Well, it's about freakin' time! Valve has finally unleashed the details of the upcoming Scout update, and even with only one item revealed at the time of this writing, it looks like it's going to be a good one!
The update page features six items that are to be revealed each weekday from now until next Tuesday. The first item, unlocked today, is the Scout's first achievable weapon: The Sandman. The Sandman is a special bat that allows you to belt baseballs at your opponents that will stun them on contact. The longer the ball flies as it sails towards its target, the longer that enemy will be stunned.
I'm looking forward to seeing what other additions Valve has in store for the Scout over the next seven days, and I'm pretty excited about the Sandman - it should add a whole new element to playing as the Scout and could make him much more useful on offense. Hopefully the achievements required to get the new weapons aren't too bad!
Has it really been over a week since I've posted here? Well, my apologies for the delay – it's been a busy time for me over the last week, and I just haven't been able to find the time to write anything. I've meant to though, so hopefully I'll be getting back on track with this post. In the interest of everyone's time, here's a quick list of everything I've been up to over the last couple of weeks that has contributed, in one way or another, to my lag in blog posts:
Met my brother at a bar and watched my dad play music for a few hours; I also saw a woman drop a cake straight onto the floor of a bar
Took a trip to San Francisco for my work, got halfway there, and then realized my boss had texted me the night before to tell me the trip was off
Worked on a game that you might just see on TV someday (hopefully!)
Took another trip to San Francisco for my work, and was nearly late to the meeting because I followed my own directions wrong
Worked on a redesign for my blog, scrapped it, then started working on it again
Fixed a long-standing server bug in the Reflect system (thanks for the help, Matt!)
Worked on a redesign for Reflect Games, scrapped it, then started working on it again
Watched the two-hour long season premiere for Lost, and the hour-long preview before it
Finished Fallout 3 (goody-two-shoes style)
Went home to see my dad before he had to have a minor procedure done at the hospital (he's doing fine now, thankfully)
Played some quality Team Fortress 2 with Yourself (alltalk servers are basically Skype on steroids, eh?)
Finished Prince of Persia (need to play it again for achievements)
Got my previous landlord to drop a bogus move-out bill after catching their cheating, and exposing it to them
Released a Windows Vista/Windows 7 compatible version of Linked
Began learning Visual Basic all over again
Watched a few classic episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia with my mom
Rediscovered my love for Joe Frank (an awesome radio show)
Bought World of Goo on Steam
Almost finished reading Lord of the Rings (I'm on page 947 now!)
And probably a lot more stuff that I can't remember right now, due to the ever-growing fatigue I'm feeling from writing such a long list!
Anyway, you probably get the idea - I've been a bit busy. I'll try to get back on the blog a bit more this week though... I've got a lot of stuff I want to talk about, but which I just haven't had the time to organize into coherent sentences yet.
Thanks to everyone who continues to read my sparse posts - I appreciate it!
Thanks to everyone who entered the raffle to celebrate Marty Blog's 100th 95th post, and congratulations to the winners, listed below! I threw everyone into the mix to receive the special Half-Life 2 + HL2:Ep1 prize - if you won, and you don't want it, let me know and I will raffle it off again.
Third Prize ($5 game via Steam): BenRK
Second Prize ($15 game via Steam): Zeno
Grand Prize (Mass Effect or $30 equivalent via Steam): MischiephX
Special Prize (Half-Life 2 + Half-Life 2: Episode 1): Zakreon
I will be contacting the winners via email. Hope to see you all around the site again soon, and thanks for helping to make this a successful raffle!
I know, I know - this technically isn't my 100th post. Well, no matter - I've been busy with things, and haven't had time to lead up to 100 before my holiday vacation, so I'll make an exception and we'll do the raffle at post 95. It is a good time to be charitable, after all.
I am happy to say that Marty Blog is still going strong into the final weeks of 2008, and I am pleased with the way the year has gone for the blog. I've been able to (semi) consistently post here about things that I care about and find interesting. I've had a great time talking about these things with members of the GMC and Reflect Communities here. And I've even moved past the default theme (and hopefully will move past my current theme with something better in 2009). In short, it's been a fun year, and I look forward to a continuation of that for the next.
Anyway, enough of the formal stuff - you're probably reading this because you want in on the commemorative raffle, and frankly, I don't blame you. So here goes!
To help celebrate the continuation of Marty Blog, and to give back to everyone who's helped make the blog fun for me, I've put together another little raffle - Marty Blog's second Post & Win!
What can you win?
