Halo

6 comments (closed), posted on march 30, 2004, tags: gaming

Dan Benjamin always makes sure people are good and dead. Even if that means shooting at corpses.

Someone Explain All of This

6 comments (closed), posted on march 25, 2004, tags: gaming

Yesterday I picked up Halo for the Mac. I own the PC version, but I got tired of plugging the Cinema Display into the converter just to play a game. It's especially annoying because you can't swap the display out while the Mac is on (since it gets power from the Mac), so you have to shut down, then unplug. It's time consuming—even if my Mac only takes 32 seconds to start back up—and I don't like having to get under my desk multiple times just to play a game then go back to normal computing. Anyway. Halo for the Mac.

I installed the game and launched it, and was shocked to find when attempting to change bindings that I couldn't assign actions to any of the action keys on the keyboard (Shift, Control, etcetera). Since I've been a PC gamer for many, many years now, I have developed a very good system for myself of using the keyboard and mouse, and that includes a very specific binding system. I use the same keys in almost all shooters because almost all have very similar command sets. In the PC version of Halo I was able to go about my business as usual, but in the Mac version I got no response when trying to assign reload to the right shift key. I tried assigning crouch to the right control key... no dice.

Now I'm confused. The Unreal Tournament 2004 beta allowed me to bind commands to these keys, so it's not an OS X thing. It seems to just be a Halo thing. Why would Macsoft do this? It doesn't make sense. Perhaps Mac FPS players are just used to the fact that walk forward is W, etcetera, etcetera, and they don't mind. I, however, do. I should be able to bind any command to any key on the keyboard.

It's also worth noting that Halo does not take over the system when it's running, which is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's great, because Halo runs exactly like another application and can be hidden, switched out of, and such, allowing you to play Halo and still receive IMs if you wish or anything of the like. OS X is so well done that I can actually use Expose and show the desktop while Halo is playing to check the time and then bring the app back into focus without a performance hit. At the same time, though, this means that when assigning keys on the keyboard that are assigned to other global system functions I get a conflict. For instance: by default, Halo binds the F1 key to show scores, but I have that assigned to an Expose function. So when Halo is running and I push F1, instead of Halo capturing the key press and just showing me scores, it shows scores and Expose also fires. This is very annoying.

Maybe the conflict problem is an OS X thing, but I don't think it is. I think an application can trap key presses and deal with them without having to send them to the system. Maybe I'm wrong. It should be noted that Windows has this problem too, but only with the Windows key on the keyboard. Then again, that's really the only global key in Windows (other than Alt+Tab, which works as well). I thought it was just Expose at first (maybe it was running in a layer above the application), but I found that using a Synergy function key also had this effect. Consider this my open letter to MacSoft. I might be the only bastard with this problem, but that's not going to keep me from complaining.

I also noticed rather cruddy visual performance from time to time, but apparently that's just because I was playing Halo in letterbox format (which matches the shape of the Cinema Display) and I needed to be playing in a 4:3 ratio (with black bands on the sides). This is something that definitely needs to be fixed. What's the point of having a widescreen display if you can't use a quarter of it? I'm willing to look past this, however, if I can actually the play the game—but the binding issues stated above are making that very difficult.

Game Boy Advance SP

3 comments (closed), posted on august 25, 2003, tags: gaming

In 1989, I got a Nintendo Game Boy for Christmas. I loved it in all it's black-and-white, bulky glory. I ended up losing it at some point many years later, as well as all of the games I had for it.

Some 14 years later, two weeks ago, I bought a Game Boy Advance SP. What an amazing toy this is. First all of, the SP has a backlit screen. The biggest problem when the Game Boy Advance came out was its screen. People hated it. You couldn't see it unless you were in perfect light conditions. I know it's true because when I turn off the backlight on the SP I can rarely see anything. If they had only added a backlight, the SP would have been worth the extra thirty dollars (the Advance is 69.99, the SP is 99.99). But that's not all.

The Advance was shaped differently than every other Game Boy before it—horizontally (see website for image). The SP, however, heads back toward the original design of the Game Boy—vertical—but with a twist. It folds at the middle, and fits comfortably in your pocket. Also, they've finally added Lithium-ion rechargeable batteries, so you don't have to keep buying AAs every few times you play. You just plug the little guy in and he's recharged in no time. In fact, the only bad thing about the SP is that you have to buy an adapter to use headphones. Luckily, said adapter is only $4.95.

In the past two weeks I've already become heavily attached to the Game Boy. I've been bringing it with me whenever I know they'll be sitting involved, and I'm loving it. Since the SP is so powerful (32-bit means it's basically a Super Nintendo in your pocket), they've started to port all the great games from the SNES to the Advance systems. And, since most GBA games tend to be less than $30, you can get tons of entertainment out of the device for a pretty cheap rate.

I've recently begun to really get back into video games (I tend to go about 6 months really into gaming again, then 6 months of being less interested), and the GBA SP has been a big part of that. If you're a fan of the Game Boy, but you haven't had once since they weighed a pound and were the size of bricks, you might want to spend some money on the Advance SP—it's really good stuff.