Author: tehmadness

My Craft

tehmadnessLeave a comment

About a week ago, I decided I was trying to play too many games at once.

I was running two accounts on EvE, getting to level 80 on WoW, trying the open beta of Final Fantasy XIV and playing nightly bouts of Team Fortress 2. It might not sound like a lot, but playing three MMOs, and trying to make decent progress in all three can be quite wearing.

So I decided to add another game to the pile. What harm could it do, eh?

I’d been after buying Minecraft for a while. I had first played it a few months back, around the Easter hols. The lovely people over at PC Gamer had pointed me in that direction, and ever-loyal dog that I was, I happily padded to it, wagging my tail all the way. Ten minutes later, I had convinced friends to try, and we spent a few happy hours constructing useless things, trying to reach the top of the map, getting lost in the huge levels, and removing blocks from under peoples feet so they fell to the bottom. We built a giant wall and write our names on it. One guy stayed up until 4am finishing it off. Much fun was had by all.

And the next day, we forgot about it and never really bothered to go back on it.

In the months in-between, I was aware of a certain quiet busyness coming from that quiet corner of the web. Again, PC Gamer kept me updated and I slowly began to feel interested in the game again. I heard of a survival mode, where the objective was to build a house during the day, and fend off hordes of ravening zombies at night. I heard of a multiplayer version of this. I heard that it was only available to those people who bought the game.

Starved for cash, as any student is (especially one with such a thirst for MMOs), I scornfully threw it aside.

Later, I returned to the site at looked deeper. I found that it would be cheaper to buy now than at release, not to mention that I would get everything released for it in the future for free. Vague movements began to start from my trousers – my wallet, of course – and I began to seriously think about buying a game in the alpha stages that looked like it was from the wrong end of the nineties.

Truly beautiful graphics

And being so easily distracted, I bought it. I knew I had many other games to play, including the limited time open beta for FFXIV, but I didn’t care. I wanted to play Minecraft, and I thought it’d be a game that filled small gaps between MMOs.

How wrong I was. I played a few hours on my first sitting, and it only got worse from there. The first day was spent just exploring, wondering when the zombies turned up. The preceding night was spent running from said zombies, and dying to the skeletons with unexplainable crossbows. You learn to weave in Minecraft. After that I learned about Creepers – creepy green penis-looking things that explode if you stay close to them for too long. Jewish psychologist, much? Oh, and lets not forget the spiders that are the fastest fucking things in the world. Apparently, you can come across skeletons riding the evil hell-spawned arachnids, but I haven’t had the misfortune to come across them. Yet.

My first night complete, I set to constructing my legacy! Armed with nothing more than my fists, I started digging into the earth, gaining many bricks of dirt in the process. Oddly, even though I found stone, I couldn’t seem to gain any blocks of stone to build with. After some confused Googling, I came across the Minecraft community wiki, Minepedia. If you’re looking towards getting Minecraft, bookmark that page. It is invaluable. The crafting system is simple, but unintuitive. But once you have the trick of it, you’ll wonder how you couldn’t figure it out to begin with.

Bravely hiding in my house. Scary buggers out there!

So, wooden pickaxe in hand – not gonna bore you with the details of how I made it, or why (read the wiki page, you lazy bums) – I set about constructing my first building. One problem; wooden pickaxes don’t last very long, so I was back before long, looking for materials to make a new one. Now armed with several, I went back to my mine, now a comfortable distance underground. Ten minutes later, I returned with a few stacks of stone and a plan. Unfortunately, the sun had set and an opportunistic zombie who couldn’t believe his luck got to bite my head off. But no problem! I respawned a few feet away and got to reclaim my booty before outrunning the poor decomposing soul. I spent that night running around, dodging arrows, spiders, and the occasional explosion before the sun rose (sunlight kills zombies and skeletons, and makes spiders non-aggressive). With the sun fully up, I could begin my construction. A two stone high wall was all that was needed to keep the beasties out, and a fetching wooden door sealed my entrance. A glass roof constructed from heated sand finished the job, and I basked in the glow of a job well done. I had survived my first few nights (sort of), and constructed my house all on my own (sort of).

