Full of Half life 2

Half life 2 is a nice game. I liked the dystopian environment (the way I like night mares, you can wake up to the nicer reality ™). The game is close to being an interactive movie. This level has a nice big bridge where there is some cliff-hanging action. There isn’t much music but I like what is there. Its well timed for me.

Lost Coast : Cathedral

The fights are not special except one of the level where are supported by Antlions (large insect thingamajig). In the ‘Anticitizen’ level you get to command resistance forces. Not many boss battles. For the sake of it they had put a strider in a hall and gave us some energy balls to pick and throw. After a quite some tries I could bring it down. Its a nice break from the tense action in Counterstrike games (when you put the bots in expert mode). BTW, I did not mean that I win any of those expert mode battles (I manage a few kills).

Lost coast

The lost coast tech demo is a nice show-off demo. I liked the shine on the rocks, improvements in character rendering and the dynamic tone mapping. I guess we are close to what is needed for the matrix :-). Its just a matter of putting raw power for finer rendering.

FPS sickness

No Clip

It was there all the way with first gen games where the scenes scrolled faster and quite outside the natural range of speed. It reduced, but not enough for me to be able to sit and play the game for hours. The games like Shadow Warrior and Duke Nukem were ok as long as the levels were in the townships. As we started closer to the bosses irregular terrain showed up, with bad textures. These caused real discomfort. DooM 3 changed it. Except for the intended scare and claustrophobia in DooM 3 it was quite easy on my stomach.

HL2 is not really up to DooM 3 in this but its better than HL and other FPSes I’ve played before. Felt it yesterday while popping those striders from atop remains of some building. 60 degrees (not sure) as field of view is not enough. I keep flicking the mouse left and right. The visuals dont move smoothly = uneasy stomach. It would be cool to have an FPS setup with like 9 monitors slightly concave to give as much field as your eye wants.

If the rock was rendered by various Engines.

Came across the pic along side (shows major game engines rendering a stone). Gave me a laugh.