check out part 1 HERE

I can easily see how in 1998 this game was heralded as revolutionary. Much like it’s sequel, Half-Life introduced gameplay elements that were widely copied and implemented by other games. Half-Life presents a complete universe. From start to finish, you believe you’re in a hightech research complex where hell has broken loose. From the intercom to the sounds of shattering glass: everything either creeps you out or makes you run for your life. Where Half-Life 2 made you a messiah figure leading the human resistance against the evil Combine empire, Half-Life 1 is all about survival. Your goal is to stay alive and escape the deathtrap that is Black Mesa. You’re besieged from all sides: be it alien wildlife, invading Zen shocktroopers or HECU soldiers out to silence you. Sure, the character models for the guards and scientists are repetitive and the dialogue knows little variation, but remember that this is 1998. In an age where multigigabyte harddrives were the stuff of dreams it’s understandable that compromises had to be made. (Also if you think back to the release of  Oblivion in 2006, it too was heavily derided for it’s extremely limited voice cast. In many ways we really haven’t come that far)

Graphics are graphics: they age. Any game that chooses a realistic artstyle (which, apart from the alien abominations, Half-Life does) will age far more easily than deliberately stylised games. World of Warcraft technically looks like crap, but that doesn’t really bother anyone apart from the most hardcore geeks because of the wonderfully stylised and cartoony graphics. No game is immune to this. Well maybe Crysis is, but that’s besides the point. Quake II, Unreal, Sin,… all of them look pretty crappy today.

AI however is another matter entirely. Often the weak point in many games (from Daikatana wallwalkers to endless armies of motionless samurai in Dynasty Warriors), AI makes or brakes a game. Your game world may be incredibly engrossing, but if you see NPC’s jump of a cliff because their AI code couldn’t figure out to use the stairs, you pretty much lose all immersion.

Like many I’ve heard of the legendary tales of Half-Life’s enemy AI, but I never would have thought that it would be that good. In fact, the dirty little secret of Half-Life 2 is that its AI is worse than it’s predecessor. Sure the Combine feel real and menacing and a Strider is a true terror on the battlefield but if they ever had to fight the HECU marines they would be royally screwed. Never in my entire gaming ‘career’ have I experienced such tenacity as the enemies display in Half-Life. They duck around corners, call for backup, wait to attack until you reload, throw grenades when you’re in a fortified position, the list goes on. The different AI behaviours are also very well divided amongst Half-Life’s enemy menagerie. Bullsquids, houndeyes and headcrabs feel like zoo animals that were suddenly dropped in the middle of Times Square. They’re scared, territorial and ready to defend themselves. The alien invasion force that follows later in the game (Grunts, Vortigaunts and Gargantua) is far more determined. Far from just defending themselves, they’ve come here to take over and wage a full on war on any humans they find. Combine this with the incredible marine AI and this three-way conflict is a marvel to behold. Many times the best way to survive is to let everyone else spread mayhem and destruction while you shoot down any surviving stragglers. In short the AI is incredible. The only game that vaguely reminds me of this kind of artificial thinking is the original Halo, played on one of the higher difficulty levels.

Sadly all is not well in in Half-Life land. What in 1998 were acceptable annoyances, have often become blatantly irritating. Prime suspects are the many platforming elements and jumping puzzels. You often don’t realise it but nearly every seperate area has at least one of them.  Maybe it was the age in which the game was made or maybe it was due to the fact that this was Valve’s first attempt at a game, I don’t know. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against first-person platforming. Half-Life 2, though toned down, still has it’s share of platforming. Heck, games like Mirror’s Edge and Portal are the proof that first person platforming not only works but can turn out amazing. The problem is that if you don’t have a robust physics system (like Half-Life 2) or if you don’t build your game around it (like Mirror’s Edge) it can often be reduced to a total crapshoot. If you don’t hit that one pixel or texture just right, it’s over. Punishment for a missed jump usually results in death (be it being torn to pieces, dunking yourself in a vat of radioactive goo or falling in a flame filled fane). The ladder climbing in particular is so bad it’s funny. The innate finnickyness of Half-Life combined with the walking turret nature of Gordon Freeman (you never see your legs or chest, just a hand and a gun) make climbing ladders, if not done just right, a twitchy nightmare

In the end, having finished the game, I must say that I’ve had a grand old time. I was frightened, fascinated, bewildered and amazed all at the same time. While you don’t really NEED to play Half-Life to enjoy it’s sequels (unlike say The Legacy Of Kain series) I would really recommend that everyone (especially younger gamers who never played this game) ignore, if only briefly, the zombie slaughterfest of Left 4 Dead or the class-warfare of Team Fortress 2 and give the original masterpiece a whirl. It’s cheap, it’s on Steam and it has earned its title of timeless classic.

