Greenery and Impotence

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Awoken by a dog barking outside and a fly buzzing in my ear. Not the worst way I’ve ever been woken up but fairly up there. Staggered out of the early morning oven my room had become and headed downstairs. Managed to get half a glass of water into me before I was roped into more agricultural work. Which a lifetime of living in the country has led me to despise. Slapped on some sunblock (rich with second hand sand) and spent an hour or so cutting down a few trees. Then it was time to sacrifice this morning’s and yesterday’s spoils to the every hungry god of the recycling plant. The first load (ooh err matron) wasn’t too bad, despite the car being so full that a sudden stop would have led to a fairly rough decapitation, it was mostly just one big tree. Back home and a bit more cutting followed by the second trip to the recycling centre. Here is where disaster struck.

Due to our victories in the war against the green the boot was packed too full to close. Science was the answer, science in the form of a few bungee cords to hold it closed. It truly is a new millennium. Anyhow, we got to the recycling centre and pulled up ready to unload (saucy). I was standing at the side of the car, pulling on my gloves, minding my own business, when something hard and travelling at a velocity that I can only describe as “unfortunate” collided with my delicate man-meats. As I doubled over in pain my mother doubled over in laughter. It seems that when she was disconnecting the bungee cords one had flown off and collided with her best chance of a perfect grandchild. I tried not to puke as she tried and failed to apologise through the laughter.

After that the third and final load was something of a blur. I had been planning to whinge about how I managed to get bitten on the head again (despite never taking off my fucking hat) but that pales in comparison to the testicular trauma mentioned above. But I’ve mentioned it anyway because I wanted to compare my twin mounds to Ms Eleniak’s (the only reason anyone watched Under Siege) and I couldn’t live with myself if I let a sweet 90’s reference like that go to waste. It was still stinging when after the third load we ventured into the metropolis of Dundalk. Dundalk is actually surprisingly even more depressing in the sun, full of the scantily clad and shittily tanned sporting even shittier tattoos. It is not a place for the beautiful people. Nipping into Dunnes for some supplies was even more depressing, some stellar child rearing on display.

I was still feeling rather sorry for myself as we headed down the Quay to trade custard creams and a wonky fan for a cylinder of gas. As I slowly cooked in the car and my mother chatted to hers I heard the siren call of the ice cream man. Not just any old ice cream man at that, no sir, Charlie’s ice cream van. I’m not shitting you, and I use no exaggeration, when I say that Charlie’s homemade ice cream is the nicest ice cream I’ve ever eaten. Went the whole hog, flake and a bit of the auld red sauce. Finally felt myself returning to something akin to human. Now I’m finally home, with the feet up and sipping a capri-sun (orange of course, I’m a gentleman). I’ve come to terms.

Brief thoughts on The Last of Us

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Finished The Last of Us earlier on, my post game reverie was interrupted by having to dump a fridge (literally, not slang for a heroic bowel movement). So I’ll need to think on it further. But as it stands the ending of the game surprised me, not in a “PLOT TWIST” kind of way but more in “Oh, they actually went with that?” way. The storytelling overall was great, while the bones of the plot might not be fresh the characters and characterisation really sold it. After been unable to get into TWD, this felt like it effortlessly achieved and surpassed what that game was trying for. The story itself is perfectly suited to the world presented in the game, and the world presented is also pretty amazing. Sometimes I’d just stop and spin the camera around because the world just looked amazing. The gameplay, both stealth and combat, were tough but enjoyable. While I died a good few times it never felt cheap and it never felt like something I couldnt surpass. I’d love to see more stuff set in this world, whether its starring the same characters or not. Its probably the most believeable post apocalyptic world I’ve seen in a game. The games only shortcomings were entirely technical, while it was lovely looking (and probably the nicest looking game on the PS3) it was clearly held back in places due to lack of processing power/ram/etc. I’d love to see a “HD+” version on the PS4 or PC. The game has a “listen mode” which basically lets you look through walls, I turned it off from the beginning (which I’d recommend). But the game lacks a button to see around corners, so sometimes you can end up dicking with the camera just to see whats going on. The pacing was generally excellent, I found the game extremely hard to stop playing. There was one short sequence towards the beginning (about 2 hours in) that I did find a little tedious. But it was short and if the rest of the game wasnt so good I wouldnt even mention it. It’s easily the best game I’ve played this year. Looking forward to giving the multiplayer and NewGame+ a go.

