Sparky’s Corner

Not So Alone

Girlfriend sent over an early birthday gift in the mail…

Alone In The Dark for the 360 with strategy guide. Have been looking forward to this game dispite quite a handful of bad reviews.

Will write my thoughts on the game once I get a good grasp of it all, but so far seems pretty decent aside from the lack of a Subtitles option (for some reason I like reading what I’m hearing in games).

I also pre-ordered Guitar Hero Aerosmith… got a lot of good songs on that.

Plus I just bought Guitar Hero III (cheaper to get that bundle compared to GHA bundle).

Seems like July will be gaming month for me.

Treyarch Community Day

For a Word document version of this with better format for reading (WordPress messed up the formatting :Sigh: ), you can view it here.
– Alex “Sparks”

“Please remember all information mentioned regarding Call of Duty: World At War are from demo levels/footage shown to us which are subject to change in the final product.”

Event Information
Day: Friday June 13th, 2008
Location: Treyarch, Santa Monica, California, USA
Hosts:
Josh “JD” Olin (TA Community Manager)
Mark Lamia (TA President)
Hank Keirsey (CoD Military Advisor)
Robert Taylor (ATVI Jr. Publicist)
John Lenaway (Step 3)
Treyarch Staff/Employees
Attendees:
Rudedog (FPS Admin)
Brandon (Total Call of Duty)
StrYdeR (ModsOnline)
Matt (Planet Call of Duty)
Jeremy (Xbox)
Sparks (.MAP)

Arriving At Treyarch
Upon arriving at Treyach, we were all guided to a meeting/cinema room where we were introduced to Mark Lamia (Treyarch Studio Head), Noah Heller (Activision Senior Producer), and Rich Farrelly (Treyarch Creative Director).
After a brief introduction by each, Mark Lamia began telling us about their goals with this new title. Mark said the team’s goal is to step up and create a Call of Duty like no other. He hopes they can show the community they’ve got what it takes to make a memorable game. He acknowledged that the PC community might be a little concerned since Call of Duty 3 wasn’t for the PC, but he says the team plans on interacting with and supporting the various platform communities in the future when they get their own forums up and more info on the game comes out.
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Call Of Duty 3… The Love Child

I recently had the opportunity to fly out to Santa Monica, CA to visit Treyarch who were hosting their Community Day for Call of Duty 5. While we’re under embargo till an undisclosed date for when we can post our write-ups (keep eye on this blog, I’ll be sure to post mine at 12:01AM on whatever day it happens to be), I thought I’d start playing Call of Duty 3 again in my free time.

Right off the bat, people tend to knock this game down as the bastard child of the franchise. Usually because it’s either glitchy/poorly polished or wasn’t released on the PC (Call of Duty having its roots on the PC platform with the original Call of Duty 1). I don’t necessarily agree with those people to that extreme, but I do think it’s a well made (and fun) title produced under a year for old-gen and next-gen; quite a feat.

While I’m more of a singleplayer guy when it comes to video games, I must say I wasn’t too impressed at first when launching up Call of Duty 3’s campaign. The first thing I noticed were the badly placed cover spots; more than often the AI would lean against mid-air and not actually hug against the geoemtry or anywhere near it. It’s a subtle thing that I guess not a lot of players would care about, but being a long time Call of Duty player and modder it slightly killed the realism for me seeing AI lean against air.

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Paradise: A New Experience

I’ve begun work on a new singleplayer map for Call of Duty 4, this time I wanted to challenge myself after making two infantry based singleplayer maps. So I thought what was something that was missing from Call of Duty 4 that I could try… and that’s when it hit me — a tank driving map.

I’m also taking it upon myself of building the geoemtry, I think it would be a good idea to expand my skill set and become more of a hybrid: both scripting and mapping. But in the end all, I want to be acknowledged for scripting more so than my mapping.

The above screenshot is a few hours of work. Definitely not final product quality, especially since I’m only doing geo at the moment and will do the scripting when I’m done, and even then in the scripting stage I’m sure the geoemtry is going to be changing quite a bit for vehicle based gameplay.

Grand Theft Auto 4 Impressions

So the game has its pros and cons, but over all Rockstar did a pretty good job.

Singleplayer just grabs you and keeps you engaged inside the world of Liberty City. From the story to the characters, you almost feel like you yourself are Niko Bellic rather than just controlling an avatar of him. Some of the missions even let you make moral decisions that affect the storyline depending on what you choose to do.

Multiplayer is just as engaging as singleplayer, but could have been better optimized for 8 vs 8. People tend to free roam in objective gametypes, which isn’t so much fun when the host decides to play One For All (you only get one life), and you have to sit around in spectator watching someone pointlessly running around the city for 10+ minutes. More than often, if someone dies within the first five minutes in a One For All match, they tend to just leave the game right away. Rockstar could have implemented more options for players to keep them entertained while waiting for a match to be done, whether by locking them up in a bar to play darts or bowling alley. Or Rockstar could have made a Battlefield type option where if players free roamed too far they would get a warning and then killed.

Other than the occasional free roamers in objective gametypes, my only other gripe is with the land vehicle controls… it’s got a steep learning curve and usually gets you killed in multiplayer really fast if you spin out or crash into a wall which gives your enemies more than enough time to spray into your window and head shot you.

The game, in my opinion, has lived up to the hype. It’s hard to put it down once you start playing.

The Post About Nothing

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