I had some stone left over.

So I decided to build a statue of myself as a tribute to the great builder that I obviously was.

Of course, the next day, I was working on it, and a Creeper got close enough to blow me up and half of my statue. And then another got the side of my house.

So I made a sword. Some bitches needed telling whose land this was.

“Get orf moi land!”

Minecraft is available now for the low low price of €9.95, (or about £8 or $11) from the website. Don’t forget, it’s 50% off during alpha, so although you’ll have to live with the various bugs and glitches, you’ll get it for cheaper than when it finally gets released. Happy mining!

Damn That Snake!

tehmadnessLeave a comment

I have a confession to make.

Months after making that post, I was led by the nose back into the accursed game which I love so much that I never play it.

Yes, I subscribed to EVE Online for a month. I regret doing so, as all people who have visited a seedy brothel do. But, like them, I hope to have left a wiser man. I’m wise enough to know that I’ll be visiting it’s turgid depths again though. Even if it did give me syphilis.

You have no idea how much I wanted to make a “your mum” joke in that last paragraph.

So, I went back to my old Caldari character for a month, hoping to do some missions and get some money and reputation. In non-EVE speak, I have a character specialising in missiles who does quests.

My hope was, as always, to get stuck into EVE and start enjoying it as much as my clan mates do. I did missions for about two days, and continued training my character for about three weeks. Yeah, I failed as epically as I usually do, and now I’m broke, which’ll hopefully stop me from charging wallet-first into it next time.

Again, I’d been brought into the EVE universe by talk from my friends and visions of doing these fun things for myself. Unfortunately, the fun part of EVE is totally overshadowed by the part of it which is no fun at all, and yet is totally vital; making money.

Ways of making Interstellar Kredits (ISK) involve one of the following:

  • Mining – this involves targeting an asteroid, turning on your mining lasers, and then al-tabbing out of game until your hold is full of minerals. Then you sell the minerals.
  • Ratting – grinding in MMO terms. You kill NPC mobs over and over again for the loot. Majorly boring, basically.
  • Mission running – this is the EVE version of quests; you pick up the mission from an NPC agent, and you complete the objectives given to you. This actually sounds like fun, until you realise that almost every single type of mission is the same. It’s either “go here and kill stuff”, or “go here and get stuff”. That’s it. That might sound incredibly similar to the World of Warcraft quests, and pretty much any MMO, but at least they give you stuff to look at. Once you’ve seen one starfield, you’ve pretty much seen them all.
  • Complex running – pretty much the same as instancing in WoW, only you’re not certified to be alone. If they can find you, anyone can jump into the complex to get you. So yeah, that can be jumpy. This is rather higher end than the other stuff though, so don’t expect to jump straight into doing this one.

I’m sure there are more, but I don’t really know what they are. Apparently planetary stuff has really taken off (lolirony) and can make you money, but I don’t know much about that.

From my personal experience of talking to many EVE players, the process of making money is a precursor to the fun part of the game, and a necessary evil. Because it is an evil. A boring, soul-destroying evil.

But I think that’s what a lot of players enjoy. It’s a totally immersive and hardcore game. The learning curve is the first test of that. It weeds out the players it doesn’t want or need in order to progress. EVE doesn’t want the carebear fest that WoW can be. It isn;t going to hold your hand, and it certainly won’t cuddle you after pirates have brutally taken you from behind. A trained monkey could reach level 80. It couldn’t play EVE. The totally immersive, real universe feel of EVE is something that brings in a lot of players.

And sadly, it’s not something that I go in for. I don’t have the patience, or indeed, the concentration to play it properly. I’m not ready for a second life. I struggle with having one most of the time. I like having games I can dip in and out of at my personal whims and desires. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t like that, and I could play games like EVE Online, Achaea: Dreams of Divine Lands and Wurm Online properly, and to the extent that they deserve. But that’s not me, and EVE isn’t my game.

