2020 - Sleepypete's Pillow

Impending New Year

December 30, 2020

10:15 pm

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Hello everyone,

The offline time went to plan, was a good little bubbly meeting up north with the mum over Christmas. We were both in Tier 3 areas at that point so it was a case of a support bubble meet up, which is still ok at the moment. Well, for a couple of hours time and then we’re into Tier 4 due to this new more infectious variant of Bug.

Thumbnail time !

I think that’s enough about what’s happening in the world for now, although I will mention that I’m good for food again for a little while. My plan all along with this Thing has been to wait it out, reducing my chances of getting it by not being around people much. That might be leading to agoraphobic tendencies though, so I’ll need to sort that when the time comes.

It was curious coming back on Saturday. Storm Bella was predicted and I could see the signs of it on my trip back. There were warnings from quite far away saying that the older Severn Bridge (it’s the M48) was closed and the I think the newer bridge was closed overnight. I follow the traffic advice people on Twitter and they give a decent amount of info for when there were issues on the roads.

Like … the road I would normally come back on but avoided on Saturday ! I have a good option to come off the motorway early and take a more chilled out route back. The car was starting to feel a bit lively in building wind, so I took that more chilled out route instead of a section that’s very exposed to the wind. And … apparently a lorry was blown over overnight. That’s the real worry. Cars will be fine but you definitely feel the effects when you’re going past lorries and going into and out of their wind shadow.

The farm shop service station was almost deserted too, so I’m on the sherbets again :-D.

Been on the travels in the internet spaceship as well, steadily making my way around the outside of the galaxy. There’s still lots of distance to go. At my next main waypoint, I’ll be almost 66,000 light years through a 280,000 light year trip. With lots of pretty sights along the way …

And new habitable worlds which have the “Discovered by …” with my name on them now.

Still on leave at the moment, hence the internet spaceships … I’ve also been checking out Prey :

This one is a super atmospheric game, another one that leads you into what’s going on in stages. You wake in your apartment, take a helicopter to the Transtar offices for behavioural testing … and then bad things start happening. Turns out there’s a bit more going on than was apparent. I’m only 2 hours in at the moment. Looks great, the lighting there is amazing and the decor definitely goes for art deco gaudy.

There’s also the arrival of Per Aspera :

If you look closely enough there is a Beagle

This one puts you in the position of an AI, tasked to set up an initial colony on Mars and then to make the planet habitable. It’s a curious game. It has massive scope and takes on a number of the terraforming ideas from the slow and prudent approaches (greenhouse gases, melting of poles etc) to the quick rash approaches of bombarding the planet with asteroids and using nukes to speed up the process.

Yep. That’s a mine. A couple of early attempts were reset due to not knowing what was going on, or a lack of critical resources. This is one of those that takes a lot of time for things to happen, which can be good for those poorly arms of mine.

I’m not sure if it’ll be one that holds my attention for that long but it’s been good so far. (I may be heading back into Mars Horizon, that game is highly addictive !)

I managed to finish off reading Absolution Gap too … The middle book was great ! This end book was a bit meh. It felt like 500 pages of set up and no clear idea of where they were going with it, on the end book of a trilogy. The next Alastair Reynolds I’ll read will be Shadow Captain (cheers CK !), which I’m hoping will be an excellent follow up to Revenger. Not yet though, the next book is Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells, the third book of the Murderbot Diaries and I highly enjoyed the first chapter.

On buying stuff … Steam sales are on at the moment and I may have had a few acquisitions … I enjoyed watching videos of XCom Chimera Squad earlier in the year, it’s a nice evolution of the usual XCom tactical action thing. I’ve also acquired the lovely pre WW2 Over The Alps. It’s a fun spy narrative adventure game. I heavily enjoyed watching the Fuzzy streams of this earlier in the year.

And I really must add a list of links in.

I also picked up Core Defense and the Hexcells series. More games may appear … I’ve also been indulging in other sales and I’ve enjoyed listening to Lisa Hannigan’s At Swim and Katie Melua’s Album No 8. More took more time to arrive, including more from Katie Melua, one from Mike Oldfield and the latest Ellie Goulding.

I must do a music post at some point.

I better leg it now though … I’m seeing more reports appearing of people I either know personally or know through forums/discord saying that they’ve tested positive. I was pretty careful with my bubble trip with self isolating, outside of the AA man thing and picking up a few things afterwards. But this new variant is pretty scary with how the numbers are exploding.

Hope everyone comes out ok.

Be well, stay safe everyone.

Day 24 Deus Ex Vader Jumper

by Sleepypete

December 24, 2020

1:41 pm

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Hello everyone,

Day 24 and the end of this series ! It’s been a fun series to do, looking back at some old games and gaming history. And the models have been pretty good this year too.

What’s behind the door today ?

