A Gaming Diary
PC
SiN Episodes: Emergence
May 13th
Finished!
Took maybe five hours. Round about that long, anyway. Maybe a touch less.
Yeah, it works for me. Five hours of great entertainment, without any game-extending rubbish tacked on, for a budget price. It’s my kind of game.
The next episode preview at the end looks a bit rubbish, actually, but I’ll definitely give it a go.
SiN Episodes: Emergence
May 12th
Well, I’ve spent an hour and a half or so with this evening after some Crossing action with P’anther. Which reminds me, I haven’t done my brain training yet and today is now yesterday, technically. Or today’s tomorrow. I’m not sure. Anyway, I’ve missed a day’s brain training according to the clock. Oops.
Anyway, sorry, Sin Episodes: Emergence. I’m trying to think of a way to describe how good it is without going overboard and definitely without damning with faint praise. It’s a very traditional, linear first person shooter. Some nice physics and a nicely accurate weapon in the pistol and enemies that don’t take millions of hits to kill. It seems to be very finely tuned and it’s definitely very playable.
It’s not jaw-dropping or amazing or the best thing ever, but it is very good fun. I don’t feel like asking for any more than that.
SiN Episodes: Emergence
May 12th
Well, I defragged overnight and installed new video drivers this morning and it’s fine now. Only had time to shoot about eight nasty men with guns and then get twatted round the head by a girder, but it seemed okay.
SiN Episodes: Emergence
May 11th
It stutters.
It loops.
It’s completely unplayable.
Odd, because Half-Life 2 is fine. This just seems to die down to one frame per second whenever it has to play a new sound effect at the same time as moving things on the screen, or something.
SiN
Apr 22nd
Came free with a pre-order of SiN Episodes on Steam, so I thought I’d give it a go. I was aware of it when it came out, but I’m sure my PC was up to it, even if the game hadn’t been notoriously buggy.
It doesn’t seem buggy so far, but it does look quite, quite horrible. However, after a few moments getting used to the feel of the thing, I began to enjoy it. A run and gun FPS with hostages, headshots and helicopters. Being old it ran completely smoothly at a fair old pace. Nice.
But then I got to a bit with security guns firing at me and I couldn’t work out to get past them, so I turned it off.
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion
Mar 22nd
It is a glorious day.
I got out of bed at 5:15am. By 6:00am Oblivion had been installed on my PC.
(I’d downloaded overnight. I have two copies arriving some time this week, one PC, one 360, so I don’t feel guilty about downloading it a day or two early. I had to install some software called Daemon Tools to run it. I hope it’s not going to do anything nasty to my PC. I don’t know much about downloading games and that. I was so worried I actually deleted all the personal information – e.g. Firefox passwords – off my PC before running anything.)
I played it for just over an hour, through the helpful tutorial section (that will no doubt get annoying when starting new characters) and out the other side. On my PC it looks great. Once out in the world I died, a lot. I only had about ten minutes out there and about five deaths. It’s no less harsh than Morrowind in that respect. Do stupid stuff, you die. And I did a lot of stupid stuff, just to test things out. In fact, everything about it is very Morrowind. The combat system’s been changed a bit, the interface has been mucked about with, but it feels just like Morrowind to me. I didn’t, however, see any enemy health bars. Hopefully I just didn’t notice them because I was gawping at the graphics. If they’re not there then I may cry.
Anyway, I had to leave for work, but it’s a lovely sunny day and I read great interviews with Peter Ackroyd and the Pet Shop Boys on the bus and after all the anticipation and build up to Oblivion I now feel sated. Itching to leave work, go home and plunge back in, but at a manageable level. The wait to play it at all was sending me slightly crazy, I must admit.
Now I’m okay. I’m fine. It reminds me of when I used to be a hardcore smoker and lit up a fag after an enforced period without.
And I’m rubbish at sneaking.
Galactic Civilizations 2
Mar 5th
So, the human race finally invents the hyperdrive and travels out into the stars. A few planets are colonized. Contact is made with other races, all of whom seem content to let me get on with things at my own pace.
(I turned them down to beginner difficulty.)