The sooner I realise that, i can stop tempting myself back into it every few months. Damn shiny thing syndrome.

In the meantime, here’s a video that shows EVEs charms in a way that I couldn’t describe. Skip to about 50 seconds in, to trim the excessive intro.

Until next time!

Fuck you, Alien Swarm.

tehmadness1 Comment

After playing for around an hour on Alien Swarm, my brave comrades and myself finally reached the last stage of the Jacob’s Hope campaign.

Our task, which we chose to accept, was to detonate a nuclear bomb deep underneath the campaign’s facility in order to raze the alien menace from the face of the Earth.

We suited up, ready to take on the alien menace plaguing the facility. In a break from my usual vocation as the Tech marine, I had chosen the Officer class, in order to fully take advantage of the monstrous shotgun combo afforded to that class. Armed with my Vindicator assault shotgun and a pump-action shotgun as a sidearm, I strode into the fray, blowing apart multiple xenos as I went.

It was all going well until I ran out of ammunition. I was forced to pick up a mining laser, in order to keep the aliens from eating my face. Thankfully, my electrified armour kept my face from being literally eaten by parasites – think Headcrabs, but more persistent.

Bruised, bloodied but never beaten, we made it to the final area. There was an ammo dump too, so I got to refill my shotgun before the final task. We simply had to hack the console to turn the nuke on, before hotfooting it out of the level before the explosion went all Modern Warfare on us. Sounded simple. Until we realised that every motherfucker and their alien cousin was going to turn up to check out the disturbance.

Time’s up; hack’s over. We ran for it. All semblance of squad tactics forgotten, we cheesed it for the exit. Our transport was waiting for us at the very end. Our Medic bit it first, being taken down by aliens flooding into the area. I ran on, followed by our Special Weapons person (sexually equal title). The Tech marine took a one-way ticket next, being gang-banged by remorseless aliens. Just behind me, the Special Weapons person taken down by horde after horde of aliens; a vicious slow motion giving me second-by-second analysis of his brave death. I imagined his soundless mouth telling me to push on, to defeat the alien menace. But with my ears full of alien viscera, and my head down I heard nothing.

Alone, I purged forwards, unloading my shotgun again and again and again. Aliens fell before me, carpeting my squishy path to freedom, Perhaps I had been cold to leave my fellow soldiers behind to die, but that’s the cruel nature of leadership. Sometimes, sacrifices must be made for the good of the mission. Each would be remembered as a martyr for their race. And now, the mission was all. I needed to escape. The end was in sight, I could see the gunship before me, hovering and ready to take me away. Spitting in my face, the devil had sent his finest, and large aliens waited to assail me before my final victory. Shield bug after shield bug awaited me, with legions of regular soldier bugs. I scythed my way through, blowing through rank after rank of exploding alien carcasses. I never bothered with the shield bugs, simply running past them. But this was to my folly. One turned to deliver a mighty blow onto my backpack, hurling my slight body into a pile of wooden boxes. Frantically, I smashed my way through the countless aliens in front of me. But strike after strike took their toll, and I finally fell beneath the unstoppable alien horde. My last sight was the gunship taking off in panic as the alien attempted to claw at it’s undersides…

Afterwards, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. The complaints of lag were well placed, and ultimately led to many of my compatriots downfall, including the brave Special Weapons person. But it was one hell of an exhilarating game, and one I hope to try again.

At which point, the game told me that the mission had been failed.

Fuck you, Alien Swarm. Whether or not we made it back alive or not is not part of the question. The nuke still went off, and we still saved the human race. Each one of us was a brave and forgotten martyr of the human race, and we deserved to be told that we succeeded.

Damn, this wrong needs righting. Fire that game back up!

I’ll admit creative exaggeration on the numbers of aliens in the final part, but it sounded pretty damn good! Either way, Alien Swarm is available for free from the Steam Store now.

