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Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction

Finished playing through the verbosely-named Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction on the PS3 at the weekend. I bought the game with my PS3 a couple of months ago, but for various reasons (chiefly, GTA IV) only just got round to playing it.

All in all, I enjoyed it. It's basically a third-person platformer, but there's a huge amount of variety (from the weapons to the environments). The graphics are also top-notch: silky smooth, with an art style that looks like a Pixar movie.

On the downside, the game was ridiculously easy - even the final boss fight only took me a couple of attempts. The story was also fairly weak, which I think explains why I didn't find the game quite as compelling as I would otherwise have expected to.

I'm now back to playing PC games for a while, as I sink my teeth into Mass Effect.

Lapped

GRID is still frustrating as hell. Spent yesterday evening racing again and again on one track, in attempt to complete the objective of finishing at least third in my class. It was the same as one of the tracks in the demo, which I had finally managed to win a race on, so I was hoping it wouldn't take me long to complete the objective.

Wrong. It took me a couple of hours, in which time I suffered a humiliation even worse than coming last: I was lapped by all of the other drivers.

For completing the objective I scored 145 reputation points in Europe, bringing my totals to 200 in the US, 145 in Europe and 180 in Japan. Doesn't sound too bad, until you realise I need 80,000 points in each region to progress to the next level of the game in that region.

I'm going to stick at it, but if I don't improve soon, I fear I'll be abandoning GRID for another game that's a bit more fun.

Fifth place, better than last

After playing GRID for another couple of hours yesterday evening, I finally managed to finish a race in 5th place (I came last in every other race, however).

I found it a bit easier when I decreased the force feedback strength on the steering wheel. Even at 40% it was a struggle to stop the wheel pulling through my hands as the car fishtailed its way along the track. It was also making me under-estimate the amount of effort needed to turn the car, usually resulting in me smashing into the corners (although I suspect I'm still approaching most of the turns way too fast). Knocking it back to 10% made things easier, although now I can't let the car pull itself out of corners by just letting the wheel slide through my hands.

It's definitely my driving that's the problem rather than other cars. One race just required me to get a certain lap time on an empty track - the best time I managed was some 25 seconds slower. By the end of the evening I was definitely starting to get frustrated.

Bad driver

My Logitech G25 steering wheel finally arrived this weekend, so yesterday I bought myself a copy of GRID and took it for a spin. Conclusion: I'm a really rubbish driver.

I must have spent about 3 hours playing last night, and in that time I not only failed to win a single race, the best placing I managed was second to last. And that was on the easiest skill setting, with every driver assist turned on. Most of the time I'd be finishing about 20 seconds behind the car in front of me, and God-knows how far behind the winner. My sole success was in a race where I was the only car on the track and I had to hit a speed of 155 mph.

When I played the demo of GRID using the PS3 controller it took me a while before I managed to win a race, while I got used to the twitchy handling. With the wheel the handling is less twitchy, but I'm finding it really, really hard to keep up with the rest of the cars without smashing into a barrier or spinning off. I think a lot of it comes down to not knowing the tracks - I'm just coming into most of the corners way too fast.

Surprisingly, however, I'm still finding it more challenging than frustrating. There were a couple of tracks were I felt that, with a bit more practice, I could improve my standings. Just a case of getting over that initial learning curve, I guess.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

In the last week I've been running, jumping and shooting my way through Uncharted: Drake's Fortune on the PS3. Although it only took me 11 hours to finish it, I had a thoroughly enjoyable time.

Think of a cross between an Indiana Jones movie and the Prince of Persia games, and you pretty much have Uncharted. You play Nathan Drake, a modern-day treasure hunter, trying to find the lost gold of El Dorado, fighting a rival group who's trying to get there first. It's a mix of a platformer and a third-person shooter, and it works really well.

I'm not a big fan of shooters on the PS3 because I find trying to aim with an analogue stick a complete nightmare compared to aiming with a mouse. But I didn't have too much trouble with Uncharted at all. Maybe I'm starting to get used to it. The next time I play a PC shooter it's probably going to seem incredibly easy.

