Games
Mass Effect 2
It’s been nearly 2 weeks since the release of Mass Effect 2 and thought that it was about time that I wrote something about it. I’ve already completed it and am now on a second play through.
I think that it is a good improvement on the original. I like the new combat system, it is good enough to rival other 3rd person shooters such as Gears of War and Army of Two. Having ammo is a little annoying since it wasn’t there before, they call them thermal clips to stop the weapon overheating but really it is just ammo. Ammo isn’t very rare though and only occasionally have I found myself a little short.
I imported my save from Mass Effect 1 and it seems to have worked well. I had completed it on hardcore difficulty and was level 57. I started at level 3 with 5,000 of each resource, 130,000 credits and 160 paragon points. It was a nice boost to start with although it won’t have made much difference if I hadn’t had it. The main benefit to the import was your decisions carrying over. A lot of them are just an extra side quest, or some dialogue with someone but I would like to see what is different. It seems that the default choices for not imported are all different to what I had so I will have to try it at some point. It seems there is more of an impact from your choices in this game. I would have to play it again being a renegade to find out how different but before it seemed a bit superficial.
By the time I had completed the game for the first time (on veteran difficulty) I was level 25. I then started again on insanity with a new game plus and it didn’t long to reach the level cap of 30. In this play through I want to try to do everything, find every side mission and get every upgrade so it is taking me a while longer. Insanity is a lot more difficult though, every enemy has armour or shields and there is more of them.
Having the mine resources for upgrades is a little tedious. It can take a long time to complete one planet and then there are dozens more. The new game plus gives 50,000 of each resource as a bonus which lasted me a while but now it has mostly gone and I’m having the mine again. Finding side missions along the way does help to break it up though.
Most of the games achievements are quite easy to get. By the end of my first play through I was missing about 5. Now the only one I don’t have is to complete the game on insanity which I should get soon and then I’ll have all 1015 points. If you played on insanity to start with on an imported character there is no reason you couldn’t get all of them on one play through. A little different to needing at least 3 before.
Overall I think that is a great game. I have already logged over 50 hours of gameplay from it and will get a lot more yet. As I said, I want to play as the bad guy once as well but I might leave that for a while to space it out since there aren’t many games I want now for about 6 months. I still have to play Assassin’s Creed 2. I have barely started it so far.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
I’ve had Modern Warfare 2 since shortly after the release date a few ago and I have since completed it. I have to say that it is by far the best in the series so far. I haven’t been able to play the multiplayer as much as I would like due to a poor Internet connection, but the single player was brilliant.
Firstly, I played it on regular difficulty, as I expected, it was particularly challenging. I then started it again on veteran. It was in this second play-through that I tried to find all of the intelligence items and pick up the achievements that I missed the first time around. I found it to be a lot more challenging but still doable. Eventually, after about 7 hours I had completed it again. It is a shame that it isn’t possible to player the campaign cooperatively, I enjoy playing coop gaming. That is why I played the majority of the Special Ops missions on coop. It took us a long time but we finally completed all of them.
Once we got through the first few easy ones it started to take us more and more attempts to get past each one. Fortunately they don’t have to be done in order so occasionally we would skip one and come back to it. After a couple of weekends we had done all but one. Snatch and Grab, I don’t know why this was so annoying for us to complete but we must have spent 8-10 hours on it over a couple of days before we finally completed it.
By this point, I already have every other achievement in the game except for the ones for completing Spec Ops so this got me my 1000 gamer score.
I have tried to play the multiplayer through the lag we get here and it is very good. I am up to about level 19 or so, mostly playing Team Death match. I would prefer it if the weapon unlocks were a little more frequent but I suppose that they have to spread them out over about 60 levels. There isn’t much new it the multiplayer, but that doesn’t matter because it is still just as good as it always has been. The new features don’t take away from the game and if anything, improve it. Such as the boosts for death streaks and the choice of bonuses for kill steaks.
On the whole it is a very good game, Infinity Ward have made an excellent sequel to Modern Warfare and I hope that they continue to make such good games in the future.