Just Explosions 2

tehmadness2 Comments

Just Cause 2 is probably one of my favourite games of all time.

It’s not the first holder of that esteemed title, of course. Being as easily distracted as I am, many different games have been made my favourite game of all time. Final Fantasy VII, Kingdom Hearts II, Smackdown! Here Comes the Pain… the list goes on for some time.

To be fair, Just Cause 2 actually deserves its praise.

Just one of the many beautiful landscapes.

Going into the game, I’d already read a lot of blog posts about the game, and I thought I knew what to expect. Ten minutes into the game, it gave me an AA gun and a bunch of stuff to destroy. And I knew immediately that the multitude of blogs and reviews hadn’t scratched the surface of it.

Lots of games give you the option to blow things up. Red Faction Guerrilla is a great example of the same style of game-play; you’re given a wide open landscape, and one simple order – go blow shit up. And it’s fun, for a short period of time. After that, you realise that whilst everything is falling down in a rather pretty fashion with bits flying everywhere, the structures stand up if you’ve left so much a biscuit wafer attached to the upper platform. Nothing keels over due to gravity. Alright, it’s set on Mars, where I’m sure the gravity is weaker, but I still take falling damage, and I’m fairly sure that the material isn’t that tough if I can knock it down with a hammer. And that aspect kind of killed the game a little bit for me. It just didn’t feel quite right after that.

Just Cause 2 gets around this by not knocking things down at all until you’ve destroyed them. At which point they go berserk. Pretty much everything blows up, if you shoot at it. Hell, the guard towers blow up if you shoot them, even if there’s nothing explosive in there. I know, I checked. And that gives the game a certain charm. It’s absurd on so many levels – the way civilians go flying if you so much as brush them, the infinite parachutes, and the similarly-limitless grappling hook – but that absurdity makes it good. Red Faction failed because things didn’t react as they should. Just Cause 2 succeeds because things react as you think that they should. It’s Hollywood movie-standard, and that’s good, because surely every gamer wants to be in their own personal action film. A moment of this occured whilst I parachuted off the side of a snowy cliff, a military base exploding behind me. And you can do that a lot, if you want to. The game world is of such a size that you can do that again, and again, and again.

This game makes you feel cool, and that’s not something that games make you feel enough. I last felt it with Mirror’s Edge, and with the original Devil May Cry before that, but it’s not something that is pushed at us enough. Lets be honest, the way that people play games is by trial-and-error. We bungle through, roughly scraping through levels in a cack-handed sort of way. We need games to give us an essence of cool to that stupidity. And Just Cause 2 has it in spades.

So much good boom.

The little touches that make the game as much as the explosions. Drifting slowly over a quiet forest, the game throws little music clips at you, highlighting the peacefulness and the beauty of the landscape; something that you often fail to notice whilst you’re blowing the shit out of it. At another point, I was torn; should I blow this mountain-top community’s only water tower sky-high? Their nearest water was several miles away, and all I’d get was a silly little completion point. My conscience was torn with my desire to complete the settlement and move on, and to be a decent human being. Eventually I stopped being such a pussy and did it, but I was genuinely torn. It’s nice for a game to do that you. I’ve never felt like that in Fallout 3, or Oblivion. But then, I’ve never played such an ass in those games.

Rico’s little quotes are another nice addition. “Now, we’ll have some fun” when he picks up a minigun, or “tough luck” when he throws a 747 pilot out into the open air at several thousand feet; the fact that he’s an asshole shines through with pretty much every action, and I don’t mind. I don’t usually like playing assholes – Mass Effect, Fallout 3 and pretty much any role-playing game can attest to that – but something about Rico appeals to me. Perhaps it’s the cheeky-boy charm as well. Or simply because it’s amusing. Either way, the developers made someone who I regarded as a complete asshole likeable, and that’s a task worth praise.

