Hellgate: London is live.

A view of the crashes forum courtesy of Gawain. It should be noted you have to be registered and logged in to see the Hellgate forums. They would not want people to see all of the problems still present in the game that may stop them from buying the game. The Blue text is more or less a hodge podge of developer quotes.

Update 11/01/2007 1:53am

Hellgate: London has a shitty launch worthy of the mmo wannabe it tries to be. I maybe sick perhaps because I enjoy this. Bad press anyone? Hellgate London Live, Subscriptions Not, Hellgate-gate 07: Subscription Servers Down As Game Launches, and Hellgate Servers Might Be A Go, But The Subscription Services Aren’t are all articles describing how launch day went. And if you go into the Hellgate Account Page it greats you with this message even now:

Subscribing is currently disabled

In red no less. My two favorite Technical Support Forum threads are Memory Exhausted and Single-Player Patch. I love how that developer build that was ahead of the multiplayer beta is shaping out.

There is a new Star Trek movie being made. With new actors playing the parts. CNN has an article talking about the news of the casting of Captain Kirk. Here is the breakdown:

Here are the IMDB links to these people:

• Chris Pine as Captain Kirk
• Zachary Quinto as Mr Spock
• Karl Urban as Doctor McCoy
• Simon Pegg as Scotty
• John Cho as Sulu
• Zoe Saldana as Uhura
• Anton Yelchin as Chekov

I don’t even know what to think. It’s hard to imagine some of them as these characters. In costume and on the set will give a better idea how they will do. Just wow though.

I bought the Orange Box. I’m playing through Episode 2 because I’m too dumb for Portal. But then I hit a brick wall in the form of the driving shit in Episode 2. And again I’m apparently to fucking stupid to figure out what to do. Here is a visual history of what I’m doing. This is the wrong way obviously:

I won’t even get into Portal. I’m completely dead in my tracks. It’s fun enough. I have yet to try Team Fortress 2 online and with people. I played around with the commentary mode to look at the levels. Halo 3 has made me scared of playing online again with the young people.

Hellgate: London just went gold. Me and Gawain had been playing the beta. The nda has been lifted now that it’s gone gold. First let’s take a look at one of my favorite bugs from the beta. The goddamn portals. Jesus they were everywhere. They did eventually fix this one. But there are so many more.

Here is a movie of the portals. Keep in mind this is footage from a beta build. Also keep in mind supposedly the beta build players played was not the up to date build the developers had. Why one would have people test an old build of the game still baffles me.

[drain file 50 show]

And on top of retarded bugs like the above the performance is shit on my pc at times. You can find more screens shots from this old beta here. And then some newer old beta shots can be found here.

The best bug yet though has to be one Gawain has been suffering since we started playing this game. His chat window is fucking broken, patch after patch and new builds came and gone nothing ever fixing his problem.

He couldn’t even get one dev to reply about the problem. If you have beta access you can see his forum post right here. The game is a train wreck if you want to play over the net with a friend. The single player is supposedey in better shape. I don’t know myself because I saw that the just released demo has adware built in. And on top of everything else wrong with this game they finally announced what you get if you pay the ten bucks a month (cut and pasted from VE3D):

• Elite Mode – Tougher mobs, tougher all round
• Hardcore Mode – Perma-death mode for your character
• Themed events and items – First begins on day of release, Halloween
• Guild Creation – What it says on the tin!
• Achievements – Slay 6,000 zombies, get a pat on the back, and maybe a bonus item too
• Extra Character Slots – 24 for you, 3 for non-subscribers
• Larger Stash – Twice the space as non-subscribers
• Name Color – Get a colored name, wooo!
• Forum Icon – Makes you stand out on the official forums when bitching about the in-game ads

And that is it. What a great deal. Pass on the game and pass on the cheap ass shit you get for ten bucks a month. I’ll look at this one again in a years time. Just to see if it lasted and is finally playable.

Here is my chat with the Hotel Insider. We cover a few topics of interest regarding the worst hotel ever. What happened when the cops came to talk to me. What the hotel is like now. The newb auditor turned into a front desk supervisor. And a shared dislike for the biggest douche bag in the universe.

[3:31] Turk: you work at the desk?
[3:32] Hotel Insider: no
[3:32] Hotel Insider: I did do night audit before though at another hotel
[3:32] Turk: how did you find out about my site?
[3:32] Hotel Insider: back when you were fired and they were all investigating you etc
[3:32] Hotel Insider: actually when I seen your site
[3:32] Hotel Insider: I was like.. “man wish I could of met that guy he sounds pretty cool”
[3:33] Turk: wow did they make a big deal out of it?
[3:33] Hotel Insider: cause of the the idiots who stole crap from regal beloit
[3:33] Turk: oh
[3:33] Turk: right that shit
[3:33] Turk: heh
[3:33] Hotel Insider: well, we had just got regal beloit again for banquets
[3:33] Hotel Insider: and they were doing like meetings for this new program they paid a mil for or something for managers
[3:34] Hotel Insider: well these 3 people that use to work there I’m pretty sure stole this like big chest that they would keep there laptops in for the trainees
[3:34] Turk: yeah
[3:34] Hotel Insider: and they were watching you and seeing what you were posting etc seeing if maybe you were the one who did it

(more…)

In response to the post Hotel Watch Day 7 I was able to get someone from inside the worst hotel ever to comment on just what happened.

The flooding took out the water boilers in the basement. the executive wing is open because it has a separate boiler. And yes the paper does not say all the problems, you know how the owners are at this place…

I know the owners believe me. I asked a few questions. So what is morale like in the hotel for the regular employees? What is the situation with the latest gm leaving? This is the answer I got back:

I would say 70% of the employees quit. thats managers too. theres no GM, no F&B, no director of operations, and of course no one knows anything thats happening for the future or has a specific time when they will get the hotel working again. but I’m sure they will find someway to try and get around not having to do things properly to get the hotel going.

This of course paints a very grim picture of what things are like inside the worst hotel ever. Which is great news. If possible I will try to get more info from this Hotel Insider.

Honestly I hadn’t planned on getting it. But I did. And I’m glad I did. With Halo 3 I had low expectations. With one feature in particular it has me really liking the game. That is the Theater mode. In theater mode you can replay saved films. In these saved films you can take screenshots. Screenshots that can be uploaded onto the net. It maybe a minor thing to some. But I happen to love taking screens of the games I’m playing. You can see a total of 33 screens here in my gallery.

Now if they would enhance these features. It’s a pain in the ass to use the file share to upload one picture at a time. I should be able to upload the entire lot. Or at the least flag shots I want to upload. Further negatives about all this, the default file share max is six slots. For replays, screenshots, game modes, etc, etc. You can pay 750 Microsoft Points to increase the file share to a total of 24 slots. That’s per month by the way. Hopefully this is something that more console games will enable players to do.