Xbox back, again
My Xbox has finally come back. Not a replacement this time but then the last one was only 4 days old. Hopefully it will last a little longer now. I have been playing on it a bit but I’ve only been back from work an hour. We will have to wait and see.
Red ring of death again
Only a couple of days since my Xbox has arrived back from the repair centre and I am getting a red ring of death again. It is a new Xbox they have sent me so this is quite annoying. I will be without it for at least another week now. I have just filled out the repair request on the website again so hopefully I will be able to send it off tomorrow and it will be back before the end of the week. I have owned an Xbox for almost 3 years and this has never happened once, then, I get it twice in one week. The same week that all the new games start to come out. My copy of ODST still hasn’t arrived. So much for fast air mail, it was shipped last Wednesday. It doesn’t really matter when it arrives now.
We started to play Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 yesterday, I have seen mixed reviews of it but I think it is a vast improvement on the old one. The story seems to be a lot more cohesive rather than in the first game where it felt like it had just been tacked on to the game play. With the two different story lines as well it gives a greater re-playability. There have been a few small glitches but nothing that causes a major problem to the game. The only problem that I have found is that, as a second player in coop, the game doesn’t remember my stats and achievement progress between loads. This is particularly frustrating because some of them will take a long time get and there is no way that I would be able to get them in 1 sitting or even 1 play through.
I have also now completed ODST, I was playing it on split screen since I don’t have my copy yet. I think that it is much better game and the story line is and improvement on previous Halo titles. I always felt like the story was kind of superficial to the game but in ODST it did feel a lot more like the story was an important aspect. While the game play isn’t significantly different, I don’t see this as a bad thing. Halo 3 is one of the most popular titles on the Xbox and why change it if there is nothing wrong with it. The subtle changes do make you feel weaker than a Spartan, you are a little slower, can’t just as high, have health. These small differences add up to change the feeling of the game without taking away from what made Halo 3 a great game.
I recently downloaded the demo for Batman: Arkham Asylum. I hadn’t previously looked at this, but I had seen some good reviews and thought I would give it a try. I enjoyed playing the demo and think that I will buy the game at some point. Obviously not much point now, I don’t have a working Xbox, but in a couple of weeks when I get it back I think it will bridge the gap of October between releases nicely.
Xbox back
Yesterday I got my Xbox back from the repair centre. They have just shipped me a new one so it’s all shiny. It is just in time for ODST, my copy hasn’t arrived yet but we were playing it last night. I will write a mini review when we have completed it although it seems to be good so far.
I am quite impressed with the repair process Microsoft have put in place for the Xbox. Despite it being nearly 3 years old, they sent a courier to pick it up, take it to the repair centre and then send me a new console in under a week and they throw in a month of gold membership for live. I was hoping that I would get a new one with a HDMI connector, mine predates the first ones to have them but alas no, it identical to the new ones. I am tempted to get a bigger hard drive for it although £90 for a 120gb is quite steep. I only have a 20GB one and now with more DLC, game installs, arcade games etc. it all adds up to needing a lot more space. I am forever having to clean up old videos and demos, I can only have one game installed at once maybe 2 if it is a smaller one.
Hopefully ODST will arrive by tomorrow so I will be able to play it over the weekend. We also have Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 coming next week so we will be playing that as well. The autumn games schedule has started at last and there is a lot of good titles coming out in the coming months to keep us busy. There is at least 7-8 that I want and a couple more that I might get as well.
Red ring of death
My Xbox has developed the red ring of death. 3 little red lights flashing away. It took a few days to get to this after it started crashing. Since it is nearly 3 years old I thought I would have to pay for a repair, then, while on the phone to the repair line, it started to red ring. The only reason that I had phoned was because while filling out the repair request on the website I couldn’t have a German address with a UK billing address. Originally it would just beep and freeze, it was only while on the phone and going through all of his diagnosis steps that it first red ringed, fortunately, this means that no billing information is required so that solves that problem.