And it’s beautiful. I had to upgrade my XP OS to Windows 7 before I could play it, but by the almighty PC gaming gods, it was worth it. Standing on the suspension bridge leaving one of the cities, it started to rain. And the rain stuck to Rico like a sweaty prostitute. If I’d been a gay man I’d have licked my screen. The whole thing was that beautiful. And the sunsets, oh god, the sunsets… One mission takes you to a far distant island, where an EMP system installed by the Japanese in World War II is still active, and is blowing planes out of the sky. The level itself is one of the benchmarks, the “Dark Tower” they call it. The whole collection of towers was simply sublime.

In fact, here’s a video:

Just beautiful. And it’s not just great looking, it’s a great level to play in the game too.

The clinching point came for me whilst I was drifting around aimlessly on my parachuting from a plane in order to reach a mission. I suddenly realised that everything that I could see, I could go and visit. Nothing was a background texture, and everything was there for real – so to speak. At that point I realised that this was probably my perfect game. I would often set off with one goal in mind, only to reach the halfway point, and notice something cool quite close, and end up chasing that instead. Halfway through that task, I’d notice a tall structure sticking out of an otherwise featureless area. So I’d go investigate that and end up on an oil rig. And so on. I’m constantly being distracted, within the game. I was almost trapped within the game, until I stopped turning it on. Aha! Victory is mine, silly game!

Of course, it has downsides. But these are minor, and if you’re enjoying what the game does well, these will mean fuck all to you. Sure, the storyline is paper-thin in substance, but every other part of the game is polished to a near blinding shine. None of the bad points matter that much, because this game is so good, and the bad points are so minor. Get this game, if you enjoy having fun. And I’m sure you do.

No, I’m Not Dead

tehmadnessLeave a comment

So, I’ve been playing Team Fortress 2.

And well, no Golden Wrench for me. But I did have a great time searching for it, and I don’t regret a moment of it. Sure, it was a market ploy designed to pull players back in again. But hey, I love those cynical market ploys!

Seriously, this was a great update. I clocked up around seventeen extra hours on Team Fortress 2. It might not sound like a lot, but when you think that I’d only played eighty hours before the update… that’s a fair increase.

tf2-20100706-231504

I crafted so many usually priceless items into scrap metal – The Scotsmans Skullcutter, The Pain Train and The Ubersaw were all victims of my frenzied search for the elusive Australium-plated tool.

And I loved every tearful, despair stricken moment of it. It’s just a shame that there are no more class updates left, because Valve really pulled a beaut this time, and I’d have loved to do it again.

Just not so soon, eh?

I’ll try not to leave it so long before posting again, I promise. I’ve been stuck on a post about Mirror’s Edge – a case of severe writers block, it seems.

Over and out.

Infinity: The Quest for Earth

tehmadnessLeave a comment

I know I said I’d update my blog with past games before I did anything else, but this really needs to go into here as a mini-update. Frankly, this game needs as much publication as it can possibly get, because it looks incredible.

What game am I talking about? Infinity, of course.

The game, a brainchild of Flavien Brebion, is an attempt to create a truely infinite game universe. It uses procedural generation to create a seamless game world, from deep space, to orbit, to landing on a planet’s surface. And that’s not all – the creators have promised that every star in the sky will be able to be visited, and again, procedurally generated. It seems that procedural generation is the future, as already seen in theHunter. From my experience from that game, procedural generation can create beautiful landscapes, with little memory space.

Infinity: The Quest for Earth now holds the hopes that I originally had for Spore. But don’t just take my word for it, check out the video in beautiful HD!

Crack, And Why I Love It So.

tehmadnessLeave a comment

So, it’s been a while since I updated this blog at all, and an awful lot of games have been played in the time between my EVE craving and now. I’ll try to cram them into a few posts over the next few weeks, but I’ll probably miss some stuff out.

Oh, as a note, I never got back into EVE. I managed to stave off the pangs of hunger long enough for them to subside and be replaced with something else. In this case, Lord of the Rings Online – which I’ll mention in a later blog post. Briefly.

