Review
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.
Google Reader
I’ve been a long time user of Google Reader but I never thought to write about it before. I spent a long time looking for an RSS reader with little success. My requirements were simple. I want to add multiple RSS feeds and then it would download them, sort them by date and let me read through them, discard them as I read them. I tried a few different systems but I can’t remember what they are now.
Then I came across Google Reader and it did everything that I needed. It is quick and easy to use. Downloads all my feeds while I’m offline so I don’t have to wait for them to download like I would with a desktop application. This also means I don’t miss things if I don’t logon for a couple of days. Some high volume feeds that only show the most recent wouldn’t have the items after a while.
My only complaint is that it doesn’t find duplicates. For example, I have the BBC’s front page and technology feeds, often there is an article that published to both and I get it twice. Hardly the end of the world though.
I also like that I can add all the blogs I read to it and then don’t need to worry about checking them anymore. Prior to using Reader I would have to remember to check every so often for new posts. A lot of the blogs I read only post once a week or less so I would usually forget about it. Now I don’t have to remember, it just pops up with 1 unread item when I want it.
It’s not really Reader’s fault but it is annoying when I don’t go on for a while and the number of unread items get silly. I have a few high volume news site feeds and I will get about 200/day in total. After not going on very often during the Christmas break, I came back to 1,000+ unread items. Fortunately you can mark as read all items older than a day, week or two 2 weeks so that is what I did.
I like the new features they have recently added, such as the recommended items and recommended feeds. Often they are a bit off but then maybe I don’t click the ‘Like’ button often enough to give it anything to work with. I have found a couple of new feeds through it.
Overall, I am happy with it and can’t see why, for now at least, I will ever need another feed reader.
Sony Pocket E-Reader
Last week I bought myself an e-reader, I’d been thinking of getting one for some time but never gotten round to it. After a small fiasco with the first one being faulty, seem to have corrupt firmware but I don’t know, I finally got a replacement and it’s brilliant.
The main reason that I don’t read more is the hassle of having lots of books. They take up a lot of space and are heavy. Especially this year in Germany, I would have like to have brought a lot of my programming books with me but I couldn’t due to luggage weight restrictions so I was forced to only bring a couple of them. With an e-reader that isn’t a problem. I can have several hundred all in a pocket-sized device.
After using it for past week I have found that it is far better at novels rather than reference books. I had a few PDFs and while they open and work perfectly. It just isn’t as easy to search for what you want. It can be done, just a little awkward. If you stick to novels then it is brilliant, just open them up and read. It certainly filled the time on my flight back to Germany at the weekend.
The screen is very easy on the eyes, far easier to focus on for a long time than a LCD monitor and since it only uses power to turn the page then the battery lasts a very long time. A small amount of power is used to keep the device on standby but that is all. After a week of use and nearly 2 full books the metre hasn’t moved yet.
On the whole I think that it was a good buy and I’m happy with it. I will probably still be buying printed books for reference though.
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.
Firefox 3.1
I’ve been using Firefox 3.1 beta 3 now for about a week and it seems to be quite good. I haven’t noticed any major problems with it. The installation was the same as normal. It did install to a different directory but copied over all my extensions and bookmarks etc. They all worked straight away.
There are only 2 changes that I have seen, the rest appear to be ‘under the hood’. There is Private Browsing, this works the same as in Chrome. It doesn’t save any history, temp files etc. of your session. Unlike Chrome though, rather than open a new window, it will hide all of your existing tabs and open a blank one. Any browsing is then private. Exiting private mode will restore all your original tabs. It doesn’t appear that your saved passwords are accessible in private mode and it won’t save any as well.
The only other change I’ve noticed is that the X on tabs to close them doesn’t appear if you only have one tab open. I use Foxmarks (or Xmarks now) and it didn’t seem to like me syncing my bookmarks between 3.0 and 3.1 but I updated my laptop to 3.1 as well and then it worked no problem.
I have only had a couple of crashes while I’ve using it, and they were while I was closing it down. So not really too bothered about that. Overall it seems to be a good update. Don’t know how long it’s going to be in beta for though but I can’t think that it will be too much longer.
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.
Halo Wars
I bought Halo Wars last Friday and have been playing through the campaign on coop. Personally, I like it. I know that a lot of people don’t like RTSs on the consoles because of the difficulty with the controls but I’ve bought all three Command & Conquer games and now Halo Wars and loved all of them. Command & Conquer 3 did have the worst by far, but once they got the radial interface for Kane’s Wrath there wasn’t any problems. Halo Wars has taken the best of this and improved it even more. There isn’t the dozen of button combinations to perform different tasks. In most cases each button has one job and that’s it.
I think that it has kept the feel of Halo very well. The warthogs move like they do in Halo and everything is as you would expect from a Halo game. There is a few new units but they don’t ruin it and it was necessary as there wasn’t really enough to start with.
The game is a lot simpler than other RTSs, there is only really 9 units for each faction and 6 buildings but I find that the game play is more about the fight between units rather than the overall battle with the enemy. While a lot of strategy is needed to win I find that it is very different to Command & Conquer.
At first I didn’t like the idea of the set number of build slots at each base, although many maps have more base sites if you need them and it just adds to the strategy, you can’t just build loads of supply pads because you need the other buildings as well. You also can’t have a completely varied army with only one base in most situations because you won’t have enough cash.
The multiplayer is fun as well. The matchmaking finds other players quickly and so it only takes a few seconds to get into the game. There are plenty of other base sites on the map so it is easy to expand. Some of them are controlled by rebels, they are easy enough to kill once you have a few units, I think that it is just to stop someone sending out 1 warthog at the beginning to get every single base.
Overall though I think that it a good game and it holds true to the Halo Universe.