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By N2H

 

Christmas Shopping 2008

Sep 07, 2008 in Random

(If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS/Atom feed. Thanks for visiting! - Michael)

It’s never too early to plan gifts, especially for yourself.

Since I live in Vietnam, the only time I really buy stuff is during Christmas, when I return to the US.

Here are some things I’ve been looking at:

  1. Lightsaber Construction Kit: these recently went on clearance, would be interested in in for around $40 (original $100+), but I hear there not quite the same super quality as normal Master Replicas. My feeling is I will not be getting one.
  2. Dark Knight DVD: well, of course.
  3. Mcfarlane Halo Master Chief Figure: just want one, probable end up getting Series 2 or 3, though I like 1 the best.
  4. X-Box 360: price cuts are imminent, and I hope rumors of a holiday pack-in are true. Like Halo 3.
  5. X-Box 360 HD DVD Addon: It’s possible to get a new one around $40 already, and I’m hoping it’ll go cheaper around December, hopefully just people/retailer finally clearing the stuff out, maybe even with cheap movie bundles. Especially with Black Friday.
  6. On HD DVD:
    1. Battlestar Galactica S1 (this is still pretty expensive)
    2. Harry Potter HD DVD Set or just: ($60 on Amazon, and less than $10 per title seperately)
      1. Order of the Phoenix
      2. Goblet of Fire
      3. Prisoner of Azkaban
    3. Transformers: not sure if I really want this. Like Kyle, I wasn’t a fan of the movie so much. If it’s $5, probably will do it since it’s supposed to be a great example of hi-def.
    4. The Game: this isn’t supposed to be so great on HD DVD, but it will be much better than the non-animorphic DVD
    5. The Matrix Collection
    6. Sopranos S6 Part 2 (less than $30 on DeepDiscountDVD, HBO series are always closer to $100)
    7. Batman Begins
    8. Bourne Ultimatum
    9. The Prestige: I loved this movie, already own it on DVD. This version would be an import, so price would be an issue here.

Pictures of the some of these things are below:

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More Buying Enjoyment (EBay)

Nov 12, 2007 in Basketball, Books, Clothes, Vietnam

  1. Fables 9 TPB Lot (Read, Excellent Condition), $63 Shipped:

    1. Vol 1 Legends in Exile

    2. Vol 2 Animal Farm

    3. Vol 3 Story Book Love

    4. Vol 4 March of the Wooden Soldiers

    5. Vol 5 The Mean Season

    6. Vol 6 Homelands

    7. Vol 7 Arabian Nights

    8. Vol 8 Wolves

    9. Jack of Fables

    10. c403_1

  2. The Punisher 13 TPB Lot (Read, Excellent Condition), $63 Shipped:
    1. Punisher/Wolverine Crossover
    2. Punisher vs Daredevil
    3. Punisher vs Bullseye
    4. Very Special Holidays
    5. Punisher presents Barracuda
    6. Punisher Max Series
      1. Vol 1 In The Beginning
      2. Vol 2 Kitchen Irish
      3. Vol 3 Mother Russia
      4. Vol 4 Up Is Down Black Is White
      5. Vol 5 The Slayers
      6. Vol 6 Barracuda
      7. Vol 7 Man Of Stone
      8. Vol 8 Widowmaker
  3. McFarlane Reggie Miller Figure, $13.40 Shipped
    1. 1189024402.5255
  4. McFarlane Baron Davis (Loose): $6.98 Shipped
    1. 86be_2
  5. Nike Kobe Bryant Air Zoom Tee, $18.50 Shipped
    1. 97d6_12
  6. Nike Lebron James Tees (2, Used), $12.50 Shipped
    1. 5550_1
  7. Nike Air Classic Tee, $16.99 Shipped
    1. DSCF0300
  8. Halo 3 Tee, $45.07 Shipped
    1. 5205_1

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Halo 2 (XBox)

Sep 28, 2007 in Reviews, Video Games

I finished Halo 2 a couple of a weeks ago, first time I’d gone through it since it first came out in 2004. I remember before that I had thought the graphics weren’t that good (higher level of graphic detail “pops” in, you can really see this during cut-scenes) compared to the original and that the game was short. On the first point, Halo 2 does look better than Halo 1. It was pretty obvious to me since I had finished playing Halo 1 right before starting 2. Also, the single player campaign for H2 isn’t really that short- it just isn’t that fun. Thinking about both games makes me wonder though, if my initial impressions of both sway my opinion too much on the replays. For example, when I played Halo 1, I thought it was the best thing ever. I still do, but in all my repeat plays, I don’t really pay attention to the story line and other details of why it was so good, I just play and get through stuff, almost like I’m trying to remind myself of 2001 rather than playing it truly fresh and seeing if stacks up the way it used to.