There we go, Darth and his favourite jumper. It’s been a good advent calendar this time around, some old classics, some more unusual like the Lucrehulk battleship and the A Wing, a new favourite with the Razor Crest (not watched Mandalorian) and a few really cunning ones like the Tauntaun and the shield generator.

What’s the game there in the background ? I actually bought that one in 2012 not long after my previous machine, Pumpkin, was built. Best Buy were still operating in the UK then before being undercut out of business. It’s Deus Ex Human Revolution and one of the best shooty games in my collection.

You start off as the security chief of Sarif Industries and before you know it, the company’s been invaded, the top scientists have been murdered (or have they) and you’ve been left legless and armless and near death, only to be rebuilt into a half man, half machine version of your former self.

Fast forward six months and you’ve been recalled to deal with another invasion at an outlying facility and you launch off into investigating an increasing conspiracy. Along the way, you help out with the inevitable side quests and bounce between various locations.

And lots of flavour stuff on the tellies and news letters is left around the place too, with radios littered around the levels that I must listen to at some point. There’s lots of attention to detail here …

One thing though about these games is that while it’s possible to go through, all guns blazing, the game isn’t really supposed to be played like that. Bullets from the enemies hurt a lot … So the idea is to steadily go through the levels, eliminating enemies undetected (and you get a bonus for just making them unconscious too).

Deus Ex Human Revolution is a game I’ll keep going back to occasionally, it was good to revisit it again in the last few months.

The follow up game, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, takes place a couple of years after this one. There’s a prologue that sees you being sent in to a desert hotel to extract an operative that’s in trouble.

The world situation is dealing with fallout from the end of the first game, where people with augmentations are subjected to a form of digital apartheid. They’re forced to relocate to segregated living areas amidst further separation and discrimination.

They definitely upped the ante with the graphics, one thing to look out for being the increase in detail on display. That’s having the freedom to make levels in daylight, for all that lovely light, shadow and reflection detail. It’s also being able to add in curves to the levels. Prague of DXMD feels a lot more like a proper city than the Detroit and Hengsha levels in DXHR.

That came with a cost though, it took me 4 years to go back to this one because I bounced off the game thoroughly when it came out due to crash bugs. (The lighting didn’t like the AMD card I had at the time)

It looked great in the night time too.

I enjoyed this one a lot when I played it back in May and going back to DXHR again was partly so I could remind myself of what had gone before before tackling another run at the newer game. Hopefully we see a third game in the series, the first two Adam Jensen games were pretty good and I’m intrigued to see where they would have taken the story.

There have been other Deus Ex games over the years, DXHR was not the first … I’ve talked about these before but here’s the rough timeline :

2027 Deus Ex : The Fall. We don’t talk about this game.

2027 later – Deus Ex Human Revolution : Adam Jensen’s first game.

2029 Deux Ex Mankind Divided : Adam Jensen’s second game.

2052 Deus Ex : the original game, released in June 2000.

2072 Deus Ex Invisible War, which is another game we don’t really talk about.

I should probably have more of a look at the timeline sometime. It’s time to sign off for at least a few days though. Doing a post a day can be pretty wearing, although it’s been great talking about the old games again. In the meantime,

Have a great christmas everyone, such as it is in these weird times.

Stay safe, be well.

Day 23 ! Home of Darth

by Sleepypete

December 23, 2020

9:44 pm

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Hello everyone,

Day 23, what’s behind the door ?

Two models today, the frontage of Darth Vader’s palace place and a tiny little TIE craft.

And a return of the Master of Orion 2 cd … I meant to talk about these games a while ago but got sidetracked. There are a few games to talk about today, first a bit of fantasy.

This one is Master of Magic, an all time legendary classic from the 90s again. This one was a real headache to run … As well as needing 4MB of system memory to give you enough Expanded Memory, it needed a huge amount of Conventional Memory too. It’s really good that those terms have been consigned to the dustbin of history and we don’t need to think of them any more !

So, what’s the game ? Think Civilisation. But add in magic and a fantasy world. You play one of 5 wizards, aiming to be the first to learn and cast the Spell of Mastery, at which point all of your competitors would be banished from the realm and you’d win. You could also banish them the traditional way by storming their castles. Instead of different civilisations with minor differences, you could play as Humans, Elves, Orcs, Halflings, Dark Elves and so on. The differences were much more pronounced, with certain races having buildings locked away from them. There were also 5 colours of magic too, which was probably inspired by the Magic the Gathering card game.

No one refuses the Girl Scout Cookie Squad

It also had a nice little tactical battle sequence, which was another major plus that set it aside from the Civilisation games. It’s a wonder that there has never been a Master of Magic 2, because this game had absolute legend status in its day.

Next up is Master of Orion (Moo).

