Posts by Section_Ei8ht

  • TRON Legacy

    As a lifelong TRON fan, I loved TRON Legacy. Everything was very faithful and it was a fun ride and fun to watch. Sure, the criticism that the story is nothing special is completely valid, but so was the story from the original TRON, but it's still a great experience. Don't even bother with the 3D bullshit. It added absolutely nothing and most of the time I didn't even notice it.

  • L.A. Noire

    Quote from Chunks

    The facial animation is incredible, but it just looks odd the way it is stuck on the rest of the model.[...] This characters just look weird because the head just seems disconnected from the body.... I dunno, it's hard to explain.

    Agreed. The facial animations look amazing, but look so oddly out of place that I can't take anything else seriously. The performance on the face and the performance of the voice just completely does not match with the rest of the body or the environment, and I find it insanely distracting. The whole trailer felt like I was watching a badly-dubbed movie.

  • Left4Dead 2

    Just played through it: incredibly disappointed. Valve coyly hyped up that the survivors from the first game were going to meet up with the survivors of the second game, and that one of the original survivors was going to die. Awesome, I thought, but no. Here's how Valve managed to fuck that up:

    Quote

    I went into The Passing without expecting anything groundbreaking in terms of gameplay (it is, after all, just a DLC pack). What I was expecting was some story. The overall arc of Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 isn't very presented. Hell the first game was supposed to be 4 unrelated B-Movies strung together with Valve retroactively making an actual coherent story out of them all. But with the release of Crash Course and an overall arc between episodes in Left 4 Dead 2, I was expecting Valve to at least do something memorable for this somewhat hyped The Passing. What we got is two decently sized levels of typical L4D2 zombie killing. Fine. A little stale, but fine.

    What do we get as our two-groups-of-survivors-crossing-paths? We walk by a bridge with three survivors standing on it, looking normal, acting like everything's ok, and ready and willing to help About three sentences later, we're off. Ok... maybe the cool part is coming up. Go about searching these rooms and oh-by-the-way there's Bill's body in a corner room there. No subtle hint of sorrow from the original character NPCs, no awesome go-down-in-flames moment. Everything's fine and there's a body in the corner over there that nobody seems to notice. I understand that this is Left 4 Dead, we're talking about. It's not exactly a game for its cinematic value and storytelling and most people just want to kill zombies and be done with it, but come.on. That's it?!? At the very least, we could have had the original survivors covering the new group as they make their way across the finale, with a short 20 second in-game cut-scene of the old survivors holding off the last wave of zombies while the new heroes speed off into the distance only to have Bill get whisked away by a charger that crept up out of nowhere, his body thrown into the wall with Zoey and Francis shooting after the Charger only to realize they're too late. The Charger and Bill lie motionless on the ground. Zoey breaks into tears hovering over Bills body whimpering "Bill!.... No..." with Francis offering his best attempt at sincerity: "I'm going to miss that old bastard..." [CREDITS]. Something!... Anything is better than oh-by-the-way-Bill-died-when-you-weren't-looking that was delivered. What valve did was pretty much akin to if the original Star Wars never showed Ben Kenobi's death, but rather Ben Kenobi deactivates the tractor beam and is along his merry way and only finding out in dialogue as Luke runs to the Millennium Falcon "Sorry kid, the old man's dead, now get your ass on board!".

    We spent the entire Left 4 Dead game with these characters; their dialogue and dynamics building through each succeeding chapter. With Left 4 Dead 1's scarcity of ammo and supplies with you constantly running out on harder difficulties, forcing you to rely on these characters as your life line in dire situations establishes something with these characters that was completely not acknowledged in The Passing. The only possible way Valve can make this right is if the Left 4 Dead 1 DLC has you play the events prior to The Passing and concludes with Bill's death, and it's actually done in a way that respects the character.

  • Splinter Cell: Conviction

    On my second playthrough, this time on realistic. Being a massive splinter cell fanboy, I've obviously got a few nits to pick about Conviction, but overall it's a great game. Story and presentation are top notch. Very faithful to all the old games (even the Montreal version of Double Agent and the PSP Essentials

    Quote

    sans NSA Director Williams not being a character in Conviction. I can understand that, though, as he wasn't in the Shanghai version of Double Agent and Conviction seems to be treating that version as canon. For a guy like me who considers all of them canon (including the ways I've been able to justify having three different contradicting versions of the same story of Double Agent), it's easy enough to just write the character of Williams off, since Sam had proof at the end of Essentials to blackmail him into resigning.

    .

    - I wish that there was still an option to hide bodies. I understand that Conviction is more fast paced that its predecessors and that not being able to hide bodies adds an element to the gameplay (executing someone who is in broad daylight in the middle of a parking lot so all his buddies can see his body) or luring him into the dark and killing him there), but still, it would have been nice to leave that as an option, even if you don't stress it as a fundamental of gameplay.