Then again, can anyone truly start fresh when you’re replaying a game? But it does make me wonder, do I not like Halo 2 because of the reasons I think (which will be listed below) or did my first play bias my opinion beyond recovery?

So anyway, Halo 2 does look a bit sharper than Halo 1. The framerate is solid, the visual design is still there, though I think the sense of mood is not created as well as it was Halo 1 in terms of the landscapes and level design. In terms of the music, I wasn’t a big a fan of the Breaking Benjamin/Incubus/rock-inspired stuff in the game, though everything else is fine. When you look at the gameplay, this is where the big difference for me comes. Halo 2 feels a lot faster than Halo 1- while I felt Halo 1 was more about patience, waiting for your turn to strike, and seizing opportunities, it doesn’t feel quite this way for the sequel. In the original, it felt like you were part of a bigger landscape, just 1 dude on this huge planet roaming around, and I think the scale is greatly reduced in Halo 2. Maybe I can describe this as a sense of openness in the game world. In Halo 2, I feel much more pushed on a focused path, smaller levels, whether this is actually true or not, I don’t know. Gunplay is much faster in the sequel, bullets come out a lot faster, and to me, I feel like this set up the gameplay to be more aggressive, less about taking your time and seeing what was going on.

The Flood are around (sorry, doesn’t seem like a big spoiler to me) again, but I just never cared about them (they seem like plot filler to me), while in Halo 1, I felt like I was in the movie Aliens trying to fight them off, running scared all the time whenever you’d hear that big pop, and then a bunch of other pops- popcorn of death. There are new races, characters, and creatures, and you actually don’t play as Master Chief the whole way through the game, but I don’t think that any of these additions are that noteworthy.

Shooting control feels solid, but the gameplay mechanics between gun/melee attack/grenade, it all doesn’t work quite the same way. It doesn’t have the same sense of balance and power and timing. I know this could sound like me basically wanting Halo 1 to be exactly like Halo 2, and in a sense you would be right. I do think Halo 1 is the best game of all time after all. Dual wielding is available in the sequel, but it was never something I really enjoyed in single player or back when I used to play multiplayer with Kyle years ago. Dual wielding is something I had to do to stay competitive or be effective. This lack of comfort comes from not having the same smooth feel of control when I was dual wielding compared to 1 gun. With 2 guns, I always felt I was guessing on the controls, but with 1, I knew I could be the bad ass I thought I was- I always knew exactly what I was doing, and the controller was an extension of my mind.

Story can be a nice motivator to any game, although I get the feeling I really don’t remember the details of any story in any game I play. Still, I think when I play, I can tell when I’m interested in what’s going on, and I think the difference between Halo 1 and 2 if I were to sum up everything is that Halo 2 is like the best version of all the other FPS games you’ve played. It looks pretty good, controls pretty well, there’s nothing so much wrong with it. The story and the pacing of the game can easily match that of every other FPS out there. Halo 1, however, is more than a FPS, it’s a different time of gaming experience. It’s a movie in which your point of view comes from the FPS mechanic rather than a FPS game that is trying to make you feel like you’re playing a movie. Normally, I’d say the former is bad, so I think I just don’t have the words to describe it.

This is noteworthy though; a lot of the story in Halo 2 is told through cutscenes. In Halo 1, rarely were there cutscenes; instead, you played the story out in gameplay. This is an example of what I mean above. For every other FPS, Halo 2 is just like them. Halo 1 is a different thing entirely.

That probably doesn’t make any sense, but maybe if you’re also someone who sees the big differences between the original and sequel, maybe you feel the same.

I guess the good news is that with Halo 3, what I’ve been reading is that it’s much closer to Halo 1 than Halo 2. Just reading the gaming news this week, it’s all Halo 3. Excellent reviews have been making me think about a XBox 360, despite the high investment I’d have to put in. I guess it’d be no different for me as with the original XBox. I lined up for launch and bought the XBox just for Halo, no other reason. If there were no Halo, I would not have an XBox.

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Why (Again) Halo is the Best Game Ever

Sep 02, 2007 in Video Games

I started re-playing Halo maybe 10 days ago on Heroic, and just finished it on Saturday. Kind of skipped a lot (using shortcuts I remembered and always avoiding fights when possible), some parts were tougher than I remember, but still, not too hard for me. Finishing it and thinking about the game’s plot made me realize I don’t remember much about what goes on, especially the end, so I went on GameFaqs to find a story summary. There’s this one, which is a transcript of all the dialog, and an edited summary at Rampancy.net. I’ll read them through over the weekend.

