Impressions: Metro 2033 (and some Gamefly)

Ashley got me a two month subscription to Gamefly for my birthday and last week I decided to finally set it up and chug through some games. The service, overall, is quite good, though it does take a while to get a game back after you send one in. I believe that it takes two to four games to send it in and then to get the next game it can take up to another four days to get a game back. Because of this, I do not see this as being a service I would use to get games through exclusively because it takes so long to get the next game. Luckily, I have a pile of games I have not played yet or are playing through (Mass Effect and Oblivion) so it is not a problem for me.

Metro 2033, by 4A Games, is the first piece of software I got through the service. I was not expecting much because the gaming media was talking a lot of crap about this game, however, my impressions differ greatly from that of the masses.

Moscow is gone.

Starting with events that must take place near the end of the game, you immediately get the sense that you, as the main character Artyom, are in for a lot of disappointments and will be a loner for a lot of the game whether by choice, or not. After this opening set piece, Artyom is awoken from sleep in Exhibition, which is the 'town,' if you can call it that as it is really just a barricaded part of the subway under Moscow, and are told that Hunter, an elite Ranger (defender of the subway tunnels), will be arriving and you must meet them. Hunter lets Artyom know that he needs to go to the stronghold of Polis to find help in defeating a new threat to the metro, the Dark Ones. Hunter is on a quest to eliminate as many as he can, but he just does not have the resources to do as such.

From here, you gear up the character with the little currency you have, which is military grade ammo, which is quite rare. Regular ammo is made in the tunnels and is not as accurate or powerful as the military ammo which is left over from twenty years ago, before the nuclear holocaust which has wasted away the above world. Various weapons practically held together by tape and glue are offered for you to use. From here, you can finally start the main quest.

Venturing into the tunnels is quite dangerous, as they are filled with various types of monsters, and even some raiders looking to steal all of your crap. I am not quite sure as of now if the monsters were caused by some kind of mutation of normal animals or if it has something to do with the paranormal. There are paranormal aspects to this game, which if done poorly, could have been real tacky and cliche. However, the paranormal stuff is not overdone and adds a lot of atmosphere to the game, something missing from plenty of current gen games.

Some of the hard-to-find good guys.

To the point I am in the game, which is approximately two-thirds of the way through the game, the paranormal  stuff does not have a major effect on the game. There are some very odd parts where you are not always sure about what is going on. I hope this is all wrapped up at the end of the game, but it is still cool to see a some subtle paranormal stuff integrated into this game.

Some people may not have heard, but this game also has its share of stealth missions, and boy are they hard. They don't have to be completed with stealth, though. In the end, using stealth for as long as you can is usually the best idea because when you encounter large groups of enemies, you will die if you are not stocked with plenty of bullets and medkits. The difficulty adds to the realism of these parts as it would be nigh on impossible for an ordinary person to take on a group of 5+ equally armed men in a tunnel with little cover. Adding to the realism is the need to charge your headlight every once in a while with a modified crank and wearing gas masks when on the surface and changing the filter for the mask every once in a while.

The Circus is in Town

Overall, I am quite excited to finish Metro 2033 because it is one of the better shooters I have played in a while. It is not all about pure action, but instead integrates a decent amount of emotion into the story with a somewhat cynical undertone. Although this may not be what most people look for in shooters, it is games like this that provide us with stories that we do not already know the ending to as so often happens with the recycled material usually passed as games nowadays.

Timeline: 18, 19 September 2010

Played Mass Effect for 6 hours on Saturday. The rest of the weekend was spent relaxing and doing homeowork, nothing of note.

Thoughts on Mass Effect

James V. Brown Library has a section where you can take out video games (for free!) so I was browsing it and saw Mass Effect, the game that really catapulted video game developer Bioware to fame. I had not yet even seen this game in action, but the game being a sci-fi space opera was really all I needed to ever know for me to be interested.

