I Have Been Flanking The Panzers

» Written on October 24, 2006 at 7:47 AM «

And perhaps, neglecting my other obligatory artistic and online duties. Apologies, but goddamn; is killing Nazis fun.

Company of Heroes is shaping up to have one of my own personal awards for being one of those awesome creations that game developers sometimes manage to come up with, even through all the filth they are usually surrounded with. Indeed, it’s not very often you will find me praising a real-time-strategy game; even rarer that you will find me praising a WWII-based game that came out after the first wave of WWII games began to hit the street. CoH is simply fantastic in the way it delivers its slice of RTS action, combining, in my opinion, elements of Full Spectrum Warrior’s system of having troops find their cover in defined positions and its style of using squad-based combat rather than actual, individual unit-based action. It pulls this off rather well, with, of course, the notable drawbacks; I wish tanks would friggin’ show slightly more accuracy and initiative, and I wish troops wouldn’t get such a crazed defensive bonus when retreating; I had 5 Sherman tanks firing at a lone soldier who was retreating right in front of them, and his defensive bonus held long enough for him to outrun my tanks. All of them. Little things that nick and chip away at the overall experience. However, the game is, without a doubt, my new RTS of fame, the last one having been quite a while ago in the form of Red Alert 2.

I suppose you can imagine my attitude towards RTSes in general, and now imagine how awesome this particular Company must be. Highly recommended, indeed.

And what joy! It doesn’t require the DVD to be in the drive in order to function without a hitch. How I adore developers who decide to make these kind of design choices to facilitate the game for players, not fucking marketers who require copyright protection and all sorts of other shit that serve only to detract from the experience.

I’ve been having a blast with this over Hamachi with a few of my friends, including Chiff. I distinctly remember a 3 on 2 situation, with 3 of us against 2 computers, getting owned, and dealing ownage. Whoever won was irrelevant; the mere pace of frenzied action was exciting enough. Now, if only I could get them all to install mikes and go over Ventrilo, that’d be kickass.

That last paragraph did indeed seem like corporate sponsorship-based advertising. I assure you otherwise.

In other rather uneventful news, school (as usual) has dropped back to the monotone functions which it endures during normal term time. Without the threat of exams (except one final one), everything has seemed to become even more sub-standard than it was before, prompting me to, for the first time ever, call sick. Previously, even if I was sick to the point that my eyeballs were about to roll out of their sockets, I would merely gut it out in the hope of actually learning something from the lessons I would be about to attend. So a few days ago, when I had a fever, I called it.

I was right, once again. For the next lesson, as I learned the next day, would have been cancelled, and I would have endured for nothing of gain.

The thought scares me.

The script for Hard Life is just beginning to take form, and characters and ideas are finally becoming something more than a disorganized mess of characters. On that note, I find that somehow, recently, my penchant for eating has become ravenous, almost preposterous, along with the diminished interest in such artistic endeavours. Perhaps I need to start that crazy routine again. In any case, I did manage to scrounge one or two designs in the last month, one of which I am quite pleased with, now shown next in its design status.

Please do note that of course, this is shameless advertising, but everyone has to start somewhere. If you’d like to perhaps take a peek at what other pixels (and perhaps illustrations) are on apparel these days, you could have a look at my store.

I mean, at least I’m not asking for donations, right? At least you’re getting something more than a damn sticker which basically means “I DONATED SO STOP BUGGING ME FOR ANOTHER ONE”.

Speaking of my T-shirt store, it’s recently that I noticed Zazzle.com has implemented a new interface for uploading T-shirt designs, and with it the ability to create supersized views of the product without an annoying Zazzle watermark is gone. I’m not sure if this is an oversight, or an intentional feature of the new interface, but either way, it’s gay, and I hope you are not overly troubled by it. I will be sending a inquiry to Zazzle if this issue continues to persist, which it probably will. Oh well.

And Adobe Lightroom is actually looking very promising to be my “quick camera RAW edit” tool of choice, if it can actually fix those damn memory/speed issues it has, which Bitmap says is apparently “normal”. Fuck that. I want my apps to run smoothly when a gig of goddamn RAM is available.

Camera-wise, I’ve been putting the new lens through its paces, and my new cheap-ass monopod is really awesome for low-light situations. I really should have gotten one sooner; I’m always too huggered to bring along a tripod, even a portable one. At least a monopod can be explained away as a device of torture or something.

And I will be getting Medal of Honor: Heroes and Killzone: Liberation and Ace Combat X for the PSP, even if I have to drive to EAHQ to torch the place myself. I’ve been heading to game shops the past few weeks in vain everytime they tell me “It’s coming in today zomg!” and then looking at me, as if daring me to punch their faces in when they don’t have it after all.

Tommy-pet can only hold out so long, so watch out. 9 millimeter is very painful, as those Krauts will attest to.

All I need is a rifle, one round and a path to Berlin

   

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