My Xbox did need to go for repair last summer as well, at the time they also extended my warranty by a year, this has now just ran out so I would have had to pay if it wasn’t the red ring problem. I am now waiting for the UPS shipping label to arrive so that I can send it off. I am hoping that it will arrive before I leave work today so that I can sort it out on the way home. I want to send it off as soon as possible in the hope that it will be back for the release on Halo 3: ODST next week which I already have on preorder. I have also just bought Trials HD on XBLA. Didn’t get much chance to play it but it seems like a good game.
1 month
We will have been here in Munich for one month tomorrow and are in the middle of our fourth week of work. Still haven’t had much opportunity to go out and enjoy Munich as funds are a little short. We are still waiting on being paid. It should have been the day after my last post but it seems they didn’t get our details in time and so we got nothing. We managed to get an advance on our salary but that barely covered this month’s rent so now we have to get by until the end of the month.
Two Saturdays ago we went to Feldmoching See to the north-west of Munich, we took a barbecue and enjoyed the weather. This map shows where it is in relation to the city, the centre starts just south of Olympiapark. We had a great day although I didn’t think to take my camera so no pictures of it.
Feldmoching See
This Saturday was Michael’s birthday, he and some other’s from work went back to the lake but I didn’t as the weather didn’t look as good and I was feeling lazy. I didn’t really do anything all weekend other than watch TV. I will go out more once I get paid and hopefully I’ll remember to take my camera with me so I can get some pictures of it.
I haven’t really been doing much else except for working. I am going to get my Xbox 360 shipped over in the next couple of weeks so I will be able to get back to playing some games. There are a lot of new games coming out in the next few months. I will have to get them shipped over here if I want and English box but that shouldn’t be too much hassle if I buy them online. Halo 3: ODST is probably the next one to come out, according to that page on Wikipedia it is September 22nd so I will definitely have my Xbox over here before then. Modern Warfare 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 are out in November. There is probably some more that I have forgotten about as well.
I keep thinking that I should start doing something about my FYP soon but then I also think that it is nearly 2 years away before it has to be finished. I think that I will get settled into the job a bit more yet before I start, although not having any money to go out, now would be a good time to do something. I am considering using C# for development rather than C++ because it should save be a lot of time and trouble on C++ issues by having a managed environment. I thought this for my physics and AI assignment back in March but ended up having problems, I can’t remember what now but I ended up using C++ anyway. At work I am using Java, I didn’t really like Java when we did it at Uni in the first year but now that I am using it again I am finding that it is not as bad as I remember. The GUIs are still annoying, messing around with layout managers and needing to use dozens of panels everywhere to get it to look right isn’t very fun, I’m sure there must be a better way of doing it but it can’t beat the drag ‘n’ drop controls in Visual Studio for C#.
Assignments and Left 4 Dead
My AI assignment is done, handed in and demoed. I have no idea how I have done on it. I covered everything that was asked but who really knows how she will mark it. My C# assignment, the multi-threaded airport simulation, is almost done as well. I have already demoed it but need to finish the report and diagrams etc. and hand it in.
I quite enjoyed working on it, the code wasn’t too complicated it was more about the problem solving, protecting the resources and making sure data was securely passed between threads. I had 12 in the end I think and yet it was only about 600 lines of code. The hardest part was solving the problems to ensure thread safety, it doesn’t resolve deadlocks if there is too many planes meaning nothing can move but otherwise it works OK. The diagram is proving to be quite annoying to make. It is supposed to show the use of the semaphores and buffers for inter-thread communication, the problem is with 12 threads, 13 semaphores and 12 buffers there is a lot of elements and lines all over the diagram. Not sure if it will even be possible to make it look neat yet. I will worry about that when I have it all in place.
My third assignment this semester is for physics and AI. I have started working on it but only really got the basics in so far. We are supposed to implement quite a lot of different features in it such as swarming and tracking as well as all the physics to control the movement of each of the bodies. The basics of the physics is nearly done although the collision detection isn’t the best, it is only using bounding sphere so it is not very accurate, I was thinking of having a bounding box as well and have it only respond to a collision in both. It isn’t due until after Easter though I should have plenty of time to get it working.
