Nerdy And Loving It

I learned about this Counter-Strike Source Mod recently called Warcraft Source (aka WCS).  The mod plays the same as any normal Counter-Strike match with the same guns and maps for the most part, except you have powers.  Each class in the game has different abilities such as faster running speed, partial invisibility, more damage, summoning weapons, flying, slowing people down, and many more.

Here are the first few classes, just to give you an idea (note that the following text is taken verbatim from the game):

1. Undead Scourge
   1. Vampiric Aura – Gives you a 60% chance to gain 12-30% of the damage you do in attack, back as health
   2. Unholy Aura – Gives you a speed boost, 8-36% faster
   3. Levitation – Allows you to jump higher by reducing your gravity for 8-64%
   4. Suicide Bomber – On death, you have a 20-70% chance to explode and make 70-160 damage on each player in 12-18 feet range
2. Human Alliance
   1. Invisibility – Makes you partially invisible, 62-37%
   2. Devotion Aura – Gives you additional 15-50 health each round
   3. Bash – Have a 15-32% chance to render an enemy immobile for 1 second
   4. Teleport – Allows you to teleport to where you aim, range is 60-108 feet
3. Orcish Horde
   1. Critical Strike – Gives you a 15% chance of doing 40-240% more damage
   2. Critical Grenade – Grenades will always do a 40-240% more damage
   3. Reincarnation – Gives you a 15-80% chance of respawning once, with old equipment and where you died
   4. Chain Lightning – Discharges a bolt of lightning that jumps on up to 4 nearby enemies 40-75 feet range, dealing each 32 damage
4. Night Elves
   1. Evasion – Gives you 5-30% chance of evading a shot
   2. Thorns Aura – Does 30% mirror damage to the person who shot you, chance to activate 15-50%
   3. Trueshot Aura – Does 10-60% extra damage to the enemy, chance is 30%
   4. Entangling Roots – Every enemy in 25-60 feet range will not be able to move for 10 seconds

There are also items to buy in the game.  Here are a few examples:

1. Necklace of Immunity – Makes you immune to enemy ultimates.  Use this if you keep dying to someone blowing up.
2. Orb of Frost – causes frost dmg to slow your enemy’s movement.
3. Ankh of reincarnation – Saves your equipment for the next round if you die.  This is useful when you’re short on money and are buying expensive weapons.
4. Boots of Speed – Makes you 20% faster.  This can be bought up to three times.
5. Cloak of Shadows – Gives you 75% invisibility.  This is very useful, especially on bigger maps.
6. Scroll of Respawning – respawns you.  Fun to come back and get revenge for someone killing you.  This can be annoying if someone keeps doing it over and over.  Personally, I would rather see this item removed, since there are classes with a ressurect skill.
7. Disguiser – makes you look like the enemy.  This only lasts one round.
8. Mole – this makes you spawn at the enemy spawn location after a 3 seconds.  Very fun to mess with people using this.  There is a later class called Agent that randomly uses this.
9. Tome of Experience – this gives you experience.  It’s useful because you only get so much experience per win and per kill.  By buying these you can level up much faster.  I would actually prefer they get rid of items like this and just give more xp for kills.

To find a WCS server just go to the very bottom of the Counter-Strike server list and look for a server called Warcraft Source or WCS.

Here is a link to the WCS homepage.  You can read the forums if you are interested in hosting your own server or helping create new classes. http://warcraft-source.com/board/index.php?action=forum

I know there are a bunch of companies working on stuff like this, but this is by far the best facial animation that I’ve ever seen.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4557935.ece

Here is their website:

http://www.image-metrics.com/

There are several more videos on the website.  Check it out.

Ever since I heard about this game I thought it sounded like a very promising and cool idea for a shooter. Just imagine, I thought to myself, stop time steal all the guns from a crowd of bad guys and restart time and have all of them go “what the…”. It turns out my hunch was right. Timeshift is extremely fun.

The premise is that you are a Physicist working on a top secret project to build a suit that can travel through time. Everything is going well until one day the lead Scientist, Dr. Krone, steals the early alpha version of the suit and sets up a bomb to blow up the entire facility, including the beta version of the suit currently in development. Thinking quickly the silent protagonist of a main character puts on the beta suit and jumps (through time) out of the building before the bomb goes off. He wakes up sometime in the past, only nothing is how it should be. Krone has altered time and formed a new world. He attempting to rule the world through his knowledge of advanced technology and cannot be stopped by any normal man due to his time suit. You join the resistance movement and off you go.

