Rabbit Hole

Allow me to continue into the second part of the saga that involves me getting my Mac Book Pro.

We left off last time with me submitting my student enrollment information via fax. Unfortunately that didn’t work out as I hoped. Apple received the fax, but they said it was too dark and I needed an actual proof of enrollment form. They emailed me after I inquired on whether they have received my information. This time, however, I was able to email them my photo ID and proof of enrollment. I headed to the University Computer Center and got it all straightened out.

It took them another day to receive my papers and finally this morning they confirmed that I was a student at the University of Windsor. So at 7AM this morning immediately after waking up I bought my Mac Book Pro for about 2300 dollars. I was a little upset though, I mean I was expecting to pay 2300, but on the American site the laptop was only 1999… I don’t want to be “one of those people” who complain about prices when the Canadian dollar is equal to the American dollar, but when it’s a difference of 300 dollars I tend to notice. However, I realize that they must take in affect duty and our crazy taxes.

Either way I purchased express shipping because I am a sucker for it and it should be here by Friday at the earliest… YAY!

It’s not physically a dry week, in fact here in Windsor is a very very rainy/snowy week, but in terms of video games there is nothing to get too excited over. I have quickly realized that the pre-christmas rush of video games is over and now we are getting showered with lesser DS titles. I’m not a fan of the DS, at least not anymore, so here’s my “catch-up” list; along with a few things I recently received that deserve some attention.

XBOX 360:
In terms of the 360, I’m not going to get too excited; mine is still without power until Zach decides to buy me a new one (or I get my shipment from DiviNeo), and I don’t really have time to play most of these games anyway… here’s the backlog (ps. I beat Kane and Lynch this weekend with my cousin… GREAT GAME):

• Assassins Creed
• Mass Effect
• Blacksite Area 51
• Blue Dragon
• Need for speed Pro Street

PC:
Really the only game I’m working on right now is Crysis, but I am too busy to go to the WGC to play that so I am really just waiting for my Mac Book Pro before I continue anything, but this is the backlog:

• Crysis
• Blacksite Area 51
• Unreal Tournament 3

Wii:
The wii is the only thing that I might have time for this week… heres my backlog:

• Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles
• Geometry Wars
• Link Crossbow Training
• Ghost Squad
• Medal of Honour 2

I had one of these fall on me last night:

It hurt like a total bitch. The whole right side of the top of my head is bumpy and I might have sprained my right hand… not the fingers but the top of the hand; it hurts when I move my index and middle finger. I might of blacked out when it happened cause I only remember my girlfriend screaming and then her moving it off me. I was at a concurrent education party and someone ran into it. It hurt; I can’t stress that enough. Luckily though no drinking glasses or seeing glasses broke! It was very surprising because it fell right on them! Either way I made it through the night so I’m OK.

I just like to state that this entire series of blog posts is essentially be boasting that I am getting a Mac Book Pro. I am ridiculously lucky, thankful and excited… now that I got that out of the way allow me to start this story off.

It all started in art class; recently I have been doing a lot of different work on Mac’s, mainly video editing, animation, programming in opengl etc. I have been looking at getting a new laptop for some time now; the last time I got a laptop was my final year of high school which was roughly 5 years ago. The laptop I received was 200 dollars off EBaY and… well probably stolen… it wasn’t the greatest of its kind. Unfortunately as most of you already know Apple products are VERY expensive. The laptop I am getting retails at about 2799… so pretty much 3000 dollars after tax and shipping. This is a big turn down for someone like me who is really into things like multimedia development. On top of it all Mac’s now use the Intel chipset so you can fully emulate Windows if I ever wanted to play any video games on the run. This laptop is better than my home PC so I’m assuming that will soon be phased out; also means I don’t have to buy a new processor anytime soon.