This one was a space strategy and one of the earliest of its genre on PC to break through. You colonised stars, created fleets and attempted to dominate the galaxy again. One curious wrinkle was that the tech tree was randomised for each game, with some techs being locked out. That introduced a certain amount of variation between games. Another classic of its day and the follow up was Master of Orion 2 (Moo2).

I see someone was adopting my favourite colour in these games, the blood red banner. Whereas Moo allowed you to build incredibly massive fleets with up to 32,000 ships in a stack (each capable of firing multiple warhead missiles), Moo2 had a fleet point mechanic. The limit is off to the right there, the 23 ships owned (50 ships supported). Bigger ships needed more fleet points. Moo2 also allowed extra food grown on one planet to be moved by freighter to hungry planets.

Moo had some aspects which were better but Moo2 was the game I was hooked on for a couple of decades until Stellaris came along.

We don’t talk about Master of Orion 3.

There’s a new Master of Orion game out as well, I was too addicted to Stellaris to properly check that one out but … there’s a Steam sale on at the moment …

On Stellaris …

I still go back to Stellaris, although I don’t think it’s quite the game it used to be. Complication has been added, which is ok if the AI is equipped to play that complication. It’s felt like the AI might have been left behind a bit.

That said though, it’s still an incredibly good space strategy game.

I think I need to hit post now though (getting late !).

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Day 22 Stormies ! And shooty games

by Sleepypete

December 22, 2020

7:50 pm

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Hello everyone,

Had a bit of drama yesterday … The plan was to get a couple of things before Xmas. In particular, a card and to top up the fuel tank. Things did not go to the plan.

So, TLDR, my car is a hybrid and has two batteries. When it’s on, it runs off the big traction battery. This isn’t a problem, it holds the capacity for a pretty long time. However, to start up the car, it uses a 12V battery. This can go flat after a while … It’s charged up off the main battery but if you’ve only done under 2000 miles in a year (pandemic things), then the 12V doesn’t get the chance to replenish itself.

And so I couldn’t get into the car last night. It’s a quick 5 minute fix by the AA man to sort it (they arrived within 10 minutes of a call today, I was proper shocked and impressed). Good job AA man. I have a Tool now though that’ll mean I can bootstrap the car on myself if it does it again.

This did, sadly, mean I had to People again tonight. Oh well. The feeling of being wary around other people has increased with the news of the Brexit mutation … But enough of the apocalypse, what’s behind the door ?

Stormtrooper today ! A traditional one too from the original movies.

I was going to talk about some more important entries in gaming history today … The game in the box is Halflife but I’m going to start with a couple of others.

The first Doom game came out in 1993 and kickstarted a revolution in PC gaming. Let’s take a look :

The first game these guys did was Wolfenstein 3d but Doom was the one that took off. One reason was that a third of the game was released as Shareware, so it quickly got copied and passed around on floppy discs. (Yep. No cd’s yet). But the massive other reason was that this game had networked multiplayer, which took multiplayer gaming out of the realm of text based Multi User Dungeons and into immediate first person deathmatches, creating a legend.

Looks crude … but it had enough to keep people happily blasting at each other. So .. Doom, probably one of the most important games in computer gaming history. I played my fair share of it too, when I wasn’t in Master of Magic, Master of Orion or Tie Fighter.

Next up is Dark Forces, a Star Wars game following the adventures of Kyle Katarn. This first game was another first person shooter with an innovation and a sign of things to come (it was the first game needing 8MB of system memory).

Actually two innovations this time. The first was a shield which would recharge but the massive one was being able to look up and down. Doom was restricted purely to shooting flat, although there was up and down in the levels (I think !). Dark Forces was followed by Dark Forces 2 Jedi Knight, which introduced lightsabers and advanced the graphics into the polygon era. (Quake started that).

The next major innovation and the cd in the box was Half Life … This game is another one of the legends.

Half Life saw you appearing at the Black Mesa research facility as a new researcher. They hurry you along to the test chamber, where you push a trolley into the Arcy Sparky thing and then all hell breaks loose and bugs are jumping on to your friends’ heads and eating their brains. One innovation with Half Life was I think smooth transitions between levels with no loading screens. Previously, games like this had been broken up into levels.

Modern games are a bit of a mix here. Some manage to do their thing with no transitions, others keep in the transitions for memory reasons and others are instanced. So World of Warcraft would have a loading screen if you fast travel or if you go from one continent to another, the loading screen is the instance swapping over. Elite Dangerous swaps you between instances while you’re going through hyperspace between systems.

Back to Half Life … this one had a decent story running through it too. As did Half Life 2, which brought us the Source Engine which was then adopted for projects like Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines.

I wonder whether we’ll ever see Half Life 3 ?

What’s my next game in this style ? I finished playing Deus Ex Human Revolution the other day, so I’ll be switching over to something different “soon” … I think the favourites are between Alien Isolation and Prey. Here’s the Alien game :

The look of this game is incredible, as is the atmosphere. It’s one where I’d want to have the external noises down to a minimum.

