Gaming General Update

So what have I been up to this weekend?... Well, on Saturday I spent the day at the Bloomfield campus of Derby College.... A lovely place, but sadly lacking in sign age so myself and the little one I had taken with me god soaked..

Little one?... little one?... But you don't have kids Xel!...

That's right, I don't, instead I took the dog, I took Sid actually and we went on a poodle clipping course... And since then have spent nearly £75 on equipment to start to clip the dogs myself, this is a stop gap measure between trims by our actual dog trimmer, but comes off of the back of having to try to fit dogs needing clips in to gaps in our schedule, our current clipper (an artisan expert) just hasn't the flexible schedule for us to chop and change... So I'm going to learn and fit interim trims in.  Don't worry, she knows all about this, she sold me the powered clipper unit we're going to use :)

In gaming news, I spent £9.99 on the Steam summer sale for the Wargame Air & Land series, including all the DLC packs.  I'd been looking at that game for a while after watching VulcanHDGaming playing it:

So I'm going to be playing that tonight.

I'm also playing H1Z1 Battle Royale with the wife... She's obsessed with that game, still only got second place as our best result... but she loves getting single blast shotgun kills, and yells and screams, and describes it as "arse itching time", when the tension is high.

I've also been enjoying dropping bombs on people in combined arms realistic tank battles in WarThunder.... My current favourite mode to play.

In the vanilla Wow Stuff I'm now level 40 on one of the characters, so ready to purchase the old first mount, when the wife picks a colour I think...

The End of my RTS Kicker

So, having now recovered from the dizzy heights of celebrity offered by appearing on Shut Up We're Talking (hehe, I jest but it was an honour) I've come to the end of something I covered in one of my very early posts, I have come to the end of my RTS replay.

It's been a bit of a roller coaster, I've converged on games which some people might not call RTS, but which I covered as they have some real-time feature, or some strategy facet, or simply because they were not a shooter and I played them during my kicker :)

I started out by replaying an amount of one of my all time favourite games, CIV2. I'm specific in this, it is CIV2. Not that the other games in the CIV series are not excellent, just I have rather a soft spot for the second incarnation. I owned and enjoyed is as pretty much the only game I could turn to for some rest & relaxation while doing my bachelor degree dissertation in the embers of Christmas 1999. I had of course owned it for a long time by then, it had been a birthday gift years before. But I really got to grips with it in 1999, and I remember building massive armies and having a robust AI fight back against me on land. I enjoyed it, I pushed my 486DX2-66 running it to the max.

With CIV5 available now on pre-order, to be delivered next Friday (at the time of writing), I hope to talk the wife into letting me pre-order it this very evening. I however don't hold high hopes for it being as simple, clean and easy to get to grips with as CIV2. Graphical complexity will be massively improved however, will game play simply be more complex? Certainly some of the game play reviews out there suggest it is so.

The next on my list ironically was a delve into a title new for me, which I did blog about in an earlier post “Supreme Commander”. A great game, I'm surprised my grape vine didn't light up more thoroughly with its original release. I enjoyed it, and more importantly, intend to enjoy it some more soon.

Next on my list was a jump to my long past, further back even than CIV2. To Command & Conquer. Oh how many hours did I throw away playing this game? Oh and how glorious those hours were. I'm talking about the original game, which though looking its age, plays well, clearly the time taken to normalize the it for the modern audience into a repackaged form (you can buy the C&C through the decades pack) has been well spent.

Modern game developers could learn a good lesson from the simple clean delivery of audio visual delight that is C&C. Of course the series itself is still going strong, but for me the original game is a classic.

Between those three titles we've been on about three months of play time, and as you can see not all of them belong in the RTS genre. But certainly all of them have a special place in my heart.

The next stop on my adventure was a strange one, Sim City 4. I'm sure back in the midst of time I blogged about this title, or at least mentioned I was about to play it... it's a good game, it's not in my opinion as good as the original was on my Atari ST, certainly unlike CIV2 which eclipsed the Atari ST version of CIV I was playing Sim City 4, in my mind, does not eclipse the original game. It's a fine execution of the Sim series, it is however simply not for me.