The grand prize for the raffle is a brand new (digital) copy of BioWare's awesomely fun action-RPG, Mass Effect! If you've already got a copy of Mass Effect, or if it's not really your thing, I'll also let you sub in any other single game of equal or lesser value ($30) that's currently on Steam.
Additionally, second and third prize winners will be chosen, and each will be able to choose from any single game currently on Steam for $15 or less and $5 or less respectively. Steam's catalog has grown impressively since the last raffle, and there are some great new games available now, so there should be something for just about everyone there, for each prize value.
Finally, I've got a spare copy of Half-Life 2 + HL2: Episode 1 just sitting in my Steam account, ready to be gifted. If you're interested in that as well, say so in your post, and once the winners have been chosen, I'll take all the losers (you're all winners to me... really) and do one final drawing for this lovely prize. This one is non-negotiable because it's actually just an extra copy I have.
Note: Many of the games on Steam, including Mass Effect and Half-Life 2, are rated Mature by the ESRB, and may contain violence or sex. I have no way of verifying people's age, so I will assume that if you enter the raffle, you are 18 or older, or you have your parent's permission to play games of this nature.
How do you enter?
Simply post a comment below (make sure to enter an email address I can contact you with in the appropriate area of the comment form). Feel free to post suggestions, criticism, long manifestos of support and encouragement, dear John letters, requests for personal advice, announcements about the sentry gun you just built, or whatever else you can think of. Everything is welcome!
Your name will only be entered into the raffle once, no matter how many comments you leave, and registered users of the site who comment will have a slightly higher chance of being chosen.
Entrants must have a Steam account, or must be willing to register for one if they win. Steam is free, it's a great service, and I am happy to promote it. If you win and I am unable to award you your prize within a reasonable amount of time, the item will be re-raffled. Apologies to anyone who lives outside of the U.S. or who doesn't have access to Steam or it's catalog of games.
Attempts at entering your name into the raffle more than once (or any other kind of cheating) will result in your name, and all aliases thought to be associated with you, removed from the drawing. And of course, Marty Blog reserves all rights to make the final decision on the validity of any entry.
Entries close at the end of the holiday weekend - Sunday, December 28th at 11:59 PM PST - so be sure to make your comment before then! Winners will be announced the following day. I wanted to have winners announced before then, but I figured I'd give everyone out there a chance to enter, and of course, I'd also like to give myself some time off over the next few days. Win/win.
Thanks again to everyone out there who reads Marty Blog now and then. I truly appreciate your visits to this site, and I hope that the site remains fun and enjoyable to you as we move into the future! And yes, I know I recycled that from my previous Post & Win, but I think it's still very applicable. I hope you all have happy holidays this season!
While I simply haven't had time to devote to much Team Fortress 2 lately, that doesn't mean I haven't been interested in it. My game is up to date and ready to play, and I've been keeping up on all the sparse bits of official news, which have been released via the Team Fortress 2 Official Blog.
Their latest announcement reveals a few incoming updates for the Engineer and Spy, as follows:
Teleporters will be upgradeable to level 3. As the teleporter is upgraded, the cooldown will decrease.
Dispensers will be upgradeable to level 3. They will heal faster and generate metal faster as they are upgraded.
Spies will be able to recharge their cloaking ability by picking up ammo off of the ground.
We've made a bunch of minor changes by adding particle systems and upgrading the HUD to show things like deaths by critical hits, players that are overhealed, and giving more information to medics when people are calling for them.
The Engineer is my favorite class, so I'm happy to see him getting some love from Valve soon. I'm not particularly good at being a Spy, but it is one of the classes I generally have a lot more fun with, and I am happy to see this change coming, as this is something I have felt you should be able to do from the very beginning. With all other characters able to pick up dropped weapons for ammo, building, etc. it only makes sense to allow the Spy to pick up these lost armaments as well, especially since the cloak ability replenishes so slowly on its own.
I'm also excited to see the minor changes mentioned in the fourth bullet point. Playing as a Medic should be even better, and it'll be nice to see more information listed on the HUD for critical hits, overhealing, etc.
Just talking about these upcoming changes is making me hungry for some TF2. Maybe it's time to stop working on my new blog layout/games and start doing a little PC gaming again?
I'm finally back from my Thanksgiving holiday at my parents' house, and I can hardly believe it's already December! Where has this year gone?
Anyway, I had a couple of things I wanted to post today.
A recent episode of The Simpsons took Apple down a peg, as Springfield mall got its first "Mapple" store. It was quite enjoyable. Of course, all the YouTube links are gone now, so you'll have to find the episode yourself.
