I know, I know. No Dr. Horrible again this week, but it's only because I am preparing a nice big post with lots of pictures and the good news is the Freeze Ray is about 90% done. Also, sorry for not posting on Friday as the norm has been, but time etc. wouldn't allow for it. Anyway, on to the review...

OK, Fallout 3 is the shit! I've only just escaped the vault as I couldn't play super long last night, but for basically having played through an hour long tutorial, it was a really fun and new gaming experience.
Fallout 3 has a really different way of setting a character up from scratch. I won't spoil it but its pretty funny how you start off. In your time spent in the vault you will receive your Pip-Boy 3000, a surprisingly helpful all-in-one tool that you will use the rest of the game and will take the G.O.A.T., a kind of standarized test that comically gets you to assign your stats based on your answers to the strangest test questions I've ever seen. Besides that, they also basically give you all this back info for the story in a creative way that's tangled in with setting up your character over time, and it immerses you instead of just, create random toon then go spam V.A.T.S..

Speaking of which, the V.A.T.S. system is pretty awesome. After your father mysteriously escapes the vault, your best friend wakes you up and suggests you do the same immediately because all hell has broken loose. She hands over a pistol but asks you not to use it unless absolutely necessary as to avoid more carnage. I am doing good with my first character, so I opted to tote my Louisville slugger instead. I've had plenty of fun thus far just sneaking corners and whamming the crap out of Radroaches and Security Guards.

But once I got outside, out the pistol came and that's instantly fun too. I am already sold and haven't begun to scratch the surface. The first thing you do after coming out of the vault is wander to this dented burned out little sign that says, Scenic Overlook and you get this epic sprawling view of an obliterated Washington D.C. with the Washington monument all torn up way off in the distance. And when you let it sink in that you can walk all the way to it, you're like holy crap this is gonna be HUGE.

The few characters I have met and interacted with so far, mostly your father and a few friends/people you grew up with were pretty good. They show early signs of how the Karma system will come in to play, and are very impressively voiced. At one point it's your tenth birthday party and as you wander around the room receiving the well wishes of your guests, a robot companion goes to cut your cake but uses a buzz saw and ends up sending the cake everywhere and utterly destroying it. So the game definitely comes with a great sense of humor as well.

All in all, it looks like it's shaping up to be pretty great so far. I can't wait to play more and dig further into all the tons of things you can do. With a wide open destroyed world to explore and a similar interaction system to games like Half Life 2, or Bethesda's previous Elder Scrolls titles, Fallout 3 is definitely my pick so far for best game of the Fall.

No Dr. Horrible to post about this week though the project is still under way. Check back soon for that. In the meantime here is a review of my experience thus far from the BETA of CoD5.

Well, I managed to snag a BETA token for CoD5 on the 360. It's very much a clone of CoD4 when it comes to the game engine and all the controls etc are pretty much the same. However, as of my experience thus far I am left feeling that it is good, but not the greatness that came with 4.

It basically allows you to play three multiplayer maps in a number of game modes including team death match, lone wolves etc. It has the same ranking system, with perks, challenges etc. You can get up to rank 11 before it caps, but you open a number of initial challenges that will allow you to unlock extra parts for your weapons. However, I do have a gripe here in that in CoD4 completing weapon challenges either got you scopes etc, or camo depending on if you were completing number of kills or number of headshots. In CoD5, it still has both sets of challenges, but they don't always necessarily unlock soemthing and it looks like camo is non-existent in this iteration as far as I've seen.

