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Advent Day 17 – X Pod Droid

December 17, 2020

9:48 pm

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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.

Advent 2020 Day 15 – Guest Battleship Master Dwagon

by Sleepypete

December 15, 2020

8:56 pm

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advent, dwagons, elite, internet spaceship

Hello everyone,

I’ve been blessed with something quite lovely today. They’re guesting on today’s Advent pic …

Isn’t it lovely ? Also adorable. How about a better look ?

I love it. He’s a custom dwagon made for me on behalf of a very dear friend, inspired by my own dwagon pics. I was still in work mode when he arrived but now that’s dropped I’m genuinely a little bit emotional :-).

A lovely and very special gift. THANK YOU !

I have been struggling a bit lately, probably because Brain wants to go on Xmas leave already. But Dwagon has picked me right up.

I’ve been doing internet spaceship again over the last few days. The objective was to get to the first waypoint in “The everlasting expedition”. It’s way off to the Western edge of the galaxy. Here’s the map :

The more dense line scrawl to the middle right is where we live in our galaxy and the rest of the scrawl shows where I’ve been since resetting. I’m hoping to circle the galaxy on this outing. Only about 250,000 light years to go. It gets pretty difficult to navigate when you’re on the fringes of the galaxy like that and Searching For Dragons needed another little refit to give her the jump range required.

110 light year jump, without a neutron star

Yep. Long way. And I suspect being off angle like that is going to really upset some people who see this :-D.

It’s an odd sight too, because there are usually many more stars in sight than what’s in that picture.

Set the controls for the heart of the sun. Where is it ?

I think that might be the Andromeda galaxy painted on there in the lower middle.

And that’s us looking back at our galaxy from the extreme edge.

Pretty.

I don’t think I’m going to be talking about the games I intended to mention tonight. (Master of Orion 2). They’ll wait for another day.

Dwagon is such a thoughtful and lovely a gift and I’m still massively going Aww 😀 <3.

That’s where I left the ship tonight. Stay safe everyone, be well.

Advent Day 14 – Ascendant Trooper

by Sleepypete

December 14, 2020

7:32 pm

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advent, games, star wars

Hello everyone,

I have no idea what game this might be about today ! Except for another older one.

It’s a Battle Droid today, which made me think of a few things … In the movie, these guys were pretty dumb things that would be sent in to battle in never ending waves. They didn’t have to be intelligent. They just kept on coming.

The lack of intelligence is probably what made me pick out the backing picture … Ascendancy was a game that came out in 1995 and it was a pretty ok space strategy game. Or rather, that was the intent. The AI was very broken, so it was essentially more like a space sandbox game.

I remember that it had a few nice ideas in there though, including planet development and the ships. But it came out in the era of Master of Orion, Master of Orion 2 (Moo2) and a few others, like Galactic Civilisations. With severely broken AI, it had no chance against Moo2, a game so legendary that they recently remade it. I’ll talk about Moo2 later in the month.

The other genre that the battledroids represent is Tower Defense. This is where you mastermind the defence against a never ending series of waves of enemies. (The levels do usually end). My favourite of these is probably Defense Grid 1.

The levels are usually created so that you can set up a maze of towers to shoot down the aliens as they approach their goal. The more convoluted the maze, the longer it takes them to get to the goal and the more shooting time your towers have. You’ll also add in combined arms towers to do things like Boom many aliens at once, to slow the aliens down or towers that boost the income you get from them.

The challenge of these games is usually increased by having to balance keeping a certain amount of resources in reserve against having a defense strong enough to keep the baddies out. With Defense Grid 1, the more reserve you had, the more interest you’d earn on those reserves and eventually you’d get far more resources in interest than in shooting the aliens. But you have to keep improving the defenses in order to match increasingly powerful aliens.

Defense Grid 1 had a sequel … but the sequel changed a few mechanics around and didn’t hold my interest. It did come out in 2014 though, which is probably when my outsides were at their worst and I wasn’t playing the games much.

Tower Defence is a massive genre too.

That’s Creeper World 3, where instead of fighting individual alien enemies, you’re fighting a sea. One aspect of Creeper World 3 was to balance quickly grabbing territory and therefore power generation with being able to defend the territory you grab.

