What happened in my first run through once I had shaken off the tutorial part was that things were going well (this was on normal difficulty) but panic levels were rising across the globe and I didn’t have enough time or money (designated as §) to build enough satellites or satellite uplinks (or the better nexuses (nexi?) that you get later) to cover all the panicking countries. Then I had a bad mission which put most of my experienced soldiers in the infirmary. Then the next mission the aliens were swarming out and killed most of my team. Then the next turn the world exploded in global panic and I lost council members.

At that point I decided I had almost and essentially lost the game, so I started a new one. Again on normal but without the tutorial. The same thing happened, after a while of doing fine as far as I can work out, the missions suddenly get very spammy in terms of alien (‘X-ray’) numbers, my teams get very injured and I end up going into an unavoidable (because if I skip it countries will panic and leave the council) tricky missions with mostly rookies, and get slaughtered.

Now I have seen gameplay footage on YouTube (let’s players I follow and I like to see play) of the game on classic ironman difficulty (this seems to be a popular difficulty level to LP the game, or even play it at for better gamers than I). As far as I can see the number of enemies that come out and/or are on the map at the classic difficulty seems to be the same as on normal (and on easy, as I will go into below). So I guess they are tougher at the higher difficulties? You get fewer §s? I suppose I could look that up sometime, but I am just playing the game at the moment, and the only ‘cheating’ I am doing is to watch other’s LPs of the game.

So after a couple more runs that suddenly went to poop in the proverbial, I lived up to the title of this blog and lowered to easy difficulty, which is where I am now. Things seem to be going to same way though, I have got to the point where half the world is on four panic bars (i.e. one bar off total panic and leaving the council) and I don’t have any satellites or nexuses or uplinks ready for days. Half my experienced soldiers are in the infirmary, and a couple of my really good ones died. I have no support! Which means a lot fewer medkits. Which means … yes, more will die next time. Blah. Then global panic and losing the game. I am not even that far into it.

This is obviously mainly due to me being terribad at the game, and I just need lots of practise I guess. So onwards to death and practise until I start getting on better with things. I do feel somewhat sheepish that I am being seriously challenged on easy difficulty. However, I am having a lot of fun and really like the game, and that is what is important. If you like turn based strategy you probably already have the game, but if not keep an eye out for it on sale or something. It is really good, PC bugs notwithstanding.

Actually, I might have a final word on those bugs. The firing animations are a bit glitchy, but this only affects what you see rather than what happens. Similarly looking around the field of combat might give you the wrong impression as to possible and not possible firing angles. The probability to hit numbers are correct, when you go into ‘fire’ for a soldier. But sometimes it seems like they can fire round corners and through walls, and other times it seems that they can’t make shots when from the positioning of them, the enemy and the street furniture or building walls it should be an easy high probability shot. Believe the numbers, and treat the representation of the buildings as just being guides.

The other thing is that the save games sometimes look like they don’t work – I had to look down the list of saved games carefully, trying to work out which one I wanted (usually obviously the last one from when I left off playing before) from the date and time. It doesn’t put the last one at the top or anything logical, the list appears to be randomized. It also appears to maliciously autosave just after a death or three, and not autosave at the start of a mission.

The gameplay is great though, and the game is very enjoyable. So onwards to hopefully get better. I realise that the required change in strategy is somewhat obvious from the above post, and writing this post has clarified that. To wit, build more satellites (and nexuses etc.) earlier and often. So I will do that in my next run through if the current one fails. I have also found an ‘XCOM Enemy Unknown top ten hints’ article that I kept from a PC Gamer magazine so I might break my little rule and read that at least, to try and help. The first hint is to build more satellites, earlier and often so that matches nicely!

Skyrim

My character and what she did in Skyrim

Seithaer, a Bosmer

A screenshot on Steam of Seithaer, a Bosmer (wood elf), my Skyrim character as she first started out after escaping the initial situation and getting out into the world. If you want to see, and if the screenshot is still there when you read this long after I posted it! I have a tendency to choose female PCs when given the choice, as the vast majority of games (without said choice) have male PCs. Also the faces looked better (to me) for the Bosmers for the female choice when I was creating the character. I do get criticized for playing female PCs when I am male, but I am not sure I follow the logic of said criticisms. I am not ‘me’ in games I am playing a game where the main character is some sort of fictional character. Seithaer is an elf, in a fictional land called Tamriel, so I really don’t see why her being female is ‘unrealistic’ because I am male. Variety and choice, and being able to control and change aspects of the game are what makes video games fun really.

That screenshot as I said is an early one. By the end of the game she was in full Nightingale armour (spoilers at that link by the way) and was carrying around two enchanted bows and four enchanted one handed swords, all with different effects for use in different situations. By then I had stopped picking up loads of loot and was quite well off for septims (money/gold) so wasn’t bothered by the fact that she was weighed down with a small armoury with not much room left for looting stuff! She had excellent lockpicking and sneak skills, was proficient with light armour and one handed weapons. Some magical skills mainly in restoration – running away healing myself a fair bit tends to increase restoration!

Skyrim’s character development is very open, certainly compared to Morrowind’s (I own Oblivion but haven’t played it yet), so your character can develop along lines that seem natural as you play the game. As opposed to trying to work out in advance how your character might develop and then having to pick major and minor traits to suit what you think is going to happen. I quite like the way Skyrim does this, as in Morrowind I can remember I restarted it a few times and re-did the starting stats and/or race, as I ended up realising I didn’t appreciate how the game works exactly, and my character wasn’t quite what I had intended. I do realise that the Morrowind way of doing RPG stats is more traditional and possibly ‘less casual’ if you want to get sniffy about it.

What she got up to

I played 95 hours in Skyrim, beat the main quest line, the companions quest line, the dark brotherhood one, the thieves guild one and the mage college. I say ‘beat’ because once you have done with the primary quest line you have infinite ‘radiant quests’ where the game will keep generating randomized little missions for you to do (see next section). I also went through a lot of the side quests you pick up just by wandering around, talking to people and so on. Some I didn’t like the look of so never continued with them but I get the impression that there are a lot more I could do – I know there are a lot of places Seithaer hasn’t found, with bandits and worse to clear out if she wants to. Side quests, little stories to follow and much more.

I (well, Seithaer) sided with the Storm Cloaks but I wasn’t too sure about that as things developed. If I play the game through again with a different character (which I may well do sometime) I might choose the Imperials to see how different it is. I won’t go into details about any of the quest lines here for reasons of not spoiling too much, just in case someone lands here who hasn’t finished the game. But the short version is that Seithaer spent 95 hours of gametime in Skyrim and that was with not taking her time. Towards the end I really was just going fairly quickly through the main quests, using fast travel a lot, not taking my time in battles and so on. Which leads to the next section.

About the game

This is a huge game. As stated above after 95 hours I think there is a lot of Skyrim left unexplored. But after so much time, and having beat the main questline(s) I felt it time to move on for a while to something else! I could probably spend another 100 hours in there doing all ‘new’ stuff with the same character, never mind starting another. This huge amount of possible content is partially because of the radiant quest system which means that the game can be literally endless should you continue playing it. See also Radiant A.I. and Radiant Story (linked from the bottom of the radiant quests wiki page) for more on this system in general. The radiant systems used by Bethesda in Skyrim worked quite well I thought, and makes for an immersive RPG in that NPCs know about things you have done – although they do seem to have somewhat psychic abilities to determine your entire history just by being in the same town as you. That is somewhat true of CRPGs in general though and would be hard to avoid from a gameplay point of view.

However, I will say that this leads to a lot of the small quests and dungeons in general being very similar. In addition although the overworld is huge and open, each individual dungeon is very linear and follows a very similar pattern, with some variations. This is fine if you like the gameplay of the dungeons but it did get a little boring towards the end. Do note that ‘towards the end’ was after a lot of hours though, so it obviously wasn’t a big problem or that boring! You can tell I really liked the game just from the play time. I started out exploring, walking to places, admiring the scenery, investigating every structure and map marker thing that showed up on the hud/compass. Towards the end of the game though I was fast travelling to the next destination in the quests so I know there is a lot of stuff between those destinations that I will have missed.

Not using fast travel, and doing the travelling the old fashioned way – walking, horses, using carts – would be both entirely possible and take a lot of time. If you like the world of Skyrim in this game and just want to spend time in it, then it is entirely possible to do just that. I have seen stats of gamers with over 1000 hours in Skyrim, and I can totally understand how they got to that number. By comparison Morrowind didn’t have a fast travel system, and you could only walk or use silt striders (i.e. the equivalent of Skyrim’s horse and carts between cities) so this slower method of exploring is again the more traditional way of playing RPGs. There are a lot more incidental structures and dungeons in Skyrim than in Morrowind though. I will say here that I also really like Morrowind, and sometime I will reinstall my GOTY edition together with the Morrowind overhaul and have another go at it, with all the mods and fixes in place from that package (works on Windows 7, higher res graphics and more).