The weapon's themselves are actually fine. I was worried it would be a bit of a void going from the cool newer weapons back to 1940's fare, but it doesn't feel all that different. I imagine with some additions like the flame thrower which you can't try in BETA, or the Molotov cocktail which you can. :- it will balance itself out to feel like the same fun variety. And some of the new perks will add a variety of skills depending on players preferences. For example the last stand perk now not only leaves you on the ground with pistol in hand, but allows you to revive fellow teammates who are in the same condition and alerts you to them with a big medical cross on the overhead map. And the kill streak bonus's are as fun as ever. You can't very well call in F-18's or a helicopter to terrorize the enemy as punishment for them having let you killed them so much. Instead, the three bonus attacks come as a reconnaissance plane, just like the UAV really, and a mortar shelling that puts the air strike to shame my mercilessly pounding an area for a good long period of time and with great effect of huge plumes of dirt thrown into the air. But the best is the replacement for the helicopter in a lot of 6 dogs, pertaining to your country i.e. German shepherds for Germany etc. who chase down all of you enemies and dive for their throats. Yes the same dogs that were hunting you in first player in CoD4 now work for you and in great numbers. There is nothing more rewarding than following your dogs who home in on your enemies only to see some hidden fool get pounced on while you assist with machine gun fire. Think if the helicopter could follow you into buildings and every last little crevice in a map. There is also something so satisfying about knifing an enemy dog or three as they jump for your throat and surviving instead of just pouring as much ammo as you can into the side of a helicopter.

In the three available maps, one allows the use of 2 ever respawning tanks, one on either side of a fairly round arena style map. The driver controls the main canon, while a second passenger can ride atop and use a chaingun. However, if no other passenger gets in the driver can switch himself to the chaingun should he so choose. The tanks are not entirely invincible either. Many of the people I played with carried missile launchers or sticky grenade demo packs that have remote detonation, plus a number of grenades. Sometimes I lasted a while in the tank against those less experienced, sometimes my joyride ended very quickly. It depends on the skills of the players. An additional fun twist is that the chaingunner is more or less in open air and can be picked off his tank with a decent aim. I myself managed to kill an enemy chaingunner from inside a bomb-smashed building's second floor through a pane of glass with my bolt-action sniper rifle as they drove between some cement slabs a few hundred yards away. (my favorite kill so far)

I think the biggest downfall so far though, and what leaves me with a feeling of good, but not great, is the level design. While this might just be a symptom of the fact that only three of many more levels are available to play, I don't love any of them. In CoD4 everyone has maps they LOVE. After playing this it makes me truly realize just how great and how much time and thought went into CoD4's levels. When playing I often felt like I was in a feasible real world location. In CoD5 while there are many cool new aspects, most of the levels feel like arenas instead of real places. The three available as sort of previously mentioned are a circular German/Russian bombed out city area with some cargo containers and trains around, a rectangle/squarish Japanese palace type of place with lots of stairs and walls throughout, and a ocean side Japanese fishing village which is mostly rectangular and contains a lot of straw/bamboo huts with bridges and water streaming down to the ocean which you can only wade in a bit. Each has its ups and downs. The somewhat openness and the tanks of the first make it fun. The angles from which you can attack in the second is great for sniping or close quarters combat. And the fun factor of the third with sneaking underneath huts or wading in the tall grass in the water sneaking up on an unsuspecting group of enemies makes this feel the most genuine to reality. I think this one is my favorite of the three.

However, the largest suffering points for all three is that they are absolutely filled with clutter. The best way I can relate this is to the airbase map of CoD4 with the tons of concrete walls and missile launchers etc just thrown down everywhere but minus the huge amount of flat space and few nice sniping spots. Each of these levels just has stuff strewn all over the place. Whether its just tons of straw huts, or bombed out refuse or perplexing staircases it feels like they've been overdone. It's like the designers said, we've got 10 feet of open air here lets thrown a turned over rowboat in to make it that much more closed up. It's hard to find any good amount of space that's even remotely wide open. Everything is always next to something, so you end up having to mostly fight with rapid fire weapons or shotguns as you are constantly running face first into an enemy. Even the level with the tank, more time is spent driving around/through obstacles than fighting the other tank or blowing away enemies in the open. The biggest problem all of this causes is your team and the other team just get spread out everywhere. There's no coming from one side to get to the other side like the cargo ship in 4 or any of the maps in 4 really, you start in one spot and your lucky to start there again, its just crazy all over the place, and the closest I can relate it to more like a halo type of match. start in a random spot then jump into the arena and see who's health bar lasts the longest. I didn't feel like any of the levels had strategy to them. There was a couple of sniping spots but they were all so easily reached by anyone that they turned hands every few minutes. It didn't have the same fighting to make your way to the top like the three story building in CoD4 and they were precariously located in the middle area of the maps instead of opposite ends. It was like a clown show at one point when an enemy was in one elevated snipers hut. A teammate of mine climbed up the ladder and killed him then an enemy in tow killed my teammate then i killed the enemy as i was coming up a ladder behind him. Its more zany go everywhere kill spree than strategically move from place to place as it felt in CoD4. What I would love to see is some great wide open field with foxholes dug in it like what took place in most of Europe.

