What amuses us and other ideas
Having witnessed it's glory days ago, I now hold the Malformed Fork and it's wisdom should be spread.
I hadn’t noticed, time flies when you’re not watching. Spacecom released on September 17th, so I find I might have a busier weekend than previously expected.
I’ll talk more about it and see about including screenshots or art of some nature later this week. Stay tuned!
Comments closedA quick passing through various sites caught my eye and because I’m not content to just keep some thoughts to myself I shall leave you with some tidbits.
Spacecom is a game of space tactical combat. But on a scale of empire management akin to Chess.
It’s got a simple design and when it releases I’ll talk more about it. For the time being you might check it out.
http://spacecom-game.com/
Comments closedFor little over a year I ran a private Minecraft server for myself and some friends. It was fun, we had some great times, some quiet nights punctuated by “GAH! Damn Creeper!” and a lot of searching. Operating at around 10 players on and off it went well until the release of Landmark sorta eroded my limited playerbase.
I’m not interested in vetting new people so while I could certainly advertise and raise the playerbase significantly I don’t feel that’s my best option at the moment. Hosting is cheap so I’m taking the opportunity to play with some Mod Packs and see what I can change the experience into.
Of the time spent as an admin I learned one important lesson. Don’t give people Op status. I feel I lost a couple people to rapid burnout when they sudden had access to all the tools and toys. Minecraft is a game of survival, discovery and adventure and by granting my players godlike status I shortened the progression and trivialized the challenge.
Minecraft isn’t a hard game in the first place, where the only measure of status comes from proving your cleverness in design or your dedication to large structures. Some projects thrive on people with Creative Mode because they’re pursuing a specific goal. The players over on the Game of Thrones server, WesterosCraft, are rebuilding a whole world. When they’re done, i’m not sure, but I know you don’t approach an idea like that with merely Survival Mode.
For my little friends/family server I think I did myself and them the greatest disservice by granting such unlimited power. Lesson learned.
I have the server up and I still play while I toy with mod packs and wait to see what new ideas come out of Mojang. Sometimes you might find me there, deep in the dark or tending my farm.
C’est la vie.
Comments closedI was into the beta approximately two weeks early from their July 29th release. It had been a while since I was in the cockpit of anything and even longer since I was doing so in space. There are some things you can’t forget easily. How to navigate an asteroid field is not one of them.
That being said I had a blast and I firmly cemented my desire for a joystick that arrived a week later: CH Products Combatstick
It’s more joystick than I’ve ever owned and I like it enough it could easily be the last joystick I ever own. Flying soon turned into an occasion of adjusting keybinds to accommodate quality control layout but I was able to turn my “I don’t know what I’m doing” into “Once more into the Breach!”
I can’t stress how excited I am for Elite: Dangerous, the potential and the quality of design. At present you can slip into full online play, limited group play or solo play with ease. The only difference being how many live humans you encounter in your travels. While EVE was a tactical game of space empires, Elite is showing to be a game of space piloting. I only hit the side of the station 4 or 5 times during my first day of full beta. Since then I’ve had a lot of close scrapes as I perfect my rapid departure technique and lost two ships to unpleasant collisions.
Elite has baked in a fair amount of forgiveness. If you lose your initial ship you have two options: a) The same ship again for a fee including all installed components or b) the newbie/Free ship all over again. For your first few days/hours this “Free Sidewinder” is easier replaced than repaired. I rather pride myself on keeping a ship operating as long as possible but even I gave in to Insurance fraud when repairs were too expensive.
You’ll likely hear more about this as time passes and updates release with more content for digestion. I’m not doing much else these days aside from prepping for the next D&D launch later this week.
If you choose to play look me up under CMDR Johann Vorga, I’ll be cruising the spaceways looking for wanted villains and loose cargo in need of a home.
Comments closedI bought into the beta over a month ago on faith. I’d played Elite back in the wire-frame and low-res days of early computing. It was hard. 200 credits and starting out in space staring at a space station your first hurdle was to figure out how to dock without killing yourself. This was harder than it sounds.
