Category Archives: Games

Games

Far Cry 2 Tips

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I haven’t spent enough actual time in Far Cry 2 to call myself any kind of expert on it. Still, from my one play through of the game and miscellaneous advice I’ve gleaned from various forums, here are some tips that someone playing for the first time might find useful:

  • Buying a weapon provides an infinite supply of that weapon from any armoury. Also inside the armoury and each safe house are storage cases for each of the three weapons slots. Whatever weapon you put into a storage case will stay there regardless of where you access the case from. This allows you to arm yourself with a particular weapon while travelling to a mission location and then switch to another weapon at a nearby safe house once you get close to actually do the mission. You do have to purchase the cases as separate upgrades before you can use them.
  • Buying the vehicle upgrades increases the damage it can take while you’re driving it and greatly reduces the time it takes to repair it.
  • Stealth is a completely viable option, especially once you’ve purchased the camouflage suit upgrade. Do note that contrary to what you might expect, sneaking up to an enemy from behind and killing him with the machete is not stealthy because he will invariably cry out before he dies. You need to use a silenced weapon to headshot the enemy for him to die silently. Also note that if you leave the body when other enemies can see it, they will raise the alarm, ruining the stealth option.

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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.

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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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