Wow. Just….wow. I was up untill 3:30am last night playing possibly one of the finest action games of all time. It’s just mind blowingly polished in everything it does, you just know that Valve have tweaked, tested and optimised every possible facet of the experience. It really is getting close to the convergence product of an “interactive movie” that we keep hearing about. There are no cut scenes, a interface that is minimalist to the extreme and a world that is so full of possibilities that it is a joy to play. The story is just brilliant, it picks up from the end of Half-Life 1 and drops you into this Easterm European soviet-chic police state (1984 style) with no explantation of why you are there, how you got there or what you have to do next. It is left to the player to use their imagination to explore and interact with the surroundings and maybe guess at what is going on.

The physics are just plain fun. Barrels, boxes, tables, chairs, radiators, phones; everything can be moved around, smashed, burnt, blown up, thrown, stacked, floated, catapulted…It’s just sublimely fun. And the graphics! Oh man! I thought my PC would struggle (1.4 Athlon, 512 RAM, Gf4) but it’s coping surprisingly well at 1024×768 and rendering the Half-Life 2 world beautifully. Birds fly from rooftops, smoke and mist hangs around creepily and custard yellow paint peels from apartment block walls. Water effects are brilliant and don’t turn my pc to treacle. Reflections, frosted glass, sun streaming in through windows, and sheets of glass breaking gradually all look amazing. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the following screenshots taken whilst playing. I’ll try and get better ones up later but most of the time I’m too engrossed to bother pressing the screenshot key.

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GameSoc had it’s AGM last week and the new committee is now in full effect. No one else wanted to be the WebMaster so I volunteered to stand again and was duly elected. This year I’m gonna try and put my stamp on the site by stripping out a lot of junk we never use. We never use the forum, the front page needs a re-design and the colour scheme is looking a little dated. On major task would be to make the whole site standards compliant. Not as easy as it sounds, as most of the pages are generated by the back end so it means lots of hacking around in PHP files. I should really write some kind of numpties guide to the backend aswell as I’m not going to be doing this forever.

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Oh baby, how I have missed you! Sweet, sweet internet is back! BT finally activated our ADSL connection today and ben ninja-ed ISA server into action on our server PC. Oh man, its good to back on the bit torrent wagon, running the IM clients, constantly polling everyone’s RSS feed. I don’t know how I survived without it really, I’m sure Kerry saw I lot more of me though.

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We have a phone line at last and luckily we same to be on the ADSL register immediately. I’ll be signing us up to force9 1MB tonight I think.

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Firefox have at last released verion one of their fantastic browser. They also raised the funds to have a full page, full colour ad in the New York Times basically telling people that IE is rubbish and that they should switch. I like their style. Go! Download it now!

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Fred Dibnah has died

I loved his programs on TV mainly becuase of his endless enthusiasm towards any kind of mechanical system. Fred, you’ll be missed.

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Thanks to everyone who came along on Friday night, it was really good fun and more people than I expected turned up! I’ve got some pics on my camera somewhere that I’ll dig out later.

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