An orange in an apple orchard
With MechWarrior 5 finally launching, I find myself torn.
On one hand: a decent MechWarrior game basically guarantees that I’ll pry open my wallet and fork over the cash. And there’s few enough games in the past twenty years that fit that definition for me.
But on the other hand: my policy towards Epic exclusives tend to be No Steam Version Equals No Purchase. Of course, someone had to go and test this resolve by launching the kinda game I’ve been waiting eons for….. bastards.
The Lie That Helped Build Nintendo
I’d really like to imagine that the banker must have shit himself when Bergsten bro he’s the topic of the 10,000 units. But I reckon things turned out pretty well for everyone in the end, lol.
Things that are probably kind of sad, in their own way.
Ended up watching Red vs Blue, which I rather skipped when it was young.
Thinking back to the days when graphics looked like that Blood Gulch.
Legendary was fun, but no chance in hell I’m doing that with an Xbox controller.
Remembering that I still have my Halo: CE disc.
Thinking that buying the Master Chief Collection again on PC, would be a good way to play Halo 3 and 4 with a mouse.
Thinking that for $40, I’d rather buy my iPad a keyboard case or add to my anime collection.
If I actually got to play games more often, I’d probably just Game Pass.
Did I mention, I originally bought Halo Combat Evolved because I thought the Assault Rifle looked cool? Yeah, I was probably a nitwit when I was that young.
Post Script: Huh? The storage requirement for MCC on Steam is marked 20 GB? I could swear that my Xbox dedicates several times that much to it.
While my back isn’t overly happy with a day spent camped in front of Deathstar One, I at least enjoyed binge playing Halo: Reach.
For the most part, the story is a sad one given the fate of Noble Team but the result makes a rather great Halo game. Spartans might not be killed in action, officially, but there are no survivors of Noble team by the end.
Noble Six is a rather interesting one. He exhibits many of the same qualities as the Master Chief, but perhaps lacks his luck. His fate isn’t the saddest though, that probably goes to Daisy-023. Aside from that, Noble team is full of far more developed characters than other fireteams in Halo games. Kat, may very well be the most intriguing Spartan I’ve seen.
The Spartan II on the team reminded me of Dr. Halsey’s rather unique relationship to the older Spartans. I’ve always found it curious that Halsey is portrayed as a more motherly figure, despite being far from compassionate. Cold and pragmatic might be a better description of the doctor. Actually, I’d like to think that she has a special place in hell, for what she did to them—what was done to those children was pretty damned wrong, and definitely overkill from the pre-Covenant war problems.
On the flip side: her children did go on to significant success during the Human-Covenant war. Jorge-052 being far from the least of them. As far as I know, only a dozen or two of that generation survived the Human-Covenant war, in contrast to ONI’s later efforts to mass produce Spartan III and IV warriors, which are pretty plentiful by Halo’s second trilogy.
Noble team’s effort certainly makes for a surprising amount of success, compared to the S.O.L. it leads into with The Pillar of Autumn’s flight from Covenant forces. I suppose when you have a fire team full of Spartans instead of a bunch of hopelessly screwed, you’re likely to see thousands of Covenant go down long before the Spartans breath their last breath.
How Much of a Genius-Level Move Was Using Binary Space Partitioning in Doom?
I still remember the first time that I played Wolfenstein 3D. It was on a contemporary hardware, as a minigame in a far more recent Wolfenstein game. My first thought was how rudimentary simple it was; my second was “Holy crap, you could do this on a 286?”.
By modern definitions, I don’t think anyone would be thrilled by the limitations Id’s early engines had for map geometry. But I think for their times, it was a small price to pay given the hardware. And to be fair, as a kid, when I first played DooM ’93 on a Sega 32X^, I certainly didn’t notice. Years later when I would play it on a PC, I didn’t care—because it was still fun. All these years later, I still find DooM ’93 to be a lot of fun. That’s the real success of a video game, I’d say :P.
For the time, even the console ports were pretty impressive games. I mean, most of the games we had looked like this:
Meanwhile if you popped in DooM, this was what you got:
That just didn’t happen, lol.