My friend Pat works for Apple, he gets a 15% discount on all products so I was planning on buying it through him… its better than the 10% student discount. So I started to save money. Aparently my parents found out about this “saving of money” and decided it would be a good present to pay for my macbook. Yes like I stated before, I am lucky, spoiled even… but anyone would accept such an offer. I still have to pay for half but I basically pay my Dad 100 dollars a month. I brought this up with Pat and he said if I am getting a Mac Book Pro you might as well get whats called the ADC Student discount. It works like this:

You first sign up for a one time membership fee of 199 dollars this allows you into the developers program and student program on proof of enrollment and citizenship. After you pay this 199 dollar fee you get a one time 25% discount on any Apple based system! I did the math and the 199 dollar fee is worth it… instead of getting 300 dollars off I end up getting 400 dollars off; it helps! So I purchased the ADC Student membership and awaited emails.

This morning I found out that I needed to fax my citizenship and proof of enrollment to Apple. I did this at work, I attached a cover letter, photocopies of my drivers license and student card, and finally the course printout of the courses I am registered in for Winter 2008. I have yet to hear back from Apple to verify my account… so now I wait.

Imagine this scenario. You are headed home from school/work ready to wind down and get into one of those brand new video games you just picked up. After starting the game you notice you have to create an “account”; OK, fine… account created, many games these days have profiles. Then proceeding to click the singleplayer/campaign button you are confronted with something you haven’t seen before. There lyes two buttons before you, start LAN campaign, start online campaign; intrigued you click “Start Online Campaign” and then click “Public Game”. You are slightly confused… you’ve never seen the word “online” associated with singleplayer, but your mind is racing! Where is this going? Will you be suddenly transported to an online community based system only to scream “No!!!! NOT ANOTHER MMO!” Strangely, you start to see a cut screen, then an in game cut screen, then a mission selector screen. You say to yourself “This isn’t online at all! I was fooled!”, but you are somewhat relieved; you came home to play a singleplayer campaign and now you have the opportunity. The first level begins, you follow the objectives, you kill bad guys, you are having fun when suddenly you get owned by a bad guy is surprisingly better than you. This bad guy’s actions are not like the others, he moves quicker, he shoots straighter, he seems…. smarter. Confronted with a challenge you adjust yourself in your seat and start taking the game a little more seriously. Suddenly the bad guy speaks? He says “LOL pwned”, strange you say to yourself; the game developers have finally coded bots who speak to you. You continue, he proceeds to say “Are you there?”… you respond “Um… hi?”… he replys! This once thought bot is really a human being… one who has joined your singleplayer campaign. It turns out you have really created a mini-server one for others across the world to join, you are following your own campaign, you pick the missions, you still get to see the cut screens, but others can join! What a remarkable scenario… this is Unreal Tournament 3.

Upon playing I was stunned by the way Unreal Tournament 3 handles singleplayer. When you start a single player campaign you are actually starting a mini-server where you are the host. Players can choose to join your server or start their own, if they join your server they pick up where you are in the game. You control the mission maps, so you control which mission to go to next, and you continue to make progress on your account. Players can come and go as they wish which adds for an enjoyable interactive environment. This isn’t very hard to accomplish with a game like Unreal Tournament where every singleplayer level is essentially a multiplayer level with bots, but what if a concept like this was applied to a game like say… Half-Life?

Imagine playing your favourite singleplayer game and having someone jump right into the fray? This would be excellent with games likes Call of Duty or any war simulation where you could have multiple soldiers on the battlefield. To top it all off, imagine if it was totally random and unavoidable! Just think about it… you go to continue your campaign in the newest WW2 shooter and the game will attempt to find other people playing the same part of the campaign as you. If it does you can join up with them and help fight those evil Nazi’s; if not your client will attempt to make its own server and put you as the host.

Like anything in life there are people sure to complain to a system like this so why not have conventional singleplayer and networked singleplayer! If any game designers are reading this post then please hear my words… Coop is the WAVE OF THE FUTURE; take notes from Unreal Tournament 3 and expand upon it! Innovation people.. that’s what this industry needs to move forward into next gen!