I wanted to read back my review for the PC version of Halo to get some notes for this post, plus I reread parts of the Halo 2 review on Gamespot.

Wired had a recent article about Bioshock and how games can scare the hell out of you, perhaps much more so than any movie since you’re the one who’s interacting with the world. I agree, at the same time, I’m not so into the traditional “scary” games like Silent Hill or Resident Evil. Those are the horror genre of video games. Instead, I think scary is when your adrenaline is flowing and you feel like you’re panicking and just trying to survive. The scariest games for me are when you feel like you have total control over a situation (such as a first person shooter that has great control) and yet, you’re about to get your ass kicked. You have the ability to stop the ass-kicking but at the moment, you were not good enough, and now the pain is coming. Scary.

The scariest moment I ever had playing a game was with Aliens vs Predator (forgot if 1 or 2) for the PC. Face huggers were crawling around (and this was only in the first few levels), they had gotten me a few times, and they were very freaky creatures. AvP is a really dark game, so you’re running around (it’s a first person shooter) just trying to move sense of what’s going on, and face hugger can just grab on to you out of nowhere. I was in a level, being super cautious, walking trying to notice everything so I wouldn’t be caught by surprise. Already on edge, very fearful of what was around me. ARRRRRGH! Face-hugged! Dead!

My heart literally (or in my mind) stopped for 2 seconds to process the face-hugger on top of me. I was so shook up, I quit the game and swore I’d never play it again. And I kept my word.

So I went off-topic as normal, back to why Halo is so fantastically great. Halo is great because running is always a good option. Halo’s tagline is “Combat Evolved” and while I’m not sure if other people would agree with me, I think running away is a big part of that. In a real life situation, if you can run away from a battle to survive instead of trying to kill everyone, this is a good idea. In video games, however, you get deducted with mission incomplete or you just can’t progress. With Halo, this isn’t a problem. Running away can help you avoid large battles that might be takes extra hours to get through. Running helps you find secret shortcuts that help you get through the game faster.

It’s another reason why I’ve always felt like Halo truly makes you feel like a space warrior inside realistic conditions within its game world. You have a sense of freedom of not being restricted or being urged to follow conventions that only apply to video games (X kills, Y headshots, etc.). Halo doesn’t make you break out of the make-believe-spell it casts on you. You are allowed to believe it’s real.

I’ve started playing Halo 2, and it just sucks. There’s a reason why I’ve played completely through the original Halo 5+ times (on Normal to Legendary), yet only played Halo 2 once. I played a lot of multiplayer Halo 2 when I still worked at my old company, and then more at Mike’s house, but single player is barely a memory to me. So when I started again yesterday, I realized why: it sucks. The control just doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t quite have the same cinematic feeling of playing inside the scene of an epic movie. I started playing on Heroic, but I might switch back to Normal just to get through it faster. I don’t really find the challenge fun this time around. I don’t care much so far for the setting or plot, and I remember not caring much about playing on the Covenant side back then too.

Wired has an article about Halo 3, and Bungie realizing Halo 2 single player just wasn’t that good and what they’ve been doing to stop it. That, coupled with a new assortment of screenshots released on the Internet has me really wanting to play Halo 3 for the XBox 360. I’m hoping it’s going to be like Halo (1) again. Now if only I could get a raise at work….I’m not sure how I can afford to get it + the X360 + Guitar Hero/Rock Band (either one), that’s a $500 price tag, and I barely make that each month working in Vietnam.

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Halo (PC)

Jul 02, 2007 in Articles, Reviews, Video Games

While I was busy saving the universe at 15 frames per second, I wondered why anyone would even care to attempt to do so, especially on a world as ugly as the one I was on. But when I found myself sitting back and watching the credits roll for Gearbox’s PC port of Halo, I realized that, despite whatever sluggish graphical performance the port suffers on its introduction to PC gamers, Halo for the PC still retains its original magic that made the Xbox version quite possibly the best first person shooter of all time.

In Halo, you are Master Chief, the last surviving member of a group of super soldiers the human race developed to help fight off the Covenant, an alien species attempting to destroy humanity. You are resting in a hibernation-like state on the starship Pillar of Autumn when the Covenant catch up to your ship and prepare to board it. Captain Keyes, the captain of the Autumn, has you woken up so that you can help the ship fight off the Covenant boarding parties and prevent them from grabbing Cortana, the ship’s AI. And so as you wake up, your adventure in Halo begins.

