The Story Never Told

So, I did promise you all the story of my game of Shadowrun with Knuckles Dawson. Through a post on Joystiq, he asked for people to add has alt-account to their friends list to get some Shadowrun Demo action on. I gotta say that it was some of the best gaming I've ever played. Knuckles ran the whole shebang very well, making sure that everyone was having a good time. I dunno about the opposing team, but most of the time I was on with KD and he was a polarising force. He had people buying the proper skills for the race they chose, and swapping money around so that there was someone who had the ability to over-power the enemy a round or two before they got up to the same level across the team.

Now, you might think that this is an unbalancing act on his part, but when you think about it, it's right. Both teams can do it, nothing is stopping them. By taking these players with these power spikes, the game changes again into something else.

It's just a shame that I don't have enough shiny things to buy it out-right :(

WAR! (and knuckles dawson)

So, EVE. We're at war. I forget who the guys are, and I'm running Second Life right now so I can't go check, but they're bigger, older and stonger than us, and as you can see, we're winning. As of posting, our efficiency ratio is up there, at 96.34%.

Let me walk you through the combat for the evening.

So, we start off with our breifing at 10 minutes past the hour. Equium Duo gets a few standing orders out, and I'm happily assigned to speed-tackler. So, we're all in space, and we're not sure if we can kill yet. I check the time, 29 minutes past the hour, so I bark into my mic 'It's 29 past, fighting is open, pew pew is on!' The hunt begins.

Me and my fellow tacklers get orders to hunt. I forget what my order was, but we were soon hurried to Pator for immediate combat. In I go, and I charge out to my target, who's at the gate. Orbit is set at 3000, all tackle modules are on, and my guns are blazing. Between Avada Kadavra and myself, he soon asplodes.

By this time, Slapdash, Ewaffles, Equium Duo, Rasta420 and our two newest newbs, Cassius Grey and Blunt DaWn have wapred in and have engaged a nearby hostile Hurricane. With all that Pew Pew focused on one soul, he soon disappears in a shining light honouring our sheer amount of win. Avada Kadavra has lost his Vexor, in the fury, but apparently, he'll be reimbursed, which is nice.

At this point, I've taken some damage to armour, so I warp out to be safe. Just as I start my warp, another hurricane appears, and the people left at the gate take it out by the time I return. Aw :(

I don't know when this kill occured, though.

I suppose that it was after that kill that Equium started asking for volunteers to scout out to their base in Rens. I volunteer, and Morgoth is assigned to come with me to compliment my tackle. The only problem is, at this point, Morgoth jumps into Onga, a 1.0 security system, and therefore he's banned from until his sec status creeps up.

So, he's asploded, and Equium orders the whole fleet to head that way if they can, and to help pick up Morgoth's stuff as they pass. I pick up most of it and take what I don't off of my corpies. Some fool passing by took the opportunity to take some of Morgoth's stuff, so I Pew Pew the gimp out of the sky.

So, anyway, that's all done, stored, diamond, so I ask for my orders, and I'm ordered to Eystur for battle. I didn't make it in time.

So, now, we're chasing these guys down. The surrender fee has been set and we know they know our demands. Their CEO is refusing, even going so far as to belittle his own employees. We're on the hunt again, heading to Rens, fanning out to check the branches. Equium finds them just off of Onga, and we camp them. While doing so, they send in a scout, who I chase from planet to planet without luck nor lock, and he leaves, no doubt relaying information to their CEO sat in his hidey hole.

People are logging off. Me, Equium and Ewaffles are the only pilots left online, and we start heading home, when Ewaffles, our very own Hamster on Speed, jabbers out his usual 'OMG HE'S HERE GUYS' and we're slowly gleaning information from his ramblings, and eventually we track down our target. In the mean time, Ewaffles is bravely tackling whoever it is while we head over to him. Sadly, Ewaffles webs the gate and the police Pew Pew him... We still don't know if he survived with his ship intact.

Fight is over, we win again.

...and so we all log for the night. Fight is over, we've made our statement.

Oh, and Knuckles Dawson seems to have been googling his ego (or has seen a backlink) and has left a comment. He seems sad that I've not told the story yet. It's good, and I remember some of it, so I'll tell it tomorrow, I promise.

FPS Nausea

So, Marathon Durandal was released yesterday. I wasn't gonna buy it, but even just the trial of the first level was enough to convince me, gameplay wise, that it was a good purchase. So far, it has met all my favourite criteria, such as menus that just sodding work and decent net-code.