And I'm being fair there, this is an old game, no-one is going to really go out there and buy it on purpose, one thing you should be aware of out there however, is that it is coded linked to the speed of your CPU and so on modern fast processors very hard to play. It is also hopeless at understanding dual headed graphics cards with two screens attached.

With three games I love, and one dross one on the pile, I took a bit of a break from my kicker and I played some Eve Online, but slowly as Eve does it waned and I started to play some other games from my past.

First was a replay of Rome Total war, which I consider to be the best incarnation of the Total War concept from Creative assembly. However, also on my shelf was a copy of Medieval Total War 2. A title which at first glance I had dismissed as it played rather badly on my computer of the time.

But, after routing Carthage and conquering leptis magma on the African coast I popped the MTW2 DVD into my drive and went to boil the kettle while it installed.

When I returned, somewhat caffeinated, a revelation was waiting for me. I can't say if it was the graphical ability of my new gaming rig, or whether it was because I was on a high craving RTS games, but MTW2 no longer struck me as an over demanding expectation breaking. No indeed it exceeded my wants and desires and I quickly set about playing my native English nation and kicked the snot out of most all of western and central Europe.



Like all megalomaniacs In history however I soon had a set back, in the game, when the Muslim nations raised against me and struck my borders.

A double barrel load of weeks later and I was cleaning up the highest level of AI, with some surprise at how good it was (though I was sure the barbarians cheated a lot).

Now in the glowing twilight of today I'm satiated, ready to move on, and I wonder what genre of games I might wonder through in the next quarter of 2010. But I don't wonder for long, until I realise my Civ5 pre-order will be taking me back into Strategy gaming...

Supreme Commander

Supreme Commander... yeah... I feel like I missed the band wagon completely on this title, but I'm happy to say that I found it now.

It seems the game has evolved a lot over time, having read the fan site wiki about the game. I have however started off with the original title, referred to as "Vanilla SupCom".

This version has a different veteran mode (a way for your units to be powered up by scoring kills) than later titles, which is apparently harder to achieve [meaning it is a more worthwhile thing IMO, an actual challenge].

The AI is good, I'm a bit of a sucker for fleet/ship battles in RTS games, as such I'm really happy about the variety of units, ocean going, ground based and flying in this game.

It really seems like a rich world, and there are a lot of varieties to strategy in the game, both winning and loosing.

I've so far only played skirmish games, I'm trying to get to grips with everything. Especially the view camera.

The game has vastly higher numbers of positive points to negative, so far, positives are the variety, the challenge of the AI, the resource balancing. They're really intuitive to get to grips with, but with such great swathes of head room so you can experiment with strategy.

The negatives so far are based around my styles of play, first off there's a bug in the mouse... if you have the game full screen on one screen, and say a movie playing full screen on the other (if you're lucky enough to have more than one monitor that is) then as you move the mouse cursor to the edges of the screen; which would scroll the map around; it works find where you physically end your desktop, but that one side which is lined up to the second monitor... the game just lets you mouse float off in that direction and you can't scroll in that direction easily.

This was such a pain in the arse that I ended up playing movies on my laptop and setting my desktop not to extend on to my second monitor while playing (which really is a nod to hod nice this game is, I was willing to change my system settings just to continue to play).

Other bugs also revolve around the camera, I found the zooming out and in a bit strange at first, and the fact you can scroll the mini map in and out just as easily, though a great feature to include, was a big jarring. But once I got my head around it everything was fine.

The next problem was also related to my play style, I often only get a chance to play games late at night, or when my wife is in bed... this basically means on headphones or simply with my speakers off. The net result was I was no idea attacks off screen were going on.

Let me explain that a bit more clearly, there are three (or four - depending on your point of view) of technology in Supreme Commander, you have to upgrade your buildings through the game to get to the different technology levels. Anyway, at the lower technology levels (1 & 2) the attacks your units and buildings can carry out
are somewhat less powerful than attacks at the higher tiers. The higher tiers cause screen shake/earth shakes with their powerful attacks, so with the sound off you know that something is going on... but the lower ones, you're meant to hear a sound and know they're going on. I can't hear this sound.

