Blog - SaxonSwine

0 comments by SaxonSwine on Dec 20th, 2009 digg this super bookmark

^^ What the topic says :D

Also hai to everyone stalkin mah profile :P

Sparrows Sparrows Sparrows Sparrows Sparrows SparrowsSparrows Sparrows Sparrows Sparrows SparrowsSparrows Sparrows Sparrows Sparrows Sparrows Sparrows Sparrows Sparrows Sparrows.
I only posted that last part because MODDB demands more text.

6 comments by SaxonSwine on Oct 14th, 2009 digg this super bookmark

A lot of games now have achievement systems in them - but what the hell is the point in them?  Nearly all of these achievement systems offer no actual reward to the player, just some shitty little button which says "achievement unlocked".  Big whoop.  It isn't like players use these achievement systems to compare cock size with other players*.  So what the hell are they there for?

Most of the time when I'm playing I'll accidentally see some little achievement button pop up to say I've done XYZ... umm yay?  Since I was planning on doing XYZ anyway it seems a bit arbitrary.

The only time an achievement system is necessary is when it offers some tangeable reward to the player, as far as I know COD4 is the only game to have this. 
Why would I want to carry a gnome all the way through HL2EP2, given that the task is pointless and the achievement achieves NOTHING?  What kind of moron goes through hours of tedium to get an achievement button?

Pretty much every new game has awards in nowadays, but since thats happened the entire system has only made itself evermore worthless - particularly since I doubt anyone will even remember the "achievements" they unlock in any given game.  Unless they happen to be a massive nerd who feels the need to boast about their achievements in a game (to make up for the the fact that they're massive failures at everything else in life).

* that would be the nerdiest conversation ever.  "Nuyahh, I've got the award for killing a jillion zombies in Left for dead, nuyarr" "well I have unlocked the door award in resident stupid 10, beat that nuhyaar"

2 comments by SaxonSwine on Sep 10th, 2009 digg this super bookmark

I'm compiling a map again and have nothing better to do SO IT'S BLOG TIEM ERGAN.  Today's subject is Guitar Hero / Rock Band, games I wish I could forget about but cannot thanks to stupid media coverage.

How the hell do these games appeal to anyone?  There isn't any gameplay to speak of since all you do is press buttons on a spastic plastic "guitar" when the game fucking tells you to.  THATS IT!  IT IS NOT A GAME NOR IS IT PLAYING MUSIC!

If you want to play music then put a CD on.  If you feel the need to look a cunt when you listen to music, then do some air guitar (actually no, please don't kthx).

The point of a video game is to do stuff you can't do in real life.  Is it so fucking hard to pick up a guitar and form a band in real life?  No it isn't. 

A real guitar costs less to buy than Gaytar Hurro.  And you know what?  You can actually play any fucking song you want to on it, you don't need to keep repurchasing the same retarded game over and over just because there are some new songs in it.

OH YEAH AND FERK THE BEETALS.

5 comments by SaxonSwine on Aug 9th, 2009 digg this super bookmark

If theres one thing that irritates me to the point of extremity, it's the modern depictions of "horror".  For the last 20 years films have long followed the same bland linear setting, making them pretty much pointless to watch (only teenage girls ever watched them from memory).  What I want to get onto are the lame subgenres/themes that exist under the horror dumbrella:

1. Zombies.  Yes, theres been a plague of those mods on MODDB, but the modern mythologized zombies are not remotely intimidating or scary.  They're about as scary as old people walking down the highstreet, since they move about as quickly as they do, look pretty similar, and are about as alive :P

The original Voodoo Zombies were pretty awesome - the "undead" slaves of a Voodoo Priest.  Somehow the shambling pathetic excuse we have ended up with is a bit of a joke.

2. Vampires.  There isn't anything particularly scary about vampires anymore, they've just been reduced to generic melee attacking villains like zombies.  I'm sure they must have seemed scary a long time ago, but they've just been so overused and so overblown that everyone knows what to expect when they appear (which is mostly down to the generic storyline...)