There are two downsides, though. Number one, the controls are a bit 'OMGIAIMLIKEASKITTISHHAMSTERONSPEED' and more importantly, the FOV is tight enough to give me that FPS Nausea feeling I thought I got over back when Quake was big.

I mean, seriously, they claim that "No one [...] reported any motion sickness issues" despite "hundreds of hours of playtime" but I really can't believe this. I consider myself a veteran gamer, being that I've been playing games since as far back as rubber keys, so stuff like this should not and usually is not a problem for me (except for Halo 2 on my VGA monitor) unless the game is at fault, so I'm here to tell you, Marathon:Durandal is faulty.

Despite that, it's a good game. You can choose to run-and-gun or you can read the annoyingly hard-to-concentrate-on terminals, catching the story as you go by... even if it is hard to realise you're meant to read the terminals because there's no obvious way to know... Alas, it's a retro and there's no way the hard-core crowd would keep quiet over a few simple improvments, either from a gameplay or health point of view, so I guess we're stuck with it...

Oh well :/

EVE-Online. I has it.

So, you may have noticed I've not posted in a while. Let me explain why.

I rediscovered EVE-Online. Space MMO, good for casual gamers because of it's skill structure, good for the hard-core because of everything else. For the win, eh?

Since I rediscovered it, I have made a new character on a second account, I've joined a corporation, set up a killboard and become a director with an itty-bitty share in the company. That reminds me, I need to buy more shares.

Oddest thing, though. The character I made, BadSushi has more SP than my old char, GleebTorin did at that age, though I think it's because of the more focused learning experiences. I may actually delete GleebTorin if it carries on like this... mostly because I'm using the alt-account on GleebTorin for my miner and industrial character.

So, anyway, if you want to sign up and fly with me, or whatever, please contact 'BadSushi' in game.

A Pet Peeve : Menus

Menus. All games have them, in one form or another. Be it the 'gone-in-a-flash-because-I-have-them-memorised' Final Fantasy battle menus, the 'menus-on-screens-in-an-environment' of Forsaken or the Japanese efficiency of the track listings on pretty much any Dance Dance Revolution/Dancing Stage machine, every game has a set of options which must be chosen from.

Now, the only problem with menus is that not very many software houses actually put any effort into their menus. Sure the above exmaples of Forsaken and DDR/DS are pretty and get the job done and do it well, but for every pretty menu, you have something truly horrific, so jarring to me that I would often just not buy the game having played the demo.

Lets take Mad Tracks, for example. The menus, and in fact the whole UI in general, has no real identifiable theming to them. You get bright colours that attract/distract the eye and absolutly sod-all in the way of animations and transitions.

Now, don't get me wrong, animations in menus can be terribly distracting, and can serve only to annoy, but by the same token, static backgrounds are not fun to stare at and do not engage the player at all. Take a look at Boom Boom Rocket, for example. It's menus are animated suitably, with fireworks exploding in a dimmed background. It's visible, but not distracting... altogether pleasant. The menu style is also tied in to the in-game UI style, too, meaning that the transition from menu to game is not jarring at all.

Please, developers, look at these examples and learn... I want to give you my money, I do, but you have to make something worth paying for...

Something Shiny

Remember how I bought a new game and tried to rediscover an old one?

Well, I must have gotten distracted by something shiny. Please, contact me on XBox Live and inspire me to get back into my games :o

Later, I'll post about my first game with Knuckles Dawson.

The Most Annoying Game I Own

I think I have to say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Ridge Racer 6 is 'The Most Annoying Game I Own' I've had it since the dawn of time... or at least a long while... and I've only just unlocked a THIRD achievement. That's just not freaking on...

Of course, it's because I've driven 500 miles.

I've just looked at the list of achievements and so I reckon I could get a few points.

New Game : Command & Conquer 3

I did a very naughty thing. Having less than no money, I went out and bought a game. More specifically, Command & Conquer 3. In short, the controls are well thought out, with most actions being held on the A button. With the removal of a cursor, replacing it with a cross hair constantly in the center of the screen, things 'make more sense', with only a small problem in selecting units that are very near each other. I've only had it a few days, and I've already defeated the GDI campaign, now I'm working on the NOD campaign. After that, I get to play as the Scrinn. I've already played some scrinn in skirmish mode, but... erm... they're confusing ¬_¬

More on this when I get back from my next trance.

