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Supreme Commander 2 Demo – First Thoughts

Filed under: Gaming, Video Games — 1 Comment
February 27, 2010

Supreme Commander 2So I loaded up the demo for Supreme Commander 2 the other day to try it out and I am still pretty excited about the release next Tuesday. As with any sequel, I am quite nervous about how well it will stack up against its predecessor. From the demo, I think that the game will be a worthy successor.

The demo gives you two tutorial and two campaign missions. The tutorial missions are extremely helpful for those new to the way SupCom handles the RTS genre. The campaign missions provide a nice sampling of land, air, and naval combat from the UEF perspective.

New Research System

I was very impressed with the new research system. You acquire research points from research facilities and may spend them in the tech tree to upgrade your units and structures. Tanks can be upgraded with anti-air missiles and shields to improve their effectiveness. Once an upgrade has been purchased, all units instantly benefit from it, even if they are currently in battle. Climbing up the tech tree is no longer solely dependent on how well your economy is performing like the first SupCom. I foresee an interesting multiplayer experience since knowing what upgrades to research first will give you a considerable advantage.

New Tactical View

In the first game, zooming out from the battlefield brought up the ‘Tactical View’ where all of the on-screen units were represented by icons and you could more easily control your theater of war. This view has been enhanced by auto-grouping nearby units. Auto-grouped units have a numbered disc above them that will select the grouped units when clicked. Hot-keying control groups is still beneficial, but this new feature gives greater control over the battlefield, especially in hectic situations. It is entirely possible to fully control your units without ever hot-keying them into a control group.

The Square Enix Touch

The new maps in the demo’s campaign missions are pretty cool, especially the second where you fight on a series of platforms floating in the sky. This is one of the more noticeable influences of Square Enix on the game. They have also made the voice acting and some of the characters a bit campy, but that is Square Enix for you.

New Resource Management System

The major grievance I have against the demo is the new resource management system. In the first game, you collected and expended resources in real time. As you built a unit or structure, it would draw out from your resource pool at a constant rate. Now when a unit or structure is built, it immediately pulls out the full amount from your resource pool. This forces entirely too much micro-management when building a base and base-building is already micro-management enough for any RTS game.

With the previous real-time system, you could queue up a long list of structures to build and let your engineers run wild. Of course, this required you to plan ahead and not overstate your limits, but that is the nature of true strategy. Now, if you want to queue up a series of structures for an engineer to build, you must have all of the resources for all the structures at the time of queue creation, or you cannot add them to the queue.

This also extends to unit production. Unit production factories still have the awesome repeat order where you can give it a build order to constantly repeat, but if you do not have the resources to build that particular unit at that time, the factory will pause all production indefinitely. You must constantly watch all of your unit factories to make sure none of them have paused production. Periodically un-pausing them gets really old really quick and is a stress I do not need during battle.

Overall Experience

I am still pretty optimistic about the game. The new tac view and research system will add a lot to the multiplayer experience. I think the story is only going to be so-so, due to the campy Square Enix style, but thankfully RTS games are more about gameplay than story. Chris Taylor and his superb studio, Gas Powered Games, have certainly brought out a game that will easily contend with Starcraft 2 for top RTS this year. I will try to write up an official review in a couple of weeks after I have fully torn into the game.

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LAN Party Debrief

Filed under: Gaming, Video Games — 1 Comment
February 26, 2010

The LAN party this past Saturday was a blast! Everyone seemed to have a great time and are ready for the next one. We had seven people total show up. One of my friends had to drop out at the last minute due to something called a ‘wife’. I am not quite sure what that is, but I think I want one when I grow up.

If you consider yourself an avid PC gamer, get out there and throw down at some LAN parties with your friends!

The Setup

We started setting promptly at 10:00am and were finished around 10:45am, after a few problems and some quick troubleshooting. At this point, we were totally pschyked out of our minds and could not wait to play. Unfortunately, we forgot the first rule of LAN parties, that Murphy kicks his law into overdrive.

We fired up good ole MechWarrior 4 first. I set up a LAN lobby and waited for the others to connect. We all connected and played our first ten minute game with no hassle at all, except that my keyboard was not operating normally. I exited the game, checked my cords, and returned to set up another lobby.

