Forums | MacLife

it's between 17-20.

It's 15 now, thankfully. I just went for a walk and froze myself. I should have dressed better

Anyways, it's basically decided that the Overpower weekend is going to be the next, right?

Yup.  NMC should be easy enough for me to get thrown on the server tomorrow, and I can have everything ready for OP Weekend next weekend without any problems.

In the meantime, I've been playing Halo 2 and Perfect Dark on the 360.  The most noticable improvement in Halo 2 is that the textures don't take time to load (hence the "pop-in" that you occasionally see even in in-game cinematics).  Everything plays really smoothly.  I like it.  I did notice some hiccups when I was using the mappack disk to install the map packs, but that wasn't anything that concerned me.

Depends on what you're looking for from it.  On the one hand, its got vast improvements in graphics, AI, they've added vehicles and (some) destructable surfaces.  Instead of being a walking armory, Joanna's inventory is managed similarly to that in Deus Ex, in that you've got 4 "blocks" in which to hold weapons.  Pistols, melee weapons, and throwables/grenades take up one block, so you can carry a maximum of 4.  SMGs take up 2 spaces, MGs and Rifles typically are 3, and there are a couple of weapons that take up 4 blocks.

The story line is pretty interesting thus far, with one of the coolest features I've seen so far being the ability to respond to enemy taunts, etc, during combat.  For instance, I was facing off against a guy in a ship, and he taunted me, and suddenly on-screen it gives you a selection of ways to respond (taunt, charm, threaten).

All of the weapons have a secondary mode, and many have tertiary options (at least using a mounted flashlight, sometimes jamming radar or mimicing enemy radar signatures, etc).  Finally, a player in an FPS is able to dock, dodge, do diving rolls, use the environment as cover, etc, just like enemy AI has been able to do for quite some time.

More later; right now, I'm trying my best to beat Hexic.

I was going to add the following, but IE died.

"On the other hand, as far as the core gameplay, its essentially just like playing the original, be that for good or bad.  You can't jump, but I've yet to find a circumstance where I really needed it.  There were times, though, that it would've been really nice."

Now, as for Halo 2... I started it up to watch the cutscenes, and to make sure I could get the map packs installed.  I've yet to actually play through a level yet, much less do anything that would really test how much the hardware has improved the game's performance.  I'll probably stay up late and do that tonight.  Like I said, the first batch of cutscenes you get to watch look better, but that's because I've seen MC's armor have to get loaded during the cutscene, so he starts off just kind of greenish, and then "comes into focus".  This time around, everything looked great.  understand, though, that I'm playing this on a 36" rounded-glass CRT television, not HDTV or even flat-surfaced.

Anyway, I'll report more after I've played it through a bit.

*Or just bring it here. My 19" NEC Diamondtron APG tubey-job'd do it more justice...

::hopefulmax::

Taunt, charm, threaten?

"I could shoot you, or make you a peaner butter sammich, or..."

Well, it'd be a change.

(Well, at least when others post, we get Google ads from the likes of kayak.com instead of the all-Mankato singing and dancing stuff Zander brings. Keep it up, jeap!)

Incidentally, in H2 I get major pop-ins for the cutscenes; not just textures but whole entities- dead bodies, ships, you name it. And of course it's weird to see the central engine glow of a Phantom before the ship's skin appears.

Sooo... I can afford this when?

I was a bit underwhelmed by the pre-release demo in a Wal-Mart kiosk several weeks ago... but it was pre-release, and at Wal-Mart. Teenagers took turns playing that and Nintendo Mario Superstar Baseball(?)... one lasted awhile, then they both died frequently saying, "Wah..?" Durr, you kept ignoring grenade warnings and running straight at machineguns; even got meleed out by an SMG's buttstock. HUD looked dumbed-down for such as they, and their friends could still wander up and ask 'what are you playing?' despite the huge "CoD 2 Pre-Release Demo" logo that dominated the screen.

Duh. I'll know more when I get around to the PC demo; the graphics are supposed to be quite demanding, like being one of only a few games now out that can benefit from a 512MB videocard.

Icks, have you seen the 164MB, 720p Q4 E3 video?

Anyone have a link to NMC? BC doesn't have it.

This is the only one I have, though you may have to log on, probably not.

http://files.halomods.com/viewtopic.php?t=32472

EDIT: That's a mac only installer and file. One of you guys with a mac is going to need to apply the patch, then grab the longest.map file and host it (it should be ~40MB instead of ~20MB)

Last edited by Leonard Nimoy (2005-11-26 3:26 pm)

Um.  I have both the Mac Overpower mod and NMC.

Come to think, BC did mention having a Longest. He probably forgot about the swapping. I'll inform him if he's got this really oversize Longest map archived, it's probably NMC.

Working on it right now.