One thing Skyrim does share with Morrowind though is the not-very-good combat. The archery was a fair bit better but the sword fighting was only somewhat better, it still seemed like a lot of vaguely waving the sword about in front of you and sometimes the enemy’s health goes down and sometimes it doesn’t. It has a slo-mo killcam in it too, which was sometimes nice to see and sometimes not. I left it on though so it wasn’t that annoying to me, but I can see why some others dislike it. I will have to play Obvlivion sometime as it is somewhat strange to have missed out that one in the series (I won’t bother with Daggerfall or Arena though). The magic was good and felt effective, like things were really happening. Ice bolts in particular were spectacular with a loud unnatural ‘thwack’ noise as they were launched and an eye opening effect if a hit was scored, with a huge icicle sticking out somewhat ludicrously from the person that got hit. I say ludicrously because you would often see an enemy (or NPC, or companion/follower, or your PC) still running around unhindered with an two metre massive ice spike completely piercing them through. Or several ice spikes, plus a few arrows, plus they were on fire, plus … etc. All good fun though!

The follower AI and pathing left something to be desired though. Followers would have this habit of blocking a doorway you wanted to go through and refusing to move at all, you could push them, jump up and down, and … nothing. They would stand there and mock you – shrugging in a ‘what now’ gesture or just saying ‘ow’ if you ran into them. This problem is well known, and was extremely irritating at times.

It is a good game if you like the gameplay, and can cope or not mind, or even enjoy, the linearity and sameness of a lot of the dungeons. A lot of people agree with that as it is very popular, and to be honest if you are reading this still you probably don’t need to be told this!

Mods

As I play on the PC I have access to mods for games that support them. There are a lot of mods for Skyrim so kudos to Bethesda for allowing and/or supporting modding. Other Elder Scrolls games have mods but Skyrim seems to have a lot even by comparison with Oblivion and Morrowind. The mods can be used to fix some of the issues with the PC port being very much a port from the console versions, especially with the UI. Here are the mods I used with the game for most of my play:

• SkyUI
• UFO – ultimate followers overhaul
• Race menu
• Unread books glow
• Summon followers

I also tried out some others and tracked and organized all those with the Nexus mod manager. SkyUI is a much better UI for mouse use on the PC, and summon followers was really good for when your follower gets stuck in the landscape somewhere. With UFO you can have more than one follower. I will admit to playing silly buggers and having half a dozen at one point – I would be approaching some enemies and the moment one got aggroed all my followers would charge in and kill everything in sight. Yes this totally unbalanced the game and I would not recommend play with more than one or two followers at once, but it was a lot of fun to do that now and again. Wander about with an overpowered (as there were so many of them) band of warriors, mages and what not at your beck and call. Having more than one follower means that the pathing and AI problems mentioned above would sometimes get ridiculously bad, so that is another reason for not going nuts on follower numbers unless you do want to go nuts for a bit. There is a reason why the vanilla game only allows for one follower at a time!

Tomb Raider

For why I gave up (at least for now) on Tomb Raider Legend see my previous post Tomb Raider Legend and rage quitting it. I have decided to leave Legend for a considerable time, long enough so that I can start it again from the beginning. The next Tomb Raider game I will play will probably be Anniversary. However I have bought (in a Green Man Gaming sale) Tomb Raider (the new reboot) for a massive discount, it cost me just a few pounds. So I might even have a bash at that. It does look like a good game, albeit very unlike previous (traditional?) Tomb Raider games.

Next?

I am playing XCOM – Enemy Unknown at the moment. You can read more about me buying this game and why I liked the look of it in my previous posts XCOM Enemy Unknown, and an update. Well I have finally got round to playing it properly as opposed to just poking at it, for want of a better way of putting it. I am playing on normal difficulty with the tutorial on. I must say that the tutorial ‘mode’ is actually a bit frustrating as it doesn’t explain the why and how of things, or just suggest you follow one option with reasons why – it actually greys out the options it thinks you shouldn’t be doing next and just forces you down one route. Probably the best route for a beginner, but without an explanation of why you should be doing ‘this’ next instead of ‘that’ you don’t really learn much. It is also patchy on the hows of doing things too. I actually learnt a lot more when I got the the mission where the tutorial mode backed off and I could click around and explore the game.

However, judging by other gamer’s experiences when they get into XCOM I daresay I will be doing multiple run throughs, and I can drop the tutorial mode and try out different strategy and tactics. Hopefully upping to classic difficulty once I stop being terrible at the game. So many deaths in the early missions so far, and I get surprisingly attached to, and feel sorry for when they die, my randomly generated soldiers. I daresay a blog post on XCOM will happen when I have played it a lot more and have something to say about it, so I shall save my minor criticisms for that. Overall the game is excellent with really interesting and enjoyable gameplay, so far.

After that comes my pile of shame (mostly on Steam due to sales) which includes Bastion – another game that I am not sure why I haven’t got round to playing it yet as I have been looking forward to playing it since I bought it.

Spoiler warning for Tomb Raider Legend – I daresay very few people are worried about spoilers for that game as it is fairly old now, but just in case.

Tomb Raider Legend

If you examine the links on the right of the home page of this blog you will see a few Tomb Raider ones, including a Tomb Raider category for blog posts. I like the Tomb Raider games and was looking forward to playing Legend again. I say again because I have played it before, back when it came out, though I don’t think I finished it. I don’t know if my gamer skills have rusted badly in the meantime, or I was wearing rose tinted spectacles, or if the game just hasn’t aged well – but I had a frustrating time with it in places and I don’t remember being that frustrated with it before! I originally had the game on retail disc, I couldn’t find that so picked up TR Legend, Anniversary and Underworld super cheap in a Steam sale. Within a week or so of buying them on Steam I of course found the discs – yes I also had Anniversary and Underworld. Ho hum. Still, it is good to have retail discs as well in case Valve ever delete my Steam account on a whim (which happens albeit not often).

This post will probably come across a bit whiny, so I will say up front that most of the game I really enjoyed – the frustration was coming from some control issues, especially with vehicles. Vehicle controls seem to be my nemesis in games, I do have trouble with them more often than not (depending on the game, some are absolutely fine). Possibly the control problems are from using a mouse and keyboard not a controller, but I am usually much more comfy with mouse and keyboard with most games as long as they are reasonably well supported. Perhaps when I played it before I was on the easiest difficulty, though I don’t think so. This time round at least I played on ‘adventurer’ difficulty which was medium or normal – the easy setting is called ‘explorer’ and the hard setting is called ‘tomb raider’ (of course!). However this frustration with some parts of the game has lead to me stopping playing it, so bearing in mind I am on record as really liking Tomb Raider games, and really liking Legend, I thought a post about it all was in order.

The game looked very good for an older game, especially with ‘next gen content’ on. However there have been reported CTDs with next gen on, and although the frame rate was excellent in most places (90-120fps) in some (e.g. with surface water) the rate tanked to 30fps – which is cope-able with depending on the game but in this case it was juddery and laggy. So I turned next gen off and the game still looked fine, with the fps consistently above 150, so I left it like that. For some reason the dialogue was a lot quieter in cutscenes than during the game. Modern games (and indeed the later TRs e.g Underworld) have better or more realistic character models etc. but I think Legend has borne up well – but do bear in mind I am not a graphics fanatic – see my post never mind the graphics feel the gameplay for instance.

The game feels like Tomb Raider. The protagonist is definitely Lara Croft. The backstory might have been changed a bit but it is all very familiar, and although the game mechanics are modernized and different from ‘classic’ Tomb Raider, things are close enough that it all works as a Tomb Raider game. The exploring, the climbing and puzzles, the visuals of the game are all excellent and I thoroughly enjoyed them. The combat was fine, the original Tomb Raiders also had lock on, not free aim, so that felt the same too. Combat QTE type moves to slow time etc. were OK but again it took me a little bit of practice to get them. I was failing mostly at first, then the timing seemed to ‘click’ and I got it nearly every time – they really did make the combat easier and felt good when I pulled it off. I later realised that the combat slow motion run and double jump to get headshot thingy was only working in some sections. It wasn’t working on those parts of the game where Lara would lose combat lock if she jumped as she moved, or just moved a little too far – I mention this below where I realised that that was what was going on (the latter part of Ghana) and also realised that whatever was going on broke the slo-mo headshot thing too. The grenades weren’t very good, Lara seemed to have a weak throwing arm when it came to grenades!

The controls and camera are a bit wonky, the camera has a mind of its own sometimes and you have to guess jumps. The grapple jump – swing – jump sequence only seemed to ‘fire’ about one time in three for me, and why is it bound to using the space key twice and not Q for that one? I got better at the timing as the game proceeded. The QTE sequences seemed out of place and to me were annoying. There was one symbol a sort of ‘Lara action with pistols out blue silhouette’ that I couldn’t quite work out at first what I was meant to do when it showed.

The (first?) vehicle section – the bike ride in Peru – was a bit frustrating and it took me several goes before I got the hang of things – but when I did get the hang of it I got through it fairly well. It is something I have found elsewhere in the game, e.g. the boss fights, I have half a dozen attempts with early failure and start to get frustrated then something ‘clicks’ and I manage to do the section, beat the boss (or whatever) if not easily then at least fairly well. However, the problem with the vehicle sections rears its head again later, and I will go into that at the end of this section.