It’s a great genre. Very tactical. Very frustrating at times. The levels represent puzzles and often there’s only a couple of feasible solutions to beating them.

A good challenge.

There’s actually another Creeper World game out now, Creeper World 4. I’ve been enjoying watching a playthrough of it. Not sure if I’m going to get it though, I’ve tried Creeper World 3 a few times and I always run out of steam on it.

And I have a few more of this genre too that I haven’t played enough yet !

Have fun, play what you want, be well, stay safe. See you all tomorrow.

Advent day 13 ! Republic cruiser, warry Empire

by Sleepypete

December 13, 2020

7:44 pm

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advent, internet spaceship, star wars

Hello everyone,

Day 13 … Gotta admit, the tireds are still with me (4 working days left to break) so this might be shorter. Mind you, I’m also short on screenshots for the games … What’s behind the door today ?

It’s the Republic Cruiser today. I think this is the one we see for a short time at the start of Episode 1 before it has a Rapid Planned Disassembly courtesy of the Trade Federation.

What are the games there ?

Supremacy / Rebellion (different name in UK due to a different game) came out around 1998. I was supremely hyped for this one. I was looking forward to a grand strategy game combining the Galactic War in Star Wars with being able to do the more tactical engagements.

And it may have worked too … ~~if not for those meddling…~~ Nah. It was a good idea for a game but the execution wasn’t great.

You had the galaxy spanning map, broken up into sectors with a cluster of star systems within. You’d have industrial planets, shipyard planets, resource planets contributing to an economy that would support your growing military.

It was an asymmetric setup too, with the Empire having big scary fleets and the Rebels needing to build up or run away. It also had the idea that while the Empire had a fixed seat of government in Coruscant, the Rebel base could be moved around the galaxy.

The game had characters which drove the gameplay in their own ways as well. They could recruit, run bases or ships and execute commando missions.

The game appeared to have the lot. It even had a tactical battle engine the likes of which I don’t think had been seen before in a PC game of this era.

Yet it failed. I gave it up reasonably quickly and moved back to Master of Orion 2. It was bland and boring. And a waste of the concept. A shame too because if they had pulled it off, then it would have been an excellent game.

The other game up there is Star Wars Empire At War. I actually rebought this one a bit later to try it out again. (I couldn’t find the disc !)

There’s another cautionary tale here with the Steam offerings for old games. It does not include the manual in soft copy. You need the manual because it tells you the unit strengths and weakness. This is a game from the Rock Paper Scissors era of strategy, where all of the units in games would be set up as hard counters to the other units.

So as well as not telling you how to play the game, you would be denied access to the info required to win at the game.

The lesson here is to be extremely wary about acquiring old games via Steam. There’s probably been little to zero effort gone into making them run on modern machines. Good Old Games are a decent alternative but they’ve moved away from bringing back old games and on to being a publisher for New Things. Sadly they’ve lost some of their soul along the way, including indulging in some of the nastier marketing tactics around That Big New Game.

Empire at War ?

So it’s another grand space strategy game again, this time with either the asymmetric (Empire strong, Rebels weak) start of Supremacy / Rebellion or more balanced starts.

It had a ground combat layer …

There were a whole heap of new units invented for this because they needed to balance what we’d already seen in the films.

However … I can’t remember why I dropped the game the first time. I might have gone straight back to what I knew and enjoyed, which was Master of Orion 2. It looks like it came out in 2006, which was a really bad time for me psychologically … I’m not going to go into that.

I suspect I went straight back into World of Warcraft !

I do know why I bounced straight off the game when I looked at it again. There was another bad porting issue, where the tutorial phasing had broken. Instead of a slowly flashing red/blue in the tutorial for things you couldn’t do yet, the red/blue flash was ultra quick. The kind of ultra quick flash that can cause head problems …

So after a little research into that, I figured it wasn’t an issue I could fix any time soon and went straight back to Stellaris.

So today’s couple of games, Supremacy/Rebellion and Empire At War, were a couple of games that should have been great but something went wrong somewhere along the way.

Great concept was broken by flawed execution. If I talk about Star Trek Birth of the Federation at some point (it’s on The List), then that game has the same problem to a worse degree.