Three great first person shooters are on my scope right now. I just got my greedy little hands on Unreal Tournament 3; I had the German version the other week, but refused to play it… but now… now my friends I have the English version and I am ready to pwn. We have been seeing media for this game for as long as I can remember and I am finally ready to make decisions on my own! The game is supposed to have amazing graphics and AI, but how does it favour coming so late into the game, against I.Ps like Crysis and COD4. Either way I am ready to mark another chapter into my Unreal book.

The release of UT3 couldn’t of came at a better time. Last night I just finished Soldier of Fortune Payback. Activision decided SoF wasn’t worthy enough for a full development team and put the title under Activision “Value” development. This really grinds my gears! Soldier of Fortune was HUGE when I was a child, with all its blowing off limbs, mindless violence and infinite bots coming out of every corner you could possibly imagine. Now its a second class citizen! A cast-a-way; something only to see in the bargain bins of Walmart! But no, this game is INCREDIBLE straight hardcore action with really good graphics and of course more mindless violence and limb blowing offing. The game starts out where you left off in the previous SoF’s; you are still pissed about your partner getting killed and now you are here for… well payback. You are instantly thrown into the fray fighting Americas favourite enemy… Iraq; trying to track down some weapon dealer and then heading to Asia to fight Americas second favourite enemy, Koreans… all very stereotypical. But what do you expect from Soldier of Fortune?! With Duke Nukem forever taking… well forever games need new Bruce Willis American Heroes. There’s nothing to say about the multiplayer of SoF:PB its just like anything you could expect from any old school first person shooter, you got your regular deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag and the subsets of the two. If you are looking to spend a couple of hours in a video game Soldier of Fortune would definitly be the way to go. Soldier of Fortune Payback has all the great qualities of the Soldier of Fortunes before it, plus better graphics and even better limb gibbing.

Lastly on my list is Crysis… I’ve been playing this game on and off for the past couple of days. I am making a valient effort to beat it, but it is a very very hellishly long game! I’ll keep you dudes and dudettes updated on when i finally do beat it, but guarenteed it won’t be for a while. Unreal Tournament 3 here I COME!!!

Today we have a guest writer! Mike McMahon from the Windsor Gaming Centre… he’s here to give us a guest review on Assassins creed!! Take it away mike!

Since we got the game I played it as often as I possibly could. The game started out with twist that took me by surprise by adding a bit of present day / futuristic content to the game. The storyline parts in between the assassinations all take place here, but thats the only time that anything happens in the “real world” as it would be. Once you get into the past, you take control of a character named Altair, who is an assassin in the days of the crusades. Your in the middle of a mission that you fail, and for that, you are demoted from the best assassin, to the lowest level. After each successful assassination, you regain one of those ranks to get new items / abilities. After waiting for all the preliminary story line stuff to end and adoring the awesome graphics, I immediately started free-running around town for a good 20 minutes. A complete waste of time, wishing that I could only do that in RL (Real Life), but fun nonetheless. Since I was in my own town I really couldn’t kill anyone, so I left for my first of 9 Assassinations. I needed to ride a horse to the first town, which was pretty sweet, only because it’s something that you can’t do in most games, and it looked really good. Sneaking my way past the guards into the city, I did a bit more free-running along the rooftops of Jerusalem (I think thats where it was anyway) and started looking for the target.

To get to the assassin’s guild I needed to get at least 3 of 9 “investigations” done to gain enough information to assassinate my target. There are only 3 ways to do this; Informant’s, eavesdropping, and pickpocketing. Informants have 1 of 2 missions for you once you find them. Either free-running to pickup a series of flags then returning to the informant before time runs out, or assassinating a specific guards before the time runs out. I did all of them with at least 1 minute to spare. Eavesdropping was rather easy, just sit down on a nearby bench, target the eavesdropping target, then press Y to eavesdrop. Listen to the dialog, and the mission is done. Pickpocketing is also rather easy to do. Target the guy carrying the intel, wait for him to finish some dialog with a random NPC, then wait till he isn’t looking, walk up behind him, and swipe the intel from his backpack (its more like a satchel, but whatever).