Alright, I’ll kick off my post with a biggie; World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft

So some of you are guaranteed to be groaning at this point. But really, as an easily distracted gamer, how can I not have played World of Warcraft at some point? As the guy to be distracted by shiny things I can’t fail to have been pulled in at some point.

Alright, so that point was around four years ago (the seventh of August, 2005, to be exact), but that’s not the point. At the time (bright-eyed and innocent), I was looking for a MMORPG to involve myself in; having a strange, rose-tinted view of online play ever since my Runescape days. After trying many, many different free MMOs, I came across World of Warcraft. Alright, it wasn’t free, but doing a little research, it seemed worth the money.

Of course, my “research” was looking through their official site. Again with the shiny things.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I bought the game and have been having a love-hate relationship with it ever since. The longest I’ve ever gone for without a subscription has been five months, even though I’ve probably never played a subscription all the way through. I’ve always gotten bored before the six months is up, and am usually inactive when it runs out. Still, I always come back.

The main reason I’ve always come back is because of the involvement I have with the game’s society. Despite never having been a major member of a guild, or joined a WoW-centric forum, I’ve always had links back to the game that’s dragged me back in again and again. One of these has been the WoW podcast, Taverncast; a childish, yet mature trip through various bits of Warcraft fun with added beer. Seriously, any one of their episodes can get me cracking up, regardless of what it’s about. The other one of these has been my cousin. I’d have been clean from my personal crack for several months, say, and I’ll go to visit him.

And he’ll be raiding.

Or doing something cool.

Or just AFK in a city.

All it takes is for me to see it. Or for him to talk about it. And I’m straight back in again. I’ll get home and throw myself on Blizzard’s mercy, apologising feverishly for my foolish desire for a life, and offering my money and my soul in recompense.

And Blizzard would look down at me, laugh and supply me once again with six months of grinding and leveling…

And yes, only those. Because I have never ever hit the level cap in any of my almost five years playing Warcraft. My highest level character is a 72 Rogue, who was leveled up to 75 by some hackers when my account got highjacked. Again, my love of trying new things, and consistently getting bored of old ones crosses into games, as well as across them, accounting for my alt-o-holic attitude.

But why do I love this game so much as to come back to it, again and again? I really couldn’t tell you. I love the art style – it’s bright enough so that distinct contrasts between characters and landscapes are actually possible – unlike Age of Conan, for instance. It’s also cartoony, and wonderfully exaggerated. Areas always have an air of difference to them, perhaps to a stupid degree in some cases (the area full of snow being right next door to one full of lava, for instance), but hey, that’s what Cataclysm’s for, right?

Anyway, back to what I actually did this past month. Well, I’ve been leveling up my Undead Mage. I’ve always had an urge to play a Mage, and earlier this year, I bit the bullet and raised one past level 18, finally surpassing my previous efforts. I’ve been having a lot of fun with this character, and I certainly want it to be my first (level-capped character, of course). I won’t deny that a large part of my leveling experience has involved a lot of adventuring using the Dungeon Finder, which has been an absolute boon for someone like myself. I’d never been half of the dungeons in Old Azeroth before the Dungeon Finder would randomly put me there. Maraudon, Lower Blackrock Spire, the three Dire Maul wings, and even a brief and brutal foray into Undead Stratholme.

All this has taken me to level 59, and my progress has somewhat stuttered there for a time. Oddly enough, it’s not down to my attention span this time. Most of the dungeons that I’m eligable for at this point, tend to take a fairly long time to complete, and I simply don’t have that much time now I’m at university and have developed what is known as “a life”. Scary, I know. I could leave halfway through an instance, but I’ve never liked that approach, especially when there are shiny things waiting at the end of it.