In other news … I’ve been in the Internet Spaceship again over the weekend, making my way to the edge of the galaxy.

This is the last shot of the Searching For Dragons in the original configuration … The next few bits of the route are going to be a bit awkward so there’s been a small refit to eke out a bit more jump range.

That’s a Herbig Ae/Be type star. Looks pretty much the same as the other stars, there’s a few things that Elite Dangerous doesn’t know how to draw properly yet. That aside, it’s still one of the prettiest games I have.

That’s where I stopped for the day. Body said it wanted a break and the next parts of the trip will be interesting times … if they’re even possible with what I have.

We shall see !

In the meantime, stay safe, be well.

Advent Day 12 – Porgrim

by Sleepypete

December 12, 2020

3:29 pm

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advent, games, skyrim

Hello everyone,

Day 12 ! It was good to get the little rant out of my system yesterday. I needed it for a bunch of reasons.

Also really tired at the moment ! I think that’s the usual thing of seeing a long break coming up and my body and mind anticipating it. No idea still what will be happening over the break. As I got supplies in on Thursday and those usually last a fortnight, I’ll need to plan a little because that schedule will see me run out on Christmas Eve … Going shopping then would be a Bad Idea. I also don’t know if any traveling will happen, although the family is well aware of the need for distancing and isolating.

But … advent ! What’s behind the door and what’s the game today ?

Yes. I’m going to go to Hell for that caption. It’s a Porg today ! And I still need to ask google how to make the phone focus on what I want it to instead of the stuff in the background. (Or I need to pull the camera back a bit and crop the sides instead of just resizing).

And the game is Skyrim. Link being the bird critters. They’re in Skyrim too, except at the much revered and holy turkey. Do crimes against the populace, they don’t really care much. Harm a turkey, they’ll hunt you down and take your head.

Skyrim has been around for a pretty long time. That copy there is the boxed original PC edition (Oldrim), which was released in November 2011. It looks like I wasn’t too late to the party, with my first screenshot for Oldrim dating back to Feb 2012.

It’s one of those rare times when developers got a game so incredibly right, it gained instant popularity and is still being worked on 8 years later after being ported to a whole heap of different platforms.

I think part of that is because they drop you into a world with a beginning that you barely escape with all limbs and extremities intact and then go : There you go. Explore the world. Knock yourself out finding everything we’ve placed here. Main story ? Doesn’t matter. Just have fun in the world we created. And it’s a pretty sizeable world too :

Ahh, from an era where we got more than a leased digital code for our money … I must have a look at the manual again at some point.

I gotta admit, I never finished Skyrim but I still occasionally go back into it to explore some more. Although one reason for not finishing is that I’ll usually make a new character and start again. It is curious though … This is another 2012 screenshot :

And …

It looked great back then. Since, there’s been the Skyrim Special Edition released which improved the game engine and a multitude of mods have come out to improve the graphics, animations and interactions with the world.

Note, it’s from a different time of day and weather (yep, it has that too) which is one reason why the more recent shot looks so much brighter.

I think the mods are one thing that has kept the game alive for so much longer than you might expect, although they did an incredible job making the world come to life. I might well be going back in there later. (If not in Mars Horizon, Per Aspera, or Elite Dangerous!)

I must look to actually finishing a run through as well.

Someone needs to sort out the local dragon problem.

Or just look at that sky.

Back again tomorrow with … something ! Be well, stay safe.

Advent Day 11 – Danger Falcon

by Sleepypete

December 11, 2020

4:38 pm

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advent, elite, internet spaceship, lego, star wars

Today might have been a good day to talk about Falcon 4.0 !

Instead, I’ve brought forwards talking about a different game that you’ll probably recognise instantly. The draft plan had the original game right at the start and the new game at the end but I’ve been swapping things around a little bit as I go.

What’s behind the door ?

At some point, I’ll figure out what arcane combination of thing to do to get the focus how I want it. Or while the Pixel 4’s cameras are better than the Galaxy S7, it isn’t quite as good at doing super close up photos.

Millennium Falcon today ! Venerable workhorse of the series and fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy. Home of scoundrels and leader of squadrons.