So what was so great about the game? The graphics were nice, particularly the character models, although I still think that top-end PC titles like Crysis have them beat. The story was enjoyable, if predictable, with several hugely fun set pieces (the vehicle chase and the jet-ski ride upriver standing out). I liked the way that finding the hidden treasures scattered around the levels gradually unlocked special features, such as making-of videos and special abilities - it really gave you an incentive to explore. Ammo was rare enough to make you worried about running out, but not so rare that you often did. And auto-save points were sufficiently frequent that I rarely got frustrated.

The few, minor annoyances included quicktime events which sprang from nowhere and required you to quickly press a button or instantly die (which invariably meant that I died the first time), and Drake's unpredictable ability to automatically grab onto ledges when running off them.

But all in all, Uncharted was the most fun game I've played since Rainbow Six: Vegas.

Spore Creature Creator

Despite the hype, I haven't really been able to see what all the fuss is about with the upcoming game Spore. But after sitting down to play with the recently released Creature Creator the other night, I'm beginning to change my mind.

The Creature Creator is the part of Spore that lets you design a creature and see it come to life. There's nothing more to it than that, and I was a bit cynical about EA's decision to release it as a $10 download (although some stores will then give you $10 off the full game when it's released in September). However they've also released a free version (which has fewer bits to build your creature from than the $10 version), and it's that that I was playing with.

I only expected it to occupy me for half an hour or so, but in the end I spent a couple of hours with it, and will probably go back to it again. It was surprisingly fun and addictive playing around with different creature designs, and it's amazing how the game can then animate your creation.

Most cunning of all is how the designs are actually saved in the image of the creature itself. This means you can just save the thumbnail (like the one above) to your desktop, then drag and drop it into the Creature Creator to see it move or use it as the basis for a creature of your own. Clever stuff.

More of my creations here.

My dad, my hero

"Just retrieved all your old Lego from the loft – see attached pictures.

Amazed ourselves with how much stuff you had and as you can see, still with some of the original boxes. Also with all of the instruction leaflets and booklets as well. The assembled pieces are just as you abandoned them, when you were about 10, for the computer! We even found an astronaut on a digger!

Hope this will have made your day. But to ship this lot to Bermuda would cost a fortune!!!

Dad"

Alas, I think he's probably right. Guess I'll just have to take a large, empty suitcase with me next time I go to the UK.

More pictures here. Thanks for digging it all out, dad!

Lego nostalgia

This is absolutely awesome.

I almost cried when I saw the Lego Galaxy Explorer again. It was my favourite Lego model when I was a kid, along with the Space Cruiser, Starfleet Voyager (so that's where they got the name from!), Mobile Rocket Transport, Alpha-1 Rocket Base and all the rest of the Lego Space stuff.

Don't suppose you've still got them up in the roof, do you, dad?

The Pyro is a Bermudian

While debate continues about whether Team Fortress 2's Pyro is a man or a woman, with him set to receive a new weapon called the Axtinguisher later this week, there can no longer be any doubt about his nationality.

Making progress

Made quite a bit of progress in GTA IV yesterday, getting another 10% or so further through the game. I reckon I've got about the same to go again before finishing the main story, after which I'll probably leave it and go play something else. Compulsive completer-finisher I may be, but there are just too many other games out there vying for my attention now.

Yesterday aside, I've now spent the last eight days writing my program for Mandy. In that time I've only left the house three times, and never ventured further than Ferry Reach. Starting at 9am and working until 11pm most days, I've been working harder than I do when I'm at work.

I've made good progress, but there remains a lot to do. It's proven to be a much more complicated piece of software than the inventory management system I wrote for Godet & Young, and I think I underestimated the amount of work involved. I've learned a fair bit about data binding in .NET and SQL Server Reporting Services in the process, though. The data binding stuff has proved considerably trickier than Microsoft make it out to be in their introductory videos, and I've run into several problems that I've struggled (and in some cases, am still struggling) to fix. I'm now going to have to work evenings and weekends to finish it.

As usual when developing, I've been doing a lot of swearing, but overall I've been feeling less stressed than I normally get at work. I think that's because at home I have at least been able to work uninterrupted, whereas at work I'm constantly getting emails and phone calls from people who need me to do stuff for them, which makes getting into a state of flow almost impossible. It's times like this when I appreciate the advantages an office with a door has over open plan.

Grand Theft Auto IV

I'm having a lot of fun with Grand Theft Auto IV at the moment.

