It seems that I've become a bit lax with the blog. Plenty's happened over the past week and a half, though I honestly haven't had the motivation to write any entries lately.
I finished Halo 2 a bit over a week ago. Obviously, Halo 2 is a sequel - and that dismayed me somewhat at first. There have been many attempted game series that couldn't survive a sequel, let alone two or three, notable exceptions including the classics (Mario, Zelda, StarFox, and so forth). Halo 2, impressively, managed to get things right in this regard.
One of the first things you'll notice has been changed in Halo 2 is the environment: the setting, the way objects are interacted with, and so forth. While Halo 1 was fought exclusively on Halo itself, Halo 2's settings range from Earth to Halo to Covenant capital ships and High Charity, something I'll get to in a minute. Bungie brought back the Covenant speeder/gunner, which was present in early Halo alphas for the Mac but disappeared upon the port to the Xbox. A number of new weapons have been introduced: on the human side, the Battle Rifle (a cross between the original Assault Rifle and the pistol) and SMG; on the Covenant side, the Carbine, Beam Rifle (a laser-driven sniper rifle), and Brute Shot (a grenade launcher). Certain weapons can be dual-wielded, that is, one in each hand, at the expense of being able to throw grenades and melee enemies. Vehicle performance has been improved: it's now possible to pilot a Wraith, while the Ghost and Banshee have been given afterburners.
The social aspects of the game have been dramatically overhauled. In Halo 1, the only real social implication was that between the Chief and Cortana. In Halo 2, the Covenant has annexed a number of new races, and an entire half of the game is based on the unrest between the tenured Elites and novice yet mighty Brutes within the Covenant. We learn that the Covenant are an entire theocracy led by a group of prophets, rather than the militarily-organized interspecies union that it seemed in Halo 1. Character dialog has been extended from time-scripted utterances to full-on reactions: if you stare at a friendly target, for example, he may say something along the lines of, "Yeah. It's me. Here. Alive. Okay?" Covenant phrases have now been translated from Halo 1's gibberish (explained as "better translation software"), in favor of slightly more humorous versions from Grunts: "Oh shit, he's gonna kill us all! Run!" I especially enjoyed how well Bungie pulled off the concept of brotherhood among the Elites.
Architecture hasn't changed much from Halo 1, which is something that I'm thankful for - Halo 1's style was amazing even back when I first watched the QuickTime trailer under Windows 3.1 in all its choppy Cinepak-compressed glory (go figure, it was 2000). Halo 2's graphics are fairly high-end for a console like the Xbox, which admittedly exhibits a deal of rendering difficulty with the game. Physics additions are quite welcome as well - things actually fly properly now when exploding. Overall, a pretty darned good improvement over Halo 1. Unfortunately, as of yet I haven't had a chance to test out the multiplayer functionality, and most likely won't at any point between now and June, when I have to return the Xbox. Oh well.
In other news, my Motorola router now runs DD-WRT, a cool Linux distro that runs on Broadcom-based routers. Its interface is vastly improved when compared with Motorola's firmware, which provided little organized control over the features of the box. It introduces something that I miss from the good old days of my Lucent RG-1000: full readouts of wireless performance, including signal strength, noise indexes, and SNR. There are options to overclock the CPU (though I can't see what good this would do on a router) and boost the output power of the internal transmitter to the full 250mW allowed under the 802.11 standard (for reference, it runs at 28mW under the factory settings). It's also possible to run Samba Server on DD-WRT, which I may try a bit later. Among the strange things I've configured the router to do, it Wake-on-LANs my desktop shortly before I start using it every day.
I finally got around to installing FreeNAS on one of my P3s. It provides everything from disk encryption to Samba services to Web-based management and live performance-tracking graphs in SVG. To simplify things a bit, I installed another copy of FreeBSD alongside FreeNAS for workstation use, on which I proceeded to install X11, XFCE, and the like, which seems to have been arguably easier than dual-booting BSD and Linux. Both are now in good working condition. I'm still looking for something to do with my third, diskless P3, which at this point seems impossible.