This ship type found its way into the various games too, not necessarily as the Falcon, usually as the Corellian YT1300 light freighter.

The ship made me think of Elite Dangerous. A ship roaming the known tradelanes, going from place to place looking to make a quick profit while avoiding the attentions of the authorities and casual pirates. Bit like Elite ! Come to think of it, bit like Freelancer as well.

I’m going to do a little side note here though … I’ve been struggling lately. Been feeling the effects of this year building up on me and can hear that burn out clock ticking away again. I’m on duty for work until Thursday evening next week, then off until the new year. “On Duty” ? That’s one thing we’re getting used to with this pandemic. I struggle to call it “in work” if I’m working from home. On duty feels like it covers it better.

Our place has been continuing to work as before, just distributed around working from home instead of in the office. It’s been an odd difference … It’s let me experiment with protobeards (the current one comes off soon, itchy factor is rising) and not having time lost to the trip in to work and out again is very welcome. So work is still fine.

It’s everyone else’s attitudes to the pandemic and other things that is continually wearing. I don’t like talking about that too much here because you get too much of it from elsewhere. We should be handling it far better than we are. The controls on infection rates should be getting put in earlier and stronger. And they should be getting followed by the general population.

I should not be getting double glazing salesmen knocking on the door.

The later the controls come in, the more hold the infection will have taken and the longer it takes for the fire to go out. Personally, I think people have given up on trying to keep a lid on it and are now treating a very serious illness as nothing worse than a cold or the flu. It’s not just here, the England team just came back from South Africa after the cricket tour there was cancelled due to increasing covid infections occurring in a supposedly bio secure bubble which was anything but. The England people gave probably too many chances … yet are now being accused of coming home when they shouldn’t have.

So I’m annoyed at that.

I’m also not angry … but very disappointed at the attitudes around a couple of big games at the moment. One just got an expansion, one is benefiting from rabid levels of hype. People are falling over themselves to play both. Yet the new game is getting its notoriety partly from disgusting marketing methods and the expansion one had everyone coming out in arms about their treatment of a protest.

Yep. Not angry, just disappointed. I won’t ever be playing either of them. Mind you, “not angry, just disappointed” sums up what I think of The Outer Worlds too. It had massive hype … but I found it dull, disappointing and indulging in the laughs through lowest common denominator humour that seems to be a hallmark of Epic Store exclusives.

Elite ?

I’ve apparently gone rather overboard on the screenshots since restarting … That was an opportunity shot after emerging from one of the starter system stations into a rather glorious eclipse.

Since then, there have been many stars.

Many bases to explore. And plunder.

Sadly no buggy on this occasion, it didn’t fit …

Visited familiar places along the way.

Had Outside Context Encounters …

And done a little archeology too.

And there have been some very pretty locations to visit too.

Elite Dangerous has been a great game for me over the years I’ve been involved with it. I’ve hugely enjoyed getting up close to the various astronomical phenomena that have been included in the game.

And it’s expanding soon too with extra features that let you step outside the ship and bounce over the ground on foot. That should be pretty good. We shall see !

It feels like that Odyssey expansion has gone from A Long Time Away to Wow It’s Coming Soon ! I think that’s another sign of how time has gone very strange this year. It doesn’t feel like it’s 9 months since the pandemic situation properly broke out here in the UK.

That feels like it’s enough for today though.

Tired. Hanging in there. Enjoying the games when my body lets me. Definitely enjoying looking back at and remembering some older games. And winter break happening soon.

Stay safe, be well everyone.

Advent Day 10 – Warring Robots

by Sleepypete

December 10, 2020

6:52 pm

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advent, games, lego, robots

Hello everyone,

Door number 10 ?

Good on you there BD-1 with the hat. This one is a curious one … you usually build up Lego from small components but this one is just one piece for BD-1, sitting on a 2×2 circle to stabilise the little one.

BD-1 is a kit I’ve been tempted by, although I’ve slowed down my lego acquisitions lately. It takes up too much space.

The games of the day are mostly the Battletech series, which started in a tabletop battle form before being converted to computer gaming. The original came out way back in 1989 running in MS DOS … Ancient ! This is a game that I completely missed, coming into the series with Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries, which I can remember enjoying playing through a few times.