I've clocked up about 25 hours play time so far, but have still completed less than 40% of the game (although the main story accounts for only 68% anyway). The story is engaging, my character sympathetic and the missions enjoyable and well-constructed (and not too hard).

The highlight came the other night, when my unintelligible Jamaican arms-supplier and I were given a helicopter to chase some guys in another chopper around Liberty City's skyscrapers, before blowing it out of the sky. Afterwards, I took the chopper over to have a look at the Statue of Liberty Happiness. The sense of freedom that I had flying around was amazing, knowing how long it would have taken me to drive a similar distance.

I also like that there's so much to do that's not central to the game, yet it's so well implemented that you want to spend time doing it anyway. The pool, darts and bowling mini-games are excellent and I've found browsing for clothes for my character oddly compelling too (if only I could find a pair of dark shades somewhere).

It's not perfect, however, and I still think the fawning review scores of 99% and 100% that greeted the game on release were rather silly. The graphics are fine, and the frame rate is good, but they're a bit fuzzy, with a lot of jagged edges on display. The missions have evolved little from those found in previous GTA titles. Having to keep taking your friends on man-dates to keep them sweet gets a little tiresome. Being unable to save part-way through a mission can be frustrating, since failure involves starting over from the person who gave it to you - which usually involves a drive back across town to the place where the action actually happens. Vehicles occasionally inexplicably disappear too. After taking a look inside the Statue of Happiness, I got back to the spot where I parked my chopper after to find that it had mysteriously vanished into thin air.

GTA IV is a great game, but it's not a perfect one.

The game that thinks it's a movie

One of the biggest upcoming titles on the PS3 is, apparently, Metal Gear Solid 4. Lots of people seem to be getting very excited about it. I don't understand why.

Admittedly, I've not played any of the previous titles in the series, but based on the dull introductory video ("war has changed" - yawn), which looked little different from any other shooter set in the Middle East, and now the news that there are several cut-scenes in the game that are approaching 90 minutes long, I remained resolutely unimpressed.

In the words of one of the commenters on Ars Technica, referring to the game's developer Hideo Kojima, "If he wanted to make a movie that's what he should have done. Games are meant to be played."

Quite.

Overload

I have too many things on my to-do lists right now. It's partly due to my parents' recent visit, but mainly due to me (as usual) trying to do too much.

Games to be played include, on the PC, Puzzle Quest (which I'm still obsessive-compulsively working my way through) and Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts. At my prompting, my dad has also downloaded the excellent (and free) Trackmania Nations Forever, so I want to spend some time racing him too, if the latency isn't too bad. On the PS3 I still have GTA IV, Ratchet and Clank, and Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, plus a shed-load of demos that I haven't looked at or want to play more of, including GRiD and DiRT. I'm really enjoying the PS3's driving games and want to find some more time to play them so I can justify shelling out for a Logitech G25 wheel.

Podcasts to be listened to include the last week of the Radio 4 Today program, the last five months of In Our Time, the last couple of News Quizes, and a bunch PC Gamer podcasts (which are just as entertaining as the magazine itself). The only time I get to listen is when I'm in the car or on the bus or, in the case of the lengthier, more cerebral In Our Times, when I'm ironing. I think I'm going to have to do a lot more ironing if I ever want to catch up.

Books to be read include Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (still only about a quarter of the way through, still quite enjoying it), after which I have Iain (M.) Banks' latest sci-fi novel Matter lined up. Reading only gets done when I'm on the bus to or from work and not listening to any podcasts, so the two of them will probably last me the rest of the year.

TV shows to be caught up on include the all of the current season of Doctor Who, the last two weeks of Battlestar Galactica, the final four episodes of Pushing Daisies (which my parents put me onto), and most of the first seasons of Dexter and The Riches (downloaded the first episodes from iTunes several weeks ago and haven't had chance to watch any more since). That's in between watching new episodes of Lost and old episodes of the first season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Ah well, at least Survivor has finished now.

And let's not mention the couple of videos that I still need to make time to edit into something watchable.

I suppose I should find some time to spend with my wife and son too.

Too. Damn. Much. To. Do.

Talisman

Now that I have a PS3, I've been spending some time poking around to see what games are available or upcoming for it.

The most exciting thing I found was news that a PS3 (and XBox) version of Games Workshop's classic board game Talisman is in development. I had a lot of fun with that back in my D&D-playing youth, and the prospect of a video game version that looked as nice as this was something to look forward to.

