December, 2020 - Sleepypete's Pillow

Advent 2020 Day 5 – Razor Crest Bounty Royale

by Sleepypete

December 5, 2020

6:14 pm

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advent, dwagon, games, lego

Hello everyone,

Day 5 ! And …

It’s the Razor Crest today from The Mandalorian. Gotta say, I haven’t watched any of the Mandalorian episodes. As well as the many allegeds about their business practice (check the Alan Dean Foster led likely class action), it’s just yet another streaming service. There are too many of those popping up at the moment and it’s unnecessary expense especially as the only things on their front page of interest are The Mandalorian and Star Wars Clone Wars.

Still, nice functional ship and there are all those Baby Yoda memes that have brought much amusement.

The marshmallow of the day is Candy Floss flavour.

The Lego of the day made me think of small traders or bounty hunters that travel around writing their own story as they go, so I figured two games today : Port Royale (first one) and Bounty Train.

Port Royale has just had a major release of its 4th edition, Port Royale 4. It feels as though it’s been expanded a bit but from videos I’ve watched, I don’t think they’ve moved on the mechanics particularly since what I remember of the first and it still has the flaws and limitations of the first. Well, apart from draconian copy protection that stopped legal owners of the game from playing it. (It clashed with Star Trek Dominion Wars). Copy protection of the time would also interfere with other devices in your system, like a USB hub I had for additional devices.

People complain now about having to install additional launchers for their games. When I hear that, I go back to the days when all games had their own individual launchers. And the issues happening with the copy protections built in where it became more awkward for legitimate owners of games to play those games than it would be for owners of pirated copies.

Having the copy protect built into the launcher and a named account has helped those compatibility problems no end.

About the game ?

Port Royale was a sailing game, where you’d own a steadily expanding fleet of trading and privateer ships. It was a nice concept, although I’d have liked to see wind angle effects come in to the combat layer more. You’d trade or privateer your way around the Caribbean and along the way, there was a treasure map story developing. Nice game. But I won’t be paying much attention to Port Royale 4 because its asking price of £46 for something that seems just an iteration of a 10 year old game is No. Just No.

The other game of the day is Bounty Train …

This one starts you off in Portland of the 19th century. All you have is a very humble little steam engine and a cargo carriage. The massive trading company you were going to inherit has had its assets seized and it’s up to you to figure out what happened and try and get them back again.

Not pretty but she’s got it where it counts

That’s the engine you start off with, the little Tom Thumb. I have to admit I bounced off this one when I bought it a few years ago and, although I’d been thinking about it, I hadn’t gone back. There’s a combat minigame where bandits will come in and try and steal your stuff, that massively turned me off the game. So I’ve essentially turned that off for the playthrough started tonight.

Early days, with just Boston down the coast opened up. The padlocks show where you need to pass quests or pay for licences in order to open up the route. It’s a decent way of steadily working you into the game so you learn how things work and have a chance to upgrade the engine a bit.

But yeah, good little session again in this one earlier. I think I’ll go back in there later at some point although I still have that Mars Horizon addiction, plus Per Aspera looks very interesting too. I managed to get an upgrade in before closing the session. An actually train looking train !

I abandoned my first play of this one a few years ago because I fell foul of some of the mechanics of the game, arrived a little late at a destination and suddenly WANTED Dead Or Alive posters started appearing with my character’s mugshot on them. Oops.

Oh look ! Dinner time.

Stay safe, be well.

Advent 2020 Day 4 – Luke and the XWing

by Sleepypete

December 4, 2020

7:21 pm

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advent, games, lego, star wars

Hello everyone,

Before I start, no food was sacrificed in today’s advent picture.

There we are, Luke Skywalker there and a guest XWing at the back.

I’m going to have to investigate the phone too to see if I can figure out the whys and hows of doing off centre focus. Cos the figure tends to be closer and lower and the focus goes on the back.

Oh and don’t mind the discolourations of my night stand table, it’s ancient and those were there when I acquired it.

Not guilty.

