More On GRAW2 AI

Posted on 25 March 2008 by FoxTwo

Back in November 2007, I wrote about how bad the AI in GRAW2 was.

After my recent reformat, I reinstalled GRAW and finished playing through it again. Now, I’m reworking my way through GRAW2. This time around, I installed the latest patch, v1.05. Back in November I was still playing with patch v1.03.

I must say the AI is much better this time around. More pro-active, much like how GRAW is. Now, they tell me “Contact!” and they fire back. They don’t need to be fired upon to shoot back this time. However, Hume, my sniper, sucks. I wish I had Allen back with me. He’s THE marksman. Far as I knew, Allen never missed. Every single time in GRAW1 where he saw a sniper or an enemy, he’d kill the guy with his first shot.

Hume, in GRAW2, sucks ass. Usually takes 2 shots to take an enemy out.

Right now I’m up to mission 4 or so. Just after entering Juarez I believe. I just finish the mission where we were supposed to take out the rebel base which is holed up at a supermarket. This mission was a framerate killer – it plummeted from mid 20s to between 5 and 7. As you can imagine, when mortar shells are falling, when Apaches are striking the enemy armour, and explosions going off all around me, the whole scene started to jerk like in a slideshow. It doesn’t help that I’m playing this on a 5 year old rig too 🙂

Anyway, seeing as how much better GRAW2 is this time around, I’m starting to have hopes of being able to finally complete the final mission – The Last Stand. It’ll be coming pretty soon if I continue this good performance. In fact, I got a “Perfect Mission” score where I was supposed to infiltrate a quarry and take out some artillery pieces (mission 2 if I remember right). I was the one holding the sniper rifle and the rest of my guys were on assault weapons. Basically I just sent them in first, to peek around corners and to clear the path for me.

Ah well, since I’m sick and the meds still knock me out, I can’t play too much. But, I’m happy now that the AI is so much better.

More on GRAW2 later! Maybe I’ll do more video captures and show ’em to you guys.

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I Did That Under 13 Seconds!

Posted on 23 March 2008 by FoxTwo

OK So what?

Back in November, I was among the first few to get Call of Duty 4 from the shops. Being the generous guy that I was, I thought I’d do a couple of video captures and show people who were still waiting to buy the game, what it looks like, as well as writing a blog post on my impressions on it. After all, we’ve all played the demo. Sometimes, the actual retail game and the demo is quite different.

Anyway, for those that are lazy, here’s the video from the Boot Camp part of the game:

To my surprise, people on youtube hardly read the video description. Soon I started getting comments like “you suk! I can do that in 5 seconds!”. This was in reference to the part of the game (shown in the video) where you have to undergo a “test” and complete the course in 60 seconds.

And, kiddies, telling me that I “suk” doesn’t make me wanna be your friend anymore than I do already (which I don’t), get it?

The video was to accompany my blog post, not to show off how wickedly fast I can play the game. As an aside, Xfire tells me it took me only 5 hours to get through the WHOLE Single Player campaign. To me, that sucks, because 5 hours is hardly enough time to enjoy a game man! That’s like $10.00 an hour! It sure sucks for me, since the game costs like $50.00 (in Singapore currency).

No, I don’t really play multiplayer for FPSes. I know it’s strange, but the only FPS I actually play multiplayer for any length of time is Team Fortress Classic, back from the original Half Life, back in 1998.

After that I’ve tried to play Battlefield 2, and Battlefield 2142. I somehow don’t get the same satisfaction as I did from Team Fortress Classic. So now, I don’t bother to play FPSes in multiplayer mode anymore.

So stop trying to show off, and read the video description on youtube next time ok kiddies? If you’re so good, go make a video of you running through the entire game in less than 5 hours. I look forward to seeing that.

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Cabal Online

Posted on 22 March 2008 by FoxTwo

We went to Simei for lunch on Thursday. After lunch, we were wandering aimlessly, and being the IT geeks that we are, we just ambled on into Challenger. Everything was “as usual” in Challenger. Speakers, mice, thumbdrives etc. Nothing unusual, except….

…except that they’re handing out free DVDs for an online game called Cabal Online. Now, Cabal Online isn’t a new MMO. That much I know. I just haven’t really gotten around to playing it.The thing is, my colleague at work has recently been smitten by the Cabal bug and he’s been raving about it at work. Also, Cabal Online seems to be launching a South East Asian server soon, so that’s why they’re handing out the free DVDs.

Strangely, when I play Cabal Online, I have a very strong feeling that I’ve been here before. After awhile I realised why – Because I had played Guild Wars before, and the graphics here look very familiar. They are in the same style as in Guild Wars, slightly cartoonish. Normally I’d hate anything manga-like. Guild Wars was an exception, I thought. The manga-ness isn’t too pervasive and I can overlook it, mostly.

Well, seeing as this is the Southeast Asian version of Cabal Online, we see a lot of localised speech in the chat. Singlish is very pervasive, for example. I even saw a guy running around belonging to a guild called “Singapore”.

Thus far I haven’t made any new friends yet. Basically I have been running around completing quests that can be considered “tutorial quests”, ie they make you do things to explain how you level up, how you equip stuff etc.

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