Category Archives: Games

Games

A Game: Far Cry 2

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Out of all the things that have been said of Far Cry 2, one single line by Kieron Gillen resonates most with me: this is one awfully brave game. Consider, for example, that you likely spend more time driving around dirt paths than shooting at enemies. Or that in a game that is supposed to present you with a realistic recreation of Africa, the only people who populate it are invariably and implacably hostile to you. Or that instead of drawing inspiration from Hollywood action movies like so many shooters do, the source material here is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

All this is brave because Far Cry 2 is unashamedly and undoubtedly a shooter. Given the goals it tries to accomplish and the design elements it tries to incorporate, one would think that it would make more sense for it to be a role-playing game or an action adventure game. But it’s not only a shooter but a first-person shooter with all of the conventions and controls of the genre. You move around with the familiar WASD, right-clicking zooms in on an enemy, use number keys to select weapons and generally try to kill everyone in sight. There is no Gears of Wars style cover system. If you want to take cover from enemy fire, you manually move to put an object between you and the enemy just as you did back in Doom.

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Games

Making mazes in Defense Grid

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I’ve been slowly making my way through Defense Grid, the tower defense game that I posted about a while back. I’m down to the last two maps, but I’m holding off finishing them until I go back through every single previous map and get at least a Silver Medal on all of them. My wife loves watching me play this game and both of us enjoy figuring out the best way to build a maze on each of the maps. Most of the time though we’d come up with a pretty good maze for a map, then go search on YouTube for a video on how the real experts do it, and then kick ourselves for missing something that seems so obvious in retrospect.

Then when I go look at the leaderboards, I get absolutely blown away by the top scorers. Someone tell how is it possible to get more than 200,000 points and to place nearly 300 towers on a map? Cheats?

Games

The Dark Heart of Africa

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I’ve been looking to play something a little more actioney and a little less cerebral after finishing Space Rangers 2 earlier this month. Ideally, I’d be playing either Grand Theft Auto IV or Saint’s Row 2 right about now, but the PC ports of both of these games turned out to be nothing short of awful. I’ll probably break down and get one or both one of these days anyway, but not right now. Far Cry 2 wasn’t a game that was originally on my must-buy radar at all, but it generated some very interesting and conflicted discussion on QT3 and Tom Chick named it as his best game of 2008, so that’s how I found myself in the dark heart of Africa.

My first impressions of the game after its version of the introductory tram ride: man, is this game hard or am I just getting old? As per standard procedure when playing any type of shooter, I’d turned the difficulty level up one notch from normal. This is a habit I’d developed as shooters have become more and more mainstream and consequently easier. But at hardcore difficulty Far Cry 2 was kicking my ass without breaking a sweat. I’d be minding my own business in the jungle, come under fire and end up dying in short order while I’m running around like a headless chicken trying to see where the hell the bullets are coming from. I’m not ashamed to say that I quickly dropped back to normal difficulty. Things are much more manageable now, but still challenging enough that  get killed regularly if I’m just a little too reckless.

Other than being difficult, the game is also incredibly immersive. I’d followed the prevailing advice on QT3 and turned off music in the game to enhance the effects. I’ve actually been in Africa before, and I agree that this game nails it. Claustrophobic jungle trails that force you to rely on audio cues to know if any enemies are nearby. The overwhelming hugeness and openness of the savannah, so vast that it seems land and sky are joined and the world is a bubble around you. The graphics are quite Crysis level quality, but the fantastic environmental effects, day-night cycles and far greater variety in landscapes more than make up for that. So far, it also seems like it’s going to be quite a bit longer than Crysis or most shooters, so it’s looks like I’m going to be stuck in Africa for a while.

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Games

Space Rangers 2 AAR Part 4

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Yay, finally done with Space Rangers 2 in the year 3330. The only way to defeat the Dominators once and for all is to eliminate the three bosses: Keller, Blazer and Terron. The main way to do that seems to be researching them by gathering parts from destroyed Dominator ships and handing them in to a scientific base. The more materials you hand in, the faster the research rate will be. The other way is to confront the bosses directly and defeat them in combat. As you’d expect, this is pretty hard as each of them has a ton of hit points, and the Dominator-controlled planets nearby will spawn an infinite stream of Dominators to protect the bosses.