Halo is a direct port of its Xbox counterpart. While multiplayer now supports online play, and the control system is now mouse-driven (though the game supports game pads and joysticks as well), the game is essentially the same. This, as with most ports, is both good and bad.

Halo run at its highest detail settings looks the same as the Xbox version other than for the fact that PC Halo at high resolution looks extremely crisp. You won’t find, however, anything like improved textures or better special effects. Fortunately, that doesn’t mean Halo looks like trash. But while Halo was the best looking FPS ever upon its release for the Xbox, it now ranks only slightly above average for a PC FPS.

The real issue with I had with Halo is on a performance level. I don’t have a strong gaming PC, but I can run most games moderately well. For me, Halo, despite it being released close to a year ago, runs on par with games that were just released (Doom 3). I ran the game at the worst possible detail settings at 1024×768 (with low sound quality as well), and I averaged 15 fps (for comparison, gamers consider 30 FPS playable with 60 FPS being optimal) throughout the game. While I found that I could play through the game at that rate even though I was playing at a harder difficulty level, this may have been because I know the levels of the game well. The loss in visual quality for me was quite significant as well. The game at its lowest settings often looked like an early Quake 3-engine game, which is to say that it can look like a 4-5 year old game at times.

The visual quality settings actually have a significant impact on gameplay. On high settings, in a situation where you have a Covenant who is partially invisible and difficult to fight, on low settings, that same Covenant becomes gray and easily dispatched of. Lighting and special effects are affected so drastically that explosions don’t really explode (you cannot see explosions or fire) and the flashlight, which is supposed to be absolutely necessary in some levels, becomes an afterthought. Halo actually becomes easier on its low detail settings. Some might say these types of issues occur with all PC games; if you don’t have the power to run a game, you’ll have to sacrifice certain things in order to play it. I would argue, however, that because Halo runs much more sluggishly than it should in terms of its ratio of performance to visual quality, this is an important issue that needs to be voiced. If you have a slower PC, the performance is definitely something you should consider because it may really damper your enjoyment of the game.

Unlike Halo’s graphics, its music, sound effects, and voice acting don’t suffer in the transition to the PC. While Halo supports surround sound, I ran the game in stereo and found the sound positioning to be very strong. I actually heard a lot of sounds I had never noticed in the Xbox version as well. Sound effects and voices are crisp, in sync, and distinct.

Having mouse control, as you might expect, is a huge advantage over the analog sticks of a gamepad. In the Xbox version, the aiming reticle was slightly magnetized; as you got closer to placing your reticle over the enemy, your aiming sensitivity would get slower. Therefore, it was easier to “lock on” to an enemy once you got your aim onto him. For mouse control, Gearbox just removed this aiming help. I did notice that when you’re manning a turret, you’ll still get a little bit of help, however, and so I’m not sure how much exists (if any) in other situations. Mouse aiming controls well as you might expect for any PC FPS. An odd thing is that the maximum mouse sensitivity that you can set through the game menu will likely be too low for the experienced PC gamer. This, however, can be tweaked externally through information you can find on the Internet. If you’re migrating from the Xbox version, you’ll find that sniping and grenade throwing is significantly easier with a mouse despite how well the Xbox version controlled.

Halo separates itself from other games due to the level it immerses the player in. From the start when you wake up on the Autumn, the game setting almost seems realistic, or at least plausible. You can only carry two weapons, just like a normal person might. You’re a super soldier, part man, part machine, so it’s no wonder you’re stronger than everyone else. You have a rechargeable shield which allows you to survive encounters that would normally wipe out an entire human squad. The characters around you act real and treat you like you would expect for a person of your stature. If humans are fighting around you, you’ll notice that their mood picks up when you arrive. They recognize who you are and what you’re capable of. They’ll chatter during fights and you’ll know it when they’re scared or confident about the current situation. They’re human.

Enemies are no different. There is a hierarchy system where if you show the lower grunts that you can defeat their higher ranked warriors, they’ll become scared of you and try to run. If you throw a grenade at them, they’ll panic in an attempt to escape from it. You’ll always feel that you’re powerful, but that doesn’t mean you can just walk in and kill everyone Rambo-style. The enemy fights you together as a coordinated team, not just a bunch of AI bots trying to kill you on their own. It’s hard to understand what this means until you play Halo. In other games, it seems that characters fight you the same no matter what happens around them. In Halo, however, the environment and situation always dictate how the other soldiers and enemies fight.