On another note, I picked up Left 4 Dead for the Xbox 360 this week. I haven’t played much of it yet, only 1 1/2 of the campaigns but I am enjoying it so far. I think that it makes for a really good cooperative game, we had 4 people playing it briefly and it was a lot of fun. I haven’t tried playing the multiplayer yet though so don’t know what that is like.
I have heard some criticism about the AI for the other characters but they seemed good enough to me. Having another person will always be better but I didn’t think there was any problem with them. I also like the feature of being able to go idle for while and have the AI take over until you get back. There is as always, the console vs. PC argument particularly when it comes to an FPS. I think that the game works well with a console controller, I haven’t really been into PC games for quite a while now. It was really before I started uni that I stopped playing PC games, I still do occasionally but not anywhere near as much as I used to. I much prefer to sit in an arm chair in front of the TV than at my desk on the computer.
Midweek update
This time next week I will have finished and handed in my AI assignment. I need to get some more work done on it although I think that I am quite close to completing the program. It is really just the user interface and then bringing it all together. I still have to write the report though, I tried it last night but realised that I was waffling about rubbish and there is an 800 word limit on it so I can’t have that.
I got the results for my math test from last week though, 100%. It was a multiple choice and I guessed on one of them but that doesn’t matter. Full marks in the next test should make life easier for me in the final exam, I will only need 54% in that to get a grade-point 15.
My C# assignment, the airport simulation, is coming on well though, I keep on working on it when I should be doing AI, since it isn’t due until after Easter I have plenty of time to do it but I have done all of the check boxes except for other so I don’t really know what to do for that. I should probably leave it alone for a while and get on with Physics and AI but I have no motivation to do it. I was hoping that the assignment would be open and we could do anything really as long as it ticked the boxes, but instead we have to do a very specific system and I don’t really want to. I will have to at some point but I would like to get the AI out of the first.
I had another placement interview this morning, I think that it went well and hope that I get offered the job, it looks like very interesting work. I have another interview in Liverpool tomorrow as well though, I am driving up there for that.
No new games at the moment though, there isn’t really anything coming out in the near future that I am looking forward towards either. I still want to play some more Halo Wars, I want to play the campaign again at some point and do some multi-player. It realised the other day that I never really played any multiplayer on Red Alert 3 so I might do that as well. I want a new game like Halo where I can pick it up at anytime and play it for a while without having to think too much. Looking at my game shelf there is a few that I never completed but I don’t really want to, it seems like too much hard work. I thought about getting Empire Total War but I played the demo and didn’t really like it, I’d much prefer an RTS that is a bit faster. I might have another look at it next week.
I’ve been finding myself very bored in the evenings lately, I don’t really know what to do, it is one of the reasons that I made this blog although posting once every few days doesn’t really keep me occupied for long. I need some kind of project that I can work on when I have nothing else to do but I can’t really think of anything now.
This week
It’s been an eventful week. I had a placement interview on Monday, it must have gone well because I have been invited to a second interview next week. That will be my 4th interview then, as I have another next week as well.
Had a Math test today as well. I think that it went OK, we should get the results next week but there were only a couple of questions that I struggled with and have since found that I was right. I have an AI assignment due in a couple of weeks so I really need to get that done soon. The problem is that I have only just worked out how I am going to structure the program. I don’t even know where to begin with writing it in Prolog. Still it should be fun….
We completed Halo Wars as well, there is only 15 missions in the campaign but because of the scoring system attached to it, as well as par time and the collectibles in each mission there is still plenty that we need to do to get 100% completion. I will probably try it on an easier difficulty though as we did it on Legendary difficulty. Playing through it cooperatively was an interesting experience, it is very different to Red Alert 3, the last coop RTS I played, rather than getting a base each we shared the same base, but we could get our own units simultaneously from the same buildings. It’s also possible to transfer units to each other so it makes a very different game to Red Alert 3.