As seen from the screenshot above, I’d managed to climb to the top of the rangers rating chart by 3324 after concentrating heavily on hunting and destroying Dominators, also becoming the most Distinguished Fighter in the process. It was also at around this time that the Coalition forces managed to whittle down the area controlled by the Dominators to just the three systems occupied by each of the bosses. I made a conscious decision to target the Keller boss first. This was because while the other bosses could only launch attacks against systems adjacent to their own, Keller has the ability to attack systems through black holes, allowing its forces to strike behind the Coalition’s lines, so to speak. This made it very annoying to have to constantly travel away from the front lines against Blazer and Terron to rescue a system attacked by Keller.

Continue reading Space Rangers 2 AAR Part 4 →

Fun, Games

John Dvorak needs to learn “WASD”

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UPDATE: Apparently I forgot to add a link to the article in question the first time around. Added now.

So when was the last time PC Mag columnist John Dvorak wrote something that wasn’t pure idiocy? Here’s a line from his latest:

And when you try to take on one of these games as an adult you soon realize that there is too much weird crud, like “hit the A button while moving the joystick forward while pulling the trigger while moving the mouse with your right hand and left clicking.” That’s just to walk forward!

As someone on QT3 posted in reply, all I need to do on my keyboard is press “W” to walk forward. Perhaps Dvorak needs to get himself a better keyboard. And which game needs you to use both a joystick and a mouse at the same time? Even the use of the word “joystick” reveals how out of touch Dvorak is. It was emblematic of the Atari 2600 days, but now that flight simulators have been relegated to a niche enthusiast community, few people actually use joysticks now. The closest modern equivalent are the sticks that are now selling out due to the recent release of Street Fighter 4, but those are now called “fighting sticks”.

Also, look carefully at the last line of his column:

A game like Garage Band or Guitar Hero isn’t the answer. But what is?

Uh, “Garage Band”? Someone should take this guy to one side and kindly explain to him that he’s just making a laughingstock of himself at this point.

Games

Space Rangers 2 AAR Part 3

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Lots of combat in my ongoing Space Rangers 2 game from 3307 to 3312. I’d finally managed to join a proper military operation to liberate a system in the game, but while it was success, taught me to pay attention to which system is actually being liberated. You see, these operations start by docking with the military base organizing the expedition. When you agree to join in, you’re placed in suspended animation until the date and time of the attack, and then the entire base warps into the target system held by the Dominators. Then everyone undocks from the station and proceeds to kick Dominator ass.

The battle itself went well enough, as by that point I’d upgraded to a great combat ship with max weapons slots and a special +15 to shields, which means any incoming damage is reduced by a further 15% in addition to the base defense of my shield generator. I did need to redock with the station for repairs once, but overall, destroying all of the Dominators garrisoning the system was fairly easy, and I happily hopped over to one of populated planets to be properly congratulated and feted.

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Games

Space Rangers 2 AAR Part 2

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Just a quick update on my Space Rangers 2 game from the year 3303 to 3306. As I noted in my previous post, I’ve been meaning to get more involved in combat, and this I did. Combat in this game isn’t terribly involved. Each ship has a limited number of weapons slots, from 1 to 6, and basically the more weapons you mount, the more firepower your ship can muster. Your accuracy and mobility skills make a big difference of course, and your defensive options including armour which blocks a fixed amount of damage and shields which block a percentage of all damage, but in actual play, it’s a simple matter of choosing a target and shooting it until either one of you dies or someone runs away.

This process is prolonged by the fact than any combatants can always dock at a friendly planet or base to make repairs. This means that very often, actually destroying an enemy can involve chasing it down, shooting it until it’s smoking at which point it’ll run to get repaired and you’ll need to wait until it takes off again. Repeat until you destroy the enemy or it runs out of money for repairs.

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