This is something which begs the question, how would a hearing impaired person deal with this? I at least have managed to rig up some of my electronic wizardry to let me mix the PC and laptop and radio together to let me wear one pair of head phones while hearing multiple sound sources...

All in all though, minor niggles against a great game.

I can see the expansion sets out there for the original game, however, I'm tempted (having read about how they gimp the original) to skip them and go straight to Supreme Commander 2 later next month...

Anyway, this is the second in my RTS fest of 2010. I've not really covered it here, but I really got deeply back into the Total War Series. I've finally managed to conquer the whole world on the hardest AI settings in MTWII, so I've retired from that game (after originally hating it upon it's release - it's not my favourite in the series overall - with Rome Total War a close second).

And as for the rest of today, I'm now going to depart my place of work, and go watch England play Football... England v Solvenia.... "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori".

Retro Avenue

I'm going all retro today, I've just received a whole bunch of games bought with some money I got for my Birthday, thank you Paul!... I have....

SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition, this is really retro, this game itself was released in the early naughties, so it's got to be nearly 7 or 8 years old. But I loved the original SimCity on my Atary ST :) I've fired this puppy up and have a play already. I enjoyed flying a plane around, I loved how even touching a car to another resulted not in a tiny fender bender, but your car exploding like water being thrown into hot fat... and of course I was thrilled to be able to wipe my city from the face of pangea with ligthtening, fire, earth quake, robot attacks, UFO's and alsorts of nasties.

Supreme Commander, I've heard so much about how good Gas Powered games are, and this title did receive a "Must Buy" and better ratings when it came out... So I'm holding that one to play last.

And right now, a game I loved when I played it on my 486SX-50mhz PC way back in the day... Command and Conquer... I loved C&C and Red Alert... I played them until my eyes bled. But they took a real hiatus for me when, as a student, I struggled to scrape together £35 to go buy Tiberian Sun when it came out... and the thing crashed more than an old ZX80! It was a buggy piece of crap. And I was so heart broken.

At the time of this bebarcle with Tiberian Sun the internet was in it's infancy, I didn't have access to "patches", infact I never realised there might be patches out there... I was firmly of the position that software should be right straight out the box [an ideology sadly lacking today].

So, anyway, right now I'm watching the combined installer for "Command and Conquer: The First Decade" install right now... I've just laboriously typed in the six different activation codes for each title I'm going to play... and I'm waiting with baited breath.

More later...

Ventertainment....

I suppose I should give some background to this one, there's a chap, by the goings of "Ventertainme", he had a youtube and 1up profile, and I heard of his fine work through the old GFW Radio Podcast (R.I.P The Brodeo). Anyway, this chap has a sound board, be jumps on peoples vent servers, records them and plays it back to them as a joke. And tonight I checked out some of his archive and this one always makes me giggle, it's a pretty good joke, but the guys he's clowning on take it with such warm good humour. Good Stuff.

Link to Ventertainme's YouTube Channel & the very nice folks getting clowned on while they play together.

Anyway, apart from that, I'm also sorting out a new couple of articles, one is about RTS's and where they're going, especially with Starcraft II just around the corner. The second is about the evolution and progression of FlightSims, especially how things are over at MS Flight Simulator since the staff cuts 16 months ago and what Oleg Maddox is really up to with the IL2 franchise.

And of course, I'm busy playing Free to Play MMO's. Both DDO and RoM still going strong... But can they be my methodone hit to keep me away from the draw of Blizzard's Heroine?

The weekend will therefore see a plethora of posts and game play, see you all then.

In other final news, on a personal note, tonight, just three hours ago, I handed over the last payment of all my student debts... that's it... I'm a free man! So I have a little more wonga lying around... what games can I buy with it... Suggestions please...

Welcome to Eberron

Right well, here we are at my second instalment of my progress with DDO. Downloading and installing the game, in both standard and high quality graphics, is actually relatively painless, indeed it took far less time and was more informative to the progress made than other titles and indeed the obligatory patching and data updating following install went on without a hitch on both platforms I tried.

