I’ve been thinking about doing a look back at the maps I’ve made over my many years of designing levels. I’m still not quite sure if its interesting to others at all, but if nothing else then I get to check out my old levels and grab some screen shots and videos to make it easier to remember just how crappy they were

Now to be honest this wasn’t my first map, in fact my first 5 maps were part of a small single player campaign for Half-Life that I called “Mazy Complex”. The first level in Mazy Complex was my very first room where I fiddled around with prefabs and figured out for the very first time what a leak was (and as a result, how to get the lighting working). Considering that I learned how to map and made 5 decent maps in little over a month is something I still find pretty impressive about myself. However at one point I lost all those maps in a format, and since I never released them on the net (I followed everyone’s advise about not releasing you first map), then they seem to be lost forever. Still irritates me to this day, because I’m sure that the picture I have in my head of them is not quite as spectacular as the real thing.

Anyway, that brings me on to this map, mazy51 (no dm- in front, didn’t know about that yet). I started mapping in early 2000, and somehow made the Mazy Complex levels through most of January and some of February. I remember this map starting out as a test for how multiplayer entities worked in Half-Life, rather than a fully fleshed out map. I made the core layout over a weekend, and then spent some days the next week on figuring out where all the pickups should go.

When I look at it today it just has so many small cute details. Such as the sign saying “Mazy Area” is written with the Half-Life decal letters, with some of them pointing the wrong way. The fact that most of the “detailed” geometry is all prefabs, I basically only made the rooms myself and then placed various props around. Again, I’m impressed that I actually managed to put something like this together after just little over a month of mapping, at least considering how dumb I remember myself being

I’m currently playing through Call of Duty: World at War on Veteran difficulty, for points. Now, with Call of Duty 4, I got all the way through on Veteran, except for that last bonus airplane level, that was just too fucking stupid for me to spend any more time on. In case you’re not familiar with what I’m talking about, then the gameplay on Veteran changes the game dramatically. Since you have so little in health and very few shots kill you, the best strategy is mainly having your AI buddies doing all the work. Now this would be fair enough if it wasn’t for the fact that the gameplay of CoD revolves around spawn rooms that keep on going until you hit a trigger box, and that the essence of Veteran mode ends up being about running to a piece of cover, get down on your belly and hope that your AI buddies progress a bit further so that they can shoot the enemies, which they will in due time, since the key characters are invulnerable.

Now for a while I’ve been telling myself that this was more a really elaborate meta-game, and that you were just playing the game in a different way, and that this was a different experience. However with CoD:WaW its really not working for me anymore. The game is broken on Veteran, you’re not playing the solid shooter that is CoD anymore, but a tedious trial and error based puzzle where you need to get to the right covers, maybe throw some grenades, and then move on to the next cover in the hope that your AI buddies will follow you.

The only reason anyone would be playing this is because they tie half the achievements of the game to completing each level on Veteran, not because fun.

Now it should also be said that CoD4 was just a much more enjoyable game, even on Veteran, and that CoD:WaW is a fucking AI grenade spamming nightmare most of the time. I still think its broken in both games.

Bah, enough whining

The other day I found these videos on Youtube of somebody driving through Tokyo at early morning and recording it. I donno if I’m weird for feeling like this, but looking at those videos makes me wanna go to Japan even more

Here are two, but there are more of them, pretty relaxing to look at I say~:) (There’s high quality ones if you check it on youtube.com)

I am so joyous that this game exists! Looks brilliant!

I know its old, but I’ve never seen this Ikea ad by Spike Jonze. It’s pretty fingerlicking ill, yo.

This one is pretty cool too

Thank you internet.

Last week I got my grimy little paws on the Band of Brothers on Blu-ray, and I’ve been watching it yet again, think I’ve pretty much seen every episode at least 10 times at this point, love that series. Although I already got it on DVD then I figured that this was one of those things that I dig so much that I might as well get a lil upgrade on it. Its hardly that much more you get outta it, the picture is sharper, but its mainly more detailed mud you get, while close ups of faces look exactly the same as DVD.

Aaaaanyway, while watching it something strange happend; I really got the urge for playing a WW2 shooter. Pretty weird that its even possible after all these years of draining that “genre”, but I just can’t shake it off. I was kinda planning on getting the new Call of Duty for christmas anyway, but now I’m actually really looking forward to it. I just hate to encourage them with my wallet to do even more WW2 shooters, but right now I can’t help it

Recently I purchased Wall-E on Blu-ray, mainly because I’ve been wanting to finally get a computer animated film HD crispness, but also because I’ve been hearing universal praise of it, many saying that it was Pixar’s best to date. Also my dad has just come home from the hospital again (Some problems, its going aight now though), and since both my sister and brother aren’t even in country at the moment I felt obligated to come spend some time with them, and since they’re suckers for Pixar movies then I figured it would be ideal to check out for the first time with them.

Well, Wall-E is definitely the best movie I’ve seen all this year, but further more I’d dare say that it might very well be the best of Pixar’s as well. It is just so amazingly heartwarming, especially in the first half, and although I feel that Pixar’s movies have always had a lot of personality in their characters, Wall-E surpasses everything with him just being grotesquely adorable and filled with small quirks all over.

Anyway, be sure to check it out, next time I’m not gonna doubt Pixar, gonna watch it in the cinema this time around!

Check it

Might be slow in the beginning, but watch the entire thing, you’ll thank me

That some pretty epic production values for a mod

Awesome.