Mark's Blog

With the super-cold temperatures there hasn't been all that much to do, so I've been splitting my gaming time between three games: DX2, Civ 3 Conquests and MOHAA.

I liken Deus Ex: Invisible War to the movie Gangs of New York: very flawed, and easy to find problems with, but I just really liked it anyway. My Deus Ex: Invisible War Biomods Guide got indexed by google and is now getting some traffic, maybe 20 visits a day. I finished the game a couple of weeks ago and tried a couple of the endings. The last third of the game had a lot of tie-ins to the original game, which was neat. I didn't like the inventory management system, which was too simplistic and unrealistic. Also, the universal ammo system (one ammo type fits all weapons) was okay from a usability standpoint, except only nine clips could be carried (as if one could carry around, all at once, a flamethrower, sniper rifle, swords, SMG, shotgun, and a few other weapons, but no more than 9 small ammo clips).

I got the Civilization 3 Conquests expansion pack, which has been a good buy. There are some scenarios, which allow you to play a particular segment of history, with different technologies and different rules than the regular game. The multiplayer seems to be a lot better than the very slow and buggy multiplayer capabilities in the previous expansion pack, Play the World.

As well, I've been continuing to play MOHAA multiplayer. I have the Breakthrough expansion pack and went through the singleplayer campaign in a couple of days. Good, but nothing revolutionary. Fortunately there are a lot of really good multiplayer maps, which almost seems to be the main value of the game. I'm not complaining though. I wish MOHAA had some sort of centralized ranking server, where you could learn approximately how good your opponents are (like America's Army). If I'm having a bad game, it's nice to know if it's because the other players are more skilled, or if it's just a bad night, or lag, or whatever other problem there might be.

Finally there was an article on Slashdot discussing the strong rumors about the next Grand Theft Auto game, supposedly GTA: San Andreas. Needless to say, this is the game I'm most eagerly anticipating right now. It's scheduled to come on the PS2 later this year, with a probably mid-2005 release for PC (probably sometime around the final, still-unnamed Star Wars movie)