And then there’s Prey …

This one excels in the atmosphere … Anything could be a mimic, waiting for you to turn your head away so it can jump at you.

Very tense.

Time to sign off for now though, stay safe, be well.

Day 21 ! And it’s aliens …

by Sleepypete

December 21, 2020

5:38 pm

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Hello everyone,

Day 21 … Shortest day of the year. And :

Special snow man Gonk droid today. I wonder if they’ve switched to covering a few old favourites now for the last few doors.

That’s what I’m doing now with the games, there’s a few that I want to cover before the series comes to a close. For today, it’s the XCom / UFO Enemy Unknown series … This started in 1994 with Julian Gollop’s UFO Enemy Unknown, another one from the very prolific studios who had Microprose as a publisher.

The game starts you off on 1 Jan, 1999. UFOs have been sighted in the skies and strange abductions are becoming more common. The nations of Earth decide they need to answer this new threat and the secretive XCom agency is created. There can only be one leader of XCom …

The game is divided into a Geoscape section, where you manage your base, your people, the research and the production, culminating in attempts to intercept UFOs and send troops over to check them out. And then there is the ground assault section where you send your people in. The above pic has them about to knock on the door of a small scout UFO.

A hallmark of these games is that they gradually ramp up the strength and menace of the aliens and you need to be able to keep up with the research to allow your people to stay having a chance at defeating them. The game also included a fairly sophisticated seeming line of sight and light model, so if you went into a ground mission in the dark, enemies that could see in the dark could pick off your people.

Oh and it was also incredibly tense … aided by futuristic styled music.

UFO Enemy Unknown had a sequel called Terror From The Deep, which moved the aliens from the sky and had them menacing the oceans instead. (Never played this one).

The cd in the picture is for XCom 3 Apocalypse, which was based in a megacity instead of encapsulating the world. That megacity felt more alive though.

The city was filled with factions, who would get upset if you ignored aliens knocking on their door. You needed some of the factions to sell you kit, so if they got too upset then they’d stop selling you goodies.

The aliens were very different too, with brainsuckers going to a few varieties of soldier alien and the feared Popper who would dash up to your people and explode.

I’m not sure if I remember the tension quite so much in XCom Apocalypse but a real time mode added nicely to its gameplay and was the only counter I knew for the Poppers. (Firing squad massed fire tactics !) There was a neat art-deco look for everything as well in this game which set it aside nicely from the others.

The next one in the series to be released was XCom Interceptor.

This one was set in space, with you being in charge of an increasingly wide network of stations that were there to mine materials to go towards building the Mega City in Apocalypse. Aliens appear again, so it’s up to your people to go out there and shoot them down. One major change here was that instead of being a passive overview commander, you were one of the pilots. I don’t think this worked and it was probably a big mistake to do so. The space combat engine was nice … but it was too fast (as a veteran of the Tie Fighter game) and had bugs. I didn’t finish Interceptor.

The original series was fizzling out at this stage and the eagerly anticipated XCom Alliance was cancelled before release with the bones being turned into some other game that got the XCom tag thrust upon it (Enforcer), much to the chagrin of the fans of the series.

Since then, there has been a fan made recreation called Xenonauts. I watched a Scott Manley series on this and they did a great job updating the UFO EU mechanics and expanding the equipment available. Haven’t played it. There was also a spiritual successor trilogy in the UFO Aftermath series. I looked at Aftermath, it was actually pretty good. Not sure why I didn’t stick with it.

And then there was the reboot …

I haven’t got any action screenshots of this one sadly … This one came out in 2012 and was a great reboot for the series. It was a bit simplified, with squads of up to 6 instead of a maximum of 36 in Apocalypse but one of the things I read about this one was that they examined everything about the games and took out things that they didn’t think were fun.

It was great having such a big army in the original game but it did make the battles take longer than they needed to … and you’d have to fight an increasing number of fairly meaningless police action battles in order to keep up. They also simplified the air interception system.

And then came the latest game …

So, another small unit tactical combat thing. XCom 2 picked up the story a decade or so after XCom 1. Earth lost … in a big way. And you are expected to be the leader of a resistance that saves the day.

One of the strengths of these games is the customisation …

That one was going to get “Truthseeker” added as a nickname as soon as it let me.

Yep. That’s what she’d go by when she wasn’t using the name HeyChrissa.

I’ve been thinking about going back into the XCom games … although I’ll stay with the new ones and keep the nostalgia of the old ones intact. That might happen sooner rather or later because Per Aspera isn’t really working out (it has bugs it shouldn’t have).

So there we go ! A massively important series of games where you’re out there sorting out the alien threat and saving the Earth. There was also XCom Declassified, a shooter style game. Must actually play that. The latest is XCom Chimera Squad, which I am highly likely to get in the impending Steam Sales.

