I’ve been mucking around with the copy of Space Rangers 2Complete that I bought at the beginning of the year when it went on sale on the Impulse platform for a measly US$3.99. This was a game that I’d briefly tried when it first came out, and though I really wanted to like it and loved the very idea of it, I was put off by its opacity and how unforgiving it can be. The chorus of acclaim for the game on QT3 convinced me that persevering with it would be worth my while, and since I’ve never written a After Action Report (AAR) on any game before, I thought it would be fun to keep a sort of diary as I make my way through the Space Rangers 2 world.
You start off by creating your character, a freelance Ranger tasked with defending the galaxy against the incursion of the robotic aliens known as the Dominators. The game takes place in a galaxy that’s dynamically generated every time you start a new game and you’re free to either take the fight to the Dominators as you’re supposed to, or do your own thing. It’s as open a sandbox as anyone can imagine. For me, since this is my first playthrough, I’ve decided to play my usual goody two-shoes with the intention of building up my character and ship until I’m strong enough to take the fight to the Dominators.
This is just too awesome for words. Quoted from the page:
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My problem is that I can never tell if campaigns like this are serious or a deliberate attempt at humour. I know, I know, I’m a sick, sick person.
Again, I’m a little late on this one, so apologies. Three articles for this one, two on different aspects of human nature, and one on cloning. It does seem that I’m focusing a lot on biology these days, but that’s because such articles are more interesting in how they shed light on the human condition and have more potential to fundamentally alter how we view life and the universe than yet another article showcasing some new technological development.
The first article is from The Economist and deals with measuring the difference between the levels of prejudice that people admit to and that they actually seem to have. It summarizes the findings of two different groups of researchers, one at the University of Chicago and the other at York University in Canada, who looked into the matter.
Since I knew I wouldn’t have access to my gaming PC over the Chinese New Year holidays, I made sure to have something to play on my PSP in the meantime and the game I picked was Armored Core: Formula Front. I’ve had an eye on this game for a while now but couldn’t find an English language version of it and playing such a complex game without being able to understand the on screen text was completely out of the question.
I’m normally not a fan of Japanese games, so I had to look it up to know that Armored Core refers to a fairly well established mecha action game series. This PSP version involves mecha as well, but the twist here that made me interested in this title in the first place is that you’re not really supposed to manually pilot the Armored Cores, as the mecha are known. Instead, you’re supposed to put together your own stable of ACs from a collection of parts, devise a strategy for them and the AI will try to implement your strategy as well as it can in a series of gladiatorial one-on-one fights against ACs from other teams. This makes it more of a strategy game than an action game as success depends on finding the optimal combination of parts to make an AC that’s well suited to carrying out a particular fighting strategy against enemies with specific builds and strategies of their own.
Obviously, I’ve been away for a while during the Chinese New Year holidays. My wife and I spent three days in Penang with my parents. This was mostly to make my mother happy because she grew up on the island and wanted to see the familiar places and sights from her childhood again. This made this more of a trip out of duty rather than pleasure for my wife and myself, but it was an okay experience overall.
My parents were particularly pleased with the Penang food though personally I could have gone without the ridiculous crowds and extremely poor service. Other than that, we did the usual rounds of meeting friends and family while in Kuala Lumpur. The only interesting thing that I did was installing a new ATI 4670 graphics card for my nieces’ gaming computer. We’re back in Kota Kinabalu now and happy to be reunited with our dog Spidey. We’d left her at a boarding school and she’s lost some weight and has shed quite a lot of fur while we were gone. I think it was more out of being miserable at being left alone than because she was treated badly, but she’s delighted to go back to our normal everyday routines now.
Considering the number of posts I’ve written about Fallout 3 already, an official “review” of it wouldn’t be appropriate, so I thought I write a summation of my final thoughts about this game. First up, this is easily the most controversial game of 2008, at least within the gaming community itself. On the one hand, the game has been an undeniable success, selling faster than Bethesda’s previous hit Oblivion and selling more than all of the previous Fallout titles combined. Its review scores are uniformly high across the board, with the PC version in particular being widely recognized as the best across all platforms. This last part is especially impressive given how badly the PC ports of games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Saint’s Row 2 have since turned out.
On the other hand, ever since it was first announced, this game has spawned a small but extremely vocal gang of detractors. Explaining the full history behind all this animosity would take far too long, but the short version is that they call themselves diehard fans of the original Fallout games and are disgusted that Bethesda bought the rights to make this game when, according to their sense of justice, it should have been made by the group behind the original titles. It’s not like there’s no substance to their arguments, but the sheer spittle-spewing vitriol of their attacks makes them look bad, and not unlike what you may find posted on sites like Free Republic and Hillary is 44 on Barack Obama’s inauguration day.
Someone posted a link to this photoblog on QT3 and I now intend to check it regularly for updates. It’s collects examples of badly used English in situations that make it humorous. Check it out. It’s awesome.