This one was from 1996 and had you as a small time Mercenary Mechwarrior pilot trying to make your way around the fringes of the galaxy, taking jobs as they come and attempting to stay solvent enough to keep the Battlemechs in good repair and yourself in one piece in the missions.

It was a good little game too.

I skipped over a few more, before finding the two Mechcommander games. I can’t remember the first one much but I enjoyed playing through Mechcommander 2. This one was a real time strategy type variant, converting the tabletop rules to run in that time frame instead of the big handfuls of time that turn based games run in. At that time, the popularity of games like Command and Conquer and Warcraft meant strategy games were all about being real time based with turn based going out of fashion.

It’s probably an easier transition than it seems, instead of turns being minutes, you split them up into seconds instead, have a lot more turns and give the illusion of real time.

While the previous games had you in the pilot’s seat, the Mechcommander games elevated you to the godlike position, commanding all of the mechs in the lance. Instead of you aiming the guns and steering the robot, you told them where to go and what to shoot at and probabilities would determine whether they’d hit or not.

Different game styles for different people. I like both … at the right times. There’s times when I want the disconnected position and times when I want to be doing the pew pew.

There were a few more games along the way of varying success levels. I think Mechwarrior 3 came along at a time when I couldn’t afford to own a machine of sufficient power to run it. This was the time when PC components were rapidly advancing in power and performance and by the time you’d upgraded the machine to catch up, the games needing high performance had been forgotten and there was a new Shiny around.

Or I was just deep in the Master of Orion 2 addiction and didn’t have time for other games. I missed Mechwarrior 4 as well and avoided Mechwarrior Online as it was one of those shallow online things instead of following a storyline.

Apparently the latest game, Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries has a storyline keeping it together but I think I’m avoiding that as well due to issues with how the game is set up. I’d usually look to clear opposition from levels in these type of games and then be able to operate freely (or depart) … I get annoyed when endless waves come in when it doesn’t make sense for this to happen, which is a characteristic of MW5:M.

And then there’s the recent Battletech game, which I enjoy quite a lot still. I’m a bit on and off with it again but it’s one I’ll keep coming back to.

There’s lots of variation in Battlemech available, although you tend to go towards one theme or another. I tend to reduce the guns and increase the armour. Each mech has a weight limit that you have to stay within and the guns, armour, heatsinks and jet packs all have their own weight.

Plus while having a full set of guns would mean an incredible first shot, they’d overheat your mech and you’d actually only be able to sustain fire from 2, 3 or maybe 4 lasers, guns or missiles. Kinda like asking if you’re getting value out of what’s fitted. If the guns aren’t being used, they might as well have been armour instead.

Good game. The story was criticized as being a bit dull and long but I enjoyed the story missions cropping up along the way. The game is not well optimised, with long loading times unless you have it on an SSD. It also eats memory and with the Roguetech mod, was unplayable on Pumpkin with its 8GB of memory.

But I liked it, warts and all. I didn’t like Roguetech for another whole heap of reasons, not all of which were to do with what they did to the gameplay.

What’s that in the first picture ? Haha, I intended to have Michael Stackpole’s Ghost War book from the Battletech universe back there but I couldn’t find it. So the game adaptation of Robot Wars came in as substitute.

Hmm. Should I be polite about it ? Nah. The Robot Wars game was a buggy mess and one of those merchandising cash ins on the very popular TV competition series of the time. It was playable … but instantly forgettable and just not that good.

Even if Robot Wars ran, I wouldn’t bother now.

Instead, it’s likely to be Mars Horizon for the end of that game or the also new Per Aspera where you’re playing as an AI construct in charge of terraforming Mars. I enjoyed a first look at that one the other night.

Need food though. Shopping first. Back tomorrow.

Stay well, be safe ! Wait … that’s not right. Be well, stay safe !

PS There’s another massively hyped Big Game out today. I’m not talking about or playing that one for a whole heap of reasons.

Advent 2020 Day 9 – Knights of Rey

by Sleepypete

December 9, 2020

8:50 pm

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advent, games, lego, star wars

Day 9 !

What is that dragon getting up to ? Next thing you know, he’ll bring his friends in. Now there’s a thought.

