle and realistic, both from above and below. Poseidon's key room in St. Francis' Folly is particularly notable for that reason. Lara has a ton of animations that are generally pretty seamless, and her character model doesn't lose any quality the closer the camera gets to her.

TRA is also notable for its load times, or lack thereof. New levels and saved games load exceptionally quickly, and not just as compared to recent games. I'm talking three to four seconds, better than Quake III, and for the record, that game is eight years old. It's a far cry from games like Far Cry, or Half-Life 2, Doom 3, and Quake 4, where loading a new map can take upwards of twenty seconds, and even loading a quicksave can take as long as five or six. While TRA has no quicksave function, checkpoints are numerous, and if you die or take a wrong step soon after finding one, it takes only moments you quit your current game and continue from the last via the main menu. More evidence that this new engine is just brilliant.

Digressing completely, I want to mention a work-around for Half-Like 2: Episode One that seems to be working, though I'm not terribly happy about it. After beating HL2 with only a few crashes by, apparently, unloading WindowBlinds, I decided to try my luck with HL2 E1. First try, I watched the opening cinematic, Dog pulled me from the rubble, and it crashed. Classic looping-sound crash. I noticed a texture setting that was different in my HL2 and HL2 E1 config files, so I changed it, completely syncing up the settings for the two games, and tried again. This time I got a looping-sound crash during the black screen before the cinematic even started. Lovely.

I didn't want to do it, but I tried running the game in DirectX 8.1 mode (as opposed to 9.0c) and it works. There's no bump-mapping, which is okay except when pointing your flashlight at things in the dark; Alyx in particular looks downright creepy. There's also no HDR, although bloom works, and Source HDR is so system-taxing that I tend to just use bloom anyway. Other than that, the game looks just fine, although running in DX 8.1 mode means the graphics settings reset themselves every launch, so you have to reset resolution and just about every advanced setting each time you start the game. But that only takes about thirty seconds.

As an added bonus, with no bump-mapping the game runs at what seems like nearly double the framerate (I was playing with v-sync enabled, and didn't run any benchmarks). Just lightning quick, even in big, complex areas with a lots of light sources, and even during combat in those areas. It's a trade-off, and may be worth it if you prefer high framerates to having every possible graphical extra turned up.

The bottom line is that I was able to play through the entire game without a crash, and that's kickass. Alright, almost the entire game. For what I think was the third consecutive time, it crashed during the train ride at the very end of the game, immediately before the citadel blew itself to hell. I don't know what that's about, because it used to work fine. Whatever.

UPDATED: June 23, 1:00am-ish

Half-Life 2 and Ep. 2 news.

The joys of not crashing. Sort of.
by AC - permalink

I'm about three quarters of the way through my latest Half-Life 2 play-through, in the midst of Anticitizen One, and so far I've run into four crashes. That would be a lot in any other game, and it would have been a lot for HL2 a couple of years ago, but these days I think I've been pretty lucky. Early on I ran into what would have been a typical looping-sound crash, but I was miraculously able to alt-tab back to the desktop, where I was able to use the Windows task manager to manually close HL2 and Steam. That's a first for me, and the sort of crash I can live with.

Later, during Highway 17, I ran into consecutive crashes at the same place, which was somewhat ominous. Just after downing the first gunship, while loading the map with the mag-crane, it stalled out on me, and forced a shutdown. I don't know why. Then it happened again, but I realized I'd forgotten to unload WindowBlinds, so I was a little less worried, but all the same I went ahead and upgraded from Catalyst driver set 7.4 to 7.5 (again using NGOHQ's Catalyst + Control Panel installer).

I tried again, this time taking no chances and setting my desktop resolution and refresh rate to the same I'd be running in the game. I made it through the map transition and played on.

The last crash was right at the end of Sandtraps, just before entering Nova Prospekt. In the middle of that furious battle against two gunships, the game instantly quit to the desktop as I tried to quicksave. Weird, but as Source-engine crashes go, pretty damn tame. And it's run fine since then. In all, it's something like seven hours of gameplay with three inexplicable crashes, and with HL2's track record, I call that progress.

Moving on, if only laterally, Shacknews is reporting another unofficial release date for Episode 2, this time directly from Valve, of October 9th of this year. With the Black Box canceled, I can't see myself buying the Orange Box with HL2 and Ep. 1 (both of which I have) plus Ep. 2, Portal, and Team Fortess 2 for $50. The word is that what would have been the retail Black Box (Ep. 2, Portal, and TF2) will be available on the PC, but only via Steam, and for a price not yet set.

It would be nice to have the option of buying each of these games separately, as originally promised by Valve's original episodic content concept. As good as Episode 2 looks, from the Shack's new preview of it, it looks like they're incorporating a lot of new tech geared towards newer video hardware than I have, even though Valve's own Steam survey data indicates that I'm practically on the cutting edge with my old X800 XL. So all I really want is Portal, but current Steam pricing leads me to believe they'd probably charge no less than $20 for it. At that price it would make more sense to pay $40 for the whole Black Box.

