Track, Bash, Do it Again...

Coming to you live from a creaky office chair next to a window overlooking a poorly tended lawn it's...

The Starting Village (DUN DUN DUN!)

Two games have been taking up my time. I shall now divulge information about them, before my extraction team turns up.

Trackmania Nations Forever, which is like the shorter, slower, less attractive brother of Trackmania United Forever. TNF is free, and generally fun, and as I said before, I've yet to come across a free game that I didn't like. Although...

You see, when I started playing TNF, I really enjoyed it, having to improve my time a desperately shaving off extra points to try and beat the gold ghost. But around the mid-difficulty level, the races suddenly become impossible. Jumps that have to be hit at exactly full speed and at just the right place with incredibley twist run ups mire your enjoyment of the game. Stupid camera shifts and split second timing make the gravity-defying tracks a nightmare. When I was struggling to beat the bronze medal, I just quit and gave up. The point is, the tracks get TOO stupid. Loop-the-loops I can handle. 180 sideways twist can suck a rock.

Crash Bash. It's like Mario Party... But with Crash. So Crash Party. My flatmate has a PS2 and Crash Bash is one of two multiplaer games that I'd play (note; the other is CTR, so there we go). It's amazing how many swears you get from playing this game. Some of the goal defending levels are piss-takingly difficult, and the ones where you play off a handicap are so amazingly nerve-testing. It's also fun to play because of the chunky graphics. I've always found it weird how we never really saw the blocks at the time, we just thought the graphics were awesome. I'm not saying I don't like them mind. Being retroactively critical is unneccesary.

Also, BFH, but I don't need to talk about that again, do I?

Aha, bow before my jetpack-and-armour might!

See y'all at the finish line!

Ice, The University and Everything

This weekend's installment of "The Starting Village" comes to you live from a brand spanking new location; a small room in a flat to the north of Canterbury!

Yes I have moved. And after soom furious battling with the internet, I established a connection, and got back to what really matters; teh interwebs.

Over the past week, I've been using my laptop a lot more than I normally would. I've downloaded a few demos off Steam (because I have no money and my Xbox is at home), and here's a short sentence for each of them;

- Gish; Jumping is too hard, lighting is nice
- Psychonauts; Good length, if I heard the word punch again I'll explode
- Blueberry Garden; Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

I've also bought the LucasArts Adventure game pack, or whatever its called, and I've been playing both Fate of Atlantis and LOOM. FoA is very... cheesy, and LOOM... Well in the first 10 minutes of LOOM, all of my friends had turned into swans and my mother turned into a duck and flew through a rift in space time. Yes.

Another thing I've been playing is this, or for those of you who are scared of links, Icycle, a bike game set in an icy apocalypse. Insanely tough and incredibly well designed, it's a great time waster.

Because I'm now using a wired connection, I've been playing more BFH. I still suck, but at least I can get better because I won't have "THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH YOUR CONNECTION" popping up every ten seconds.

Well that's all for now. I'll be doing a "Postcards From..." for all the LA games I just got, but until them, don't feed the Yao Guai, chiiildren!



I miss Fallout 3 =(

...and now for something completely different

Oh man this is embarrassing. Remember last time when I said that my brain would be exploding from joy due to the arrival of Fallout 3? Well I can firmly say that my grey matter is still safely encased inside my cranium. Turns out the best time to order things from Amazon is not the Friday before a bank holiday. Go figure.

So there is no new epic Fallout 3 stuff for me to natter on about. Instead... Uh-oh, I have nothing to talk about!

Uh... I beat 'Splosion Man. This officially wins the award for strangest final boss fight ever. For the most part it involves the normal running around dodging attacks stuff, but the way you beat the boss is amazingly inventive and the sequence at the very end of the fight is bizarre. Also, Hardcore Mode is ridiculously unnecessary. Seriously, who would do that to themselves?

I've been playing Battlefield Heroes again, in no small part cause of the new outfit I've got. For a free to play game, BFH is a surprisngly good game. Sure, the lack of maps is annoying, but the vechicles and classes make it interesting, and the RPG elements mix things up. I'm getting better at it too, although connection issues are still a bitch. Check me out, yeah?

I'm so cool. With my jacket, and weirdly shaped legs, and holster I can't use because I use a shotgun.

Fianlly, I used the PC Zone DVD to install The Elder Scrolls II; Daggerfall to my laptop. This was the whole game, for free on the DVD, and as you all well know, I've yet to resist a free game. Unfotunately, I have little to no idea about how to install the game, so the closest I got was clicking a lovely little install button in a lovely little dialogue box with a lovely little dragon in it, and getting absolutely no where swiftly. Richard, if you're reading this, help me please! If you do, I'll buy your magazine forever and also mention it on this blog every week (if I remember to). PC ZONE MAGAZINE IS AWESOME. There, free marketing.

Right, I'm just about out of information, so I'm signing off. If I never do another blog it's because Fallout 3 hasn't arrived and I've topped myself. Although there's equal chance it has arrived, and I can't stop playing it to do the blog. I'm sure I'll be alright.

See ya in The Wasteland, y'all!

In the Zone

Okay firt off, I really the following story is both dull and makes me out to be a really geek, which I guess is technically accurate, but the the hey.

Anyone who plays Battlefield Heroes will know about outfits, but for anyone who does not yet play (WHICH YOU SHOULD cause it's free) they are essentially different items of clothing you must pay real money for, but don't actually provide any gaming upgrade. Now I'm not rich enough or stupid enough to actually fork out any money to buy the clothes, because that would be a) a waste of money I don't have and b) just too damn sad for someone as cool as myself.