Anyway, don't get me wrong. it is good, and I will be buying it. I just don;'t think I'm going to rush out to do so. I'll be more interested to see what Infinity Ward has up their sleeve for the 6th one, I think a Vietnam one or a futuristic one could be a lot of fun. In the meantime this is fun, but its not CoD4 if that's what you're expecting.

Bwaaaahahahahaha....     BWAAAAHHHAHAHAHAHAHA.... ha.
K, so I'm working on my evil laugh as well. Why? Because yours truly is taking on the persona of he who has a PhD. in Horribleness for not only this Halloween, but for the New York and quite possibly the San Diego Comic-Con's as well. Yes, I am a fan of Dr. Horrible.

I've managed to scrabble together most of the costume with the lab coat being the only part remaining, and I have ordered one and it should arrive soon. I got a perfect pair of goggles and have painted them to match the silvery color in the video. As well, I have the exact pair of boots and gloves that were used. So I'm pretty excited.

However, what is any good Halloween costume without some accessorizing? I mean really, what's a pirate without his sword, or a Stormtrooper without his laser carbine? It was with this in mind I decided to pursue creating the perfect thing to go along with the outfit.

Now I've looked all over the internet. I've seen some great attempts at recreating props from the video. I've seen at least 1 or 2 of the arm mounted laser from the bank heist scene. I've seen many a Wonderflonium briefcase (which i will also be making). And I've seen many a nerf-gun or other toy gun either standard or modified to play either the stun/death ray or freeze ray, but I have yet to see anything try to be faithful to the actual looks.

With that said, I am creating Dr. Horrible's Freeze Ray.



Work has already started and is going well so far. What follows below and in the next few blog posts will detail its construction as much as I can afford to do. For today I even have a few photos, though they aren't the greatest quality as I just snapped them quick with my iPhone before running out the door. But I promise to follow up with better shots from my digi camera. So lets begin.

First thing when i came up with the idea was to do some research on the Freeze ray itself. This boiled down to heading over to hulu.com and slowly playing and replaying the scene in which you see said freeze ray, over and over again. As I did so, I tried to grab a few screen grabs of it so I would get a good sense of what components went into it. Once I got them I placed them in photoshop and lightened them up, moved them around and basically manipulated them to make the images as clear as possible to see what I needed. Below is a picture of the freeze ray by itself. It was originally very dark and lacking a lot of essential detail. I did a bit of work to correct this to what you see now.



With that done, and what few other angles I could scratch up, I drew a mock up in my sketchbook. I will try to scan these in at a later time. Once I was done setting a relative scale of all the parts, I tried to list which pieces I thought could be built out of what material. As you can see above the ray consists of 3 main parts. The long barrel of the gun, the middle "base" section and the back handle bar. At this point I also decided I would not be including the pole it sits on as I want it to be mobile, and also the second little "grip" pole as I noted in the actual video this was not used, in favor of Dr. H holding the actual barrel instead. From a weight distribution point of view this also seemed logical for toting it around. There is also in addition to these main parts, a second small barrel on top of the ray, and a side "panel" component that has two steel cables running into a box with a pulsing blue square of light and another cylinder on the front of that that could be taken to be a third small barrel.

Now unfortunately the ray is only ever shown from this side, and often at low angles, in dark situations or too close to see everything together. So I had to do a lot of guesswork as to actual positioning of elements. And as I have already established, I will be taking liberties with the design as I see fit. Without better shots of the freeze ray, and with my current situation, being lacking tools and appropriate parts/materials to build it exact, I am instead working on matching as many things as I possibly can and then being creative to fill in the gaps.