How to not crash the Source engine.

Are you kidding?
by AC - permalink

After putting it off and putting it off, after playing all the way through nearly every game I have, I finally gave in and just had to try to play some Half-Life 2. I love this game. It's one of my favorite shooters ever, but the instability that seems native to the otherwise brilliant Source engine makes it hard for me to even launch it. I know it's the engine and not just the game because Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life: Source have the same problems. Source games have crashed my PC more spectacularly than any games I've ever played. But I may have found the problem.

Before starting another HL2 campaign, my first with my new CPU and PSU, I tried, yet again, to troll through the Valve support site and forums for some overlooked magical cure-all. In the middle of this year-old post, I noticed the following:

"Tuneup WinStyler Theme Service has been found to cause a crash with the Steam client application and WindowBlinds may cause crashes with Source games."

It can't be, I think to myself. WindowBlinds? Seriously? I've been using WindowBlinds for almost a decade. I'm a registered user. I paid twenty goddamn dollars for WB 5 (now 5.5), I look for new themes literally every day. I've never had it interfere with any game I've ever played. But I unloaded WB, shut down a couple of iTunes-related running processes that I've never been happy with (ituneshelper.exe and ipodservice.exe [I don't even have a fucking iPod]), and launched the game. And I played for two hours and it didn't even blink. Later in the day, after a reboot, I went back into HL2 and played for about 15 minutes before it crashed, and once again locked up my PC in the process. Then I realized WB is in my startup. I rebooted, unloaded WB again, and started HL2. I've been playing for over an hour.

This is insane. "Game freeze or crash with looping sounds" has got to be the most common Source issue ever, and of all things, I can fix it by disabling WindowBlinds? What the fuck? Obviously, I'll keep playing the game, and I'll update if anything else happens (like a crippling crash with no obvious cause).

Moving on. Seems Ars Technica agrees with pretty much all my complaints about the new Windows-compatible Safari 3 beta. They also raise an interesting question: if Apple is hoping apps like Safari (and iTunes) will sway Windows users toward switching to Macs, this is not the way to do it. Sure, Safari behaves on Windows just like it does on a Mac. But it's weird and inconsistent with the rest of my OS. That makes it annoying, not attractive. And releasing it with at least two downright dangerous security flaws is not especially compatible with Mac OS's image as the most secure mainstream operating system on the market. Don't get me wrong, gaming aside, I'd love to have a Mac as a second computer. But I think I'd rather run Firefox or Camino as my main browser.

Steam is unintuitive.

Installing a game twice is stupid.
by AC - permalink

So now that I've got the high-speed hookup going and Steam is marginally less a pain in the ass, I thought I'd look into registering some of my games that require a CD-check with the service just to avoid having to dig out a CD whenever I want to play them. I figure the Steam-enabled third-party games aren't as likely to shove unwanted patches down my PC's throat at random intervals as Valve is. So I tried Call of Duty and United Offensive, but no go. Apparently it only works with Valve games. That's somewhat annoying.

So I took a look around my stacks of game boxes and decided to try to register Counter-Strike. I got it as part of the Half-Life Platinum Collection a long time ago, but I've never really played it. It turns out that entering a valid CD-key only activates a game -- or, in this case, a set of games -- and enables you to download them into your Steam account. Previous installations are ignored. That's also somewhat annoying.

The good news is, activating my CS CD-key unlocked not only CS and the other games in the Platinum Collection (Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue Shift, TFC, and the Ricochet mod), but also Day of Defeat and Deathmatch Classic, which is just the original Quake 1 DM maps and weapons modded into HL1. I downloaded CS and DoD, since they're multiplayer games and you can only find servers in-game for them via Steam. And I guess I'll go ahead and download Blue Shift even though it's single-player only, since it's the only game in the collection that requires a CD-check, and I fucking hate that.

In other news, my PC still hasn't crashed since I decided to pop it open, knock it over on its side, and point a desk fan into it. GPU temps are down and somewhat steady, and I'm not so gun-shy about starting massive downloads anymore. I've also been toying with the demos for the first two Splinter Cell games (the third, Chaos Theory, crashes immediately after startup) and Need for Speed Underground 2. The SC demos are interesting and look really nice, but they're incredibly frustrating. There are about a hundred ways to fail a mission and only like two ways to win, and it's just a huge amount of trial-and-error and not very fun at all. NFS Underground though, is really cool. It's just a demo, and offers no hint as to how much depth the actual game has, but just zipping around, randomly challenging people to short, tear-ass races around town is more fun than it seems like it should be. There's like half a dozen NFS spinoffs out there, and all of them have PC demos, so I'll try out most of them and I'll probably end up buying at least one.

