The Orange Box

Contrary to what posts here might suggest, I do actually play games other than WoW (though the stability of my system and the low requirements for WoW, and the general, you know, crack cocaine nature of the game, means WoW is my primary electronic passtime).

As most gamer folks, at least the non-wow and non-johnny come lately console jockeys, know The Orange Box came out this week. Which means a) the next Half-Life episode (if you don't know Half-Life please back your head against the wall several times and then go buy it) and somewhat more importantly b) Portal and TF2.

I'm a little torn about HL games, they're very good, and the storyline is nicely paranoid and I like them, but it game out a bit before I got into FPS games, and ultimately most single player FPSs leave me a little cold. My normal routine is to finish 70-90% of a Half-Life game, turn on god mode and finish off the rest to see the end of the storyline. That said, it's still the big daddy of large scale shooters, all the frat boys drooling over Halo 3 should pause for a moment of silent reflection, because this shit? This is what dragged FPS's kicking and screaming once and for all from the shareware ghetto.

That said, Half-Life, and to a lesser extent HL2 are the 900 lbs. gorilla of modding platforms. No game has spawned so many good mods as this franchise.

Portal is good. Short, but reasonably fun (and unexpectedly atmospheric at a few points). Apparently the brainchild of a group of DigiPen students it's a nice simple idea (Portal Gun! Puzzles!) executed rather well. And luckily it avoids most truly shit bits of the 'puzzle' sections from Half-Life and HL2 (namely all those crap bits about moving stuff around to build bridges, especially all those ones with floating objects in water, because holy crap is the HL mechanic for picking up and putting down objects bad, and yes the gravity gun is included in that, it was utter crap, deal with it). It avoids the feel of 2D platformer badly ported to 3D for the most part as well. There are a few finicky bits, and a few moments where I'm sure I managed to launch myself in the right direction with appropriate momentum by blind luck alone, but it was good enough for me to play till 4.30 in the morning so I could see the ending.

Team Fortress is the granddaddy of non-deathmatch online fps. Classes? Objectives? They started here (admittedly they went back to the even then tired well of CTF, but no one's perfect). TF2 is pretty much what you'd expect in all the good and bad ways that suggests. If you didn't like previous incarnations of TF, you'll probably dislike TF2. If you did like them, you're in luck, TF2 is TF with improvements (shockingly). Most stuff plays exactly the same (a few tweaks to the medic, but by and large everything plays just like it did), just with better art direction (the taunts are classic, and are different for each weapon, be sure to try them all). It's still fast, and like it's predecessor much closer to the old school Deathmatches from which it was born than new uber-organized games (like the Battlefield series), but it's still very very fun.

Memory and BF2142

So I plunked some more memory into my box a few days ago, upgrading from 1GB to 2GB. I'd like to take BF2142 out for a spin and see if I can run it in something higher than the absolute lowest settings possible. I've seen vids (e.g. Squadplay which has some great fun fraps of casual but organized play) which show how gorgeous the game can look, and I've heard memory is one of the big sticking points (anything under 2GB gives it problems). So I dug around for my disk and loaded it up.

The good news is I can run it in significantly higher resolutions, the bad news is the patch process crapped out, so while it, for the most part, runs, it registers as a modded version of the game, so I can't log into any of my old regular servers. So I think I'll have to do a full reinstall to get it working, which means I might just hold out until I move the system to Vista (what the memory was actually for, honest).

Recap

As everyone needs to come from somewhere, here's the brief history of what I've been up to for the last year or so gaming-wise.

About a year ago I started to put down Guild Wars which I'd been playing for at least a year or so. While I enjoyed it, and I still think it's one of the better looking mmo's about, a less than active guild, limited pve content, end game that's pretty much limited to HoH (at least when I played), and a number of choices in the mechanics of Factions that really annoyed me made it hard to keep slogging away. (If they hadn't forced you to find a group before you joined a faction battle, that alone might have kept me)

Around the same time I also tried WoW during the bundled one month period as I was going to be on the road for a month or two away from home but with internet access and a low workload (it was a lame duck period at my old firm, still getting paid but not much getting done), which is kind of the gaming equivalent of trying crack cocaine because you're having a dull weekend.

Also around the same period I worked my way through Dreamfall, the sequel to The Longest Journey. While not quite as ridiculously good as the first, it's a good game for the most part, with the two caveats that a) the fights suck and feel shoehorned in, and b) it's very much part two of a three part story (much more than TLJ felt like part one of three). I'm willing to get over that if they get around to putting out part three pretty darn soon.

With a couple server hops (Malorne (lag/server issues) to Zuluhed (server pop death) to Altar of Storms) and toon changes (shaman shaman mage priest) I settled down with WoW and finally got past the 30s, put down GW pretty much for good, and completed Dreamfall. That took me through til late 05 and a new laptop. Then, full of myself and my new hardware I picked up BF2142 and NWN2.

I'm not really a huge fps type, I was an awful twitch gamer growing up, but they've grown on me, and I think BF2142 was the thing I'd been looking for for a while. Nice setting, unlocks to keep you occupied, squads, different roles, objectives, and non-instant respawns, I was sold. Finding a good server makes all the difference, but I found the Tactical Gamer server at just the right time.

NWN2 was a different story. I liked the original, a lot. Modules kept it alive for me long after it should have lost all interest. NWN2 however is a shockingly badly made piece of software, and runs appallingly. Combined with some issues on my hardware end of things meant I got maybe 30m into the game before I mothballed it. I'm hoping to go back to it at some point, but I'm not hopeful.

BF2142 and WoW took me through until the WoW x-pack release, at which point a reroll to shaman on alliance side meant a 70 level grind to catch up to guildmates which eat what time was going to BF. Also in the meantime I'd gone from nubby loner with occasional pvp urges, to regular raider, to class officer, to full officer, with occasional stops off in raid leader positions. Full MC and BWL clears, Twin Emps kills, 7 Naxx bosses, and some BC server firsts all followed, along with various server and guild dramas.

So now I'm here, working on Serpentshrine, and one of the holdouts in a increasingly embattled class (It's not QQ all the time, but let's be honest, playing a shaman these days is mostly about adjusting for the latest set of class nerfs) . I'm almost sure I'm one of two raiding shams on our server that don't run resto.

I'm looking into Vista upgrades both to try to sort out some chronic problems with the graphics on my machine, and to get myself ready for the Vista only Shadowrun (which gets double points for being an innovative shooter of the kind I like, and catering to the inner tabletop geek in me), I just hope the (reportedly) craptacular Live for Windows doesn't burn me. I'm also looking ahead at Bioshock, Fallout 3, and Tabula Rasa (which I'd like to see do well, but suspect might disappear quietly into the night), and personally suspecting to be underwhelmed by the performance of Warhammer and AoC.

So now that's out of the way, I should probably start talking about more recent stuff.