Minecraft: The Fort

Just to give you a taster of what Minecraft is all about here are a few images from the game McDowall and I started earlier on today.

First up is a shot of our fort from the nearby dried up lake bed. The column of dirt on the left hand side is natural, as is part of the bottom of the fort, but the rest of it was built up in deliberate defiance of Sir Isaac Newton and his puny laws!

Above is the fort seen from further to the west. Not much to look, but not bad for a couple of hours work. Certainly beats the underground hole we were hiding in for the first couple of nights.

A view from the top of the battlements. Most of the lakes down below were created by those damned creepers blowing up in our faces.  You can see a few of the craters scattered about. The whole area seems to be a spawning point for the green swine.

Off to the left of the last shot is the infamous Bridge of Doom (TM) which I built during my first ever go in the driving seat. It was supposed to be a safe route to gather stone and coal, but I ran out of materials halfway across… It’s finished now, but it doesn’t really serve any purpose. Notice the sheep hanging about an abandoned workbench, and the huge creeper blasted hole that leads down for miles just at the right-hand side of the water.

Shogun Fevah

The more I see of the forthcoming Shogun 2 from The Creative Assembly the more excited I get.

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XCOM – Reprised

The man who nearly had a blog has pointed out an article on Blue’s News which reveals that a new XCOM game is in the early stages of development. The XCOM series is one of my all time favourite game franchises, and it’s one of the few that I still own all of the games from so I was naturally excited. There’s already a website up for the game, but there’s only a single screenshot so far, and the blub on the page is already causing my head to shake:

XCOM is the re-imagining of the classic tale of humanity’s struggle against an unknown enemy that puts players directly into the shoes of an FBI agent tasked with identifying and eliminating the growing threat. True to the roots of the franchise, players will be placed in charge of overcoming high-stake odds through risky strategic gambits coupled with heart-stopping combat experiences that pit human ingenuity – and frailty – against a foe beyond comprehension. By setting the game in a first-person perspective, players will be able to feel the tension and fear that comes with combating a faceless enemy that is violently probing and plotting its way into our world.

So it’s going to be a a rip off of the X-Files then, and crossed with Half-Life probably?

I don’t know about you, but that seems like a total let down. Sure I may be misinterpreting the blurb, and there’s not a lot of information to go on of course, but it seems to me that this won’t be a first person shooter in the traditional sense. Nor will it have anything particularly to do with the original XCOM franchise. The player is an FBI agent tasked with identifying and eliminating an alien threat to Earth rather than the commander of a special force dedicated to combating the alien menace.  I take it the developers have done the usual and thrown the original game in the re-imaginatron 2000 and this is the result. No doubt it will also be “gritty”, “realistic”, and have an “innovative control mechanism”.

I’m not at all enthused about the whole project, but out of fairness to 2K and the XCOM franchise I’m going to reserve judgement on the project until I see something concrete examples of in game screen shots and know a bit more abotu the game itself. Speaking about screen shots, there is one on the page and it looks decidedly the wrong side of budget game graphics, but I suppose it’s early days yet.

This isn’t the first time that an FPS has been attempted in the XCOM universe either. Those of you with long memories will remember XCOM: Alliance which was the great white hope of the XCOM franchise. It sadly sank without a trace along with the whole franchise at the end of the nineties.

At least one good thing has come out of this announcement though. I’ve been inspired to dust off my old notes for the xcom TV series scripts that I was working on ages ago.

PC Gamer Freelance Search

I just spotted that PC Gamer magazine are looking for freelance writers.There’s a small snippet giving details in the latest issue (209 Pg.13):

Do you know a lot about games? Do you also know a lot about sentence construction? Can you be entertaining with these fancy word things?

Then you could write for the market leading, world dominating PC Gamer. We want freelancers: people who can write bits of the magazine in exchange for nutritious cash. If that sounds like you, send a 300 word review of a recent PC game, written to PC Gamer’s standards and style, to tim.edwards@futurenet.com, with the subject line: “I am a freelance writer”. It’s worth running a spell check before you send it in.

Seems fairly straightforward, and three hundred words is half an hour’s work at best. Hell this  post is already about two hundred words and it’s mostly waffle as it is.  The real difficulty is getting the style and tone correct. If they’re looking for something that is similar to the magazine’s general writing style that needs a little more effort than banging out a short review.

Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Battlefield Heroes

I’ve been playing Battlefield Heroes the last couple of days. It’s a “free” game developed by EA Digital Illusions (DICE) the part of Electronic Arts that’s responsible for the Battlefield series of games. The game is free to download, and it’s free to play on the servers, but to get access to several items and abilities you have to pay, with real money, for an in game currency called Battle Funds. They don’t confer any direct in game advantages, but they do allow access to fancy costumes for your character and permanent access to different pieces of equipment. Those unwilling to part with their hard earned readies have to make do with earning in game Valour Points which essentially operate in the same way as Battle Funds, but have far fewer purchasing options, and far less purchasing power.

The game is played primarily from a third person point of view, but is otherwise a fairly standard team based; capture the flag first person shooter. The teams are made up of two opposing factions, the nationalists and the Royals, who are rendered into a shiny cartoon parody of World War Two. As a player you have to create a character to take part in the cartoon war. The two sides really only differ cosmetically with the National’s having a distinctly WWII German look about them, and the Royals resembling WWII British soldiers.

As with most modern team based shooters each side is divided into three classes. The Soldier who is the standard FPS run and gun specialist; the Gunner who specialises in heavy weapons and is the tank of the team, and finally the commando who doubles up both as an infiltrator and a sniper character. Naturally all three classes have their own strengths and weaknesses but apart from their superficial appearance both teams are identical in game play and stats.

The object of the game is, naturally, to slaughter the enemy team. Each side starts out with fifty “tickets” which are simply the number of respawns available to that team before it loses the match. The first team to run out of tickets loses the match. To complicate matters there are flags scattered around the various maps that can be captured. The more flags a team holds, the more tickets the enemy loses whenever one of their team is killed. As you kill enemies and complete missions your character gradually levels up, unlocking new abilities as he goes, but the game generally makes a good job of keeping people on the server at a similar level of experience so nobody rides roughshod over the entire game with uber equipment and skills.

All in all it’s an enjoyable romp, but I can’t see myself playing it for long as the selection of maps seems limited and there doesn’t seem to be much team play or strategy going on in any of the games that I’ve played so far.

My Eye is Bigger Than My Wii

I was surprised to find that my wee sister has gone and bought herself a Nintendo Wii. I have to admit that I was fairly sceptical about the Wii to begin with. I actually, perhaps foolishly, advised her against buying one because many of the games seemed very gimmicky at first glance. Having finally played a few different games on the console though I’ve found it very intuitive, and the controls don’t seem all that gimmicky when they’re done correctly. I’m sure that there are quite a few poor games that have badly designed motion sensor based controls that feel shoehorned in to an otherwise standard console control scheme. The Nintendo games that I played on my sister’s machine, Mario Kart and Wii Sports specifically, seemed perfectly designed for the system.

I do still think that some of the available games are gimmicky, but i suspect that’s simply laziness on the part of the developers. It’s easier to throw out a new Wii-Fit-esque clone than it is to come up with something genuinely original. It’s the problem that plagues every form of modern entertainment so I can’t judge the Wii on that any more than I can judge the cinema.  I am worried that when I passed a cursory glance at the latest Wii games available on play.com most of them were game versions of the standard post-Christmas celebrity fitness videos, but I’m going to assume that there are some nuggets of gold like Mario KArt buried under all that shite.

The Elite India Company

I’m really enjoying East India Company at the moment. The game is complicated on the surface, but much of it really starts to play itself after a while. You can set up automatic trade routes between your European base and trading ports in the Far East. Your designated trade fleet will beetle back and forth carrying goods till their heart’s content and you can sit back and watch the money roll in. Well at least for a little while near the start of the game’s campaign. Eventually this jovial veneer of civil competition between the various nations’ East India Companies becomes a mite more cutthroat.

At the moment I think I’ve got more warships than cargo ships as I desperately try to hang onto my lucrative spice trade routes in the face of an aggressive alliance between the Spanish and French companies. The war is slowly gobbling up all my profits as I work hard to replace lost ships, cargo and troops as well as upgrading the defences in my foreign ports. I think I’ll be bankrupt long before I’m finally defeated.