XBLA:Mad Tracks

Having just finished the Mad Tracks free trial, I have very mixed feeling about it. First of all, if you DO play it, save yourself the heartache. DO NOT PLAY ON EASY. It really is easy, with your CPU rivals being forced to go slower than you. You have nothing to aim at :P

In the mean time, lets take a look at the graphics. Starting with the menu, there is nothing impressive. Okay, so there IS a definite sense of theme going on with the whole thing. The only problem is that the only animation you'll find on the menus is that seemingly customary 'Press A to Start' screen, where the text will pulse a little. Other than that, it's just plain cuts from one screen to another, the old content disappearing, only to be replaced by the new content. This may have been acceptable back in the Olde Days but I do like to think that we have moved on since then.

In-game, the graphics are passable. The cubemaps on the cars are, unfortunately, quite static, unlike the shiny reflective cubemaps of PGR3. "This is hardly PGR3 now, is it Gleeb?" I hear you say, and you're right, it ain't, but rendering out cubemaps is an old technique, many years old, in fact. With the XBox360, we can now afford to render a cube map for each car, paint it on there and get nice shiny cars. Add to this the use of ambient shadow rendering for the cars, despite the fact that the restaurant level HAS no proper ambient light, and you're heading to some bad times. The less said about the static lightmaps, the better.

However, trying to be objective about the graphics style, you must also look at the art side of the coin, and I must say that other than some of the model being pretty low-poly, even for XBLA, and the textures being low quality (which can be forgiven, seeing as the plethora of content was squeezed into 50mb) the are style is solid and very much so.

Onto the gameplay. I did at first think that the physics and therefore the whole gameplay system was broken, but as soon as I put the car AI onto 'Hard', the enemies became a half-decent callenge and I was having great fun with this. I can see this game being very fun in multiplayer... of only I had someone to play it with in this hideous, 4:3 hating split-screen mode, I could tell you.

Unfortunatly, if there is one place that this game really lets me down, it's in sound design. Not a SINGLE sound in the whole game loops properly. NOT A ONE. Not even the music, which fades out and in again at the loop point to 'disguise' this particular failing.

All in all, it's a take-it-or-leave-it game, and I've decided to leave it. Back to Boom Boom Rocket.

BackCompat makes me cry :(

So, as you can see from my earlier post, I've had reason to play a lot of BackCompat on my 360 recently. Gotta love it, ya know... but the only problem is, if you're playing an old XBox game and you're using a VGA cable, it will always assume that you're using a widescreen display, never mind the fact that the resolution you're using is a 4:3 resolution. So, games like Halo 2 get all squished. I was playing with Masterazzer last night, and I kept getting pounded, because my aim was all off because of the squishy. Add to the the fact that some of the levels are poorly lit and I had a shitload of glare to deal with, and you have one very sad Gleeb.

Needless to say, we soon switched to Gears of War, where I got my groove on in the high-contrast world of BLOWING THE SHIT OUT OF THE OTHER TEAM.

It's all fun and games until I rip your eyes out :)

Jade Empire

So, I notice today that my 360 is unhappy with me. It's not really, it's just that the awesome 360voice.com can't detect when I'm playing sweet Classic XBox games like Jade Empire. Not their fault, I know, but it really can mess things up, like the streak I was building. Ho-hum.

So, anyway, yeah, Jade Empire. I bought it way back when it was first released and never invested more than an hour or so into it, mostly because the story can take a while to go any where. If there's on thing I dislike more than unimaginably long cut-scenes, it's dialogue that doesn't flow because of gaps in silly places, like between every sentence. All these gaps add up and means the plot explanation takes longer. One benefit of the dialogues in Jade Empire, however, is that is actual dialogue. Things are being said to you that you have to reply and react to, altering the course of the conversation and the game. It's just such a shame that it doesn't effect it very much. It's almost Fable-like in it's linearity.

But, it looks good and it's eaten TWO days of game time, time I should be spending on other things. Oh well :)

First Post!

I claim First Post! Admittedly, it's not HARD to claim first post, considering that I'm the only person capable of posting here. Them's the breaks, I guess ;) So, just so that you're clear on what I'll be posting here and so that I'm clear (because I'm very good at confusing myself) I will go ahead and tell you the kinds of things I will and will not be posting about.

I will be posting about:

• Adventures on my XBox360
• Things that happen in Second Life
• Interesting news I hear elsewhere

What I won't be posting about:

• My Sex Life
• How depressed I am
• How much I Love Bees

So, Boys and Girls, have fun reading, and don't blame me when you get intensely bored, kay?