I was a bit concerned about the lack of information about the title available online, however - not a good sign for a game scheduled to launch this month, having already been delayed from last year. And sure enough, it seems that the project is currently in limbo with, at a minimum, a change of developer planned.

Bummer. Maybe I'd have better luck trying to persuade Mandy to play the 4th edition of the board game with me. Failing that, Aidan will just have to hurry up and grow up so I can play it with him!

Puzzle Quest

Puzzle Quest is the most addictive game I've played since Civilization 4.

I wouldn't have bothered with it had it not scored an impressive 87% in April's PC Gamer (making it the highest-scoring game that month) and attracted the mag's infrequently-seen "Must Buy" award too. It's only $20, and is available on Steam, so I decided to take a chance and download it. I'm glad I did.

It's a cross between Bejeweled (a popular casual game that I've never played) and a role-playing game. You take the role of a fantasy hero trying to save his homeland from an undead invasion by doing quests and fighting monsters - with all combat being resolved by playing a turn-based puzzle game. The puzzle consists of an 8x8 grid containing coloured icons, and each turn you have to swap two to try to make lines of three or more identical tiles. Depending on the tile icons, you either gain mana, gold or experience from the match, or cause damage to your opponent. Mana can be used to cast spells with a wide variety of effects. The first person to reduce his opponent to 0 health wins the combat.

It sounds simple, a little dull even, but it's very strategic. In addition, there's a variety of other stuff layered on top, from mounts, to special items, to crafting and spell creation (done via mini-games that are some variant on the combat puzzle game), all of which confer various bonuses and extra abilities in combat. It all makes for a surprisingly rich experience.

It's also nice to be reminded that great games don't have to have first-class 3D graphics and computer-melting minimum specs. Highly recommended.

To PS3 or not to PS3?

Against my better judgement, I've again found myself thinking about buying a PS3.

Pros:

• It's the only BD-Live Blu-ray player currently available.
• It can play back DivX- and XviD-encoded video. Like torrented Battlestar Galactica, for example.
• Apparently it can play games too. Including some you can't get on the PC (Guitar Hero I'm looking at you). Plus, the prospect of playing games on a big screen is quite enticing.

Cons:

• Price. I'm guessing between $600 and $800 in Bermuda.
• Selection of Blu-ray movies is a bit rubbish right now.
• Hi-def torrents seem to be mostly encoded in X264, which the PS3 can't play (at least, not without a lot of frigging around). And I don't know if the standard def, XviD-encoded ones will look any better than Cablevision.
• Selection of games isn't as good as, say, the Xbox 360. Although as I wouldn't be buying it for the games (and certainly not first-person shooters, which need mouse-look), that's no big deal.
• It's a console. Sellout.

Any console owners out there have any thoughts?

First Person Strategy

Finally finished playing Rainbow Six Vegas today (the first one, not the recent sequel). I thoroughly enjoyed it - more than I was expecting to, in fact.

The reason was that I was playing in "realistic" mode (where just a few hits will kill you) with the game only saving at predetermined checkpoints. Normally I hate games that don't let you save wherever you like, because having to replay the same segment again and again can be an exercise in frustration.

In Rainbow Six Vegas, I rarely found it frustrating, however. That's because whenever I was killed it was usually because I hadn't planned my attack, and had charged in as I might in any other first person shooter, hoping for the best. In this game, I really had to use cover carefully, guard against being flanked, and make use of my smoke grenades if I wanted to stay alive. That made the game hugely more strategic, and hugely more satisfying to play.

Gaming on a shoestring

In games, as in movies, you have the blockbusters and the arthouse titles. Most of the time, I just play the blockbusters: the likes of Bioshock, Portal, Crysis, Call of Duty 4 and so on. But in the last couple of days I've been enjoying a couple of considerably lower budget titles.

The first is Audiosurf, a sort of driving game where the track is generated from any of the music you have on your computer (DRM-protected purchases from the iTunes store excepted, annoyingly). The aim is to hit coloured blocks on the track and score as highly as you can. It doesn't sound like much, but there's several different game modes, and it's a lot of fun. The high score tables are online, so you can compare your paltry scores with those racked up by everyone else. Available for only $9.95 from Steam.

