The Adventures of Lam Laminaus, Intergalactic Suicidal Valet Squid

2011-06-13 by . 0 comments

“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” – Douglas Adams

Extreme Spacewalking

There are two rules to follow when dealing with a Teladi.

  1. Always assume they are cheating you in some way.
  2. See rule number 1.

Unfortunately, it has been a while since I dealt with them and I forgot those rules (excessive consumption of the Earth variant of space fuel probably didn’t help much either).  So here I am, floating in my spacesuit in the middle of some random sector with a repair laser and very far away from Boron space.  Damn those sneaky Teladi.

Read on for: What happened 1 hour ago…

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Filed under Game Diaries

Late to the party: Assassin’s Creed

2011-06-10 by . 4 comments

I’ve never touched upon the Assassin’s Creed series, in fact I know little about it other than a few friends have told me it’s “good”, although I’m not sure if they mean the series as a whole, or a single game, or what. To be honest, I’m not really sure why this one slipped entirely under my radar.

Luckily for me, Steam came to the rescue again with stupidly cheap prices during an offer week, so I managed to pick up the first two games nice and cheap. Let’s see what they’re like…

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Horribly Japanese and a little bit fun.

2011-06-08 by . 0 comments

The Japanese game box

Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale was first released in Japanese in 2007, but was then translated to English in 2010. The game follows a girl called Recette who’s father has run off to get money for his debts (or to run from them). Either way he never came back and you are made to open an item shop in the adventure capital of France with the fairy loan-shark loan advisor Tear.

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The Adventures of Lam Laminaus, Intergalactic Suicidal Assassin Squid

2011-06-06 by . 0 comments

X3: Terran Conflict, or X3TC for short, is the latest game set in the X universe made by Egosoft.  The best way to describe X3TC is a sandbox style free-roaming game in a universe that is connected by a series of jump gates.  Although the player starts out small, they can eventually be in control of an empire that spans the entire known  galactic space with fleets of ships and hundreds of sector spanning factory complexes.  The last time I played X3TC was version 1.5.  Since then, Egosoft has be steadily adding patches and content into the game, which is now up to version 3.1.  Eager to jump in to discover the new missions and content, I’ve decided to fire up the game once again and log my adventure.

Read on for: A new beginning…

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An introduction to League of Legends

2011-05-27 by . 0 comments

History

League of Legends (a.k.a. LoL) is one game that composes the Legacy of Defence of the Ancient game on Warcraft III.

Original Defense of the Ancients (from Warcraft III)

You have one objective: kill the enemy nexus that represents their base core. From your own nexus spawns creeps, sent to fight the enemy team.

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Filed under Gaming 101

Competitive Pokémon Battling

2011-05-26 by . 1 comments

Pokémon is child’s play, right? Between the animé and the adorable plushies sold, it probably seems so. However, the world of competitive Pokémon battling is extremely in-depth, and requires more knowledge than is initially assumed. The first place to visit is Smogon; one of the best resources at your disposal while learning the ropes of battling.

Smogon is German for Koffing - the Pokémon featured at the top of the insignia.

The most important point of competitive Pokémon battling is the idea of tiers. Pokémon are categorized into various tiers, to create a balanced metagame. The tiers are Uber (everything goes), OU (overused), BL (borderline), UU (underused), and NU (neverused). (Unfortunately, at the time of writing, the tiers are still being decided for the Black & White metagame, so the tiers are based on usage rather than actual strength. In a few months, enough playtesting will have occurred that each and every Pokémon properly be placed in a tier.)

When playing an NU battle, only NU Pokémon can be used. In a UU battle, UU and NU Pokémon can be used. This continues until playing Ubers, where you can use every Pokémon. The most commonly played tier is OU, but people sometime tire of seeing the same Pokémon over and over, and play UU battles as well. The reason for these tiers is to provide a scale on how strong each Pokémon is, so there aren’t battles where one trainer has vastly superior Pokémon to another in-battle.

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Storm8 games for dummies

2011-05-25 by . 0 comments

Image from Galactic WaterCooler

Storm8 games, you’ve probably seen them around when browsing the App Store or Android Market. There are currently nine games from them available:

  • World War
  • Racing Live
  • iMobsters
  • Pets Live
  • Ninjas Live
  • Vampires
  • Kingdoms Live
  • Zombies Live
  • Rock Battle Live

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Filed under Gaming 101

Engineering in TF2

2011-05-24 by . 1 comments

So you are tired of getting owned by those darn accurate sentries standing in the way between you and victory, lurking around the corner, more vicious than a spy. You want to get some action. You want to get kills without raising a finger. You want to heal people without holding your left mouse button, or, hell, healing more than one person at the same time! Or, your latency is too high and you’re tired of getting without giving.

You want to be an Engineer. So do I. And well, how can I blame you! The Engineer class in TF2 is awesome. Think of what a great engineer can provide to his team:

  • Teleporters! shuffle people from spawn to the action in a fraction of the time!
  • Dispensers! stationary medics that also replenish ammo and can treat more than one person at a time!
  • Sentries! kill people without lifting a finger! Create a no stabbing area for enemy spies!
  • Alternatively, Minisentries! Annoy the hell out of the other team with small, inexpensive grief generators.

Indeed, you’re so awesome for your team that, for balance, your life is pretty awful.

  • You and your toys become the #1 targets for the enemy team, only bested by ubers.
  • Speaking of ubers, you’re mostly powerless against them. You can’t uber a sentry.
  • You are pretty useless on your own. Your weapons suck. Your health is low. Your wrench is average, until your toys go online.
  • If you aren’t careful, any enemy classes can bring your 3 minutes of engineering into dust in matter of seconds. And you don’t have to take my word for it; that sucks.

Is the frustration you’ll have worth it? Let’s see what the rules of the game are.

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Who has been drawing in the Aperture Science Enrichtment Center?

2011-05-23 by . 0 comments

Remember this from back in Portal?

Somewhere in a hidden room near chamber 17 we suddenly see the following drawings and posters:

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Filed under QOTW

On the Brink of greatness?

2011-05-20 by . 0 comments

Yes, apologies for the cheesy title, but well, it sort of works…

Preface

Photo retail box for Brink PC game

OK, I’m writing this section having not yet played the game. The box is here on my desk – and apparently it’s the “special edition“, which is nice, but I’m fairly sure I only ordered the base game [Actually, I’ve now checked, and I did only order (and more importantly only pay for) the normal version, so apparently that’s an extra £3 of random unlocks for “free”…]. Anyway, it’s waiting to be opened and pushed on to Steam, but the release date in the UK is tomorrow, so I’ll probably have to keep waiting.

Let me just say that at this stage my attraction Brink confuses me. Prior to release I’ve been quite excited about it, but this is strange, as I’ve “gone off” the FPS genre over the last few years. I can’t really put my finger on it, but they just don’t really attract me any more. Sure, I’ve played the Mass Effects and Fallouts, but there the shooting there isn’t really the main focus, so probably the only full-on shooter I’ve played any time recently is Team Fortress 2, and I don’t think I’ve even played that for a months. But, something about this game has grabbed my attention, I can’t now put my finger on what that is right now, hopefully after I’ve logged some play time.

Out of interest, I had a look at some reviews of the game on the web, and they seem to be slightly mixed. A week after the US release, and the PC version was scoring 72 on MetaCritic, which is not bad, but hardly excellent. It’s fair to say that since reading the reviews I’ve been a little bit apprehensive, but will have to wait until tomorrow to try it out myself (and seriously, what’s with the staggered global release dates? Especially when the game’s PC version is Steam only. It just feel’s so out-dated).

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Filed under Reviews