Posts by Taylor

  • If you could go back in time...

    Well, I would've spent more time building up a portfolio, making something decent and making an active effort to get a job; than being a complete dick on Internet forums (sorry!).

    But I wouldn't have decided to be more outgoing than working on level design. It's what I'd always wanted to do since I was a kid, and I feel good that I'm doing it 'for real.' It's very geeky, but who cares? Doing what I want is more important, and now I have free time for other things.* Mind you, I've always had friends who were into the same kind of thing, and I didn't spend all (though a lot) of my time getting a vdu-tan.

    [* And I say that after raiding Naxxaramus in World of Warcraft until 1am, yelling on ventrilo for people to "fucking AoE the damn bugs." Go me.]

    Hell, computers are cool now anyway.

  • Developers ditching PS3 in favor of Wii?

    I know Sony are doing a lot of shooting themselves in the foot with, well, pretty much every decision they have made. But I don't see how this is the case purely because the Wii is so far apart from the PS3 in terms of actual use. With it's gimmick remote, motion senstivie joypads, etc. Most games "ported" from the PS3 to it aren't going to fit without a lot of tweaking, surely? It'd be much more probable for them to switch to the Xbox 360 (except maybe the Japanese developers).

  • All hail the Valve

    Quote from mikezilla

    I'm not sure Adrian Shepard would have the same effect as he once did. I'm curious what you think would be a good opfor style expansion for the game. Being a combine would be strange because they're just zombie'd little prune lookin' dudes who can't talk so much.

    I got the impression Shepard is going to show up in one of these mini-episodes-for-HL2/HL3, at least. I'm not sure how, since IIRC you've no idea what Shepard looks like, but when they said "some old faces," there isn't actually many to choose from.

    Ofc he wouldn't work as a playable character. Opposing Force got most of its cool from you playing "the bad guy," even though five seconds into the game you're rather pally with the scientists.

  • Half-Life 2: Episode 1

    Quote from Skjalg

    She isn't? woah, and all the times when I was just letting here blow up like 3-4 times in a row by my own grenades because the zombies were swarming her etc... guess i got lucky

    Yeah, I think she has some kind of sick hitpoint regeneration, so she's alright taking a grenade every now and then, but when she's swamped she goes down fast. And I imagine explosion splash doesn't do as much damage to her. Because the most annoying thing about escorts outside of the crap AI (definately fixed here) are them dying to splash, or being so injured you need to revert to an earlier save. All this might be in the commentary, which I still have to check out, though.

    There's a lot of little jokes in it, one of the things I like about Blizzard games is they are usually quite light-hearted and it doesn't mind joking about itself - and I saw Valve doing the same thing. Alyx talking about your vent crawling skills and Barney lugging around that crowbar were really nice touches.

  • Half-Life 2: Episode 1

    I enjoyed it a lot and there were only a few minor things that annoyed me. Some places where I was unsure where to go next (platform section with the strider, for instance) and the new enemy: combine zombie and his kamikaze deathtouch grenades.

    But everything else was pure class. I don't think I've ever liked the company of an AI buddy in a FPS until now because not only are they more of a hindrance than a help, they lead to FISSION MAILED screens every two seconds because they're jumping out in enemy fire or checking out the splash damage on your weapons. But Alyx is very good in this regard -- Okay, you're kind of encouraged to exploit the fact she's practically immortal and has infinite ammo, but it was fun rather than frustrating. And that's what matters.

    But she’s not actually immortal, as I found out when I crapped myself during the zombie zerg fest in the dark and left her to fend for herself while I pegged it to the lift like the coward I am.

    Edit: And the complete darkness sections were generally quite annoying. Was cool for one little section but by the fourth it was getting a bit tedious. But hey, like I said, overall it was fantastic.

  • Fun with your games

    You're going to be waiting a long time. MMORPG's cost money because thye get constantly added to and cost a lot to run -- though they make a sizeable profit on it when they have as many subscribers as WoW does.

    All "free" MMORPG's have the same kind of thing, only disgused. Some new MMORPG's encourage players to buy items and money to support the upkeep costs. And Guildwars, which, despite what they market, is not a MMORPG in any way whatsoever except a big HUB city -- makes all its money in constant, small expansions, even though I doubt it requires much more bandwidth to run than battle.net.

  • Fun with your games

    We had a spot of bad luck today, as the guys from Norway kept getting cut off. And every one of our warriors is from there - so we couldn't get past the Twin Emperors (bosses before C'thun, though there's also an obscene amount of hard trash mobs between). I couldn't say for certain we'd be having an attempt on him this week, but if we do I'll fraps it.

    But if you just want to know what he looks like (though animated he's much better), this guide has some more pictures:

    http://www.wowwiki.com/C'Thun (link is borked, copy and paste)