The next thing I wanted to post, also a video, is a new trailer released yesterday for the Black Mesa mod - a Half-Life 2 mod that is looking to recreate the original Half-Life with the Source engine, but with more content, higher resolution textures and models, and environments that take better advantage of the engine than Valve's original port of the game. Normally I don't get too excited over Source engine mods, since they rarely make good on their promises, or even get finished for that matter, but the amount of polish that has gone into this trailer makes me hope otherwise for Black Mesa. You can view the trailer below and find out more about the mod at the official site.
I played through a huge chunk of Half-Life 2 this holiday weekend, so I guess I'm a little bit excited about Half-Life in general again.
I'm glad to see that people found my recent set of examples interesting too, and I hope to get a fixed GM6 version of the 3D Rain example up sometime tonight. Sorry about the slow rain example, I'll play with it and see if I can get something up that's a little easier on the older machines soon as well!
That's all for now - thanks for reading, and I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving (or just a good weekend if you're not from the U.S.)!
Update: I've made a new GM6 file that should run better than the previous rain example, and which should load correctly in GM6. The area that the rain covers is a bit smaller than the original example, and the rain is a bit more sparse, but you should get the idea.
You can download the new example at the link above!
My apologies for the delay between this and my last post - I've been at jury duty for the last two days, was sick for about a week before that, and have begun the long, arduous process of moving all my material possessions from old apartment to new.
I've also been working my way through Fable 2 for a second time, having a blast playing co-op / horde mode in Gears of War 2, and slowly leveling Totino up to 80 in Wrath of the Lich King.
So yeah, I've been a little busy.
As I've made my way through all the new games though, I've been feeling more and more like getting back to some of my older projects and making them into something new, and better than before. Chiefly, Hover Tank 3D 2 (as Yourself urges me to make a multiplayer mode where you steal resources from enemies to build up a base) and Falcon Squad, which I feel like I am almost ready to return to with a complete engine rebuild and graphics injection. I'd also like to get that robot battle engine finished, so we can finally have a new competition over at Reflect Games.
I know I keep returning to these projects over and over, but one of these days... well, you know.
Anyway, I'm going to get going so I can start moving more of my junk. Just wanted to check in and let everyone know that I'm not dead, just WASD-ing through the mire of many planned, random, and seasonal events. Thanks for reading, and I hope you are having a healthier November than I am!
I logged in and updated my games list to represent my recent game-buying spree. I added the following games:
Audiosurf (only $2.49 this week on Steam, thanks for the heads up, Xot!)
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3
Commander Keen Complete Pack
Fable 2
Gears of War 2
I've still got one or two more I want to pick up, and like I've mentioned before, a couple others I'm putting on my Christmas list, but I'm really starting to get progressively angrier at game publishers for this mess. Seriously - I know everyone wants to have big sales for the holidays, but pace yourselves please! We can't all go out and buy a dozen games in one month, and many great games are going to suffer from poor sales because of this ridiculous overlap.
Penny Arcade summed it up pretty nicely here. It's eerie how similar this comic looks to my Google calendar where I've marked all the upcoming games I'm interested in.
Oh well. That's all for now. I'm feeling a bit under the weather and I need to recover... which means less time spent blogging, and more time spent laying on the couch, complaining to my girlfriend, and of course, playing games. Just gotta make sure I fit some rest in there somewhere!
Yup, that's an actual screenshot above (and below). Gears of War 2 is officially the best-looking game ever.
And though I'm only part of the way through the game right now, it's obvious to me that Epic went out of its way this time around to deliver gamers from the dull grayish browns that so many have complained about as the cliche of "next-gen" gaming. Color has been infused into the war-torn atmosphere of Gears and coupled with the incredible detail has helped make Gears 2 the best-looking game of all time.
I should mention that it's also fun. The few new guns that have been added, a flamethrower, minigun, and mortar, along with the new poison grenade and mobile cover system are welcome additions to the game. There are new enemies to blast, huge levels to explore, and more story and cut-scene elements as well. Many parts of the game that remain from the original game have been re-tooled, and the game has a much more grand ("Epic?") feeling to it than the first.
The only thing I've been disappointed with so far (aside from a small plot point which would be a slight spoiler, so I won't mention here), has been the game's music. It sounds great, and I love that Epic stuck with the orchestral tunes, but it doesn't have the character the music from the first game had - it seems more like background music, rather than part of the action. To me, that kind of sucks. To others, they may not even notice it, or they might appreciate the change of pace. It's a small irk to be sure, so I wouldn't worry about it if you're planning on buying the game and you still haven't gotten it yet (for shame!).
