Monday Meanderings and Melee

I don't feel like writing to much today so if anyone else is really feeling like they have something to say please feel free to post something. Pablito, I'm looking in your direction for a first impression of COD4.

Bungie just posted their longest weekly update ever in which they talk about how they are changing Melee so it doesn't seem to randomly choose the winner. Because it is so long I will briefly paraphrase what they said they did.

Before, in Halo 2 it gave the winner of a Melee contest to whomever hit first. This of course gave the host advantage because the host would always see their melee first, or whoever had the fastest connection would also tend to win more melee contests. In Halo 3 they changed it. Most people play with a ping of 80-100. If the ping is 100 that could be a difference of 3 frames from one xbox to another. So when the computer would see a melee it would wait about 3 frames to see if another melee occurred within that time frame. If it did, whoever had more health would win the fight even if the loser punched first.

Now the when a melee contest occurs, and both players are close to the same health (including shields), no special protection is given to either player. This means the outcome of a close melee contest can be death for both participants. If one player has clearly more health than the other they will be more likely to win in a close melee contest, but if it's close it will go to hit first. If I did a bad job of explaining that (and I probably did) check out the Bungie post on the topic.

Be careful playing Call of Duty, a marine is now missing after playing the game. Authorities are saying that the game may have sparked bad memories from his time in the Middle East.

These guys made a full stage for Rock Band where each band member gets their own screen and they modified a full drum set.