I was looking forward to 1942: Joint Strike (Xbox 360) ever since it was first announced earlier this year. I finally downloaded it a couple of days ago and was eager to try it out right away. However, the game fell flat from my expectations. I really liked the older 1942 series games, especially 1942 itself and the highscore battles I associate with it. Joint Strike however just has too many flaws to live up to its legendary predecessor.
Music From The Year 2000
Check out my brother‘s “new” album – it contains a couple of electronic tracks he made from around 2000. If you’re more into acoustic sounds, you may also want to check out his earlier album released under the Hobo Twang monicker together with a friend.
I created the strange cover art for MFTY2K by the way. I should do more stuff like that, I’m really out of practice. However, my internship will start on Monday, so that’s definitely going to give me the opportunity to get back into drawing/pixeling and all that stuff I couldn’t do much lately.
Tracking your Euro notes
Yesterday I got my 6th hit at Eurobilltracker. This is a website dedicated to tracking the paths Euro bills take around the world (derived from the US-counterpart Where is George?.) It works simply by entering the serial number of the note into the online database. Once somebody else receives your bill and enters it, you’ve got yourself a hit. The website generates a lot of statistics (did I mention that I’m a huge fan of statistics, graphs and tables yet?) and maps showing you the distance your note traveled and the amount of time it took. It’s a really fun waste of time, and a very satisfying feeling once you actually do get a hit (which will take its time at first.)
Babel Babel released
Our Half-Life 2 Deathmatch mod Babel Babel is finished! Well, sort of. There’s still a bunch of bugs and unfinished stuff in it, but it’s playable. You can grab it over at the Babel Babel website.
Best Games Ever.
I re-activated my Mobygames account a couple of weeks ago and decided to add a list of my favourite games to my profile page there. It’s hard choosing only a couple of them, but here’s a list and my reasons why I included them, in no particular order. Maybe you’ll discover something new or have some good memories of some of the games.
Where “Gun Control” Means Using Both Hands
Two days ago, the United States Supreme Court toppled the gun ban in Washington DC. I am probably a bit naive, but I was shocked at how the mostly US-residents at a games forum I frequent reacted to this. They had pretty much nothing but applause for the result, even those who didn’t care much for guns stated that the freedom to bear arms is important to them. I simply can’t understand how having firearms in your home reduces the crime rate. Criminals knowing that every household has a gun in a drawer somewhere won’t turn into saints looking for legal work all of a sudden. They commit crimes for a reason, and I doubt they don’t know the risks that come with their “job.” And even if they avoid robbing homes and choose “easier” targets, as suggested in the forum thread, that doesn’t reduce the crime rate at all. It just shifts a little into other areas. And I guess it’s safe to say that the probability of firearm accidents is 100% higher if you have a gun at home than if you don’t. And of course, lifting the restrictions on gun possession will make it a lot easier for criminals to get hold of weapons themselves. It’s like an arms race between two nations. If you know your target owns a gun, you’d better be equipped with an adequate counterpart yourself. I mean, a gun is a device made to kill a living being. How can that be any good for anyone? I’ve even seen a video once of children sitting on machine guns at a firing range, with their daddies standing there right next to them smiling. WTF is wrong with this society? I think it’s time to realize that maybe, 200 years ago, things were a little different than they are now. At least other high-income countries with stricter regulations seem to have less problems with homicide as well. But I guess the constitution is just too much of a religion for the US, an infallible, untouchable holy grail of democracy.
De La Soul – Stakes is High
Postcards from Alien Worlds
I’m checking NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander website daily to get updates on the mission and new photos to look at. I find it really fascinating and quite a technological feat to shoot a complicated machine into space, have it travel millions of kilometers over periods of months or years and then land it on another planet. And it still works after everything it went through (well, sort of, there are already some minor problems.) Anyway, I was getting some of the latest photos from the site. The stereoscopic camera on Phoenix only shoots black and white photos, but there is an array of red, green and blue LEDs near the camera. This allows to shoot the scene three times, with different lighting and thus later on compose a colour picture. I tried this myself today with one of the pictures, but it’s of course only a very rough approximation, and nowhere a scientific process. It’s especially difficult since the photos aren’t labeled, so you don’t know with what colour light they were illuminated. I tried some reasoning, since the primary colour on Mars is red, the brightest photo of the series should be the red channel from my naive understanding and so on. The result is what you can see above.
This got me thinking about my favourite space pictures, so here’s a little rundown of some of them, in no particular order. Click on the images to view high-resolution versions.
Boom Blox, Omega Five and the Best 3D Shoot-em-ups
So I was able to play a couple of rounds of Boom Blox yesterday. First results: my arms hurt. Well, I guess I’m just not used to physical activity, the same thing happened to me the first days after playing Wii Sports back when I got the console. Boom Blox has several modes of play, one of them involves throwing baseballs and bowling balls at the towers of blocks in front of you. I may exaggerate the motion a little too much, but I kept getting weak in one arm, then changed to the other until that one hurt, changing back again and so forth. With the result of a hangover in both arms. I guess I should work out some more.
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Half-Life 2 Deathmatch Tutorial III: Triggerable Trapdoors
In this tutorial I will demonstrate how to create a deadly trapdoor triggered by throwing physics objects at a certain point. In our HL2DM mod Babel Babel, the teams playing against each other have the option of throwing boxes lying around the arena at targets on the other teams’ side of the level that trigger a series of trapdoors in the ground. If one of the enemy teams’ players happens to be standing over one of these hidden trapdoors, he will face his certain death at the bottom of the pit.
I had some trouble getting this trapdoor to work at first, since it seemed to work fine – as long as no player was standing on it at the moment it was triggered. In this case, it simply refused to open at all. After browsing the net a bit I found several hints on how to make the trapdoor work correctly and combined them in the following tutorial. As always, you should already be a little familiar with Hammer, because I won’t tell you all the icons you have to click on.
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GTA IV and Upcoming Titles
GTA IV has gotten a lot of extremely favourable and even “perfect” reviews. But after having played through the story line and currently sitting at around 77% completion, I think the game doesn’t really deserve these high rankings. To be fair I have to say that I was unable to try out multiplayer yet, which I am certain is an excellent new addition to the series and warrants higher ratings. But the single player experience offered hardly any innovations over previous GTA games. In fact, it’s just more of the same while looking a little better than before.