The rush before the calm before the storm

It’s the story of my life.  I live from one big project to the next, but I guess that’s the way it is for most people nowadays. 

What’s the next big project you ask ?

Here in Dickson we have what’s called Old Timers Day.  It’s a day celebrating the ‘Old Timers’ and remembering the past of our county and city.  There’s a big parade (which shuts down several miles of roads around downtown for an entire day) and then afterwards there’s like a kind of carnival set up with all kinds of celebrations in the downtown area.  Old Timers Day is this coming Saturday.

This year they are having a ‘Gospel Stage’ where several church’s choirs and bands are going to sing.  Our church has been invited to sing and Pastor wants this to sound good.  The problem is that there are several church’s singing (one right after the other) using a hodgepodge of systems . . . which has the potential to NOT sound good. This means that we’ll be bringing our entire portable sound system to Old Timers Day.  Don’t let the word ‘portable’ fool you into thinking it’s small in any way, this is a job and a half.  Having just gotten SOME of the needed details today (like how many KWatts the generator will be, where specifically the stage is going to be set up) but still need to know what everyone else is bringing to the event and . . . if we are sharing all the equipment to make a community sound system.  And if so, who’s running sound for the community system ?

Getting ready for this has consumed most of my time this week.

Also next week I’ll be on vacation !  Last June was my 5 year anniversary working at the church so this year I get three weeks of vacation.  The first full week of which I’ll be taking next week. Matt and Mel are moving to a new apartment (well, a duplex) and I’m heading to Arkansas to help them.  I’ll be leaving Monday afternoon sometime so as to arrive Monday evening.  Tuesday we’ll do all the heavy moving and Wednesday we’ll finish up whatever is left and then christen the new place with a nice gaming session (including, gasp, board games !).  I’ll head back home either Wednesday or Thursday and spend the rest of the long weekend doing nothing in particular.  So prepping for vacation, on top of Old Timers Day, is going to make this week a fun fun one ! 

Well I’ve started playing Resistance 2.  I know I’m late to the party, but I can only afford a single $60 game every 6 weeks or so.  And most of the games I’ve gotten in the past few months have been 360 games.  But I found Resistance used on the cheep and decided to get it for myself with my birthday money.  And I have to say . . . I’m torn about how I feel about the game.  For every thing in the game that I like or love so far, I find something that I’m annoyed by or just flat out hate. 

Now let me say that I’m only to the second level (completed Prologue and am about to finish up Chapter 1.  So this is just my initial opinion.  But there are several things that I can see will be carrying over into later levels, so I feel like some of the things that I love / hate will still be there through to the games end. 

I love how the levels are so detailed.  Look down at a grating in the floor and you don’t just see a grate with a texture under it . . . you see pipes, conduits, wires, water, etc.  You see STUFF under the floor there.  Not only that, but you don’t see a bunch of repeating pipes over and over . . . you see broken bits where a cord has been run from under the grating to someplace on the wall (where a repair was under way), or tools, or . . . just stuff.  Beat up, blood stained, worked on . . . stuff.  This is the kind of things that bothers me about other shooters . . . I want detail !  I’m so tired of shooting things in a square hallway that looks like every other square hallway.  I find myself just stopping and looking around and admiring the coolness of where I am.

The control scheme is nice.  I don’t remember being able to customize the controls in the previous Resistance (maybe you could and I just don’t remember) but I have a problem learning new control schemes . . . Resident Evil took me a few hours to get use to.  So the fact that I could set up the controls to be like every Halo / Call of Duty game made playing to so much easier for me (even on the PS3 controller which I don’t like very much). 

The sound design is very good, some of the sound implementation leaves me cringing though.  The epic first level left me with the feeling of being surrounded by Chimera, yet I could pick out the distinctiveness of each unit type.  It was loud and a lot of sound, but it wasn’t just noise, it made sense.  Though I found some of the dialogue hard to hear (I’m sure that’s more realistic, but I missed a couple key lines I think).  Also, as I have mentioned before, my center speaker isn’t the best in the world.  It’s has a strange muted tone to it and has given me some problems in games past . . . so that might have contributed to it too.  A few things that made me cringe were the looping sounds in Chapter 1 (the second level).  Some of the water loops had obvious loop points and looped twice a second . . . leaving it sounding a bit like a CD skipping.  This happened several times throughout the level with non essential sounds, but even the more background sounds stuck out like a sore thumb as I quickly ran by them.

Some of the things that frustrated me were the fact that in the first level I got stuck in some kind of spawn / death loop.  I was outside, running toward a broken bridge when I though I had just passed a piece of intel (I hadn’t in actuality), but I turned around to go back for it . . . ran a few steps, got blown up, spawned just above a twisted girder on the bridge, ‘slipped’ off it, fell to the river bed below and died.  Then the game reloads, I spawn just above the girder, and then fall to my death.  This went on a few times as I struggled to try to move one way or another so as to catch the edge and not fall, but to no avail.  I quit the game, then continued it only to spawn in the same point (obviously an auto save point) and die again.  After trying everything I knew how, I eventually just started a new game from the begining.  If this kind of thing happens in a later level and I have to start the game ALL THE WAY OVER . . . I’ll probably throw the game, case and all, in the trash and just end up reading about it on Wikipedia or something. 

Also, while I realize this is a shooter, I still expect a good story line.  Call of Duty 3 was just an excuse to shoot people, with sort of a story thrown in.  I expect more out of a shooter now.  From the end of the first level, to the beginning of the second level two years have passed.  But you don’t get a cut scene explaining what happened in those two years, where you are now, how these other people know you, or what the state of the Chimera invasion is.  Maybe later in the game there’s going to be a ‘flash back’ or something to fill in the gaps.  But I felt like I went from a situation where it was very clear what I was doing and where I was, to one where I was just expected to follow this guy to a command center and then kill some bad guys (‘details to follow’ kind of a thing).  I’m just keen on knowing why I’m doing what I’m doing . . . otherwise it’s just another in a long line of hall-crawlers. 

Anywho, death loops and missing story aside . . . I like it very much so far. 

Well I WAS going to post some pictures here, but ONCE AGAIN I cant do it with out them screwing up the post (even causing internal server errors).  So, as this is the third atempt at this, I’m going to (once again) use Dream Weaver to make a page that you can open to see the pictures. 

 So click HERE to view to wonderful pics !