I haven’t had as much time to work on the site and apps and such as I’d planned because I was given Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 for Christmas. The former I just finished yesterday after an unexpected and rather uninspired ending. I have much criticism of HL2 and it just doesn’t deserve the 98% from PCG and unpresidented 11/10 from MaxPC. First off, my biggest gripe is Steam. It works on the assumption that you will only be playing games from Valve and have a broadband connection. It’s also a huge annoyance for its new piracy measures. Not only did I have to copy everything from 5 discs, but I then had to sign up for Steam, decrypt the entire 4GB of data, download critical parts of the engine, and then download the latest update. Five hours later, I actually got to load HL2. It takes a while to load, and I’m afflicted with some kind of bug that causes the game to hang while loading after roughly 15 to 20 loads (quickloads and new area loads). It also wasn’t that fun of a game. After the first few hours of “woah, check out this engine!”, the gameplay gets rather unexciting. There’s nothing you haven’t seen before. It only looks better. Then there’s only half the number of weapons that HL had, a weak plot, and unclear mission objectives. I had the feeling a number of times that I was just wandering through the linear maze of a level and shooting things without a purpose. However, there are a few isolated cool scenes in the game. One being the Tremors/Starship Troopers “Ant Lions” chapter. Some of the squad stuff was also fun. While HL2 may look absolutely stunning, it plays rather lame.
I just installed Doom 3 today. I was initially put off by the fact that Doom 3 doesn’t like to run when Daemon is installed. I immediately went for a NoCD that fixed it right up. These game developers and publishers are going too far with the piracy protection. It’s almost a pain to be legit these days. That aside, Doom 3 is quite impressive. It sure did scare the shit out of me when the accident happened and the guy right next to me became a zombie. However technologically advanced, it still feels reminiscent of Doom.
And because you never have too many screenshots:
Now for the real news. LOL. 😉 I fixed the email script and there’s a new major beta release of the RoN Script Maker. It now comes in two flavors: Full Version and Lite Version. The difference being that Full has an installer/uninstaller, makes start menu shortcuts, and installs necessary redistributables (hard ass word to spell and type).
So that’s the news. 8)
