There’s not much I can say about Half-Life 2 that hasn’t already been said.

It is true that it is visually stunning. It is true that the level design is nearly genius. It is true that the weapons feel satisfying. It is true that even though the physics engine is severely over-exploited, dismembering enemies with flying sawblades and creating makeshift ladders/bridges never fails to amuse. It is true that the game is so immersive that you’ll find yourself yelling “why can’t Gordon Freeman climb a god-damned fence or flip a table back to its proper position?!” It is true that even with a minimum of dialogue (or, indeed, perhaps because of it), the plot development is more intriguing than most you’re likely to find in any game, shooter or not.

So what’s the problem? In a word, Steam. Half-Life 2 brought my first exposure to Valve’s content distribution system. My experience thus far is that Steam is clumsy, obtrusive, and an incredible detriment to the way that I want to play.

You’re required to install Steam in order to play HL2. No connection to the Internet or the Steam infrastructure’s too busy/not available? You can’t launch HL2 for the first time. You’re planning on playing HL2/Counterstrike: Source at a LAN party with no Internet connectivity present? Make sure you have backup games, since despite what Valve tells you (specifically, that if you tell Steam to remember your username and password, then you can play offline) you’ll still ocassionally get “Steam ticket expired” errors and won’t be able to launch any of Valve’s games. To add insult to injury, don’t forget your CD - even if you launch your game through Steam, enter your username and password, let Steam validate that your credentials are good and you have a good CD-key via the Internet, you STILL NEED THE HL2 CD IN THE DRIVE TO LAUNCH THE GAME. Complete and utter idiocy.

I’m a gamer, so I have a vested interest in rewarding good game developers by purchasing their games instead of pirating them. I also believe that some anti-piracy measures are tolerable. In the end, though, when I buy a software product, I expect to be able to use it how and when I choose. UbiSoft’s Rainbow Six 3 patches which disabled the ability to play the game off of virtual CD drives were understandable, but annoying. Yes, launching the game from a virtual CD image instead of a physical CD made piracy easier, but it also made legitimate gameplay easier - if I have the hard disk space and I want the added performance of playing from HD instead of CD (not to mention the ability to stow my physical CD away and not have to fish it out every time I want to play), then I should be able to. However, that measure pales in comparison to a software package that requires me to check with the manufacturer every single time I want to use it to make sure I still have the right to do so. This is simply the case of a software company presuming that all of their customers are guilty until proven otherwise. Valve has decided that breaking their software for legitimate customers who can’t (e.g. on an airplane, on a trip, at a LAN party, etc.) or don’t want to use Steam is an acceptable loss in order to weed out potential pirates.

Once I finish the single-player game, Half-Life 2 is going to be relegated to a shelf and I will be as thrilled to eradicate Steam from my system as I would any other piece of spyware. No multiplayer (not that there’s much to speak of anyway), no expansions, and no mods. Much like I wouldn’t go to a restaurant that punches me in the face, takes my wallet, and checks for sufficient funds before seating me, I simply have no use for a company that treats me as a potential criminal first and, after rigorous and intrusive examination, delcares, “oh, sorry, my mistake, we have already made money off of you after all…”

People’s Sexiest Man of 2004…

Jude Law

And how! rawr.

Due to a set of complicated factors such as illness, Halo 2 gameplay, and sheer unimportance, we forgot to note that November 10th was the 2-year anniversary of this site.

Happy birthday to us, er something!

Behold - the Heroic Proteins!!!

Make sure to sign up for the Bungie.net group at the link above if you are (or want to be) a Heroic Protein.

As ColdForged has noted, there are a lot of games hitting the shelves now-ish, just in time for the holiday season.

Desiree picked up Zoo Tycoon 2 over the weekend (which, oddly, appeared as though it had a “stealth” launch) and it seems to be good if you were a fan of the original.

Today there’s that little obscure indie game, Half-Life 2, plus its brother-in-technology Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines. (If you were wondering, I’ll probably get Bloodines before HL2, now that I know the only multiplayer component for HL2 is Counterstrike: Source.) The expansion for Joint Operations, Escalation, also hits shelves today - which, given the competition, might not have been NovaLogic’s smartest marketing move. My brother-in-law loved Need For Speed: Underground so he’ll be happy to know that the sequel also goes on sale today.

If you never plan to have any interaction whatsoever with Sony’s customer support (or enjoy the sensation of sharp, heated objects being inserted in unpleasant places), then you might be excited that Everquest II is already shipping; otherwise, if you’re a fan of MMORPGs where the live team doesn’t hate the players, then you’re more likely to care that Blizzard’s World of Warcraft launches simultaneously for Windows and MacOS on November 22nd.