It’s Rey making an appearance today. I liked Rey. She had a great entrance leading us into The Force Awakens as a scrapper junker kid with attitude and an instinctive (from taking ships apart to loot the best bits) head for starship workings.

There could only be a couple of games to feature today for Rey. Well, perhaps the Jedi Knight games and Jedi Academy too but I don’t think I owned those. (I tried the Dark Forces 2 Jedi Knight demo but I don’t think I got the game).

So … Knights of the Old Republic (aka Kotor). There were two of these games … They were set 4,000 years before the movies in a similar but different universe. Instead, the galaxy is balanced between the hordes of the Sith and the legions of the Jedi. They really don’t like each other.

You could put someone’s eye out with those

Like Rey, you don’t start as a Jedi though. There’s no lightsabre as you wake from a coma with no memory, escape an exploding starship and find yourself marooned on the city planet of Taris.

And the adventure launches off from there as you find your ship, the Ebon Hawk, before heading off around the galaxy in search of answers to your mysterious past.

Along the way, you pick up Bastila (the lady on the cover of the game), with the incredible voice of Jennifer Hale who was later to become the only Commander Shepard of the Mass Effect games.

There we go. Jedi and fella with apparently no jaw.

HK-47 is there as well, as the assassin droid with the best lines in the two games.

I played through Kotor once, enjoying the way they turned d20 mechanics from the Dungeons and Dragons system into something that played really well as a faux-real time system on the computer. The game had decent writing, good characters and was probably when the publishers Bioware were at the peak of their powers, producing an excellent game that didn’t outstay its welcome too much. Modern games can be a bit too long.

Kotor spawned a sequel, Kotor 2. I do actually own this game after coming to it a bit late but it’s a digital copy so no box to take a picture of. One reason for not getting it back then was because it had picked up a reputation for being a bit broken. It’s since had the fans having a go at it, patching it up and restoring some cut content.

I’m not sure why but I didn’t really take to Kotor 2 and only got perhaps halfway through. I might have to try again at some point. Maybe because it felt like it was following a similar line to the one before. Not sure. Perhaps like some of the others here, it’s tough to go back to the old games again. New games have come out and do everything so much better. There was also a game that should have been Kotor 3 … but it got overtaken by the trend towards turning everything into Massive Multiplayer Online games and became The Old Republic. I did try that … but it kinda sent me back into Warcraft.

One thing for that is the expectations around How To Play.

The old games would have manuals and keyboard reference charts in their boxes along with the cds. My Mass Effect Andromeda box didn’t even have a disc in it !

Nowadays, the games have their tutorials built in. Games still steadily build up the mechanics that you play in, rarely throwing you in at the deep end. But instead of it being in a book, you’re led by on screen prompts.

I’m not complaining there, this is progress that is good :-D.

Now wondering what’s behind Door Number 10. That’s one for tomorrow. Maggie K’s just updated her discord and twitch emotes and said nice things about the animated and edited versions of those that I do, so I know what I’m doing after hitting the Publish buttons 😀

Be well everyone, stay safe.

Advent Day 8 – Crimson X Falcon Wing

by Sleepypete

December 8, 2020

6:35 pm

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games, lego, star wars

Hello everyone,

Lots of games to chatter about today. I had a sudden random thought about needing something more though. What’s behind the door today ?

It’s the iconic XWing today. Introduced in the first Star Wars movie and ever present in the films that came after. A balanced starfighter, agile with excellent firepower from guns and missiles, protected against glancing attacks with shielding, an astromech droid for repairs and navigation and good for atmospheric flight too.

Oh and perhaps a small cross section profile too, making it more difficult to hit. Many little boys (including me) would have grown up wanting to fly these, which probably contributed to the XWing game being such a success back in the day.

What was the random thought ?

Ah there we go. I read the Timothy Zahn Expanded Universe books first but a little earlier in the timeline came these, by Michael Stackpole and the later Wraith Squadron books by Aaron Allston. These were brilliant books. There was a huge amount of homage and information about how the XWings worked from the Rogue Squadron and Wraith Squadron books, although this just added to the character stories in the novels. I’d thoroughly recommend these, if the Timothy Zahn books were the rightful Eps 7, 8 and 9, then these would have been the basis for an excellent series.