With that in mind I sketched out a second set of views. The second set were more for "internals". As it is clear I will be needing some electric components for at least the pulsing blue light, I sketched out some wiring running from the base out to the small side panel. I also decided I wanted to create the effect of the blue-white light that came from inside the barrel when the ray fired, and I wanted to be able to turn these two elements on and off separately with switches at the handle on the back of the ray. To create both of these sources of light, I would need LED's. After some quick math and creative decisions, I established for the barrel I would need at least 8 LED's running on one 9v battery in arrays of 2 each with a resistor for each in a parallel circuit. For the pulsing blue light I researched on the internet for a ready made controllable pulsing circuit board. Which I found and will detail in another post. More on these LED's later in this post.

On to materials. It's obvious from the video that the real life equivalent is built mostly from metal, and is probably quite heavy. As that won't do for carrying it around, nor my capabilities for working with metal or getting the proper metal components, mine will be built mostly from plastics and possibly some wood. With this in mind I headed off to Home Depot where I got just about all the components I need...
For the main barrel I got a 2 ft length of 2" PVC pipe, as well as some fittings to give it a more accurate/cool look.
For the second smaller barrel I got a length of 2 ft of 3/4" copper pipe and some fittings to get the same effect as above. This barrel as has not been mentioned I decided to run along the entire top length of the base and then turn into the base at the back. It will be held down by a series of binding clips of which the proper name I am unsure. None of this was clear from the video, so is instead, a creative touch.
For the Base I found a plastic container that the receipt calls a shoe box. It is tapered from its top to its base instead of the perfect rectangle seen in the video, but I think this may even give it more of a unique look. It also feels pretty sturdy which is important as it will be the center of weight and gravity for the finished piece and if it's not sturdy the whole thing will wobble and not be very strong. I am not sure yet, but I may need to later reinforce this with some extra material, possibly wood or metal. The fact it has a removable top will work well for dealing with the "innards" on a  whim.
The back handle as of yet is something of a problem. This, next to the base, is arguably the part that needs to be the most sturdy as if I intend to hold the rest of the weapon from there it would need to support the weight of everything in front of it. This paired with the fact it is uniquely shaped to diagonally move down to where the actual grip handle is located means I need something sturdier than what I bought I believe. I intended to use either thin PVC or Copper for this too, but the problem was, they didn't have PVC or Copper precut in the sizes I needed, and their pipe cutting machine was broke. So, making due I found a small metal part in the shape of a square, that I intended on bending to the correct angle, but it is also flat on all sides which won't do. this means I would need to wrap soemthing around it such as newspaper or foam then bind it together to give it the rounder shapes and the ability to hold it. the metal is also kind of flimsy, so I think this option is out. I have since drafted up in photoshop a rough template for cutting he shape from wood. I think 1 1/4" plywood could be cut to the shape and would be sturdy enough to hold the weight. More on this when I venture to the lumber yard.
For the side panel, and this is something I think I'm most excited about, I got an industrial electrical switch holder, the type of thing you see hooked on a wall in a big building's basement with huge metal conduit heading into it and a switch for power. Pretty neat looking. It had an open front and as I need a blue blinking rectangle here I got an empty switch plate that you would normally have in your house of which I intend to cover with a semi-seethru plastic. *And* it has 2 holes in either side perfect for the next item I'll talk about. I also got some little parts for this as I've decided instead of the third barrel looking thing to go a little more creative with the look. It should be pretty cool.
The next item as mentioned is some steel conduit, a huge roll of which I could never dream of using but for quite cheap, so who cares. And it perfectly fits right into the side panel box, and it will carry the electric cabling for the LED's from inside the box through the conduit into the side panel and right back out again. I actually feel like I'm making something functional! Hooray!
For the dark side of the freeze ray, that being the left and never seen side, I had to get entirely creative. For all I know, there is nothing there, but that's boring back in reality, so I found these great little canisters that look like they came from Ninja Turtles 2 mutagen canisters. For these I am going to hook them to the side and run more conduit into them through the lid, and label them... are you ready... Wonderflonium power source. I am trying to figure out how I could get a viscous shimmering liquid into them possibly in pouches so it even looks like Wonderflonum is in fact powering the beast right then and there. I am also considering trying to find one of those black and yellow diagonally striped "danger" stickers to put by it.