Flash forward some 30-odd years and here’s the original developer under a new name, having built other games in the meantime, envisioning a return to Elite as Elite: Dangerous. Citing their original build of procedural content but small enough to fit on a floppy disk. Flash forward to Terabyte Hard Drives and HD monitors the new incarnation of this game is quite awesome. Following my beta investment I was watching various videos from people involved in their “Premium Beta” antics with docking, hunting pirates and hiding among asteroids. I was enamored with this one video where a player was using voice controls via Voice Attack to adjust power settings to enhance evasion and strafing runs as the need came. Another was in a npc dogfight defending a carrier under harassment by enemies, this player took some opportune damage that cracked his cockpit. Instantly a timer appears “Atmosphere depletion in 10 minutes” and starts counting. Said player lines up for Hyperspace jump and hops out to the nearest station for repairs. The whole time I’m watching with tensed nerves, this could be his death.
As of last week they opened the doors for normal Beta purchasers and I was able to play with a limited list of combat scenarios. The full game will give you a full sandboxian universe to crawl around in but for now I have several combat missions to practice against so that when the gates open we’re got some flight experience under our belts. I’d have appreciated a docking simulator as I’m sure that will kill more people on Day One than anything else.
That being said, I’m having fun. It’s very beautiful, well rendered and laid out. I’m horribly out of practice for dogfighting from my Wing Commander 2 days, but I’m picking it up quick. I ordered a CH Combatstick as the controls all but mandate a real joystick.
If you join Elite, I would love to see you and fly with you. It’s coming with what’s loosely described as three venues of interaction. Single Player, Multiplayer with Friends and Full Multiplayer.
Not quite as tactical and much more deeply sandbox simulator than EVE, if you liked one you might very well like the other and it’s hands-on approach to ship control. I’m about as excited for this game as I have been for anything and when I have a chance to delve into the docking and long-range flight on July 29th you’ll hear about it later that week for sure.
Comments closedOnce upon a time I worked with a person who was Internet Radio DJ for a game in an age when Internet was a newish idea and “Internet Radio DJ” was almost a joke.
I hadn’t touched the game for but a day at the time having rapidly become confused and lost and putting it down for forever. It wasn’t until very recently when a comment thread lead me back to KoL this time with more patience and a hell of a lot of determination.
Notably, it plays much like a MUD with limited actions per day and various rooms you can adventure in as part of your ongoing questing. At present I’m a Level 9 Pastamancer, delving into the dangerous arts of Cannoli Cannons and Ravioli Shuriken. KoL features a strong tongue-in-cheek design and approach, lo-fi graphical quality and the flexibility to play on any browser I can think of.
The game is totally free to play though they do ask for and reward donations with ingame things. For my $10 dollar contribution I was rewarded with a Galloping Grill. There’s a very robust crafting system and several unusually named classes to choose from.
Give it a spin. They have an inviting and unusual community and a ridiculously entertaining game.
Comments closedA mix of strategy, some adventure, simple design. I duno. It’ll probably join my collection next.
Comments closedAnd in one fell stroke Lords of the Fallen falls off my must-have list. Previously hailed as Dark Souls meets Fantasy-Borderlands now is more Dark Souls oriented with a difficult single-player story.
I’m sure it’ll be good, but not quite for me.
Comments closedAnd testing my patience. This video has a fairly clear rant on what’s wrong.
(I should warn you, the youtuber is vocal about his dissatisfaction and uses some colorful vernacular.)
If it weren’t for Sims, after Sim City I would have given up on EA entirely. I’ve cut Ubisoft out of my life, there’s a lot of great games out there that I think I could do it again. Though I’d prefer not to test my limits on this. That being said, if you walk into any FPS franchise in the middle, intelligently choose which game to play and vote with your wallet it’s not so bad. But when you start looking at the underlying details it gets ugly.
Comments closedE3 happened or is happening and games are displayed in their vestigial stages, cocoon only barely opened, to give us a glimpse of their final form. It should be no surprise I’m a great fan of Minecraft. In that vein I’m also a fan of Space Engineers and Limit Theory. All games featuring some level of sandbox-freedom and procedural design with near-limitless exploration potential.
These aren’t games you ‘finish’ but merely put down for a time in favor of more present concerns like food or water. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve invested into Minecraft nor how many more will go into Limit Theory. So far there doesn’t seem to be a lot of information on ‘Sky, but if it comes for PC you can bet it’ll find a home on my shelf of “Endless Fun”.
Comments closed