Chimps in Space

Podcast number 15

Jon Shute — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:19:22 GMT

Oh yes, blog. I keep forgetting about that, I'm far too busy to think nowadays. It's something to do with Eve and weekly podcasts I think.

Episode 15 of the podcast is here. It's a bit different this week as we go all chatty and discuss guilds, corps and cities in online games, with stops in Guildwars, Eve and SWG.

And I'm King not Queen, OK?

Uncharted: Drakes Fortune

Jon Shute — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:30:58 GMT

One of the big things I love about achievements/trophies/whatever a game wants to call them is that they encourage you to play the game more, whether it be to get through to the end of the game, go back and play content you missed, or even to encourage you to try different play styles.

Last week Uncharted: Drake's Progress was patched to support the trophy system on the PS3, the first full retail game to do so, and so I dropped in to have another look at the game.

The first time I played it was just after it came out. I really didn't get on with the controls, found the plot to be more ridiculous than usual and was bugged by the graphics. What's more if you replaced the main character with Lara Croft you'd find it impossible to tell it wasn't a Tomb Raider. Needless to say I didn't enjoy the game.

This time around I have exactly the same problems with the game, but I'm enjoying it a lot more. Before you say, no it's not because of the trophies. They just got me to play it again.

The controls, for a start, are annoying in a they move you in a direction and the camera keeps moving to new view points. More than a couple of times while doing some jumping I've had the camera move and then my next jump has been in totally the wrong direction. Can we move past this as an industry please? Also there are some quick time events (press X now!) which I think are cheap, lazy and wrong. They're not too bad in this game though as they aren't that frequent but they jar far too much still. What's more the last section is just quicktime events and running at the right time which means the ending really feels like a let down.

Then there is the plot, which makes National Treasure look like a history documentary. It's not Bonekickers bad, but "Sir Francis Drake fakes his own death (why?) in order to go find a big golden statue to make himself rich (although everybody thinks he's dead so he'll not be able to go to the sort of parties that being very wealthy usually provides) and an alleged descendent of his goes looking for the treasure". The plot is very shallow and simple of course as it is a computer game after all and so doesn't need much more, but it seems to have elements that are not clear all the way through as if it wasn't perfectly thought out. For instance are the monsters making the traps? There is nobody else around to do so, but they don't seem up to a bit of woodwork in the evening in order to fill the forest with traps. My experience of them was more along the lines of them running at me to rip my head off while I kept an eye on the ammunition level on my machine gun in an Aliens sentry gun kind of way.

Graphically the game suffers from some very common problems on consoles. The first is texture popup where the game doesn't manage to read the textures from the disc before it needs to display them (no HD install for this game), but there's also some distance based rendering issues with plants that mean as you walk along you'll sometimes see them pop into view as they get close enough. Minor things I know, but it's the impression that counts. More strangely the people do that annoying thing that people do nowadays in some games and glow internally, which I suspect is to make the teeth as white and pristine as possible. Or maybe not. It's really strange, you get weird highlights on places like the inside of the lips.

Gameplay is, as I've mentioned, tomb raider. You run, you jump and you hang below ledges as you move along cliffs and walls. There's a couple of vehicle sections which are OK but don't add much. The second water based one is actually very annoying, what with fast water currents, barrels that explode on touch being washed towards you from behind blind corners around rocks and helpful enemies lobbing bullets and explosives your way like they're going out of fashion.

Ah yes, the enemies. The ragged band of pirates who are there to stop you. By the time I had completed the game I had trophies for getting 100 head shots, having shot 50 people with the basic pistol and a few others for shooting slightly less people with other weapons. I must have killed 3-400 pirates at the least, plus more mutant creature things and mercenaries. In fact there's a line where the big bad guy asks why the leader of the pirates had been hired and the response was that they were cheap. Apparently you get an unbelievably large army for "cheap" nowadays. I hope they weren't planning on getting a share of the gold at the end because with the number of people involved in that little operation the profit wouldn't have been that high. And who made that many identical pirate outfits? And what about the logistics of having that many guns and all that ammo? And where did they sleep, I didn't see a small camp city. Was there a cruise liner moored off the other side of the island? They had lots of trucks and jeeps too. There must have been a transport ship too. I really should learn to ignore the plots and circumstances in games...

To be fair it wasn't all nicked from Tomb Raider. There was a Nazi U-Boat pen right out of Indiana Jones as well, which was getting a bit close to shark jumping for my tastes.

All mocking aside it's actually a very solid, albeit short game. The cutscenes are good and move the plot along at a fair whack and there's only a couple of places where you get really annoyed at difficulty spikes. The fact that it brings nothing new to the genre isn't necessarily a problem, just a missed opportunity and so I'd say it's probably a game worth playing.

