• 25Jul 08

  *Insert Bomb Pun Here*

  Yes so I moved over to Giant Bomb. Mainly because everyone else is but also because not 90% of the users on Giant Bomb are complete morons that suck up to the 90% of clueless moderators. I'll see you there. Username is the same letter for letter: ChestyMcGee.

  The site is a little slow but it's worth it.

  Oh yeah, and you can swear without getting a mod knocking on your virtual door with a letter of complaint.

  • Posted Jul 25, 2008 4:35 am GMT
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• 29Jun 08

  Battlefield Bad Company First Impressions...

  If you read my last blog, you'll know I was happily suprised to be payed £50 for my work experience. With this money, I made the abetary decision to buy Battlefield: Bad Company (Gold Edition). This came about after playing, quite seriously I must add, the demo online with Matt and working together really well as a team in the two-seater vehicles (like the helicopters and tanks).

  Anyway, the first thing I must say is I'm very pleasantly suprised by the singleplayer campaign. I expected just to have a playthrough of the campaign, find it mind-boggingly average, and then move immedietly on to the multiplayer. Bad Company is just plain fun. It removes all those things that other games have started doing for realism purposes, for example the reloads in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (where-by reloading a clip not entirely spent you don't have to pull any bolts, thus making the reload faster...I will add though that CoD4 banged on about this when the game was released but Rainbow Six has been doing this since 199. Instead, the reloads are overly long, exagerated...and absolutely fantastic.

  I think the game that can be compared most to Battlefield: Bad Company the most is definitly PS2 and Xbox's Black - a game that attempted to recreate terrible 80's action films brilliantly well with an excessive amount of explosive barrels, loud guns and lots of swearing. BFBC does this too, and it almost feels like compensation that it appears Criterion have given up making Black 2. It's pretty much Black with better destructable environments and a less serious storyline.

  This brings me on to the so-called great destructable environments. Some people have tried to compare this game to the likes of Crysis. Don't believe them. Basically, walls can be "destroyed", though basically all that means is when they're hit with a grenade or shell they kind of dissapear in a cloud of smoke and are replaced with clumps of rock and other rubble. This is nothing like Crysis, where small building such as sheds and the like are actually built like real buildings, and as such fall apart in a physics-based engine that makes it look very realistic indeed. However, BFBC's engine doesn't require a science-fiction super-computer to run and as such, every building can have its walls and roofs destroyed. The way trees fall down is exactly the same in both games and works on a 'gib' system. This is a simple method of having a model split in a fairly scripted way when it takes a certain amount of damage, another example of this is when you kill an Antlion in Half-Life 2 with a powerful weapon it explodes into little bits. Now, I've just moaned a lot about how bad it is...but it's fantastic. Sure, it's not the most technolgically spectacular engine but the implications of it in the sheer immersion in battles is great. It's a truely great feature that makes the fighting feel truely hectic and exciting. It's genuinly exciting to sprint through a building, the walls exploding behind me in a cloud of smoke as a main battle tank launches 120mm sabot-shells at me in a desperate attempt to remove me from the gene pool. Awesome.

  Wow...for first impressions that was pretty long, but it's not really an average first person shooter. The thing that must be said about it is, when I was giving my first impressions of Metal Gear Solid 4 I said, "you have to play this game seriously", or words to that effect. With BFBC however, I must stress that you have to play this game for fun and for nothing else. Even I can manage to play through it not thinking about "oh, those grenades couldn't blow up a wall of that density" or "the reload for that Colt M16A4 is completely wrong; the bolt should snap back automatically and the release switch above the magazine should be all that needs to be slapped"!

  So, I'm...well...I have no idea how far through the game I am but I reckon it must be about half way at the least. So, once I've played the online for about a month or so you can expect a review. So far (basing it on what I've played on the demo online and the game on singleplayer) I'm expecting to give it around an 8.0. "Just plain fun"!