Even Mandy loves it and insisted that we buy a second copy for her laptop. It's the first game of mine that she's taken an interest in since Unreal Tournament 2003!

The second game is Space Hulk, a faithful reproduction of an old Games Workshop board game I used to play when I was a kid. It only runs at a resolution of 640x480, so I had to drop the resolution on my monitor so I didn't need a magnifying glass to play. But despite that, it's still an enjoyable turn-based strategy game which made me feel very nostalgic. And best of all, it's free.

Leaving Azeroth

I've just cancelled my subscription to World of Warcraft.

Truth is, I'm bored of WoW now. I've been playing since the beginning of 2005, however, the longest I have played any game, and there's just not enough to hold my interest any more. I don't participate in raiding because I'm not prepared to give the commitment that requires, and I've done so much PvP that that just isn't fun anymore. Running the 5 man instances is still fun, but it's difficult to find a group for them these days.

As I paid three months in advance, I can actually keep playing until April 16 (so the server transfer won't be a complete waste of money). And even after that, since all characters are retained indefinitely, I can return to the game at any time and pick up where I left off. I don't think that's going to happen, however.

Time for something new.

STALKER

I've just finished playing STALKER, a "first-person survival horror shooter" set in the Zone of Alienation around Chernobyl.

It's been out for about a year now, but I only got part-way through the game last year before I lost interest. Having visited Pripyat, the ghost town near the reactor, in Call of Duty 4 last month, I was inspired to return to STALKER and try to finish it off.

The game's real strength is its mythology, and the creepy, desolate atmosphere that it creates. The Zone is a wasteland of run-down buildings, strange anomalies and aggressive, mutated wildlife, and it's fun to explore. Many of the locations, notably Chernobyl itself, have been closely reproduced from their real-life counterparts, and knowing that really added to my enjoyment of the game.

While most of the enemies you fight are human, not all are. While exploring an abandoned research facility, a couple of hours into the game, I ran into my first mutants. It was a genuinely scary experience. One creature had some kind of telepathic attack that seemed to pull me towards it; the first time I ran into it, I had no idea what was going on, or how to fight it. It was a refreshingly different experience. A similar disorienting effect occurred later in the game while I was exploring another abandoned lab, and ran into some really bizarre anomlies and a poltergeist. STALKER conveys the weirdness of its Zone extremely well.

The game isn't without its problems, however. There are clipping problems galore, and getting around can be tedious. The Zone is large, yet there is no means of rapidly moving from one place to another. When the missions required me to backtrack a long way, I wouldn't bother unless it was essential for me to proceed.

Because of that, I ended up missing a large, important chunk of the game, even though I didn't realise it at the time. About 2/3 of the way through the game I got a mission to go and talk to someone back in the starting area. It seemed important, however I already had a mission to find a monolith inside the Chernobyl sarcophagus, which I assumed was the main quest line. So I didn't bother with the other mission.

When I finally made it to the monolith, I got a perplexing cutscene and the game ended. Baffled, I stared open-mouthed at the screen. Your main objective, given to you at the start of the game, was to kill someone called Strelok. All through the game I had been uncovering clues as to Strelok's whereabouts. Now I realised that the game had ended, and yet I still had no idea who Strelok was.

Now I was wondering what the hell was going on again, but this time it wasn't in a good way. So it was onto Google to find out what I'd missed.

It turned out that the game has multiple endings, and that to get to the "proper" one, I should have done that mission that I skipped. If I had, I would have discovered who Strelok was, and would have found my way into a whole other section of the game within the reactor. Fortunately, thanks to a clipping bug I was able to force my way through the locked door in the reactor that lead to this final section, and play it out. But I was left feeling mildly irritated that the game had allowed my to have such an unsatisfying ending intially. I guess that's the price you pay for a free-form, open world, rather than a game that's on rails.

As a result of the game, I've taken an interest in the real-life Chernobyl and its exclusion zone. It's fascinating to check it out on Google Earth, along with Pripyat and its ferris wheel. The BBC's Horizon program did a documentary on Chernobyl in 1996 and I intend to watch that too. It's spooky to think that there's now a 19-mile wide exclusion zone around the reactor that's almost devoid of human life.

It's amazing that it took someone as long as it did to turn such a mysterious place into a setting for a game.

Changing servers

Last night I changed the server that my main World of Warcraft character plays on, moving from Kil'Jaeden to Skullcrusher.