I popped the game into my Xbox and as usual with new games I let all of the before-game cutscenes roll. What was most obvious at the beginning is the Start Screen. It is a panoramic view of an unknown planet that slowly rotates under the camera. It is stunningly beautiful and the music that plays makes the scene even better.

After starting a new game, the create character screen comes up. I never put too much time into created characters, but since the menu was so easy to navigate and because changing the parameters actually did something (coughOBLIVIONcough), I made a character which I think looks tough.

For all the talk of Mass Effect's story, one would be led to believe that it is excellent. Well, it is. In a matter of seconds, the entire scope of the story is laid out. The characters are deep with intricate back-stories just begging to be explored. At the beginning of the game, in the create-a-character section of the game, you can actually choose from multiple back-stories for yourself and characters will react to this progressively throughout the game. It molds how they act towards you, and you can react back with an expected response, or in a way that would not usually be you.

One last major plus that is immediately obvious is that the graphics are amazing. This game is gorgeous and the environments are expansive and for the most part are quite expansive.

Well, those are the major things I could gather from the first two hours with the game.

_______________________________________________________________________________
Backup for video is here: LINK (.flv)

Timeline: 15 September 2010

Morning
Awoke at 7 AM to finish the Quantum Mechanics homework assigned two days before. Of course, the professor said it would be an elementary assignment, but it did give us some challenge. The problem was to find <x>, <p>, <p^2>, <E> of the Psi function:

Took some work but most answers came out to around the cube of the Sine function in some form.

Afternoon
Went to Quantum Mechanics, Planetarium Techniques, and Thermodynamics (in that order) and all classes went as one would come to expect. Nothing was really out of the ordinary, and most of the math seems somewhat manageable as opposed to the past few days where the most fundamental of the quantum theories were derived and physically explained (to the extent that was possible).


Colloquium was quite good, if not almost completely over my head. The speaker, Dr. Rudeger (Derek) Wilke, talked about his work at the Materials Research Institute at Penn State University. The topic was how he is using peizoelectric materials to correct the lenses on an upcoming X-Ray observatory satellite. Here is the description from the Lycoming College website:

Post-Doctoral Scholar and Visiting Scientist in the Materials Research Laboratory at The Pennsylvania State University, will discuss, “Piezoelectric Lead, Zirconium, Titanium (PZT) Films on Glass Substrates for Gen-X Imaging Systems.” This gala event will take place in the Academic Center Lecture Hall C-303. Students, faculty, staff, and the public are invited. 

Abstract: Gen-X is a next generation spaced based x-ray telescope that hopes to study distant, faint objects such as the formation of black holes, distant galaxies, and the early evolution of the universe. They key to achieving the desired goal of 0.1 arcsecond resolution is the implementation of an adaptive optics system that allows on flight corrections of structural or figure errors in the mirror and minor adjustments to alignment. The optics for the telescope consist of "bi-morph" mirrors on flexible glass substrates. These mirrors consist of an iridium/chromium (Ir/Cr) reflective surface on the front side and a piezoelectric Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 (PZT) thin film on the back side. With an active area of ~10,000 m², developing a scalable approach to depositing PZT of sufficient quality to achieve the necessary actuation presents several processing challenges. The glass chosen for the telescope slumps above 560 ^oC, far lower than the 700 ^oC typically used to crystallize PZT films. Additionally, the stresses induced in thin film deposition can significantly warp the substrates due to their flexible nature, potentially introducing more figure errors in the mirror than can be corrected by piezoelectric film. In this talk I will review the fundamentals of piezoelectricity and how piezoelectric films can be used in adaptive optics systems, as well as discussing the progress made to date.

It was interesting in I am quite intrigued by the electromagnetic properties involved in the process.  


Evening
Took a nap, missed dinner, and played some Mass Effect. I will be typing up a lab report tonight for Classical Mechanics and I think I have a Thermodynamics homework due tomorrow. Quite beat and cannot wait for the weekend to catch up on reading and recharge the batteries.