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E3 2009 / Highlights

// June 3rd, 2009 // No Comments » // News, News - Games

It’s that time of year again and the Electronic Entertainment Expo (or E3, if you will) is once again running amok through the streets of Los Angeles – carjacking passersby and stomping hookers along the way. I’ve scoured the news from the first two days and I’ve decided to share my favourite bits with you. Jesus, I must really like you.

Eventual Middle Manager

// June 1st, 2009 // No Comments » // Journal

This past week/weekend has been an absolute blur. There’s so much shit going on, it’s straight-up craziness. Madness.

Last Thursday, I had the first session of my last Master’s class at VT (the Northern Virginia campus). After a severe bout of misguidance via my various school advisors, I’ve been forced to take this one last class after being told I was done for good after finishing a course in Artificial Intelligence over a year ago. If that came out confusing, it’s probably because the whole graduate school situation has been fucked up for many, many months now. As it stands, I just need to defend my thesis (which is complete, but untouched for 6 months now) and get a passing grade in this summer class to finally get my MS and move the hell on.

Without getting into too many trivial details, this class is an absolute joke. The professor who teaches it is a hardcore academic and is of the mindset that all programmers eventually ‘graduate’ from coding and enter the ranks of middle management at some point in their careers. I don’t know about him, but the day I stop coding or designing is the day I start looking for a new job. At any rate, the worst part of the class is that it starts in the early evening and doesn’t get out until 10pm. So, I’m basically forced to work late, scarf down reheated left-overs at work for dinner, drive out to Falls Church, attend class, drive home to Leesburg, and then pretty much go to bed before heading out to work the next morning. Goddamn drag and a half. To top it off, last Thursday I called Krystle on the way home only to find out she had an accident while I was in class. Thankfully, she wasn’t hurt at all, but she hit a deer coming home on a back-road in the dead of night. I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later, living way out in the boonies like we do – but it’s still a pain in the ass (and a several hundred dollar deductible) to sort through.

The weekend ended up being pretty nice, though. We slammed through all of our errands / chores on Saturday so that we could pretty much just chill out the entire weekend. Chilling out, in this context, involved watching a metric ton of the French Open and playing a bunch of games. The highlight of the tournament has definitely been the match today where the Swede, Robin Soderling, absolutely manhandled Nadal to beat him in four sets. This is the absolutely first time that Nadal has ever lost a match in the French Open and I’m insanely happy that Soderling was the man to finally do it. He’s been one of my favourite players since last Wimbledon when he pissed Rafa off by mocking him and pretending to pick his ass like OCD Nadal always does before a serve. Serves him right – fantastic match.

I mentioned that Krystle and I played a bunch of games, but that’s a straight-up lie. In reality, we’ve just been playing the hell out of one game – Sacred 2 for the 360. Generally, the only games that she’ll even consider cooping with me are the isometric, hack-and-slash RPGs which, pretty suprisingly, are in severe short supply on the 360. After scoping this out on-line, it looked right up her alley and so I ended up buying it Friday evening. Needless to say, we’re both addicted to the damn game, and we’ve racked up about 15 hours just from this weekend alone. While it can be buggy as hell and it’s interface is pretty clumsy, there’s something intangibly awesome about the game in general. For one thing, we’ve been running around completing quests and leveling up and, after all this time, we’re still in the first chapter. There’s still 85% of the game we have yet to uncover – it’s insanely massive, to put it mildly. So, it looks like we’ll have a distraction for quite a while to come.

Speaking of massive, this post has turned gargantuan. Serves me right for taking so long to update, I suppose. The tech blog at Pansopht is still in the works, I’m just tweaking the design before I turn it live. In addition, I’m working on a few other projects which should yield some interesting things in the next few weeks. As for the near future, I think Krystle and I are going to see Up tomorrow after work. I’m a huge fan of Pixar’s body of work, so I’m really jazzed about seeing it. If we do end up seeing it tomorrow, I’ll be sure to write a review and post it by the middle of the week for those who are interested.

Well, that’s all I’ve got. Night.

Left 4 Dead Free Trial Arrives Tomorrow

// April 30th, 2009 // No Comments » // Journal

Left 4 Dead

If you haven’t heard, Valve has announced that they are giving away a free 24-hour trial of Left 4 Dead tomorrow (2009/05/01) on Steam. This trial also comes with the brand-spanking new Survivor Pack DLC that was recently released.

Left 4 Dead is one of my favourite cooperative games on any system and I’d highly recommend giving it a spin if you haven’t tried it yet and you are a fan of: zombies, humans,  humans shooting zombies, or zombies eating humans. While light on story, each campaign in the game attempts to emulate a horror movie cliche involving a zombie apocalypse and a rag-tag band of survivors who try to make it to safety using anything and everything at their disposal. For example, one campaign starts you off on the roof of an apartment building and forces you to traverse through the abandoned city subway system as you try to make it to the local TV broadcast station to try and signal for help. Another one has you blasting your way through a Friday the 13th-esque campground as you attempt to reach a quay where a boat is waiting to ferry everyone in your party to some unknown safe haven.

However, what it lacks in narrative, it more than makes up for in fundamental gameplay and outright fun. Valve has proved time and again that they are masters at crafting new experiences from played-out genres. In the late 1990’s, they breathed new life into the first-person shooter genre with the first game in their venerable Half Life series and now they’re breaking the mould once again by presenting a truly cooperative shooter fused with horror elements.

In Left 4 Dead, communication within your team is paramount to your success within each level. As the difficulty ratchets up, so do the sheer numbers of undead that you’ll have to take down. Additionally, special ‘boss’-like monsters will appear more frequently, each with a special set of abilities that will rip your team apart if you’re not careful. The boomer, for example, will explode if you let him get too close and will cover everyone nearby in a goopy substance that acts like zombie candy – causing every upright undead in a mile radius to home in on you as fast as they can. And god help you if you are beckoned by the keening wail of the Witch and accidentally manage to wake her up.

Long story short, I would definitely recommend Left 4 Dead and Friday’s free trial is an excellent opportunity to check it out.