My other mistake was Red Dead Redemption. I didn’t even care enough about it to follow the media hype prior to its release. But recently one of my friends purchased the Undead Nightmare DLC (which is a standalone playable game) for my son, but he was afraid of the zombie on the front cover. So being the good dad I am, and not wanting the game to go to waste, I plopped it in my Xbox.

Ho – ly – shit. Dude this game is amazing! I have played very little of the single player story (which is cool), but I’ve played a bunch of the multiplayer. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say this is one of the most entertaining free roam games I’ve ever played. The environment is so well done, the gameplay mechanics work perfect and the graphics and ambient music keep me in awe. This is the first game I’ve ever taken pictures of with my phone just to save a moment (I wish consoles supported screenshots).

Its like GTA IV but way better in many ways. I thought the old western theme would be boring but its actually the best part about it.

If you get a chance to play either of these games, do it now.

We’re at the tail end of finishing Zinger. I can’t believe we’re the last gamemode to be submitted to Garry, but then again I guess it isn’t that big of a surprise. We have an incredible amount of custom content and we’re also OCD kind of perfectionists. It’s a curse really.

In between our workings on Zinger, we are also revamping an old website and converting it into an HTML5 web app. I don’t want to indulge everyone with all the details just yet, but those of you who use LuaBin will really be excited about this product. It’s going to have a community integrated into it as well… it’s super cool. We’ve already invited a few people into the alpha testing phase and we’ll invite more as we progress.

I’ve also been playing a bunch of games recently, mainly games I’ve owned for a while but never got around to playing.

Oh and I picked up Halo: Reach the other day but haven’t had a chance to play it yet because my Xbox RROD’d right when I put the disc in. No big deal because it’s under warranty. It just gives me more time to catch up on PC games, even though I’ve got a small collection of unplayed Xbox games building up (Reach, Splinter Cell, etc)

Anyway, more to come later…

Work! Work! Work! We’ve been busy on the newest installment of Zinger! designed to be a contest entry for the Fretta Contest.

For those of you who played the original, there has been some changes to the gameplay. We haven’t discussed much of the gameplay in the contest thread, so let me go over what we changed and why:

Teams

 In the original Zinger! it was 1 vs. all. This was fine and we had great fun with it, but most of the time people teamed or paired up and beat the crap out of other people. Which again was just fine, but it normally pissed said people off because they didn’t have a chance in hell of winning. The other problem was as much as everyone wanted to mutilate others with their weapon arsenal, they had to focus on getting to the cup first or they end up losing anyways. So now, with teams, you can work together by helping one guy get to the cup while you collect items to protect him.

Asynchronous Turns

Many of you are probably thinking “wtf does that mean?”. Basically it means everyone has a turn at the same time, you’re not waiting on each other. Once you hit your ball, the game waits for you to stop moving then its your turn again. You don’t have to wait in a queue for your entire team to go before its your turn again. Why did we do this? Simple answer: Speed. In the previous Zinger! you spent a lot of time waiting for your turn to come around, which led to a lot of down time. We wanted to remedy that. This accomplished two things: a) less waiting around doing nothing, and b) increased the speed of the game dramatically.

Rings

We wanted to give the mappers the ability to create a less linear hole. Instead of just starting at point A and trying to get to point B, we added in a feature to move the players around in all different directions. Basically there are a set amount of rings the mapper places on each hole; your team needs to go through each ring before you can finish the hole and sink the cup. This added in another element to the teamplay environment: working together to activate the rings as fast as possible while making progress toward the cup.

Randomizing

No longer do you have hole 1, hole 2, hole 3, and progress through in the same order each time you play a map. Now, all the holes are randomized and played in a different order. We’re also considering randomizing the rings, as in, let the mapper place 8 of them but only spawn 4 random ones.

Tee Off

The mapper also has the ability to create more than just 1 tee per hole; actually we’d prefer they make 2+ tees. 2 of the tees would be picked at random and assigned to each team. Once the hole starts, teams tee off player by player. Once the last player has teed off, the tee is removed.

This should shed some light on what we have planned. Remember, this is all preliminary and we reserve the right to change anything/everything before the official release.

A few years ago my dad was using a really archaic method for keeping track of what vehicles he was in charge of. Like… where they were stationed. He wrote the vehicle number down on a magnet and placed it on a white board and moved them from square to square depending on where the vehicle got shipped. So I wrote him a digital version of that and since he struggles with computers, I totally mimicked the look of a board with magnets on it. Except you could double-click any “magnet” and open up extended information and tools on it. Needless to say this worked many times faster and he instantly fell in love with it. I spent loads of time in the UI so it was extremely user friendly.

Well he has since left that company and moved on to bigger and better things. Little did I know he continued to use that program and one day his boss saw him using it and one thing lead to another… next thing I know I’m in a meeting talking business for writing this company a custom software tool. So a lot of our time is being dedicated to that…

BUT THEN…

Garry decides that he wants to start a Fretta gamemode contest with some high dollar incentives. So now we’re working on THAT at the same time. Our goal is to submit two gamemodes so we really gotta bust ass on everything. We’re not going to sacrifice quality though, so its just time dedication.

