Terraria: Under the Wing and Down the Mine Shaft

"The fuck asshole, where the hell is AC: B and AC: R?"  Bitch you don't know my life.  I was going to make posts about those two but then I realized, "The fuck am I going to say?  It's AC 2 just more of it."  So that's why.  But here's the short version.

AC: B TL;DR  The assassin recruits are a cool addition, being in one city the whole game not so much, I don't like the npcs anymore

AC: R TL;DR This game feels wrong, but I do rather enjoy making bombs, city is way too small.

There, you happy?  Didn't think so.

This time around I'm talking about relationships.  Yes, those kinds.  Gamers (not recognized as a word by Chrome's spell check by the by) have long had a bad rap when it comes to relationships.  The quintessential gamer, as portrayed in most media, is over/under weight, lacks social skills, lazy, is the definition of the word nerd and has never been within 25 feet of a girl if they weren't sitting in class with them.  The neckbeard as they have been so coined.  And while they do exist, and I have met a few, most of the gaming community is just normal people.  The caring father that works 40 hours a week, takes care of his kids then goes online and tags and teabags 12 year olds (fuck that sentence sounds bad) in CoD after the kids go to bed.  The suburban mother who got tired of Sudoku and picked up her son's 360 controller only to get hooked sawing Locus in half.  The 65 year old retiree who's running the world as a tyrannical Gandhi in Civilization.  We're out there and in bigger numbers than people seem to realize.

So at some point you'll probably have a relationship with someone and no matter how long you try to hold it off, they are going to figure out what you're doing staying up until 4am every night, aside from the porn of course.  In my limited experience, girlfriends (I would do boyfriend as well, but I've never had one of those so I don't know how that works out, sorry ladies) come in three flavors in terms of their reaction to having some form of gamer as a boyfriend.

1. The Disapproving Mother

They hate your "video games" (I don't know why, but when people say "video games" it makes my skin crawl).  They can not figure out what's so fascinating about them and they're mad about how much of your time it takes up, how much money you spend on it and your general inattentiveness to them while you're playing.  I had a girlfriend at the time Black Ops came out who was like this.  My roommates and I had gotten into Zombies with a passion. She ended up turning off the Xbox when we were at wave 56 because she came over and we were still playing and she was tired of waiting and did not understand what the big deal was, "It's just a game."  The relationship did not last much longer.

2. The Casual

They've played some games, probably some console games in their younger years.  They might still show some signs of life in iPhone games or something like Bloons or, god forbid, farmville.  They have a better appreciation for your gaming habits but are generally rather confused and overwhelmed by whatever you're playing at the time.  You've probably tried to branch out to them.  "This game is hard/confusing" is a common phrase after the tenth death to some shit talking 10 year old on Xbox Live or the first guard in the first area kills them in a 1 on 1 fight.  But at least they have some idea where you're coming from.

3. The Gamer Girl

Full disclosure, I've never actually dated a "Gamer Girl" in the full sense, but I have been friends with quite a few over the years.  They're better than you at some games and you're better than them at some.  They've been playing for as long as you have and they've put up with more harassment online than you knew existed.  But they will support your gaming habits as long as you can put up with the mutual shit talking in any slightly competitive games.  And stay away from Mario Party, that's a sure way to kill off any relationship.

I'm seriously not trying to offend anyone or pigeon hole the entire female gender, this is merely my observations from my life as it has unfolded.  Please don't kill me.

I started dating my current girlfriend a while ago, but obviously not that long ago since this is a different one than the Zombies story I was talking about.  She knew before we started dating that gaming was a pretty big part of my life, which always makes things easier.  She falls into the "Casual" segment I mentioned earlier and she's always been supportive and tries not to mess with me too much after an all nighter because I had to kill those assholes in Dishonored.  And she even enjoys watching me play some of them.  When I was doing my AC marathon, she was very interested due to her love of all things historical in nature.  I've tried to get her to play a couple of things with me to some success, but nothing really caught.  In her words, "I like video games, I'm just not very good at them."

