Intellidick.com - Pure Insanity

They finally did it. Rock Band got a new free download, the ending song from Portal. GLaDOS finally gets to take another shot at me by making me play that song over and over again on Expert. Call me a geek or whatever, but hey, i’m Still Alive.

Well, I was “still alive” until Microsoft took my Xbox 360 away from me. I suppose GLaDOS finally get her way and just blew up my Xbox so I couldn’t finish the song. Little did she know, it’s still under warranty.

What did I do before Portal? How did I survive? Why am I at work when I should be playing Portal? I wonder if I can get away with playing Portal at work? Questions like these are in your immediate future once you purchase the Orange Box.

I recently bought the Orange Box from Valve to get Team Fortress 2. One of the crew who’s playing TF2 got me started playing “Portal”, a game that comes with the Orange Box but definitely did not get the hype that TF2 did.

Imagine, you’re in a “training center” with a sadistic computer that needs your help “testing” a new weapons system. Too bad that some of the “tests” can be fatal if you’re not careful. Take that concept, toss in the gravity gun from HL2 and multiply it by the ability to throw portals, toss in a physics engine and you’re at pure hysteria. That’s Portal. Slow at first but once you throw a portal on a wall and then another down the the bottom of a pit and then jump in, you’ll be hooked. You’ll have to take my word for it, but wow… just wait. The HL2 physics engine really shines in this one.

So here it is, your official ID.com bullet list for this game.

• If you have Orange Box and haven’t played Portal then you need to stop reading this blog and play Portal.
• If you have Orange Box and have played Portal, then you’re not reading this because you’re playing Portal and officially have no life now.
• If you don’t have Orange Box and need a reason to get it. Portal.

Based on the recommendation of a friend, I went out and purchased Battlefield : 2142. Yet another work of art… no pun intended.

As usual with EA games, something doesn’t work right out of the box, this time it was the registration utility. Oh sure, I only had to re-enter my serial number, but it was just a sign of the bad programming to come. That registration routine had a glitch in it that caused my serial number to get turned to garbage… it was one of those “hold the delete key for 30 seconds and then type in the right code” errors. No big deal… just a Testament of things to come.

On to the game! First, let’s see if there’s a patch… it’s been out for a while, surely there’s a patch. Ah ha, the 1.25 patch. 300MB?!?!?!?? For a patch? Oh well, I must get tons of new content with the patch. (Or maybe not)

Finally! Patch loaded and i’m in! Ready to game! Okay, pop in the clan tag and the player name and we’re rolling. Wait a second… no spaces in the names? Bummer. Another sign of the horror that awaited me.

Alright, first stop, options. Keymaps - Check. Video - Check. Audo - Wait a sec… the voice command won’t let me select a secondary sound card for voice input / output. Weird… TeamSpeak does, Ventrillo does… BF2142’s voice engine doesn’t. Bummer. True bummer. Well, i’m not reconfiguring my PC for one game, so, voice support off… moving on. Having done some DirectSound programming way back in the day, I don’t remember it being that difficult to enumerate the sound card list and display a choice to the user as opposed to just lighting up the default. I suppose that extra 20 lines of code was too much to ask. I’m sure it falls into the “Nobody will use this” category. Yeah, except all of the people with a Sound Blaster and an onboard sound card. Or a USB headset… which appears as a virtual sound card. Or a bluetooth headset, which also appears as a virtual sound card. But nobody has those, so we’ll just move on.

Okay, finally… let’s play! We’ll start with single player as i’ve never played this game before and a good bot match will get me used to the game engine. That way i’ll have at least played the game before I go out and get my few weeks of spankings as a new player online. Here we go! Single player, select maps, and start the game! Woot! After an excruciating optimization thing, the level loaded and now I can’t get in to the game. It shows the “kit” screen, I pick my kit and hit “Select Spawnpoints”. Nothing. That must just be a tab or something, even though it looks like a button. So, i’ll just click on some spawn points! Nope, nothing happening here either. Oh wait, I need to join a squad… Okay! Click the squad tab, here’s three… I click join. Good. Now i’m in a squad. I click the “continue” button (which looks exactly like the “select waypoints”, which isn’t a button.)

Game up! I’m in… no wait… i’m not. I can’t spawn. A few seconds go by and now the squad screen shows up. Okay, let’s see, let’s click all over the place and see what happens. Nothing. Nothing happens. I get a clicking noise as a conformation that i’ve done something, but no responses on anything except for leave squad, create squad, and join squad. I create a new squad with me in it, hit the manage squad button, and that interface doesn’t seem to work either. I must be crazy… it must be me… right?

I bust out the mighty Google and start running queries. Sure enough, others are having the same problem. Single player is broken in this 1.25 patch. Most people’s response in the help forums is something along the lines of “But why do you care? Single player sucks!”. Gee, that’s helpful. So now I have two options, I upgrade to the new “beta” 1.40 patch, or downgrade via uninstall/reinstall. This is just sick. I’ve also seen reports that the 1.40 beta patch has the same issue. So much for the QA process.

I fiddled around with the multi player and decided I didn’t want to bother. The spawn works in the multi player, but I die so fast it’s not even funny. I can’t get the good weapons b/c they have to be “unlocked”. Which can be difficult for those who have no clue how to play the game.