    - Unless I missed it, I really miss the option to whistle or whisper to attract attention. My first playthrough, about 50% of my time was spent sneaking, and the other 50% was spent Sam-Fisher-Rapes-Everyone. During the sneaking time, I really missed this feature.

    - I don't like how when you're crouching, you only move at one speed. Granted, they tweaked the enemy's hearing, so they hardly (if ever) hear you when you're crouched (or walking slowly for that matter, something that's new), but when you're in a firefight and want to move to cover that's too far away for the cover system to recognize, it would be nice if you could move faster when you're crouched, instead of having to stand up. Again, I completely understand why this is the way it is, but just saying I miss that from the old games.

    Excellent game though. Still have to play coop.

  • Show us ya FOOLS!

    I got really mad when YouTube removed the TEXTp option after April Fool's (because I really thought it was awesome). So to cope, I wrote a pixel shader to recreate the effect.

    Optimus Prime demonstrates.

    [Blocked Image: http://www.greyboxware.com/images/transformers_ascii.jpg]

    I've still got a small bit of tweaking to do (mostly to the font map). I'm kind of interested to see where I can take this. I can already apply it to a live video stream in flash (I'll post swfs later). Also, because it's done in the Adobe Pixel Bender framework, there's a possibility I can turn it into a Photoshop Filter.

    Sorry for posting this here, but I don't think this is far enough along to start its own thread. Also didn't know if it was relevant enough to go in the 2d WIP since... it's all done in code. Figured it's more relevant here than anywhere else.

  • METRO 2033

    Quote from D3ads

    Jesus I fucking hate

    .. they're so bugged, sometimes you can get past ok and other times you do what you're supposed to and they still beat 7 bells of shit out of you...

    Agreed. The whole concept of them is awesome, and the first two or three I encountered (except the first one, because I had no idea that that was actually one of them [Achievement Unlocked...]) worked just fine, but every single one after that didn't work properly; kinda ruined the experience. It wouldn't have been that bad, but one of the problems with this game is that several of the levels are really bad about conveying where you actually need to go, and most of the paths are braided causing you to run in loops. I understand if they were trying to convey a sense of confusion, but that's not really something that works for a game. Most of the time you have to run around with your compass out (which doesn't point you in the right direction half of the time, anyway). I totally see what they were trying to do here. Excellent ideas, just poorly executed.

    Anyway, still an awesome game.

  • METRO 2033

    I'm having insane amounts of fun with this one. Metro 2033 easily ties Mass Effect 2 for best game released this year so far. My only real complaint is damage feedback. Most of the monsters don't have an audible sound or flinch animation when you hit them and what little blood spatter there is is obscured by your muzzle flare. It's really tough to tell when you're damaging enemies. Other than that and a few bugs (gas mask filters not actually being replaced, some cutscene animation wonkiness) it's a damn fine game. Atmosphere and locales are great. Cinematics are excellent.

  • Adobe Photoshop CS5 - finally a worthy upgrade?

    I was more impressed when it was presented in its original form:

    External Content www.youtube.com
    Content embedded from external sources will not be displayed without your consent.
    Through the activation of external content, you agree that personal data may be transferred to third party platforms. We have provided more information on this in our privacy policy.
    (if I remember correctly the guys that wrote that now work at adobe). This just seems like an extrapolation of that original functionality, only this yields more texture repetition due to the nature of the operation (an area at a time, rather than a 1-pixel-width line at a time).

  • Battlefield Bad Company 2

    Ah. My mistake

    Also, me and a few of the Black Mesa Source fellows are renting a server for BC2. It's a Rush Hardcore 32 player server.

    Whore Island - HARDCORE

    74.200.237.235:19577

    Since there's no way to join via IP, you can either search for it in the server browser (searching for "Whore Island" should find it), otherwise you can add me as a friend (Section_Ei8ht) and join via the friends list. It's a little barren right now because today is the first day we've had the server

  • Impulse::Reactor

    I'm all for it. I have high hopes for Impulse, although they do have some issues to work out. I've never had any problems with it: I bought Sins of a Solar Empire a while back, then Dragon Age, and the SupCom pack, no problems although my buddy who was sitting right next to me ordered the same SupCom pack at the same time, and for some reason he never got the games added to his account.

    Things I love about Impulse:

    - Client does not need to be running in order to play the game

    - Updates are not forced

    - Very lightweight interface

    - You can make backups of the games you purchase.

    Things I don't like about Impulse:

    - Small catalog

    - Lack of community (I've found myself appreciating the Steam Community more and more)