This time around two people were not able to connect to the game, so we entered another troubleshooting round. After several minutes of ‘WTF is going on’, we thought that the ancient hub we were using could not handle the network traffic. We went to our friendly neighborhood Office Depot to buy a new switch (for the tech-ignorant: switches are better than hubs). We got back to the house at 11:30 and plugged it up.

FINALLY! All our problems were instantly solved and we continued playing. Just kidding, the two problem computers still could not connect to the LAN game. After a few more minutes of ‘WTF IS GOING ON HERE!’, we noticed that only the Windows XP machines were not connecting. The rest of us were running either Vista or 7.

This was really confusing. How could XP not connect to a game, but Vista and 7 had no problems at all? We started to scream things like ‘THIS MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL’ and ‘XP IS THE GREATEST EVER, WHY IS IT HAVING A PROBLEM?’, but noticed that did not help at all.

When it comes to problems, I normally live by the mantra, ‘It is always something simple’, however in times like these it is extremely hard, since the craziness of the problem threw me into overdrive. We circled around this problem for the next 45 minutes until the attending networking guru stumbled upon the problem.

When hooking up the computers, I had connected my router to the cable modem/router and then the switch to my router. What I had forgotten was that the other day, the power went out in my apartment and reset my router back to default settings. Since the cable modem and my router were both Linksys, they both wanted to have the same IP address and the XP computers were getting confused as to which device was which.

I felt like such an idiot.

The Gameplay

After the rocky start, we played MechWarrior 4 for several hours. We started with 3v3 Team Destruction until the seventh person showed up. 4v3 is no fun, so we did 4v4 and added a bot to the short team. I aptly named the bot ‘Your Mom’ to enhance the fun, and believe me, we wore out all the jokes you can make with that.

At one point I was on the short team and we were playing on a mountainous map. The bigger mechs (which we had all chosen due to their awesomeness) have trouble climbing up the mountains, so we were all careful when navigating through them. Unfortunately for my team, Your Mom had trouble navigating and would mostly sit on the side lines trying to figure out where to go. We charged in and dealt a good deal of damage to the other team, but they out numbered us and killed us pretty quickly. Then Your Mom comes out of nowhere, annihilates the entire enemy team and runs and hides again. It was the strangest, yet most hilarious, event of the day.

It took us a while to get tired of MechWarrior, because it is such an awesome LAN game, but we eventually did and switched over to Left 4 Dead 2. We played a couple of rounds of Scavenge before moving on to Dark Crusade. At this time, one of the guys had to leave, so we were back to playing 3v3 again.

We were seated at a long table with three people on each side, so one side of the table played against the other.  The way it worked out, all the experienced DC players (including myself) were on the same side. We fired up a game and completely power-hosed the others. They cried like little girls about it, so we were no longer allowed to play the race we were most familiar with. However, that still did not even the score up, so we finished up with some 2v2v2, which worked out pretty great.

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LAN Party

Filed under: Gaming, Video Games — Leave a comment
February 18, 2010

LAN party on Saturday! My friends and I have been planning this one for the past couple of months and it is going to be awesome. Online gaming is fun, but there is nothing better than destroying your friends in a game and instantaneously witness them react to your gaming superiority. Plus, you get the added bonus of not feeling guilty about playing video games all day instead of socializing, albeit socializing with fellow nerds may not be the same as socializing with real people. But who has real friends anyway?

We have eight confirmed participants for Saturday, so it’s going to be 4v4 madness all day long. Witty banter and friendly fire are going to drive all our emotions as we fuel up with Monsters and Mountain-Dew. Our day will start around 10am as we get set up and game away until we pass out from exhaustion. I anticipate playing for no less than twelve hours, because once you have put in the effort to set up your LAN, you want to get the maximum mileage out of it.

Thankfully, Pizza Hut still has their ‘Any pizza for $10’ going on so we have a cheap, constant supply of food. Of course, there is a Taco Bell and a Chinese place right up the road that we will probably end up crashing with our ravenous bunch of gamers. Never ever get between a PC gamer and his food. He (there is no such thing as a girl PC gamer) will eat you as an appetizer.

