bordagen

Just waited nearly three hours to see the teaser for Bungie’s latest game.

I have no idea what is going on. It looks to be set in the Halo universe again – which is good.

Looks like some city (Reach) is being invaded by drop-pods as one moment there is a nice clean city, then there is a sky shot of the drop-pods falling to the city, then ruins, chaos and fires.

At the end of the trailer, we get to see the words ‘Halo 3′ (strange as I thought that had already been released and I’d finished it), and the words ‘Prepare to drop’ appear.

Could it be a Halo 3.5? or an add-on pack for it showing the true fate of the Master Chief?

Here is a selection of links to the download on Bungie’s website:

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OK, so while I’m actually a little late on the pickup of CoD4, I thought that since it’s my latest gaming purchase, I’d chime in about a few things. Please note that if you haven’t played the game you might not want to read this as it will probably contain some spoilers.

First of all let me get out of the way that I don’t usually like war games (such as Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, Company of Heroes etc.), nor really war films – but since CoD4 isn’t set in the much overplayed and overused World War I thought I’d give it a go.

If you didn’t know already about this game, it is set in modern day, using modern conflict (namely the Middle East for a fair majority of the game) and above all else modern day weaponry. The game flicks between hardcore-in-yer-face-action-shooting-from-cover when you play as the US Marines and a-bit-more-stealthy-but-still-in-yer-face-sneaky-shooting when you play as the British SAS. I’m only on the 3rd SAS mission (or it could be the 4th) but either way I’ve just passed the bit on the US missions with the crawling around with a guy suffering form extreme radiation poisoning – quite a powerful scene for a game.

Graphically (and though I’m still only playing on a standard definition telebox) it is stunning with realistic texturing and the physics are awesome in it (yeah, thats right – I said ‘awesome’). I have seen a couple of glitches, but nothing serious enough point point out exactly where they are – I just chalked it up to the sheer amount of things that are going on at any one time. Which actually bridges me nicely to my next comments about the gameplay.

Although this game is great, it is very infuriating. Because of the insane number of things that can be happening at any one point in the game (early on in the US campaign you have to defend a tank which is stuck in some mud) where you can be getting shot from 3 different angle, shoot those three only to find out you’ve been shot in the back by some cowardly chump who thinks it is funny to shoot an AK47 at point blank range at the back of my character’s skull (lesson of the day: ‘check your 6′). Because of moments like this, I’ve found myself replaying the same checkpoint (and believe me this game needs checkpoints) over and over again – and I’m only playing on regular difficulty. I’ve been told that it gets a bit worse when you play the veteran difficulty (of course I’m paraphrasing as I can’t remember fully all the expletives Dan used to describe it).

Ranting aside, this game is very good and, from what I’m told, a worthy addition to the CoD series.

On Monday night I went back to Ubuntu – forsaking Windows completely and starting anew with my favourite flavour of Linux (based on my experience of Suse, Red Hat and Fedora).

Complete with a format and full system update and installation of video drivers, I had a full working Gutsy Gibbon system running in an hour and a half. Not bad going when you compare it to Windows installations which have taken me slightly longer in the past. And only 2 system restarts.

Luckily, this time I didn’t have the fun of trying to get my network drivers sorted (which last time took me nearing 3 days!) – it just went straight through, enhancing my love for Netgear products!

Next it is time to install World of Warcraft…

I had been reading about this application called PlayOnLinux which is a friendly frontend for WINE. At least, that’s what it says…

For a start, it’s all in French – which I’m not really good with. I can guess a few words and phrases (‘Hello’, ‘What time is it’, ‘How do i get to the bank?’) but that’s basically as far as it goes. It doesn’t really help when I can’t install from the DVD as Ubuntu doesn’t see any of the .exe files or folders – only the install archives. I then need to operate a mount command to read the CD using ISO9660 and only then, can I see my executable install file.

However, even after this had been sorted, PlayOnLinux still couldn’t install the game because it couldn’t find the bank (as I said, my understanding of French is limited). In the end, I gave up with this frontend and just used the command line to install it, and lo and behold – installed first time. Managed to download and install The Burning Crusade add-on without a hitch too. I just need to patch it and I’ll be good to go.

My next task tonight is to download and configure Compiz-Fusion. By default, Ubuntu 7.10 includes some effects from the package, but doesn’t actually let you customise them, meaning I have a pointless piece of transparency at the top of the title bar which for some reason annoys me.

I have just hit the 5000 point mark with my GamerPoints on my Xbox 360. I have many games that I regularly play, BioShock, Half-Life 2, Halo 3, Assassin’s Creed, what gets me through the barrier? Bomberman!

That was my task for the weekend – what do I do tomorrow?

Liz also managed to break the 2000 barrier on the same achievement I got.