One of my friends made the move a month or two back, citing problems with lag on Kil'Jaeden. I hadn't found it too bad, and was reticent to pay the $25 moving fee, so I initially decided to stay put.

Last night, however, I begrudgingly decided to fork out the cash and move. The final straw was another unsatisfying evening fighting nothing but premades in the battlegrounds, with the 1 hour+ wait times to get into the Alterac Valley (AV) battleground being an additional factor.

Despite Blizzard saying on their website that realm transfers can take several days to go through, mine only took about an hour. I didn't have much time to explore my new home last night, but I did discover:

• You sometimes have to queue to log on to the server itself. Last night I only had to wait a couple of seconds, but I understand that at peak times it can be longer than that. That's a result of the server having a high population, but the flip side is that at least it should be easier to find groups.


• Latency wasn't much better than it was on Kil'Jaeden, which was a bit disappointing. Skullcrusher is an east coast server, whereas Kil'Jaeden is a west coast one, so I was expecting to see some improvement.


• The queue for AV was less than a minute. Hurrah!


• The people I played AV with were retards. Boo! I knew it didn't look good when the first thing one of them said in chat was not to attempt to capture the StoneHearth graveyard. When I asked why, I was called a noob. On my old server, I hadn't lost a game in AV for months. That was because we always moved up the map slowly, capturing all the objectives (including the graveyard) as we went. Instead, these idiots just pushed straight for the enemy general, not bothering to capture any of the graveyards or towers along the way. Surprise, surprise, we lost. I really hope that game wasn't representative of what I have to look forward to in AV from now on. Mind you, even if it is, the greatly reduced queue times may still mean that I can farm honour faster in there than I would on my old server.

Fingers crossed that the move will still work out to be a net positive. If nothing else, at least I can group with my friend once again.

Premade vs PUG != fun

Last night I was playing some more battlegrounds in World of Warcraft, in an attempt to grind enough honour to buy myself the epic PVP crossbow. But almost every time, our pick-up group or "PUG" (a group of individuals without any connection to each other) found ourselves up against a premade (a group of players who join the battleground as a unit and generally exhibit considerably more coordination and discipline). Needless to say, we lost every match - heavily. In several hours of playing, I couldn't even get my daily quest (requiring a win in the Eye of the Storm battleground) done.

A fight between a premade and a PUG is no fun at all for those in the PUG. To ensure fairness, and a fun time for all, Blizzard need to change the battlegrounds so that premades only fight other premades and PUGs only fight other PUGs.

War 101

Took my first Eve University class last night.

Almost missed it, because I stupidly thought that 2am Thursday Eve Time (i.e. GMT) was 10pm Thursday Bermuda time, when of course it's 10pm on Wednesday. Fortunately, I was online anyway and saw the messages about the upcoming lesson in corp chat, so managed to get myself over to Korsiki in the nick of time.

The class lasted the best part of two hours, and was run by a guy called Angelica, who sounded like he was German. It was pretty good. There were over 20 of us in the class, and most of the time we were just listening to Angelica over TeamSpeak, with the opportunity to type questions in fleet chat.

Most of the class was about war: how to know when another corporation has declared war on Eve University, and what to do when it happens. There was a lot of useful information and by the end of the class I had a full A4 page of closely scribbled notes.

We also got to see our corp's POS or "Player Owned Station". It was a bit disappointing. I was expecting a big station that you could dock in, but it seemed to be just a big pylon floating in space with a few manufacturing facilities attached to it. Apparently dockable POSes are known as "outposts" and can only be built in lowsec space over which your corp has sovereignty - not something that we have.

The last part of the class was a very brief introduction to fleet movement and gate camping tactics, but I suspect I still have a lot more to learn in this area.

Good deed for the day

One of the gaming blogs that I read had their account hacked today, and lost a number of posts as a result. Fortunately, the blog includes whole posts in its RSS feed, not just excerpts, and my feed reader had already downloaded and cached the deleted posts. So I was able to copy-and-paste them into an email and send them to the blog's author so he could repost them.

It feels good to have been able to help.

Eve University

Finally got accepted into Eve University last night, after another hour-long chat with one of their recruitment officers.