All the habitable worlds in the (small) galaxy are now taken. There’s nowhere else to go. I’ve researched weapons and built some smal fighters that I designed myself. I couldn’t make them symmetrical, unfortunately, so they don’t look sleek or slick, but they’ve got some sort of charm.
Anyway, I’ve got to the stage now where I don’t really know what to do. I’m trying to build up my influence at the moment, but I’m tiching to try out my fighters, too. So I’m researching Planetary Invasion so I can take over some planets. Trouble is, I’ve been playing as a good civilisation, so going to war unprovoked isn’t really in character.
They key word in that last sentence? Civilisation. Or, rather, Civilization, because that what play GalCiv2 makes me want to play. It’s not that GalCiv2 is bad – far from it – but Civilization has a familiarity that GalCiv2 doesn’t. (Yes, I played GalCiv, but this sequel is very different and being all in space, doesn’t have the intuitiveness of Civ.) But Civ4 would need installing and GalCiv2 is already installed and I’m lazy. And after a few games I’m sure I’ll get used to it.
To be honest, putting the difficulty level on braindead might not be the best idea, because it leaves everything up to me. If I had a threat to fight that might focus me.
Elder Scrolls: Morrowind
Mar 5th
So I left Ginis and wandered around until I found myself in Khuul, a rubbish little fishing village that seems to have slumped into the sea. Wandered into a shack and killed the owner for no reason. No idea why I did that at all. He wasn’t doing my any harm. Sometimes I worry myself, I must say.
Down on a jetty someone offered to give me a lift to the island of Solstheim. I was a bit worried as that’s a big new island that was added in the Bloodmoon expansion pack and thus is meant for high level characters. Not sure that level twelve Nord Knight counts. Thought I’d give it a go, though. After the boat arrived I wandered off into the wilderness, getting quite worried when a wolf ran at me. When I killed him in one hit I became less worried, I must say. Found a Barrow, which I picked my way around in the dark, because I wanted my shield out and you can’t carry a shield and a torch at the same time. I killed all the nasty things inside and then lit my torch to look around. Found a big new axe that’s dead good, but it’s a two-handed axe, meaning I can’t use a shield at all if I want to use it. Hmm. I’ll have to think about that.
After leaving the Barrow I wandered back to the large fort where the boat dropped me off. Huge maze-like place. However, as I’m an agent in the Imperial Guard everyone’s either deferential or friendly and I can use the beds, which is nice. The Captain of the place greeted me warmly and asked me to find out why the morale of the men in the fort is dropping so much. Seems to be a lack of alcohol, but I’ve not quite got to the bottom of it yet.
Day Of Defeat: Source
Feb 24th
I want this recorded.
I’ve had this game since it came out, what with buying Half-Life 2 over Steam, but I’d not got around to playing it.
Chose a server at random (more or less, filtered it down to Euro servers that had anti-cheat stuff enabled) and leapt in. Wasn’t sure what was going on at first, but I soon got into it after working out that Assault class characters fit my style of play best. I even recaptured one of our flag point things that the enemy had taken. I learned the best ways round the map for an Assault payer. (Assault players have short range attacks that do a lot of damage. Up-close fighters, suited to interiors. Nasty, brutish and short, basically.) When the map finished, I was about half-way down my team’s rankings. Fair enough.
Then we moved to a different map. I was a Nazi and started in a railway station. This map (dod_surrender?) has three of the flag points and each team starts with one each. The idea – as it is on all maps – is for one team to capture all three. My team kicked arse. We won and won and won and won and kept on winning. Not only were we winning, but I was the top player on my team. Yes, me. The one who’s rubbish at all games ever. I had more deaths than anyone else on my team, I think. I had a fairly low kill count, though it wasn’t embarassingly low. But the list is sorted by the number of flag captures and I was at the top.
Of course, being an Assault trooper I’d be expected to get more fag captures than a defensive player. It’s pretty much my job. But the point is, I was doing it. And not doing it badly. And I wasn’t the only player on my team who was on the offensive side of things.
I was competent.
I think my Counter Strike days are over. For one thing, you respawn when you die in Day of Defeat, so no watching your team run around after you’ve died at the beginning of a round. No worrying about money, either – you just choose your class, which you can change whenever you like.
Excellent.