So for a while, we sat at kind of an impasse.  I like difficult games, I always have.  I get upset when the "Hard" difficulty is locked at the beginning.  She likes games that don't move too fast and don't require overly precise movement or mouse skill.  I like Super Meat Boy, she likes Portal.  But all you have to do is find one game.  One game that you can both enjoy together and that's what we found.

Last week, Steam was running it's Thanksgiving/Autumn/Insert Politically Correct Holiday Season Name Here Sale and something interesting popped up, a game I had lost an entire week to about a year previous, Terraria.  It was $3.50 so I bought it, gifted it and when we got back from visiting my parent for the holiday, we started off.

If you've never played Terraria, first you're missing out on something magical and second you might not know exactly what it is.  On the surface, Terraria is 2D Minecraft.  In the beginning  for the first hour at least, you'll be saying "This is the most shameless ripoff I've ever seen."  And it's almost true, for the first hour.  You are thrown into a harsh and unforgiving game world with the worst tools imaginable and they say, "Go."  You build a tiny house out of wood to keep the zombies out and spend your nights crying in the corner of your house making tiny crafting tables and metal forges so maybe you won't die instantly the next time you run into a slime.

But Terraria is more game than sandbox where as minecraft is more sandbox than game.  But the most important part about Terraria is it starts slow and scales perfectly until you're doing some crazy things you never thought you'd be able to.  At the end of the "game" part of minecraft, you have diamond everything, some good weapons and a shit load of bricks to build random stuff out of.  At the end of Terraria, you have a lightsaber, a shark that shoots bullets, wings, rocket boots, a three pronged grappling hook and you walk around in a tuxedo killing 1000 foot long mechanical worms for fun in a world that is constantly changing in real, noticeable ways.  Seriously, go play this game.

So I run the server since my computer is overkill to Terraria's humble system requirements, my girlfriend logs in and we spend the first half hour walking around the woods chopping down trees.  What she doesn't realize, is that just by walking around and cutting trees she's already learned how to move around with WASD, and how to use the mouse and keyboard at the same time without thinking about it which is an incredibly hard skill to learn if you're new to PC gaming.  The first night, we didn't know how late it was until the sun came up and she now completely understands how you can just get lost in a game.

We played for 30 hours the first four days, basically did nothing else with the remainder of our respective vacations.  When we started her comments were, "Jumping and moving at the same time is hard."  "How do I kill things?", now we've moved on to, "Do we need more ash?  I'm going to the underworld for more hellstone so I can just grab a stack while I'm there."  "I'm going to go run Eater five times, be right back."

Finding common ground is key.  You and your SO might bond over being a medic-heavy in TF2, playing hotseat Civ or maybe you just need to build a castle and dig a hole in the ground together to find it. 

Tale of the "Less than subtle" Assassins Part 2 (Assasin's Creed 2)

So now we move onto AC 2.  Two years after the release of Assassin's Creed, Assassin's Creed 2 arrived on the scene and like it's first iteration, PC got shanked again for the time being.  And I was very wary about it's release after my disappointment with AC in regards to it's trailer.  I didn't play AC 2 when it first came out,  I just couldn't be bothered to give it another shot especially since the lack of a PC version and my living in a new apartment got in the way of access to a 360.  So it gathered dust until early 2011.

I lived far away from home during my university years, further than I wanted to drive more than a few times a year, but my roommates did not.  So one holiday break I had an empty house, a 360 and AC 2. I loaded it up, sat down and played the whole game over the course of three days.  I think I might have problems...


AC 2 picked up, at least in the future, after the events of AC which is one of the things that sold me on the sci-fi aspect of the game.  How else were they going to do it?  At least they didn't make you a time traveler which seems like it would be awesome, but there would be no character development at all.  The main character would already be the greatest assassin in history, no room for growth.

But aside from that, AC 2 shines in every way that AC should have.  You had some stock in the story, Altiar was a renegade seeking redemption and then there was some bit about an apple.  It was tough to relate to the guy, he had no back story, very little motivation and was kind of a dick for most of the game.  Ezio on the other hand was just some fairly average guy thrown into a situation beyond himself.  It felt like there was actual stakes and there was legitimate room for character development.  Every target felt like an actual blow struck and carried weight.  In AC, the weight of the target was only reviled after you had sunk a blade into them, their exit monologue the only thing to carry the story.