I think that’s it for me today. Have fun everyone, stay safe, be well. See you tomorrow.

Day 20 – Shields up

by Sleepypete

December 20, 2020

7:06 pm

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Hello everyone,

We got the news yesterday that everyone should have been expecting but really didn’t want to hear. Lockdown again. And today we have the news of people behaving very predictably and attempting to get out of where they are before that lockdown hits.

In my opinion, it’s too little, too late. I’m not surprised at all that our numbers have been climbing again over the past week, it’s about due for when the last lockdown was lifted. Perhaps :

If the lockdown had been initiated again in October when the climb in cases was starting, the peak wouldn’t have gotten so high again.

If the lockdown had been extended another week or two, we would have been in better shape now.

But I don’t want to talk about virus things too much here. You see far too much of that on the news. Advent ?

I did wonder what this was for a moment but it follows the trend of the last few days of being based on Empire Strikes Back themes and this time it’s the Hoth Echo Base shield generators. Nicely done.

That got me thinking about base building games today. The book there is an original manual from Settlers 1. The original … One of the best maybe too ? It had a pretty simple aesthetic, as demanded by the processing power of the day. But behind that, massive complexity.

You had your main castle, where your people lived, with the castle acting as a stockpile too. Your territory was marked out by guard huts and upgrades of these. Everything was linked by paths, with a settler carrying goods from one end to the other. You had to think carefully about your logistics as this game depended on your people being able to get those goods to where they’d convert from wheat to flour to bread. Or ore to iron to weapons.

There was a pretty simple ritualistic angle to the combat, where you’d send soldiers over to another player’s guard huts to take their territory. The soldiers would fight one on one.

Gosh this one took a long time though. Games would take a couple of sessions to play through.

The other game in the series that I played a lot was Settlers IV. This had similar mechanisms to the first few games but opened up a couple of different ways to play with alternate races.

One key difference here was the lack of roads. Settlers would be able to take the goods where they needed to go, direct, without having to pass the parcel along the logistic system.

This also made for massive battles too, I’d usually wait until I had a massive army together and then steamroller over an enemy area. Usually the one that had been left out of fighting that had already been occurring … One of my strategies for these games is sometimes “Punch the strong one”, because if you’re picking on an enemy that’s recovering from massive losses, then the strong one can take that as an opportunity to jump on your place while you’re looking the other way.

I mentioned above that there’s been a whole series of these games come out … There are 7 of them now. I haven’t played the others though. Maybe one to look at ?

Another one for today is Planetbase …

In this one, you land on a hostile planet and your job is to set up a self sufficient base and expand from there.

There are enemies, both in invaders that come in and attack and the planet/moon itself. The moon in the picture is an airless rock, which means if the sun flares, any colonists outside need treatment (fast!) for radiation sickness. Other moons have lightning storms. The conditions also impact things like whether wind turbines will work (not on the airless moon) or how good the solar panels are.

It’s a simple game but I enjoyed it massively.

Looks like I played with annotations while talking about the game a while ago. That’s an almost self sufficient base, with a farm for growing food, a factory for turning raw material into bioplastic and metal, a canteen, an oxygen generator and a dorm. Plus an airlock for getting to the facilities outside.

It’s a game where you had to be careful in a few ways … The initial materials had to be conserved. That’s a 2×2 farm there, you can build bigger at the start but don’t have enough people to look after the plants and it would take required materials away from other vital structures.

Almost done with that base and it was much expanded over the original there. The green highlight is for a visiting trading shuttle at the spaceport.

Planetbase has its flaws (a single minded colonist AI) but what it does, it does extremely well. It’s one of very few games where I’ve stayed around to pick up all of the objectives. Writing this, I’m tempted to go back in again now.

However … there’s another colony builder game in the library called Per Aspera that just came out. I haven’t spent enough time in that yet. My shoulder was giving my little pain jab reminders for most of today too and Per Aspera’s more hands off style should suit that.

Later !

Be well, stay safe everyone.

Advent Day 19 … Tauntaun

by Sleepypete

December 19, 2020

6:46 pm

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Hello everyone,

I think it’s a Tauntaun today … Trusty mount of the Rebels of Hoth. And leaving me with not a clue for the games to run alongside it today. So it’s off to Star Trek !

Three games that could probably sum up as The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. But first … something arrived in the post today (also card from the Mum <3).

It’s one of the Team Luminary cards from a lovely person who streams under the name of Tashnarr. (linky) And it arrived with a lovely message inside and a picture of a sleeping dragon which has resisted all attempts to take pictures of it so far (one had one of my out of control hairs on it, the other didn’t focus).