The gameplay of Timeshift makes up for any other shortcomings in any other category. It’s just damn fun to play. You get to use three types of time control: time slow, time stop, and time reverse. You mostly will use time slow and time stop. Time reverse is rarely used in any sort of combat situation. (I played the PC version, so I’ll be referencing controls based off the keyboard.) You can assign each of the three time powers to a button (I chose Z, X, and C instead of using shift in combination with these) and you push another button for a sort of automatic choice time power (I chose T). For the most part you don’t really even have to choose what power you are going to use because pressing T chooses the right power for most situations. This generally applies to puzzles or stuff blocking your way. It also applies to combat with certain enemies, where T will stop time instead of slowing it. There are a variety of weapons including your generic machine gun with grenade alternate fire, a sniper rifle, a rocket launcher, a flame thrower/more powerful machine gun with less ammo, a crossbow that fires bolts (short arrows) with a detonation device on it that makes a person blow up when hit and a scope with different zoom levels (if you couldn’t tell this is my favorite weapon), a gun that lobs energy orbs and can charge up a energy blast, a worthless handgun, and an extremely cheap gun that you won’t see till way later in the game the kills most guys instantly. The gun that kills guys instantly shoots orbs of blue energy blasts that are more powerful that the other energy gun and the alternate fire sends out a constant beam of blue electricity which pretty much kills most guys instantly. It’s probably a good thing that they didn’t include this gun until later in the game because it is incredibly cheap. You can only carry three guns at one time and you can switch them out whenever you find new ones. Your current weapons carry over into every new area except the last one. My chosen three are the machine gun with grenade launcher, the crossbow (of doom), and the rocket launcher. This allowed me to have a fair amount of ammo for a close range weapon, a long range weapon that kills people no matter where you hit them because they blow up anyway, and a rocket launcher for large groups of guys or for when you want to have fun just blowing up one. There are ammo chests in select areas of the missions which will help you get ammo for a weapon if the guys in the level aren’t carrying it.

My favorite weapon, the crossbow.

Fighting soldiers is relatively the same. Slow down time, pop out from your hidy-hole or crate and shoot guys, then hide again and wait for your shields and time meter to recharge. However, fighting some of the other things in the game was a lot of fun. There’s a giant mech (read giant robot that a guy rides in with big powerful guns that kill you quick) that you have to avoid being shot by while running up levels of a building with destroyed walls by slowing time so he doesn’t kill you immediately. There are also a few helicopter fights reminiscent of shooting down helicopters and those weird living drop ship things in half life 2. The health is similar to halo’s recharging shield system where you have a certain amount of shield and when it runs out you die, but it recharges after some amount of time of not taking damage. I actually haven’t played many shooters that use the shield system (I know I’m out of touch and need to play more) but I have to say that it really helps keep the game moving. No searching for health packs or reloading a save because you lost more health than you would have liked to, or having to play a level over again because you needed way more health to beat a tough boss at the end. Also I should mention that the time powers aren’t too cheap because they only last a short time. I know I mentioned that I thought you would be able to stop time a steal a large group of guys’ guns, but in order to do that they would all have to be relatively close to on another and that doesn’t happen very often. Slowing time drains your time bar the slowest, then stopping and reversing. The puzzles are also pretty fun. They all involve using your time powers of course. There is this one puzzle with a rotating fan that turns like a water wheel and I thought you had to freeze or slow time to get through it, but I found out that you could reverse time to reverse it’s movement and have it push you through when I pushed the T button.

These mechs are found in several levels.

There are several vehicle sections in the game. One of the vehicle sections is where you are riding in a giant blimp with large platforms on the sides with gun turrets. Your job during this section is to shoot down mines in the air tied to balloons and later shoot down jets that fly by. You can still use your time powers here so it’s fun to slow time and shoot down the jets. It may sound simple, but I found this part a lot of fun. There’s also a later blimp section where you shoot down helicopters. The other vehicle section is where you ride an ATV. This section would have been more fun if you could actually control the ATV. The steering is terrible. If you barely bump a key to steer it moves so far over that it’s mostly unusable. I had to resort to tapping the gas a little at a time in order to steer. I tried using the mouse too, but it wasn’t any better.

The blimp with gun turrets.

As far as the graphics go my pc was a poor representation of good graphics because it’s old and slow (one of the reasons I’ll be getting a ps3 soon). I did get to play the start of the game on the ps3 at a friend’s house and it definitely looked good there. The rain effects in the beginning looked great. I liked how when you stop time, run up to a guy, and shoot him in the face, blood splatters on the screen as if it were on your mask.