As another excuse (or reason), the university has a Firewall that allows Warcraft under the most silly of exceptions. After logging onto my account, I must log into a level 1 character on the Darkspear realm. Then log out. Then I can log into a level 1 character on MY realm. Only after logging out of that character, can I then access my real character. It’s bloody wearing, let me tell you. I can’t just log on; I need to go through this rigmarole every single time. That’s the reason I have a character called “Access” on my character list.

————————–

Haha, this was originally meant to be a post amalgamating all of my gaming history of the past month into a single post. After writing almost a thousand words on WoW alone, I’ve decided that I’ll just leave as a standalone WoW post.

‘Til next time, true believers!

My Lust for Forbidden Fruit

tehmadnessLeave a comment

Ah, shiny things, how I love thee.

The shiny thing in this case is CCP Games’ EVE Online, a massively multiplayer role-playing game set in outer space. My problem is that I’ve played EVE before, on many occasions. I’ve also given it up and gotten bored of it very quickly on those occasions.

The main problem is the people I know who play it. I’ll hear people playing it a lot of the time, and that tempts me back in again. The problem is, I know that as soon as I get back into the game I’ll be stuck doing the same thing as I’ve done before. And that soon gets boring for me. I lose enthusiasm, and soon re-quit the game. Again.

EVE Online, for those not acquainted, gives you a large galaxy, a small ship and kicks you out the door, expecting you to fend for yourself. There’s a fairly lengthy and in-depth tutorial, but in my experience, very few people bother to sit through it, preferring to jump into space screaming “FIRIN’ MAH LAZOR”. I can understand why those people left the game. However, I wasn’t one of those people. I sat through the tutorial; warped where it told me to, shot what it told me to, and picked up what it told me to. I knew as much as starting players would be expected to know, and I left the tutorial with optimism and a bunch of ideas for my personal expansion into space.


They never really materialised. I spent a few weeks mining high-security space (security rating of 0.6 and above) asteroid belts before an ill-advised trek into low-security space (0.5 to 0.1) caused the destruction of the Destroyer that I had scrimped and saved up all my little Interstellar Kredits for. And that kinda killed the game for me. Everything that I’d spent weeks on was destroyed in an instant by a player who had a whimsical decision to roam into the same belt as us. I understand that a lot of EVE players actually thrive on the risk involved in going into low-sec space, but I personally have never liked the crushing feeling of having everything taken away from you by one moment of bad judgement. To pile on top of that, it’s horribly hard to make good money in EVE without doing the NPC-run missions, and even those are remarkably sparse in money until you reach a decent level.

In addition to this, EVE has a notoriously hard learning curve. It takes months for you to be able to fly anything resembling decent, and it’ll then take another few months to be able to fit the guns to use on that ship. And that’s fine, to people who don’t mind making the commitment.

So why, despite all of my personal criticism, do I still hold a lusting for it? Well, a few friends of mine stayed on in the game after I foolishly introduced them to it, and they kept tempting me back into it time and time again. The first few times weren’t as bad as the first, as my friends had gained more than a little experience in the harsh PvP-orientated world of 0.0 security space (the riskiest area in space, but the most profitable), and I had picked up stuff from listening to them in Ventrilo. So I joined them down in 0.0, where we set up a base and began skirmishing with other pirates. I bought my ISK by selling timecodes to other players (a legitimate way of “selling gold”, basically), and before long I was in a Cruiser, flying around with the rest of them, taking part in fights. I was usually the first to die, being in a comparatively fragile ship, but my economy was stable, and I enjoyed myself immensely.

However, it was the parts in between the fighting that I couldn’t stick. I found that I was doing nothing else in the game except logging on to change a training skill, and take part in scheduled fleets, and that was about it. I quickly lost interest again.


So, from all of that, you might imagine that I’d lost all interest in EVE, right? Well, obviously not, since the first few lines indicate otherwise. But just pretend.

