Hello everyone,
Had a bit of drama yesterday … The plan was to get a couple of things before Xmas. In particular, a card and to top up the fuel tank. Things did not go to the plan.
So, TLDR, my car is a hybrid and has two batteries. When it’s on, it runs off the big traction battery. This isn’t a problem, it holds the capacity for a pretty long time. However, to start up the car, it uses a 12V battery. This can go flat after a while … It’s charged up off the main battery but if you’ve only done under 2000 miles in a year (pandemic things), then the 12V doesn’t get the chance to replenish itself.
And so I couldn’t get into the car last night. It’s a quick 5 minute fix by the AA man to sort it (they arrived within 10 minutes of a call today, I was proper shocked and impressed). Good job AA man. I have a Tool now though that’ll mean I can bootstrap the car on myself if it does it again.
This did, sadly, mean I had to People again tonight. Oh well. The feeling of being wary around other people has increased with the news of the Brexit mutation … But enough of the apocalypse, what’s behind the door ?
Stormtrooper today ! A traditional one too from the original movies.
I was going to talk about some more important entries in gaming history today … The game in the box is Halflife but I’m going to start with a couple of others.
The first Doom game came out in 1993 and kickstarted a revolution in PC gaming. Let’s take a look :
The first game these guys did was Wolfenstein 3d but Doom was the one that took off. One reason was that a third of the game was released as Shareware, so it quickly got copied and passed around on floppy discs. (Yep. No cd’s yet). But the massive other reason was that this game had networked multiplayer, which took multiplayer gaming out of the realm of text based Multi User Dungeons and into immediate first person deathmatches, creating a legend.
Looks crude … but it had enough to keep people happily blasting at each other. So .. Doom, probably one of the most important games in computer gaming history. I played my fair share of it too, when I wasn’t in Master of Magic, Master of Orion or Tie Fighter.
Next up is Dark Forces, a Star Wars game following the adventures of Kyle Katarn. This first game was another first person shooter with an innovation and a sign of things to come (it was the first game needing 8MB of system memory).
Actually two innovations this time. The first was a shield which would recharge but the massive one was being able to look up and down. Doom was restricted purely to shooting flat, although there was up and down in the levels (I think !). Dark Forces was followed by Dark Forces 2 Jedi Knight, which introduced lightsabers and advanced the graphics into the polygon era. (Quake started that).
The next major innovation and the cd in the box was Half Life … This game is another one of the legends.
Half Life saw you appearing at the Black Mesa research facility as a new researcher. They hurry you along to the test chamber, where you push a trolley into the Arcy Sparky thing and then all hell breaks loose and bugs are jumping on to your friends’ heads and eating their brains. One innovation with Half Life was I think smooth transitions between levels with no loading screens. Previously, games like this had been broken up into levels.
Modern games are a bit of a mix here. Some manage to do their thing with no transitions, others keep in the transitions for memory reasons and others are instanced. So World of Warcraft would have a loading screen if you fast travel or if you go from one continent to another, the loading screen is the instance swapping over. Elite Dangerous swaps you between instances while you’re going through hyperspace between systems.
Back to Half Life … this one had a decent story running through it too. As did Half Life 2, which brought us the Source Engine which was then adopted for projects like Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines.
I wonder whether we’ll ever see Half Life 3 ?
What’s my next game in this style ? I finished playing Deus Ex Human Revolution the other day, so I’ll be switching over to something different “soon” … I think the favourites are between Alien Isolation and Prey. Here’s the Alien game :
The look of this game is incredible, as is the atmosphere. It’s one where I’d want to have the external noises down to a minimum.
And then there’s Prey …
This one excels in the atmosphere … Anything could be a mimic, waiting for you to turn your head away so it can jump at you.
Very tense.
Time to sign off for now though, stay safe, be well.