I will try to take pictures of all these components before I start transforming them into whatever devilish end product awaits. Now i know this post is going long, and will probably be the longest of the bunch, But i wanted to get all the prep info and materials info out there before I really dug in. So don't expect the rest of this series to be quite as verbose as this first part, but I do have one more thing to talk about. The barrel LED's.

After gathering all this stuff I had one more trip to make. So off to radio shack I went. There I got 6 ultra-high brightness white LED's, 2 ultra-high brightness blue LED's, a pack of 100 assorted resistors (actual project need is 3 - 100 ohm resistors, 1 - 150 ohm resistor but the pack is cheap), two switches, a 9v battery connector, a blank circuit board, 3 pack red green and black 20 gauge connector wire, a soldering iron, solder, and a pair of wire strippers/cutters. This actually took two trips to two different stores as both ran out of some of either components, especially the LED's. If I weren't doing this so quickly I would have probably ordered the LED's of the internet.

I figured out a new pattern for the LED's. Originally I was going to use 8 white LED's instead of the two blue ones, but I decided I wanted to mix some blue color in with the white to match the video. I also wanted them in a different pattern on the circuit board. So I hot glued them in place with 3 whites on top, 2 blues in the middle, and the other 3 whites on the bottom.



I'll talk about the process of the circuit hookup using the blue's as an example.

1) I made the blue array connecting the first blue's negative cathode to the second blue's positive anode. I wrapped this connection in electric tape.
2) I then cut 4 lengths each of black and red connector wire and made inline connections.
3) The red wire to the first blue's anode.
4) The black to the second blue's cathode.
5) I connected the 150 ohm resistor inline with the black connector wire

I repeated all the steps above for each of the 3 white arrays as well. I found it easiest to do each step at the same time before moving on to the next step. i.e.: I connected the red wires to each of the arrays anodes before moving on and connecting the black wires to each of the arrays cathodes. This keeps it more organized and prevents connecting the wrong wire to the wrong place and getting a short/burnt out LED or non working circuit. Also the white arrays work at a higher voltage so I only needed 100 ohm resistors for each of those 3 arrays.

When they were all done I twisted the 4 red wires together and the 4 wires after the resistors together. This is all temporary as I intend to solder these connections to make sure they are solid, but it was late and I didn't have enough time last night when I made this.



Once I was done I connected a 9v battery to one of the 9v connectors. (try saying that 5 times fast, huh?) Then for the sake of simplicity I touched the positive to the positive red wires, and the negative to the negative connection after the resistors and viola! There was light! I also tested a switch by placing it in between the positive lead and the red wires (it worked charmingly). It was very nice and bright, so I held the finished circuit board into the end of the main barrel PVC pipe and it was quite fantastic. The effect was very lit up blue-white internals in the barrel, so anyone looking towards it would see the light spilling around inside, and to my delight, it created a very focused perfect blue-white projection like a giant flashlight at the wall even with the room lights on. With the room lights shut off it was even more marvelous. My only advice is not to look down the barrel because it was actually blindingly bright in there. In the finished product the inside of the barrel will be painted a highly reflective chrome color, so hopefully the light will be even better then.

Well that's it for now. Like I said, more posts soon, so check back. And wish me luck in the rest of the build. I will be taking as many pictures as possible and some video when its finished so you can see it in action. Thanks for reading.

Wanted to drop a quick note about a site I really love. GameTrailers.com houses tons and tons of media on Video Games. From trailers to gameplay footage to exclusive interviews with developers and one of my favorites, retrospective series on older games, GameTrailers is a one stop shop for all things in the gaming world.
Something I just recently discovered however, is that its possible as a member to earn points just by using the site, that you can use to purchase games, systems, swag and all sorts of great stuff. You earn the most points by watching videos, but literally everything you do on the site earns points, such as commenting on videos, writing blog posts, or using the forums.
Check it out. Below is a link to the membership signup form, membership is of course free, and as far as I can tell, there's no strings attached. Enjoy!
GameTrailers.com