As an aside playing East India Company has got me thinking about an idea for a computer game that I would like to see developed. I don’t know how much mass appeal it would have, but I’m thinking of a sort of cross between Elite, Silent Hunter and East India Company. It would be set sometime in the age of sail, probably between 1600 and 1800, and the player would be the master and commander of a sailing ship operating in a dynamically generated world economy based partly on historical lines. They could act as a pirate against the Spanish treasure fleets in the Caribbean. Sail as a privateer for the great nations of Europe, or be a humble trader trying to strike it rich by importing goods from far flung places. They could also undertake missions, fight in famous battles and struggle against unrelenting storms.

Naturally the player could spend their hard earned gold on upgrades, better crew and a better ship to make life easier and more profitable. They could play from first person standing on the 3D deck of their ship, or hovering with a birds eye view above the action much like in Silent Hunter.

What are you waiting for developers, get writing, and as I came up with the idea I want 10% of the gross like Alex Guinness.

An Expensive Hobby

I’m a greedy man I think as I’m constantly looking at the price of components on ebuyer.com with an eye on improving my PC. I’ve not got much spare cash right now, and with Christmas approaching I’ll need to set some aside for presents, but I’m still plotting and planning and dreaming of a massive upgrade. I know it’s only been about a year since the last time I carried out some upgrades, but I’m planning a more comprehensive overhall this time. The old dual core AMD Athlon that I’ve got is starting to act quite tired, and windows XP is slowly choking to death under the bloat of installed crap that I’ve never got round to removing.

I’ve even gone as far as going through all the review websites and checking out what would give me the best bang for my buck.  Tom’s Hardware and Tech Radar have been particularly helpful as ever. I’ve not gone overboard and went for the best of stuff, but I have tried to pick things that will last quite a long time and dramatically improve the current performance of my machine.

So far my plans are shaping up like this:

Intel Core i7 920 D0 – £214.87

ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 iX58 – £202.30

Antec 902 Nine Hundred Two Black ATX Case – £86.99

Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB Hard Drive x2 – £116.22

Corsair 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz XMS3 – £133.21

Grand Total: – £753.59

Unfortunately that’s far to steep for my current financial situation. In fact for that price I could more or less get the MacBook that I’m always humming and hawing about, or I could even buy a complete computer from Mesh or some of the other specialist gaming PC retailers. Advantages being that I would get the whole package with a warranty, and various other peripherals included in the price.

I’ve already got a copy of windows 7 professional that I bought, so it would be a simple matter to wipe all the preinstalled crap off a shop bought machine and set it up however the hell I like.

The Not So Silent Hunter

If you cast your mind back into the ether of history you might remember me writing that I was keen to get one of the Silent Hunter games (link here if you can’t remember). El Kat was good enough to buy me a copy of Silent Hunter 4 a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been playing it quite a lot since.

The game is difficult to get to grips with at first. Submarine tactics do not come easy when you know next to nothing about their capabilities and limitations. This is confounded in the version that I have by the total lack of an included manual. The sole content of the DVD case is one of those accursed registration cards that seem to come with everything. There is a PDF manual included on the disk thankfully, but you have to go looking specifically for it. I think the lack of the manual is a particular quirk of the specific cheap edition that I got rather than a general thing across all the available versions. Seemingly the collector’s edition came with a spiral bound ship identification book, fancy manual and even a cloth patch to sew onto your clothes.

As an aside I really miss the old days of computer games when the disk came in a big cardboard box with hundred page manuals and a dozen bits of paraphernalia.

There are tutorial levels, but they lack any decent direction or instruction in the operation of the submarine and they’re especially lacking in giving any kind of insight into how to fight a war inside one. Without a manual the learning curve is steeper than the north face of the Eiger, and twice as deadly. The Japanese forces are totally unforgiving and seemingly remorseless in their desire to turn your fragile submarine into a cigar shaped steel coffin. Even at flank speed on the surface it’s impossible for a sub to outrun a warship, and there’s no chance of outgunning one either.

I’ve so far utterly failed to sink a single Japanese warship in the game. In fact at the beginning I was so poor at submarine warfare that I’ve probably made every mistake that it’s possible to make. I set out assuming that I could just said about on the surface until I spotted some enemy ships then dive to periscope depth, sneak up on them, whack a couple of torpedoes into them and sneak away again.

