Tuesday 23rd September, 2008 @ 7:00 pm
My recent forays into gaming on a computational device have taken me to playing Spore, the latest game from Maxis which bewilderingly doesn’t contain the word “Sim” anywhere in the title.
Personally, I hated all the SimCity games, I found them boring and directionless. I hated the Sims series, they just seemed to be either more boring than my life (in which case I wondering why I was playing them) or more exciting than my life (which made me sad 
). Reading most of the build-up for Spore made me think it was going to be just-another-boring-sim-game. When I read that Soren Johnson, the lead designer of Civilisation 4 (a game more addictive than any drug), was working on it my interest was piqued.
I got the Creature Creator partly as it was £5 and I thought it might entertain me for a few hours by creating some grotesque creatures and watch my girlfriend make some pretty ones but, despite my expectations, I actually ended up getting quite into it. The intuitiveness of the tool and the sheer variety of creatures that were getting created really excited me so I bought the game.
For the last two weeks I have been living like an addict, waiting to get the next fix of the game. I think yesterday evening may be the first since I bought it that I didn’t played it (instead I just read about computer games). I don’t just play for fun, I play to elevate the Globby Empire to greatness!
Globby is a friendly fellow. By which I mean he’s eaten all his fellow cells, ripped his fellow creatures to bits, massacred his fellow tribes, nuked his fellow civilisations and blown up the planets of his fellow space empires. In Spore you can be friendly, evil or somewhere in the middle. Sadly, blowing up planets and eating other creatures has proved to be far more fun than talking to them or forming trade routes.
I realise you don’t care about Globby or his mighty empire but you would if you’d created this creature from a single cell (with a mouth, but I’ll give Will Wright the right to give cells mouths) and evolved it to a mighty space-faring empire.
Really this is just a really fun game. It continuously rewards the player through the multiple stages and in-stage checkpoints and the badge/achievement system strongly appeals to the more obsessive types like me (HAVE TO GET THEM ALL) it’s just a really enjoyable experience. Add this on top of the ability to subscribe to Sporecasts and your friends feeds, meeting them in game and you just get a really fun community experience.
I highly recommend buying and playing Spore. It’s one of those incredibly innovative games that everyone should play, regardless of their preferred genre.
Posted in Computer Games
14 Comments »
Monday 14th April, 2008 @ 12:32 am
Before you complain about this title completely contradicting my last post I want to point out that I’ve already given myself a good telling off and I’m sure I will never do it again.
Do you like computer games? If not then why are you reading a computer games post?
Anyway, those remaining like computer games. Do you have a computer with Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BSD or a GP2X, PSP or Windows CE device?
If so, goto the UQM download page and get it now while I tell you why it is such a great game.
I’m a real sucker for good stories. UQM is the open-source port of Star Control 2, one of the best game stories I’ve ever played (and I’ve played a lot of games). Humanity has been conquered by a brutal regime after attempting and failing to fight for their freedom. Their people are enslaved but safe on Earth and their allies have also been enslaved and trapped on their homeworlds or forced to fight for the Ur-Quan’s military. You come to Earth from a research mission on another world, cut off from Earth since the war and don’t know any of the above. The researchers discovered an ancient alien race and ancient technology. From then onwards it is your job to deck out your ship and kick some serious alien arse.
UQM is so good because it is full voice acted somehow, frankly amazing for a game released in 1992. The script is intelligent and amusing, each races having fatal flaws and how you talk to them has a real effect on your interactions with the races later in the game. You have multiple dialogue choices and a huge amount of dialogue available from every NPC if you choose to grill them.
As well as the discussion and interaction you need to gather resources to equip your ship by mining planets, some light trading or destroying enemy ships. No race is forced to be your friend and every race can be at least partially placated on occasion. Your ship can be decked out in the fashion you see fit depending on if you want to play in a bloodthirsty fashion, killing enemy ships, just carry lots of cargo or somewhere in between the two.
Every of the 10+ races has their own music, art-style, feel and area of space. The galaxy is huge with thousands of planets to explore and many nooks-and-crannies than can convey advantages through technology or pivotal diplomatic assets.
Combat is settled in a 2D shooter fashion, flying your little ship about with Newtonian physics trying to outshoot or flee from your enemies.
This game a strange fusion of adventure and action with RPG and RTS elements also thrown in. The bright, colorful graphics have actually aged reasonably well and don’t detract from the great game.
If you like computer games at all I challenge you to leave the Sol system in this game (<1 hour of gameplay) and not be enjoying it. I will be frankly amazed if you do.
This is a brilliant game, hats off to both the original developers and the open-source team that have made the game work so well on modern platforms.
Go and play it now!
Posted in Computer Games, Software Development
3 Comments »
Tuesday 29th January, 2008 @ 1:04 am
I still keep a Windows partition around, partly to see what the competition is up to and partly to play games. One of my pleasures recently has been playing Unreal Tournament 3. A Linux port is in progress but has yet to be delivered so I’m biding time with the Windows version.
Try as I might I couldn’t get the NAT traversal to work with the v1.1 patch. I read various blog posts informing me to use a STUN server but that seemed unnecessarily overkill.
I finally worked out the problem this evening! Epic added STUN support to v1.1 and added initialised the server variable in the configuration file to a dummy value which turns on the STUN NAT mode, breaking the existing NAT support.
To fix this change the:
“StunServerAddress=stunserver.org”
line in “My Documents\My Games\Unreal Tournament 3\UTGame\Config” to:
“StunServerAddress=”
and it should all just work 
Posted in Computer Games
7 Comments »
Saturday 5th January, 2008 @ 8:11 pm
We’re on the 5th day of 2008. It’ll probably take me till the 300th day before I remember to write “2008″ instead of “2007″…
Like most people I’ve made a few New Year’s resolutions this year whilst trying to take on a few bits of advice on how to make them and keep them.
Anyway, here goes:
- Hack more on KDE. I think the combination of starting a new job and not running KDE4 as my desktop (until recently) has made me slack from working on KDE. Once I actually am using it daily then I reckon I’ll be able to do more work and help with KDEPIM for 4.1.
- Practise my bass more. Playing every two weeks with a bunch of music teachers and session musicians is making me feel a little insecure about my playing! I need to practise more, especially working on my soloing and probably buy a Fake book.
- Study rather than just reading my Bible. I’m normally alright about reading my Bible regularly but I’ve just been reading it like a novel rather than actually using commentries and then like to properly study the passages. I’ve done this a few times lately and it is far more beneficial, I need to get up earlier and try and do it more often
- Play less computer games. I do enjoy gaming but it is one of these activities that really benefits no-one except myself so I want to try and divert more time into things like hacking/music where I can benefit others whilst enjoying myself.
- Be a better friend/boyfriend. Just generally take more of my time to try and focus on others and help them with their problems.
- Become a better software engineer. Improve my knowledge of my main languages, maybe try and pick up some more and improving my algorithmic math skills.
- Take more of an interest in politics. Now that Nick Clegg has been elected the leader of the Liberal Democrats I’ve felt myself want to try and get a little more involved and interested in British politics in the gradual run-up to the next UK elections.
I’m sure there are more but that’s all I can think of for now!
Posted in Computer Games, Music, My Life, Politics
1 Comment
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