Anyway, I'm going to get back to playing... as well as to a few other domestic tasks. A pile of dishes in the kitchen is calling my name, and I've got a few things I want to box up tonight - I'm moving to a new apartment soon!
If you have the game and you're on my Xbox friends list, drop me an invite sometime - I've been ignoring them up to this point, but I think I'm ready to play online now. Thanks for reading, and maybe I'll see you in-game!
Taking the new demo for a test drive. Pun intended.
After a long evening of dishwashing, laundry-doing, and paperwork-filling-outing, I finally got a chance to fire up my Xbox 360 yesterday to try out a demo for a game I've had my eye on for a few months now: Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.
I have to say that so far, that this game looks like it will be completely awesome.
For the uninitiated, Nuts & Bolts is a sequel of sorts to the original duo of 3D platform games for the N64. The first game in the series introduced the oddly-paired Banjo (the bear) and Kazooie (the bird in Banjo's backpack) and had players exploring a large non-linear 3D world collecting jigsaw pieces. The game played very similarly to other games of the period, like Mario 64, only with an added emphasis on story and humor. Banjo-Kazooie was a fun, ground-breaking experience, and won two awards at the 1999 Interactive Achievement Awards, for Console Action/Adventure and Art Direction. The original Banjo-Kazooie was released in 1998.
The second game, Banjo-Tooie (see what they did there?), followed two years later in 2000. And though the gameplay mechanic was not dramatically different from the first game, Tooie was met with great acclaim.
Ten years later, Nuts & Bolts has finally landed as a demo on Xbox Live, and the full game looms in the distance, only a week and a half away. I've been anxious to try this game out, as I've always enjoyed N64 era 3D platformers, and I've been wanting to check out the vehicle creation system Rare crafted.
Nuts & Bolts takes the classic platforming play of old and throws vehicles into the mix - vehicles that you design yourself. As you explore the world and complete tasks, you're given an ever-expanding arsenal of parts from which you can construct vehicles of all shapes, sizes, and utility. At any point in the game, you can enter the garage to edit your vehicle. You can save and load different designs you've already created and edit all to your hearts content. With the release of the final game, you'll also be able to send plans to friends, so they can cruise around their game in vehicles of your design.
I played Nuts & Bolts demo for about 45 minutes, and I had a very good time with it. Lots is included in the 1Gb+ sampling, and I'll probably spend some more time with it this weekend.
The graphics in this game are excellent. Rare never ceases to amaze me in their ability to create rich, living environments, and Nuts & Bolts is just another example of their mastery over this skill. The character animation is nice and smooth, and you really get the sense of a real world that the old N64 games just couldn't do. My only complaint about the graphics so far, and this is really more of a design issue overall, is that the informational cut-scenes that explain the story and how the game works are all done in the same way as the old games - with lots of text, and squawking heads next to them - and no spoken dialogue. This may change in the final version of the game, but I really would have liked to see Rare put their obvious talents in animation to use and give us fully animated cut-scenes with actual dialogue. Other than this single caveat though, the game is visually incredible, from the anthropomorphic characters roaming around town to vast rolling hills with roads and ramps, it's all very beautiful.
I was also impressed by the audible quality of the demo. The sound effects are varied and appropriate, and the goofy little sounds Banjo and Kazooie make as they traverse the world put a big smile on my face. The music in the game is especially good, and I was glad to see that Grant Kirkhope and Robin Beanland (responsible for Viva Piñata and Conker's Bad Fur Day respectively) were behind it, since I have enjoyed a lot of their past works.
Control in Nuts & Bolts was solid, and felt very familiar to the way the older games did while I was running around on foot. Vehicular controls are similar to most other 360 games you've played, using the analog should buttons for gas and brake, and the left and right sticks for direction and camera control. The vehicle I played around with felt a little slow, but since I was only playing the beginning stages of the game, and thus had the lowest power engine on my car, this seemed appropriate. Building cars was also a snap, and within only a few minutes I was jumping in and out of the garage, experimenting with all sorts of configurations. Anyone who's ever used built something with Legos before will feel right at home.
All in all, I came away from my initial run-through of the Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts demo very impressed. I was intrigued by the handful of screens and video that were released a few months ago but wasn't sure if the game would be very much fun or not. After having played the demo, I feel silly for having worried about this at all - Nuts & Bolts is looking to be a lot of fun, and I can only imagine how crazy the later part of the game will get as you gather more and more diverse parts for your vehicle crafting.
Jump on Xbox Live and try out the demo for yourself - if you go into it with an open mind, and looking for some genuine fun, you won't be disappointed. Let me know what you think if you do!