Finally, there’s even a new RTS to get excited about… EA’s The Battle for Middle Earth will be released on December 8th.

Don’t forget the new ATI drivers (or nVidia ForceWare drivers) while you’re checking the Windows games out.

Apparently, I deserved some punishment. Was it for playing Halo 2 first? Was it for thinking that being so good with a mouse and keyboard would translate back into thumbsticks with little-to-no practice? Was it for thinking that team and large game skills were transferable to 1-on-1 skills?

Whatever the reason, punishment was required and ColdForged was there to provide it. Even worse, the evil geniuses at Bungie.net have made the evidence incontrovertable.

Oh, have no doubt, I will have my revenge… and, thanks to Bungie.net, everyone will know about it.

Ahhhh, Halo 2.

Full disclosure: I am not a Bungie fanboy, but Bungie’s Marathon games and the original Halo remain to this day the only FPSes that I played through to the end because I cared about the story. I also cared pretty deeply about the story in I Love Bees. I am loving Joint Ops for Windows and would play Rainbox Six 3 on Windows over Xbox any day of the week and twice on Sundays. Bear in mind my heavy bias for PC FPSes as you read this.

First of all, the Chicago event last night took place in a movie theater. When we got inside, we were given a DVD with all of the “I Love Bees” audio clips, credits, some “making of” information, which was a classy touch. We were also given a raffle ticket.

Inside, Halo 2 was set up on 5 Xboxes and TV screens. 4 of the Xboxes were system-linked for a local LAN 8-player game, while the 5th, middle Xbox was hooked up to the other three “training exercises” in Austin, New York, and San Francisco via Xbox Live. This was also the system that was projected on to the big screen.

Playtime was raffled off, as were 5 “prize packs” which included Halo 2 Limited Edition, the Plantronics Halo 2 headset, Xbox Live Starter kit, and 12 months of Xbox Live. These prizes are being sent out next week, so don’t fret that some people are playing (the legal, English version of) Halo 2 already.

I didn’t win a prize pack, but I did win some time on the system link. This game unequivocally lives up to the hype and then some. There will be ZERO disappointments next week.

Let me get the obvious stuff out of the way - the graphics and sound are the best of any console FPS, period. Frame rate was high and fluid and the controls are the ones you know and love from the original (if slightly more responsive). As with everything, the controls are very (but not totally) customizable - you have a variety of preset gamepad layouts to choose from, you can disable inverted look controls, and you can even set sensitivity sliders for the thumbsticks.

I played in a (non-team) Slayer match. (That’s what every other game calls “deathmatch”, for those not in the know.) Some of the subtle things were quite incredible - dual wielding, for example, is all you hoped it would be and more. John Woo should be jumping for joy. In my short time playing, I got pretty handy with a run-and-gun technique with a submachinegun and a pistol - spraying bullets from my right hand while closing the gap to my enemy, then finishing him/her off with a few shots to the head from my left from up-close. Of course, dual plasma rifles aren’t too shabby either… and I consider it a personal point of pride that I’ve destroyed opponents with the Covenant sword before the rest of the free world gets a chance to. The maps are well-designed and the speed of the game is perfectly tuned to be andrenalin-pumping but not cartoony… think Goldeneye for N64 with killer graphics and far more interesting weapons and you’re starting to get the idea. The HUD is great and is tailored to the incredible variety of game types. For example, in CTF it shows you where the enemy flag is and where your base is without being too obtrusive.

Speaking of game types, this isn’t your father’s CTF (at least not with the options we used). Instead of both teams hunting opposing flags that require capture and return to your own base, the CTF we played had one team on offense (i.e. get the flag and return it) and one team on defense. The offensive team won a point if they capped the flag and returned it to their base - the defensive team won a point if the offensive team failed to do so within a set time. Once a point is awarded, the teams switch roles (offense/defense) and the teams play again until one team has 3 points. Sort of a mix of regular CTF and the Unreal Tournament series’ “Assault” game mode. SO sweet. The other game modes are crazy - in addition to the free-for-all “Slayer” and this new-style CTF, there was also “Team Slayer” (not limited to two teams - I watched a 2x2x2x2 game last night), “King of the Hill”, “Team King of the Hill” (also not limited to 2 teams), “Oddball” (a game mode from Marathon in which you try to hang on to a skull-shaped ball for as long as possible and the first person to accumulate 2 minutes with the ball wins; the only problem is that when you have the ball, you show up on everyone’s radar and your only offensive option is punching), “Team Oddball” (again more than 2 teams are allowed), and probably several more that we didn’t see (for fear of plot exposure, we obviously didn’t get to play Co-op, though it was on the menu). Of course there are subcategories of the Slayer and Team Slayer modes called “Swords” and “Rockets”. I’ll let you figure out which weapons you’re limited to in those modes.