3.  The guy who never dies.  The Halloween or Scream films are pretty good examples of this, though it has become a stock staple of generic horror films.  Basically some boring guy runs around after some retarded screaming girl.  Along the way this guy will get shot, maimed, etc: but nothing stops him until he's lying supposedly dead on the floor.  Whilst our moronic heroes chat around his fallen body, he gets up with an axe only to be decisively shot dead.  The end.

4.  Protagonists who wear leather costumes and wield 2 pistols (or similar).  Theres something so pathetic about this: in any modern vampire film you can almost guarantee to see some douchebag with a goatee, sunglasses, stupid long leather coats and dual pistols.  With these characters I don't ever shout at them for their stupidity, I yell at them to come out of the far depths of the closet they inhabit.

Have people run so short of ideas that they don't even bother to change appearances of things when they remake the same crap again?

This particular lame concept seems to find a lot of currency amongst the minority of people who make games/mods based around vampires.  They'll come up with something like "Father O'Gerryneric" who happens to wear a stupid long leather coat, tall boots, etc.  He can wield two bibles at the same time as well.  Oh and watch out because his years of err... fiddling have taught him how to wrestle vampires into submission.  Note: characters like this should be the villains in a horror film.  Now that would be scary...

5 comments by SaxonSwine on Jun 20th, 2009 digg this super bookmark

So I'm bored and waiting for a map to compile, which in typical Half Life fashion is taking forever.  So while I wait, I might as well list reasons why the Half Life engine sucks:

1. It's old, and looks like shit. 
This is pretty much a given, even a noob could tell you this.  It's frustrating that you have to build EVERYTHING from the ground up for a Half Life mod, and even then it still looks god awful compared to a newer engine.  That is unless you happen to go down the horror route of making everything dark thus preventing the player from seeing your shitty graphics.

2. CRASH CRASH CRASHY CRASH.
Seriously, this engine is so unstable you wouldn't believe it.  It crashes if too many models appear.  It crashes if theres anything larger than a boring corridor.  It crashes when an entity goes where it shouldn't do.  It crashes when the horribly illogical code fucks up.
I haven't even got started on the horrors of compiling things for HL1.  Models are nuisance to compile, but they're nothing compared to maps which will crash out at the first opportunity (onoes your map has too much detailz I must die).

3. Terrain.
It takes months to make and only looks like shit.  5 minutes work in Crysis can accomplish what would take a lifetime to do in HL1.  Then once you've done all that work you only find out THAT MONSTERS CAN'T WALK ON IT, which incedentally links to my next dislike.

4. The AI is completely retarded.
I have no idea how the AI got so many awards back in 1998, I guess things were pretty simple back then.  Perhaps people thought that it was really clever how the Grunts blew themselves up.  Or perhaps they liked how Friendly NPCs got stuck as soon as you ran around a corner, or god forbid, climbed a ladder.
Perhaps the pinnacle of stupidity is exhibited in Deleted Scenes where NPCs lacked any ability to move at all, though that was in part due to terrible level design.

5. Rendering Bugs.
I don't know where to start here...  I don't like seeing NPC textures appearing on walls for one thing... really many of the Rendering Bugs come from the fact that HL1 was designed to use 2mb (YES 2mb) of memory.  Go over that and you start getting problems.
Then there are other rendering problems which occur with any version of Half Life (Vanilla or otherwise) such as decal scaling (ever notice how bullet holes change in size according to texture scale?) or how the shitty flashlight scales according to texture size?

6. Rendering Limitations.
Theres not really any proper support for alpha layering or whatever in Half Life - while there is some primitive method, it never quite renders correctly in game (textures tend to look pixellated or whatever).
Decals are limited to world brushes, they don't appear on models.
Sprites look like crap - especially if they appear in front of the primitively defined "alpha" textures.
Lighting is purely static, and the effect it has on models is pretty ass.

Oh hai my map has finished compiling...

In short, don't use HL1 for modding kids!  HL2 is easier in just about every way.  FarCry2 would be a jillion times easier to use if they opened up the SDK.