In the Japan section Lara has a magic dress, that when the skirt was ripped off of it all the guns and grenades and grapple and backpack appeared. That was kind of silly, as was Lara’s wiggle-bum walk when she was in the dress. I mentioned in previous posts that I didn’t think she was too sexualized, but really playing the game again there is a hell of a lot of fanservice. Anyway, we at this point are in Japan which leads on to:

Takamoto boss fight

I tried and failed and failed. Then I looked up the strategy and realised I was doing the right thing, it was just that the green wave attacks seemed to come too fast to dodge them all, the jumping or ducking animation from one attack hadn’t finished when the next green wave hit, thus the next jump or duck didn’t happen when I pressed the space/F key. It was really annoying. The weapon lock kept dropping as well so running and not falling off the ledge and still firing at the boss seemed to be mutually exclusive. I know I have played Legend before but some years ago, however this boss fight I really don’t remember having that much trouble with. Maybe I did play it on easy (explorer) last time.

The trick that I found that worked for me was side strafing rather than running forward to try and catch him, that way Lara keeps the weapon lock on him. It is very hard to leap and duck in time for the green blasts unless you are running and firing (Lara rolls and leaps faster with her weapons out I think). Also sometimes Takamoto gets into a machine gun like sequence of fast and furious green waves, almost but not quite alternating high and low. At that point I would try and park Lara behind a statue and wait until it died down.

The overall strategy I ended up with for this boss fight was as follows: Side strafe around the rotunda top level clockwise – holding down A and W and the right mouse button when there is a lock with the more powerful weapon, or all the time once you are down to pistols. The right finger on your left hand is then free to hover over F to duck high level green wave attacks, and your thumb can hover over the space bar to jump over the low level attacks. Once you are close strafe left and right to avoid the vertical attacks. I had the assault rifle as my secondary weapon and that really did do some nice damage up close. Once I worked that strategy out he went down fairly easily, compared to the earlier efforts.

After Japan we are off to:

Ghana

I remembered (from my previous playing of the game) the fixed/turret machine gun (used for both the enemies and starting off the puzzle by destroying a pillar) but by the time I got to the water reservoir ‘upstairs’ that I had to release to continue I really didn’t remember any of that part. I have a bad and selective memory for most things – I can remember silly trivia very will, but am terrible with peoples names for instance – to the point of embarrassment. It seems that my patchy memory also applies to games I have played some time ago, at least this one anyway.

At some point in the Ghana mission I really finally decided that the Tomb Raider Legend Guide wasn’t that good. Lovely looking book and worth getting if you like getting/collecting game guides for your favourite games (which describes me – see printed strategy guides for instance). But, although it says it covers PC it doesn’t really at all, and assumes that PC controls work the same way as controller ones. Which they don’t (were they meant to?). The solutions to some of the puzzles and QTE sequences are just plain wrong – in these action QTE thingies (or at least in this one I had trouble with in Ghana) the mouse doesn’t work for steering, but a controller does. I got seriously stuck on the rolling boulder trap (which is escaped with one of those action QTE type things, the blue silhouette thing) and I just couldn’t get started on it. The unskippable cutscene got repeated several times and I got fed up with hearing it, so looked it up in the guide. Which suggested doing exactly what I had been doing, and was wrong.

So I went to Stella’s walkthrough for Legend and got the correct answer, which also mentioned the lack of mouse control problem during this particular bit. Interesting that the guide’s wrong answer was exactly what it looked like you had to do and I had been attempting for a fair few times, and would have worked had the mouse not been disabled for this action sequence.

Later, towards the end of Ghana, you have the room with the waterfall and mercenaries. A few attempts and I had the hang of killing the enemies without getting killed myself. Another reminder of how TR (at least Legend) isn’t a shooter but a sort of tactical game where you have to meta game the game engine. Especially when it half breaks! To be honest the originals were somewhat like that too but at least the controls worked as advertised and were also consistent. Anyway, so there was a previous checkpoint that meant the bridge wasn’t there (I kicked a barrel earlier just to see what it would do, and something exploded, so I shrugged and carried on). So I had to cross using the ropes. I was lining up and jumping very carefully but Lara just kept missing the ropes (mostly the first one, otherwise the second one). The checkpoint was way back before I killed any mercenaries, in fact before I platformed up to the higher level so repeating all that just to get to the rope bit and fail again got old fast.

At this point I realised I was having control (and indeed camera) problems. The camera seemed to glitch out a lot and judder back and forth or provide a view that was totally unhelpful. The camera would shift suddenly in the middle of a manoeuvre – you would be all lined up on a rope or something, start to swing and it would jump so you were no longer lined up. So you would stop, turn a bit, line up again, swing and it would do it again. Sometimes Lara would just not grab the rope she jumped towards and plunge to her death, over and over. This was similar to where she kept losing weapons lock and firing into nowhere, this latter effect was very annoying with the boss battle afterwards. So onto:

Rutland boss fight

The above mentioned camera judder sideways and lose weapon lock problems meant that Lara just wouldn’t fire towards Rutland. Also the grapple which you use to pull keystones out of the platforms just didn’t work most of the time. I know I was doing it right, shooting off the covering stone then using Q to try and pull out the then exposed keystone, but nine times out of ten the grapple wouldn’t connect to the shiny stone. I was trying to grapple when Rutland was up on a platform healing (which is when you are meant to do it – yeah I looked up the strategy again after a few failures), so I don’t think it was that. This was so frustrating I came close to giving up and just quitting the game.

I am fairly sure I had no where near as bad control problems when I played the game some time ago, I really would have remembered this very frustrating ‘gameplay’. Also things being this bad aren’t mentioned by others, so I suspect something was wrong with my setup or game. In some sections of the game Lara lost combat lock every time she jumped so I would be firing and moving, and one jump back or sideways and she would lose the red reticle and just fire straight forward to wherever the camera was pointing. She also lost the lock if she wasn’t looking almost right at the target – unlike when it was working properly and she would swivel her upper body to retain the target lock. I realised at this point that the game had been doing this on and off previously (e.g. towards the end of the Ghana section mentioned above), and to kill an enemy I would have to stop moving and just stand there with the mouse button held down until they died . Then stop firing to line up on the next one. This obviously meant Lara died a lot when it did this and was very frustrating – Lara doesn’t wear body armour and in all the Tomb Raider games to date (the latest reboot hasn’t come out yet at the time of this post) you avoid Lara getting hurt by jumping about and rolling and acrobatics. I wasn’t able to do that for some parts of the game and that was a good part of the source of the combat trouble I was having. You had to manually reholster the guns too if you wanted to use the grapple and Lara is slow in doing that, slow in swapping weapons, slow in reloading and there aren’t any invincibility frames. So yeah, very frustrating.

And the repeated over and over really awful dialog during the boss fights! So annoying when you are on your umpteenth attempt at the boss. By this point I was starting to hate the game and not look forward to playing it – I had already taken almost a two week break after a few attempts prior to finally beating the mercs in the cave with the waterfall and getting to Rutland. In the end I beat Rutland using the quick and dirty strategy detailed on this section of Stella’s walkthrough. However that took several goes as most of the time Rutland would get stuck/glitched on his starting platform and just sort of moonwalk in place throwing grenades. I finally got one where he did jump down, I had timed the first grenade right and just killed him in a very short time with the grenade and assault rifle spam of the quick strategy (which was a bit exploitative) but by this time I really didn’t care, and wanted to try and get back my enjoyment of the game. I am fairly sure I managed to beat Rutland in my first playthrough years ago with the strategy of destroying his healing platforms, the way you are ‘meant to do it’. I was having to actively try and not rage quit with the frustration at this point.

Kazakhstan

In Kazakhstan the combat went much better than the mercs in Ghana – the combat lock was working again, the run double jump slow motion headshot thing was working again. I did notice evaporating health kits though. Using the mounted machine gun I saw and counted three of them pop out as I killed the soldiers/mercs. When I actually got down to the area there was only one of those left (plus another inside). Somewhat disappointing as I was counting on those extra packs to get back up to full health and three packs in my inventory. The subsequent (after getting to the roof checkpoint and ziplining down) combat with another wave of mercs was when I realised that Lara was no longer losing combat lock when jumping and moving and I was coping fine. So much easier and I was back to having fun as opposed to gritting my teeth. Also only one health pack evaporated here so I got back up to three. It wasn’t until this point that I realised that the game was actually only sometimes working with the combat lock, and when it was working it was a load of fun and I was enjoying it. I think this made the frustration with the game when it was buggering about even more intense, as I knew it was capable of working properly, and I was capable of actually playing OK and having fun.

Then my nemesis reared its head again, a vehicle section – in fact another bike section, chasing the train. I seemed to be able to control the bike much better this time than the first time which was nice. But, there was no mouse camera control, and sometimes the camera got stuck looking sideways or backwards. Sometimes spamming the J key (the camera centering key) would reset it, sometimes not. There were more checkpoints during this bike ride at least. I was often concentrating so hard on driving/riding the thing that I forgot to keep an eye on my health and would die for lack of using a health pack – or just not pick up enough on the way. It doesn’t help that the use health pack key was a bit far from WASD even after I remapped it (it starts off on the other side of the keyboard!). After a while I started to think that this motorcycle ride was going on way too long, and so after a bit I went looking – and found out about the bugs in this motorcycle section from Stella’s walkthrough Kazakhstan bike bug TR Legend.

