I’ve been staying up playing a lot of video games this week. The Team Fortress 2 Beta came out this week after an initial delay for those who pre-purchased the Half-Life 2 Orange Box. Artistically it is excellent and it seems to have stuck to the core game play of the original Team Fortress faithfully. It’s integrated really well into the new Steam community features as well. So while you’re playing you can shift+tab to get the Steam Community overlay where you can chat with your friends online. It makes it really easy to join a game that your friend is already playing in. And the stat tracking is nice as well.

Since the engineer is my favorite class, I thought I’d share this little introduction with you.

I also picked up World in Conflict, the game I’ve been raving about for months now. Unfortunately it kept freezing on high graphical settings. It would run with a decent framerate and then suddenly freeze. I downloaded all of the new drivers (one of which came out yesterday) and some hotfixes for Vista. I went through four or five tries of changing graphical settings. And then I changed everything to medium quality. At that setting you switch from DX10 to DX9, and it worked. So that sucked. I mean, great that it stopped freezing in the middle of the game, but sucks that I can’t play it at a higher setting. Hopefully a patch or something will come out that fixes it.

And of course there’s the ever present Medieval 2 which I’ve been avoiding for the past couple days. My ally attacked my practically undefended castle and I don’t want to fight that battle. Not only does my castle have a small garrison, but the attacking army is probably the biggest I’ve ever seen. They have all kinds of catapults and trebuchets and things. I must think on how I’m going to retaliate and crush them!

One of the editor’s at GameSpot, Guy Cocker, posted about a visit he had with System 3, the developer of a Ferrari racing game. He mentioned that he got to go for a ride on the Mugello circuit in Italy. (Actually he called it Mugalo.) I thought the name sounded familiar and after seeing the map I recognized it instantly from Forza. I can visualize the course in my head. All the turns, when to accelerate and decelerate. The parts where I lose traction the most often. It’s kind of creepy actually. Anyway, here’s the map.

With the new computer setup I’ve been playing a lot of video games. After the late night I previously wrote about, I continued the trend and stayed up again until 2:30am the following night. The night after that I stayed up until 4:30am and last night I think I stayed up until 1 or 2 again. I’ve been focusing on three games mainly, BioShock, World in Conflict and Supreme Commander.

BioShock

I got a bit of a late start with this one. I had to wait for the new PC before I could dive in, but I’m glad I waited. The environments are the best part of this game. A lot of people have been raving about the graphics.

…the environments you find throughout the game look amazing and practically beg to be explored… In addition to a terrific artistic design that ties the visuals together, the game has a very strong technical side, provided you have a machine that’s built enough to handle it. Unreal Engine 3 is under the hood, and all the requisite bells and whistles are along for the ride. – GameSpot Review

The art style, animations, and special effects create an unparalleled sense of mood and believability. – IGN Review

However, it’s the sound that’s really impressed me. After playing the demo on the 360 I started inquiring about surround sound, but I ended up going for the PC version and I don’t have the desire for surround sound in the bedroom.

I still haven’t made it very far through the story yet but geez those big daddy’s are brutal. I went through all of my first aid kits fighting the last one I ran into. It was pretty brutal. I know it doesn’t really matter if you die as there is no penalty, but I still try to avoid it. I’ve also been ‘rescuing’ the little sisters. I would imagine it makes the game slightly harder maybe since you don’t get as much ADAM, but I don’t really know the difference at the this point. I just know it feels good to ‘rescue’ little girls. Their eyes get so big and watery and they say “thank you mister.” Now how can you ‘harvest’ them after seeing that?

World in Conflict

What haven’t I already said about this game? I’ve played it at every stage so far: alpha, beta and now the demo. It looks gorgeous and runs smooth on my system now. Jules asked me if there was anything interesting about the gameplay today over some pizza. I rambled off a bunch of things but I thought I’d highlight the cooperative nature of the multiplayer component.

When you begin a game, you pick a role: infantry, armor, support or air. You get the rock paper scissors thing going with all the units. A tank is weak against helicopters which are weak against anti-air vehicles which are weak against infantry and so on and so forth. With built it VOIP it is easy to communicate with other players when you need assistance from another class. In addition to the VOIP there is a way to indicate on the screen where you need help and what action you need taken. For instance, if I’m playing support, I can see artillary indicators on my screen when my teammates want a building or area barraged.

If you have a decent computer and enjoy RTS games, I strongly urge you to download the demo and try it out yourself.

Supreme Commander

Last but not least is a game that I have been playing off and on since its release back in February. I wanted to try it out again with the boost to my CPU power. It played well before up until I got hundreds of units on the screen all doing their own thing. It seems to be handling the load much better now.

Also exciting is the expansion Forged Alliance (which is where the above image is from) due to come out in Novemeber.

Yahoo!

And for those of you who don’t know, I started working for Yahoo! two weeks ago. I’ll have to write another post soon about how that is.