One of the main reasons I haven't published many post on my blog lately is I've been writing articles for one of my projects: batidoradigital.com. It's an ezine I created with some friends years ago that, given I always enjoyed it, I decided to relaunch recently after a period of inactivity.

A group of journalists, bloggers, professionals and creators want to express their firm opposition to the inclusion in a Draft Law of some changes to Spanish laws restricting the freedoms of expression, information and access to culture on the Internet. They also declare that:

Given the original "Ghost Recon" is one of my favorite PC games, I was really interested in this "Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter" (GRAW from now on). I bought it some time ago and soon discovered it had some flaws that could ruin the gaming experience for me. I started playing the game two times and both times stopped only minutes after, annoyed by the terrible AI of your teammates and the lack of a save option among other things. The problem is since I first saw this game I had the feeling it could be interesting so, recently, I decided to give it another chance and once you assume it's a game far from perfect, and has some annoying things you have to put up with in order to enjoy it, GRAW becomes a pretty decent tactical military FPS.

The fact that you can give orders to just three soldiers and you only control the leader of the team, the fourth member of the squad, results in a game too simple compared to the original, offering a very limited set of tactical options. This is a design decision which may be a problem only for those who played the original or want more depth, but there are some things that are clearly badly implemented and/or make the game lose points, being the main one the terrible AI of your teammates.

I enjoyed a lot playing Wolfenstein 3D and, even more, Doom years ago (I even enjoy playing them nowadays). Since then, the First Person Shooter genre is probably my favorite, and I've always wanted to learn how John Carmack, John Romero and the guys from iD Software made those great games, and make one myself.

Recently, I've started programming a game based on one of the techniques used on those early days, called ray casting. I'll include some videos of my progress here.

Even though Terminator Salvation is the official game of the film, it doesn't recreate the film's plot, with the story of the game taking place a few years before of what is shown in the movie. This is something good, giving the developers more liberty to create a different story but being able to use all the enemies and gadgets of the film.

The overall experience playing Terminator Salvation is quite good, I read some bad reviews before playing it saying it was short, boring and unfinished... It's short, that's true, but it never bored me and, although, like many other games, it could have been better if more time had been dedicated to polish it up, it's a really entertaining third person shooter with very well crafted graphics, the apocalyptic sceneries in particular, that suit the game perfectly.

I especially liked the cover system. Most of the gameplay is based on taking cover through the scenery while shooting your enemies and moving quickly from cover to cover so you can flank them, which is very easy to do with the control system implemented for this game.