The only glitch came with I starved the connected of bandwidth, throttling it down to below 100kpbs, I found the updates repeatedly stalled while downloading. But I can forgive their servers that, after all I caused the problem by watching too many Videos of Elmo on YouTube.

Once I logged in, I could select the world [I assume this is the same as realm] to visit, and previously visited realms are highlighted in bold. However, if like me you are on different machines between visits the different machines are not aware of what realms you've been on. As such I missed getting the same character twice for my time on the laptop and desktop PC's.

Creation of the characters went on without a hitch, however, when creating your character you get a few of the action animations being played. Immediately I was struck with how awkward some of these animations look. Characters will spin and swing clubs, dodge, parry and cast... but some of the moments are physical impossibilities. I don't like this much, it's a real turn off to me, I like to see natural looking [albeit cartoon-esp] movements. Not these strange efforts in DDO. Indeed I'd have to go so far to say they look amateurish.

However, after selecting my class, race, sub abilities and look I was ready to go, and after giving my character both a fore and surname, I was on a beach somewhere with a short bloke shouting at me.

Please Note - I added the speech bubble.

Now, this guy grates with me, his speech is voice acted by someone I want to punch, this whiny, adenoid dominated rat faced character is matched only by the most whiny adenoid dominated rat arsed voice acting. [Did I mention that the speech text is not bubbled and comes up in the most basic courier font?]

This is your welcome to DDO, this guy SHOUTING at you, showing how bad the 3D sound system is, because though you see the guy a head and slightly left of you the sound of his voice comes from way left and is VERY loud for someone stood so far away.

He proceeds to cajole you into moving about controls, however, there is a lot going on within the UI, if this is your first view of it then it can be quite daunting. You have an action bar at the bottom, which on default settings is hard to comprehend. You have a text/chat area with more of the bad font being used. You also have a mini-map but also a lot of crowding going on, the interface is not clean looking. It just looks to me like it has a lot of things to explain to me, or rather a lot of buttons I don't yet know about. And I'm not sure what clicking them is going to do. All of which leads to feeling that I'm in a rather cluttered user experience. And, with bars above others, and the position of things I have to just hope that I can change things around because to my untrained, but WoW Conditioned eye the interface in DDO does not appear to take ergonomics into account.

Now I suppose I have to draw on a point raised by Darren Love in the latest edition of SUWT. That is that with Blizzard's domination of the MMO Market with Warcraft, there are certain demands and requirements from a player of an MMO today, which are wants and needs influenced by Blizzard. One of these is a simple accessible learning curve and interface. And I'm afraid to say that though DDO's interface is visible, I don't feel like it is accessible.

Even simple things like popping up hints & tips, or tooltips seem sluggish. On the machines I'm running DDO on, I don't think it should feel sluggish... And these feelings about the UI don't even take into account actually achieving control of my character. I am solely commenting about the UI here. Actually taking control of your avatar feels even more alien.

For example, in World of Warcraft to attack you have to select the target and choose to attack [or you can auto attack with a different control]. In DDO you can stand and suddenly make your character punch air. I have been told that later this all makes sense, but right now to the total beginner it does not, I'm basically looking at an avatar whom is punching thin air and I can't seem to stop them doing it [again because in WOW you have to click something else to stop the auto-attack going on, not so in DDO].

I find this shift in my expectations hard to reconcile. I'm afraid to admit that Blizzard have me well trained, conditioned to jump to their tune... I am Pavlov's Dog for MMO control expectations. *Sobs*

However, I did play a little more of the game, I played through the introduction instance, more about that in my next DDO post.

Now, in other news, I have to blush somewhat. As you may gather from post number 1, Darren Love over at CommonSenseGamer was the inspiration for this blog, and today he has made mention of this my corner of the interwebs as his blog of the week.... I thank you Sir.

For now though, I'm about to take a weeks break from work, I'm going on Holiday! While I'm away I'm going to play some Total War Games... Those of you whom know me as “Lord Xelous” formerly of "The Lords Modding Collective" and “The Lordz Games Studio” will know how, and why, I love the Total War series.