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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.

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.

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.