About the games ? One thing George Lucas had been aiming for with the space battles was something akin to World War 1 dogfights. So Brain went to some of the flight sim games I have …

Yep. That’s a map of Korea and Southern China …

Luke you’ve turned off your targeting computer

It looked good as well, for the time it came out. Flight sims have been on computers since the early days of the BBC, which had the game Aviator. This one saw you attempting to repel an alien locust invasion in a … Spitfire. Good game. Excel used to have a flight simulator hidden away in it.

Military jet flight sims have been a thing for many a decade too, although they reached a peak and went away after Falcon 4.0. They’d start with a small, artificial map and as the games improved, the map would get more and more detailed. Hills would be added. Towns and other features.

And then Falcon 4.0 models Korea … And has a fictional war break out where the North has invaded the South and you’re a small part in attempting to repel them. Your F-16 Fighting Falcon was fully modelled too with a manual almost 2cm thick. (I will do penance later for abandoning the glory of the Imperial number system).

There was a Bubble system, where the closer you got to places, the more the combat would resolve from Macro scale to Micro scale. This concept turned into flashes on the horizon at long distance resolving into individual missiles flying across the sky as you got closer to the combat zone.

It was a cracking game too, although I didn’t stay in it long enough to learn the systems fully. There was an active fan patching scene for Falcon 4.0 as well until that was apparently stopped in a pre-DMCA style STOP THAT order involving an update called Falcon 4.0 Allied Force.

The next one there is from 2001 and it was a misbegotten Eurofighter Typhoon sim …

As a Brit, I’m more interested in flying what we have instead of what the other countries have and this led me to being very interested in the Typhoon sim when it was released. This saw you as part of a detachment of Typhoon pilots stationed at Iceland … when the Russians invade.

It seemed like a very promising game but was deeply flawed. This covered things like the AI being unable to pilot properly (they couldn’t land at one airport due to a hill in the glideslope behind. But it was also a damage model that was just horribly wrong, leading to needing 2 missiles (Brimstone) to stop each tank. That was annoying.

What really made me bounce off this one was that it was extremely shallow, essentially an arcade game (like the MFDs there) rather than a simulation on the scale of Falcon 4.0. The expansion, Operation Icebreaker, tunneled even deeper into the “Oh you did not do that” level of bad with Super Typhoons on an Aircraft Carrier.

I did manage to acquire a copy of Joint Strike Fighter (the one that turned into the F-35) but didn’t manage to get that playable.

That brings me to the second picture and Crimson Skies.

This was pure arcade sim action, with modernised World War 1 style planes duking it out from airships.

I didn’t play this too much but did enjoy what I did. Perhaps it felt a bit shallow again. One really notable feature in Crimson Skies was being able to skip missions if you couldn’t satisfy the victory conditions.

I managed to finish Tie Fighter and the XvT Balance of Power campaigns but hit solid walls with the campaigns in XWing and if you couldn’t satisfy some really tough victory conditions, you didn’t progress in the campaign. This is how they extended the gameplay time in those days. If you got stuck in Crimson Skies, it would give you the option to skip and progress anyway.

I think I appreciate features like that much more nowadays where I’m more interested in playing through the story than in satisfying some daft GitGud urge. I don’t need to prove the skill, I’ve done that time and time again. (This is why Concussion 2 scared me with the lagged reactions)

I’m there to enjoy the game, especially seeing the story progress.

Brave New World is on the telly at the moment. I’ve stuck with that to see how the story progresses as well and … if there’s a season 2 I don’t think I’ll come back for it. The story has been a bit meh.

I’m hoping that a second season of the lovely Ghost In The Shell SAC 2045 comes soon. It’s the version of that story which I’ve enjoyed most so far. It doesn’t mine into the origin story like the live action movie and it doesn’t lose you in dull, overthought oddness like the older anime. It went for fast, light hearted (most of the time) fun instead.

Entertaining stuff is good. Hopefully the entertainment doesn’t come at the cost of others though ! (There’s a big AAA game out imminently that I will not mention here for many reasons)

On that note … I need food, time to put the dinner on.

Stay safe everyone, be well.