What do the hats have to do with anything?  You can get a halo for not abusing the system that was implemented to give you hats, but otherwise they seem like a superfluous addition.  I never wanted to customize my character back when Team Fortress was a Quake mod.  I didn’t want to do it when it was a Half Life mod and I don’t want to do it now either.

The worst part is that the hats aren’t even skill-based acquisitions.  I agree that the Medic update left a lot to be desired in terms of achievements required to get the cool stuff but at least there was something to work for.  Whether or not you used achievement servers there was an extra goal to the game that gave some distraction with a definite end point.  Now the goal is to play as long as possible to get as many hats as possible and whatever random item drops you get.

I can’t understand removing the achievement based acquisition.  I think they should keep that in addition to the random drops so I don’t have to play hours and hours as scout while I keep picking up Ubersaws and KritzKriegs but am locked out of the sandman because it hasn’t been randomly selected to drop.

At least they didn’t bring in the attack dog.

Isn’t that like putting a McDonald’s Big Mac up for a James Beard award?

The idea of going through Black Mesa as a security guard is an interesting one.  The security guard was fairly integral to the original Half Life experience and it crossed my mind more than once that it would be interesting to see things from that perspective.

The implementation has a few problems.

I completed the game last night.  This means I dealt with the a-ha moment of the crane puzzle, a few shootouts with the military guys, getting blown up by a terribly placed tank and leading a scientist to the teleporter lab.  I also wandered around for a half hour after I started the generators looking for the power cell which was only accessible by using a lift that could only be operated by not conveniently place call buttons.

The crane puzzle was a frustrating 5 minutes.  You come into a room with a barrel, a barrel that crushed a colleague, two open frame lifts suspended from the ceiling, a control panel for the lifts’ heights, two indestructible large crates and a smaller metal crate.  The goal is to get to a ladder adjacent to one of the lifts high on the wall.  This goal is not entirely clear upon first glance unless you look up (lesson learned in Half Life 2 per the commentary).

The way the room is set up I initially tried to use the lift next to the ladder.  To get on the lift I pushed the barrel over, crouch jumped and then fell to my death.  The second attempt I jumped onto the lift, then the crates then thought I needed to use the roof of the second lift and then jumped to my death again.  The third, fourth and fifth attempts involved various combinations of getting to the roof of the first lift to no avail.  Finally I realized that I was looking at the puzzle completely backward.  The solution is to push the barrel over to the lift by the crates, to the top of the  crates and onto the ladder lift then to the ladder.  This turned out to be the only unnecessarily difficult jumping puzzle of the game.

Some run of the mill firefights ensued for a while after that until I got to the train depot.  After killing some 20 troops I made my way down a long hallway to a few more troops and an open truck containing much needed health and a large supply of ammo for the carefully guarded rocket launcher.  I disposed of the most threatening troops and jumped in the truck.  I died.  No trip mines, shots fired or cliffs to fall from.  No, it was a tank sitting on the other side of the room.

The gun of the tank touched two of the walls of the room as it tracked me and it was only threatening to my health if I was in the rocket launcher truck.  The rest of the time I was below the barrel as I made my way to the door.

The tank must have been airlifted in as it sat on train tracks bounded by a solid wall and an opening that was only large enough for a train car to fit through.  I think a couple carefully placed turrets or a bunker with a soldier and a heavy machine gun as littered throughout the first game would have sufficed.  I mean at least the dam in Half Life had enough open space for the helicopter to be a realistic experience.

All of the design decisions combined don’t match the line: “Hang on a second Barney, I need to rest”.  That line uttered by Dr. Rosenblum was the worst design decision I have ever seen in a game.  He had followed me through an office building down three flights of stairs and then decided to run back to where I rescued him.  I had to rescue him for the second time, luckily the only time it was from himself and make the trek back down to where I needed to go.  Halfway down the stairs he got winded and I had to sit there for two minutes before he would follow me again.

Health isn’t tied to endurance in the Half Life universe.  You can run for hours without getting tired or having any adverse effects.  Waiting on an NPC who is winded because he ran double the distance he should have due to a poor path-finding algorithm is inexcusable.

I enjoyed the game overall, although it was weird that when I went to Xen I couldn’t get the alien gun that shoots out the flies even though I had to kill multiple enemies that had them.

Despite Valve’s insistence on NPC leading, if I have to have an NPC follow me in Episode 3 I am going to lose it.

I didn’t want to like it because I don’t have the amount of time I would want to play it.

My success rode on simply not playing the game.  Not having friends who are big into PC gaming that made things fairly easy.  Until I went to the household of XBOX 360.

I have only held the wonderful 360 controller for about an hour of my gaming career but 40 minutes of that hour was amazing.  Witches, tanks, shotguns, molotov cocktails, it was amazing.  So amazing in fact that two days after the experience I dreamt that I was one of the survivors and had a terrible night of sleep while I banded together with the rest of the uninfected.

The only saving grace now is that I don’t think am telling myself it would be as fun to play on my PC without friends in the room.  Which is partly true.