Reading that the cure for this bug is to restart the game from before you get on the bike, or to load up someone else’s savefile from after the bike ride is over, was the final straw. The games checkpointing is such that I don’t even think I can restart Kazakhstan, I can restart from the beginning of Ghana – at least that is the only load point it is offering me. So I decided to take another break. I was intending the break to be a day or two or perhaps a couple of weeks like the other break from the game, but I haven’t got back to it yet. I really hope I do get back to it and beat the game, I still want to go on and play Anniversary and Underworld. I also have all the previous Tomb Raiders from GOG as well.

What I am playing instead, for now anyway

Osmos

I saw a YouTube video on a game called Osmos and thought it looked interesting, so went looking for it and discovered that I actually had it in my Steam library, from a Humble Bundle a while ago. I have got a ways into it, and it says it is a laid back relaxing experience. It is, soft of, but also can be a bit frustrating as you have to be careful and it is easy to get yourself into an unwinnable state by trying to hard.

In the game you are a blob, that can move around by ejecting some of its own mass. Standard Newtonian physics applies so as you eject your own mass on one direction you accelerate in the other. There is no friction and the aim is to consume other blobs that are around the same by bumping into smaller ones. Similarly you have to avoid bigger blobs as they will consume you and then it is game over. You can’t accelerate hard, brake, do sharp turns – or rather you can but that means you spend far too much of your own mass, thus becoming smaller than everything else and so you can be ‘eaten’ by everything else. Thus you have to take it easy, wander about slowly and thus not use up too much of your precious mass.

There are of course a lot of extra aspects than that to the game, with different types of blob, some quite active in hunting you down. Tricky starting states where you are surrounded by bigger blobs (hint – firing mass in little bursts at a bigger blob can move it, thus making space for you to manoeuvre. This at the expense of feeding the enemy blob!). Different things to achieve to ‘win’ that stage and so on. Pretty graphics and nice sounds too.

A Slower Speed of Light

This is a game from the MIT game lab called A Slower Speed of Light. It is a very simple object collecting game, except that collecting the objects slows down the speed of light in the game universe, and relativistic effects are modelled in the game – so that as you collect more objects the speed of light approaches that of your walking speed. So you get time dilation, light frequency shift, and all that stuff. Check out the site linked and watch their video on the game.

I beat the game in nearly 9 minutes real life my time, but that was less than 8 minutes game time due to relativistic time dilation. Yes, it tells you both times after you beat it. More of a curiosity from a game point of view, rather than something that will engage you for very long. However, I am a physicist by original training and the idea of the game was interesting. It is open source on a fairly generous licence and they say they hope other game developers can use the relativistic game engine to make new games, or incorporate such physics in other games.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Huge time sink. Thirty hours in and I have only just started the main quest line (I think) and have only just started to think about joining a couple of guilds and started towards that. You can just wander off and explore and do interesting things and before you know it it is hours later and you might have levelled up some, but haven’t actually advanced any quest lines. I am sure everyone reading this knows of The Elder Scrolls, and Skyrim, so I won’t say more. But having started this on a break from Tomb Raider Legend won’t help in getting back to that game any time soon.

Some ago I got Lucid on Steam and made a not very good YouTube video review of the Lucid game – that video was more about me testing out recording gameplay with commentary to be honest! I have had Bejewelled 3 for a while and have sunk 35 hours into it since I got it. More recently I watched TotalBiscuit’s WTF is … 10,000,000 and thought it looked interesting, so bought that as it was on a 20% off on launch offer. 7.5 hours of gameplay and less than a week later I have beat it. So yeah, I do play these things a fair bit.

I know this blog is straplined ‘playing on casual’ but I have explained that elsewhere, the reason I play these is that I find them an excellent distraction when I am ill, in pain, tired, on high strength painkillers and so on. Again elsewhere I have explained a bit about my health problems and disability and how computer/video games help when I am badly off with my problems – match three games seem to be like that, but more so. In that when I am very bad, or woozy, in pain etc. and can’t even cope with ‘regular’ games, I can usually spend some mindless time with a match three game. The other thing I can do when I am very ill is watch Let’s Play type videos on YouTube. For some reason both these things seem to work better than reading (or watching TV, which I very rarely do anyway) to distract me and not let my mind dwell on how crap I am feeling at that point. Or if I am being kept awake and am very tired but in too much pain to sleep they work too.

So, onto the latest one of these games I have been playing, 10,000,000. It has retro style ’8 bit’ graphics – the ’8 bit’ is in scare quotes as it isn’t really 8 bit but that retro graphics style seems to be being called 8 bit lately. Very simplistic, and not done that well to my mind, but the graphics don’t really matter that much in a game like this anyway. The gameplay has a twist in that you collect resources (gold, stone, wood) by matching certain tiles and use them to upgrade your ‘home’ allowing you to upgrade your attacks and character. You match different types of tile to give a magical attack or a physical attack; damage to different monsters is more effective with certain attacks so there is a strategy to it in some ways. You match chests to perhaps get items (magical attack orbs, one shot ‘big’ physical attacks, keys for the chests, food for health, scrolls), match keys to open doors and chests to get past them if you don’t have an item skeleton key, and so forth.

I did find the best strategy is not to hunt too hard for the precise best match for the current task but to keep matching as quickly as you can, the tiles falling down would often either line up or present a more obvious quick match for the attack (or key, or whatever) you require. It was useful to match wood, stone, shields (which give you shields to absorb damage) and keep an eye on the rest of the board waiting for attack combinations to present themselves. I had a lot of fun with the game, though I felt it to be a bit short, having beat it in 7.5 hours. Towards the end I ran out of things to spend XP, gold and resources on – I sort of felt that it would be nice to have a further stage where you could level up even more and so on, but for £3 or so I cannot complain.

Will I play it through again? I am not sure, it was fun to play through once, but probably not – at least not for a while. I might try to get the last of the Steam achievements but that will be about it for now. However I find myself popping back into Bejewelled now and again so I daresay I will play this one again in a few months. I haven’t played Lucid in a long time though, that game became a bit frustrating towards the end and the higher levels – and also that game was a lot more about the somewhat mesmerizing graphics and sound than the gameplay.

10,000,000 has distracted me from carrying on with Tomb Raider legend, which has been somewhat frustrating in places with control issues and lingering bug like features – but I hope to beat TR legend and will possibly do a blog post on it since I have some notes I have been making as I am playing it, mainly about the frustrations! The frustrations are mostly down to me, but I can see why some people prefer to play the game with a controller not a mouse and keyboard. But that is another post, when (if) I beat that game. Meanwhile, don’t look down on me too much if you seem me playing a lot of super casual soft core match three games if I am on your Steam friends list or something – I am probably feeling a bit rubbish and am distracting myself. And why not, it is still better than daytime TV.

Well I have beat Saints Row: The Third. By which I mean I have played through the main mission line and got to (one of) the ending(s). You can check the choices I made for the main ending and one or two other choices during the main storyline if you really want to by checking my Steam profile and looking at which achievements I got. I won’t go into details here in case someone is thinking of getting the game, and doesn’t want spoilers. My Saints Row 3 initial thoughts blog post still stands, so check that if you want.

I did get a little tired of the game – as I stated in my previous post to this one (Catch Up) I lost most of my progress and had to repeat a lot (in fact, most) of the game. More specifically in my previous lost save I had done a lot of grinding and had got a high income, high respect level, lots of upgrades etc. and the thought of doing all that again really didn’t appeal. So after a while of doing activities and so on, I found myself starting to get bored with the game which is really not what I wanted. So I dropped the difficulty down to casual and just played through the main missions.

Things I didn’t like

I will start with some things that I didn’t get on with in the game. I will emphasize here that I really like the game, and had a thoroughly good time playing it. These niggles in this section are just that, niggles. A lot of them are just my personal preferences, and indeed my own lack of ability. I want to save the ‘things I did like’ section for afterwards, because it really is overall, an excellent game.

The main problem I had with the game, that wasn’t down to my own lack of ability with some aspects of it, was that the AI tended to have some really dumb moments, and had pathing problems. Also the AI controlling, for instance, other cars on the road or pedestrians was either really stupid or deliberately coded to be annoying and obstructive. I guess this is sort of amusing at first but it gets old fast, and when you are trying to complete a mission and a car just randomly rams you off the road and thus you fail the mission it is just plain irritating. Especially when it happens more than once in a row, and you get multiple failures due to sheer trolling by the game.

Often I would have followers – just general Saints help or mission specific homies – and I would get into a vehicle and they would just ‘run on the spot’ or orbit around the car (or whatever). This sometimes happening when I was trying to leave a combat area to get to an objective, so of course the car and the PC, and the NPCs are all taking fire and damage as the dumb AI NPC buggered about failing to find the car door. Also my player character would do this too – I would want to get in the car and leave a ‘hot’ area fast. So would run up to the car and press E. Sometimes this resulted in my jumping in rapidly, but sometimes the rapid get-in-the-car thing didn’t work. And my character would sloooowly walk gently around the car before getting in. Or not get in and just walk on the spot or orbit the damn thing. Of course enemies would be firing at me/us and enemy vehicles would be driving up fast and crashing into the car I wanted to get in to. Sometimes ending up with death or the car being trapped.

