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I hear a lot of jokes about my name. None of them are funny.
My fiancee Gina plans events for World Travel Meetings and Incentives. We live in a loft in San Francisco, and can occasionally be found flying kites at various spots around the city. If you're on Xbox Live, look me up. My gamertag is Willski.
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May 9, 2003
What have I been playing?
I’m writing reviews of Rise of Nations and Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis for our July issue, so I’ve been pretty occupied with both of them.
Rise of Nations kicks ass in just about every way. It’s the best RTS game I’ve played in ages. The combat portions are great, it doesn’t take 4 hours to fight through a single mission, there are a wide variety of mission types, and the units range from pike toting peasants to stealth bombers and ICBMs.
The single player missions are tied together with a Risk-like turn based campaign. You move armies across the map to defend or invade certain territories. Eventually, your empire is either wiped from the earth, or you stand alone as the supreme ruler of earth.
I’ve not played any multiplayer yet, but I’m going to try to get a game going later this afternoon.
Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis is the first JP game I’ve seen that didn’t suck in every single way imaginable. It’s actually quite good. Combining the Jurassic Park universe with a theme park building sim is brilliant. As the park’s manager, you control everything from collection of DNA samples to the security surrounding the T. Rex pen, to the types of souvenirs you sell in the gift shop. Putting a Stegosaurus in a Velociraptor pen to see what happens is sick, but very entertaining.
Best of all, it uses programmable shaders to draw the nifty waving grass and ripply water.
The game has a few flaws. It’s horrifically unstable on Radeon-based boards, and crashes as soon as you zoom in for a closer look on a dinosaur. It’s also got a pretty shallow tech tree. I had completely exhausted all my research options by the time I was four hours into the game. You should also be able to unlock more different types of dinos in each park. In order to see all the different species of dinos, you’ll have to create multiple parks.
E3 is next week, and I’m going to see all sorts of new stuff, including Half-Life 2. From what I’ve seen so far, it looks like it will be a worthy successor. I’ll keep you posted.
///Will | Games | Email this entry