I'm going to move my base of operations up to Korsiki, the location of their HQ, so I can better take part in the classes and fleet operations that they run. It's only 8 jumps away from where I'm operating now - not far, but far enough that it makes sense to take all my assets with me. So I started gathering them up from the stations they're currently scattered between, and spent the rest of my time familiarising myself with the corp's rules and installing TeamSpeak (mandatory for participating in the corp's activities). Didn't even get to run a single mission. Eve's like that: it's easy to spend hours busying yourself with minutiae, be it figuring out a skill training plan or getting to grips with the game mechanics, and never actually leave the station you're docked in. Right now I'm quite liking that slow pace, although it remains to be seen whether that's still the case once the newness of the game starts to wear off.

Interviewing, and repeating missions

Had the first part of my interview for Eve University last night. I was expecting it to be short, something of a formality. What can you ask someone who's only been playing the game for two weeks, after all? But my conversation with the recruitment officer dragged on for a couple of hours, with sometimes lengthy pauses between messages as both of us were doing other things at the same time. It didn't really feel like an "interview" as such, more just a casual chat.

When it came time for me to go to bed, I suggested we carry on the interview when both of us were next online, hoping that he'd tell me that wasn't necessary and just welcome me into the corporation. But he didn't. I'm not sure whether this is a deliberate stalling tactic they employ with all new recruits, to weed out the folks who are keen from those who are not, but I guess I can understand if it is.

Found the first thing that I don't like about Eve last night: agents will sometimes give you missions that you've done before. Considering I've only been playing this character for a couple of days, I think it's pretty lame that I'm already running into this. I levelled a character from 1 to 70 in World of Warcraft without ever having to do the same quest twice. Guess that's one of the reasons why solo PvE content generally isn't considered Eve's strong suit.

Gamefest

I got a stack of new games for Christmas, which I'm slowly working my way through. Here are my impressions so far.

Crysis. This is the game I was looking forward to most, and on the whole, it didn't disappoint. While I question the wisdom of Crytek's apparent decision to optimise it for the next generation of PCs, I still managed to squeeze an acceptable 30fps or so out of my rig, which is now getting on for 18 months old. The early levels were by far the best, being the most free-form and giddily reminiscent of the old Far Cry. But even after you entered the alien ship, and the game started to go on rails, it was still an enjoyable ride. The only downside was the final boss fight. Even though I was playing on the "delta" difficulty setting, it was laughably easy and I wondered if it was actually bugged. I wasn't prepared for the cliffhanger ending either, which felt rather unsatisfying. Overall score? I'd give it 90%.

Unreal Tournament 3. This is a game that gives a whole new meaning to the word "frenetic". I'm a veteran first-person shooter gamer, but UT3 makes me feel like a geriatric, it's so fast. Unreal Tournament 2003, the last incarnation of the series that I played, wasn't anything like as crazy as this - Mandy used to enjoy playing that, but there's no way she'd survive in UT3. I started by playing through the single-player game, but hit one level where my retarded computer-controlled teammates kept getting stuck on the scenery, and now I'm unable to progress any further. Of course, online multiplayer is UT's strength, and that can be a lot of fun. I'll be dipping back into this whenever I need to sate my thirst for an ultra-twitch shooter. 84%

Gears of War. I didn't quite know what to expect from this, but overall I was a bit disappointed. The cover and active reload systems were interesting gameplay innovations, and the graphics were generally impressive. However I didn't like the generally washed-out colour palate that made all the environments seem rather drab, and my game was blighted by stuttery graphics and audio that would inexplicably drop out in the middle of some of the cutscenes. 80%

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I loved this. The environments were varied, the gameplay exciting and the presentation among the most cinematic of any game I've played. But what really made this game memorable were the numerous "wow" moments where I found myself staring at the screen in either awe or disbelief. The multiplayer doesn't seem too shabby, either, with Battlefield-style unlocks, and although I haven't played much of it yet, like UT3 I expect to return to play more when the mood grabs me. 93%

World in Conflict. I've only just started playing this RTS. Although it's by the same developers as the Ground Control series, which I thoroughly enjoyed, I've yet to find myself hooked. I think part of the problem is the silly story, which features the United States being invaded by the Russian army, which somehow sneaks in on a bunch of cargo ships. It also seems a bit too easy - even though I'm an RTS noob and am playing on Normal difficulty, I've only failed one mission so far. It's entertaining enough, I suppose, but just not quite as much fun as last year's Company of Heroes. That said, I've yet to try the multiplayer, which some have hailed as the Battlefield 2 of online multiplayer RTS. For someone who still rates Battlefield 2 as his favourite game of all time, that's high praise indeed. As of right now, however, I'd have to rate this around 80%.