Our game selection will mainly consist of older titles. Classic games have a certain nostalgia appeal that really puts magic in a LAN party. They also open the floor to everyone’s past war stories for additional entertainment.

Games:

Mechwarrior 4: Vengence

Giant walking tanks with customizable weapons? Instant gaming gold! This game was completely amazing when it released and still holds up today, especially in a LAN setting. 4v4 on this game is boss!

Learning the controls is kind of tricky, especially if you are used to more modern, fact-paced shooters. Mechs don’t move as fast or react as quickly, but once you get the idea, you are in for the ride of your life.

Starcraft

With Starcraft 2 looming in the distance, it was only right to resurrect this piece of gaming history. This game just oozes classic era PC gaming (remember when Blizzard was a group of nobodies developing out of a garage?).

I must confess, however, that I have never actually played this game. Please hold back your shurikens! I was really into the game Total Annihilation when this came out and kind of overlooked this gem. I never went back to play it.

Dawn of War: Dark Crusade

Dawn of War: Dark Crusade

Now this is a good game and one that is pretty easy to pick up on as well. Relic created an awesome franchise with the Dawn of War series and this is its pinnacle. With seven races to choose from, the action never gets old.

This should be mandatory at all LAN parties. Nothing says ‘We are such good friends’ like ‘Hey, guys! Lets do an eight player free-for-all!’ No matter how you choose to play, this will instantly become the life of any LAN party.

Left 4 Dead 2

Left 4 Dead 2

Bring this to a LAN Party and you can generate some real competition. Playing through the Scavenge or Versus modes with a room full of people will surely drive you to shout in your friends’ faces.

This game is super easy to just pick up and play. Just team up against one another and have at it! Plus, you never have to worry about playing with annoying kids who are way better than you will ever be (but only because they don’t have real jobs).

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CD Review: Living Sacrifice – The Infinite Order

Filed under: Music — Leave a comment
February 11, 2010

At the start of the last decade, Living Sacrifice was a giant in the Christian metal scene. They had just released The Hammering Process and were touring alongside P.O.D. and Project 86. With such a strong step forward into the new millennium, it felt like they would only continue to soar. However, a few short years later, they disbanded, leaving many of their fans with the stark realization that even giants can eventually fall. Fortunately, this turned out to be only a short hiatus. In 2008, they digitally released two new songs and announced that they would be working on a new album.

Living Sacrifie - The Infinite Order

Now, at the beginning of the new decade, Living Sacrifice has returned to reclaim their place in metal with the release of The Infinite Order.

Certainly their finest work to date, The Infinite Order starts off strong and continues to mezmerize throughout its 47 minute run time. The polished, melodic feel is unique enough to stand on its own, but still carries the weight of the classic Living Sacrifice sound. This definitavely marks a new chapter in the band’s journey.

Songs like Rules of Engagement and Organized Lie provide a solid feel for the grooves and breakdowns that Living Sacrifice is known for while Love Forgives and Apostasy show the new, melodic direction the band is headed toward. This musical diversity provides a great aural experience for all metal fans. You are furiously swept into the breakdowns and then gently moved with a melodic drive that continues to rattle around in your head long after you have turned the music off.

Whether you are a long time fan, or just happened to stumble across them, Living Sacrifice demands your attention. They are back with a passion and this album shows how dedicated they are to once again dominating the Christian metal scene!

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9-11 Conspiracies: Fear Factory Edition

Filed under: Politics, Science — 4 Comments
February 9, 2010

I love metal. I listen to it throughout most of my day via Sirius Satellite Radio‘s Liquid Metal station. Every once in a while, they will host artists in the studio to interview them, especially if the artists are approaching a CD release date. Today, a couple member of Fear Factory were there promoting their new album, Mechanize, that will be released next week. Liquid Metal has been playing a few tracks from the album lately, and they all sound pretty awesome. I am glad that Fear Factory is back doing what they do best. Unfortunately what they do best is creating metal and not thinking.