Everyone knows what Luke did … Well. In the first movie. He was still off flying X Wings in the later Expanded Universe (true canon) books as well. Usually on solo missions for the burgeoning New Republic or doing Jedi Things.

There was a game for that …

This one came out in 1993 and is thought of as being the impetus for people acquiring many, many PCs with 486 processors. You know, those old 32 bit processors that occasionally came with a math chip added in. The one I got was a 486 DX2/66, which meant it had the math chip and ran the memory at 33MHz and the cpu doubled at 66MHz.

3d accelerated graphics wasn’t really a thing back then. We had 2d cards with perhaps 1MB on board if we were lucky, so the graphics were extremely simple and resolutions were low. This is 640×480 upscaled to my monitor – ish. (Display scaling often reduces it from 1440p).

They start you off in a flight simulator game thing where you fly through the hoops and shoot the occasional targets. There’s a 3d representation, although the models are exceptionally simple. Such as the platforms above having no depth. Other objects will be polygonal boxes with sides 1 pixel thick.

It looked good too when it came out. Note that this is the Special Edition which came out later, using the XWing vs Tie Fighter engine which had actual texture work included. The best that could be done when the games first came out was clever shading.

The game was broken up into small missions, preceded by a briefing. Sometimes it was Admiral Ackbar. Sometimes it was General Dodonna. It worked really well for the time, although nowadays the mission objectives would be spoken in game through voice overlays and targeting indicators.

An early mission where you’re in an A Wing (Y-Wings were also available with the B-Wing coming later) saw you whooshing through an enemy fleet on a mission to identify everything. I think this got copied in a more expansive XvT mission later where you needed to abuse the Need For Speed more.

It was interesting going back to the old game. It’s still nicely fast but also balanced to be playable. The 4th XCom game, Interceptor, made the critical error of attempting to match the XWing flight and control style to an engine that was just far too fast to be playable. It worked pretty well in XWing.

I was starting to make the precision shots as well. The lasers take a bit of time to travel between shooter and target, so you need to lead your shots to be able to hit. Works well.

The story was good too. It starts up before A New Hope and amongst other things, sees you picking up the Death Star plans and eventually, doing the Death Star Trench Run.

However, I didn’t finish XWing back in the day. I came to it a bit later, having been solidly addicted to Tie Fighter, which saw you fighting for the Empire instead, seeing Galactic security from the other side. The way games worked back then was to pad out the content with occasional insane level missions, which acted as a bump to slow down your progress so I never got to the Death Star missions.

I think there’s another game in the middle that I can’t remember but the follow up to Tie Fighter, XWing Alliance, saw you eventually flying a Millennium Falcon type ship.

The last one was XWing vs Tie Fighter (XvT), a multiplayer online starfighter game that erupted on the scene perhaps 5 years too early. It was a cracking game too, although the world of dial up modems and higher pings was not ready for it. The Star Wars starfighter games pretty much died with XvT, although they’re back now with Squadrons. This is what modern graphics can do :

Shiny. I didn’t buy Squadrons though and I understand that even with initial hype, it’s ended up a bit of an underseller. Many, many people were wanting a Tie Fighter 2 or a true successor to XWing, with a strong single player storyline. What we got was a tutorial campaign which unlocked the different ships … and a multiplayer online battle arena game.

Oh and the cockpit displays get in the way far too much (even worse in the Tie Fighters). I thought it was very difficult to pick the targets out of the background clutter too, probably because the modern game can put background clutter in that would just be a starfield in the old game.

It was another one that was good to have a little look at but I sense a recurring theme here will be that Nostalgia is great but going back to the old stuff can end up being a bit of a let down. I was curious that the control mapping had the stick set up to yaw the ship instead of roll it. Brain was going Does Not Computer somewhat at that, although I adjusted somewhat to it.

(I started off in flight sims, where you would roll to initiate a turn. You wouldn’t side slip with the rudder)

One more pic ? Oh go on then. Plus Farcebook demands it :-D.

Stay safe, be well.

