mozidesign.com Unorganized Thoughts of a Game Designer

Let the Games Begin!

Too many gams not enough time! The other day I loaded parts of the Orange Box on to my system, Half-Life 2-Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2. Did not get Portal, but I’ll install it later. The odd thing was that at work these games were installed in no time, but at home the download rate was riduculous with speeds of 3k/s! So I waited for the downloads to end but everytime I checked they were still stuck at 55% or so due to the slow download rate. But sometime after 1am the speeds really picked up, and by around 3:30 am I had HL2 and TF2 on my machine. So given all that wait I decided to stay up a bit longer and play both games for a bit.

First I ran Team Fortress 2, and level of detail is amazing! I really dig the new cartoon art style for the game, and the characters are really cool each having their own unique set of weapons, combat style and personality. For the short time that I played I really started to enjoy the Scout and Pyro class. Speaking of the Pyro class if you have not seen the short machima video of the lonely Pyro check it out, it’s quite well done and has some humorous elements…

After about two or three games of TF2 I fired up the next episode for Half-Life 2. Did not get far but the little that I did play I was quite impressed. The whole outdoors enviornment thing going on is really cool. Even though I have barely scracthed the surface of both games, just from the hour that I played I knew it would make up for the dissappoinment of Halo 3.

Moving on, Unreal Tournament 3 demo is out, downloading it now. When I first saw the posts over at Beyond Unreal stating that the demo is “two weeks” away I had to laugh. That two weeks joke has been going since UT2k3, but this time around it looks like the demo was actually released within the estimated two weeks and not a day later. Looks like I’ll have to finish up Half-Life as soon as I can becuase if the demo is out that can only mean that the full game may indeed be coming out next month.

Speaking of which, next month will be crazy with Gears PC and hopefully UT3 as well. I already pre-orderd both games and can’t to get them and start modding using the new Unreal Engine tool set. I got some neat level designs drawn on paper so hopefully it should not take me too long to actually get those ideas into the game. So within the next couple of months keep an eye on my level design page with updates of Gears and UT3 maps!

8 min left till the UT3 demo is done downloading…. quoting Cartman, “C’mon… C’mon….”