Anyway, Tashnarr. Chirpiest, bubbliest, chucklyist person I know on Twitch and a real pleasure to watch. She’s one of only two people who I’ll switch over to watch as soon as they come on. She’ll occasionally cover crafting but has had to walk away from streaming that due to issues that lead to painful hands. More often now seen streaming variety games like Horizon Zero Dawn, Sub-noot-noot-ica and joining in with chat with jigsaws on Tabletop Simulator and Rainbow Six Siege. Maybe on later.

Games ? Three today … Let’s start with the Bad.

Star Trek Birth of the Federation came out in 1999 and was another competitor for Master of Orion 2.

The premise of the game was one of empire building. To take the Federation, Ferengi, Klingons or Romulans from basic beginnings and build them up to dominate space. It was a nice idea too. Except … the execution was really poor. I can’t remember this being a crashy game, just that the mechanics of it were really, really bad. In that shot above, the first group to fire torpedoes would win the battle. And that was that for the combat.

The empire building wasn’t much better with the colony build up process being very flawed. There was a lot of lore in the game and it borrowed from sources from Star Trek Next Generation, although apparently due to licensing issues, that was it. Alas though, despite it looking pretty decent, it was a really bad game and a waste of whatever licensing they had managed to secure. Back to Moo2 again.

Next up is the Good, Star Trek Armada.

Fire at Will ! He’s in that thing over there

This was a rather decent Real Time Strategy variant game that came out in 2000. (Crikey, that long ago?) It was set just after Star Trek Insurrection, with the early missions picking up straight after that movie. The missions took you through Federation, Romulan, Borg and Klingon campaigns.

It felt pretty good as a game and I enjoyed the time I spent within it. The story was decent and you could rush through it and its varied missions.

There was a decent amount of variation here as well, which always makes for a good game for me, especially when the variation is balanced.

The last one for today is Starfleet Command II, which sits alongside another couple of games in the series as well as Star Trek Online which I think borrows and updates its gameplay. (And then there’s Battlefleet Gothic, which stole that gameplay).

This game was a computer port of the tabletop Starfleet Battles game. It didn’t look great, hence the Ugly. But it took what it had to work with and made a really good, pretty detailed game.

There were aspects and races within that you’ll have never heard of from Star Trek (Mirak with missiles) but were in the tabletop game. They did a great job including the detail of managing all those starship systems.

The game expanded its remit in Starfleet Command II, which was still set in the TOS era but also contained an online enabled Dynaverse mode. When you finished the campaign, you could join a Dynaverse server and find things to do there. Alas, this was still before when internet thingys really took off (SFC II released in 2000) so the online mode didn’t really go anywhere.

There was another followup released in 2002 called Starfleet Command III.

Again, not much of a looker. They’d simplified the mechanics somewhat as well, with a reduction to 4 shield facings from the original 6 which would have been a carry over from the tabletop game.

There was a decent campaign as well, which would see you steadily upgrade your ship from the humble Sabre frigate above, up to the big Galaxy and Sovereign classes by its finish.

Ugly … but a great game and another one I considerably enjoyed playing in its day.

And I think it inspired the space engine of Star Trek Online too, which carries over some of the mechanics from SFC III, upgrading it to be 3d space as well.

That’s it for games today ! Have a great evening everyone.

Be well, stay safe.

On the Eighteenth Day …

by Sleepypete

December 18, 2020

9:56 pm

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advent, games

Hello everyone,

Day 18 ! And for many people, start of Xmas break. For those who are still at it, I hope it all goes ok. This can be a nutty time, as I hear from those I see online who are in healthcare (especially now !), retail and entertainment. Be well, stay safe, hope the idiots stay away.

I actually started my leave today and something inside me was saying “Have a really quiet one”. I tend to crave more and more input. It’s probably an addiction … And too much can be, well, too much. So I’ve only watched the latest ST:Discovery today, watched the Enterelysium and Fuzzyfreaks streams, made another couple of animated things for EE and watched Ready Player One tonight.

Oh I’ll log into the Internet Spaceship game when RP1 has finished playing out as well (the bluray player shares a USB slot with the flight stick and I’m very wary of the game deleting my control settings) but that’s only to pick up the free ARX points that they’re offering daily.

What’s behind the door ?

Don’t worry, Dwagon will be back later.

Snowspeeder today. And another example of the lovely items we got with the old games sometimes. In this case, it’s …

Draw me like one of those French Dwagons ?

There we go. The box is for Neverwinter Nights and its two expansions. The game came out in 2002 and it was the next in the line of D&D roleplaying games based in the world of the Forgotten Realms. That’s been a very popular destination over many decades. They did a great job of creating a fantasy world and filling it with all sorts of ways for adventurers to have shenanigans.

In this case, the player arrives in the city of Neverwinter in the North West of the Realms. They’re one of many who were attracted there by promises of gold in return for helping to find the cure for a plague ravaging the city. The name Neverwinter coming from the local fire elementals who kept the city state free from snow.

