Sean Reid's Blog

This is the first screenshot of a Prime workspace in action with prototype resources for Mecho Tales.

The full-size image is 5760x1200 because I have 3 1920x1200 resolution monitors. If you preview this image in your browser, be sure to zoom in and scroll around to see everything! If you have an even bigger resolution than me, then I tip my hat to you!

My comments on this video are as follows:

• ‎"War is not a game". Games are a form of media entertainment. To say that war is not a game, she should also say that war cannot also be a movie, a book, and a TV show.
• "World War II... it's not based on real people." I do believe that WWII did involve real people. In fact there were magnitudes more deaths in WWII than any present-day war.
• ‎"We've just come off the worst month of casualties in the whole war." This game would have been in development for many, many months. There is no way for the developers to know that the game would be complete around the same time as the peak period of deaths in the Afghanistan war.
• ‎"and it's just not based on reality." If the game is not based on reality, then why are you so upset?
• ‎"The average game age of a person buying this game is 39 years old." I will have to see the actual study on this because either this means that the vast majority of players is exactly 39 which weighs the average towards that number, or there are an even distribution of player ages which means that there are just as many 63 year old players as 15 year old players.
• "Well, pro wrestling, nobody dies, hopefully." Owen Hart.
• ‎"If you don't want to play it, don't buy it." Exactly. I don't buy a ticket to see Sex and the City, and I also don't go around trying to stop the movies from being released or take the DVDs off the shelves.

Bought this yesterday and played it a bit. I was eyeing this one out for a while because I don't have the episodes, and I also wanted a GTA 4 for my PC since it is a powerhouse. The thing that pushed me over the edge was that I came to realize that there was a whole new 80s radio station as well ass the addition of Run to the Hills by Iron Maiden to Liberty Rock Radio, as well as a few other good tracks.

It appears that when the game isn't loading, I get a good solid 60 FPS. I haven't tweaked it much, so I could probably get more stability out of the game. Though, some forum posts suggest that the most recent patch has decreased the performance of the game for many players. Also, there is a strange "bug" where the game thinks my vsync is 56 hz and not the correct 60. Fraps is reporting 56 fps most of the time which indicates that this is the capped framerate. My work-around was to use ATI Tray Tools to force vsync in the GTA 4 executable and then disable vsync in the game directly. Although 4 FPS may not seem like much, it must be realized that out of 60 rendered frames per second, there are 4 "double frames" resulting in 8 frames out of 60 that are duplicates. So if framerate can be described as fluidity, then 56 fps on a 60 hz monitor has a few rough edges. ;)

I beat the Brood War expansion on the weekend. I thought I was nearly done the game on Friday when I learned that there are 2 more missions in the final episode. The really sucky thing was that these 2 final levels were SO LONG.

The levels were long in a very irritating way. In single-player Starcraft, the enemies have typically have bases setup by default. Every 5 minutes or so, the enemy will make a push and attack you. The basic gameplay gist of SP Starcraft is to build-up your base and peel away the enemy base because they don't rebuild too many structures. Although that doesn't sound terribly irritating, the last 2 levels were very large, and there was the added annoyance of enemy micro.

The enemy micro is what I define as the ability to cast the special abilities of each individual unit with extreme efficiency. In fact, there seems to be no penalty (a human player would have to select units whether it be by mouse, unit groups, or a mix of the two, plus hotkeys). So, as I move my zerg in for an attack, ZZZAAAPPP, there goes off 10 psionic storms by protoss templar. OK.. I guess I'll use a different group of units.. BAM BAM BAM. All picked off with mind-control. So annoying to constantly have to make waves of zerg to go in, attack, die, and repeat.

The best units to use in the end seemed to be guardians because they do massive damage to ground units/structures and usually from a safe range. Anyways, onto the original point of this post. I wanted to play single player Brood War because I wanted to experience the game's storyline before getting into Starcraft 2. I saw a preview video about Starcraft 2's single player component. It looks very much improved from the original Starcraft. I haven't played SC2 single player and don't know everything about it, but it seems that they even address the issue of preserving upgrades between maps. I am sure many of you out there find it strange to have to re-research upgrades when going between levels. It is not a serious thing, but yeah, it does stick out there and cause people to think "what up with that?"

I don't mind the long, epic single player battle in Starcraft, but only if it's within reason. If I have to make all unit types and use all of their abilities including the defiler's plague, the queen's ensnare, and the lurker's burrow, while controlling all of my 12 max-unit groups, making sure certain units stay back and other units go forward,... then I am not going to have fun (what a mouthful).

I have high hopes for the single player missions in Starcraft 2. With mission branching and choices mixed with an in-game central pub plus cutscenes to convey story, I think I will be pleasantly pleased. In the worst case, Starcraft 2 can't be any worse than the original Starcraft's single player missions.

The Twitter widget is back and working. That is all.