Now, on to Opposing Force!

You know, I often sing the praise of Half-Life 2 and its various episodes, I love Portal and I’ve read nearly every page on the Combine OverWiki. So how is it possible that me, a self-proclaimed hardcore gamer, has never played through the original Half-Life? I mean, it was quite literally the best PC game ever (at least until its sequel came out). Since I was spending the next two months at home (exams) I thought it would be a great idea to finally start up that copy of Half-Life: Source and play it from start to finish. Just an hour or two a day, a nice leisurely pace in between intense mental labor.

So why didn’t I play Half-Life? First problem: Half-Life came out in 1998. I was 10. Although I had by then already conquered Europe in Red Alert, built the Roman Empire in Caesar III and scared cows in Earthworm Jim (iTunes link), I had never played a first peron shooter. If I remember correctly, I originally bought Half-Life in 1999 or 2000 in tandem with a new pc. Strangely, that wasn’t my first encounter with Half-Life. I first saw Half-Life being played live (as in on a computer, in front of me) during the holiday season of 1999 (or was it 1998?). I was visiting my nephew (well, we call him my nephew even though he isn’t) and he showed me the very first chapter of Half-Life: “Anomalous Materials“. You can understand, at 10-11 years old, I was blown away. I assume this is how geeky college kids must have felt when they first saw Wolfenstein 3D in 1992. I think the memory of that first playsession pushed me to buy Half-Life in 2000.

Even then I didn’t really play Half-Life. To be honest I was scared out of my pants: the lack of a traditional soundtrack, the creepy science facility, the aliens, the dead scientists and guards. I only wish today’s games had as encompassing an atmosphere as Half-Life had in 1998. The other stumbling block was my lack of experience with first-person shooters. Half-Life was my first FPS. With it being so different from it’s contemporaries (Quake II, Unreal) and it’s advanced AI, it was a tricky baptism of fire. Suffice to say I gave up.

Flashforward to 2004: Half-Life 2 comes out. Although carrying on from Half-Life 1 and an incredible game in its own right, it was very different from its predecessor. Wide-open environments, lots of dialogue, completely new enemies, higher stakes, vehicles, physics, realistic NPC allies, etc. If you equate Half Life to DOS, than Half-Life 2 is Windows 95. Same rock solid gameplay, remade, enhanced with a nice user-friendly facade alongside a whole slew of graphical and gameplay innovations. Although chronologically I owned Half-Life before Half-Life 2, it was the sequel that drew me into the Half-Life universe.

Of course coming into Half-Life in 2009 is quite different than doing so in 1998. I’m playing this on a modern rig using the ‘remade‘ version running on the Source Engine. This means widescreen resolutions, modern water graphics, a new skybox, limited physics, full 5.1 surround sound, maximum AA & AF, etc. I will never have the experience of running Half-Life on a Pentium MMX with a Voodoo 2 at 800*600. I’ll never see low framerates or hear thinny audio. You could say that playing Half-Life: Source in 2009 is like watching the Star Wars: Special Editions (without the wimpy alterations). Same core game, polished to the extreme.

Up next part 2: The Good and the Bad. (will appear in some future blog post)

Here’s the deets on the new(ish) PC.

• Intel Core i7 (socket 1156) processor @2.80 GHZ
• 8 Gigs of DDR3 RAM (@1333 MHZ)
• Corsair HX 620 Power Supply
• Zalman CNPS10X Quiet CPU Cooler (massive!!!)
• Gigabyte P55  UD4 motherboard
• Three 1 Terabyte Samsung F1 drives
• Reused my ‘old’ 8800 GTS 640 MB (until a decent sub 150€ Fermi card comes out)
• Creative X-Fi Extreme Gamer
• Antec SOLO case (with hard drive suspension and sound proofing)
• Windows 7 Professional

Overal, not a killer gaming rig but then again I only payed about 800 € for this build. The graphics card will see an upgrade in early 2010 (gottta find one that fits in the SOLO case and isn’t too loud)

Overall, I’m satisfied. Mass Effect, COD4, Fallout3 are all running at max settings at 1920 by 1200 (with at least 4 levels of AA and AF)

DVD encoding time has seen the most improvement: in some case four times as fast. Windows 7, so far, does everything it set out to do.

