Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Today was my second day at work at EA Games as a Language Integration Tester. We're just training right now, but so far it looks like it will be a pretty fun job :)

Picked up a copy of Special Forces at the EA Store. Installing it now. Bloody thing requires me to install a 500 meg patch before I can get it to run, though. D'oh!

Friday, June 23, 2006

Officials at the US Pentagon recently confused a Battlefield 2 fan film for a terrorist recruiting tool.
Woops! Check out the ABC Nightline video.

Here's an interview with "SonicJihad", creator of the BF2 fan film. And here's SonicJihad's profile on BF2S.com (the video shows his game name as JihadJoe though, so that could be another SonicJihad). SonicJihad, if you read this somehow... you need a montage. Your k/d ratio is 1.0, not much better than Dogar's. For a guy who confused the Pentagon, you're not very good at BF2, dude. Hahaaaaa... ;-)

And hey, maybe we could do a joint mercenary auction together.

Monday, June 19, 2006








Check out this Half-Life 2 mod: The Hidden.

In it, players are split up into two teams: Hidden and IRIS. One player is The Hidden, a freak with superhuman powers of cloaking, strength, and tracking. This player is only armed with a knife and 3 pipe bomb grenades. He can pounce, kill in one strike, and generally scare the hell out of people by being nearly invisible. Using the Source engine's physics, he can also toss objects at people, or pick up dead players and toss them at their comrades. The IRIS team consists of the rest of the players on the server. They're basically your typical gun-toting commandos.

"The Hidden" is a great game. Unique, well polished, and professionally done. Fans of "stealth action" games should definitely check this out. My only gripe is that I have to lower the game's graphics to DirectX 8.1 to make it run smooth.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Funny combination of Team America's "Montage" song and some Battlefield 2 gameplay footage. Warning: has some obscene language.

I found this video after telling my friend Dogar that his k/d ratio for BF2 sucked (0.5), and that he needed some training from Master (Sergeant) Charlie_Six. All we needed, I told him, was a "training montage" to get him into shape. And so.. I stumbled upon this on Youtube.com. Hehe :-)

Friday, June 9, 2006


Bought the Armored Fury booster pack for BF2. $10 may seem too steep for a mere 3 maps at first, but the maps are really fun. None of them come close to Karkand/Sharqi quality combat though. Many of the previews for Armored Fury had the designer stating infantry combat was much more well balanced into the pack, but this simply isn't true. Most of the battles are centered around tank combat, and the "Armored Fury" part of the title is very apt. The most popular infantry class on these maps is the Anti-Tank kit, as there's few opportunities for the other kits to shine in. Karkand and Sharqi have plenty of areas where infantry can hide from vehicles, and these areas stretch across the bulk of those maps. But in Armored Fury, most of the flag areas are separated by long empty areas. These areas are usually full of tanks, and it's not that easy to bypass these tanks with another vehicle besides a tank of your own. Once you do arrive at a flag area, most enemy tanks will be assisted by their team's UAV. This makes it very difficult to destroy the tanks with Anti-Tank or C4 attacks.

So yeah.. infantry, which to me (and probably most BF2 players) should be the game's focus, is very much set in a supporting role with this booster. Much of this could be rectified if EA released a patch for the booster that removed, say, half of the available tanks on each of the maps.

I think one way to counteract the effectiveness of the tanks at the flag areas is to make sure the enemy UAV is kept destroyed as often as possible. This is mostly easily accomplished with the use of the new scout helicopters and Spec Ops troops. Right now, due to the position of the UAV trailers (deep within enemy territory, surrounded by tanks), enemy UAV trailers are rarely destroyed. If you fly a scout chopper, I encourage you to do as many commando raids on UAVs as possible, and not just focus on the highly entertaining act of machine gunning the crap out of fleeing infantry ;-)

My final complaint with the booster is that all of the original jets are absent! D'oh! Flying jets is one of my fav things to do in BF2, so their absence in the booster is quite painful. This "booster" is supposed to expand the game, not shrink it. Boo!

Sunday, June 4, 2006

Finished Genji for the PS2 last night. Great game. Very underrated IMO. Gamespot gave it a 7.0, but the user score is at 8.5. The game isn't very deep, but it's good fun and I think a good match for any casual gamer. Similar to the Onimusha games, you run around chopping up people for combo and critical hits. Unlike Onimusha, Genji actually has a decent inventory system. So you can drink health potions while in combat. Can't wait to see how Genji 2 turns out for the PS3. Looking forward to flipping giant crabs upside down and stabbing them for massive damage!

"X-men: The Last Stand" hit theaters recently and made a ton of money on its opening weekend. NPR has an interesting report on the film's social commentary. Hugh Jackman (Wolverine) mentions how the film's topic caused some heated political debate amongst the cast of the film.