My ‘favourite’ dumb NPC moment was during a helicopter mission, where the main PC (i.e. me) was flying the thing to get to various points (radio towers to plant bugging devices for Kinzie I think) and Shaundi was sitting in the side door shooting things. Right up until her AI decided it would be good to jump out of the helicopter. So there was the little purple/blue pointer saying I should go revive my homie, some 400 odd metres away on the ground somewhere!

Talking of helicopter missions, often you are sitting in that same side door and shooting (often shooting rockets) at enemies on the ground who are pursuing an ally in a vehicle who is going from place to place to do things. So the dumb AI comes in again where that allied driver gets stuck sometimes – but that isn’t the main problem. Your range of aim is a limited arc out of the one side of the helicopter. You can’t swap sides (someone please tell me if you can, because I couldn’t work out how to do it if it was possible!) and often the enemies that you had to target were literally not targetable. You could see the little red markers, behind you or too far to one side or the other (which is forwards and backwards to the helicopter since you are sitting in a side door). And sometimes those enemies would catch up to and kill or damage the ally you were meant to be protecting.

I really did never get fully used to the vehicle controls. With a longish gaming session I kind of got not impossibly terrible at them, but I would only have to take a break for a couple of hours, let alone a day, and I would be back to almost not being able to control anything. This makes a fair bit of the game much more frustrating than it should be. There is no fast travel system (again if there is and I missed it tell me how dumb I am and let me know how to access it!) so getting to mission starts, or even just activities and so on involves driving about a lot. Or even worse flying (I had even more difficulty with air vehicles than ground ones). And a lot of the activities involve vehicles and driving them fairly fast without crashing a lot. I have no idea why I had so much trouble. I guess it is partially the digital nature of WASD vs analogue sticks, but I am a PC gamer so should be used to that. I also had a similar problem with GTA. This one is definitely down to me! On the other hand I definitely don’t have trouble controlling vehicles in other games.

I really dislike QTEs, and the game has some. There are other games with lots more, and I would hate to play those. Limited save slots? I guess that is just the console port with checkpoint system nature of the game. Not a problem as there are a lot of save slots, and I only just ran into the limit towards the end of the game. Also the DLC I bought probably wasn’t worth it. I never did use the weapons, vehicles and cosmetic items I ended up with – and I discovered that a fair few of them unlock as you progress through the game anyway. The extra homies were just skins not extra homies, so that wasn’t worth it. I did get them for very little in Steam sales though, so no biggie. There are ‘proper’ DLC mission packs though, so that might be worth a look.

I reiterate though none of the above complaints are anything other than minor, and other gamers and reviewers don’t have those problems. So this is very much a personal view.

Things I did like

The rest of the game. Seriously, it is a great deal of ridiculous fun. Very violent but so silly it ends up like cartoon violence most of the time (e.g. like Tom and Jerry or Looney Tunes). You can also steer the game along silly lines somewhat. The fact that the game is gloriously ludicrous means you end up playing it with a silly grin on your face. The combat is fun, the guns feel good and you can upgrade them nicely for some serious firepower. Approach fights with some thought and things go a lot better than just charging in. I had to relearn that once or twice, but using cover and taking down enemies at a distance works really well. W-mouse1 will often get you killed even on casual.

The missions and activities had a lot of variety, although some activities got a bit repetitive (that was mainly because some of them I didn’t get on with though I suspect). After the main game is done you end up in the open world of Steelport, where you can just carry on to try and finish city takeover tasks, upgrade things as you get more money and respect (which is sort of the XP of the game). I won’t be removing it from my PC, but will leave it there. I am sure I will be revisiting the game now and again, after a while perhaps as I have played it a lot very recently (over 20 hours in the last less than a week according to Steam). A bit like Borderlands 1 – I have it on my disk and will revisit it, having reinstalled it in fact just to play again from time to time.

You can get Saints Row: The Third very cheaply when it is on sale, I mean extremely cheaply. The Steam sale has just had it at 75% off and other places have it on sale too fairly often. Well worth a look if you haven’t played it. Bearing in mind I don’t like driving based games, or even just driving sections in games, I still loved playing this game even though it has a lot of driving in it. The characters are really good and well written. They have personalities which goes with the fun and interesting storyline (which steadily gets more over the top as the game progresses) to make it fun to play through for the story. It isn’t an RPG though, so don’t expect Mass Effect levels of epicness. Just a lot of silly fun. It won’t make you feel like a superhero, but you can dress as one:

Onwards

I managed to not play any City of Steam after all, they had server problems so the game was down for the days when I wanted to play it. Oh well, hopefully the game will do well in the next beta (I might play it then) and eventually get to full release. Feel free to check out my City of Steam blog post with my thoughts on the game (or rather on the first part of the tutorial for the game, as I found out later!). The City of Steam website is here and it is also on Steam Greenlight.

I still have a week to go before I go back to work – although there is some stuff other than playing games I want to at least get started. Not sure exactly what to play next, possibly Tomb Raider Legend as I said in the last post, and some more Borderlands 1 second playthrough I expect. The YouTube stuff is still on the backburner although I have tested recording and it went better than I thought it would. I wouldn’t mind playing XCOM as detailed in my post XCOM – Enemy Unknown and an update since that is my Christmas present.

Or something else might catch my eye in my Steam library (ooh shiny!) and I will go off on a tangent and play something I forgot I owned. And why not.

I have also discovered that cloud saves are very variable, even on the same service (i.e. Steam). Borderlands (1) is fine, but I lost a lot of (i.e. most) progress in Saints Row 3. And of course anything without cloud saves I will have to start from scratch. The main one I am sad about for this is all of Mass Effect. Everything, my canon run through and save game ready for ME3, all gone. However, I guess I won’t mind playing through those again from the start, but this does mean that I won’t be playing ME3 for a long time.

So, two weeks off before I go back to work. I was looking forward to playing some games but not quite in the way I imagined a few weeks ago. I will see if I can get back into Saints Row 3 or if the loss of most of my progress in that game will put me off it. I can do the extra Borderlands 1 stuff I mentioned in my YouTube videos of the end of Borderlands 1. I might play some Tomb Raider of some sort – I have never finished Legend so that would be nice. Sadly though I have missed out the the betas for City of Steam (see previous post) and I can’t seem to recover my login for that, so I guess I will wait until it gets officially released and play some then from scratch.

I was going to do (sometime) some more YouTube vids, but this computer has a much lower grade CPU than my last, and also the disk is fairly slow to both read and write compared to my last box. So I doubt it will record games very well, so recording for YouTube is, for now, on the back burner. I might do some test recordings but if it is as laggy when recording as I suspect it will be then they won’t be very good, certainly not good enough to upload.

Still two weeks off should see some gaming get done, even amidst a boatload of hassle. I will be spending time with my wife and having some nice Christmas food, and all the usual stuff (although we make less of a fuss about the year end holiday(s) than most I suspect). Hope everyone out there has a great Christmas/Holiday/Feast of the Unconquered Sun.

Update: I have managed to reset the password to, and thus regain access to, City of Steam. Not sure why it didn’t work the first couple of times I tried it. Also there is still one closed beta session to go, so I may well get to play some more after all. I will probably try an elven or human character rather than goblin this time.

City of Steam is (or will be, it is in closed beta at the moment) a free to play, massively multiplayer online, role playing game (F2P MMO RPG). It is browser based, but don’t let that worry you too much. It isn’t built with Flash but with Unity and uses the Unity web player. I first heard about it via TotalBiscuit’s Hyper WTF is City of Steam YouTube video where he played through some of the game (an earlier beta I think) with the City of Steam developers Mechanist. That video is an hour and a half long by the way, so a very good look at the game.

The game looked interesting, and I thought that the graphics looked very good indeed for a browser based game – so I signed up for the City of Steam email newsletter, found them on Twitter and Facebook and followed them there, and kept up somewhat with the news. I was very lucky and got a key/invite to the closed beta due to being on the newsletter list (don’t think everyone did but not sure) and the first of four closed beta long weekends was on the 18th to the 20th of November so I had a go. It is beta, so there were problems obviously. There was a ‘black screen’ problem for most of the latter half of the weekend that meant I couldn’t get on and play it at all. That was fixed, but by that time it was Monday so I had less spare time to play games in.

Here are my very early impressions. Totally subjective, this is not a review and definitely not objective. If this article piques your interest please do go find out more about it! Finally a warning about spoilers; I do describe the starting missions – which contain the tutorials – somewhat in the captions to the screenshots in this article, so that could be spoilerish for anyone that wants to play through the story totally unaware of what is coming up. I don’t imagine many will be that spoiled by the opening missions/tutorial in an MMORPG but you never know.

Character generation and start

There are a fair few races you can choose from – check the City of Steam website for details, it is worth reading a bit about the world, races and classes and so on there. I chose a Goblin (a ‘greenskin’) – other possibilities are one of four different varieties of human, two sorts of elf (dark and light essentially) and three ‘greenskins’ (Goblins, Hobbes and Orcs) and also coming in the future Dwarves (which aren’t traditional fantasy dwarves but look to be steampunk cyborgs or something!).