When you arrive, the paladin Aribeth leads the way to the hope for curing the plague, 4 mystical creatures who’s essence is believed to be the only hope. Except … in a raid, they escape. And then it’s up to the player and their companion to get them back. The creatures aren’t exactly impressed with their intended fate though.

The story happily turns and twists along the way too, with betrayal, dishonour and a bit more betrayal along the way. Also skullduggery.

It was criticised when it came out because it exchanged the complexity of the Baldur’s Gate games for an all new 3d spinny rotatey presentation. It was the way games were going in those days. 3d was in, predrawn backgrounds with sprites on top were old hat. How did it look ?

Looked alright. It presented what you needed to see pretty well. The sacrifice was probably less bodies on screen and a shorter story. Part of what they did with the game was to create a sandbox system where outside people could create further modules and player created content. There was also a Dungeon Master mode, which was far ahead of its time. The Roll20 app does something similar now and is very popular for playing D&D over a Zoom (or other telecon app) call.

I played through Neverwinter Nights a multitude of times. The thing about D&D is that there isn’t really a perfect class. They all have their strengths and weaknesses and different balance. I think I played through on probably all of the classes, with different companions available to balance the weaknesses out.

Neverwinter Nights grew two expansions after release too. Shadows of Undrentide added another new story to play through, the legendary Kobold bard, Deekin and a collection of prestige classes.

Hordes of the Underdark followed the original story and opened up the level cap to include the Epic Levels system. It also had a particularly epic story where you investigate weirdness occurring under the city of Waterdeep, find your way into Hell, fight your way out of Hell and reclaim lost souls along the way.

The modding community brought more Stuff to the game as well. Probably the most notable being the Player Resource Consortium pack which added pretty much every race and prestige expansion class imaginable.

It was a great game. It’s stood the test of time as well, being one of those very rare games that’s still played now. The streamer DistractedElf (great emotes, here’s a link) had it as a staple stream to keep going back to, with an online role playing server that’s still running now. (No link to that for reasons).

There was a sequel game called Neverwinter Nights 2, which spawned a couple of expansions as well. I bought this but bounced off it, mostly because my Windows installation at the time was broken in very odd ways (you looked at a campfire and it would white out the screen, happened across a lot of games). NWN2 updated the game engine to be more like a 3d first or third person style game. I don’t think it really worked and I went back to the better original.

The name has been used for other game projects before and since as well. But for me, Neverwinter Nights was an old favourite. I might actually go back to it at some point. It was one of the great games.

And it’s been good to talk about it again !

I think I need to retreat back into my quiet zone for now though with a book and some videos in the background.

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Advent Day 17 – X Pod Droid

by Sleepypete

December 17, 2020

9:48 pm

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internet spaceship

Hello everyone,

Christmas leave is here … I’m off now until the new year. Yey ! This has been a very strange year … We haven’t seen anything like this in living memory. Hopefully you and yours are all ok.

Advent pic ?

At least I think it’s one of the pit droids from Episode 1, following yesterday’s pod racer.

If you see a couple of spots on the marshmallow there, it’s a Salted Caramel marshmallow and some occasional spots appear from the flavouring. Tis a good marshmallow.

Brain is suffering at the moment (from that just gone on leave feeling) so this one might be a bit shorter … The pit droid made me randomly thought of the X series of games.

I’ve ended up acquiring most of these over the years and they’ve been around for a long time too. The X Gold game was originally released in 1999 as X Beyond The Frontier with the Gold pack including the expansion X-Tension. It was a space combat / trading game that took over from the X Wing and Tie Fighter games as the next space combat type game. It was a pretty dark era for space games as the publishers decided that people didn’t want them.

The game starts with a test of a new hyperjump capability, seeing you in the prototype ship about to go zoom. The test doesn’t go to plan … and you end up in a far off place, in a ship that’s about to explode.

And then the Teladi appear, fix you up and send you on your way.

Although it’s not quite that easy because the Teladi expect to be paid for their help and charge more if you try and sass them. One of the things that sticks in my mind from this game is their description of the Xenon “If you see them you are already dead”, in a translated sibilant voice that makes the menace more apparent.

I have mixed feelings about the X series of games … They kept the space ship piloting genre ticking over for a decade and a half (outside of Starlancer and Freelancer) but I never had much success with the X games. I’d try them out, bounce off them and never stay with the game for as long as I thought I should do.

No Mans Sky was similar there. It’s a game that in theory, has all the ingredients to be something I’d enjoy but I didn’t stay with it.

No Mans Sky pic ?

It has its own particular art style. It’s much more cartoony than Elite and the gameplay is definitely far more arcade simple. I think it was the inventory system that disrupted me on both games.

One thought though is … If you have several games and you’re enjoying your time in one more than the others, play the one you enjoy most. I follow a streamer called Shenryyr, his favourite game in the whole world is Aerobiz, a game that came out in 1992 for the Super Nintendo. He loves it, he goes back to it when he’s wanting a pick me up. And it leads to a chilled out fun stream.