The sci-fi storyline is great, and the dialogue is consistently good as well. The voice acting is never cheesy, and the music always creates a great sense of atmosphere. The soundtrack picks its spots; it’s not just always looping in the background. Instead, it always seems that, at the game’s most exciting moments, that’s when the soundtrack is primed and getting you ready for what’s coming.

The magic of Halo is that it never lets you break from its grip. There’s nothing that reminds you that you’re just playing a game. From beginning moment to end, you are Master Chief, the super soldier. You’re fighting an alien species for the survival of all mankind. It’s all perfectly normal, perfectly natural. When you die, you won’t think “Hey! That’s CHEAP!” Instead, and even at the hardest difficulties, you’ll always know you can beat a particular section- you just need to limit your mistakes. And as a super soldier, that’s all you’ll ever want because, after all, you can only control what you do.

What makes Halo such a great game is that it is the closest thing to a cinematic experience in gaming. Usually, a “cinematic experience” means heavy use of beautiful pre-rendered cut scenes and high production values, such as what you’ll see in the Final Fantasy and Lord of the Rings games. In Halo, however, you’re not playing the movie or reliving the movie, you are the movie. If you’ve ever watched movies like Predator, or Aliens, or even Starship Troopers, the pure adrenaline rush you feel in the best moments of those movies is what the entire Halo game creates. In Halo, there are no puzzles or slow moments- Halo is pure action (without boring repetition) mixed in with a fantastic storyline, strong AI, excellent voice acting, and an epic score. Like Half-Life and Goldeneye (N64), Halo will always be considered one of the true classics of the genre.

Test System: Windows XP SP1, Intel M 1.5MHZ (approximately equivalent to a P4 2.0-2.2), 512MB, Radeon 9200 (64MB).

Note: Multiplayer was not tested

(originally published in GamersInfo.net)

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Halo: The Graphic Novel

Jul 02, 2007 in Articles, Reviews, Video Games

I am a comic fan. While I would never claim to be an expert on them, I enjoy them, and buy some every month, usually in compiled trade paperback (TPB) or hardcover (HC) form. That said, I have never found myself interested in comics based on video games. While there have been commercial successes like the Street Fighter and Tomb Raider series, and while the art within these types of comics are usually satisfactory, I have never found anything I enjoyed on a story level. When I heard about the Halo Graphic Novel (HGN) though, my interest was piqued but I still was not too optimistic about it.

HGN is based on the universe that Bungie created for its Xbox/360 game franchise, Halo. The book is the result of a team-up with comic giant Marvel, the company responsible for comics like the X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man. I am a big fan of the Halo games, especially the first, but in the same way with comics, I would never think of myself as a hardcore Halo devotee.

The “Graphic Novel” moniker used to title the book is a misnomer; HGN is actually a compilation of four separate, unconnected stories, with an art gallery collecting contributions from various artists to end the book. The book retails for $24.99, which may seem pricey for 128 pages (a normal comic book runs about 24 pages for $2.99, so the pricing for HGN is about $5.00 for a normal book’s worth of content.). In terms of physical book quality, the pricing fits; the book features a beautiful cover and sleeve and has been constructed for repeated readings. The paper and print quality are outstanding as well.

The stories inside, however, are a different matter. As I read the introduction of the book, it sounded like Bungie agreed with me about previous video game comics, and I might be pleasantly surprised reading these stories. Unfortunately, the stories are lacking. The story I was most interested in reading about beforehand was Sergeant Johnson’s escape from Halo, a story that takes place during the events of the first game. What I found was a series of panels showing Johnson shooting and running until he is rescued. Literally, that is the story, panels of action, little text, nothing of interest going on. There is nothing more to know than what I have told you (and I do not consider this a spoiler).

For the rest of the book, one story is about testing out the Spartan armor (what Master Chief wears), another is about an Elite Spec Ops Commander’s with the Flood, and the final story is about New Mombasa, the Earth city that Master Chief protects in Halo 2.

Of these, the New Mombasa story is probably the most interesting, but still, there is nothing worth remembering from it.

As you can guess, I was very disappointed in the book. It is really not worth purchasing, to the point where it is not worth reading. I would guess that only hardcore Halo fans (people who buy Halo shirts, read the novelizations) would be interested in it. Ultimately, HGN fails to break the pattern other comics have established before it: good artwork paired with uninteresting storytelling.

(originally published in GamersInfo.net)

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