For my class I chose Arcanist, specializing in electricity. There are a couple of favoured classes for each race (e.g. the other recommended class for Goblins was Gunner) and again will not go through any of that here, do check out the City of Steam site for information on all this. I will say that there is enough choice to make things interesting, but not so much it gets confusing and it is tricky to tell one race or class from another. For me personally it is a good balance of choice and complexity in character generation. So for my Goblin Arcanist, specializing in electricity my main attack is to throw lightning bolts at the enemy from a sword like technical device wielded in my right hand. I had a shield in my left hand for combat.

The actual first level arcanist skill calls down a lightning strike from above on the enemy, and has the usual cost in ‘steam’ (a mana equivalent I guess) and a cooldown and so on. There are skill trees to upgrade through as you level up, but you start with a race skill (the ‘Goblin jump’ in my case) and have to wait to gain some XP before getting the first and subsequent level skills for the class, so I have got ahead of myself a bit here as that is after character generation.

Playing the introductory missions which also include tutorials

The screenshots aren’t as good as the real thing (I took them with FRAPS and there isn’t a compression setting, and it appears to over compress a bit – at least that saves some disk space and data transfer for my web hosting account!) but clicking on the thumbnails will get you to larger images (1080p). But as I said the game itself looks better than the screenshots indicate, especially after an update they did towards the end of the first closed beta session.

Movement is by WASD keys, or click the mouse and the player character will move to that point, or by clicking and holding the mouse and dragging it. Right clicking and moving the mouse moves the camera position. I ended up using a combination of all three and after a while it worked quite well for me, but it is good they give a choice of WASD or mouse based movements, as that is very much a personal preference. I had a little trouble with clicking on enemies to attack them from a distance, missing slightly and having my character run up to a bunch of monsters. That is probably partially finger trouble on my part, but on the forums a few people mentioned that they were having the same difficulty.

Escaping from Delton with Uncle Fizzgig, escorting him through some underground areas as our route to the railhauler station was cut off. Some enemies were down here.

Having made it to the railhauler station Todpullen the Goblin looks out over his home city of Delton, watching the Colossus fight the invaders as the city burns. The Colossus is on the left – the big steam powered robot thing, it is fighting the flying demon like invader. The invaders arrived out of the spire you can see behind it with the laser like red light beam coming out of it upwards. The spire dropped from above releasing all the ‘brood’ – the enemies – that started destroying things. There is some more explanation in game via a cutscene and voiceover that describes what is happening in context of the lore of the world that City of Steam is set in. You can see the quest tracking arrow at Todpullen’s feet pointing back at the railhauler station entrance, indicating he should be going there quickly – but I think that he would have looked sadly over his home town as the fighting goes on, one last time before escaping to the Refuge in Nexus (via a railhauler journey).

After some more things to do in the station Todpullen makes it onto the railhauler – a big steam train affair that is the main transport between cities.

Todpullen’s cousin managed to get lost or run up the railhauler, and was cut off by some brood that seem to have followed them onto the railhauler. No one is quite sure why they seem to be interested in the railhauler or the refugees, but the train guards aren’t coping too well with these monsters. Since he is the protagonist, Todpullen sets off up the train killing the monsters and making his way to his cousin, who is fine. The yellow thing with three dots above the guard indicates that he can give you a quest (upon left clicking him and going through some dialogue). Doing so means you get to go further up the train and end up meeting (and hopefully killing or at least driving off) what seems to be the head monster for this railhauler infestation.

I won’t go into the story too much as this isn’t a let’s play but a first impressions of new game in beta. The world in which City of Steam is set isn’t a planet but appears to be an artificial construct, made by some long gone (perhaps?) race. They left a bunch of devices and stuff around, and the catastrophe that befalls Delton (Todpullen the Goblin’s home town) was caused by one of these. But another device – the Colossus – wakes up after decades or more of not moving to fight off the invaders as the inhabitants flee to a refuge that has been set up in another city (Nexus). See the screenshots and text above for a little of this. The invaders (brood) follow the refugees onto the railhauler which leads to more adventures in fighting them off.

As you play through this introductory story and the first missions, tutorial text pops up explaining how to use your skills, how to move, how to fight etc. I will admit that I had usually worked out how to do most of that beforehand, just by reading tooltips and experimenting with clicking on things and doing things. I am sure most gamers would be the same, but it was nice to have things confirmed by the (not intrusive) occasional tutorial pop up, and of course if I hadn’t worked out how to do something I got told about it as the game progressed.

The Refuge (in Nexus)

Having arrived at the Refuge in Nexus we step out of the railhauler station and take in the view of the new city.

As above but showing the map of Refuge – a fairly big place.

The Refuge is an area of the city of Nexus where the refugees from Delton (and possibly elsewhere, I don’t know anything about the starting missions and origins of the other races) first end up when arriving and getting off the railhauler. The starting missions here, which also include some tutorial pop ups as you work through new stuff, are basically sorting out your house, doing creature clearance quests in dungeons/quest areas, getting favours from locals and signatures from officialdom etc. Apparently Todpullen the Goblin’s good deeds on the railhauler coming in help out a lot as officialdom looked favourably on me for that.

I only did a couple of these before running out of time on both the beta and having to do other things in real life like work. I haven’t done any co-op with others at all yet, so have just played it as a single player experience. Dungeons or quest structures are instanced, and they consist of the fairly familiar ‘kill creatures, break and loot boxes, do the tasks you need to do down there’ etc. RPG experience. Lots of clicking on stuff and power/skill using. Very satisfying if you are into that sort of thing (MMORPG, Diablo etc.). I started to get used to the combat system at this point and things were going a lot more fluidly. I levelled up and got myself a Tesla Turret. Which is pretty much what it sounds like, I could place down a little thingy of wire and whatnot and it would zap stuff as that stuff came near it. Great for laying one down then going forward and drawing back the mobs through the area with the turret zapping away as I pulled the mobs past it.

A beta bug I suspect; a flying steam bike. Don’t think it is meant to do that once they are implemented properly.

I played a little on the last day of this first closed beta session in the evening after work. There are three more closed beta sessions, the next in a week or so and a couple more after that up to and including Christmas. There had been a two hour server downtime before my final chance to play the game and when I played the game again the way the graphics settings worked was slightly different and the game loaded my GPU a little more (I wouldn’t have noticed except I run the Open Hardware Monitor software to keep an eye on things). However, the game looked a lot better, it had a slightly lowered fps (from 50 to 45) when in combat (lots of particle effects with my lightning attacks!) but it really did look very nice indeed – for any game let alone a browser based one. I did another dungeon or two (still story wise associated with getting settled in Nexus) and below there are a couple more screenshots. Not sure you can see the improved graphics because of the way the screenshots compress the file though.

This screenshot and the next two are showing another part of the Refuge from three different angles, but approximately the same point (this one before Todpullen entered a dungeon, the other two afterwards). There had been some sort of update to the game (the server was down for a couple of hours) and when it came back the graphics looked a lot better, but I am not sure it shows so well in the screenshots.

Thoughts on it all so far

The story behind the world is very interesting and somewhat different from the usual fantasy fare, with a somewhat steam punk feel to it in places but I wouldn’t call it straight up steam punk. This might say a bit more about my lack of experience in many other MMORPGs, bear in mind that I haven’t played Diablo or Torchlight for instance but I do think I would enjoy those games and will probably play at least Torchlight at some point (I actually own the first one, just have never played it (it is in my pile of shame along with about a hundred other Steam sale games believe it or not)).

I can’t really address the MMO aspect as I didn’t do any of that, but for me I enjoy MMOs if I have people I know and am friends with (internet gamer friends or real life) to party up with and do co-op PVE. I really don’t like PVP at all, in any game really not just MMORPGs – I much prefer co-op PVE if I am playing multiplayer. For instance with respect to shooters I like Killing Floor but not deathmatch type games so much. So for me, I like it a lot so far, but was playing it almost like a single player RPG experience with run around lots of clicky combat and looting things – and a neat story behind it all. Would that keep me playing? Depends totally on how much content there ends up in the final game, and also if I make friends and end up doing the harder dungeons with them in a party. Or perhaps if PUGs (pick up groups) can be easily formed on the fly in the game. It can be dispiriting if you want to tackle a harder level dungeon and both no one you know is on, and also no one in the vicinity wants to do it. Whether that is a problem will depend on how popular and populated the final game ends up.

I am certainly looking forward to the coming closed beta sessions, there are three more up to and including Christmas. Also the open beta after, I will see how I go but I may well get into the game and play it once it is released – and probably buy some stuff to support the devs if nothing else, if I am playing and enjoying the game. I am certainly interested to see how the game gets on, and how it all goes. I do wish it well and hope it does well, I think it is enjoyable to play, has a lot of nice and different things about it whilst still being familiar enough for MMORPG fans to get right into it. I shall be playing more definitely.

Thoughts for others: if you like RPGs and MMORPGs, and think you might like the steampunkesque (sort of) nature of the world then check it out, visit the City of Steam website and maybe try to get in on the closed beta, or at least have a go at the open beta (or just wait for release if you don’t like betas). On the City of Steam site there is a list of places where you can perhaps get closed beta keys – or you can always become a supporter (pay money) to get one if you are really keen. The browser based nature of it with the Unity web plugin works well and shouldn’t put anyone off as long as they can get over the initial ‘browser based’ thing. I definitely think it is worth a closer look if the first sentence of this paragraph applies to you. It is free to play so it doesn’t cost you anything to try it out.