  • Posted Jun 29, 2008 12:59 pm GMT
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• 25Jun 08

  Work Experience...

  ...is a mixed but interesting experience.

  For those who don't know, I'm working for five day week (starting last Monday, 23rd June) at GBM, who, as I've said to people in order to avoid confusion, are a graphics design company. In actual fact, GBM does work on the designs of others...okay, this is hard to explain. Basically, GBM are given design work off other companies, usually in Adobe Illustrator or Acrobat format and then GBM make fine changes to the designs and set them up for numerous printing, cutting and finishing techniques as specified by the client.

  My first day started with a short tour of the buildings before I was handed over to some member of the computer team. They came up with the idea of me creating a poster for something. Already ideas were forming in my head. The second I was asked, "so what do you like?" the words "Video games" were coming out of my mouth before I could react. As a result, I was soon at work on a Mac making a, yes you guessed it, Metal Gear Solid 4 release poster. It used the background and message of this wallpaper. The two characters on the poster were taken from in-game screenshots from the game. The logo in the top right corner was made entirely from scratch on Adobe Illustrator. Likewise, the title in the bottom right corner was made on Illustrator with a downloaded font. Sadly, because the logo and writings were made using vectographics (they can be scaled to any size without any distortion what-so-ever) the low-res screenshots and background look quite tacky in comparison. Beggars can't be choosers though, and these were the best screens I could find on the 'ol tinter-web.

  The next day I printed off this poster on multiple mediums using a huge ink-jet printer and with a large Lambda printer (in the Lambda Complex, OMG Half-Life!) which uses a modern version of emulsion printing. For this I had to work in a dark room...which suprisingly wasn't the dark red room I've seen on TV, in fact it was completely pitch-black and I had to work blind!

  Today wasn't that much fun in comparison to the days before. I was basically working like a factory, assembling and cutting and using various machinery in a fairly repetetive nature. All of the tasks were interesting at first but got dull as time passed. One of the pieces of machinery, the cutter, was quite cool, it was a large knife on a conveyerbelt with a camera attatched. I got to control the camera to line it up with dots that are detected because they're a perfect magenta (CYMK colour, all settings on 0 except for M on 100) and then it cuts out any shape perfectly, following the magenta dots.

  So, I'm not exactly sure what I'll be doing tomorow but I think later in the day I'll have a chance to cut out the characters from myposter to make some desk-side stands of Snake and Liquid. This depends on how busy the cutter is, however.

  UPDATE:

  Thursday was me standing in one place for eight hours framing prints. Much fun.

  UPDATE:

  Friday was odd jobs and watching people work for the morning, then finishing off all my Metal Gear stuff. So I now have three or four A2 cutouts of Snake and Liquid with a picture-frame stand on them (so you can put them on your desk or what have you) and eight or more A2 Metal Gear posters on various mediums. Coolio. Best thing about Friday though which can only be described in the wise words of 50 Cent in 50 Cent: Bulletproff: "Pay day mo-f****!" Yay! I got £50 on a HMV card which was completely unexpected. MY superviser dude said it was the first time they'd ever payed a Work Experience person because I had helped them meet a dealine with those terrible prints on Thursday. Huraah!...now I might go and buy Battlefield: Bad Company - yeah I know I said I hate it but I went on with a mate and we worked as an awesome team (both getting the top scores) in the two seater vehicles (tanks and choppers) and it was amazing.

  NOTE(S): If you're reading this blog any time soon after 18:30 and wondering what the hell I'm going on about with this poster because you can't see any pictures of it, don't worry, I'm on my Dad's laptop right now but when I get home I'll have the file up and ready on GameSpot.

  After you've read this, stay tuned: I'll probably be posting a new paragraph or so each day to update you (as if you're interested) on the day's goings on.

  Oh yeah, and now anyone else who's on work experience has to do a blog too (Ben, Tom, Jonny, David etc).

  • Posted Jun 25, 2008 10:27 am GMT
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