One last thing, how come nobody is playing Unreal Tournament 2004 online? I've got the Editor's Choice edition, and it's fully patched up now, but all I can find are loads of empty servers. Lame.

What the hell is wrong with Valve?

Patch this.
by AC - permalink

I fired up Half-Life 2 tonight after a fun couple of hours terrorizing random car-owning citizens in GTA San Andreas, only to discover a new bug, one unlike anything I've ever encountered before. It seems that now in the world of HL2, I can no longer use my mouse while holding down any keyboard key without almost constant mouse-input cut-outs.

What I mean is, mouse input freezes while using the keyboard. I tried both USB and PS2 mice, and both optical mice and ball mice. I ran dxdiag to see if it's a DirectInput bug, and I tried every other game I own to try to replicate the issue. Even HL2 Episode One works fine. It's just Half-Life 2, and it happened after yet another mandatory Source patch forced on me by Steam. I can't find any reference to this in the Steam support database or in the Steam forums. I could look into this further, but I think I'm just going to email somebody directly about this one.

I just can't wrap my head around why Valve won't implement some sort of opt-in patch functionality for Steam games. At least for their own games. Half-Life 2 is one of my all-time favorite games, but apparently to play it now I have to stand still whenever I want to look around. What the fuck?

It's not just that. I had an issue where Half-Life 1: Source would quit to the desktop as soon as it was launched. This was fixed with a special command-line string I found on the Steam support site. Not only is this no longer working, the same thing is now happening with HL2: Lost Coast. And to start an offline server against bots in Counter-Strike: Source, I now have to be online first. I can then disconnect from the internet and start as many offline servers as I want. Again, this bizarre behavior started after an unwanted and unneeded patch Steam forced me to download.

Attention Valve: I hate mandatory patches. Everyone hates mandatory patches. Steam is the reason I didn't buy Sin Episodes at retail. Don't become EA; I don't buy EA games anymore because I've had such horrible experiences with all the recent EA games I've bought. Steam is rapidly becoming a deterrent to buying new Valve games. I know that Activision has a new deal with Valve that would allow me to update games like Call of Duty 2 via Steam. Well, guess what? I own CoD 2, and I read about the patches available for it, and I was able to decide which patch I needed, and I downloaded it. So fuck you, Steam, and stay out of my CoD directory. Do you see where I'm going with this, Valve?

Episode One and Ghost Recon.

New school vs. old school.
by AC - permalink

I was going to write up a fairly detailed review of Half-Life 2: Episode One tonight, but then I read this review at 2404.org. Just read that, because it's what I would have said, with only a couple of modifications. First, I don't agree that Half-Life 2 was artificially lengthened with the long vehicle sequences. They may feel a little out of place if you've played four or five dozen other shooters, but that doesn't mean those levels don't have their own merits -- and it definitely doesn't mean they aren't fun. Second, I like HL2's weapon load. I think it takes a lot of time to get used to them, but eventually you realize that every one of them is useful throughout the entire game, and the hugely diminished ammo capacity from Half-Life is, in the end, a plus. I also don't have a problem with the "bucket" weapon-selection method, but that's probably because I've spent so much time playing the original Half-Life series and Counter-Strike: Source.

In any case they made a lot of right calls in their Episode One review, so read it if you still haven't decided to get the game. After I finished it, I let it simmer for a couple of days, then plunged back in, and had a much better time with it. I tackled a couple of areas with a completely different strategy, and I'm already kicking around new ideas.

The brilliance of the gravity gun in HL2 and Episode One is how it lets you move around almost anything in preparation for an upcoming fight. You can gather explosive barrels so they're easy to reach for toss-and-bangs when the baddies advance on you, or you can strategically place them for remote detonation via pistol. Or you can move around heavier objects to create a defensive bulwark, funnelling enemies into presighted avenues. This is no tactical shooter, it's simply an action game with an unprecedented amount of depth.

But speaking of tactical shooters, I've just about finished my new campaign in Ghost Recon. I'm up to the last mission, the one at Red Square in Moscow. The depth of this game is just phenomenal, which is probably why it still has an active fan community five years after it was released. This time around I've reversed strategies on a number of missions, moving hard and fast through maps where I had previously had success with stealth, and creeping my way through the missions that had always seemed to call for full-on assaults. I also ended up taking a couple of the standard operatives - a support soldier and a demolitions guy - much deeper into the campaign. The demo tech in particular has been upgraded to the point that his stats are on par with the specialists, and in fact I'm taking him into Moscow on a tank-busting fireteam with Tunney.

