Category Archives: Miscellany

Team Fortress 2 – The Scout

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Yeah, yeah, I know – right on the heels of my “CGI Trailers are Trash” post comes another about how great a new CGI trailer is… Well, this is a bit of a different case than what I brought up in my other entry, so I’ll hear no complaints.

So in case you’ve not heard about or seen it already, Valve has released another Team Fortress 2 character vignette, this time for the scout, and I remain both impressed and excited for them. To date, we’ve seen videos for the soldier, heavy weapons guy, engineer, demo man, and scout, and my only complaint so far is that we’ve had to wait so long in between each video.

If it means that we will continue to see such high-quality stuff, however, the wait is fine with me. In contrast with the ridiculous marketing materials I complained about in my last post about CGI trailers, I feel that these vignettes show that Valve truly cares about their Team Fortress 2 project. The visuals are rendered with expertise, the dialog is genuinely funny, and the voice acting is excellent. Most importantly though, they maintain the same attitude and style of the game, and they don’t insult my intelligence by trying to masquerade as actual gameplay footage.

Well done, Valve. I’m looking forward to future character profiles!

I’ve re-encoded and uploaded all the previous vignettes below (and after the break). If you haven’t seen ‘em, I highly recommend watching them. They’re instant classics, whether you play the game or not!

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Culture Rant: Lolcatastrophe

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Homeless Cat

Every now and then something annoys me so much that I just have to say something about it. File this under that heading.

Let’s say that one day, sometime in the future, a hostile alien race came to Earth and decided to destroy the entire planet. Except in the midst of all the explosions and such, they reconsidered, and now you are the only person – nay, the only thing – left from the original Earth. The alien race, not having taken the time to study Earth before destroying it, relies on you to tell them all about the earth so they can recreate it exactly as it was (or at least, exactly as you remember it). What would you tell them? What would you make better, or worse?

One thing that I wouldn’t tell them about is “lolcats.” I would take the opportunity to strike them from the history and from the collective consciousness of the world without a second’s hesitation.

And now, I can practically hear the thoughts of people who would be greatly distressed by this… “OMG! I’m on ur blogs, rightin complaintz!” or “WTF! I can has hates for u!”

Hate all you want – I wouldn’t tell the evil space aliens about lolcats. No sir. If I see another picture of a cat within close approximation of a computer (or game console), overlayed with unintelligible graffiti, it’ll be too soon. Lolcats are stupid. The end.

More Games, More Competition

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So it’s been a couple of weeks since the sharp increase in my games to work ratio (Halo 3), and now with the release of Orange Box, there are three new impending threats to further separate me from my productivity. For those of you not “in the know,” Orange Box is Valve’s continuation of the Half-Life 2 series, which includes Half-Life 2: Episode 2 (with HL2 and Episode 1 if I remember correctly), Portal, and Team Fortress 2. I’ve already written some kind words about TF2, which is one of my new favorite online games, and from watching all the videos of Portal, I think Orange Box is going to be an awesome purchase. But I’ll save all the gushing comments for Valve’s latest for another blog – I have a few things I want to talk about related to Game Maker and Reflect Games!

First, I wanted to announce that the second Reflect Games Game-In-A-Month contest is officially underway! I am sorry for announcing this here a week late, but there’s still plenty of time for anyone interested to throw their hat into the ring. Game makers are challenged with creating a game in a month which follows a specific theme and control scheme. The games do not have to be finished to be entered, so there isn’t a whole heck of a lot of pressure to actually finish… more so, you are encouraged to come up with a good idea, implement it in a fun way, and polish it. The competition is over on October 31, 2007, and there’s $20 worth of goods at stake, so get to work!

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Beware: Big Bad Blog Begun!

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Alliteration is a good way to kick off a blog, right? No? Crap.

Well anyway, greetings everyone, and welcome to the first ever blog entry on my first ever blog (discounting 64 Digits, EO, and those other… things). As I have been quite a scatterbrain lately, I thought creating a blog would be a helpful, organizational exercise for myself, while also providing you with an exclusive glimpse into the random string of events that make up my existence.

But I don’t come into this blog thing without my reservations. I’ll be honest; I don’t particularly care for these “deep” blogs people write. That’s not to say that what I plan on entering here will be shallow, but that I’m hoping to keep this as down to earth as possible. And I absolutely refuse to use the word ‘blogosphere.’ That word was created be a being of sub-human intelligence.

So now that introductions are over with, let’s get down to it. As some of you probably already know, I run Reflect Games (for those who don’t, it’s a website which provides online services for Game Maker games), and we just got done with our first game creation competition about a week and a half ago. The goal of the competition was for entrants to create an arcade game in a month and overall, things went pretty well – we had 6 entries when all the dust settled, and an equal number of judges, which turned out to be a great combination. I’m happy with how it went, and hope to continue with another contest starting October 1st.

As far as games go, I’ve also had some time to sit down and look over some of the code from Falcon Squad, and also begin (yet another) game. This new venture will be a departure from my “normal” game; it will be heavily sprite-based, and will be 2D. I can almost hear the gasps!

Being a kid who grew up on games like Mario World, Sonic the Hedgehog, Earthworm Jim, and a slew of other platformer games, I have had a very hard time suppressing my urge to try to create one this long. I guess my love for 3D really got the best of me at first, but I ever since I first laid my hands on Game Maker, I have wanted to make a platformer game… and the time draws nigh that I embark on that goal. Not too much is currently planned out in my mind, but I have begun spriting the main character, and the results have been great so far. There are many elements of past games that I have played that I would really like to incorporate into this game, but I will discuss it a little more in depth at a later time. Needless to say, it will probably be quite a bit of work, but I am looking forward to spending some time getting back to my spriting roots. All those hours of Mario Paint might finally count for something!

Other than all that (and playing through BioShock on my 360 a second time… gotta get those achievements!), it’s been pretty much business as usual for me. Which means going to work every weekday, and squeezing every last possible amount of enjoyment out of the weekends. I’ll have to talk about that stuff another time though, because I think this blog is starting to approach “short novel” territory.

So to whoever did, thanks for reading… to whoever didn’t, I’m very disappointed in you. But since you didn’t read it, you don’t know that. Gah.