To be extremely powerful I think the Auduino would need access to some low frequency oscillation and keyboard control.  Filters and envelope generation might also be useful.  It is a pretty straightforward task to replace a pot with and LFO to get some interesting effects, and the output could also be tweaked around to give some cool effects.

I never got beyond the blinking light experiment the first time I dabbled in Arduino territory, mainly because there wasn’t a goal to work towards, but since that I have been playing around in the synth world for a while I am going to work on various ideas with the end goal of a functioning keyboard controlled synth running on the Arduino platform.

I hate the name.  I don’t sort of dislike it, or think that it is something I can live with.  Putting an “i” in front of something to make it more catchy to the hipsters is a terrible idea.  Apple already did it and trying to jump on their bandwagon is just pointless.

I digress.  I love the functionality.  I can see the unread items in my blogroll when I open up my browser?  Hell yeah I can.  I can read them from there without having to go to another page too?  Amazing.  Wait.

The one downside is that I can’t add a subscription without clicking the header, going into Google Reader itself, clicking the “Add Subscription” button and pasting the link there?  Tell me again why I can’t do that from the horribly named iGoogle interface.

Oh yeah, I shouldn’t be adding any more subscriptions to crap I shouldn’t be wasting my time on.  Thanks for the help on that one iGoogle.

I played through to the Fishery level then stopped because I needed to reclaim some hard drive space and ran out of free time for a few months.

I am now on a kick to play some of the games I missed out on over the past few years as well as replay some of the ones from my past, and Bioshock is one of those games.

I am almost to the end, in the middle of the fourth (maybe more) major collection quest of the game.  I was initially enjoying the game, but it has gotten pretty repetitive and I’ve stuck it out solely because I don’t want any more unfinished business with this game.

I really don’t understand all of the hoopla for this one.  In my mind it boils down to a short, linear (to an extreme fault, I mean an arrow telling me where to go for the entire game?) version of Oblivion set in an Ayn Rand book cover with guns.

Plasmids are the spells, Eve is the mana, Adam is the soul gems, and even worse there are only four or five types of enemies in addition to Big Daddies, which are named “Rosie” and carry rivet guns (WTF?).

Shooting electricity into pools of water and fire into pools of oil is pretty cool, as is freezing people and bashing them with the wrench, which seems to be the best weapon in the game, despite the grenade launcher and chemical thrower.  Until the “Grenades you shoot don’t injure you” perk later on in the game.

The research camera with various perks coming from taking pictures is an interesting idea, although I rarely have any open slots to put anything into.  When I do have open slots to put stuff into the items don’ make much difference because I have pruned away a lot of the varying strategy to make it through the game.  Getting high score photos could be a cool mini game but it seems somewhat random at times when good or bad grades are given out.

The final collection quest to become a Big Daddy to escort a little sister who will open a door that only parasite infected little sister can open is a bit much after having to collect 25 some odd samples of various items for the Lazarus plant cure earlier in the game.  The most frustrating thing is that those samples are strewn across the game like weeds the moment I collected the final one.  In fact I think I saw one of those tiger characters from Oblivion drop distilled water from their inventory and shoot it with their bow in the background there was so much of it.

Glad I played Bioshock but I probably won’t re-install it later, and I will begrudingly try out the sequel because if nothing else the game looks amazing.

I went to add some new music to it last night before putting it into my ITunes library and I could not connect to the server.  I tried waking it from the console to see if it was sleeping.  When that didn’t work I went to the machine and saw no lights of any kind.

I hit the power button.  Nothing.  Changed outlets and tried again.  Nothing.  Changed cords and repeated.  Nothing.

I think the power supply went out on me.  I am not sure if it overheated because it doesn’t have that burnt electronics smell, if it shorted out, or some other ungodly thing that could happen to a four day old machine.

Must have been doomed from the factory.  It does ease my mind that I couldn’t get the ITunes server set up on there, nor could my wife’s Mac recognize the server over the network, as it must have just been a hardware issue all along.

Tonight I’ll deal with tech support to verify that I am not a complete moron and then send it back to Newegg for a replacement.

I’m absolutely certain I will get to bring the box into work when I send it off which will be nice for the fact that the office is not a wasteland this week and I can be the geek hero of the week.

I got my machine set up for backups and took my music off my machine and put it onto the server to free up some much needed disk space.  (The convenience of a laptop constantly fights with the physical space for upgrades.)

I have run into some trouble getting the lone MacBook in the house to talk to the server but called it a night before I put in too much effort on that front.  I think it is a connection issue between the Mac and the router so I will try a wired connection next and see if that fixes it.

I am excited to get the remote access set up.  That is one of the main reasons I wanted to get a server in the first place.  Now I can grab files that I need from there wherever I am and not have to get into the constant hell that is emailing myself the most recent version of my projects.  Subversion here I come!

Coming from experience with straight Windows Server 2003 the Home Server software is like the mom friendly equivalent.  Nice interface, cleanly labeled buttons, not having to manually do an RDP to get to the server console, all nice ways to make it user friendly.  Granted this probably comes with some limitations in control but for a first foray in incorporating a server into the home I am impressed.

Let’s not mince words though and say that when the Home Server is a success in my home its successor will be something with hefty horsepower under the hood.

Awesome day!