I stayed home sick today and played a bunch of Killing Floor. Last game of the day, the one that I should not do because it would have been better if I got more sleep, turned out to be really nice as I made a few online steam friends.
We share similar play styles and similar skill levels (B-class on a good day, but game enough) and we all play as a team. Hopefully I will see them online over this weekend.
EM
So I did some digging around for a good, solidm cheap-ass oldie game vendor that combines shipping, has good deals, and works ina professional fashion. I think I found them - Knight Discountshas a large selection of older games, they combine shipping, and best of all any order over $20 ships for free.
I placed my first order today and got a number of titles that I have been wanting to scoop for a while now...
Price-wise, Sacred was $11 of the total and the rest of the games barely broke $20 combined.
Too bad all of this should arrive right about the time that Battlefield Bad Company 2 unlocks :). Yeah, most of this will probably not get installed until April.
I will try to post about how my experience with Knight Discounts turns out.
I managed to entirely miss Serious Sam and when the remake was made, I knew that I was eventually going to get it. A Steam sale arrived and now that that game has been heavily patched (evidently had some Serious bugs when released), it is time to see what the series is all about.
It is a coop game and I considered getting the 4-pack, but my purchase of 4 Killing Floor licenses has notgotten any of my friends involved,so nope, not gonna do it :(
I played a bunch of Sins of a Solar Empire (what a shocker) and 4 hours or so of Burnout Paradise. I finished out by getting in an hour or so of Killing Floor, which is becoming sort of an old reliable way to have a some zombie shooting fun.
I will probably write a review of Sins this week or next. I have put in the time and feel like I have a view to share.
Burnout Paradise is such a fun, care-free game. I have a PC steering wheel and it really helps with the immersion. The pedals are not so good (they are on a single axis, so it is not possbile to hold both the accelerator and brake down at the same time), but just being able to spin the wheel helps me so much.
I spent a lot of time with flight sims and I have to say that I have gradually come to appreciate an arcade feel to my simulators. For instance, I would really enjoy Burnout and DiRT 2 a lot less if they were more realistic. They have enough realism to feel like you are driving, enough wiggle to be fun but not so much that it detracts from the experience. Both of the aforementioned titles really strike a fair balance between realism and having fun.
Killing Floor is one ofthe rare shooters that does not have an on screen targeting reticle. You know what - it doesn't matter too much as you learn to go to the scopes or sights for long range work and to work fast and loose when they get close.
Welp, back to the weekday grind, I guess :(
I bumped up the difficulty a couple of notches in Sins of a Solar Empire and won by a wide margin. I've found the right pace.
Here is the deal... When I first started playing, I thought research was a single queue when it is actually 4 in the base game. So spending all your money on 4 military advances and not having enough for a needed civ advance makes no sense - to maximize efficiency, you would always keep something queued on both your military and civic sides.
This goes a little further into planet dev too. There is only one construction ship in a system, so buying 3 or 4 things for a ship to do when you could spread contruction across multiple systems again makes little sense.
Anyhow, just adjusting how and when I buy things - which is possible because I finally have enough experience - makes a huge difference in how successful I am able to be.
Oh yeah, TEC gets an end-game cannon... my gawd, it kills planets with 2 shots and smallers colonies with just one shot. I made 3 of the cannons and broke the computers back. It basically made his ships irreplacable and from there I just nibbled him down until a triple cannon salvo wiped him out.
So you find a rifle and some ammo... Do you equip it immedately, or just keep on rolling with your pistol? In gaming, I have learned the hard way that the game designer usually cannot wait for you to need to use the new gun. Sure enough, I equipped the rifle and right around the corner was a new, tougher enemy.
That is the way of Shadowgrounds, a shooter done in an overhead view. It uses a typical WASD layout, F for the flashlight, R to reload, you know the drill soldier.
This is a 2006 game, but the graphics hold up pretty well. I had to manually edit a file to get my preferred resolution plugged in, but the game ran without a hiccup otherwise.
Once we got going, the game warmed you up to the weakest of the bugs. You slowly become aware that these bugs will run from the light of flashlight which allows you to win some fights that would have been pretty difficult without the flashlight.
As you go, you notice some nice touches. A movement-sensitive radar gives you an indication of potential trouble. The flashlight has to recharge from time to time, so you cannot just run it wide-open.
