Category: Revelation

How I spent my winter vacation…

I had a list a mile long of things I wanted to accomplish this vacation, including writing up a faq about the imminent loss of the DAFIF data, adding some more data to my extended GPX file, and writing a tach book entry program for my flying club.

Instead I spent the whole damn thing catatonic in front of the TV or the computer. However, I did nearly manage to finish Bad Magic a very funny book. I should be finished by tonight (except the appendices). I don’t read nearly enough books these days, so it’s good to find a good one and time to read it.

Oh well.

Half Life 2

I got Half Life 2 for Christmas. It arrived this afternoon. So far today I’ve spent about 2 hours playing it, and so far I’ve gotten to two “exposition points” where you meet somebody friendly and you think they are going to explain everything to you, but really all they do is say “You’ve got to get to so-and-so’s lab, RUN LIKE HELL”. I’ve met a lot of those ghoulish looking “Civil Protection” guys, and those flying buzz saws, and just a minute ago I got cut to ribbons by a helicopter gunship of some sort. I’ve got my crow bar, a pistol and a submachine gun. Ammo for the SMG is darn scarce, which is annoying. Back in HL1, it seemed you used the MP5 all the time – I find myself having to be more careful about this SMG.

Technically the graphics are stunning, the AI looks way better, and so far I’ve seen some very cool things. One of the interesting things was the way the NPCs would keep turning their head towards you as you walked around them when they were talking.

Of course, all this technical sophistication comes with a cost. The original came on one CD, this one comes on 5. I played the original on a 300MHz Celeron 300A overclocked to 450MHz and a 16Mb TNT graphics card. This one is a Athlon XP2400+ processor and an 128Mb ATI graphics card, and I get the impression I’m barely keeping up. The hideously slow loads as you move from one area to the next are still there, and they seem longer. One of the strangest things is that some mobile objects fade away as you walk half-way across a room away from them. The smaller the object, the sooner they fade away. One thing that was a little annoying to me was the lack of an Obstacle Course or Boot Camp to get used to the movement controls. Instead, as you progress you get little prompts the first time you are likely to need something, like “Use Z to zoom”, in a box on the screen. (Speaking of which, I wish I could shoot when I’m zooming.)

I’m only playing at medium level this time, which is just as well – I keep getting my ass nearly shot off, and then finding a big cache of health/ammo/armour. As a matter of fact, just before I quit, I found one that got me from about 17 health and no armour up to 100 health and 30 armour. Laura remarked “You know you’re being prepped to hit something really nasty”, and she’s right. So I hit save and decided to call it a night.

I can tell that this game is going to be fun. I don’t know if it’s going to be as much fun as the original, but it’s looking good so far.

Blast from the Past

One of my former cow-orkers at GeoVision just sent me this picture from one of our pick-up hockey games:

GeoHockey, as we called it, was a blast. I was terrible at it, but it got me a chance to get some exercise. The best part, though, was getting an ice-level view of some really good hockey players. There was one guy, Chris Fanjoy, who played in a couple of leagues, and because he played 4 or 5 times a week his equipment never dried out – you could smell him coming sometimes. There was another guy, dammit I forget his name, who just about danced on his skates – I remember just standing there in awe at what a fluid and natural skater he was. There were several other really good players, and watching them make plays gave you a sense of the game that I never got from watching it on TV.

There was another guy who I was always glad to see, because with him there I wasn’t the worst skater on the ice. He never changed his clothes – he skated in the same black jeans that he’d go to work in.

And there was a guy or two I was always sorry to see – they were good players, but they cared too much about scoring, and not enough about having fun. One of them would cuss me out for not having enough equipment after he’d broken the rules and raise the puck or after I’d limp off after he body checked me to the ground. We didn’t allow body checking or raising because this was supposed to be a fun thing, and some people didn’t have full equipment (namely cups).

We usually didn’t have goalies either – we just turned the nets around backwards and you had to bounce the puck off the back boards into the net to score.

Normally it was so much fun that it was worth the knee pain afterward.