In Office XP/2003, all you had to do to change the file properties was go to file -> properties and to get to options you just went to tools -> options. I use the new office 2007 at work and had no idea where to find these two options so looked it up on google and found out where to find them.

File properties can be found by clicking on the Office Button then Prepare then Properties.

Options can be found by clicking on the Office Button then Word Options in the lower right corner of the drop down.

You can see both in the image below.

So I bought painkiller off of steam in January and was really looking forward to playing it ever since playing the demo, but some parts of the game really annoyed me.

Painkiller is a hexen style shooter with lots of bad guys and very little plot. While I love games with a good plot, I was willing to overlook the lack of plot because I wanted to play a mindless shooter at the time.

The plot, basically, is that you and your girlfriend/wife died in a car crash. Your wife went to heaven, but you went to purgatory. God wants you to go and kill satan’s generals for him, since they are invading purgatory.

Obviously the generals are the bosses. The bosses in the game are, in my opinion, the best part about the game, and what saves it from being a bad game. In between the bosses you just keep on fighting endless hoards of guys.

Here’s the first boss you encounter, the necro giant:

Although the continuous killing through the various levels was fun, it started to get old towards the end. I felt there should have been more mini bosses to break up the monotony. But plot and mindless killing aside, my biggest annoyance with the game were the black taro card unlocks.

Black taro cards are power ups that you can enable once per level. They add damage, slow down the world, make you shoot faster, and give other various benefits. The gold cards give you the one time power up and the silver cards work all the time. There are some cards that allow you to use the gold cards more than once. I like the use of the black taro cards. I think they make the game more fun and are useful when you get in tight spots. But, I am annoyed with how you unlock the cards.

In a game where you get a bunch of overpowered weapons, black taro cards, as well as a demon morph mode that makes you invincible and kill most thing with one hit, it makes no sense to force the player to limit themselves just to unlock the black taro cards. Some of the more annoying tasks are finding all the secret areas, finding all the holy items, avoiding collecting any souls, killing all enemies (I’ll explain why this is annoying in a sec), defeating level without using any armor, picking up every ammo box, and avoiding all damage. The find the secret areas/holy items/hidden areas tasks are annoying because some of the secret areas are impossibly hard to get, like on one level where you have to bunny hop up a mountain side in a weird way just to get the secret. Usually to get all the secrets you have to back track after beating the level just to get to areas that were blocked off before. And besides, this game is fun for the killing aspect, not for spending a bunch of time tracking down and trying with difficulty to reach the secret areas. The train station level is covered with solders that run at you in droves, making it very difficult and very annoying to have to avoid getting every soul to unlock the card. On the military base level you have to kill every enemy, which seems like no big deal, but if you missed one of the optional areas or buildings that you might not to think to look in, you can’t go back, even after the level is completed. The monsters will only appear the first time. On babel you have to pick up every ammo box. This one isn’t as annoying as the others, but it still distracts you from having fun just plowing through the level, killing everything.

I realize that some people like to do every single thing in a game. Find every secret, get every armor, every ammo box, and beat every difficulty, but I don’t and I suspect that most gamers don’t. I want to play through a game once, have a good time while doing it, and then move on to the next great game. My comment about beating all the difficulties brings me to my other annoyance; locked levels.

If you play the game on normal, you can’t play two of the levels. Even if you start the game on hard (nightmare) you still don’t have all the levels unlocked. In order to play all the levels, you would have to play through the game at least twice, which I don’t have the motivation to do. I like to play games to experience what the game has to offer and I don’t want to have to replay the entire game again, just to see something I couldn’t get to the first time.

So that’s my brief review/rant about painkiller. Overall I would say that if you don’t have anything else to play right now, painkiller is still a pretty good game and I would recommend it, just keep in mind what I had to say before you play.

I should note that I really like some of the new weapons they added in the expansion. It’s nice to have a machine gun/flame thrower and a 4 bolt cross bow with zoom/flak grenade launcher. And they added a level that I have absolutely fallen in love with: The Dead City. This level is what the whole game should have been like. It has a dark stormy sky, creepy buildings, zombies that run at you and explode, exploding cars, zombies that puke on you from buildings, giant mechanical spiders, man sized flying bugs that throw molotov cocktails, zombies that are thrown off of buildings that splat on the ground just to reform seconds later, as well as a mall area, and an area with two overweight guys with meat cleavers that throw cars at you….with their mind.