Really, what drew me in most about EVE after the first few experiences was the politics. Because 0.0 security space is a fully player-driven and owned area, unlike any other MMO, and because EVE utilises a single server for their entire player base, also unlike any other MMO, the player politics and battles are staggering in scale. It is the constant battles that go on between the player-run Alliances and Corporations for control of the territory that keeps me loving EVE’s world. I love to listen to the EVE players, simply because it gives me a window onto the game which I love, yet cannot play. My lack of longevity with this game frustrates me, and that’s why I attempt to play it every couple of months. I always fail, but that doesn’t stop me from trying again in another couple of months.

And now, I’m at that point where I crave EVE. Yet I know I won’t play it properly and I’ll lose interest. Such is the curse of having such a low attention span. Perhaps this time will be different. Perhaps.

Wish me luck.

Migomi Hysatacks, out.

On Murdering Defenceless Animals

tehmadness1 Comment

Who knew that killing deer could be such fun? Certainly not I.

That’s why when I found myself getting rather addicted to the hunting simulator, “theHunter”, I was rather surprised. I’d never played a hunting game before this, for fear of becoming an evil fuzzy-bunny murderer. And after becoming an evil fuzzy-bunny murder, I must say it isn’t as bad as I’d thought it’d be. For one thing, I’m an evil deer murderer.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not the kind of guy who revels in pain and death. I’ve wooped at my own share of crockets, and I’ve sworn and promised revenge on plenty of Demomen. But it’s never been on the level of slaughtering an innocent animal in the name of sport, even if it is in a game. I’ve always been of the mindset that unless it’s actively trying to kill me, I’ll leave it alone. That’s always been my mindset in Warcraft PvP, and I feel iffy taking an innocent life.

I downloaded the 450MB client and about a week later, after I remembered that I’d downloaded it, installed it and created a character on their website. Standard login, standard password, standard nickname… what’s this? Choose a from a randomised selection of faces and names? Vincente Foxe it is, a beautifully pornstar-esque name, even if my character does look Mexican.

So, with my Mexican pornstar alter-ego created, I clicked the “Hunt Now” button (the game is launched through the website; this isn’t a game for those with unsteady connections) and the game booted up. I quickly chose the highest possible settings based on a pre-disposed assumption that my computer can run anything.

My god…

This game is prettier than a Hollywood poster boy. If anything, my deer-hunting pornstar felt a little intimidated. It was certainly prettier than his day job. I wondered if he was getting feelings he was only supposed to get on set. I knew I was.

After literally gobsmacking at the graphics and squeeing at the presence of crepuscular rays, I wandered aimlessly around for a while, inspecting the odd leaf, and strolling off into the forest at my leisure. Ten minutes later, bored, I closed the client.

So far, it wasn’t the emotional tour de force that I’d expected from Grand Theft Hunting: Deer edition. Hell, I hadn’t even seen a deer. It was as I closed the game and glanced at the website that I noticed I had a message. It turned out to be the tutorial, and I follow the directions down to the waterside, where I notice two deer drinking from the lake. I go prone to steady my gun, aim my sights carefully over the poor animal, whisper an apology, hold my breath to steady my sights and…

I miss. The deer runs off into the forest. With it go my last vestiges of restraint towards the killing. I’m hooked. There’s something horribly compulsive about tracking down and killing something that actively works against you. There’s a true pride in pitting yourself against an opponent that you must out think and outmanoeuvre your prey. The first time I succeeded in taking down a deer, I yelled “get some!”, like I was in Vietnam or something. It felt like the deer had really made me work for my victory. This was the most fun that I’d had in ages. No FPS had compared to the sheer joy that I gained simply from trekking around forests. It was the constant hope that a deer will be around the next corner that kept me tracking them, and it made up for the long time between spottings when I finally did find one. And then it was “just one more”.

I’ve succumbed. I’ve bought a four month license to hunt the rest of the wildlife on the island, better camoflague, and a much better gun.

But how long will this game last me until I get bored? In the meantime, turkey, coyote, elk and whitetail deer await me!

Visit theHunter at http://www.thehunter.com/pub/.