The hardest part was finding those missions. To do that I generally had to climb to the top of a tower, look around the area, and it would point out all the missions that were nearby, afterwards jumping off and landing in a conveniently placed pile of hay. Pain in the butt sometimes, other times it looked really nice so it made up for it. One of the three cities has a cathedral in it that was a ton of fun to climb, then fall off of and die because I couldn’t find the bail of hay to jump into. That process was to be repeated 9 times. Here I’m going to stop for those of you who would like to play the game and get into the storyline of it, because if i went any further I would end up ruining it.

All in all I thought the game was fun, and it looked amazing. However there is very little replay in it, other than the free-running part, which can get boring rather quickly. My final rating for it? 8/10, for Great graphics, and good first time game play.

I skipped class again today; I hate Monday classes, they are always so boring and full of stuff I don’t pay attention to anyway. So because of this I am able to sit here with you today and talk about how my weekend went. The first thing one should know is that I broke my keyboard. I attempted to clean it, then got lazy and cut corners… to make a long story short; water + keyboard + power = short. I am borrowing a keyboard from the Gaming Centre until A) They ask for it back or B) I get a new one. Me not having an XBOX 360 kinda turned out to be a good thing. I ended up getting 91.5% on my midterm, second highest mark in the class. Still not as high as I expected, so I am going to look over the test in her office.

So lets get on with it shall we! Let’s get on with the games.

Mass Effect started much before the weekend, in fact I didn’t play Mass Effect at all this weekend, but I’m 5 hours into it. The game is awesome! It comes out this week and for those who liked KOTOR or KOTOR2, it’s definitely well worth it. However, if you are a completionist like me you will be stuck listening to A LOT of audio and reading A LOT of text! After four hours of game time I only had 15 minutes of action. It’s a good sit down and do nothing game where you can just mellow out for a little bit and learn. It gets the brain juices flowing. I’ll let you guys know how my adventures in Mass Effect continue!

Next we have Kane and Lynch! I played this for an extended period with my cousin on Saturday! And I have to say it’s the best CO-OP game I have played since Sven Coop. The characterization in the game is something I have never seen before; you are teamed up with each other, but Lynch is really your enemy who is soon convinced that hes working for the wrong people. A little mysterious, but REALLY fun. Definitely not recommended for children though seeing as there is TONS of swearing and mindless violence. Kinda hard to play a game like that in a Gaming Centre, but we got through about half of it. We were going to finish the rest of the game Saturday night, but I guess I got back later than Tyler though I was coming back and he left Oh well… I am getting the PC version so we can probably try to hamachi it anyway.

Crysis… oh Crysis how I love thee. Since Tyler didn’t show up Saturday night I took it upon myself to take advantage of the excellent computers the Gaming Centre has and play Crysis for a couple hours. I was originally going to play BlackSite Area 51, but I realized I only got the first CD (which was 7gigs) and there were still another 7gigs to go! That is one HUGE PC game. Crysis is so fun, reminds me of farcry with special abilities. Good game over-all your standard run of the mill shooting, but with excellent visuals, graphics and game play elements. I wasn’t able to play this game for too long, because they closed the WGC early, but I did get my taste.

Assassins Creed, Blacksite Area 51, Soldier of Fortune, and Cabellas Big Game Hunter are all games I plan on playing this week, or when I get my XBOX 360 power supply back. Here’s a little update on that part of my life. I had to send the defective power supply back to DiviNeo (I had to pay for shipping), and apparently the package still hasn’t made it to its destination. So I still have to wait for it to get there, then for them to send me a new power supply Jeeze this was a bad mistake; expect the FULL story after its all said and done so I can flame DiviNeo to no end.

The rest of my weekend went pretty good, went to Detroit, hung out with my girlfriend most of the time. All in all it was a really really good weekend. I also was able to get a hold of rockband, which means I pretty much already have all the new games that come out this week; gives me time to catch up so to speak

We are coming to the home stretch of this week and my earlier post was right… I have tons of games but nothing to play them on.

