RE: We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.
05-18-2013, 10:26 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-21-2013, 07:37 AM by BRPXQZME.)
Aaaand now I’m done with Half-Life: Blue Shift. It was basically a glorified mod; fanfic quality writing, short, not different enough like Opposing Force was. Not worth saying much else, other than that I didn’t need any cheats on this one (partly the hardest enemy in the whole thing is an alien grunt, partly I’ve learned how to go around corners so that I can headshot the tough guys). Seeing as to how I lack a second player, I’m just going to watch Decay on YouTube; then I’m done with the first generation. Final thoughts to take away from the whole experience:
- Ow, my eardrums. There may be a little too much dynamic range for me. When you’re constantly going from quiet scientist voice acting to ridiculously loud ambient sounds to gunfire, you can’t be too sure when to use hearing protection.
- It would be for the best if video game characters would not speak in paragraphs.
- I got several moments of completely unintended horror thanks to playing on a somewhat glitchy trackpad; sometimes, the system would think I have MOUSE1 held down when I don’t. Outside of combat, this is just loud and startling (again, the quiet sounds are really quiet, and the loud sounds are really loud in this subseries). In combat, this is also frightening because after completely emptying the magazine at targets you weren’t aiming, you need to unstick the mouse, and this is a bit unintuitive to pull off in addition to being something like having your gun jam in a firefight.
- And as regards MOUSE2, whose brilliant idea was it to put a full auto setting on a security guard standard issue sidearm!? of course, I never used that; it was too inaccurate to kill things at any point I had the pistol out, and it’s definitely a horrible way to use ammo.
- UI rant up ahead: Scrolling on a trackpad doesn’t go a click at a time like lots of games expect, so it was impractical to switch weapons, then click. Rather, I hit the appropriate number key (however many times it took to get to the one I wanted), then hit enter. This is passable, but makes it very difficult to switch weapons in a hurry, and I ended up never doing it while enemies were active. Obviously this isn’t something that would have been reasonable to anticipate in 1998, but at least weapon selection there is a matter of taking your dandy time looking through weapons before you just pick one (the menu stays open however long it takes you to pick a weapon, which is bad if you change your mind or wander out into an ambush, but is good for thinking through it). I don’t consider that great usability, but it’s worse in HL2. You have to scroll through weapons and quickly pick the one you want by clicking (no enter key firing because only one key assignment is allowed per input—this is probably a bad thing), or the menu goes away. And the trackpad scroll is completely useless there; scrolling just a little bit makes the menu cycle really fast. I wish I knew UI well enough to address fixing things. Apparently you can make a job out of that.
- Ow, my eardrums. There may be a little too much dynamic range for me. When you’re constantly going from quiet scientist voice acting to ridiculously loud ambient sounds to gunfire, you can’t be too sure when to use hearing protection.
- It would be for the best if video game characters would not speak in paragraphs.
- I got several moments of completely unintended horror thanks to playing on a somewhat glitchy trackpad; sometimes, the system would think I have MOUSE1 held down when I don’t. Outside of combat, this is just loud and startling (again, the quiet sounds are really quiet, and the loud sounds are really loud in this subseries). In combat, this is also frightening because after completely emptying the magazine at targets you weren’t aiming, you need to unstick the mouse, and this is a bit unintuitive to pull off in addition to being something like having your gun jam in a firefight.
- And as regards MOUSE2, whose brilliant idea was it to put a full auto setting on a security guard standard issue sidearm!? of course, I never used that; it was too inaccurate to kill things at any point I had the pistol out, and it’s definitely a horrible way to use ammo.
- UI rant up ahead: Scrolling on a trackpad doesn’t go a click at a time like lots of games expect, so it was impractical to switch weapons, then click. Rather, I hit the appropriate number key (however many times it took to get to the one I wanted), then hit enter. This is passable, but makes it very difficult to switch weapons in a hurry, and I ended up never doing it while enemies were active. Obviously this isn’t something that would have been reasonable to anticipate in 1998, but at least weapon selection there is a matter of taking your dandy time looking through weapons before you just pick one (the menu stays open however long it takes you to pick a weapon, which is bad if you change your mind or wander out into an ambush, but is good for thinking through it). I don’t consider that great usability, but it’s worse in HL2. You have to scroll through weapons and quickly pick the one you want by clicking (no enter key firing because only one key assignment is allowed per input—this is probably a bad thing), or the menu goes away. And the trackpad scroll is completely useless there; scrolling just a little bit makes the menu cycle really fast. I wish I knew UI well enough to address fixing things. Apparently you can make a job out of that.
sea had swallowed all. A lazy curtain of dust was wafting out to sea