Advent 2020 Day 3 ! This could be pod racing …

by Sleepypete

December 3, 2020

7:25 pm

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advent, games, lego

Hello everyone,

We’ve made it to day 3. Before I go too far with the post, there’s stuff in the news today about an explosion a bit down the road at Avonmouth. I live quite a distance away (didn’t notice a boom even) so I’m not affected.

What’s behind the door ?

I think that’s one of the desert dwellings on Tatooine and yes, I may well be continuing the theme of using something edible to stand the models on to get a decent angle for the camera with them.

The cookie did not survive.

Tatooine made me think of a pod racing link. (The other one would be something to do with wrong droids). I did enjoy the pod racing sequence in Episode 1, that was probably the highlight of the movie.

And one of the best of the Star Wars games was the Pod Racing game. What’s that ?

They’re basically two massive engines, a pilot pod running behind them and lots of luck to hold everything together. I suspect the image in George Lucas’s mind when he thought of this sequence was to try and pull off something like the Ben Hur chariot sequence.

It worked pretty well as a sequence in the movie and the game was incredible when it first came out. I’ve been having another look at it this evening …

I did get it running in the end, although the Steam version needed an extra file added in (for Google – Star Wars Pod Racer crash on start up solved by adding the Dinput.dll into the game folder). I didn’t manage to get it to recognise my two Hotas controllers (I have no idea where my Xbox pattern controller is !) but it was ok running with mouse and keyboard. It even ran at 1440p.

I tried looking back at this one before, with the copy on the cd (yep, cd !) and found issues with it not knowing where the save game was due to Windows changing how it organised files. Looks like that’s been solved this time.

I’d forgotten how fast it was … Let’s see :

The 462 is I believe, speed in km/h. And the pods go faster in an engine boost mode. I think the speed used to reach 1000+ …

I’d forgotten how much of a rush the game was. Lots of varied courses over multiple Star Wars locations. Places like the deserts of Tatooine, with occasional Sand People snipers. Lava planets … An ocean world where you race across platforms connected by undersea tunnels. And a space circuit with zero g sections.

It’s exciting. I was remembering why I was so addicted to it way back … As you see from the screenshots, the graphics are very simple. But you don’t really notice that as you’re zooming through the circuits.

However, if you’re looking to try it out again, DO NOT buy the Steam version. I’m hoping that the fan project to recreate the game comes to fruition. While the Directx suite should in theory allow older games like this to run, there are issues involved. The game itself came out just as Directx was taking off, so it was looking to use 3dfx Glide libraries to run better via proprietary non Directx hardware. I think that was leading to problems this evening …

I couldn’t get my controllers to work, although got round this by using keyboard controls.

And … I called a halt to play due to the game crashing on me, following steadily decreasing texture quality. I think this is why only 3 screenshots were successful out of the 11 attempts.

There is a saying “You can never go back”. It’s kinda true this time round, although while it was running, it was running very nicely. Everything was nicely presented on screen, even in a much higher resolution than the game would have expected. Of course, that means the low resolution textures look really, really bad in the screenies.

It did work as a game now much better than Jagged Alliance 2 did when I tried that again a while ago. (I’ll talk about that in a later post !)

Good game, hopefully something similarly ultra fast and great will come out at some point. I got the memories from it again of it being huge fun the first time … but with the state of the Steam edition, it’s one for the past.

That’s all for today ! Stay safe, be well. May compatibility with the force be with you.

Advent 2020 Day 2 – Tea and Civilisation

by Sleepypete

December 2, 2020

5:16 pm

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advent, games, lego

Hello everyone,

Shorter one today I think. Maybe. We shall see ! What’s behind the door ?

I do have a list of games to talk about prepared for this advent period but I will shift it around a bit as appropriate … Like yesterday when I wanted to talk about the author Ben Bova, which gave me a convenient link to Mars and space programmes. Spookily, today linked straight away …

Yep. I reckon that’s a tea cup there in his left hand which can only link to …

Civilisation !

I’ve played most of the Civilisation games over the years, although I’ve gone away from the series lately.