This is a post that is explaining why I have bought a game soon after release, at full price – and the special edition of that game to boot. I haven’t done that for many years, I don’t have a lot of spare cash at all so I tend to buy games once they get somewhat cheaper. Also this post is a bit of an update to record/explain why I haven’t played any games for two or three months.

XCOM – Enemy Unknown

The game in question is XCOM – Enemy Unknown. I had heard about this somewhat from news about it before release. I don’t remember the original X-COM (called X-COM:UFO Defense in America, but called UFO:Enemy Unknown elsewhere) at all. I played games from around that era at the time (e.g. Tomb Raider 1, the original Command and Conquer, the original Syndicate) but don’t remember UFO:Enemy Unknown at all. Anyway, a fair few people seemed excited about it, but also worried that it would get turned into a yet another shooter of some kind like the Syndicate remake. So I kept a vague eye out for reviews, trailers etc. but only a vague one.

The trailer that was released for the game really did, to my eye anyway, make the game seem like a 3rd person shooter. The trailer was mainly cinematic cutscenes, most of it taken from the introductory cutscene of the game. I only found this out later, the trailer just looked like a shooter with aliens on the other end. I think I read reviews of the game, in PC Gamer and on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I say ‘I think’ because I don’t remember getting much from the reviews, they didn’t pique my interest in the game and to be honest although I am sure they said that the game was a turn based strategy that really didn’t stick in my mind.

TotalBiscuit covered the demo of the game on his YouTube channel – TotalBiscuit’s analysis of the XCOM – Enemy Unknown demo. The demo wasn’t very good – in the sense that it didn’t seem to give a good idea of what the game was really like. But at least I started to realise the game was a TBS! Later I watched the WTF is … XCOM Enemy Unknown video from TotalBiscuit when it came out and I sat up and took notice. Just seeing someone play through the game on YouTube was a revelation. A metaphorical lightbulb went on over my head and I was starting to think that I would like this game.

So I went looking for more. I noticed that only one of the people I subscribe to on YouTube was doing a playthrough of the game – for some reason none of the let’s players I follow are doing it – possibly because a TBS isn’t as fashionable as the latest corridor MMS or episode 6 in an interminable franchise. However the playthrough XCOM Enemy Unknown – Evelyn’s Chronicle by Hathur99 was ideal. Feel free to check out Hathur99′s channel and you will see why I like his playthroughs, as long as you bear in mind I am a big fan of the Mass Effect series. I started watching his videos, and sat further up and took notice even more. I really liked the game, and it went from a ‘not even on my wishlist’ to me starting to look at prices and wondering how soon I could afford it.

So I stopped watching the playthrough videos (although I will go back and finish watching Hathur99′s playthrough once I have done at least one of my own) and was wondering about prices. To get to the point, with my wife encouraging me to get the game (probably to stop me moping) I got the special edition with various extras. This is my Christmas present from her and from myself to me (this is how I/we justified it). I got it from GAME as they have UK exclusivity on the special edition. The disadvantage of this is that without competition the price is always going to be high, but it wasn’t that much more than the price of the standard game. The advantage is that as I used to buy games a fair bit from GAME I had a bunch of loyalty points I could use up on the purchase. I also got a strategy guide too which lead to the previous post on this blog about printed strategy guides. I bought the guide with some spare PayPal money I had (from some internet business I do in my spare time – that isn’t video game related by the way).

The special edition came with the soundtrack (excellent by the way) and an art book (very interesting and helped me understand some of the look of the game that I thought was a bit strange), a clothing patch (which will get attached to a green polo shirt sometime, and worn to work to see if anyone at all recognizes it). There was also a poster showing the XCOM base (not called or callable SHADO sadly) but I don’t really have anywhere to put it, due to the other posters and things on the walls of my little computer/study room here.

I won’t be playing it straight away, as I explain in the next section. However, there is a final thought about this. If I hadn’t looked at actual gameplay footage on YouTube I would never have realised what this game was like. I don’t have much spare money at all, so I am careful with what non-essentials I spend money on – hence only getting games in sales and only when I am fairly sure I will enjoy them. If I had just gone by site and magazine reviews, the trailers, and the demo I may well have missed out on this game entirely. As I said I went from not even putting this game on my wishlist to buying the thing soon after release and buying the special edition to boot. That is unheard of for me at the moment, and totally down to seeing it being played by a gamer or gamers on YouTube.

Why I haven’t played any games for about three months

As I have probably said before, here or elsewhere, I suffer from chronic bad health. I have a progressive debilitating/disabling illness and during the last few months it has flared up very badly. When I get these flare ups I have to concentrate on my part time day job (as it were) as that pays the bills, and everything else gets put to one side. I am fairly bad on average, but when my problem gets really bad, it is awful. So yeah, I have been very ill for the last 3 months or so and am only just starting to (slowly, intermittently and with ups and downs) get a bit better from that. So basically I haven’t played games (other than a quick ten minutes here and there) since my Saints Row Three – initial thoughts blog post.

So today I got back to Saints Row the Third to pick up where I left off. One thing I did notice was that I wasn’t playing on the casual setting for the difficulty. If you read that post linked above I mentioned that I was having a lot of trouble and bumped the difficulty down to casual. Well apparently I had been playing on hard, and so I actually bumped it down to normal. At least I am playing on normal now and am not having lots of problems in combat (enough to make it interesting though). I am still a bit all over the place driving the car but that is fine as that is part of the game in some ways.

As well as SR3 I want to play some more borderlands 1 as I explained a bit during my Borderlands 1 Final Boss commentated gameplay videos on YouTube. I would like to play through as the Hunter perhaps, or at least do some playthrough 2 with my old Siren character. As I also explained in those videos my game disk semi-died and I was waiting for a Steam sale, which happened, so I know have Borderlands 1 GOTY on Steam, and the save files just transparently loaded up so that is good.

So it will be a little while, and also dependent on my health not plummeting again, before I get to play my XCOM game. But waiting to play my new game is OK, XCOM is more about gameplay, strategy and tactics than the story so spoilers won’t matter so much. And it looks like the sort of game that can definitely be played through many times. I have played a little of the early levels to see how it runs, and it runs well and is going to be fun, but I don’t want to leave other games half done (as I have in the past) by getting distracted by ‘new shiny thing’ so will save it for Christmas, when I will have a week or two off work anyway. It is my Christmas present after all.

Update 10th of November 2012: I have just discovered that there is in fact another XCOM reboot in the works from 2K Games (for comparison here is the Wikipedia page on the strategy XCOM reboot – the one that I have just bought and I talk about in this post). I had got the news and anticipation in the press and on forums for my game mixed up with that for the new game, in fact until now I didn’t realise there were two games. Anyway, it looks like the ‘shooter version’ of XCOM is actually being redesigned to be a lot more tactical, so that could be good.

I guess the success of XCOM – Enemy Unknown has made 2K reconsider making it yet another shooter? I hope so, straight up shooters are nice, but not every game needs to be one. Variety is good and if it can be shown that games other than the mainstream shooter can sell well and make money, then we will carry on getting variety in the games that are produced.

I have recently bought the BradyGames ‘Official Strategy Guide’ for the game XCOM – Enemy Unknown’. It is a good book, nicely printed, good illustrations and covers the game well in terms of gameplay. But it does say on the front of the guide that it covers Xbox, PS3 and PC versions – but once you get inside it doesn’t cover the PC version, not really. Admittedly the only difference is the controls, but when it is describing how you do something and only gives options for the console controllers it is annoying. I suspect their excuse would be that I should be playing it with a controller, not a keyboard and mouse. This got me thinking about printed strategy guides, and what they are like these days from my experience in the last ones I have bought (XCOM, Mass Effect 2 and Fallout 3). They, to my mind, aren’t really strategy guides but in fact game guides. I have also started thinking about why I still buy them for some of my games and whether I should bother in the future. Hence this blog post expanding on all that.

Lack of game manuals with modern games

You used to get manuals with games. Sometimes very comprehensive ones, going into detail about the game, the gameplay, the controls and so on. This was usual and normal, you just got a printed manual with the game. These days? You are lucky to get a 5 page pdf – and often that is a link to something on the web and not even on disk. Older games expected you to have read the manual and to have understood the controls before starting the game. These days the convention is to have a tutorial at the beginning of the game to slowly introduce the controls and lead you through the process of learning how to play the game. So the manual became less necessary and basically shrank to a small mnemonic device to refer to if you forget a control or two (e.g. if you take a break from playing the game for a while). Sometimes these terse pdf documents don’t even cover all the controls for the game!

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the modern way of doing things, a tutorial introduction to a game or tutorial level at the start (skippable for later playthroughs is nice) is a good way of doing things, as long as it is a good tutorial. With in game codices and so on a lot of the information that used to be in the (sometimes huge) game manuals you got with games is now in the game itself, which makes more sense in a lot of ways. There is more memory, disk space and so on these days so such information can be put into the game. Printed manuals are now more expensive than including the information in the game, which is the opposite of how it was when computers were more limited.

But all this has meant the demise of the printed comprehensive game manual that comes with the game when you buy it, and I think that the printed third party strategy guide has stepped into this position, for reasons I can speculate about, and have done below.

