From the very first few days playing Team Fortress 2 I’d decided that tc_hydro was the coolest map. from never knowing where you’d be attacking to the cool industrial style, everything about it was fun for me. The general playerbase though, didn’t share my enthusiasm for it. Hydro quickly fell by the wayside of TF2′s ever growing pool of official maps and today barely manages to hold more players than the arena maps. Even OrangeX has more players!
TF2maps.net held a 72-hour competition, complete a map between 6PM on the 27th and 6PM on the 30th of June. I hunkered down and after 45 hours of work (an hour of that being testing with players) I emerged from my lair with an near-finished map. » Continue reading “Introducing pl_haste!”
Time passes in strange ways doesn’t it? » Continue reading “The Vortex of Time”
I’ve had my eee Slate for a little under a week now and I love it.
I just need to buy a small blutooth or USB mouse and it will be perfection. It chews through battery life so it’s not really suited to heavy use out and about but on the train, at university at a friend’s house or even other rooms in my own house are perfect locations.
I can now take my level design with me when I leave my room and dropbox means I can sync files with my desktop without even thinking about it. The big advantage the slate has over a laptop is the pressure sensitive screen and digitizer so I can take lecture notes in my own handwriting, which is essential for a physics course. I’ve tried using MS Word’s equation builder and in a lecture where I might have to write over 100 equations, that’s just a joke.
I haven’t really begun to tap its potential, mostly I’ve been web browsing and watching House MD on it but Hammer is installed, as is Photoshop so once I get back after Easter, and back to work on tc_strata, I’ll really be having some fun with it.
Only thing to complain about is the battery life which is really short, otherwise it can do everything I could ever want it to.
More on the eee Slate to come…
Before I begin, this will contain spoilers so if you don’t want any stop reading and play Precursor first http://precursormod.com/
In contrast to my last post, I’d like to highlight two games and their methods of making me buy (and nearly buy) a console just so I could play that one game. » Continue reading “How to win me over and make me buy a console just for your game”
Two games recently have taken hold of my attention, and both of them have squandered it. I could have been one of those guys who gets excited at the very mention of it and preorders a copy at the first opportunity possible, but instead they push me away into that area no developer wants to put its potential customers in.
What are these games, and what have they done so wrong? » Continue reading “How to lose my respect and put me off buying”
Today is a red letter day, Mann Manor has had over 8,000 people buy 10,000 stamps through the Team Fortress 2 store and Hoodoo is following just 150 stamps behind it.
I never imagined that anything like this would be happening when I bought the Orange Box back in 2007, the levels that TF2 has escalated to and the quality of the community surrounding it continue to amaze me. Seventeen community maps and uncountable community made weapons and hats added to a game that originally had just three weapons per class and only six maps and the team responsible are showing no signs of slowing down.
So I’d like to offer my thanks to everyone who has bought stamps, everyone who has made anything for this game, be that fan art, model replacements, maps or anything else that shows love of TF2, everyone who runs servers and communities that play with the stuff we make, and to everyone who plays TF2.
Thank you all.
Why jinxed? I have started a lot of projects and stopped a lot of projects short and I’ve found that often projects fall through very quickly after I write some kind of blog post about them. Hopefully Strata will hold on to completion, I’d certainly be very upset if it didn’t!
Here’s just a bit of an overview of what’s going on. » Continue reading “tc_strata is now jinxed!”
I foolishly bought Dead Space in early December instead of waiting for the post-Christmas Steam sales when it was about a quarter of the price, still, I think it was just about worth what I paid for it and despite the problems I’m about to discuss I did find it to be somewhat enjoyable after getting used to the very sluggish controls. An average gaming experience in all I’d say, and definitely a good lesson of how not to do horror games.
This article will include spoilers, more after the jump. » Continue reading “Dead Space: a dissection”