One of their new songs is unambiguously titled, “Controlled Demolition”.  Burton C. Bell, of Fear Factory, introduced the song with the following statement:  “This is a song about how a certain destruction in our world of the last decade may or may not have been a controlled demolition. It is up to you what you believe. ” Upon hearing this, I immediately felt nerd rage begin to overload my intellectual abilities as I thrust my headphones away from my face. All I wanted to do was reach through the radio and educate him in hopes that his ignorance could be cured.

I completely understand the reason for political differences, and I know that Fear Factory is liberally minded when it comes to politics. Political differences arise due to the opposing philosophical ideals that fuel them. This is why we will forever have the conservative and liberal paradigms. I could have easily listened to the song if it was promoting a political view opposite that of my own, but one thing I cannot stomach is willful ignorance.

I find it baffling that in spite of all the scientific evidence levied against the 9-11 controlled demolition conspiracy that people still believe it. Have we really become that scientifically illiterate as a nation? What really disturbed me about the band member’s comment on it was when he used the word ‘believe’. How can you ‘believe’ or not ‘believe’ in scientific facts?

Can I choose whether or not to believe in the ‘conspiracy of gravity’? If I plug up my ears and decry the notion of gravity as only a government conspiracy, does that make it any less true? If someone went around screaming about how gravity was only a government conspiracy, we would gently take that person to a nice group of doctors dressed in sterile, white coats. So, how are 9-11 conspiracy supporters any different? Their conspiracies have been scientifically proved false many, many times, but sadly enough, they remain willfully ignorant.

I realize that science is hard, but we must regain our focus as a nation on math and science to prevent this from becoming the norm. Ignorance spreads like a virus.

My new slogan: “Science is hard, so if you don’t understand it, keep your mouth shut until you do. “

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The Dividing Line

Filed under: Politics — 2 Comments
January 26, 2010

A couple of weeks ago, I was having a nice political discussion with one of my ultra-conservative friends (who is ironically a member of a worker’s union), and he made a statement about how Nancy Pelosi had nothing to say when Rush Limbaugh was rushed to the hospital. Me, being the moderate I am, turned that around on him and reminded him what Rush had to say when Ted Kennedy died (sorry for the HuffPo link, but it was the first Google result). Then I began thinking about our current political polarization here in America, and when you think about it, it is really disheartening. We have become so quick to draw party lines and point fingers that we have forgotten what we are fighting for.

It doesn’t matter if you are a baby-killing liberal Democrat or a gay-bashing conservativeRepublican, we are all Americans and want the same things – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Being the intrinsically self-centered creatures we are, we tend think that our idea for attaining these things is the best thing since sliced bread and that all opposing ideas are evil plots specifically designed to destroy us and undermine the nation. Whatever happened to critical thinking? The only thing that is really destroying us is our inability to consider opposing ideas as viable solutions to a common problem.

No one claims to be right 100% of the time until you come to political topics, then they transform into a inerrant scholar and will not concede the argument no matter how many facts you throw at them. They completely reject any other approach and remain blissfully ignorant and arrogant. To move forward we need to purge this mentality and accept the fact that we can sometimes be wrong in our political views and ideals. All opposing views should be met with careful consideration rather than blistering criticism. Facts and analysis should always trump buzzwords and speculation.

Three simple steps to becoming a critical thinker:

  1. Admit you can be wrong
  2. Look at the facts
  3. Quite acting like a jerk

We have to work together to fix our problems and not declare “it’s our way or the highway” (big thanks to Scott Brown for stopping this from happening).

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Hello world!

Filed under: Random — Leave a comment
December 23, 2009

Hello World!

I am quite sure that my fellow programmers are intimately familiar with this program. It is a rite of passage that we must all write before advancing, so I have taken it upon myself to make this my first blog post here on my awesome nerd blog!

Programming is currently my livelihood. In fact, I am working on some SQL SSIS stuff right now and am using this post as a slight distraction until I gather my thoughts. Well, my thoughts are now gathered, so I must go and fight the good fight of code.

Peace!

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Christmas Time Again

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December 10, 2009

Well its that time of year again! You know, the time that everyone starts complaining about something.  The Christians are up in arms about the ‘War on Christmas’, the atheists are rambling on about how ‘Christians are ramming Jesus down their throats’, and everyone else is screaming about how ‘Christmas is just a materialistic holiday’. When did Christmas become so painful?

