It's not like me to get my hopes up for a new release.  Being the cynical bastard I am, I expect games to disappoint me on a regular basis, and generally keep my expectations in check.  Metro 2033 however struck some kind of nerve that mitigated my usual ability to look at games rationally, and I built a certain amount of hype up for the game.

Going into it I knew that drawing comparisons with the STALKER series wouldn't work; the developers of Metro were very blunt in stating the game was a focused, story-driven single player title.  In short, it's linear and it's damn proud of it.  It's much more accurate to compare Metro to Half Life 2 in that regard.  However from a tech perspective it's easy to weigh Metro against STALKER, because both have engine issues, framerate problems and crash constantly without considerable tweaking.

Here's a quick pro-con rundown of Metro 2033 for prospective buyers out there:

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This post is going to be done in two parts.  Those of you socialist liberals who can't stand me ranting about guns can read just the first half, while the freedom loving patriots can take in the full value of this rant.

I recently got to play Battlefield: Bad Company 2.  In many ways it's an amazing game; the visuals are outstanding, the sound design is solid, the voice acting is excellent, and the destruction system is also very satisfying despite seeming much more scripted than some other engines.  However, despite these steps forward it seems that we're still living in a world of perpetual console ports, and even developers that promise the moon only give you a meteorite.Read more

Thanks to local stores breaking the street date of ME2 by several days, I've put about 20 hours into the sequel already.  It's a welcome reprieve from the shit I'm dealing with in the real world, and does a great many things better than its predecessor.  I feel that a lot of the RPG-centric folks will dislike it to a degree because it does lean hard on the side of shooters, doing away with the traditional inventory and being able to individually outfit crew members with armor or upgrades.Read more

In case no one noticed, the L4D2 SDK was released on time on Christmas eve.  I'm not sure what the bigger news item is: that the SDK is out, or that Valve was on time with a release.

At least we didn't have to wait 8 months this time!

Since we've got the goddamn STORM OF THE CENTURY rolling right now here in the hills of Pennsylvania, I figured this would be a good time to drop a line regarding L4D2.

For awhile now, most of us have been frequenting the fantastic 8v8 server run by Newf and co. over at No Nonsense Shenanigans which almost perfectly mirrors the kind of mod setup I would run myself.  The server's been picking up a lot of steam lately, and during primetime it can be a real bitch to get in.  That's where this post comes in.Read more

I'd like to extend a very sincere thank you to the three contributors who decided to buy me a copy of L4D2.  I'll be hosting it quite a bit, and the Sourcemod team is already hard at work putting out beta support for the game to give us admin functions and the ability to re-add crawling and other fun stuff if Valve left it in.

The modding this time around will be much more subdued.  The first L4D proved to be a cakewalk on any difficulty but expert, but this time around Valve has upped the challenge level considerably and done most of my modding work for me.