In essence my assumption was correct, but I didn’t take into consideration a lot of the characteristics of submarine warfare. Firstly a submerged submarine is very slow. There’s no chance that you can chase down a merchantman that’s doing anything more than five or six knots. In reality you have to carefully plan your attacks, checking the enemy’s course continually through the hydrophones, periscope and the sonar as you creep towards an intercept point somewhere along their heading. Lesson one is simple, submarines are not active hunters, they’re ambush predators that lurk underwater and strike from a concealed position.

Secondly the faster you go the more noise your engines, propellers and everything else make which is a huge no-no in underwater as sound travels further and faster in water than in does in air and enemy warships are ALWAYS listening on their hydrophones.

Due to the lack of a manual I had no idea what the maximum safe depth I could reach was so I tended to either stay at periscope depth or no deeper than a hundred feet. It turns out that almost all of the submarines modelled in the game have a safe diving depth of at least three hundred feet. Worse it turns out that at periscope depth in the clear waters of the pacific the submarine is entirely visible to aircraft flying overhead. A submarine at such a shallow depth is virtually as visible to warship sensors as it would be on the surface. Worse periscope depth is just the right depth for a passing destroyer to snap the conning tower right off a submarine as it passes overhead. This is usually fatal for the destroyer of course, but it’s just as deadly to the submarine down below.

It turns out that many of the islands in the Philippines and the Japanese home islands have shore emplacements to ward off enemy shipping. I only realised this after I tried sailing through the narrow straits of Selat Sunda between Lampung and Java with the time compression on. I don’t think my men even saw what killed them as the shore emplacements don’t show up on radar or sonar. Strangely their attacks don’t seem to cause the time compression to switch off, or maybe they just got in a lucky shot that sunk the sub the instant before it turned off.

At first I didn’t realise that the Q key floods the torpedo tubes and opens the outer torpedo hatches. If you don’t do this it takes about twice as long to fire the torpedo and as a result you miss whatever you’re aiming at nine times out of ten. In my first patrol I fired sixteen torpedoes and didn’t hit a single ship.

I also thought that Japanese patrol aircraft were only a minor threat to my submarine, until I was sunk twice in a row by a lone A6M Zero fighter bomber. The third time I got away but half of the deck watch were killed, my periscopes were smashed and I had to return to PearlHarbour for a refit.

I made the daft mistake of assuming that all merchantmen were unarmed and surfaced to attack one with my deck gun. Unfortunately for my hapless sub it turns out that quite a lot of them have guns on them. Their gun crews aren’t the best, but a submarine has next to no armour compared to a warship. Yet another short sharp lesson that ended with a trip down to Davy Jones’ locker.

I pressed the wrong button while sitting three hundred feet beneath a Japanese task force that was steaming leisurely towards the Solomon Islands. I’m not sure who was more surprised when I blew the ballast tanks and crashed into the bottom of a battleship them or me. Sadly I learned that battleship armour beats flimsy submarine hull every time and I had plenty of time to reflect on this hard won knowledge as my sub went down to her watery grave.

My skills have slowly improved with each harsh lesson, and I’ve become more confident in the capabilities of my submarine. I’m still making crazy mistakes and taking stupid risks with the lives of my simulated crew, but gradually they’re transforming from sheer lunacy to calculated madness. So far I’ve managed to sink quite a few merchantmen of various sizes, and even a destroyer by accident, but my ultimate ambition is to sink a battleship.

I’ll put up some pictures later showing the game, as it looks cracking with all the setting set on high.

Campaign Ideas: The Rise of Evil

I often regret that I haven’t had more of a chance to indulge in playing RPGS. Unfortunately as I’ve said in previous posts there tends to be a lot of wariness on the part of most people to take part in such a thing. It’s annoying that those selfsame people have no problem with making a fool of themselves playing Wii-Sports or warbling out I Will Survive at the pub karaoke. I’ve never let the lack of players stop me from coming up with ideas for campaigns and scenarios to play through should I ever manage to somehow acquire a new gaming group. My ideas don’t go to waste of course, but they do tend to get half scribbled into a notepad or a half started short story and forgotten for years.

One of the ideas that I’ve had bouncing around for as long as I can remember is a campaign called “The Rise of Evil“.

Most RPG scenarios are needlessly clichéd and episodic. The players and their characters stumble from one loosely related adventure to the next, killing monsters and taking their treasure. Eventually they’re richer and more powerful than most of the kingdoms in their world, but by then most campaigns have petered out through players moving on, or simple loss of interest in proceedings.

