I was reading through my previous blog entries today and I saw that I had an entry about BF 2142. At the end of the post I made a comment about how it feels like good games are few and far between. Well at last there is a game to fill that void. Bioshock.

Unless you live under a rock and/or hate video games, you’ve probably heard of Bioshock one way or another. This game has everything including amazing graphics and remarkable story, and even some controversy about little girl characters in violent video games.

Bioshock starts you off in the year 1960 as a character, Jack, who has just been involved in a plane crash in the middle of an ocean. He is the only survivor. With pieces of the plane wreckage burning all around, you see there is a large lighthouse type structure. As you head towards the structure, very little is known about what lies ahead. You begin to learn more about Rapture, the underwater city, and its oddities as a character named Atlas coaches you though the beginning parts of the game, in what feels like a very immersive and plot-driven tutorial. As you get deeper and deeper into the story, it gets more and more twisted. I personally have only played about 4-5 hours of this 20+ hour game, and I am throughly impressed with every aspect of it. The visuals are very impressive, especially the water effects. The music and sounds add a sense of eeriness and work into the time period quite nicely. Everytime I play this game, I feel like I am walking around in a huge immersive piece of artwork.

I think, whatever type of gamer you are, if you enjoy a game with a deeply captivating environment, an incredibly amazing story, and a little bit of scare-factor, then purchasing Bioshock is a no-brainer.

I thought it might be nice to put up a quick update of what’s been going on lately. I have tons of stuff to talk about, so I’ll have to post some more later. And no, I don’t especially love Vanessa Carlton, I just liked the sound of the words.

Anyways, for starters, I am currently employed at ABB part-time over the summer. This is pretty cool because in order for me to make the same amount of money every pay, I would probably have to work about 2.5 times more hours than I work here (Here being where I am right now). Not to mention the work isn’t too difficult (Note the last parenthetical statement). Also, this summer, I finally embarked on the Great Journey (read Circuits II), hopefully it will turn out like I expect it to. Speaking of the Great Journey, I bought a Xbox 360 back in May, and it is leet. I tried to buy used, to save some bucks, but that was a bad idea. Out of the two used ones I had, neither worked… Regardless, I now have a pretty all white Core system, and the Halo 3 beta kicked serious butt!

The new Transformers movie comes out today! It should be cool, I’m going to go see it at 10:20 PM tonight. I’ll have to put up a post of what I thought of it. Today I had this for an away message… “Transfloormerz! Robuts in Da’ Guys!” And Ben Radey messaged me with “transgenders! more than meets the eyes!”. That was good for a laugh!

I’ve done a couple things to the site lately. First of all, I made a new header. I used the base Flash file that the snow header was created from, rewrote the action script, found a cloud image and did a little PSing, and it looks pretty good to me. I also dropped a Twitter javascript into my sidebar. So that’s been a summary of the last couple months. I’ll update again with more soon.

A couple weeks ago I got the opportunity (finally) to play the new Battlefield game’s demo, BF:2142. It is created with the same engine as its predecessor, and is an OK game. BF2 has, for some unknown reason, progressively run slower and slower on my computer. And I seem to not be alone by checking some of the Battlefield forums occasionally. 2142 also runs fairly slow on medium-low graphic settings… Needless to say, I am disappointed. Mostly, because the game runs like crap-o-la on my machine, and it probably shouldn’t.

Some have griped that 2142 is merely a large “mod” for BF2, which is I suppose, a valid argument. Hopefully some of the bugs from BF2 will be gone, but I would have really liked to see this game in a different light than what it has shown so far. I will have to say, I have no idea why a company would push a demo of a product the way they did. The two days that I got on to play the demo, the master server probably kicked me 8 times. Not to mention, 3 times it took over 5 minutes to login or time-out. If the demo is supposed to represent the final game, I sure as hell wouldn’t buy it, but Alex says that the game is better than how the demo played… Sometimes it feels like good games are just too few and far between.

So just browsing digg, and found an interesting article about a fellow Ubuntu user.

“After a rather fine night out on the town, I came home in a rather inebriated state. Put the live disc in, and recklessly choose to install Ubuntu, and did so by wiping the entire hard drive (previously XP). This sort of switch has sortof thrown me in at the deep end, but I have no regrets and has to be one of the best drunken decisions I have ever taken…”

Ubuntu: It’s so easy to install, you can do it when you’re three sheets to the wind. Just goes to show how easy the install for Ubuntu really is.