As for the trophies they map directly onto the medals system that was in the game from the start. This is a direct copy of achievements from the 360 where you have 1000 points in the game and a bunch of medals for performing actions such as getting x number of headshots or completing the game on each difficulty level. A nice touch is that these points unlock various bonuses as you get towards the magic 1000, for instance when you hit 400 you get access to a cheat where you can just select some of the weapons to give to yourself. There's also other costumes for your character, the usual collection of concept art and making of videos to unlock as well so if you care about such things you have an incentive to collect the medals.

I'm currently at 750 points with two to go. 100points for completing the game on the hard difficulty level and then 150 for completing the rather harder mode that is unlocked after that. I believe the hardest one doesn't allow you to use cheats, which sounds like it'll be a tad harsh. I think I'll be back in 6 months to grab the first of those, it was an enjoyable enough time this play through to make me want to do it again someday.

Eve and time

Jon Shute — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 22:56:00 GMT

Eve has given me a strange ability, and it's really quite handy. I can time things really well if I don't think about them. Not in the "this has taken X minutes", but in a "this will finish now" kind of way. It only works when I'm not thinking about it but I can log in to Eve just when a skill finishes without remembering that the skill was even going to finish soon. I can also be where I need just before the timer on the oven goes off, or just before washing finishes.

Of course it's nothing more than confirmation bias, but if I believe it's real that's all that counts, right

Being a newbie

Jon Shute — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 22:03:29 GMT

Not long ago I thought that skill points don't matter. I have lots of skill points, and new players don't, but you only ever use as many points as you're currently using.

Then I tried faction warfare with my first fresh alt in years.

Ouch, being a newbie hurts. My first ship fit plan was scuppered by the reality that I didn't have the skills to use the equipment I needed, let alone have the skills to fit that gear if I could use it. Fitting is tight at the newbie end of life.

So there I was in a frigate (rifter at 5, that's some consolation) with good gunnery skills (That's 2 5s at least) but the inability to fit a tank, afterburner or any ECM at all. I was useless in anything other than a fleet, and even then I could only do a small amount of damage and then explode.

Boy that was a depressing few weeks. Being a newb hurts! You know what? It took a couple of months to use all the gear I wanted. My initial skills would have me in tech 2 frigates with tech 2 guns in no time at all, but without the skills needed to support that. I've been playing since they went live with this game so I know what's what, I have no idea how somebody coming to the game fresh copes. I guess I've forgotten that when I started cruisers were the top of the pile ship wise, battleships came in later and battecruisers wouldn't be there for years. There are so many skills needed to fly frigates, let alone the bigger stuff...

People like Eve Uni provide a service way more important than I think a lot of us appreciate, and I was pretty in awe of them before this experience, now I'm even more so.

Being a newbie hurts, but you soon get better.

Loose lips sink ships

Jon Shute — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 21:31:53 GMT

I have a very big problem with Eve, and it’s not one that many of my readers have. I have a podcast, and Eve gets talked about a lot. It’s my main game, and it also generates the most interesting subjects to talk about. Warhammer has innovative PvP? Bit small isn’t it, why not have the scope of Eve. WoW is adding new tradeskills? What they really need is a proper player economy like Eve! Conan has a well developed first 20 levels of PvE content? Well Eve… OK, it breaks down there.

My problem is that I can’t talk about some of it. I have a corp and 100odd people I’m responsible for so I have to be careful what I say. I have comments about certain corps and alliances we deal with, but me saying something on the podcast will only cause trouble.

My biggest fear is that I’ll attract some corp of griefers who will come after the corp. Not that we can’t defend ourselves but because war is very disruptive, we’re mainly an industrial corp and so need to shift large volumes of materials around the universe, including freshly built capital ships. When this gets more difficult it slows down and we make less cash. It’s as simple as that.

There’s a voice in the back of my head saying that I shouldn’t have mentioned that we make capitals. What if it attracts an attacker? What if I’ve disrupted how my members want to play with this post? I’m paranoid about the fact that I’m putting myself out in the public eye, I know that a lot of our podcast listeners are Eve players and so far they’ve all been groovy. What if somebody isn’t? Like I said, paranoid.

I’m sure one day somebody out of the thrill of fighting industrial corps will put two and two together and turn up on our doorstep and we’ll have to make a point about how not all industrial corps are an easy target. But until that day I’ll keep on talking about stuff.

In the meantime I need to go edit out all the juicy alliance gossip from our latest podcast before I get into trouble.

Why I can't take a break

Jon Shute — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 20:46:08 GMT

Last time, as part of this insane post every day for a month challenge, I said that I need a break from the game but can’t do it and said that I would tell you why.

The reason? I feel like part of the universe. There are wars going on, alliances rise and fall and although I’m not involved with most of them the fact that it’s all the same single universe means that I want to keep watching what happens, especially with our local alliances as if I drop out of contact for a while then I’ll never be sure I know all that I need to know when I come back.