BUT THEN…

All these new games have come out/are coming out and ahhhhhhhhhh. I’m deep into Fallout 3 right now, I’ve got Borderlands to focus on, Left 4 Dead 2 soon… Modern Warfare 2– fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu–

AND NOW FOR SOME COMPLETELY UNRELATED MEDIA

Awesome:

On another random note: A few days ago the most wonderful thing occurred. I played Garry’s Mod WITH my son. As most of you know Aidan loves the game. Maybe its because there’s no objective he can fail at, or maybe its because he can spawn as many Mossmans as he likes and shoot them in their face… I’m not entirely sure. But he loves the game!

About a week or so ago I custom built a laptop for my wife. I even threw in a nVidia card, the 9800 series or whatever… not exactly sure right now. Well anyways, it runs games great, even the Source Engine games. I figured… instead of Aidan taking over my computer and playing games he could play games on her laptop. So I created him a Steam account, gifted him my extra Half Life 2, then bought him Garry’s Mod. As if my son having his own Steam account wasn’t cool enough… this meant we could play games together!

It was awesome! I put him in a Ventrilo room with the transmit set to voice sensitivity and we played through a couple HL2 single player maps together. He was able to comprehend that it was his dad with him in game, he would ask me to follow him and watch him as he shot Combine and random citizens. Everything was going great until he decided to shoot me. I asked him to stop so he killed me with the crowbar. Being the tough guy I am, I respawned and took him out with an alt fire of the shotgun. BAD FUCKING IDEA!

Maybe he’s smart enough to figure out 3D games and coordination with keyboard+mouse controls, but the trauma of having his dad shoot him was too much. He broke down in tears, screaming and crying. Ask Chad he was there… it was pretty sad. Oh well, live and learn I guess.

And by learn I mean he learned not to fuck with his dad.

Edit:

By the way Aidan is 3, and Chad’s comment below was a true moment:

Aidan, put down the car and come over here… AIDAN PUT IT DOWN

LuaBin has been revived. I rewrote it from scratch and restored the snippets I had in the backup. I went for a clean and easy interface and maximized the syntax highlighter. I still use Geshi but I’ve utilized it to its full potential and extended the keywords…

Oh…! I have to derail this blog about being derailed with a short derail: Is it just me or are some people complete fuck-faces and overuse the vote kicking in Left 4 Dead? I joined a verses server the other day on the infected team and spawned as a hunter at the start of No Mercy. The survivors ran down the stairs (of course) and I jumped down the glass sunroof. They encountered the other infected and killed them all. So this one douche is like:

WHAT ARE YOU DOING FOSZOR? ATTACK THEM! ATTACK THEM NOW!

So I’m trying to get to them but they’ve shut a few doors so I have to beat them down. What happens? I get vote kicked! They didn’t even give me time to explain the fact that they were stupid cunts… err… I mean that I was stuck behind some doors and wanted to maul their faces off like a pet chimp… err… was trying trying to get to the action. I could have explained myself quicker but my mic was broken…

Oh…! Time to derail this short derail with a different derail: So the other day my mic just randomly stopped working… I can’t figure out what happened. I tried messing with my system settings but I’m pretty sure its a problem with the mic itself because of the weird feedback I get and I tried my DJ mic and it worked fine. Fucking hell! So I went to order an identical headset (because I heart mine so much) only to realize the god damn things are still almost $100! WHRY!! They were $100 like four years ago. How can they still be that much? I mean I got these for free as a promo gift but still…

Oh…! This is a short derail to the previous derail: Speaking of free, have you guys tried the new Battlefield Heroes beta? They said they focused on the backend but its still pretty crappy at the moment. The game itself works decent. I mean I get a black screen when I join a game 50% of the time, and the matchmaking is worse than the Left 4 Dead system… but for a beta its cool. Seems like no one wants to be Royal Army and everyone is a National.

To sum it all up:

LuaBin == done
L4D players == idiots
mic == broke
BFH == cool + needs work
me == brack to wok on gadget


</derail>

HIGHER QUALITY VERSION HERE

I had a lot of fun making this video, and I learned a lot about editing… and about being a director. Waxx so kindly put it into perspective for me: “hi I’m Brandon I tell everyone absolutely nothing yet expect them to do it”… or something rude like that.

Also, today marks a day in history… for my alias “foszor” is now** autocompleted by Google from their main page. Go try it out… start typing “foszor” in and it will finish it for you. ABSO-FUCKING-AMAZING!

** Edit: sorry I fixed “not” to “now”

I really think I have a grasp on most of the characters of TF2… sure I’m not a pro at all of them (except Pyro & Demo) but the Spy has always been my worst class. This video explained things to me… from the OTHER point of view. Too many times I would chase a Spy and end up being killed by them in some unexpected way… now I know how they’re doing it!

Anyways, I first tried it with the boxes, but they weren’t tall enough and I kept breaking them

Then I tried it with the hand jack, and it was barely not tall enough. Then I managed to flip the hand jack over, which was then too tall to jump on. So I had to reset the campaign again (this time not breaking the boxes) and use the boxes to jump on it. Easy enough? Sure it is, but the fucking bots like to get in your personal space so I’d recommend doing it with friends or kick the bots. On to the video!

Edit: I know it doesn’t make sense to do it, but in my defense I was trying to get the no medkit achievement ON EXPERT and spending all that time to save a little health would really help in the long run! AND NO, ZOMBIES DON’T SPAWN IN SINGLEPLAYER WHEN YOU’RE DOING THIS… I HAD NO CHEATS ON WHILE DOING THIS!