Here is a brief review of the past 4 weeks or so since I've stopped updating the site.
1) School started. Another year has begun.
That does not sound right...
Another BOOOORING year has begun.
Amongst the greatest features of this institution (school) is its ability to consume time. Endless amounts of time. For every hour in school, about 25 minutes are wasted right down the drain. About 15 in each pause, with moving from one side of the building to another, and another 10 or so until the teacher comes in the class. And then the fun begins. A stereotypical voice that is most of the time too full of himself/herself (itself?) to teach. A lot of classes whose sole purpose is explaining to you how great and amazingly smart is the teacher and how stupid you are.
Of course, this year there are a few pleasant surprises (as is the case every year). But being the disgruntled student that I try to be, I'll just pretend those exceptions do not exist.
Ok, now the test part. Today Brainbench gave for free all of its tests (about 500 of them). The offer is available about two weeks, so make the most out of it. I myself took 3 tests today.
That about wraps it up about the tests.
Now about Quake 4. I have played it on a medium level of difficulty (yeah, I know, I suck). What can I say about it? ... Unfortunately not a lot of great things. I shall put them in the order that they have occurred to me.
First, the game requires pretty good hardware. I was able to run it on my computer quite well, but in 640x480 with anti-aliasing turned off. I must say that with a higher resolution and anti-aliasing, the game looks much better.
Now about the gameplay... Paraphrasing a great South Park episode, I will say "Half-Life 2 did it!!" The game supports vehicles, and a bit of exterior stuff... But it really doesn't compare with half-life. Andi, a friend of mine, said that Half-life 2 was a very short game. I considered it about medium in length. Quake 4 however is about half the size of half-life 2. It also doesn't have effects nearly as cool as the gravity gun.
Probably as a response to the Half-Life gravity gun, there is a Dark Matter Gun (DMG) that generates black holes. To me this is somewhat of a mystery since black holes and dark matter are pretty different things, but then again I'm no physicist.
Enough about the problems. Now about the good stuff in it. First of all, the graphic is very good. However, it somehow suffers (like all of id's games) of bad design. This title and doom 3 are a little bit better in this respect, but still, it is painfully obvious that the main driving force behind this game is technology.
We have beautifully rendered textures and complex lighting, but this necessitates a lot of hardware resources and the game play really doesn't help the gamer. The more I think about this game the more I see it as a product made for the companies that want to subcontract the Quake engine. Probably in multiplayer the game will be better, although IM
VHO the items are not that well balanced. For example, the rail gun really is too powerful.
As the time passes, I realize that id is not really a gaming company anymore. The drive is too much on technology and people there aren't really doing game design anymore. John Carmack is a very talented programmer and in a way he is forced to do this because he is pretty much the finger that points where the gaming industry should develop (at least it's graphics part).
Well, that is about all I am going to say about Quake.
Now about the more part... Stay tuned for more articles on the previous open topics: Ruby and cryptography. They will follow soon (I hope).
Doru