Here is some quick bits of information before I start to list everything I got this week. First off my Internet is DEAD. Cogeco is coming to fix it tomorrow (friday); so hopefully that can be done by the weekend. I may of broke my keyboard by cleaning it out of boredom, the LAN centre doesn’t have any more DVD-R’s so I can’t burn anymore Wii Games and I have a midterm in roughly 8 hours that I have studied like crazy for… once again out of boredom.

Now with all that said I have managed to play ONE game out of the many I have received this week and that game is… drum roll please… Raving Rabbids 2; the sequel to the Wii release title Raving Rabbids. I refuse to call it Rayman Raving Rabbids because it is no longer about Rayman… its about demented rabbits. So take a look at this golden list of games that I CAN’T PLAY BUT I HAVE IN MY POSSESSION!

Cabella big game hunters - 360… not a game I’m into, but it seems the whole “hunting game genre” has become rather popular. I might play this for half an hour to see what all the buzz is about.

Need for speed pro street - 360 and PC… I don’t expect this to be any different than any of the other Need for Speed games so I’m not too excited however if I were to play it I would be playing it on my 360.

Kane and lynch - 360… You bet your ass I’ll be playing this I am very much excited to play this with my cousin. Should be an interesting experience; still waiting to get the PC version.

Scene it - 360… Microsoft’s attempt to speak to all audiences much like Nintendo has been doing this generation. I have no interest in this game… games like this only make me feel retarded.

Beowulf - 360 and PC… Movie games have never been that exciting, but if I had nothing to do I would touch this… but since I have other games like Assassins Creed and mass Effect; I don’t think this will be played much.

Blacksite area 51 - 360 and PC… A mysterious game. The only thing I know about this game is that kotaku is doing a contest around it. Other than that I really want to give it a try and see what its like.

Crysis - PC… Oh the untouchable. The only way I will get to play this is if my cousin decides to bring his computer to my house again.

Unreal tournament 3 - PC… Sure I got the German version, but there is nothing stopping me from playing this to check out the visuals

Soldier of fortune payback - PC and 360… Everyone is up in arms about this sequel; I loved the SoF series so its only natural for me to give this one a try. Definitly one to pay on the PC, but I don’t think it will live up to its daddy.

Resident evil umbrella chronicles - Wii… Don’t know much about this game but I would love to try it out real quick.

Raving rabbids 2 - Wii… Already been playing it and I can’t say much other than its much like its big brother… only not as good.

Assassins creed - 360… Do I really need to explain this?

Sim city society - PC… VERY BOTTOM of my list

Mass Effect - 360… Do I need to explain this too?

Oh and to top that all off I got Marie Antoinette to watch with my girlfriend

Well this past weekend was somewhere between a blast and a bomb. My XBOX 360 Power supply blew up, but I did get to play Time Shift, COD4, and painkiller overdose. This week I will really be feeling the pain without my 360 because games like Mass Effect and Assassins Creed have been leaked all over the innertubes… so basically I will have copies of the games, but nothing to play it on. This is entitled the “Super mario Galaxy” week, but since I have already played and beat that before the street date I refuse to call it that. Instead I shall call this the week of “Crying” and let me explain why:

Assassins Creed - Oh I don’t got my 360 so forget about that
Mass Effect - Look up n00b
Crysis - Good luck getting my computer to play that
Blacksite: Area 51 - Look above AGAIN
Need for Speed Pro Street - If I had my 360 would I really play this?
Kane and Lynch - Ahhh no 360 again, thoughts of killing myself
Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles - This is a maybe I’ll probably get bored of it
Soldier of Fortune Payback - One I actually might get to play on my PC
Medal of Honour 2 - God I can’t take any more of this shit
Raving Rabbits 2 - Looks promising
Mario and Sonic at the Olympics - Left over from last week
Battalion Wars 2 - If I get bored of the above.

If video games aren’t my foray this week I’ll probably be catching up with “The Office” or “Lost” or actually doing homework.