On a completely different note, there’s a browser based MMO, called Travian, that I’ve been playing, and its pretty dang cool. Maybe some of you remember playing “Kings of Chaos” and “Dark Throne”, well this game is similar, but it beats the pants off of both of them. It’s a good way to be able to passively game, while not spending more than an 15 minutes to an half-hour a day playing. Of course you could play it more, but there is only so much you can do at the “passive pace” the game plays at. If you do decide to play, I’m on Server 2 in the South-East area.

So my brother decided he needed a laptop, but of course he wanted one that would game too. So he decided to get on eBay and find one. On his first attempt, he ended up with just a e-mail that stated that the auction wasn’t valid due to the sellers account being compromised. After that mishap, he started to look for more believable deals. So he found a Dell XPS Gen 2 for sale in one of the 48 contiguous states. A few days and $1,200 later, the laptop arives. I’m a little worried it might be broken, piece of junk, or maybe just really used. Holy crap was I wrong! This laptop doesn’t have a mark on it. Windows XP MCE 2005 freshly installed, all we did was plug it in, start it up and away we went.

This XPS has some real horsepower too! It packs an Intel Centrino M with 1GB RAM and a GeForce Go 6800 Ultra into a quite beautiful package, not to mention the huge screen. It is only slightly less powerful than our desktop PC, which to me is quite impressive! I would have to say, even though it’s not my laptop, I will definitely be looking forward to playing some games (like BF2!) on this massive mathematics mauling machine with its pixel pushing GPU!

More news today, and a FOTP:So, browsing digg.com and I noticed an article about a programming language called KPL, which stands for Kids Programming Language. This will allow even the most novice programmer be able to pick up an IDE and just start writing readable code that can do things such as manipulate sprites, and 3D applications in 100 lines or less! I’ve dev’ed in Java before, and this is an amazing feat. Currently KPL is only in version 1, and version 2 is only in alpha, but it is roughly 10 times faster for certain executions. This looks very promising for high schools in the future. The whole idea behind the project was to make programming an almost instantaneous gratifying experience, and I think that goal has been met. 

In other news, yesterday Apple announced a Video iPod with a 4” screen. Supposedly it will sport a touch screen and movies will be able to be purchased from iTunes. One more thing for the MPAA to gripe about, yay…

As for WoW ever making its debut on the Xbox 360, it looks as if that is not going to happen.

“We do not have any plans to take WoW to Xbox 360,” Blizzard COO Paul Sams told MCV. “WoW is built as a PC gaming experience. Porting PC games to console often compromises games, and we’d never allow the WoW gameplay experience to suffer.”

That’s ok, I suppose, I couldn’t really see how World of Warcraft gameplay would be a whole lot of fun on the Xbox anyways, but what do I know.And finally, today the Catholic Church just got a little bit more classical, as in classical music. Pope Benedict XVI got an iPod on Friday. 

FOTP: TagWorld.com “Think MySpace, on fire, going 150 MPH though a school zone, being chased by ninjas.” (Thanks Bungie)

I haven’t personally signed up for a TagWorld account yet, but the Web 2.0 App looks freakin’ cool. Drag and drop interface, and so much more customizability than MySpace, but yet organization that doesn’t leave you searching the page for the person’s info. PLUS VERYTHING IS TAGGED. This makes searching so easy. If you have a social life, dump MySpace and get to TagWorld

-Tom

Happy New Year. Hope everyone had a good holiday season.

Back to school again, time to reminisce with old friends and attempt to make some new ones. Maybe this semester will be less work… no probably not.

On to more important things. Battlefield 2. If you like FPS and you are one of the elite few that have PC capable of enough FLOPS to cure cancer, this is definitely the game for you. The graphics are ridiculously amazing and the gameplay is addictive. I honestly bought this game, and I don’t buy many games. If you have played any of the Battlefield Series games and liked them, and your PC is one heck of a workhorse, then pick up this game.

Most sites have features such as POTD (Picture of the Day) or SOTD (Site of the Day), well I’m going to start a new feature called… FOTP ( Feature of the Post). This will include just a cool thing I found or use, and a short blurb about it. So here goes the first FOTP.

FOTP: Maxthon

If you dislike the featureless IE and you are not sure you want to switch to the Flaming Fox Browser Thing. Then try this program. It was actually featured at CES and has won alot of awards.

Until next time… Peace out.

-Tom