Mike Milo's Journal

I’m a huge Halo fan and this has got to be one of the coolest geek things I’ve seen in a log time….a real live Halo warthog built from Nissan Patrol 4×4. Amazingly cool! I’d love to have one of these! You can see more pics on OXM!

This Christmas Santa brought the Milo family a Wii and I have to say it is an incredible gaming system. It actually gets my fat ass sweating while playing! Well now some enterprising fella named Johnny Chung Lee  has come up with a way to make the Wiimote into a digital Whiteboard. Even more amazing is that you can make any LCD into basically a Tablet PC with a few basic techno bits. Outstanding! Now if you put the $360  Asus rugged LCD and use the Wiimote trick would you pretty much have a Cintiq without paying the outrageous price? If so then it seems to follow that eventually Wacom will have to lower their pricing.

So last week my beautiful wife got me a copy of Halo 3 and I didn’t even ask for it! She’s awesome! Anyway, I played it all the way through in one week and it rocked! The best part is that they put a good ending in like in the original Halo.

Halo 2′s ending seemed lame in comparison to the first Halo’s ending. Well, Halo 3 delivers nicely on that end. The graphics are a bit better but most of it is environmental. The trees during gamerplay look lush and even sway when you hit them. A nice touch.

I was honestly shocked by how bad the Cinematics were. Bad, modeling, really bad textures, bad bump mapping and bad animation. Really bad rigging and weight mapping. Some of the characters arms actually broke through each other when they bent which was shocking to me considering how weight mapping is 3D 101 and how difficult it would be to get a job at Bungie.

Half Life 2 and Fear kick it’s ass with regards to quality. Still it was a great game to play and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

I really want to get Half Life’s Orange Box next but at $60 I ain’t got near the cash flow to do so.

I guess I’ll wait until it goes down on Amazon…

I’ve really been trying to work on my portfolio for gaming development. It’s really hard for me as I am primarily a cartoony designer but I feel that nothing ventured, nothing gained so I keep at it. My tablet PC also makes it easier because I can continuously tweak it without hurting the original.

In this particular piece I wanted to design a character that might be from a game and I also wanted to render it out as much as possible so I could get some detail in there. I’m pretty happy with it but in hindsight I should have done a more dynamic pose.

Click the link to see it a bit bigger.

Ok, I am really REALLY ticked off. Three weeks ago my beloved Xbox 360 broke AGAIN ( the second time now and twice when I had my Xbox) decided that it was not going to read DVD or game discs any more.

Soooo, I sent it to Microsoft and waited the three weeks it took to get it back.

But guess what? IT WAS STILL BROKEN!

I turned on the Xbox, put a disc into it and played Lost Planet for a few hours only to find that it decided to give me the Red Rings of Death. What I find really funny about it all is that the site that I linked to Team Xbox had the same problem I did; it was sent back twice without it working correctly. So they sent their own facility two bad Xboxes!

Priceless!

Come ON Microsoft! That is just plain WRONG!

So I spend $350 for an XBox and you get to keep it longer than I do! That’s some racket man! Some racket indeed!

I also love the canned response that they give as well:

Customer satisfaction is our highest priority, and we do everything we can to take care of gamers who may be having problems with their consoles. The vast majority of Xbox 360 owners are having outstanding experiences with their systems, and we are sorry to hear that this particular individual had such an unfortunate experience. Each incident is unique and customer inquires are handled on a case-by-case basis. The overall return rate is within the CE industry average of 3-5%.

That’s ridiculous! Anyone who owns and XBox has had this problem. ANYONE! And if you haven’t had this problem yet you will.

What Microsoft SHOULD do is follow Palm’s excellent repair service by taking our credit card and charging us for a new xBox, then sending us the new Xbox and having us put the broken xBox in the same box. then once you recieve the broken XBox you charge our account back.

THAT’S HOW TO DO IT!

Wow! This is amazing! A group of geniuses have developed a First-Person shooter for the web called Phosphor using Macromedia Director and I have to say it’s outstanding! It’s not easy to play and sometimes it doesn’t work well in Firefox but fire it up in IE and it works flawlessly.

Like most FPS games, you are a soldier with an arsenal of guns running through buildings, valleys and over ravines etc. trying to find other players (the computer) to kill before they kill you. In Phosphor the IA characters are hell-bent on destroying you and waste no time in attack so you have to be really quick to get the jump on them first.

The graphics are pretty good considering the fact that you are streaming over the web and while they’re no match for a true console FPS remember it’s all free so you really can’t complain.

You even have options to choose from in that you can choose multiple guns, ammo and even tweak settings such as full screen and frame rate. It’s a pretty in depth application.

Phosphor is pretty fast paced and you die quickly unless you keep your wits about you but suffice it to say if you’re in to FPS games you’ll dig this one!

