…I will be buying up a small arsenal of these. Admit it, who among you wouldn’t want to release your inner child and pilot remote controlled paintball firing tanks, mobile artillery, jeeps and more in a grand scale mock battle of Tobruk? Well, ok so I’m the only one who would really appreciate it. Damned cool nonetheless.
Month: May 2003
Halflife 2 is coming
Half life was one of the best first person shooters ever made. It’s going on 4 (or is it 5?) years old at this point and it’s still the number one online game, which is amazing when you think about it. Shortly after it was released the developers (Valve) announced they would be producing a commercial ‘Team Fortresses 2’ game, which they proceeded to show at several E3 expositions, but to this day they’ve never released anything aside from repackaging of the original Half Life and various Mods sold in shrinkwrap. So everyone was surprised when they announced a couple of weeks ago that not only had they been working on a sequel, it was almost finished and would be in stores no later than this fall.
Shweeet!
I’m trying not to get too excited about it since Unreal 2 and Unreal Tournament 2 were both big disapointments, but damn I hope they do it right. More than any other developer, Valve ‘gets’ online gaming. They’ve done a fantastic job encouraging the developer communities and the breadth and depth of the mods available for their engine are testimony to that. To this day I miss playing Frontline Forces (sadly now defunct), and I am occasionally tempted to reinstall Half Life so I can play mods like Day of Defeat and Firearms, but the damned engine is getting so creaky – if you look at the maps with a critical eye you realize just how low polygon they are and you can see the limitations on texture resolution and size. It just looks, well, bad, compared to the Quake III engine or Battlefield 1942, and I can’t bring myself to get it running again.
Anyway what got me going on this topic is these screenshots I
Recent health news
I had my 3 month doctor’s visit recently and got my lab results back. It’s a mixed but generally positive outlook. My 6 months of hard work have paid off, I’m now off of all prescription medications and my bloodsugars have been basically ‘human normal’ for 6 months now. Amazing what hard work, persistance, careful dieting and lots of exercise can do for you. I’m really pleased. That’s the good news. The bad news is, my cholestoral levels have crept back up. Basically I’ve had to eat more fats to replace the carbohydrates I no longer eat. This has led to borderline/just above the borderline cholestoral in basically all of the categories. My doctor thinks I should now go back onto prescription meds to control the cholestoral. I don’t want to have to do that, so for the next three months I’m going to try drinking a glass of red wine with dinner and see if that manages to cut the cholestoral down to an acceptable level – since the bloodsugars are looking good I can afford to experiment with alchohol. If it doesn’t I think I am hosed and will have to go back onto meds. I need to do some research though and figure out exactly how bad my levels are, comparatively. Also since my bloodsugars are now normal, it may be possible that I could start eating more carbs and reduce the fat intake, it’s a question of which is worse for me in the long haul – slightly elevated blood sugars or slightly elevated cholestoral. I don’t know which is worse at this point, though I suspect the answer is the fats are worse.
Excellent roundup of great sci-fi
I happened across a short piece about recent science fiction that any fans might find interesting. I’ve read at least one book by all of the authors mentioned but two and it seems the author of this piece has similar tastes to my own, I basically agree with his sentiments. Oh and Jesse, Simmons is next for you, given that you like Vinge I think you’ll dig it (I’m reading Hyperion now). Oh, and the link, almost forgot about that.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 