But.

When I went onto the BFH site t'other day, I accidentally stumbled on this little gem of info, which was about how to get a rather cool outfit, permenantly, for free. Well sort of. The codes to get the outfit were contained inside copies of PC Zone, a magazine which I don't think I'd ever actually heard of prior to this point. So I decide I would go out and invest in one of those magazines, not just for the code, but also because it'd probably come with one of those free DVDs full of stuff.

The amount of effort I had to put in just to get that damn magazine completely outweighs the boots and trouser and DVD and strange magazine I got from it. PC Zone despite being, and I quote "Britain's Best PC Games Mag" is not sold in any of the several news agents on my high streeet, nor the supermarket, nor a service station on the M5, nor a Tesco's in Norfolk. In fact the only place that actually sold it was a WH Smiths in Bluewater, which, I point out, is miles from my home. Ultimately it was a lot of effort and an expensive magazine, although I'd imagine double sided DVDs cost a lot to produce.

But I won in the end. I got the first part of my outfit (which, incidentally I won't finish until I've started at uni) an "intresting" magazine and a disk full of freeware games (which is good because I've yet to come across a freeware game I didn't like).

Well, I'm going to bed. And as it goes, I'm eighteen years old in 11 minutes. Go figure.
G'night y'all =)

Machineguns, Shotguns and Bazookas, Oh My!

It's probably time I do a new post. It's been a while...

I tried Battlefield Heroes again, and by "tried again" I mean I've been playing it all week, but under the guise of a new character, the scruffy haired gunner Kaboomish. My commando was all uptight, and was called KnightHunter. Take a look.

Kaboomish just sounds awesome. Look at him. You know he's cool cause he's not wearing army uniform. Damn right.
So yeah after my previous post about how lame I am at Battlefield Heroes, I wasn't expecting anything different, just less invisibility. But as it turns out I'm much better at being a Gunner, probably because I requires a lot less skill, and more pointing the gun in a random direction and firing until whatever it is until it dies. I'm much better at that than all this aiming crap.

Playing a gunner is quite a different experience than being a commando. Mainly, you get to blow stuff up a lot more, with barrels or a bazooka. Tanks become a lot less daunting when you can take them out from afar with a rocket. I also get to use a shotgun, which is my "Weapon I Would Go For In Case Of Zombie Invasion", and I'm not too shabby with it, connection issues aside. I've been killing a lot more people, and coming last a lot less. More mid-table.

Driving vehicles is also much more fun, because when you jump out of the car/tank/plane, you actually have something to shoot people with, as opposed to a knife, which kinda sucks. The barrel is also a brilliant weapon for clearing capture points before attacking them, although I also use it as a parting gift for anybody who is killing me. I got the greatest kill on some guy who waved after shooting me, only to get blown up a second later. That'll learn you to taunt.

I've also been playing Cave Story, the freeware-to-WiiWare success story, but I'm gonna do a "Postcards from:" on that when I get a few more shots.

Until next time, keep on truckin', y'all.

FYI I'm a (crap) Spy-per

I don't have much experience playing the Battlefield series, except when I used to play a lot of Medal of Honour at the Internet Cafe, since Battlefield gave me something else to suck at. I enjoyed it quite a lot as I liked using the different vehicles, mainly as offensive weapons. Like my patented "Kamikaze-Air-Bomb Attack", which maintained my perfectly balanced kill/death ratio for a while.

I'd been keeping half an eye on Battlefield Heroes, primarily because I'd been told it was built to run on low-end computers, which to me was a god-send. A laptop with 1.73 GHz can never be classed as a gaming PC. Fortunately, BH only requires 1GHz, so viva la download.

In case you were unawares, Battlefield Heroes is an EA "Play 4 Free" title, meaning the download is FREE, and playing the game is also FREE. The payment comes in the form of microtransactions for cunique clothing, so and so forth. Obviously you don't have to buy anything, so for people like me, it's free =)

After a few starting up issues (like not realising you had to create a character first, and not being able to find a server) I finally got into a real game. It's very hectic, especially at the start when everyone is slamming together in various vechicles, and some idiot decides the best way to get a capture point is to use a bomb on it. But it all works together quite well, despite the graphics not being up to much. Not that it really matters, because it isn't about the graphics at all.

I'd decided to take on the role of a commando, which is essentially a sniper-spy combo, being able to disappear, but also shoot people with a good ol' scoped rifle. It might just be my suckyness, but the knife really doesn't kill people the way you'd like it to. Meh. The sniping is good, especially from the top of a lighthouse. When you are invisible.

There's also a decent levels system where you go through ranks for kills and captures, which then leads to upgrades. It works well, and it's a nice little metagame aspect to it. It also gives you new abilities and access to new weapons, which is good in terms of variety in the long term.

Despite all the good things I've said, Battlefield Heroes probably isn't the game for me. Why? Because I absolutely suck at it. There aren't words to describe how god-awful I am at it. Seriously, there are people who can't even use a computer who are better at the game than me. I seriously am awful. I crashed a plane because I forgot to accelerate. It's hard to explain how bad I am, so here's a visual representation in the form of an Excel graph, an idea I in no way stole from Chris Livingston;



I awarded myself a coupla points there because I did get a few headshots in, but still, these were when I was hidden up a lighthouse, in stealth mode, whilst crouching.

I guess I could blame it on my dodgy web connection that lead me to be running into a wall more than once, but at the end of the day, I just plain suck at it. Oh well. That's not gonna stop me =D