I should open up Moo 2 again some day …

It was Elite again today, making another little step in going around the galaxy.

They’ve opened up a new outpost station today at a place called HIP 58832. It’s a star system 3000 light years above the galactic plane and there are some lovely screenshots coming out of the galactic disc spanning before them. That’s me pointing at the star that they’re at from 36,411 light years away.

I think that’s it for me for tonight though. Time to watch Tashnarr (linky) in the background and read more of Absolution Gap.

Stay safe, be well.

Day 16 ! And return of the racer

by Sleepypete

December 16, 2020

9:30 pm

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advent, games, racing

Hello everyone,

Oh wow, Headline analyser actually likes that one. It’s a widget that tells me what it thinks of the post title that my brain semi randomly stumbles upon. Usually it’s in the range of 30 to 40 out of 100. You know, make you feel better about avoiding clickbaiting. It’s saying 65 today. It still thinks I need to add in some uncommon words, emotional words and power words.

(What’s a power word ?)

And does it count as digressing if you never started on the point to begin with ? Here’s what was behind the door today.

Actual pod racer today. Which meant it was time to talk … racing games …

That’s Revs, a game that came out in 1984 for the BBC Micro made by none other than Geoff Crammond. Yep. The one that next went on to work on the first F1GP game by Microprose. Not sure if that got continued on to become the F1 games we have today but Revs was an excellent start. It was a game simulating a Formula 3 car and when it came out, only the original Silverstone layout was available. It was later expanded to include Snetterton, Oulton Park, Brands Hatch and an older Donington park layout.

And it was a cracking game too, although with the amount of practice we got, we were far faster than the computer drivers. As you’ll see in the picture, it was very much limited to the graphics of the day but those graphics worked extremely well.

It had some weird tricks too to make that work. The old BBC had 8 display modes and I think that’s using 2 of those at the same time. This is from the days when computer memory was measured in kBytes …

The other game of the day is approaching becoming my most played game on Steam. It’s …

Of course I had to choose the Dragon team first. This is from the very earliest days of the game on PC, before custom teams were made available. Oh ! I forgot to name it, this is Motorsport Manager. I’d been bouncing through a few racing games but none of them held the attention. Let’s see … from the picture :

Grand Prix Manager 2 – nicely detailed … too detailed. If you have to select individual gear ratios and there’s no help from the game for set up, then the detail has gone too far. That said though, Grand Prix Manager and GPM 2 were the benchmark games in this genre for a very long time surpassing :

F1 Manager – I have no memory of this. It may have been so bad my brain deleted it.

Grand Prix World – this one came along in 1999 as a sequel to the Grand Prix Manager games. It was pretty good to start with, although it did have more than its fair share of bugs. It had the usual problem of Formula 1, that of a lack of overtaking. If you set up the cars for high top speed, the rear wing would fall off (known bug). The sponsorship amounts would also be static while team costs increased, so there was a finite amount of time one could run a team for.

Back to Motorsport Manager. It started with the Formula 1 style single seaters, with those going across all conditions, whether that be rain or shine, hot or cold. Whoever managers the drivers and tactics better wins the race. One of the reasons why I like this game so much is that good tactics work, bad decisions get punished. My number 2 driver there, Maduka, had tyres that were near the critical point and would have started losing seconds per lap if they’d degraded further. Like Barth being overtaken before the line, losing 3rd place.

The locations owe a lot to real life tracks too, although suitably altered for licensing purposes. The above track was the “Milan” track, which looks suspiciously similar to Monza. There’s a Guildford track, Black Sea (Sochi) track, the Rio de Janeiro track turns right instead of left at the start and there are analogues to Nurburgring and Spa too.

The tracks don’t matter that much though, outside of emphasising different parts of the cars.

The game was expanded later with downloadable content expansions covering GT cars …

And Endurance racing that could go up to 6 hours long for a race. (Lots of fast forwarding).

Some seasons go better than others … (This would be at the start of my current campaign when the cars and factory is rubbish !)

There are a few issues with the AI though, which can make the races a bit easier. They don’t handle the changeover between wet and dry well, which can lead to situations like :

There’s my two drivers on the dry tyres for the first three laps of the race, making a gap big enough to make a stop for wet tyres. And in the meantime, the computer cars tyres have all been wearing out fast in the dry.

That wet / dry issue is the only issue I have with this game though. Apart from that, amazing game. If you’re interested in a racing management game where you watch the races and occasionally intervene at key moments, this is perfect.

(The limited interaction is also great for my hands).

One last pic ?

There’s a comprehensive livery editor in there as well where you, yes you too, can create cars that will make the scrutineers shout NO ! OFF MY RACE TRACK !

Stay safe, be well everyone.