But this is not the only thing that makes AC 2 great, far from it.  Weapons had actual value for one.  In AC you get a better sword and what?  The combat had no need for an upgrade system, hold the right trigger and hit X at the right time, just this time the death animation had a different model running through the guards.  But in AC 2 it changed the way you fought.  Guards that were once beyond anything but a well timed counter now can be killed by simply attacking them with your new and improved knife with twice the speed as the old one, but now heavy attacks break straight through your block and you better learn to dodge fucking sharpish.

Armor gave you a reason to avoid combat lest you blow your hard earned (waited for?) money repairing your armor for the ninth time that day and the ability to dye your robes was just plain awesome, just awesome.

The climbing also got easier and more fluid, I guess physical training wasn't exactly at it's peak in 1200 AD.  Along with the addition of the jump climb mechanic, climbing was a joy rather than a chore.  And the cities had some variety.  Florence was nothing like Venice which was nothing like Flori which was nothing like Montegiorno.  Each area had it's own feel to it rather than just running around the same city in a slightly different section of the city as AC would have it.  Even the memory walls seemed less invasive, not getting in the way unless you actually tried for it.

Oh and Leonardo Da Vinci was in it, mother fucking Leonardo Da Vinci.

Better outfit design too, that painting looks familiar...

I'm going to depart for a second to talk about a little bit about the insane DRM locked in with AC 2 on the PC.  Since Steam seems to be the pinnacle of game-program management-community management at the moment, of course, every other company thinks they can do the same thing.  Ubisoft made uPlay.  Now I'm more forgiving than most when it comes to game programs that are like Steam because as most people seemed to have forgotten, when Steam first came out, it was awful.

For those of you not privileged enough to be around during the hay day of Counter Strike, everything was going okay until one day, one day that lives on in infamy, buried beneath current good press and the newer, better versions of Steam, this day was the launch of Counter Strike 1.6.  Way back when Half-Life was getting modded like a douchey high schooler's car, every game had it's own shortcut on your desktop.  One for Half-Life, one for Deathmatch, one for TF, one for Day of Defeat, one for Counter Strike and so on.  Counter  Strike 1.6 changed that.  In order to launch Counter Strike 1.6, you needed to download this new fangled program launcher called "Steam" and it was awful.  I mean really awful.  Steam crashed the game often, it sucked resources even though it appeared to do nothing and just added and extra step to the process.  It also killed my framerate.  At the time I was running CS 1.5 on a Pentium 3 machine and was getting about 40 fps.  1.6 comes out and BAM 25 fps with skips.

The point of that long ass story was why I'm willing to give new programs a chance because now I love Steam.  That said, uPlay can die off and I wouldn't care.  Here's the process to get into the game.  Open Steam, click "Play" on AC 2, unusually long hang on the "AC 2 is launching window" then, do I get the game?  Fuck no, uPlay opens up, and I have to click "Play" on that too.  uPlay thinks for a while and then about 30% of the time will load up in a window for zero apparent reason causing me to have to close the game, and relaunch through uPlay.  Then, once I get into the game, I have to reset the controller settings because apparently, uPlay can't just load Logitech's Profiler settings like a sane program, and sometimes it won't even recognize that I have a controller plugged in, it insists that the key and mouse are the only input devices.  I did eventually solve this problem by saying "Fuck it" and just ran my controller in X-Input mode and used it like a 360 controller.  And then I can actually play the damn game.  And it's a damn good thing my tower has 16GB of RAM because uPlay holds on to about 500MB of it for no apparent reason.  I suppose it's so if I call on it to find me the 15,000th row of Pascal's Triangle, store all the values in long form, and then bubble sort the entire triangle it will be ready.

