Don't you just love spaceships?

Courtesy of Quake IV. id, you RULE

I don't dare imagine the future

Does anyone remember the very first time they loaded Quake? When your breath was taken away by the fact that you could look up and down? and that enemies were now polygons rather than just sprites? I remember spending a long time with Nile Warp back in Baghdad trying to get the game to run over a network, just to see what the player looked like! Great stuff.

Ofcourse time has changed and nowadays if a game doesn't have ragdoll physics we don't play it!
When I first ran Quake 4 Single Player (I thought I'd finish F.E.A.R. first before playing Quake 4, then after that I'll start CoD II), I thought the gfx weren't that good. But playing the game more and more I'm still firmly convinced that the Doom III engine is the best ever made. Raven have tweaked it a bit more and the game is absolutely amazing! And gory! and just great fun to play!

But then Valve released The Lost Coast HDR tech demo on valve yesterday! I ran the level and man we haven't seen anything yet!! HDR = High Dynamic Range, a way of rendering light so that it can utilise the whole 100% brightness of your monitor. This makes for amazing lighting effects in games, but the one that impressed me most is the "iris effect", which simulates a human eye's reaction to moving from dark to light and vice versa. The first time I walked out of a dark corridor onto the outside in the level I was astonished!
Truth is, games are just going to get better and better and better. And I do believe that one day they will be a totally immersive experience, like that cyberbar in Minority Report. Or something.

Have a look at the snap below, with special attention to the reflection of light on the sand to the right (the sand on the left is the usual rendering we're used to these days, bland eh?). And obviously, it's all in real time.....



Oh and one last (geeky medic) thing, the effect should really be called the "pupil effect", cos it's the pupil that changes size when the environment light changes, not the iris. We all know that :p

Save the best for last

I've just done something really silly. I decided to play the final 2 levels (or intervals as the game likes to call them) of F.E.A.R. just a few minutes after midnight. Now we all know the game is scary, with spooky little girls and clone soldiers that like to suddenly jump out at you. But Monolith has very cleverly left all their tricks in the bag until the last 2 levels. Without telling too much, but after destabilising some atomic-core-reactor-big-ass-thingie, things go very pear-shaped and our poor man has to escape the facility that's shaking and quaking with atomic instability. To add to his worries he's also being chased by some dimension-shifting baddies and a teenage girl that has a death-touch. Oh and he also frequent flashbacks.
Monolith has managed to create some very tense and scary moments in the last 2 levels that really have to be played to be believed. And they've also managed to make running out of a exploding factory (and the explosion itself) an interesting and refreshing feat (admit it, how many times have you had to run out of something or another that's about to explode/be destroyed etc? last time I did it was about a month ago in Project Snowblind).

End line, EVERYONE, and I mean EVERYONE has to play F.E.A.R.

Oh, and don't forget to watch the credits to the very end :)

Omar Simpson

Today The Guardain reports:

They're a famously dysfunctional family from small-town America but suddenly they have all learned Arabic and started talking like Egyptians. The Simpsons have changed their name to Shamsoon. Bart, the skateboarding, gum-chewing delinquent has become Badr. Homer, his slobbish dad, has become Omar and has given up Duff beer and pork sausages, at least for the duration of Ramadan.

As a treat for TV viewers during the month of fasting, the Dubai-based satellite network MBC has dubbed into Arabic 30 episodes of The Simpsons and is showing them twice a day. MBC, which has heavily promoted the series, signed up several of the most popular Egyptian actors - including Mohammed Heneidi and Hanan Turk - to provide new voices for the characters.

Ragdoll Physics

Now I've seen alot of dead bodies (virtual and otherwise), but this one is a classic:



I found him when I reloaded F.E.A.R. for my pitch-dark late night scare-athon. Apparantly I'd killed the poor sod before going out, without noticing what he'd ended up as. Which just shows how cool F.E.A.R. is, it even saves your corpses for you :)

Spoilt For Choice and Spielberg

What a night!
2 GREAT games showed up yesterday, Serious Sam II and F.E.A.R.
I managed to get my hands on sam relatively quick (for us mere mortal internet users), and came back from work today to find that F.E.A.R. was in my trusty d:\leeching folder (directory if you're old) also.
Unfortunately both are alcohol 120% clones, and need a bit of computer trickery to run but they're both running now flawlessly.
My oh my what games! I know I'm going to get flamed for this but I gotta admit enjoying playing Serious Sam II. I know it's mindless action, but the environments are great and the gfx are spank up to date with hdr rendering and the lot. Great fun.
As for F.E.A.R. well I really can't put any words that give this game any justice. It is one of the most amazing FPS games I've played in ages, with loads of scary moments and good shooting action to boot.
Tonight I plan to turn all the lights off, put my 5.1 surround headphones on and cream my pants. Gaming rules.

This also means that FarCry gets uninstalled yet again (yes it still sucks!).

I still think Doom III is the daddy of the latest FPS games. The gfx in that game were truely mind blowing. I still haven't seen them copied in any other game. But all other games are excellent in their own right.
Problem is, next week Quake 4 arrives (based on doom III engine!), so there's ALOT of gaming to do... this is THE year to be a PC gamer.

Next month? Call of Duty II

And finally (as our good old British newscasters say), EA has signed up the relatively unknown film maker Steven Spielberg to create 3 games "for everyone". Being an avid gamer himself, he thought he'd take a shot. So what does that mean for everyone? a better, longer, and more involving Fahrenheit (Kelly finished that, it's great!)? Here's hoping so...

