So I finished Halo 3 the other day. Now what to do? Good question. Microsoft must have asked that very same question because they are releasing a new Halo game: Halo Wars. An RTS done by Ensemble Studios, who also did Age of Empires (Rise of Rome), which is one of my all time favorite games.

When I googled for Half-Life 3 images tonight, I got this funny result which made me chuckle:

..then, when I searched for Hexic on Flickr, I got this result:

The caption says “Taken on our vacation to Gatlinburg. The fencing at Hillbilly Golf reminded me of Hexic” - I guess this guy really needed a holiday.

Trailer by Blur.

There ya go Nathan (via Makezine).

I’ve really been waiting to get this and this morning it landed on my (a bit messy) desk: Halflife 2 and Team Fortress 2 for Xbox 360. The Orange Box is a bit of a stupid name for this. And not just because it comes in a green box.

This demo for 360/PS3 game Assasins Creed blew me away. Its from the makers of Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell. Coming this november.

I’ve had an Xbox 360 before (in the pre-order era) but got rid of it since I couldn’t stand the noise it makes. To me, the vacuumcleaning sound coming from a 360 doesn’t really enhance the experience of lying quietly on a roof sniping nazis in Call of Duty 2.

But then I tried out a ton of demos the other week at Louis’ crib. Here’s a few highlights..

• DiRt
  Realistic rally racing - quite nice, but I’m getting the idea the demo isn’t really doing the game a lot of justice.

• Forza 2
  What a killer. Played for a good few hours and not one frame dropped. Ultrasmooth simulation. Liking the fact that the graphics seem tweaked to optimise gameplay, rather then the other way around. This is Fast. Add to shopping cart, ship overnight.

• Halo 3 (full version, not the demo)
  Nice graphics. Quality game, I guess. Didn’t really get into it. Yet.

• Sega Rally (pic above)
  My kind of game: arcade style slip ‘n slide rally racing. We ended up playing this demo all evening - just basic racing to see who is fastest. The demo holds two full maps. We mostly played Canyon 2 and my personal record now is 4:18:26. Liking the dynamically deformable terrain. Bit of a shame though that individual players cannot enter their names for their racetimes. Xbox Live is nice, but playing at home with your buddies trying to beat eachothers laptimes is nice too.

So I went out and bought a 360. Again. Just decided to have Volume Real Loud when playing it this time.

The games on the Sony PSP platform never really did it for me - the PSP always felt a bit like a miniature Playstation 1 (which it is, so that makes sense) and that vibe doesn’t really cut it for me no more. So I never really played with it a whole lot..

..until I found out about Amiga emulation on the PSP. The project is called Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator and its great, I figured I’d share my experience with it here. Someone told me about this a while ago, I just never really found time to play with it yet (the first version of PSP UAE dates back to 2005).

The installation procedure isn’t completely harmless apparently, so at first I wasn’t really sure if I should do this at all since the process can potentially ‘brick’ (screw up) your PSP completely, although I read somewhere that there is tricks to ‘unbrick’ it again. It also does a fair bit of overclocking (sets the CPU speed to 333mhz). I believe there isn’t really a lot of knowledge on if this overclocking business is actually harmful to a PSP.

It took me a few hours to install the emulator - My PSP is from 2005 and ran on version 2.81. Which meant I had to upgrade it to v3.50 in order to be able to downgrade it to v1.50 again. I could find all the tools and tricks trough google - ‘its all there you just have to find it’ (pasting the links in this post is ‘breaking the law’ I think?)

Anyhow…

A few hours later I was looking at Turrican II - running smooth and looking mighty fine on the mint PSP screen:

Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken, Indy; The SCUMM adventures all run great as well - only the sound is quite broken.

Some observations:

• Sound emulation not really working right on any of the games I’ve tried so far.
• Not all games run smooth with UAE, a lot of them are slow and/or skimpy on the frames.
• A 4GB Memorycard will store any Amiga game ever made (including the one by mr. Waterfall, if only he told me what its name is) - how cool is that?
• Trying to make pictures or clips of the shiny black & glossy PSP is challenging.

If you don’t really fancy this old-school retro gaming stuff, there is more emulation going on for the PSP, like DeSmuME - emulating the Nintendo DS. Nice.

I really enjoyed this launch site for Halo 3 - its quite an experience: You ‘fly’ trough a gigantic beautifully crafted hand-built miniature set of a paused Halo3 scene. Diorama stylee. Made me want to get my hands on the real thing as well.

Update: Just found out trough Ventilate that this is done by Method Studios who collaborated with Director Rupert Sanders and master modeler Stan Winston via T.A.G/McCann for a Halo 3 TV commercial. There is a Making Of as well.