Perhaps most impressive of all are the overwhelmingly incredible Xbox Live features. This may be old hat to people who have read all of the press releases and gaming site/magazine articles, but I hadn’t - and the Xbox Live options BLEW ME AWAY. If this game doesn’t sell a bajillion Xbox owners on the service, then I’ll let CF blast me repeatedly with a Covenant carbine.

Where to start… there is a “Party” system, which allows you to grab a few of your buddies and move around from game to game as a block. Bungie calls this the “virtual couch”, because it allows you to stay in the same games and on the same teams as your friends with zero effort, just as if you were all sitting on the same couch. One person is designated the party leader, and they make the choices regarding which games to join (or what options to host with) and the other members of the party are automagically brought along in tow. It’s so goddamn cool it practically hurts. The matchmaking options for individuals and clans, the clan support in general for that matter, the avatar customization, it’s just simply breathtaking. The absolutely ginormous number of stats that are tracked in-game (and ultimately, on Bungie.net) will make your head spin. In fact, after November 9 I encourage you to go to Bungie.net regularly to see how many times Coldforged has killed me via tragic Warthog “accident”… (CF, you do realize that you’re the designated driver given my, uh, limited PGR2 skills, right?) All this plus the regular Xbox Live features like hassle-free voice chat, friends lists, etc. is almost too good to be true.

I was a bit too caught up in the excitement to give a more in-depth preview than this, but suffice it to say I’m sure that the stuff I didn’t see (single-player, co-op, all of the customization options for controls, displays, and multiplayer game types, under the covers of the Live features) can only make me more excited about this game.

This is it - this is the pinnacle of online FPS gaming on any platform, including Windows. It’s so easy to set up exactly to your tastes, it’s such a snap to get in to games with your friends, your clans, others of your skill level, and of course the content is beyond your wildest expectations. It’s not as good as you thought it’d be, it’s not as good as you hoped it’d be, it’s BETTER. Bungie has anticipated features that you didn’t even know you wanted and overdelivered on everything you could have possibly dreamed of.

If you’ve ever enjoyed an action-oriented video game, then pre-order this game now. If you don’t have an Xbox, then get one. If you don’t have Xbox Live, then sign up today. The gamer in you will thank me later.

Well, the “I Love Bees” ARG ends today, but hopefully it’s going to be a bit of a blowout. Tonight I have a confirmed reservation to attend a special “training exercise” here in Chicago - which will probably mean I’ll get to play Halo 2 before the rest of you! (I promise lots of multiplayer details, CF…)

Also, it’s nice to know that the little group of intrepid “I Love Bees” players that I formed, the Fireflies, had our site (ilb.extrasonic.com) mentioned in the New York Times.

On the other hand, it’ll be sad to see it go - it’s been a blast!

I don’t often write about politics, but I feel that the United States has just witnessed a fairly historic election. Even after all the extreme vitriol and outright seething hatred of Bush by the Democratic Party and its supporters, the Democrats still couldn’t pull off a victory. In my estimation, the 2004 general election will be viewed, depending on the Democrats’ next steps, as either the death or rebirth of the Democratic Party.

If you believe the left-leaning weblogs, then I am among the uneducated, oblivious, easily manipulated, and downright evil masses who willingly and/or ignorantly invited the destruction of the American way of life by inciting terrorists and simple-mindedly handing over our democracy to fascist Nazis that are chomping at the bit to reward their corporate cronies through war profiteering.

In reality, I am an educated, well-informed, thoughtful voter who weighed the candidates’ views on a variety of subjects and found that while both Bush and Kerry hold positions that I strongly disagree with, my disagreements with Kerry were unacceptable and my disagreements with Bush were tolerable (if only just barely).

I am a registered Republican, but if there were a candidate that more closely matched my views, then I’d be happy to vote for him/her. Case in point: although I voted for Bush here in Illinois (despite his steep odds in my state), I would have rather gnawed my own arm off than vote for Keyes over Obama. Keyes is a nutjob of the highest order, and voting against him was almost as strong of a motivation to get to the polls as voting for Bush was.