Keep on gaming people.

FarCry

I must have installed FarCry about 20 times till now.
The game that everyone heralds as one of the best shooters for PC, which started off as a tech demo called The Beach by German outfit Crytek.
Problem is, I hate the game! I've tried tons of times to play it but I just get fed up and bored with the so-called clever AI.
This morning, with a sudden urge of FPS-addiction (I haven't got any fps to play these days, all i've been playing is killer7 on gamecube and burnout revenge on xbox), I dediced to install farcry yet again.
I'm gonna give it a chance, honestly. Let's hope the damn thing is worth it.
If it isn't, there's always FEAR and Quake4 next week (I pre-ordered quake from amazon. I think it's only fair to buy it since I own q3a and I've played so many id games but only paid for one ;)

So, it's finished installing now and I'm gonna patch it up to the latest version and let's see if it captivates me this time round. Fingers crossed.

EDIT (10:25am): I'm hating it already. Why? cos farcry uses the age-old technique of step patching. I'll explain: The latest version is 1.33, so I downloaded that patch, but ofcourse it won't work cos it wanted me to patch up to version 1.31 first. OK, so I downloaded that patch, and that didn't work cos it wanted me to patch up to version 1.3 first. Now I've got that patch and it's finally agreed to dish its dirt. So, after downloading about 200mbytes of patches, and patching 3 times, let's see if the damn thing works. I presume I'm gonna need a nocd crack also. Sigh.

Opera Dude

Now this must be one of the coolest sites I have ever seen!
Make sure you've got flash installed and head over to www.tokyoplastic.com and check out the opera dude, the drum machine, and a whole load of japanese goodness. Amazing.
Thanks to Ookami Snow for the heads up!

My Precious....

in the dark...

Xtreme Fidelity

X-Fi for short. I've just finished installing my new X-fi Fatal1ty soundcard, and reinstalling windows (cos it sucked and alot of hardware has changed). Anyhow, the drivers for xfi are installed, and I'm just blogging at this unholy hour cos I'm so amazed at what creative has done! Not only is the user interface way better than before, but I've quickly tested some mp3s on it, and 2 things really stand out:
The Crystaliser: Supposedly makes your mp3s sound alot better, and man do they! I don't know what it does but it really really makes everything sound so much sharper and clearer, and I tried lots from different sourcers
But the best thing I liked is the smart speaker settings. As the card comes with a drivebay, if you connect some headphones it automatically detects that, and so mutes the main speakers, and changes my settings from 7.1 to headphones, plus all equaliser things are changed too! A small, but very nifty and impressive feature, that sure makes a difference.

If you're reading this and you like music, or like games, then this is the card to get. Just listening to those crystalised songs is hair-standing.

It must be a mistake

Wolf (Sheep and Dog) told me that since I got the razer copperhead, i've GOT TO get it's special mouse pad, the best ever, super-dooper ExactMat X, made by razer.
So I did.
And cos God smiled down on me and got me some work, I wasn't here yesterday to receive the pack, so I went down to the post office with my trusty "Sorry, we missed you!" card and my driving licence, all ready to pick it up.
After queuing for about 5 minutes, a pleasant lady took my card and checked my id and disappeared into the storage bit, she came back a moment later with a box about the size of a 17" flat monitor. I thought she'd gotten the wrong box, but sure enough, it had:
Ali Alsawaf
play.com

written on it. I rushed it back home (it was nearly time to eat), and after eating i openned the box up to find the BIGGEST mouse pad + box I've seen in my life!

There's nothing extra special to report about it yet (i haven't used it in games yet), but here's a picture of the box that the BFG will be proud of (note the scale of it compared to the tower/monitor. Scary).

Quake IV Release Date!

“On October 18, QUAKE is dialing it up to 4.0 on the Richter Scale with this new chapter in Earth’s war against the Strogg,” said Todd Hollenshead, CEO, id Software. “Fusing an epic war-story driven single player campaign, and fast-paced QUAKE III Arena® inspired multiplayer, QUAKE 4 delivers a gaming experience fans will be raving about for years.”

More here

I'm all smiles, today has been all good news, I've got a locum, and now this :)

I should've wished for something else!

Remember in my "Where's the damn pointer" entry I was being sarcastic about mice with firmware, saying "what next? consoles with magic wands..... wait a minute.....". I was refering to Nintendo's excellent revolution and it's controller.
Scarily enough, today joystiq reports here that details of a patent filed by sony back in 2004 have leaked, and guess what, it's a magic wand! I kid you not, dubbed the sonywand, and is remarkably similar to ninty's revolution!
The fact that the news surfaced today is very freaky. Perhaps if I try again I'll get what I want. Here we go:
"what next? me winning the lottery and getting a job at the same time, making me rich, famous, and reemployed!........."

Left Handed

I remember my first ever WIMP system (windows/icons/menus/pointers). It was my good old ATARI 520 STFM. I used the mouse for the first time then (back in 1991), and for the last 14 years I've always used the left-click setting for right handed people.
Now, finally, I've decided to stick it up to the forces that be and rebel against the system and I've now swapped my primary and secondary mouse buttons, ie my right mouse button is primary!
Take that whoever made the left mouse button primary (XEROX I presume, afterall they invented the mouse).

Problem is I'm just not used to the change, and i've changed it back to normal twice now. But I'm gonna stick to this left-handed setting and make the world a better place.

SoB - Left handed (in case you hadn't noticed :p)