Here are some (crappy iPhone) pics for your enjoyment.

edit (23/11/09): After upgrading to the F3 Bios to fix the P55 iPhone syncing bug (and spending a few frightful moments wondering why my pc wouldn’t boot up until I realised the boot order had changed), my CPU multiplier suddenly became unlocked! I slightly bumped the clockspeed from  2,8 to 2,93 GHZ (in the vein of the old Conroe x6800 processor) which is also the speed of the pricier, but otherwise identical Core i7 870. A modest overclock to be sure, but stability, low noise and low temperatures are more important to me than raw speed. Saving about 200€ is nice as well.

Just got my Kindle 2 today! Check below for unboxing pix.

Everything’s positive so far. The device is solid, the e-ink display is amazingly crisp and even the text-to-speech is pretty good. The Kindle store is great and I’ve already downloaded a lot of free chapters. Also the official Amazon faux-leather cover is surprisingly useful.

I’m using calibre and Stanza as my e-book manager & viewer respectively.

The only small gripe is the US-only power adapter. Luckily I can charge over USB and the device itself only consumes power when Whispernet is on or I turn the page.

The 20$ refund from Amazon wasn’t too bad either.

This blog has been silent for a while. But no longer!

Customer support stories are always predictably full of irritation and annoyance: let me tell you mine.

So, I admit, I got caught up in the netbook craze. It just seems so cool to just chill in bed or on the couch with a light 300€, 10 inch laptop. Checking e-mail, updating twitter, watching some ripped tv-shows (personal usage only of course). So when at the end of April, Dell had a promotion on it’s Mini 10, I jumped at the chance to own one. After all, I had heard great things about it on Buzz Out Loud and ironically Macbreak Weekly. So ahead I went and ordered one.

Less than a week later, my Mini is delivered and I get to tinkering. First annoyance: despite expressly checking off the Norton Security box when ordering, I still find a 30-day trial on this thing. No biggie, easily gotten rid of. After installing a few apps (CCleaner, VLC, Firefox, etc) and going through Windows update I put the thing on standby. Less than an hour later I come back to it, wake it up and up pops a bluescreen. Again, BSODs on Windows XP when coming out of Standby sometimes just happen. It’s an older OS that isn’t as crash-poof as Vista or 7. Reboot: no result. After rebooting a dozen times, in and out of safemode, I pop up the diagnostics and get a bunch of disc errors. Seems like a call to Dell support was in order.

This support call went really well, and soon I was calling the delivery company to pick up my Dell for repair. Problem is, repair and transport are in Germany, and nobody on call that day spoke Dutch. Instead I’m forced to explain my situation in English  to a barely bilingual person. I get my things in order and the following week they send me my RMA-box and pick it up again.

I wait a day, a week and another week. Finally I call customer service, where they assure me that the delays have been adressed and my Mini should arrive next week. As of today that week has just officially ended: no netbook.

Naturally, I call again. The customer service guy says he has no new information for me and gives me the direct number of the repair company (outsourcing: always a bad sign). I call in, where in the two week interval they seem to have learned Dutch. After waiting for 5 minutes I’m told to hang up while they sort out my case, after which they’ll call me back. Rather surprisingly, I got the call only 10 minutes later where I’m told that the  blame lies with Dell. Apparently repair has been requesting parts for Mini’s since May 18th, but Dell has of yet refused or been unable to provide them. I was told that I was not alone and that I probably would get my netbook in two weeks, enough time to get the replacement parts, install them, and send me the machine.

As off now I’m continuing the waiting game.

If I had known how long this was going to take, I would have cracked the machine (in the process voiding my warranty) and installed the hard drive myself. Instead, I trusted someone else (Dell) to fix my problem for me, which was the big mistake. Never let someone else do what you know you can do yourself.

As of now Dell is on my Sh*tlist, joining the likes of Sony, ECI and PerfectSystems. Never again will I buy anything off them anymore. No more laptops, no desktops, nada. They have officially lost a customer.