So I have found a new cool game! A few weeks ago we were robbed. Two bastard kids broke in and among other things stole my XBox and all my games! BASTARDS! Anyway, as it is in some cases I had insurance and they paid for me to get a brand spankin’ new XBox 360!

So I am now playing Gears of War! It’s a really amazing game (not as good as Half Life 2 IMHO, but pretty sweet so far) It’s got incredible graphics and some really well done game play I’ll post more as I play further into the game.

Lately I have been playing a game called Half Life 2 on XBox and let me tell you if you have not played it and like games then you should run right now to the store and buy it immediately because it is one of the most fascinating games I have ever played.

The game starts out and you are Gordon Freeman, a fugitive on an alien-infested Earth being picked to the bone, its resources depleted, its populace dwindling. Freeman is thrust into the unenviable role of rescuing the world from the wrong he unleashed back at Black Mesa. And a lot of people people he cares about are counting on him. I

t’s pretty basic, you run around killing bad guy soldiers and trying to get the guy that started it all. Along ythe way you meet Alyx Vance who is one of the hottest chicks I’ve ever seen in a game. Unlike Lara Croft who is overtly physically sexual with her pontoon boobies, Alyx is just the hot bad girl chick you knew in college. Shapely, smart and resourcful. I am amazed by the detail in this game as the people look the most like actual humans I have ever seen. Great eye candy the whole way through.

Ok so it’s pretty to look at… why do I like it so much?  Well, unlike most games where you are corralled from one spot to another and then watch a “movie” of what’s happening in the story, Half-Life 2 just keeps you in the room as ewveryone speaks making it feel more like you are actually living the experience. What’s more is that you can pick things up! That’s right… you can pick up, throw and kill people with most things. In a true puzzle nature, in certain places you need to figure out how to get to new areas by either stacking boxes or wood or bricks or using a ballast to hoist you up somewhere or using a 2X4 to lay across a chasm so you can precariously walk across it.
Apparently the whay they do it all is by using a physics engine called Havoc which makes almost everything in the game moveable.  Pretty amazing. Later in the game you’re given a Gravity Gun which allows you to pick up and hoist huge things. You can even grab soldiers and throw them at other ones! How cool is that!?!?!

It also uses a thing called ragdoll physics so when you shoot someone on top of a building they fall and bounce arms flailing and flopping around. Very real.

It’s not too bloody either so you don’t have to really worry about that with regard to kids but it is a bit scary as there are lots of dark places for baddies to hide and there are these things called Head Crabs which jump onto your head and take over your body turning you into a zombie-like creature. Very scary. There are also these bugs called Ant Lions which are nasty creatures that burrow in the sand and they can feel the vibrations when you walk on their terrain. They lie bured eveyewhere waiting to kill you. Later you figure a way to control them and sick them on the bad guys which is really cool. Really amazing stuff when you consider that it’s all just 0′s and 1′s running through your computer or XBox to create all this stuff.

Here’s a bit from the Half Life 2 Website toting some of the game’s impressive features!

• Characters – Advanced facial animation system delivers the most sophisticated in-game characters ever seen. With 40 distinct facial “muscles,” human characters convey the full array of human emotion, and respond to the player with fluidity and intelligence.

• Physics – From pebbles to water to 2-ton trucks respond as expected, as they obey the laws of mass, friction, gravity, and buoyancy.

• Graphics – Source’s shader-based renderer, like the one used at Pixar to create movies such as Toy Story® and Monster’s, Inc.®, creates the most beautiful and realistic environments ever seen in a video game.

• AI - Neither friends nor enemies charge blindly into the fray. They can assess threats, navigate tricky terrain, and fashion weapons from whatever is at hand.

Anyway, it’s a great game and having just finished it I am a bit miffed that the newest game Half Life 2 Epsiode ONe isn’t coming to the XBox. It’s only for PC play. Grrrrr.

Buy the game. You will not regret it.

Okay, you smart people, let’s see you figure these out without peeking at the answers. Post your answers in the comment box below. I’ll post the answers if anybody cares. Ok, here’s the riddles!

Awesome! Check out this trailer, that is playing at E3! You’ll have to watch a commercial first but it’s worth it. Finally we know a bit more about Halo 3! It’s coming in 2007 and it looks pretty cool! Honestlly you can’t see too much except enviroments but for a Halo addict like me, anything is cool. If only the game looks like this! Probably will be close on xBox 360. According to this article the footage you watch is actual gameplay so it just might be. I guess I’m gonna have to break down and get me one of those next year.

As for me I’ve been getting my fix lately playing Far Cry Instincts and Half Life 2 which are both pretty coll games. Far Cry is kinda boring as the enemies are really, REALLY stupid but in Half Life 2 they’re are actually pretty smart. the game itself is beautiful and quite puzzling at times. At least for me. I’m sure some 14 year old would run circles around me but I’m having fun and that’s the point.