G3

After playing (and loving) the demo of FarCry for a few days, I bought the full version this weekend. (Gamers tip: Get new releases at Target, since MediaPlay/BestBuy/Circuit City sell out right away. Target had plenty-o-copies.)

Aside from being the most gorgeous game I’ve ever played, I’m thoroughly impressed with the gameplay. The AI is the best I have encountered, and the bad guys work together in a way to get you positively panicked at times. You can’t go Rambo in this game and live long… stealth and defensible positions are the only way to survive.

I haven’t messed with Multiplayer yet, but that’ll come. I’m having way too much fun in the single player mode right now. Between the game play, the “solve the problem however you see fit” game design, the Half-life-ish “music timed to get the adrenaline pumping” effects… it’s all good.

Addendum (4/27/04, 1am):

I thought the mercenary opponants in the game were pretty tough. After playing for awhile, though, you start to get a feel for what you can get away with and how to bait them into walking into a bullet. “Maybe I’ll do alright at this game,” I thought.

Heh.

I just got to the part of the game where the mercenaries are the least of your troubles. There are some baddies in this game that can easily kill you with one hit. And they are everywhere. And to make it worse, the freak-you-out factor from Half-Life is back in full force. Even after getting killed by the same baddie in the same spot 8 or 9 times until I figured out how to get past him, I got chills every time he showed up. Running into the mercenaries is actually a relief now. But these new things are evil, evil, evil. There is some serious trouble in paradise.

In my quest to be less fat, I’ve been drinking quite a bit of diet soda lately.

Somebody told me to do a little research into Aspartame (the artificial sweetener of just about every diet goo on the market) and decide whether I really wanted to drink that stuff after all.

Lots of people think Aspartame is a pretty nasty substance. At least on the web, however, much of these folks have the source of their misgivings in the “Nancy Markle Hoax“. This turned out to be a bogus letter written by another woman who is neither a scientist nor a doctor. Her claims are pretty sensational, and are repeated ad nauseum by people too lazy to do a little of their own research.

Discounting this kind of “I pasted it in my website because it must be true” tripe, there are a few seemingly more reputable sources of concern out there. Here’s one of the better sites, with many links to physician statements: Aspartame Warning.

Much of the concern out there focuses on what Aspartame turns into when warmed (in the can, or in the body): Formaldehyde.

In my research, I also discovered the FDA did an investigation on GD Searle (the inventors of Aspartame) after Aspartame was already on the market. They wanted to see if the trials done on animals (prior to approval for humans) were conducted appropriately. The FDA concluded that Searle did quite a few things to cover up what the sweetener really did to animals:
(more…)

No seriously. They are.

I mean how many times lately has someone said, “Dude, this friggin’ game is cool!” or “Check out this mod for Battlefield 1942.” And then when you get to the download page you end up saying something like, “1.4 GB download!?!?! What the?”. For me this has happened lots o times. So imagine how refreshing it was to find that .theprodukkt wrote a FPS called .kkrieger

You want it? Download the 96kb zipped demo here. 96 kilobytes!!!. All the textures are procedural and generated at startup. It actually looks quite nice, and what’s even better is that size-wise, it could fit inside UT2004’s readme file. Now that’s awesome.

Welcome to another installment of….

The What The? Files

Ever wish you could just order somebody else around, and they’d do it, no matter how ridiculous? Ever wish you could do it from a web page? Ever wish the guy was wearing a chicken suit?

Okay, me neither. But just in case…

The Subservient Chicken

In theory, this site is designed to sell BK chicken bits. All I see is a guy in a chicken suit (with garters!?) getting sweaty. After doing those antics all day, I’ll bet he could use some Disposable Underwear.

Life imitates art imitates life?

How’s this for a Twighlight Zone plot?

Heaven help us if they ever prempt that Simpsons episode where Homer tries to stop a nuclear reactor meltdown.

Or for that matter, any given episode of MadTV.

A fire suppressant that doesn’t damage your electronics. What will they think of next? Some interesting images of the demo.

Best Buy is indicating that Half-Life 2’s release date is 8/26/2004. And, that Doom 3 is scheduled for 7/13/2004. Gee, that’s almost a year behind their original schedules. Are the dates real? I guess I’ll believe it when I see the whites…err ‘reds’ of their eyes.