Category: lounge

Fosdem 2008

It seems not every Belgian developer is aware of this great F/OSS conference we have right in Brussels, called FOSDEM 🙂 So I thought I should blog about it. 😉 It is a very general conference, so just about anyone remotely interested in open source can surely find some topic of interest. Very impressive list, imo.

Since I have a car now, and don’t live too far off from Brussels, I thought it’s my duty to attend 🙂 probably only Saturday though. Which is a shame actually as I miss the Drupal track and some interesting suse presentations.. Oh well, you can’t have it all anyway as there is simply too much 🙂

I printed some flyers with the press release on the back, here is the pdf (thanks Klaas). If you want a nice introduction to the main talks, read the brochure. Yes, they thought of everything 😉

I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting
[me] cu there! 😉

Team Fortress 2

CGSociety has an interesting feature about Team Fortress 2.

The art in TF2 and the game in general is indeed quite special imo 🙂 Having played it for a few hours, I really can appreciate the game Valve put together. High usability, restricted weapon selection and funny cartoonish graphics and animations trick the player into believing that this really is an easy kids game, but nothing is less true. Well.. it actually all depends on the players 🙂

A lot of rookie players (I have the impression there are a lot, me included 😉 ) just don’t get the full potential of the game and do a brute force attack. But due to unique gameplay elements, you are forced to find better or switch tactics all the time. For example, you simply can not find a sniping spot and snipe until you are discovered, simply because after each kill, the killee (heheh =) ), is presented a nice close up snapshot of his killer!
On top of that, because the game keeps track of your kills and hangs a big fat nemesis icon above your head for the people you killed a lot, you can be reassured to spend some payback time. 😉

There does not exist such thing as a fail proof tactic, each can be countered. And this is not because of the right weapon choice, but because of the wide range of characters. It takes some time to handle each of them in an effecient way and unless in each class someone knows what he does, the team simply doesn’t work. And that’s in fact my only problem with the game, I guess. 🙂 A lot of people don’t play their class well and also don’t care “because they just wanna frag”. That’s okay, if the other team agrees with that 😉 The minute they start playing “intelligently”, they win. Of course, the game wouldn’t be called team fortress if team play wasn’t a key part of the game 😉 yet, on public servers, we all know it is sometimes hard to find the team spirit …

Half-life 2. Finally.

yes, I know my hardware is not the most recent, but so is Half-life 2. Yet, it seems I won’t manage to play it although I finally bought it! 🙂 Have a look at the following nice free disk space requirements..:
Orange box disk space requirements
/me faints 😉

even when I only want to install Portal (which I wanted to try out badly), I still need 6260 MB !!?? what have they done with that game?! it looked so nice and small (and I heard play time was not that much either ;))

Guess I’ll do have to buy that extra disk first now!

Btw, I bought it through steam, but got almost zero price benefit (given that the dollar is quite weak now) over a boxed version here in Belgium. Still, I wanted to try it and I wanted to play _now_ 😉 (I guess, after hours of downloading ;))