Infamous 2 and SCC

In the last 2 days I complete both inFamous 2 (on PS3) and Splinter Cell: Conviction (on PC). For inFamous, I played through the game continuing the evil story from the first game. I had a really good time with it and found the story interesting. In particular, the ending was pretty surprising to me. I can't wait to play through the good story line. I would recommend this game to anyone that has played the first one (which is free to download from the welcome back program).

As far as Splinter Cell: Conviction goes, I wouldn't really recommend the game to anyone. The story is pretty forgettable to me (having not played any of the other titles in the series) and the gameplay was only sort of good. I initially tried playing the game with a controller, but the controls made the game unnecessarily hard. Once I switched to mouse and keyboard, the difficulty went from impossible to easy. The random bad guys walk around swearing all the time, so if that is something you don't want to deal with, then there is no reason to play this game.

Console game stores

With the recent "Welcome Back" program that Sony is running I've had a chance to use the PSN store. The store is somewhat useable, but it has a lot of areas in which it could be improved. I think perhaps the biggest improvement would be a web browser based store similar to the Steam store. I would be much more likely to buy stuff if I could have a tab open on my web browser all the time showing me what the current deals are, and letting me manage and view wishlists directly from the web. I think then Sony (and Nintendo could do this too) could afford to have many more sales on games, which would lead me to buy even more. Basically, I want my playstation to have access to the excellent Steam store user experience.

Making a Minecraft Texture Pack on a Mac

I'm working on a texture pack for Minecraft. It's not going to be anything super amazing, but it will be made by me and using my Mac laptop. I've had a few issues that I was able to solve, so I figured I should spread the knowledge by making a post here.

First of all, it's helpful to have the basic images to start from (for image sizing if nothing else). On a mac, those are located in /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/minecraft/bin in the file called "minecraft.jar". To get at them you need to extract the contents of the minecraft.jar file. Probably the easiest way is to copy it and rename it minecraft.zip (click use zip in the popup) and then double click it. This should give you a folder called "minecraft" that has pretty much all of the data you'll be interested in using for your texture pack and a lot of other files you won't care about.

The method I use is to create a new working folder for my texture pack and only copy the images I'm interested in changing as I work on the pack. The first most interesting file is "terrain.png" and it has pretty much all of the terrain images that are used in rendering the world. Others of the textures, such as the skins for creatures and the player, are found in inside directories and should be placed in directories with the same names in your texture pack.

The final step for your texture pack to work is to compress it. On the mac, this is most easily done by selecting all the files inside your texture pack directory (the one with terrain.png at the top level) and right clicking then selecting "compress" from the dropdown menu. This will create a file called, "Archive.zip" that you should rename to be whatever you want your texture pack to be called.

I hope this post will be useful for other people trying to make texture packs on their Macs. I'll share some of the image editing software that I've found useful once I get a little more time to try it all out.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

I beat AC:B recently. The game was pretty fun. The plot was kinda silly. The multiplayer is quite enjoyable. Blog post done.