The Mineralpatch

After about a two year hiatus I decided to boot Hammer up one more time and give it another shot. Not surprising, Left 4 Dead fuled my desire to dive back into level design and I’m having tons of fun so far. This is what I managed to crank out while re-familiarizing myself with Hammer. (click for high-res)

I’m very pleased about my progress so far. Now all that’s left is to get aquainted with how the HDR stuff works and for a L4D fgd to emerge!

Keep posted for more stuff soon

The preview program for the latest dashboard update for the 360 (known as the NXE) rolled out a couple of days ago, and I happened to be one of the lucky to be selected. I’ve played around with it quite a bit and have listed some of my initial impressions below.

The good:

• The first thing you’ll notice about the NXE (aside from the drasticly different look) is how much faster it is. Scrolling through menues is a lot more comfortable and it doesn’t take very long to get used to the new layout.

• Installing games makes the console a lot less noisy and it provides some (and somewhat un-noticeable depending on the game) improvements regarding loading. If you have a 120gb harddrive, be sure to utilize this feature.

• The avatars are surprisingly less annoying than what I thought they would be. There’s a ton of stuff to choose from when customizing your dude, with categories regarding just about everything you could imagine.

• Did I mention how much faster it is?

• Browsing the marketplace provides much better information about every piece of content, including screenshots from games etc.

The dissapointing:

• Running the xbox in 16:10 wasn’t as sweet of a feature as I had hoped it would be. Instead of scaling games to the correct aspect-ratio, it simply puts everything in a letterbox.

• Still no Inside Xbox for scandinavia :(. The same goes for community events.

So far, this seems like a fantastic update. There are still some stuff that needs to be added since this isn’t a final version, but I can guarantee you won’t be dissapointed. The NXE will hit Xbox live worldwide on the 19th of November

I have played about an hour of it so far and it seems pretty promising! It crashed on me while I was taking screenshots though..
The environments are pretty good looking, but they seem pretty limited in terms of scope (nowhere near the size of crysis’ open fields yet). I really hope that changes. As it is in the early game it feels too much like I’m running/driving through corridors to get to the next arena. I’ll try to capture some video but I won’t promise anything. At the very least I’ll keep updating this post with screenshots as I play more.

Screenshots are below (and updated as I upload more)

It’s not long until Far Cry 2 hits the shelves and I just thought I’d let you know that I’ll try to put up some impressions by the end of the week! I can’t wait to try out this game and from the looks of the reviews, it turned out pretty awesome! Again, look out for something on FC2 toward the end of the week.

I’ll try my best to round up Starcraft 2 videos from BlizzCon 2008 in this post!
If you have a video that’s missing, be sure to tell me

Singleplayer / Panel footage

Trilogy Announcement - [HD] [SD]
Trilogy Details - [HD] [SD]
Bar Scene: Part 1 - [HD] [SD]
Bar Scene: Part 2 - [HD] [SD]
Third Mission Gameplay [HD] [SD]
Bridge Scene: Part 1 - [HD] [SD]
Bridge Scene: Part 2 - [HD] [SD]
Return of the Zerg Cinematic - [HD] [SD]
Kerrigan Reveal - [HD] [SD]

Gameplay Trailers

Zerg vs. Terran Trailer - [HD] [SD]
Protoss vs. Terran Trailer - [HD] [SD]

Multiplayer Gameplay

Sonkie(Z) vs Yellow(P) - [URL] (can’t link directly to the video :/ )

Showmatch between two developers: (Horrible quality. I’ll update if a better version becomes available)

Part one

Part two

Part three

Part four

Part five

Shacknews has put up a massive article containing everything you need to know about Blizzard’s upcoming game, Diablo III. Everything from story elements to gameplay footage is collected in this article. Go check it out!

http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=1024

Closed beta sign-ups for the spritual successor to City of Heroes has now opened. Just click the application button on the front page here.

This PC specific beta is set to begin sometime in the middle of November.

Blizzcon 2008 is now happening in Anaheim, CA, and alot of interesting news have emerged from the several panels and interviews there. The most interesting thing for me is the fact that they have decided split the SC2 campaign into three different products, one for each campaign. For me, this is awesome.

However, we have seen tons and tons of nerd-rage from rabid blizzard fanboys calling this a travesty, and that “spending $150 on a game is an outrage”. Ok, first of all: Who said that every product will be $50? Second of all, why in the hell is this a bad thing? We get to play SC2 sooner than we originally would, we get three times the amount of campaign missions than they intended and each product is stand alone. I really don’t see the problem here. This is awesome

source: http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/55267

Activision decided to release a demo of the PC version of Quantum of Solace completely out of the blue, and I’ve checked it out. The demo has you chasing a guy through some sewer for 5 minutes (no seriously, the demo is 5 minutes long..). I was left very dissapointed when it was all over. Garnett Lee over at 1up.com has praised this game for being one of the best bond games in years, and I really don’t see where the hell he got that from. The gunplay feels mediocre at best, and the third-person cover system seems that it’s implemented simply because “you can’t have a shooter without a cover system nowadays”.

In the end, this feels more like a CoD4 mod than a full retail game. Screens are below the download links!

- http://cdn.007thevideogame.com/007thevideogame.com/redemption/Bond_QoS_PCDemo.zip
- http://fileshack.com/file.x/13041/Quantum+of+Solace+Demo
- http://www.gamershell.com/download_33818.shtml

http://themineralpatch.net/img/Quantum_demo/shot0000.jpg
http://themineralpatch.net/img/Quantum_demo/shot0001.jpg
http://themineralpatch.net/img/Quantum_demo/shot0002.jpg
http://themineralpatch.net/img/Quantum_demo/shot0003.jpg
http://themineralpatch.net/img/Quantum_demo/shot0004.jpg
http://themineralpatch.net/img/Quantum_demo/shot0005.jpg
http://themineralpatch.net/img/Quantum_demo/shot0006.jpg
http://themineralpatch.net/img/Quantum_demo/shot0007.jpg
http://themineralpatch.net/img/Quantum_demo/shot0008.jpg
http://themineralpatch.net/img/Quantum_demo/shot0009.jpg
http://themineralpatch.net/img/Quantum_demo/shot0010.jpg

sorry, i’m to lazy to make thumbs!

When I first bought this domain I had some pretty grand plans for it. My dream was to make something that I could look at with pride and say “I actually made this”. Maybe that day is still forthcoming, but right now it seems like that day is too far in the future. I really have no clue what to do with this site right now and I probably won’t know for a long time. I still have plans to make it a Starcraft 2 themed site, but how grand it will be is uncertain. Audio commentaries will hopefully be a part of the mix as well as some other stuff like news and the like. I also really want to do something with Red Alert 3 once it hits the shelves (been having tons of fun with the beta so far).

We’ll see what the future holds for this site (if anything!) , but I really have to get back to reading up on Mark Twain!