That’s the core of it really, but it’s bigger. I’m utterly afraid that I’ll miss something. It could be politics, a market opportunity, a good scrap with some pirates or a new corp member who I may really like. The thing is that Eve and its single world is a unique experience in the MMO world. Every Eve blogger is talking about the same universe I play in and every action they mention is something that I might be able to profit from.

How can I take time out and maybe miss something new?

This is why I know I can write about Eve for a month: There’s always something happening and it's why I can’t quit. I wrote down a list of possible subjects last night and in 10 minutes I came up with nearly enough to last me all month. Eve really is a unique game.

Not being able to stop playing doesn't mean that I can't take a break though. It just means that I have to do something new for a few weeks. I just need to figure out what that is.

Time to take a break?

Jon Shute — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 22:46:58 GMT

As listeners to the podcast will know I’m a little burnt out on Eve. This has nothing to do with the game itself, I’m just burnt out and need a break. The problem is that I’m the CEO of a corporation and so have responsibilities.

Eve is now 5 years old, but I’ve not played 100% of that time. I was there at the start though and for the last few years I’ve been playing all the time.

This got me thinking: do I need a holiday? I have no idea what I want to do personally in Eve (I have ideas for the corp, but I could do that on our forums without playing) and factional warfare has reminded me that I don’t want to put in the effort for PvP. I can’t stand mining, missions bore me nowadays and, well, what’s left?

Yes, I need a break. Badly.

And yet I can’t quit. I’m going to hit 60million skill points this month and I can’t stop training. I can’t even stop logging in to see what the corp is doing.

Why? That's a topic for tomorrow.

Why the delay? Since I'm probably burnt out the hardest thing in the world would be for me to write a blog post a day for the whole month. CrazyKinux has come up with a mad idea, and I thought I'd try the iron man version of one Eve post per day for a month. I don't post enough and aren't focused enough to be part of the eve blog pack, but how hard can it be when you don't even feel like playing? Let's find out! Just 30 more subjects to go!

A life without Windows

Jon Shute — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:17:55 GMT

I am, for now, without any Windows based computers at home. This is due to a failing hard disk on my iMac and my utter laziness in buying something new and cheap from Dell (have you seen the spec of their cheap machines?) and not any real [Windows sucks/computers are too powerful/games rot the mind/have I missed any other common complaint] reason.

A while back I tried getting LOTRO to run on the Mac, but decided it was easier to just reboot into windows. Now I can't do that I installed Crossover Games and decided to start small with Guildwars as it's a couple of years older and so a bit easier to get running. I've tried with previous versions and been disappointed.

One thing that helped was my decision to install my games onto an external drive. This means that I just had to plug the drive into my laptop and my existing patched version of games are sitting there.

Crossover is an interesting product. You create something called a bottle, which is basically just a fake OS (no real OS needed, so no Windows license) and then you can install applications into it. Most games are very resilient and so I just opened up the guildwars exe into my newly created bottle and waited to see it all fail.

Only it worked. Almost perfectly. Sound, music and graphics and the speed was very playable. There's a few problems, I can't get the fullscreen mode to go to full resolution as the "did this work?" reset happens before it's finished, but windowed mode uses nearly the whole screen. There's also a problem where using the mouse to move the cursor drifts the view up if you hold it but if you just click, move the camera and then release that's almost OK. In the end I just controlled it using the keyboard for all movement and that was much better.

Crossover has a seven day trial, but they've got a customer in me I think so that I can play anywhere without needing bootcamp.

I also had a go at getting EveMon working on the Mac. There's a special build for Linux, but to run on the mac it needs turning into an .app package (trivial if you know what they are). It worked, ran and then let me enter my API details. This wouldn't let me paste text into the key textbox (um, it's 2billion characters long. That's painful) and then crashed when I told it to get my list of characters. I'll take my config from my windows install and use that one next, the characters are already set up.

Next up for crossover is LOTRO. People seem to have it working.

I should really get around to ordering a new PC. WAR is out soon as well and that'll not work straight away so I'll need a PC.

Podcast 11

Jon Shute — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:45:31 GMT

I haven't mentioned this weeks podcast here, but I doubt anybody only finds it from this blog. Anyway, podcast 11 (live from a time before good recording equipment) is up over at Virginworlds.

That Eve personality test meme

Jon Shute — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:42:15 GMT

Is it just me, or does everybody get this result?

Industrialist with teeth
Take The EvE Personality Test today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Personality Test Generator.

You enjoy Eve's economic model and you find that the greatest challenge of the game lies in mastering the market. System security status is a matter of profit/no profit for you, and you always factor in the possibility/probability of PvP in your estimates. To you, Eve isn't a PvP or a PvE game. It's a simulation of capitalizm in its purest form, and a place where the savvy wins the day.

I don't think that the test is a valid one, my views on the game aren't always what are in my best interests as my main itself, but the interests of the game so I think that's why we're getting so many of these results from the fellow bloggers.