Love or hate the iPhone or MGMT, you’ve got to admit this is pretty fricking cool.

This post is just going to be a highly subjective spur-of-the-moment type rant, so bear with me here. I’m writing this here because I need an outlet for my frustration. My frustration with Windows and Microsoft. While I may in the past have been known to be somewhat of a Microsoft fanboy and Apple basher (not true: I own an iPhone and I love it), I’m not afraid to call them out when stuff goes wrong, as it did yesterday.

You see for months now I have been using a 320 GB (Neil Poulton Designed) Lacie external HDD in conjunction with my Xbox 360, in order to play back the many tv-shows and netcasts I’ve downloaded and ripped throughout the years. Alas 320 GB is becoming rather average in today’s world. But hey, storage is cheap, so I went out and bought another Lacie Drive, this time of the 1 Terabyte variety. I love these drives and currently own 3 of them. They’re quiet, well-designed and they blend in with their surroundings. Happy as can be with my new purchase, I plug it in to my 360 and … nothing happens. The 360 wouldn’t recognise it. I tried everything, from swapping power adapters and data cables to rebooting the console. Nothing. No change. As you might imagine I was a bit miffed at this. I just spent around 100€ on a new drive only to discover it doesn’t work.

Fifteen minutes and a lot of Googling later I come to the realisation that Xbox 360 does not support the NTFS filesystem which my new drive had formatted to by default. Even though for the life of me I could not understand this (why Macs can read NTFS and an Xbox, which is made by Microsoft, can’t is beyond me), I kept my cool and went to disk management to reformat the drive as FAT32. To my chagrin I discover that Window Vista no longer includes FAT32 in it’s drive management settings. It can only format to NTFS or the incompatible exFAT. A bit more googling and I discovered that FAT32 formatting was still possible in Vista (even surpassing the arbitrary limit of 32 GB) by using the command line. After that I left my computer running overnight (formatting a 1 TB drive takes a while you know).

This morning I wake up and discover that after having spent the night churning along Windows apparently cannot format the drive because the assigned volume is too large. Not a good way to start the day. The fact that Vista doesn’t notify you of this at the start of the formatting proces is just preposterous. This is typical Microsoft stupidity. This is the side of Microsoft everyone hates. I finally had to use a free utility called Fat32Formatter (which is a true godsend) to finally make my drive usable.

But you know what was the final insult ? If I had just hooked it up to a Mac, I never would have had these troubles. It saddens me when for once Apple’s attack ads ring true. “It just works”. Well apparently in this case it would have.

I have become more and more disillusioned with Microsoft since the whole Vista debacle and the crappyness that is Games For Windows Live. You’ve got one chance to redeem yourself Microsoft: Windows 7 better be damn good.

Brilliant stuff.

I’ve long searched for a way to easily rip my DVD’s to hard drive. The challenge has always been to find a decent balance between format, file size, compatibility and image quality. From AutoGK to DVD Decrypter, I’ve tried them all and finally think I’ve found the magic combination. In fact, I know I have, judging from the 586 episodes of tv-shows that I’ve ripped to drive and that play beautifully on my Xbox 360 and HDTV.

The key lies in the combined efforts of two programs: DVD43 and Handbrake.

DVD43 is like a free version of AnyDVD. Sure, it’s no longer being updated so you might have some issues with more recent forms of copy protection. It also doesn’t support HD (not that I know of anyway) but hey, it’s free so how can you hate it? DVD43 is essential in breaking through the layer of copy protection present on most commercial DVD’s (although you’d be surprised how many actually don’t have any form of copy protection at all).

Once you’ve got DVD43, you’ll need Handbrake, a free program originally coded for the Mac that has recently recieved a very decent Windows GUI. Handbrake does the actual ripping and it’s here where you’ll do most of the tinkering with settings. I’ve presented below my favorite presets. These were reached after a good two days of testing with a variety of DVD’s. A good tip when testing out your settings is to only rip a small chapter of the tv-show or movie. This saves a lot of time and allows you to quickly swap between different presets.

In general I rip to a MP4 file. This plays great on my Xbox 360, in iTunes, VLC, Media Player Classic, etc. I’d advise turning on Large File Size only when ripping movies. I don’t own a 5G iPod and don’t want to post it on the web, so I’ll just leave those unchecked

I generally like to set the resolution manually: 768*576 for 4:3 shows and 1024*576 for 16:9 shows. If you’d rather let Handbrake handle resolution and aspect ratio, just set this option to Strict.