Enjoying Christmas is so easy a child can do it, and they are about the only ones who do anymore. Just as the head elf, Benard, in the movie ‘The Santa Clause’ said, “Children hold the spirit of Christmas in their hearts”. As responsible adults, we forget about the spirit of Christmas and make of it what we want–a season of contention. We need to accept some personal responsibility and simply enjoy Christmas again.

Christmas, at its core, is all about spending time with friends and family. Everyone agrees with this. We need to get back to this basic principle and spead love, not hate and division. We must take back the holidays and recreate the magic we remembered as children.

Below is a handy guide to enjoying Christmas for each of the three groups I named above.

For Christians

There is no ‘War on Christmas’. What is so wrong about retailers trying to include everyone during the holidays, anyway? A retailer’s sole mission is to make a ton of money off our consumerism. They are only trying to maximize their shopper base, and I would venture to guess that they don’t care about the ‘true meaning’ of Christmas at all. The only one making a ‘War on Christmas’ is you.

For the record, the only thing truly Christian about Christmas is the story of Jesus’ birth. Literally everything else came from pagan winter festivals; everything from Christmas trees to colored lights to exchanging wrapped gifts. Go look up the history of Christmas and see for yourself.

For Atheists

Does a Nativity scene on public property really erode the fabric of our society? It is public property after all, which means it belongs to all of us. You have just as much of a right to put up a secular Christmas display as the Christians have for putting up the Nativity. Oh, wait, Santa Clause is already a secular symbol for Christmas that is currently more pronounced than Jesus’ birth on public property. Can you try to chill out a bit and take a more constructive approach besides attacking the Nativity? This is suppose to be a season of unity where we can celebrate everyone’s views.

For the ‘Retailers are out to get us’ Crowd

If you don’t like the consumerism craze that goes on during December, then don’t be a part of it. Focus on the important things like your friends and family. I am sure they would appreciate spending time with you more than feigning appreciation over a gift. I hate the day after Thanksgiving as much as anyone else, which is precisely why I stay at home and hang out with the people that matter to me the most.

The magic of Christmas is up to you to capture. If you let yourself fall prey to consumerism and the ‘rush as fast as I can to buy gifts and mail cards’ plague, then you have only yourself to blame. Calm down and cherish the simple things this holiday season. Retailers cannot dictate how you live your life.

Christmas is what you make of it, so make it count.
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My Plan to Save the Arts

Filed under: Music — 1 Comment
August 22, 2009

I love the arts and try to support them however I can. Back in the high school days, I was a socially outcast, hard-core band nerd. I may not have had a lot of popular friends, but who needs those when you can make music? Eventually my social skills picked up and I became a regular guy with a passion for music and the arts in general. I wish everyone would share this passion with me.

One of the biggest complaints about the upcoming generation is its inability to think critically. What did you expect of them when they are being exposed to mindless entertainment all of the time? Their failings are only a reflection of our departure from having the arts in the forefront of our culture.

In the early 20th century, the mega-celebrities at the time were intellectuals, writers, and musical composers. Now, the celebrities are mindless drones parading around and consuming our lives at the behest of Hollywood. Well, it may not be that outrageously bad, but we have lost respect for the truly talented and artistic individuals that live among us. We have alcomated ourselves to vegging out to Hollywood’s latest screen vomit instead of searching for mental improvement.

Thankfully, organizations like Vh1’s Save the Music are fighting to keep us from losing our souls to apathetic entertainment. We should all get behind movements like this for the sake of our children.

I have recently created a great solution that will save the arts in our world: promote them as ‘green’ forms of entertainment. Since going ‘green’ is all the rage these days, why not piggy-back this? Think about all the resources it takes to produce a typically summer movie blockbuster and compare that with the minimal amount of resources it takes to produce a Broadway play. Broadway is hundreds of times greener than Hollywood.

Hollywood’s Carbon Footprint

Broadway’s Greening Initiative

So, let’s all save the arts by promoting them as the ‘greenest’ forms of entertainment available. If people won’t love the arts for their beauty, lets just guilt them into it.

People forgetting about the arts? Problem solved.

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