So how do the Democrats get back on track? How do they rebuild? I have a simple, 4-point plan for the Democratic Party chairman that would make the Democratic party more attractive to me (and, I suspect, a great many others).

1. Security and Foreign Policy

Forget what Clinton told you; there is no “peace dividend”. Asymmetrical threats like Al Qaeda require as much time, money, and vigilance as cold wars, and additionally a large conventional force is required to intervene in destabilizing regional conflicts, to quell genocide or support other peacekeeping efforts, and to act as a deterrent against would-be enemies of the American homeland - especially if there’s more than one of these threats at any given time.

As commander-in-chief, don’t let domestic or foreign politics compromise military operations. The President is empowered to set military objectives and - on a grand, strategic level - military priorities. Once that’s done, get the hell out of the way. Let the military do its job. Don’t force them to accomplish their goals with rules of engagement that place a higher priority on protecting America’s alliances and PR status than on protecting American soldiers (as Clinton did in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Somalia, and pretty much everywhere else). Don’t punish American soldiers who are deployed in a war zone by voting against $87 billion in desperately needed funding just because of the way the political winds are blowing domestically (like Kerry did). Kerry repeatedly criticized Bush for not sending enough troops to Iraq, but Bush listened to the military leadership’s requests and then gave them everything they asked for - U.S. military doctrine has been trending toward smaller, faster troop deployments for the past 20 years, and technology (especially communications) has finally caught up to the point where the senior military leadership could make it work (which it did, in such spectacular fashion that we didn’t have enough time to plan for the aftermath). Bush’s level of trust in the military’s judgment and professionalism is in stark contrast to Clinton’s distrust and compulsion to have non-military political operatives micromanage military operations. This is why the best military professionals love Bush and sought early retirement in droves under Clinton.

When it comes to foreign policy, quality beats quantity. Countries who share our core democratic values and with whom we have a vigorous and mutually beneficial cultural and economic exchange - countries like Australia, Germany, Japan, and the UK, among others - are always more important than rabble-rousers who are at best suspicious and at worst resentful of the United States’ role in the world. Don’t get me wrong; the support of as many countries as is practical is always preferable to no international support when the U.S. acts outside its own borders, but it is by no means required if America or its allies are threatened. The U.N. has neutered itself into irrelevance by refusing to enforce its own resolutions, and most voters are not really interested in being lectured by France, a country whose rabid anti-Semitism invalidates any moral superiority they claim with respect to human rights and whose ridiculous and unwarranted vanity brought you such classics as “Paris Mean Time” to replace GMT and the legal requirement to use the term “courriel” (since “e-mail” sounds too Anglicised).

2. Economics

Grand social programs (you know, the ones where the government knows best and will take care of everything because the masses are clearly not altruistic or smart enough) are deader than Dillinger. That kind of thinking only reaffirms the general populace’s belief that the Democrats are a bunch of cultural and intellectual elitists. Insulting your electorate by not-so-subtly saying “we’re going to take a bigger share of your money because we know better” doesn’t win a lot of votes.

That’s not to say that Democrats need to go crazy with personal or corporate tax cuts and loopholes, but not raising taxes unless the public gives you a clear mandate to create a new spending program or improve an old one is a good start. The dirty little secret of fiscal conservatives and even Libertarians is that most of them (the ones who aren’t anarchists, anyway) don’t actually want zero government spending; that’s simply an exaggeration to contrast with what we’re typically faced with. They just want targeted, efficient government spending on things that are of clear utility to society and are areas that the government has a legitimate right and interest to be involved in. Liberal doesn’t have to mean “monolithic socialized medicine program with no choice”, it should stand for liberty. Speaking of which, liberty is a decent segue into…

3. Social Issues

This is the area where Democrats can really stand out. Instead of getting stuck, like the Republicans, with a platform dictated by a religious and moral code that not every American agrees with, the Democrats have an opportunity to be the party that stands for personal freedom and humanistic values.

The tricky part about personal freedom is that you have to be consistent. You have to stick up for all personal freedoms, not just the ones acceptable at Ivy League cocktail parties. Yes, that includes the right to own a gun if you don’t use it to hurt anyone. And the right to choose your own doctor.

With respect to humanistic values, the Democrats should be decidedly pro-people in their agenda and their spending. Don’t be beholden to environmental groups if there’s a compromise between environmental protection and preserving people’s jobs. Don’t be a slave to PETA if animal testing will advance medical research. Now this doesn’t mean you should slash, burn, pollute, and dump cosmetics into rabbits’ eyes just to see what happens, but find a prudent balance. In general, if you’re spending money intelligently on protecting people’s rights (defense, crime prevention, enforcing civil liberties, etc.) or sustaining/improving society (infrastructure, education, research, health care, retirement, etc.) while maintaining a maximum amount of personal choice and freedom, then you’re probably doing the right thing.

