(no subject)

My laptop finally shipped yesterday. Should be here by Wednesday or so. In the meantime I've done a lot of game playing in the realm of Half-Life. For one, I finished Opposing force today, which has a pretty weak ending. Still OK for what I paid for it.

I also played The Specialists online. I was way outclassed by people who knew how to work the stunt system. For some reason, I have been unable to master it thus far. But I've only played it a day. And the rest of it is awesome. It has realistic weapons, excellent skins (you can play as an Agent or Morpheus), and the most stock maps I've seen in a HL mod, including the Lobby and the Chateau from The Matrix. I highly recommend it.

Of course, I also played NS 2.0. I would have to say that it still needs a little work. The gamma on mine is screwed up (set too high, maybe?), and massive amounts of lag is common on multiplayer games (the VT server lags a lot). The gameplay is the other troubling aspect -- the balance is skewed way towards the marines. Even if the aliens control most of the res nodes, it can still take about 45 minutes to knock over a well-developed marine base. Not to mention that the Onos is much weaker than in past games, and cannot stand against 2 guys with HMGs. Add heavy armor to the mix, before the third hive goes up, and it spells doom for the aliens. Most of the effective alien weapons don't come until the third hive, and even then one has to work to defeat the marines (unless the commander is really incompetent). It just seems impossible playing aliens anymore. But I'll give it more play time.

2 and a half weeks till I get back, and I'm counting the days. I've started to go through my boxes and remove all the extraneous stuff. Of course, I'll probably still take more than I need, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, unless you need to move it all. I am looking forward to the Ethernet, though. Mom had trouble getting online this evening, as our ISP's been having problems with the servers controlling user authentication. Mom, however, saw fit to blame me for this, and blamed it on everything from me dialing from my modem (which I wasn't -- I was finishing The Hobbit) to me using up the month's allotted time -- 200 hours -- in 2 days. Which, of course, is impossible, even if I was online the whole time (which I wasn't), and I explained this to Mom. Finally, she got through, and the complaints stopped. Another reason I'm looking forward to school -- if I want the unique experience of dealing with people who can't work a computer with their technical problems, Tech will pay me $10/hr to do so.