Printed guides vs the web

So, game guides that come in the game box from the developer are going, shrinking, going digital. Printed third party strategy guides appear to have evolved and moved to take their place. The in depth strategy guidance for a game is now on the web. Third party sites cover games extremely well – game FAQ sites and game walkthrough sites were the king for a while, but these days Wikis appear to have supplanted that (with a few outstanding exceptions, e.g. Stella’s Tomb Raider site).

The problem comes with deciding which site to go to or to trust. There is often more than one Wiki for a given game, a couple of ‘proper’ crowdsourced information Wikis and also probably one or two hosted on or from big gaming sites (to try and drive traffic). There will be several game walkthrough and guide sites, especially for the popular games. YouTube walkthroughs will abound for those too. Some of these are rushed out purely to drive traffic with scant regard for good information. A Google search will throw up a lot of hits, and often the entries high up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page(s)) get there by being good at SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rather than containing accurate content.

Another problem with Wikis etc. is that to become a good source of information, they need to ‘mature’ for want of a better expression. They need contributions from many gamers who have played and beaten the game. For that information to be checked and corrected by other gamers and so on. The early information just won’t be as good, because not many people will have completed the game. So if you want help with a recently released game that is a problem. Of course, mostly people like to beat the game on their own to avoid spoilers and because that is a lot of the point of a game (playing it yourself not just doing what someone else did to get through the game). But still the problem exists.

Finally for some smaller, less popular games, the Wiki information can be hard to find and navigate through on the guide sites. I personally have problems with the Binding of Isaac Wiki. On the other hand that game in particular has a lot of stuff in it that isn’t explained and it is quite hard to work out what it does – so it is hard to actually work out good information for the game to upload to the Wiki.

My use of strategy guides then and now

Strategy guides were – or should have been if they were good – additional to the game manual. They were carefully researched and written by someone who had thoroughly played through the game, more than once, and had figured out the tricks, tactics and strategies that could be used to help beat the game. They contained things to help you get through the tricky parts, or to help you collect all the secrets (or whatever) in a subsequent completionist run through. This latter point is how I used to use them (e.g. the early Tomb Raider games); I would play and beat the game, then get a strategy guide and play through again, using it to help me find the things I missed the first time. This function of comprehensive printed strategy guides has been completely supplanted by the web these days for the reasons above.

But now the ‘strategy guides’ are game guides, an overgrown game manual. You can still use them in the way that I outlined above, but they really aren’t as in depth, and also often contain incorrect information, or are missing information (see the next section). So for the ferreting out of missed parts of a runthrough of a game, getting all the secrets and so on, although it can be useful to have the game guide open on the desk next to you it is often as convenient to pause the game and Alt-Tab out to a web browser parked on a Wiki. Or if the game doesn’t allow Alt-Tabbing out (which it really should!) then researching the Wiki first before a given play session.

Whereas my older game guides from over ten years ago were well read, and look worn, the guides I have got for the occasional more recent game are fairly pristine. I might have looked up one or two things in them. In particular I found that the Fallout 3 and Mass Effect 2 Prima guides had hard to read maps, and the in game maps were so much better I tended to just not use the maps and walkthroughs of sections in those guides. There wasn’t any strategy in them, the useful strategy for Mass Effect 2 I found on the Wiki or in BSN (Bioware Social Network) forum threads.

‘Official’ game guides only

Another thing is that game guides are ‘official’ and come out at the same time as the game. What happens is that the game guide publisher (e.g. Prima or BradyGames) gets an exclusive contract from the publisher of the game to produce the official game guide, and then gets early (pre-release) access to the game, or sometimes just information about the game. They are then on a deadline to publish the guide so it comes out at the same time as the game is released to the public. The result is by definition rushed, and often a fair few mistakes slip through.

There is no way that such a system can produce a true strategy guide. So it doesn’t – you end up with what is basically an enlarged version of the old game manual that you used to get with the game in the box. Also with only one guide publisher getting each exclusive contract, there is no competition. You can’t look at reviews of two or three strategy guides (reviews by gamers who have used the guides alongside playing the game) and see which is best. There is only one. With this lack of competition there is also no pressure on the guide publisher to correct any mistakes in the guide with errata or an addendum – although errata do get published on the guide publisher’s website sometimes. The market for these printed guides is small enough that it probably isn’t economic to print second editions either, and who would pay for them anyway? It is the opposite problem with trying to find the best Wiki, walkthrough or game FAQ – in that case there are so many and also so many opinions that there isn’t any consensus as to which is best. You just have to work it out for yourself. At least it is usually free to access game Wikis and so on.

My collector tendencies

So, bearing in mind all the above, why do I still buy the occasional third party game guide? Basically it is a collector tendency in myself for games that I really like. I really like Fallout 3 in particular so I got the guide to go with it. Also that guide and the Mass Effect 2 one I got on sale and they were bargains. Mass Effect as a series I am very fond of indeed (just check the Mass Effect category on this blog!) – Mass Effect 1 doesn’t have a third party guide for the PC version (it was originally an Xbox exclusive) but I got the Mass Effect 2 guide and did try to use it with the game, but as I said just didn’t find it useful at all compared to the information on the internet. Don’t get me wrong, these are good books if you are into the game, and aren’t ‘bad’ at all, it is just that printed strategy guides in general aren’t as useful as they used to be.

So really I have these guides for recent games because I really like the games, and have a tendency to get things associated with the games. I also have Mass Effect novels, comics and graphical novels for instance. The latest guide I have bought – the XCOM one – I basically bought because for the first time in a very long time I bought a game on release date and am really looking forward to it. In addition I bought the ‘Special Edition’ of XCOM Enemy Unknown. So buying the guide too is part of my enthusiasm for this game. Why I am enthusiastic about it, and why I bought the special edition on release is another story and I might make a blog post about that topic on its own. By the way, I got the BradyGames XCOM strategy guide from The Book Depository and it was discounted and cheaper than anywhere else including Amazon (well, the UK Amazon – the US Amazon has it even cheaper but won’t ship to the UK for some things). The Book Depository is worth checking out if you are looking for a book and checking for the cheapest out there.

The manual for XCOM, even with the Special Edition, is just the same old five page pdf. Very unimpressive. The art book and the other goodies are very nice though. So a strategy guide to supplement the almost non-existent game manual is probably a good idea. Will I use it much? No idea, but I am happy I bought it – so don’t get the idea that this article is negative and I am channeling my inner grumpy old man (it was all better in my day!). Just some thoughts about how these things have changed. Due to the guide not covering PC controls though, I have still had to print out a crib sheet from the minimal pdf game manual with the controls on it.

My personal use of guides and ending thoughts

So, strategy guides – for me anyway – are nice to have things for games that I really like. More for the ‘collect things to do with the game’ than anything else, although they can be useful. I will probably still get the occasional guide, but not often and not for most of my games. They still have a place, but more along the lines of replacing the now nonexistent (mostly) game manual than as an actual in depth strategy guide. If you have more than one monitor and the game supports Alt-Tabbing out then you probably don’t need one at all. I will probably read the guides I have for research before second and later playthroughs. Sometimes even just read them for relaxation (yes I know that is probably a bit too nerdy for my own good).

As for the future I really don’t know how well printed strategy guides sell these days compared to both how they used to sell and to the sales level of the games themselves. The strategy guide publishers (at least the big ones, Prima and BradyGames for instance) also sell digital versions of their guides. So someone can have it open on a tablet or laptop as they play the games on the console, or as I mentioned above on their second monitor on the PC if they are PC gamers. I daresay things will move on, but I suspect there will always be a place for big glossy good looking books about games, partially because if done well they are nice things to have.

I was a little worried about this, as the superhub, Virgin Media, Virgin Media’s customer service, and even the delivery company they use to deliver the equipment all have a fairly bad reputation – Google ‘Virgin Media superhub’ and see all the entries for people having problems. Anyway, I am in an area that seems to have a fairly good service from Virgin internet wise (it is in the Thames Valley with all the tech companies so I guess that is part of the reason why, perhaps?). Also I wasn’t even going to try and use the wireless and router functions of the new superhub, as that seems to give most of the problems. I am using it in modem only mode, and leaving the rest of my network gear as it was before.

It took half an hour to activate, then a fair bit longer for it to upgrade its firmware. Then I had to do a fair bit of fiddling to get it into modem mode. It worked, for a few minutes, then refused to talk to the router. A couple of modem reboots, and a router reboot, later and it seems to have settled down. Hopefully it won’t do that too often, but it has been stable for a couple of hours now. If a few weeks go by with no outages or reboots needed then I think I can call it all a success.

Here are the speedtest and pingtest results:

That will do. Theoretically for an extra £7.50 (or a bit more) a month I could get 100Mbps (going up to 120Mbps eventually) but I think what I have now will suffice. So, despite the bad reputation of Virgin it all worked quite well, so my fears were luckily unfounded. Some praise for them then, from me at least, as they often seem to get nothing but criticism. In case anyone is wondering what that 60MB down/3MB up is costing me, it is about £47 a month – but that includes cable TV and telephone, with cheap international calls and all week all day free national landline calls included. It is the best deal available to me at the moment from anyone, even with new customer discounts. That is the main reason, along with the higher bandwidth than other ISPs around here (for now at least), that I have stuck with Virgin.