Visual Studio 2010

I’ve literally just installed this and it seems pretty good. I just needed something to knock up some UML and class relationship diagrams. Handled them really well, no problems converting from Visual Studio Express Edition 2008. Check it out. Here

Codemasters. i7. Operation Flashpoint.

There’s an interesting video over at intel’s website that takes a look at the way Operation Flashpoint was programmed to take advantage of the i7 processor. It’s only short but worth your attention. Take a look here.

Modern Warfare 2. Really?

Like everybody else that owns a console, or has the faintest interest in gaming, I was looking forward to the release of the sequel to one of the most successful FPS games of all time. I’ll point out now that I loved Modern Warfare. I spent hours upon hours of my life playing that game, both single player and multi player. I loved it. So like everybody else I had extremely high hopes for the sequel. Oh how I was disappointed.

The hype for Modern Warfare 2 was through the roof. The American store Gamestop started selling it early, it got its own west end red carpet launch and stores across the country were open at midnight for its launch.

Despite all the hype, this was never a 10/10 masterpiece it was made out to be. The games story as a whole felt like a drier repeat of the last game with a little more action. Yes the characters were different and the story took place in different locations but really, the last half of the game felt like a re-skinned version of the original. The first hint of this that I came across was the Rio de Janeiro level where you end up chasing down a suspect, something that happens in the first one, only the level concludes a little differently. There was the generic ‘we need to stealth’ level, snipe the guards or leave them its up to you. Also something that happens in the first one, just a little differently. Another level has you protecting a hard drive while it downloads data from a computer, then you have to make it to the LZ with enemy troops moving in on your position getting shot from all sorts of directions, yet another similar mission in the first game, which sees you protecting your position from the advancing enemy, only then to have to head towards them to a different LZ. Even the conclusion to the game is extremely similar, its just far less satisfying then the first one.

There was also the inclusion of a, in many peoples eyes, controversial level. To me the level in question, which had you shooting innocent civilians in a Russian airport was pretty poor. It didn’t really add anything to the game for me, it was nothing that couldn’t have been covered in a cinematic, something that’s shown to the player just to explain what the hells going on, there was no need to play through it. I’m not condemning the dev’s for including it, it’s a game and should be viewed in that way. It just seemed a little pointless for me, after all a game is supposed to be challenging and there was nothing challenging about it.

Yes these may sound like minor similarities but really, could they not think of anything better? or different? Lets not forget that Infinity Ward has two different teams working on this game, one team for multi-player and another for single player.

The single player game play is pretty good, mostly what we have come to expect from the Call of Duty series’ there are no real surprises there. Infinity Ward claim to have improved the AI this time around, it’s hard to see how though, the game does not feel as tough as it’s original little brother. This is probably because the bots are a little more predictable, maybe that is an improvement, the fact that the bots are acting how you would expect them to. They definitely don’t feel as deadly as the original, you can’t take more damage, they just appear to have worse accuracy then you may have been used to in the original.

The real achievement in this game was the multi-player, it is out standing. This I do feel raises the bar for all other FPS games that hope to have a multi-player. Developers will look at this game as the standard, and that’s a good thing. The multi-player is highly addictive, you find your self logging in to play one or two rounds then find you’re  justifying one more round at 4:30 am. There are a lot of updates compared to the original, some weapons are locked that didn’t used to be, such as my favourite from the original, the AK-47. There’s the choice to pick your own custom kill streaks; from the AC-130 gunship to nukes. Ranging from 3 kills to 25. This adds to the on-line experience because all players have the choice to change their perks to suit their play style, from jamming enemy radar’s in stead of getting a UAV or raining death from above aboard the AC-130.

All in all this is a wonderful game to play, it just isn’t what I wanted from the experience. It doesn’t feel as ground breaking as the original, but then again was it ever really going to be? It was always going to be difficult to follow the success of the original and in many peoples eyes Infinity Ward hard achieved that, but not in mine. The game feels too cinematic at times, it try’s too hard to blow you away and that’s where it trips up. Yes a game needs a solid story but this felt more like it belonged in a movie then a game, it’s hard to find the balance between story and game play and I think they over stepped the mark on this one.

I don’t expect many people to agree with this review. It’s just my opinion on the game. Thanks for reading.

OpenGL Textured Cube

Right. Just a quick post to say that I’ve updated my webpage with an extension of an older programme in OpenGL. The previous programme displayed a cube that could be rotated on its various axis, I made changes so the cube now has a texture on each side. The programme still needs tweaking as three of the sides have a mirrored image of the texture that needs fixing.

The texture class that was created can only take Unsigned TGA files, I knocked up a pretty poor one in GIMP for the purpose of the programme just so I could test that it worked!

You can view the source files and .exe on my webpage Here

And the Video:

Thanks for reading. Comments appreciated.

New Blog Page

I decided that I wanted to take feedback on the items I have created on my webpage, so I decided to create a wordpress blog and use this as the blogging page and keep the rest of the site as my portfolio and items. It just makes more sense this way then trying to learn PHP and add a database to my own hosting package just to add comments to my own pages when wordpress is free and easy to use.

See you soon for more updates.