Quick check … yep. I do actually own the latest ones. Never installed Civ VI though and I bounced off Civ V. (I must have got them from Humble Bundle bundles or monthly things.

Like, this month’s Humble Choice games and my opinion of them are :

Will acquire : Crying Suns. Space strategy, looks promising. Rover Mechanic Simulator, gets the oddball choice.

Nope for various reasons : Darksiders III, Yakuza Kiwami 2. They just aren’t games I would want to play.

Something I should grab : Imperator Rome. Paradox can make great games like Stellaris but I saw videos of this when it came out and it looked like the mechanics under it were terrible.

Bundle fillers to ignore : Darksburg, Little Misfortune, Smile For Me, Darkwood, Tsioque, Youropa, Townsmen. I have no idea what these are and the brief blurb made me even less interested in them.

But they usually have something that makes the bundle worth it, the bundle comes with a discount across the site and they’re good for charities.

And it makes Tashnarr jump out of her skin when I buy stuff on Humble Bundle using her code (linky) and the alert goes off. Perhaps a bit mean, definitely comical. (Link to Tash’s Stream page) And she gets a bit of the sale price, which helps her keep streaming, which is always a good thing.

I really need to make the links lists happen as well. I’ve been a bit delinquent there :-D.

This is going to be one of those posts where I talk about anything but the subject isn’t it. Those happen occasionally.

Civilisation – you start as cavemen and the object is to nurture and grow your tribe into a civilisation that spans the globe and perhaps, beyond. It was a remarkable entry into gaming with the first one. I played that on the Atari ST.

Simple graphics, well presented for the time. We have a top down presentation on a square grid with ice caps at the top and bottom and a wrap around map. This had all the original concepts of cities, units, buildings and an epoc spanning tech tree.

And spearmen that could occasionally stop tanks.

Civilisation 2 moves this into an isometric pattern. Friends at uni played this but I was still hooked on Master of Magic and Master of Orion. Besides, I knew that it had some blatant AI cheat bugs in it which somewhat put me off the game. (Plus asking price!)

The manual there is for Civilisation III and an expansion. I can’t remember too much about this one. Civilisation IV was the last of the series to allow doomstacks, where you’d have 20+ tanks and artillery on a square that would batter anything around.

Civilisation V re-engineered most of the movement systems and eliminated the doomstack. I should probably know more about Civilisation VI !

Looks pretty. They’ve steadily evolved the gameplay in the series from eliminating doomstacks, including Civic progression, adding a Culture route to victory and expanding how cities work.

I did enjoy playing the original, enjoyed playing MoM and Moo2 more (these will be in a later post)

I think that’s it for this one, the internet spaceship seat is calling. I haven’t done much in the stars lately … it feels due :-).

PS I do like the jumper.

Stay safe, be well.

Advent 2020 Day 1 – To Mars via A-Wing ?

by Sleepypete

December 1, 2020

7:02 pm

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advent, books, games, lego

Hello everyone,

It begins … And it seems, as always, where there is a plan, there is a plan that’s undoubtedly going to change immediately ! The Advent Plan this year is going to include the Star Wars Lego Stuff (the calendar looked great this year and had an excellent start) and games. But I’m going to deviate slightly from that already. What’s behind day 1 ?

There we go. Usual suspects in there (covering up the wall !), plus one I made earlier and today’s model which was a dinky little A Wing. They do marvellous things with the advent calendar models. I think that’s actually a better looking A Wing than the bigger one. I haven’t acquired the Ultimate Collectors Series A Wing though, it’s a bit expensive at £180 and to be honest, with the X Wing game, it wasn’t my favourite ship to fly. Still, nice concept with a pilot ideally placed at the centre of rotation and two massive engines for speed.

What’s the book there ? I have a memorium as part of this post … One of the authors I grew up with died yesterday of covid complications. His name was Ben Bova. I’ve enjoyed quite a lot of his books, although with all authors as prolific as him, the quality does go up and down. It’s a hell of a bibliography and I’m just realising that there are a lot of books to go there that I haven’t read (linky).