First steps in Eve

My trial period in Eve Online expired this weekend. I was torn whether to sign up or not: I've been feeling uninspired by a perceived lack of variety in the missions and environments and as a result haven't played much in the last week.

But then I realised that the problem was partly due to the character I created. Because of Eve's relatively heavy death penalty, I initially shied away from creating a military character as I didn't want to have to keep risking my ship. So I created an industrialist, and as a result, most of my missions had me mining or building stuff. Safe, but dull, and I ended up getting pwned in the few combat missions I was given because my ship was built for mining, not combat.

So I rolled a new character - Godless Wanderer - and made her a shaven-headed-take-no-shit-Ripley-in-Alien-3 soldier. I've pretty comfortably taken down all the pirates and rogue drones that I've been sent up against so far. The notable exception was when I was ambushed while investigating the aftermath of an attack on a hotel. The enemy ships pounded through my shield and armour so fast I was dead before I had chance to warp out of there.

It's definitely gut-wrenching when you realise your ship is going down. Although I'd insured it for its full value, insurance doesn't cover the ship's fittings, which are pretty expensive too. Replacing it took a fair chunk of my available cash.

So anyway, the excitement of playing a combat-oriented character persuaded me to take the plunge and sign up. At $15 per month, it's the same price as World of Warcraft, although I'm going to keep my WoW subscription for the time being too.

Next step is to join up with one of Eve's corporations - the equivalent of WoW's guilds. I've sent an application to Eve University, a corp that seems to have attracted a lot of praise on the Eve blogs and forums I've been reading. It's designed to help noobs like me overcome the game's near-vertical learning curve by showing us everything Eve has to offer. Hopefully I'll be able to get in in the next couple of days, once my application has been accepted and I've had my interview (yes, an interview!).

In the meantime I'm going to keep training my skills, running agent missions, and trying not to fill up my hard drive with all the screenshots I'm taking.

Eve Online

This weekend I've found myself sucked back into the 14 day free trial of the massively-multiplayer online space sim, Eve Online.

I tried the free trial once before but didn't continue after it expired because, on the whole, the game seemed a bit dull. But something about the game has continued to fascinate me. The advent of a couple of patches that have polished the graphics (the game is almost five years old and was starting to look a bit rough around the edges) and made space travel slightly less tedious have spurred me to try it again.

I love how beautiful the game looks. I love its intimidating complexity (an online guide on mining, just one aspect of the game, runs to 64 pages). I'm beginning to appreciate its slow pace too. Mining an asteroid typically involves staying still in space for minutes at a time. Travel times are relatively long, even between adjacent star systems. And skills are learned in real time - at higher skill levels it can take literally days or weeks of real time to progress one skill level.

It feels very different to other games, even other MMORPGs, and I think that's a big part of its appeal. In addition to the things I've already mentioned, there are no character levels, and the destruction of your ship usually has serious negative consequences.

But mostly I think I want to like Eve because it reminds me of a modern, more complex version of Elite, still one of the most enjoyable video games I've ever played (back in the days when I was playing on a BBC Micro with 32k of memory).

Moreover, I've been playing World of Warcraft for getting on for 3 years now. Just before Christmas I got my epic flying mount and completed my Season 1 Arena epic armour set. I can't provide the commitment required to raid on a regular basis (even finding the time to run a regular instance is hard enough) and even though I'm keyed, I've resigned myself to never seeing inside Karazhan. And the battlegrounds and guild chat now seem to be filled with nothing but immature trash talk. So WoW is starting to feel like it may have run its course.

Will Eve replace it for me? I have the next 14 days to decide.

Bioshock

Recently finished playing Bioshock. Beautiful graphics, amazing atmosphere, above-average story, but still not as good as all the rave reviews would have you believe. The lack of a death penalty, the sameness of all the enemies, a final boss fight that was easy even on the difficult setting, and a baffling closing cinematic sealed my disappointment. Worth playing, but not as memorable as classics such as Sacrifice and Far Cry.