And for those of you who have had the joy of playing games through uPlay, you'll no doubt know that they have their own overlay, which is absolute shit.  The Steam overlay provides good information.  Your friends list, achievements, the time, your session time, news updates that no one reads, the screenshot manager and even a web browser.  UPlay's overlay provides you with, your user name, the name of the game, your friends list (completely useless, it's already running through steam),  and it's bullshity "Rewards" thing.  None of which are even slightly useful   The rewards thing only has about 4 per game, why do I need to check that in game again?  Did I turn into a goldfish with a 3 second memory?  How many times would anyone need to check how to get the rewards again?  You get all of them just from playing the game.  Not from completing side missions or doing cool things, no just play through the story once, get everything.  I hate you uPlay.

Tale of the "Less than subtle" Assassins Part 1 (Assassin's Creed)

2007 was a banner year for the games industry.  In case you weren't overly plugged in, too young to grasp all the releases or were in an extended coma during 2007 here's a quick run down of what came out.


Supreme Commander

God of War 2

Stalker: SoC

Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles

Fornza 2

Dirt

Bioshock

Halo 3

The Orange Box

The Witcher

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Mass Effect

Assasin's Creed

Rock Band

Crysis

And those are just the big name ones, tons of other fan favorites came out.  If you were plugged in during 2007, you'll no doubt remember an incredible game trailer that came out at E3 that same year, the one for Assasin's Creed.

In case you missed it, here's the youtube version so you know what the hell I'm on about.

At this point in my gaming career, game trailers were kind of a new thing.  We used to have these novel things called "Demos" where you got to play part of the game, you know,  the part that actually mattered.  Now Demos weren't completely gone by this point, I remember fondly playing the first 20 minutes of Bioshock about 40 times that same year.  But the game looked awesome, so what could happen?

Well since it was an Ubisoft game, the game didn't launch on PC, and it ended in a major fiasco for them, but more on that later.  But luckily for me, I was living in the dorms at my university at the time of it's release and my roommate had gotten one of the shiny new Xbox 360 Elites that came out that same year and a fancy LCD TV to plug it into so I got my shot.

This was my first HD console game and the graphics blew me away.  Everything was sharp, the models looked fantastic.  The level of detail was amazing, the cities actually felt alive with more than just clones of people.  The combat was smooth and the climbing was like nothing I'd ever seen.  But there were a few problems.

The first problem was it being a sandbox.  The major sandbox game up until that point was Grand Theft Auto III and it's ilk or if you were a die-hard pc gamer like I am, you had the Elder Scrolls.  The thing about sandboxes is freedom is the key.  In GTA and ES, you could do anything within the bounds of the game, go pretty much anywhere, kill anyone, complete missions with as much or as little subtly as you liked.  This was not the case in AC.

I remember vividly walking through my first city and some asshole pushes me into a wall.  Well I wasn't going to stand for that, I'm mother fucking Altiar, the most badass assassin that ever haunted the streets of the cities of the third crusade.  So like any unstoppable badass, I shanked his ass.  Screen goes all red bordered and I lose some sync points.  "The fuck!?" I remember shouting.  No killing civis?  Asshole had it coming, he pushed me.

This is not freedom, you're an assassin and they won't let you kill everyone.

The cities were blocked off into sections, which in it's self isn't that bad, GTA did that and it kept you playing.  But unlike AC, GTA didn't have you climb to incredibly high places all the time to look at all the the areas you weren't allowed to go.  I remember seeing the Dome of the Rock from one of the first few viewpoints in Jerusalem and thinking, "Holy shit, let's go check that out!"  No dice, memory wall.

After I finished AC the first time through, I hung it up and moved onto Bioshock and it kind of faded into memory.  That is until an opportune Steam sale put AC back on my game list.

I still looked on AC with some fondness, I thought the game was fun, both story lines were engaging and even though a lot of people didn't like the sci-fi twist in the final game, I actually did.  So with AC 3 looming on the horizon, I decided to play through all the PC ones leading up to the launch of AC 3.

AC plays much better on the PC, kind of.  It certainly is a lot prettier.  With filtering and higher texture quality due to not being limited by console hardware, the game still looked new after 5 years.

That's some draw distance for you

There was one huge problem, the controls.  AC is a full bred console game.  Lack of variable move input and having to hold down keys pretty much constantly, the keyboard falls short.  W only has two settings full on and full off.  So after about 15 minutes of play, I said "Fuck this noise" and plugged in my gamepad.