Highlights include the Orion series, which started with a lovely concept of a Protagonist and Antagonist who were at opposite ends of their stories. One was stepping forwards in time, the other was stepping backwards. They would meet at certain nexus points in history, where mankind could have died out if not for an intervention. Central to the series were a race of hyperadvanced Creators, who would be our long distant followers (what’s the opposite to Ancestor ?) Ah ha ! Descendants. To ensure their survival, they had to protect their ancestors … and they made Orion their agent. As he goes backwards in time, he learns more about the origins of the conflict and how his feeling about it develop is exceptionally well written. I think the strongest of these was Orion 3, Orion in the Dying Time, which put Orion in the period where the dinosaurs died out and homo sapiens took over. There are events here on a cosmic scale.

And then there’s Orion 2, which saw our character moving through the stories of the sieges of Troy and Jericho with a little bit of Egypt too. He inherits a mercenary band of Hittite Engineers from an Empire that had crumbled to dust as the story begins.

They’re usually great stories of epic adventure and his specialty was near future Earth, such as the story of the first Moon colony and an incredibly tense race to independence in Millennium. There’s also Messianic Nanotechnology in Voyager and … the two Mars books. (I should read the other Grand Tour books at some point).

There have been plenty of Mars books and they tell their tales in their own ways. This time, we have a multinational, multirace crew inhabiting a temporary base on Mars. Bit like The Martian, perhaps double the size. They have Hydrogen fuel cell rovers and power armour. And a precautionary tale for what can happen if your vitamin supply gets neutralised by pure oxygen … One notable thing is that for the second book, Return To Mars, they convert the rovers to Methane because the Hydrogen leaks out (the molecules are too small) which might be a precautionary tale for the moves to fuel cell technology today …

Anyway. Great author, I enjoyed most of the books he wrote (variance in quality is ok !). I’m tempted to read Mars again and I was chuckling away at a Remember story written by R.A. Salvatore that was posted on Farcebook yesterday. Need to read more of his books.

To the game … I’m still addicted to Mars Horizon. Yep.

I left the last Mars Horizon post with the people getting to the Moon …

I managed to get back there again last night in record time. I’m hunting achievements again … It’s going to be tricky to get all of the achievements but I’m enjoying having them as targets along the way while I play this lovely new game that they’ve given us. It’s a little marvel.

The graphics are a little simplified and cartoony but they look great and don’t get in the way. You could probably successfully play this game on pretty old hardware and it would still look good. It doesn’t need great graphics to do its thing. The gameplay is very simple as well. You choose the research and the missions and there is a resource token puzzle minigame that determines how well the missions go.

It gives you these little cutscenes along the way too. I’ve only played Japan and half of NASA so far, so I’m looking forward to seeing the other rockets and devices from ESA, USSR/Russia and China.

Yes. I will always make that joke given chance.

This made me chuckle as well. It was a tiny little sampling rocket fired off from a Mars lander, designed to bring Martian surface material back to Earth. Could this happen with our science ? Probably not. I did enjoy seeing it in game though.

A curious base. Bit small for my liking. I think the best starter base I know of for Mars has to be the one in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, where engineer Nadia carves out an underground (for radiation protection) base at the landing spot. Of all the stories in the Mars books, that’s the one I enjoyed the most.

The Mars mission in Mars Horizon feels very much one way … but that’s ok for game things. I think the Transit Spacecraft plus Lander Vehicle and Ascent Vehicle model is more like the way to go.

I think that’s it for me for today !

Lovely little A-Wing model;

Sad at the loss of Ben Bova, possibly the author I read most (after Anne McCaffrey) in my teenage/young adult years;

Vastly enjoying Mars Horizon.

Hopefully this will be a good December’s worth of posts and I won’t start burning out on them like I have in previous years …

Stay safe, be well.

(PS I should say a couple of words for the drama in the Vendee Globe over the last couple of days … maybe tomorrow ! Good to see one definitely safe and the other travelling to safety)