written on Monday, March 16, 2009
I finally got tired of Mafia Wars. A recent update let rivals destroy my income generating buildings. @#*& that. I'm a gangster, not a contractor. Plus they weren't even showing who was doing it in the news ticker. I'm not huge on reprisals, but the game seems less fun and kinda broken.
I logged into UT3 just to check that I still couldn't add a friend. I wonder if they have to actually be logged in to UT3 to add them. That would be pathetic, and that's the best case scenario.
Also, if you'll allow me a moment to grump like the grumpy old man I am, I still don't like AltDeath. AltDeath was a type of DeathMatch added to DooM in a patch. It allowed the weapons and items to respawn. UT3 does it better than DooM did. A dominant player can't just run around picking up all the weapons and completely shut the other player down, but the final match of UT3 is all about the 100 armor belt and double damage power up. It doesn't make me feel like the better fighter when I have twice the armor and damage output of my opponent. And it doesn't make me feel like I lost in a fair fight when they have it. Weapon choice and tactical positioning is enough, in a well made game.
I also did download Tribes 2. There are extra controls to learn, and even the tutorials will kill you. (I should probably have left them on easy instead of turning them up to medium.) They spent a lot of resources on rendering terrain, so the models and animation are pretty hard to look at. There's a certain age between DooM and Half-Life where 3D looked worse than sprites to me. Tribes 2 came out two years after Half-Life, but still looks pretty terrible. More importantly the game feels janky. I'll keep trying and see if I can get the hang of it. Joint-Ops was janky, and I loved the heck out of that game.
For no particular reason, I'm finally playing through BioShock again, roughly a year after my first playthrough. I try to experiment and use different tactics, but I love the scrounger upgrade! The idea of not being able to take a second roll of the dice when a foe leaves crappy / no loot makes my skin crawl. The same goes for invisibility. Being invisible is AWESOME. I am using more telekinesis this time. And I'm not bothering with hacking as much. But considering I turned on the Vita Chambers this time (infinite respawners) just to give myself room to fail, I find my old habits are still dying very hard.
There are only two more episodes (of the game, which will probably take ten or so videos to get through) in the Heart of Evil walkthrough. As I recall, episode "e" is basically a sprawling military encampment. More armed super zombies show up, but overall it's pretty straightforward. But episode "f"... that's where the crazy hits the fan. I hope it's still as bizarre as I remember. I'm thinking I'll have to do a walkthrough for Blood next. The demo for Blood was awful, so many people (myself included) dismissed it as "another cheesy DooM clone" at the time. But Blood, once properly patched, played fine and had more character than Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, and Hexen put together.
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