News on rotary08 + Orange Box

Hi there,

just thought its time to update a lil bit. My new Q3A level, "Plasma Caves" is coming out real soon, the whole map is finished, but since the rather non-standard geometry used, debugging is really pain in the ass. Im fighting the buggy beast for months already! Now when I compiled another version today, I cheered up the bugs are finally all gone - just to find out a new one somehow popped out just a corner behind. Argh. This stuff is unbelievable. But I make a new version every day, and sooner or later the Chaos god of Buginess shall be defeated.

Damn, Im in a writey mood /studying International politics for the whole day :F /, so here I share some of my ideas on Orange box, the Valve game pack of these 5 games, which I recently purchased:

1) Half-Life 2 is fun (and the option to have Portal Gun is hilarious - read further), but we all know it anyways, right? Shame is the HL2 Deathmatch is not included in Orange box.

2) Episode 1 has some really neat moments - like the Citadel core reactor or the cliché hospital fight - but damn, it's so incredibly short. It can be played in like 4 hours, and while interaction with Alyx is awesome, the episode really misses story development.

3) Episode 2 is so much better. It is longer, has many plot twists and a climatic ending. The new enemies are great and there are many neat Gravity Gun options too. I really enjoyed this one, especially the latter half of the story!

4) Team Fortress 2 really disappoints me. While the servers are full, the gameplay is bit odd and the graphics are distracting. And why the hell did they remove all the grenades from TFC (I miss hallucinatory grenades). I might just be too used to Quake 3 Arena and Quake Wars.

5) Portal is perfect. Really nice mix of neat science fiction, pretty paranoid setting and logic puzzle. The ending credits left a tear in my eye. Whats cool is that you can add Portal Gun to Half-Life 2 - check this manual or at least the neat video.



I'll eat my shorts if the Portal Gun or some variety of it will not be in Episode 3 :)

Anyways, time to study some politics and make more rotary08 compilations - Rotary out!