So, thank you again EA for a “pleasurable” game experience.

I’d also like to take this moment to say thanks to EA for not doing any further updates on SSX Tricky so I could play it on my Xbox 360. Oh sure, SSX 3 works… but SSX 3 SUCKED compared to Tricky. What I wanted was more tracks and some new riders for Tricky, what EA gave me was something less impressive than Tricky… and now it’s the only thing that will play on the Xbox 360. Thanks EA! This is almost as good as the C&C : Red Alert 2 thing… no updates for XP to fix any compatibility problems, but you’re sure as hell repackage it and re-sell it… bugs and all. What a crock!

So now I’m on my way to return BF2142… another disappointment from EA. I think i’ll just pre-order Enemy Territory : Quake Wars instead.

Okay, so i’ve now played all of the latest consoles several times. I’m gonna have to stick to my Xbox 360. No PS3 or Wii in my immediate future. As many problems as people have had with the 360, I love mine. It works perfectly. Of course now that I’ve said that, it’ll probably break tomorrow.

I’ve excluded the Wii from the running and decided to stick with true next generation consoles here. After I saw demo after demo with cartoon-esque graphics, lack of HD support (480p doesn’t count guys), and those super gimmicky controllers, I was sure that i’d never own a Wii. Sorry Nintendo, i’d have easily tossed you another $50 or so for a better GPU. Oh, and yes, I played Wii Sports, it’s fun and all, but I rarely have people over to my house and Zelda isn’t my thing. Red Steel was an indicator that i’d never really enjoy long hours of shooters with that controller. Gears of War on the 360 reminded me of what you could do with horsepower if you’ve got a powerhouse like Epic writing code.

Between the Xbox 360 and the PS3, it boils down to a few things in my opinion.

• Price - Can anyone actually afford to get ALL of the consoles anymore? Xbox 360 Premium at $399 and PS3 at *gasp* $599, then toss in a Wii at $249? No way i’m putting out that much just to have the entire set. In the previous generation of consoles, I had a Dreamcast, PS2, and Xbox. Of course, I waited until the PS2 & Xbox were all $199 each, and the DC was $99. So, for $500, I had them all. My “Gaming Experience” was top notch.
• HD media support - PS3 gives me the Blu-Ray drive. Pfffffffffffffffft. So what? I’m not buying anything HD-DVD or Blu-Ray until they come out with a standard or an affordable dual mode player. No offense kids, i’ve been down the early adopter road way too many times. Xbox 360 has the addon HD-DVD drive. Not buying that either for the time being. In the end, I want to PLAY GAMES with the thing.
• 1080p support - Both consoles do it. My TV upscales everything to 1080p anyway, so I personally can’t tell the difference between 1080i and 1080p. The only reason I notice 720p is because of the bars. *Attention fanboys* Xbox 360 DOES do 1080p over the component outputs… trying to get an HDTV that does 1080p over component, that’s another story. You can thank the industry for persuading TV manufacturers into gimping their TVs to not support 1080p over anything but DVI or HDMI. There is enough bandwidth to run 1080p over component outputs. It’s just not digital.
• Controllers - The PS3 controller has motion sensing… but no rumble? What the? Yes yes, I know. Sony and Immersion. I recently heard that they settled that and will be giving us a new controller with rumble. Thanks for not listening to what the customers really want and being bitchy about a few million bones to Immersion. Hint to Sony… JUST PAY THEM OFF! YOU MADE ENOUGH FROM PS1 and PS2… GET OVER IT AND GIVE ME MY RUMBLE. In the Microsoft arena, it’s more of the same, but somebody in Redmond listened. The controller is better sized this time, has better button placement, and it’s wireless! I love the wireless guys, it works quite well. Not to mention, being able to turn the console on and off from the controller ROCKS. Thanks again guys.
• Titles - In the glory days of the PS2, the other 3 (DC, GC, Xbox) competing consoles couldn’t keep up with the exclusive title rampage that was the PS2. Looks like those days are over. I think Sony just learned a hard lesson here. The cell is neat and all if I want to do Folding@Home or run a crazy Linux machine, but most people really don’t give a crap. I already have a Linux machine! (with a lot more peripherals I might add) I want to PLAY GAMES. I need titles to do that. Come back to me in a year when you’ve got the titles that the Xbox 360 has and then we’ll talk. Oh, and drop that price some too. $599 and you’re still losing money on each console sold? That’s got to be hurting right now. What the hell though… right? All of these years of proprietary formats must have paid off by now…. right? Betamax! No wait, that didn’t work. Mini-Disc! Nope… UMD! Oh crap, another flop. Well, hopefully somebody saved all of that cash from the millions and millions of PS1 and PS2 consoles that were sold.
• Online - MS continues to impress me with their improvements to Xbox Live for the 360. It’s so different from the old days. I’m very happy with it as it stands now and look forward to the next upgrade. Not to mention, it seems like every time I hit the marketplace, there’s more and more there for me to download. I love that.

Long live Xbox 360. Now let’s see if Sony can pull a rabbit out of their hat and give us what we want next time. It certainly appears as those Nintendo and Microsoft figured something out after their last attempts.