4. Understanding Your Constituents

After Kerry conceded the 2004 presidential election, the reaction from the Democrats was brutal. Move to Canada! No, secede from the Union! No, armed revolution! We can’t possibly live with the ignorant yokels who gave Bush a mandate!

A little tip - slinging names at the people who voted against your candidate, accusing them of being too stupid to know what they were really voting for, etc. is not the way to win people over to your cause. Insulting swing voters instead of seeking to understand why they preferred the other candidate and modifying your platform to be more inclusive is poor politics. Truly centrist voters already think that your pompous attempts to engineer society to become some New England/west coast politically correct utopian standard is just as offensive as the Republicans trying to engineer society to an evangelical Christian standard. Break that perception. Reach out to new voting blocks.

Anyhow, that’s my $0.02. Like Coldforged, I’m taking a long break from further political blogging if I can help it.

Just to point out where we are with the U.S. Presidential election, Kerry and Edwards are not conceeding the election because they feel as though they still have a chance to win Ohio when all of the provisional ballots are counted. Given that Bush will almost certainly win one or both of the remaining undeclared states (Iowa and New Mexico), whichever candidate actually won Ohio will be the next President of the United States.

Let’s do some quick math to see what this means:

With 100% of the precincts in Ohio reporting, Bush currently has 2,794,346 votes. Kerry has 2,658,125 votes, which means Bush’s lead is 136,221.

In the Democrats’ most optimistic estimate, there are 250,000 outstanding provisional ballots and they are all valid. (In 2000, only 90% of the Ohio provisional ballots turned out to be valid.) In order to win in this scenario, Kerry would need to get 193,111 of the 250,000 votes in order to win in Ohio. This is a margin of ~77.24%.

In the Republicans’ most optimistic estimate, there are 175,000 outstanding provisional ballots and only 90% of them are valid. In order to win in this scenario, Kerry would need to get 146,861 of the 157,500 votes in order to win Ohio. This is a margin of ~93.25%.

Assuming the truth is somewhere in the middle, Kerry probably needs ~85% of the provisional ballots to win. In Kerry’s best county in Ohio (Cuyahoga), he only managed to get ~67% of the vote.

So why does the Kerry campaign think such a huge margin of victory is possible among those voters who cast provisional ballots? In Ohio, provisional ballots come in two flavors - absentee ballots and ballots for voters whose eligibility to vote could not be immediately verified (usually because they showed up at the wrong polling place).

The Democrats think that the overwhelming majority of provisional ballots are from young, first-time voters that support Kerry, and these voters made a rookie mistake of showing up at a precinct other than the one where they were registered.

The Republicans, however, agree that some of the provisional ballots are from first-time voters, but counter-claim that first-time voters aren’t necessarily young nor do they necessarily support Kerry. The ballot initiative in Ohio to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman helped motivate a lot of churches to get their members registered, and the Republicans claim that there are as many or more of these religiously motivated (and implicitly Republican) first-time voters than there are of the young Kerry supporters - a plausible theory given the age 18-29 turnout cited in other states. To add more weight to their claim, the Republicans also feel as though they have an edge in the absentee provisional ballots, since many of Ohio’s absentee voters are overseas military personnel who are thought to favor Bush by as much as 2-1. In other words, the Republicans not only disagree that Kerry can get the requisite ~85% of Ohio’s provisional votes, they question whether he can even get 50%.

The bottom line is that the race in Ohio is close enough to justify Kerry’s wait-and-see stance, but mathematically speaking it is incredibly improbable that a full count will work out in Kerry’s favor. (Celebrate or cry as you deem appropriate.)

EDIT: Shortly after I posted this, I learned that the number of provisional ballots in 78 of 88 counties had been counted (i.e. not tallied, just counted to see how many there were) and the total was 135,149. Assuming the same ratio in the other 10 counties and that all of the provisional ballots were valid, there would only be 152,476 valid provisional ballots total for Ohio - Kerry would need to have received 144,349 or an amazing 94.67% of the vote on those ballots to take the presidency. It is little wonder, then, that shortly after these numbers were released, Kerry’s concession to Bush was announced. The United States has elected its next president, and at least we can say that this time it took less than 36 days.