The Quixotic Engineer

Rainy Woods has been described as “Silent Hill meets Twin Peaks”, but it reminds me of the film Se7en more than anything. Either way it looks fantastic, I’ll be looking forward to this next year.

On a slight tangent, not only does the Orange Box come out this week, but it seems that Puzzle Quest is set to arrive on XBLA on Wednesday as well. With today being a holiday, this is shaping up to be one fantastic week. Happy turkey day, fellow Canucks!

All the hype and anti-hype about Halo 3 left a sour taste in my mouth and made me question whether or not I should bother writing anything about the game. While it certainly doesn’t deserve the release madness it has created, the fact is that Halo 3 is a very solid FPS with extremely refined balance and great production value. Taken objectively without the fanboy hype, the game is just good fun.

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Through a series of strange coincidences and necessities, I’ve been introduced to a number of really great software and web tools these past two weeks. Here’s a little bit about each one, with any luck they might fix some of your problems as well.

Google Reader

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a terribly slow adapter. However, after seeing that a good number of people were subscribed to my RSS feed via Google Reader, my curiosity was piqued and I took the time to check it out. I had previously considered switching from a browser based aggregator to web based one, but I didn’t have the motivation to do so until I began lacking things to read during my breaks at work.

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Considering the name of the site, it seemed oddly appropriate to post this video. Everything you see is true to life: we engineers frequently sit and play guitar in the middle of battlefields, and we most definitely wear orange helmets at all times. If you haven’t been following the amusing character profiles, you should also check out Meet the Heavy and Meet the Soldier. The cartoon-like visual style is really striking; I’m really hoping that the light-hearted approach translates into the actual game.

These videos are promos for Valve’s Orange Box video game compilation, set to be released on October 10th. The set is a bargain, including Half-Life 2, Episodes 1 and 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal for the price of one regular game. Furthermore, if you pre-order the game off Steam then you’ll not only get into the TF2 beta, but also get Orange Box themed Peggle Extreme (pictured above)!

Update: Rock, Paper Shotgun has been doing a really great 9 part series detailing each class in TF2. If you’re beta-less like me, this might help tide you over.

You may or may not know that I’ve been a long-time of proponent of the Segway Personal Transporter. Why, you might ask, would I support these silly devices? I have two important personal reasons.

Firstly, they’re a triumph of engineering. As vehicles that constantly appear to be in peril of falling over, they defy our expectations by remaining in perfect balance using a combination of computers and gyroscopes. Anything that harnesses the power of physics to do something counter-intuitive (see the levitating frog experiment) is alright in my books.

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