There’s now a Luke-sanctioned Insipid Firefox/Flock extension. It works well on the two systems I’ve used it on and seems to not format my system!
Just kidding, it’s quite good. The guy who wrote it, Danny Miles, contributed quite a bit of backend code as well to allow this extension (and future ones) to easily communicate with the Insipid code base.
I was going to start by posting some pictures of the first part of my “vacation” in Niagara Falls but I can’t find them. So I’ll skip right to Sault Ste. Marie and Iron Bridge.
This is a shot of coming in by the airport in the Sault:
One of the places we checked out in the Sault was an old park near the locks and the steel mill. The first shot is off the steel mill. The second here is a railroad bridge that used to rotate to allow trains to cross over the locks, and then rotate back to let the ships through. It’s been unused for quite some time, and apparently even the Canadian portion of the locks has been busted for about a year. All the ships have been using the American locks instead:
|
|
I missed pictures of this construction project though outside of the Sault - there’s a massive bypass being built north of the city so that highway 17 can skip the local traffic altogether.
Later on in Iron Bridge we took our boat and my uncle’s boat out on the river and checked some shit out. Look at this here nature!
 |
 |
You can actually see a family of ducks here:
We then murdered and devoured them. Just kidding.
This next photo is “the island”. This place was great. A bunch of us (teenagers) would get our parents to drop us off upriver in canoes and we’d just kinda float and paddle until here, set up camp and sorta party. It of course never got out of hand since several hours later we had to paddle our asses out of there:
On our way to the island we sometimes stopped at this very sandbar. I wanted to write SOS in stones but lacked the energy:
|
|
The next few are the Red Rock dam. We used to come out here as teenagers too to party. Once we locked ourselves out of the fucking car (in the winter) and none other than the great Roberto S. ran the several kilometers back to town to find the only locksmith:
|
|
|
|
Also there’s a bunch of other local pictures I took that I have to track down. I think Chie moved a batch to her computer already, but if I find them I’ll post them.
Oh and of course the most important part of the trip - the goddamned dog!:
It occured to me, after getting a bunch of longing text messages from Derek, that I barely told anyone that I was going on a vacation. Chie, her parents and I went to Niagara Falls last week and Iron Bridge over this weekend and just arrived back tonight. I’ll probably post a bunch of pictures from the trip. Unless I get even more lazy than normal.
So in the last couple weeks I “picked up” both Half-Life 2: Episode One, and Sin Episode One: Emergence off of Steam. Both were under twenty bucks and it was seamless to download and play them. As much as I first disliked the idea of Steam I really, really dig it now. It’s a distribution system for games that seems actually done right.
Sin Epsiode One: Emergence
I’ve never actually played the first Sin, but after watching a bunch of preview gameplay movies for this I bought it. It was definitely worth it - the game itself for me lasted a good six hours or so in total. It uses the Source engine (hence the title for this entry) and looks very good.
 |
 |
 |
 |
There’s not much action in the screenshots since it’s hard to take a picture while actually playing those scenes :) One refreshing change in Sin was that it was hard - I fucking died like 30 times playing it. It has an adaptive difficulty system which makes the enemies harder depending on how easily you breeze through preceeding ones. It works really well (in an FPS that is - I still hate Oblivion’s levelling!)
Half Life 2: Episode One
This one was a hell of a lot more anticipated than Sin, by me and everyone else on the Internet. It too was worth the wait. It’s a great game - er, episode. It picks up exactly where the last game left off and it’s just as polished as the full Half Life 2 was. It looks fantastic - there’s a lot of liberal use of HDR that really works well. The first chunk takes place in City 17’s citadel which is a massive, semi-open structure and the dynamic lighting blew me away there.
Alyx’s AI should get awards too for being the first escort NPC in a game that I didn’t immediately want to kill. Most situations like that are just awful, with the NPC dying all the time, getting in your way, and so on. Not with Alyx - she follows you as opposed to leading you, and never really blocks your path. She can die though (that surprised me at first), but it only happens if you fuck up.
Here’s a batch of shots. I think it looks pretty good on my old(ish) system, with HDR and filtering and what not (although I think FRAPS takes screenshots without the card’s anti-aliasing visible):
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
There’s also a ton of commentary where the developers talk about everything - covering engine implementation details, level design, sequence scripting and all sorts of things:
The commentary first appeared in the Lost Coast tech demo, and I hope they keep it in all their future releases.
Comparison
While I enjoyed both of these episodes I definitely had more fun playing Sin. Blasphemous, I know. Half Life was more polished, thought out and so forth but Sin had a lot going for it. I mean, you can literally blow people’s brains out. And the breast physics are unmatched.
Seriously though, Sin gave me about three times the amount of play than HL2E1. I don’t regret either purchases, I just hope that Valve makes the next one a bit longer.
So I switched this stupid thing over to Wordpress finally. Movable Type (the old system) was just so shitty at dealing with comment spam that I couldn’t take it any longer. Hopefully this system will block that a little more - just having a moderation queue before comments are posted helps a lot.
Anyways, random picture - we (Victor and I) saw this on the way home today. We both laughed:
And this is what was waiting next to the car in the lot yesterday:
I’d write some more, but I gotta get back to the new Half Life 2 episode.