Many times that I’ve read about porting PC games to the Super Nintendo, and other consoles, they’ve usually been stories that I would describe as “Lossy” or “Brutal” depending on the complexity gap. Such as when an arcade machine was far more powerful than a console, or a PC simply had more oompth than a console.
Id’s games were kind of revolutionary: both in their visual technology, and in their portability. Wolf 3D, DooM, and Quake were pretty widely ported during their era of commercial viability. Post open sourcing of their code, they have come to run on virtually everything, and anything. As technology has advanced, we’ve probably reached the point where it is no longer a surprise if your wrist watch is more powerful than many of the things DooM ’93 was ported to in the ’90s.
Today, I think that DooM’s use of BSP is somewhat novel. You should think of that today, or your hardware is probably so powerful compared to your goal: that you just don’t care. Given a decent computer science education, the concept isn’t the leap into rocket science. Today though, I imagine most people aren’t tasked with solving such a problem, because they live in the world John Carmack helped create: one where we have this thing called a Game Engine.
When Carmack programmed these games, I don’t think it was so obvious a technique. People were still struggling to make PCs do this kind of thing at all. Resources for learning these things have also changed a lot over time. Many of us have the advantage of knowledge built on the minds of geniuses, if we have any education at all—and the code.
Two of my favourite engines to read: are modern source ports of the Quake III: Arena and DooM engines. By releasing the code into the wild, I think it helped all of us learn better how to solve these problems. Both the things you can go off and learn, and the code you can get ahold of have evolved since these games were written. But thanks to games like DooM: it’s easier for us to do that today. Because technology is built upon what came before, by extending the ideas of others in new directions and taking advantage of improved hardware.
Genius isn’t in using a rock to smash something, it is in realizing you can smash things with a rock far better than your thick head.
―
^ Being around 25 years later, my brain cells are foggy. But DooM was one of my brother’s games, so the first thing we had that played that would probably have been the Sega Genesis, which AFAIK means 32X release. We also had the PlayStation versions of DooM, Final DooM, and Quake II but those were later in our childhood.
Pour one out for the Steam Controller, now on closeout sale for just $5 plus shipping
I’ll admit that my thoughts for another controller run towards an XBox controller new enough to support Bluetooth, but for $5 I don’t think I can resist this.
How to know it’s time to take a break:
Not sure if it’s better or worse, that my temptation to put batteries in this is tempered by wondering where the heck my other cartridges went.
It’s been in an old green pencil case for plenty of years, which was also home for my PlayStation and PS2 memory cards, but I only found two cartridges :/.
Mechanical and Apple pencil shown for scale. It’s about the thickness of three pencils :P.
This kind of makes me feel old, and tempted to root around in my closet.
A long, long time ago in a childhood increasingly far away, I remember what mobile gaming was like. More than a bit of my childhood involved being stuck in the back of a car, bored for the duration, or stuck waiting places. Needless to say it was more remember to bring your shit with you than remember your phone charger. ‘Cuz if T-800 and Cpl Hicks lost their guns, you weren’t going back, lol.
Mobile gaming when I was little was something more like Tiger’s hand held games. I’m pretty sure that Double Dragon passed more than a few hours of my early childhood. And then there was Game Boy and Game Gear. Those were cool. More often than not, mobile gaming was borrowing my grandmother’s deck of cards, which didn’t require more power than daylight.
My first “Real” video gaming system of my own, was the Super NES. Between the original NES my brother and I played, and the THHGs I was used to, I came very close to choosing the original Game Boy for my first system, but in the end the green screen balanced me in favor of a more traditional console. The Super Nintendo had plenty of pretty colours, and Super Game Boy was eventually a thing anyway. Some time later my brother would also end up with a Sega Game Gear, but that was short lived.
Most of my time with the Game Boy turned out to be the later Color model. My mother bought me a purple Game Boy Color out of the local pawn shop around the time Pokemon Red & Blue were still young in America, and I still have that GBC in my closet. Along with my Pokemon Blue cartridge, and other games. Before the rise of the affordable smart phone, more than a bit of time spent waiting someplace, I passed either reading books or playing on my Game Boy Color.
FML: noun; words uttered when sorting your Steam wishlist by price during a sale.
Not going to share the words for when 30 – 80 % makes half one’s list under $10, lol.