The game is almost exactly the same as I remembered, good and bad.  Climbing viewpoints still remains the best part of the game.

Don't look down

Combat still flows, even if it is even easier than I remember.

Using the sword is for filthy casuals, dagger all day

But the game is glitchy in more ways than I recall.  Lots of textures go through each other.  Bumping into people often appears as though you're removing their heart Indiana Jones style and guards have about as much reservation in staying their swords and not trying to slice you into Assassin cubes as someone not trying to smack a mosquito that landed on your face.  Since, apparently, knocking a pot of someone's head is of death penalty severity in the middle ages but getting into a fist fight in the market is totally cool   And textures load at weird rates, especially at long distances, I ran into invisible guards at least 4 times in one mission, but the distant skyline sure was pretty the whole time I was running from them.

Working on core strength apparently

And the game gets repetitive in a hurry.  100%ing the game is an exercise in masochism.  Collect 420 flags scattered around fucking everywhere?  Are you out of your fucking mind?  Who the hell thought that was a good idea?  I think I got 10 total the whole game.

It's still fun, I guess is my final conclusion.  If you look at it as the alpha build/tech demo for AC 2 then it holds up better, but the video got my hopes up higher than was fair and I'm still a bit bitter about it.  I thought it was going to be Hitman in the crusades and it turned into GTA with less freedom and RPGs.  Next time, "Tale of the less than subtle Assasins Part 2"

Half Life: 14 Years Later

Half Life 14 years later

I recently dusted off (er downloaded) Half Life: Source in an attempt to procrastinate from my work and to see how an old favorite has held up over the years to my jaded, hyper-realism drugged gamer mind. Here are my findings.

Modern Hardware vs. Half Life

Original recommenced specs for Half Life when it came out

Hardware Requirements

System: Pentium-133 or equivalent 
RAM:24 MB RAM 
CD-ROM: 2X CD-ROM 
Video Memory: 2 MB VRAM 
Hard Drive Space: 400 MB 
Mouse: Yes 
Sound Board: Yes 
DirectX: DirectX v6.0 

Recommended System Requirements: 
System: Pentium-166 or equivalent 
RAM: 32 MB RAM 
3D Sound Card: Yes

Back when Half Life came out, my timid Windows 3.1 Pentium powered desktop could not run it, the only computer in the house that could run it was my parents ultra-powerful Pentium II powered, Voodoo 2 having beast, but I was strictly forbidden from installing anything on it without my parent's watchful eye seeing exactly what it was. I was especially forbidden from playing “M” rated games as I was only 12 at the time. My friend down the street, however was not. I went over to his house one day and he was playing the most amazing game I'd ever seen. The textures were so vivid, the gameplay so varried and he was using the mouse to aim and look around. This was mind blowing to me, having only really played Doom and the first Quake with the keyboard it was amazing to me. I knew I had to get this game at some point. About 2 years later, my parents upgraded to a Pentium III machine and I got the old Pentium II work horse, it was my time now. I borrowed the game from my friend (remember when you could still do that?) installed the game on the very small remaining chunk of hard drive space and went at it. When I first played it, the max resolution I could get the game to run in was 800x600, but I didn't care it was Half-Life. This one of my first solo all-nighter gaming sessions, I was hooked. I forget how many times I died, got stuck, or had the piss scared out of me by Maw-Men. I played through it at least 8 times that year.

Tech Write-Up

I didn't bother attempting to run the original Half Life on my system. I've had enough nightmare times getting older game to run without crashing (Looking at you System Shock 2, I have to set affinity to one core? How the fuck was I supposed to figure that out?) So Half Life: Source was my first and only option.

My current specs

Intel i7 – 2600k @ 3.6GHz per core

16GB of DDR3 RAM

nVidia GTX 560

Bit of overkill for a source game, I realize but here's how it runs.