The clichés aren’t restricted to the general plot and proceedings either. The villain of the piece is invariably an ancient evil dragon/necromancer/wizard/nobleman/vampire (delete as appropriate) that rules from an impossibly over fortified residence hidden somewhere like the Swamp of Death, Forest of Darkness or Mountains of Pointy. The place is invariably filled with illogical traps, monsters that are inside locked rooms where there’s not enough room for them to turn around, let alone live in comfort, and treasure left lying around in plain sight waiting for a gang of hapless adventurers to come along and steal it.

I wanted to run something a bit different, something that would give the players an involvement in their world and the events that shape it.

The first quest would, by necessity as well as design, be a low level one. A simple search and retrieve, or maybe hunt and slay, mission for a local worthy. Hopefully for tradition’s sake their job wont start out inside a local tavern with buxom serving wenches either.

I have always thought it would be best if the player characters started out as members of the local community. Farmers or artisans within their community rather than a bunch of itinerant adventurers wandering through town. It promotes some proper role-playing in that they have commitments and attachments to non-player characters and institutions that they wouldn’t otherwise have. There’s more of a motivation for the characters when they’re acting in the interests of their community rather than solely for gold and silver. There’s also a greater element of realism involved when they’re focused on a local area and feel a connection with it rather than the usual staple in adventuring where they’re focussed on gathering loot and gaining levels.

The first adventure would see the characters starting out on a fairly mundane day in their small village community. A sudden influx of low level monsters, or the disappearance of an important NPC, maybe both, would see the characters band together to investigate the source of the problem. They would find a forgotten crypt, or crumbling ancient temple in a desolate area of forest near the village and in the course of investigating they would come across several challenges from monsters and the crumbling environment of the ruin. Ultimately they would emerge victorious having removed the threat to the their village and having enriched themselves through gems, items and gold pieces in the process. Mixed into these pieces of loot, and throughout the ruin, will be vague hints of an ancient evil and prophetic statements about its return, ages of darkness, apocalypse, fire, brimstone and all that fun kind of stuff.

I know what you’re thinking: Other than the NPC community aspect this is a fairly generic start to a campaign. Well you’re right it is, but that’s part of the beauty. It lures the players, and as a consequence the characters, into a sense of false security. They believe that they know what’s what from the outset. They’ll naturally assume that the troubles and situations that they encounter are all interconnected and the work of some over arching evil menace that they’ll have to defeat to “win the game”.

Really though what I want to do is create something unique. To begin with there wont be an over arching force of evil in the world. There wont be a conquering army of undead, or a demonic apocalypse. There will just be a party of adventurers that increasingly find themselves called on by the locals to help them out when they encounter a situation that gets out of their depth. In return they bring in wealth and prosperity to their community. All fine and admirable for a group that aspires to be known as heroes.

The trouble, and the core of the campaign will develop slowly and methodically from the smallest seeds. The principle villain wont be an ancient vampire, or a mad wizard or a tyrant he’ll be a local merchant. A merchant made powerful, wealthy and influential by the influx of goods and materials that the characters unwittingly trade with him. His influence will spread slowly, like a black cancer through the community, encompassing murder, extortion, intrigue, theft and intimidation. The worst aspect of his rise to power will be the fact that at first he is an unassuming, country storekeeper with little interest in anything but tending his store and serving the community. The banality of this villian, and the slow rise of his evil would be the difference between this and other campaigns. He doesn’t spend his days cackling in a mountaintop fortress, or hunting down the scattered pieces of the Amulate of Ultimate Power, or even trying to overthrow the rules of the kingdom. He just uses his resoucefulness and lack of moral centre to futher his own petty ends of power and influence.

Mainly I’m taking cues here from figures like Chairman Mao, Mussolini and of course Adolf Hitler. Normal-ish human beings that have taken on monstrous proportions through power afforded to them via legal means. In essense the characters will indirectly create their own greatest opponent. One that is far more dangerous and insidious than a high level mage, and in his own strange way more powerful than a high level fighter all armed and supplied by their own cast offs.

It’s an odd idea, having such a banal villian in what is supposed to be a heroic, almost mythical saga, but I think it’s an interesting premise.

Having written this post I’m now starting to get an itch to start writing these ideas down, and maybe start developing the whole thing for use in the ever popular Dungeons & Dragons.

I wonder if there’s any fame and/or money in this stuff anymore…