flipabode

Finally finished COD4’s campaign mode on the Xbox last night. I thought I was up to the challenge of going through it on Veteran difficulty, and it turned out I was. It wasn’t difficult, it was severe punishment. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the game. From the intro boat scene to putting the final bullet in the terrorist leader, it was an amazing, cinematic experience. It’s extremely linear, to be more precise it’s an FPS on a rail. A very, very beautiful rail.

I think the hardest difficulty exposes the (few) weak points in the game’s design. The most obvious one is the few places where there is infinite respawns of enemies in combination with the pretty obvious “tripwire” triggering of new waves of enemies. I thought this was pretty obvious fault in COD3 (nothing more awesome than watching a NPC pop into existence), which was considered a low point in the franchise. It’s not too noticeable on default difficulty, which I’m guessing Joe Gamer will be playing on, since you would move through levels fairly consistently, minimizing the number of respawned waves of enemies.

The tripwire triggering of infinite waves in a few places in combination with the increased difficulty (you only take 2-3 shots before dieing in Veteran, plus everyone has superhuman sharpshooting skills) makes it some of these sections incredibly tough. In a couple cases I think it came down to luck more than anything that allowed me to survive. Add the sometimes microscopic Checkpoint triggering, you can make your way pretty far into a firefight and completely miss  checkpoints.

On the flip side, I can also easily argue against the above. With percise enough timing between waves, you could make it through the infinite respawn area with quick enough shooting and sprinting to the next checkpoint. The only problem with that is you aren’t really taking a moment to really admire the world that Infinity Ward built.

All things considered, it is a well crafted experience, and I’m saying that after hours of swearing at the TV after dieing for the 50th time in the same place. Now, tonight, I subject myself to the hell that is known as the Epilogue mission on Veteran.

Hopefully this is positive news. This morning in my usual digg skimming before I start my day of work, I came across a post linking to MacScoop about the latest 10.5.2 developer seed issues fixed list. There was a couple things that stood out that where identified. First was network sharing of optical drives. That’s a given considering the MacBook Air’s quickly approaching release. The other discovered feature is the ability to use network volumes as a Time Machine backup device. By no means is this confirmed in the final build, Apple has pulled undocumented features last minute before on OS updates, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

If that feature makes it into final release, but you can’t use the afp share on the AirDisk, you can mount it as a regular Samba share and go about backups that way.

full list at MacScoop.com

“The” Steve Jobs had his keynote at Macworld yesterday, along with bringing a few new Apple branded goodies to the table. The biggest of which is the new MacBook Air. All I can say is this, Hotness. I couldn’t bring myself to buying one to replace my still going strong MacBook Pro (albeit it’s on it’s third battery in less than two years.), I still ordered one on behalf of my sister, as she was holding out for something thin and lightweight. I know she’s pumped to get it, and I’m pumped to get a chance to play with it before she gets it.
(more…)