The coolest feature so far is that the critters cough-up parts from time to time. You can use the parts to buy upgrades that have various costs. I immediately went for 2x damage upgrade on the pulse rifle. I dunno if the game realizes it and ramps up the number of enemies, but I just about ran out of ammo a couple of times right after I upgraded. But behold, many bugs were killed.
The scripted action sequences are probably the worst part of the game - the level of detail just does not hold up here and the hero frankly looks a bit lumpy. But it is not a bad diversion and I've already cleared out a couple of chapters.
Earlier today I stumbled across CRUSADER: NO REGRET and CRUSADER: NO REMORSE. I try not to get too hung-up on the past, but I had really almost totallyforgotten about these until I saw the screen shot with the red armor. I loved both of those games and can remember hoping that Origin Systems would keep cranking out games with that kind of attitude.
As fate would have it, Steam offered up a $5 special on both SHADOWGROUNDS and it's follow-upSHADOWGROUNDS SURVIVOR. While the perspective is not as isometric as Crusader's, the overhead view is similar enough to Crusader to make me go ahead and jump at it. I am not going to go back and replay some old mid-90s stuff, but I will play something that might be a modern heir to that style of game play.
Space Siege was also suggested as a good one in this genre of games and I mention here in part as a reminder to myself to watch for it to be on sale.
Will I ever be able to resist a Steam sale?
I finally got around to winning a game of Sins of the Empire! It felt rather good really to finally win one. And I will probably blog a lot less about it too, which is a victory for anyone reading thisdrivel :)
I sent scouts out and had the luck of having 1 terran-class planet 1 jump away. The computer meanwhile had 2 terran class planets, both 2 jumps from his home world. Each planet would have a good sized defensive fleet - hopefully enough to slow him down.
I took a couple of asteroid class systems to build up my carrier's crew and then launched my assault on the Terran-class system. It was a smooth win, with only 3 frigates getting blown away. I built replacements and then some and rushed down to grab a pair of choke points, taking a desert system as well as 3 asteroids.
From here I built a secondary fleet the colonize 3 or 4 systems that I had skipped while dropping in defenses. I was running a fairly balanced research mode, half in civ and half in military knowledge but finally poured the money and crystals into military research. Once I got a three types of cruisers researched, I assembled a monster fleet, sent out the scouts and hammered a Terran-class planet into submission.
From there, it was inexorable. I had caught the PC on a civilian research binge and his military research was behind mine by way too much. The lack of cruisers and the swarms of fighters I fielded was over-powering.
On to the next playable race, I suppose.
After watching 3 DVR'd episodes of Modern Family with my wife and daughter, I rolled up my sleeves and returned to Sins of a Solar Empire.
To make a long story short, I invested heavily into missile frigates and the AI countered by building gobs of light carriers; missiles are not so good against fighters and bombers. It was a monster of a battle, but the AI did extremely well and I resigned as the bulk of his fleet was intact while mine was reduced to ashes.
I did get the military tree maxed out for TEC and got to play with a few new weapons. Finally getting to a mega-battle was cool to watch, even if I did go down in flames. The lesson learned is that it would be smarter to build a balanced fleet.
Anyone reading by now is probably wondering why-oh-why is he bothering with Sins. Well, it is a complicated answer. At the core of it, I realize that RTS games have been probably my least played genre and playing a highly rated RTS seems like a good way to get that loving feeling that I once had with Command and Conquer back. I am also really interested in playing Elemental, which is also a RTS by the same company, so getting up to speed with Sins seems like a good way to expand my genre knowledge while preparing for a title that I genuinely want to play.
Whew! Way too long an explanation.
Anyhow, I will eventually play a game to win. One day I will not stop and turtle as I explore and learn about the technology tree. But lessons learned are good ones and I still have 2 other races to explore...
I played and subscribed to both Tabula Rasa and Dungeon Runners. If you were to look either of these MMO titles up, you will discover that they were both shut-down.
I do not have a problem with shutting down a dead or dying MMO. However, I do have a problem with a company that does not make a commitment to a title. Players invest a lot of their time into an MMO and a publisher should plan on running one for at least 3 years past launch. NCSoft is working on what appears to be a 12-18 month window before they pull the plug and that is unacceptable.
I stopped playing Dungeon Runners (or any other NCSoft game) when they shutdown Tabula Rasa. And I imagine that there were some Dungeon Runner fans that now realize that investing your gaming hours in an NCSoft game is, well, unwise.
EM
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