I always pick H.264. I believe it is the jack of all trades of current video formats. I also like to set the bitrate manually. For tv-shows I default to 2000 kbps. Movies vary based on the original bitrate at which the movie was encoded. A quick Google Search will be sufficient in finding that out. Once again, if you don’t want to do this yourself, just set the quality slider to anything around 70% and you’ll be fine. The higher the bitrate, the bigger the file size and the longer the encoding. I always enable 2-pass encoding and turn off turbo first pass. I let Handbrake take it’s time and let it fully analyse the DVD before encoding it. If you want to have faster encodings, I’d turn on the turbo option but keep 2-pass encoding. I personally do notice a difference in quality between just one and two passes.

All other options I leave untouched. Audio defaults to AAC 160kbps Dolby Pro Logic II. You can usually set audio tracks to auto unless you want a specific track to be embedded in the ripped file. I also generally don’t rip with subtitles but if you want, you can. Be warned however that the subtitles will be permanently embedded in the file. Once the DVD is ripped I import it into iTunes, and use that to edit things like episode name, number, season, etc. The final result is a file that looks great on an HDTV especially with HDMI upscaling helping along.

I know ripping DVD’s is still a bit of a legal gray zone, but as long as you don’t post it to torrent sites, you should be fine. Also, even with fast multicore computers, ripping will always take a while. Be patient, once the media has been freed from it’s optical prison, you’ll be more than happy.

Relic Entertainment recently released the beta of Dawn Of War 2, the wildly anticipated sequel to Dawn of War to those who purchased the Soulstorm expansion. As a huge fan of the original game, it’s expansions and recently Warhammer 40000 in general, how could I not check it out ? If you’re keen to check it out yourself but don’t own Soulstorm, don’t worry: Relic intends to open up the beta to everyone on the 28th of January.

One thing that I’ve been asking myself ever since Relic announced DOW 2 is how much of the original DOW-style gameplay would remain and how much of Company Of Heroes (Relic’s other hit franchise) would seep in. Well, quite a lot as it turns out. The traditional DOW gameplay is largely gone. The days of charging across the battlefield with a hundred heavily armed and armoured space marines backed by a small army of dreadnoughts and landspeeders are over. DOW2 puts a lot more emphasis on small squads of well specialised soldiers, even more so than COH did. You also have more options for squad customisation. Base building is (mostly) gone. Occasionally you’ll get to deploy a turret or a rally point but that’s about it. You have one central stronghold that produces all units, researches all technologies and if you lose it, it’s game over. The Tyrannids, DOW2’s new race, are really cool and bizarre. They’re very Zerg like (although technically Blizzard copied Warhammer and not the other way around). They utilise burrowing techniques, sneak attacks, poison and psychic powers and have some very nasty advanced units.

Graphically the game is stunning. The Essence 2.0 engine is a marvel, the terrain looks great and the detail on the units is even higher than in Company Of Heroes. The physics system is still there, making sure that debris flies around realistically. The unit animations, the much lauded feature of the original Dawn Of War still look great with added detail and better movements. The sound departement has also been well catered too. Unit sounds are great, the explosions sound realistic. The heavy bolter guns sound a bit like German MG42’s, but you can hardly blame Relic for that now can you ?

Despite all these changes, it still feels like a really solid game. Relic seems to have merged the gameplay of DOW with COH while staying faithful to the Warhammer 40000 universe. The multiplayer options will please a lot of people and I personally can’t wait for the full singleplayer campaign, which seems to carry on from Dark Crusade with captain Davian Thule, scarred by the Necron Lord of Kronus, in a central role. I’m a bit miffed that neither the Tau or Chaos Space Marines make an appearance, but if I know Relic, they already have several expansions in the pipeline.

If you loved Dawn Of War, Company of Heroes or you’re a Warhammer fanatic, you owe it to yourself to check this beta out. It features online play as well as skirmish against AI’s on 2 and 6 player maps. As I mentioned, Soulstorm owners can get it now (through Steam), others will have to wait until the 28th while the full game should be out on PC on February 19 (North America) and February 20 (EU)

The Waaaaagh!! is coming people, don’t miss it.