At 1920x1080, which appears to be the highest 16:9 resolution native supported, it runs at 300fps with all the settings turned up. Not too much of a surprise, but what is a bit of a surprise is how often in the graphics knock. If you're unsure what that means, it means that while the game runs at 300fps, every once in a while, the fps drops to about 10 for 4 frames and then comes back. It's almost like the game is lagging but it's very much not. This is a common problem with older games for some reason and it doesn't really detract too much, just something that's noticeable. Other than that, it runs very well on a modern machine, despite it's age.

The Good

The game is incredibly varied, the environments change constantly and very well. It makes your progress through the game feel like you're actually getting something done.

Big "Whoa" Moment

The pacing is top notch, there's nothing that comes absolutely out of no where. There's always slight hints to what's happening but it never feels like it's out running you or you're out running it. Things are introduced in a very nice way as to make things interesting without being overwhelming.

Gameplay and controls are just as good as you remember. Although my skill with the mouse seems to have gotten considerably better. The guns are difficult to control but I feel it actually adds to the game. It kind of makes you feel like you're just some scientists that has no control over the situation. The AI is incredibly difficult to handle since their tactics tend to take advantage of your inexperience.

Lack of hand holding is nice. The game teaches you things as you need them without explicitly saying, “We're teaching you this now!” It makes you feel like you're the one in control and you're the one getting better.

The Bad

The game is just unlinear enough to piss you off. It's very frustrating how often you can get stuck because you missed something subtle. There's little consistency as to what's a valid door or switch and whats part of the wall texture. Kind of makes you appreciate easily identifiable doors and switches in modern games.

Combat can range from fairly easy to down right impossible. The AI is very accurate with the guns, you are very much not. Add in a non-regenerating health and no auto save and you might be doing the same section more than once. In this last play through, I had to try the same fight no less than 15 times before I actually managed to get through it.

Ladders. Those mother fucking ladders.

You have to do an awful lot of platforming and the game doesn't help you out at all. The area required to stand on is sometimes difficult to work out and you can't see your legs or any sort of reference point as to whether or not your texture is going to trip the collision or not.

NPCs are poor at advancing the plot. I know in Half Life, you're supposed to figure out the storyline yourself, but you may not recall that you run into quite a few NPCs in the first Half Life and they just make vague passing statements without real concern or grip on the situation.

The Ugly

The graphics show their age in a big way. Big blocky Quake textures, out of proportion set objects, incredibly poor NPC graphics (Spoiler: there's only two kind of scientists that work at Black Mesa Albert Einstein and young Morgan Freeman), everything seems kind of too big, the hallways, the elevators, the soldiers (Maw-Men are still absolutely terrifying though) Most of the guns look cell shaded and the bigger NPCs have jerky animations and look very very odd.

Turns out toy guns actually are dangerous

Dat shotgun texture

The loading. Good god the loading. I realize that back when the game came out, incremented loading was the only way to go. No one had the hardware to do an all-at-once loading like we have now, but it's incredibly noticeable. You will run into invisible loading walls all the time, mostly in really similar looking hallways. If you're not ready for them and have your mouse sensitivity turned up fairly high, prepared to get turned around and walk right back into the same loading wall you just went through.

4th time through the same loading wall

The scripting engine is absolutely awful. On many occasions, things just didn't work and I had to reload the game. A number of times enemies would just freeze in the middle of combat, or run away from me. One time, an encounter started too early, it was supposed to happen on my way back through a room and started the first time I stepped in the room. Buttons sometimes fail to work completely, doors would make the sound that they opened, were supposed to open, and just didn't open.

These guys walk like they just shit their pants

Conclusion

The game is still great. The levels are well thought out, exploration is encouraged and rewarded without being annoying, the story is still laid out in a nice way and never in your face with long (read: any) cut scenes and manages to still tell the story in an incredibly immersive way without breaking the flow. The puzzles (kinda puzzles) are challenging without being overly so. Combat is fast, very skill based, fun and challenging and there's actually a sense of urgency, confusion and actual fear that keeps you going through the game. The adventure game elements, like most of the “boss fights” make you feel clever and satisfied when you pull them off successfully and it's still very enjoyable.

TL;DR Graphics kinda terrible, ladders suck, game is still awesome.