I'm really going have fun with this mission. Instead of two versatile fireteams, I'm putting a stealth team of Ramirez and Grey on point, with my demo team of Tunney and Allen following to take out the tanks, and a sniper team, Ibrahim and either Stone or Galinsky on reserve to pick off distant sentries on the push through Red Square. In the past I've always used two teams with OICW-using Jacobs and Cohen leading, each with a sniper and a demo in tow. But what fun is that? If you didn't need more than one demo to clear all the tanks, you could get through that mission with just one team of three guys, and that's hard to justify realistically when you're talking about wiping out thirty or more entrenched enemies.

Besides, Ghost Recon is just more fun when you've got half a dozen armed badasses under your mouse -- especially when a fireteam you've left alone for a while unexpectedly comes under fire and cuts down all the attackers before you can even switch back to them. I love that game.

Can't get enough Half-Life.

Best... franchise... ever.
by AC - permalink

Picked up Half-Life 2: Episode 1 early this morning at Wal-Mart. Officially, I went to pick up a new 20-foot tie-down for Maggie the Abnormally Strong Rottweiller after she broke yet another one last night. Unofficially, I wanted this game. Bad. Good news is, it's all good news. I found a heavy-gauge lead this time, and I don't think our friendly little terror can tear this one apart. Plus, Episode 1, so far, is pretty fucking sweet.

Lately when the gaming itch hits me - which is every day - I've had a yen for the Half-Life series. I played through the Source edition of Half-Life (up to Xen, which everybody loathes for good reason) for just the second time. Once again, I kept wishing I was just playing regular old Half-Life, because the high-def pack that came with Blue Shift simply makes it look better than HL: Source, except for the water and that one part on the cliffside. I haven't let myself play Blue Shift or Opposing Force for a long time, because at some point I'm afraid I'll just get sick of them, and I love 'em too much to let that happen. So I've gone back a couple years and started a new campaign in Ghost Recon. I've said it before, but that really is an all-time classic game for me, especially when you consider its expansion packs, Desert Siege and Island Thunder. You can lose hours and hours to that game without even realizing it.

But getting back to Episode 1. First impression? Alyx is funny. And so well-realized that she seems more real than ever. Her character model and textures have been tweaked slightly, and animation is sharper, quicker, and more varied than in HL2. She flinches and shields her eyes when you shine your flashlight at her, and jokes around when there's a lull in the action. Best example is when you first run across combine-zombies and she calls them the "Zombine," then groans at her own pun. Most importantly, having her tag along very quickly stops feeling like an escort mission, and feels natural and real. I can't stress that point enough.

Although I'm only at roughly the midpoint of Episode 1, Alyx's AI and unexpected interaction has been so good that it actually feels like a co-op game. And I've never said that about any game I've ever played. I know, of course, that she won't seem as real on the second play-through, but this is a Half-Life game. There will be new things to discover.

In fact one of the reasons Half-Life 2 is in my all-time top five is the depth of exploration. The last time I played that game, and it must have been the seventh or eighth time, I found two new areas I'd never come across before in just the first couple hours of the game. The time before, I found two more. Once you know where the lulls in the action are going to be, you can take some time to walk around and explore, maybe gather some crates and barrels, stack 'em up, and see where you can get to. I love that.

Anyway, the HDR in Episode 1 really adds to the game, when compared to Half-Life 2. And I might be wrong, but there seems to have been some optimization done to it, as there seems to be a much smaller framerate hit when it's enabled when compared to Lost Coast. I inadvertantly played through the first section of the game - the part in the Citadel - with Catalyst forcing completely maxed-out settings for AA and AF, and it was still very playable. Reverting to just 8X AF and 4X AA for the next hour made the game silky smooth, even with HDR still on, though at the admittedly low res of 1024x768.

But there is one downside. After installing Episode 1 from the DVD-ROM, I had to wait several hours while I downloaded updates via Steam over dial-up. The retail package is only five days old, but apparently it's so out-of-date that Valve won't let you play it until you've downloaded several hundred MB's worth of updates. That really is irritating if, like me, you drove to a store, pulled cash out of your pocket for the game, and just want to play it already.

Additionally, the retail edition comes with no extras, other than Half-Life 2 Deathmatch and Half-Life 1 Deathmatch: Source, which came with Half-Life 2 Game of the Year Edition and are available over Steam for free anyway if you have even the bare-bones HL2. And Episode 1 is short. Again, I haven't finished it yet, but I hear it's very short, even for just $20. $20 really isn't much for a brand new game, but you have to keep in mind that in the world of PC games, $20 can get you a lot if you're willing to wait. I bought GTA San Andreas on DVD, Call of Duty, Halo, Ghost Recon Gold Edition, Far Cry, and Doom 3 for $20. I got GTA Vice City and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault for $10, and Unreal Tournament: 2004 Editors Choice on DVD for $15.

But those were old games. I am incurably addicted to the entire Half-Life franchise, and I needed Episode 1 now. And even after playing just half of it, Episode 1 was worth twenty bucks.