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Tom McDonald has been covering games for countless magazines and
newspapers for 11 years. He lives in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.
All This and
Headcrabs Too
BY THOMAS L. McDONALD
GAME THEORY
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F
or a little while there, it seemed like Vivendi
Universal would take Valve Software’s Half-
Life 2 ball and spike it at the 10 yard line out of
pure pique. The reasons are clear: Steam, Valve’s
online service, has pulled off the first effective
digital-only delivery of a game. This rocks the
retailer/publisher/creator relationship to its core,
and jeopardizes all those millions of dollars
publishers make via boxed copies and the retail
channel. Given Valve’s overwhelming success in
selling pre-orders for Half-Life 2 over Steam, it
was no surprise that Vivendi pitched a hissy fit
and refused to let Valve “unlock” the downloaded
version of the game a few days early, leaving fans
vibrating with anticipation at a frequency high
enough to crack glass.
Masterpiece is not too strong a word for Half-
Life 2. There are precious few works of certifi able
genius and perfection in the history of gaming.
This is one of them. It’s been six years since the
original Half-Life, and as year after year ticked by,
I began to doubt Valve could pull it off. The long
development cycle and years of silence left me
deeply cynical that the Valve team was wasting
time playing networked Sailor Moon Video Strip
Poker (now with Chibi-Moon!). Clearly, this
sentiment was wrong in a truly monumental way.
As they say about over-budget movies, “It’s
all up there on the screen.” In this case, those
six years seem etched onto every frame. We
explore Half-Life 2 in detail on page 44, so I won’t
belabor the details, but what strikes me most is
how this experience is the anti-Doom 3. Half-Life
2‘s detailed and sublimely involving world and
effortless forward thrust serve as a megaphone for
Doom 3’s many defi ciencies. Its crude, funhouse
tricks look even more tatty and uninspired now.
From the first 10 seconds, HL2 creates a sense
of dread, dislocation, and disorientation, leaving
the gamer feeling helpless as he stumbles,
unarmed, through a new, confusing, and hostile
environment. As the game opens, information
is fragmentary, but it soon becomes clear that
everyone views you (Gordon Freeman) as a
messiah figure, and when The Suit is finally
unveiled, it takes on a quasi-religious dimension:
vestments for the avenging savior.
It’s a moment that will long live as a game-geek
barometer: The hardcore among us admitting (if
only to ourselves) that at the moment we saw the
hazard suit and the music from the original Half-
Life kicked in, we got goose bumps.
MAXIMUMPC JANAURY 200518
I
t sounds impossible, but Epson
has developed a method of print-
ing multilayer circuit boards using
inkjet technology. The fledgling circuit
board shown here is a mere 1mm
thick yet boasts an impressive 20-layer
design. To put this into perspective,
the latest Intel 925X-based mother-
board uses a six-layer design.
Traditionally, circuit boards are
created using a process called photo-
lithography, which is similar to con-
ventional lithography and involves
the transference of a pattern from a
photomask to the surface of a silicon
wafer. However, this process is becom-
ing increasingly difficult as circuits
become more complex, thus imped-
ing the process of creating through-
holes to connect the various circuit
layers on a board.
Epson’s new technology simply
paints the layers on top of each other,
much like laying down a row of red
ink and then blue ink to create the
color green. Instead of using pig-
ment-based ink though, Epson uses
a conductive ink that contains silver
micro-particles just several nanometers
in diameter. The circuits are completed
with a newly-developed insulator ink.
Before you begin salivating over
a 1mm thick motherboard for your
next PC, keep in mind that the tech-
nology is still a few years away. Upon
its release, Epson’s new use for inkjet
printing will most likely be used in
portable devices and other lightweight
computing applications. It was unclear
at press time exactly how many inkjet
cartridges you might need to print up
your own mobo.
Espon uses inkjet technology
to generate advanced
multilayer circuit boards
Print Me Up a Mobo
Believe it or not, this circuit board
was made with an inkjet printer,
and has more than three times as
many layers as the latest Pentium 4
mobo from Intel.
N
ow that Google is officially both
a noun and a verb, Microsoft
has decided to get into the
search engine game with the recently
announced MSN Search. The beta ver-
sion of the engine became available in
November at
http://beta.search.msn.com/.
Behind the scenes, Microsoft’s new
toy behaves a lot like Google, crawling
the Internet and indexing web pages.
It then creates a database of all the sites
it has scanned, allowing the service
to deliver accurate results in a split-
second. At launch, Microsoft stated
its engine could produce results from
more than 5 billion indexed pages. Not
surprisingly, on the day of the launch,
Google upped its indexed page count
from 4 billion pages to more than 8
billion in an effort to throw cold water
on Microsoft’s rollout.
To its credit, MSN Search currently
offers one feature Google lacks—the
ability to perform a search for results
that are near your location, which is
helpful for local businesses, like res-
taurants and escort services. At press
time it was not clear when beta test-
ing would be complete, nor
was it clear how and when
Microsoft intends to bundle
the search engine into the
next version of Windows.
“We’ll Take Search for 1 Trillion Dollars”
Microsoft unveils a brand-new search engine
Microsoft’s search
engine offers two
features Google lacks—
local searches and a
preponderance of blue.