Brief thoughts on Marvel Heroes

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Finished the storyline part of Marvel Heroes, 12 hours, level 25 (soft cap lvl30, max lvl60). It’s an average to mediocre arpg that kept pulling me back in becuase of my fondness for Marvel. It does leverage the property quite well, the story is ok (nothing amazing, but then again what can you expect from Bendis when it comes to Marvel?), the locations are nicely varied, the enemies could perhaps do with a bit more variation but you get to duff up most of the standard bad guys so thats good. Similarly the bosses have a nice selection of the more popular villains. What dragged the game down for me was a) the relatively blatant cash grabs and b) its unpolished nature. Still I enjoyed most of the 12 hours I spent with it (it started a bit slow but certainly picked up). I’ll probably buy one of the 6 or 9 quid heroes and run through the story again. Not super interested in running the sparse endgame dailies at the moment (especially, and bizarrely, becuase the autogroup function doesnt work for them – which is fucking dumb). If you like Marvel and ARPG’s then I’d say give it a go (its free after all) (feel free to add me on Steam and we can “Team-Up”, SteamID is Aueberon). If you simply like ARPG’s then theres much better options out there, both F2P (Path of Exile), cheap (Torchlight 2) and not so cheap/great (Diablo III)

I’ll revisit/expand on this later when I’ve had some time to mull over it

GIWTR 01 – A Mecha in King Arthur’s Court – Part 6 – Knight Armour’s – Updates, Claymore & Dirk

Michael Leave a comment

KA---Group

Well after getting into the swing of things and designing six units I’ve learned a few things about the process and got a much better handle on how to adjust the MTS to get the results I want. So due to a better understanding of the system and the comparative expense of the Saxon Armour’s I’m going to make a few tweaks to the Sweord and Pendragon Knight Armour designs as well as introducing the Claymore and Dirk Knight Armours. Continue reading…

GIWTR 01 – A Mecha in King Arthur’s Court – Part 4 – Saxon Armour’s – Ceorl & Oegn

Michael Leave a comment

saxgroup1

So in the first mecha design post I used the MTS to design an average KA, the Sweord. In the second mecha design post I used the MTS to design a top of the line KA, the Pendragon. In this post I’m going to look at creating mecha from some of the other factions in the world, in this case the Saxons. I still havent entirely pinned down how the Saxons will work and what exactly they are yet so this may change a bit. However I’ll throw out a list of concept stuff for both the Saxons and their mecha and work from that. Continue reading…

GIWTR 01 – A Mecha in King Arthur’s Court – Part 2 – Mecha Design – The Sweord

Michael Leave a comment

groon

So as I mentioned back in Part 1 I’m planning to use Mekton Zeta for the giant robot portions of this game. By that I mean the combat and the mecha construction. Theres actually a (weirdly?) small number of dedicated giant robot/mecha rpg’s and Mekton Zeta is one of the oldest and in my opinion one of the best. A number of the more recent mecha games use systems where the attributes are defined narratively, e.g. I mentioned Camelot TRIGGER in the last post. It uses FATE so you have statistics for your robot like “Torso: Great armour”. Nothing wrong with that per se, it lets you quickly model the salient features and start playing. I actually have a lot of time for the FATE system and its various offshoots. But when it comes to giant robots, even if you’re talking about super robots, I like the feel of getting down to the nitty gritty, to the nuts and bolts, to complex systems and sub-systems and lots of numbers. Mekton Zeta’s mecha construction system is a nice middle ground between the fairly light system of something like FATE and the overly detailed/fiddly tech creation systems from something like the Silhouette Vehicle Creation System or T:TNE’s Fire, Fusion and Steel (basically I dont want to deal with complex forumlae). Continue reading…

Summer Lovin

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This is more or less the first week of my “summer holidays” (well more of a break while exams are on). So my plan for this week was to do nothing at all other than what I felt like (for those wits wondering what the difference is…shit theres no emoticon for giving someone the fingers). Which is going quite well. But my “at least one post a week” initiative has been working quite well for the last month or so, so I thought I’d throw up my tentative summer plans. I’d written a (hilariously) amusing line about what you can do when I inevitably fail. But fuck it. Maybe framing my endeavours like that isnt helping. So I’m going to keep it upbeat (Eye of the Tiger will be playing during the film version of this). Here is what I WILL get done this summer.

Programming

-> Finish Head First C# and The Programmers Guide to C# (June)
-> Get an alpha of Ave Imperator up and running (July & August)

Writing

-> From June 1st – August 31st write 1000 words a day (or 7000 a week if something unavoidable comes up)

Personal Life

-> Loose a minimum of 2 lbs a week from now until September (and hopefully after that as well)
-> Find a job (This isnt something I want to do but sadly need to do, hopefully my current contract gets renewed because I quite like working in the School of Business and with the Springboard Initiative. But I need money and as always I lamanet that that means finding a job).

I dont think these goals are impossible. To be honest, I think even objectively, I could achieve them easily enough. I’ve done so in the past. Its just a question of motivation. I cant really see my generally nihilistic outlook changing but I do want to just well, “put it over there”, I dont need to discard it I just dont want to be held down by it.

GIWTR 01 – A Mecha in King Arthur’s Court

Michael Leave a comment

What the fuck is GIWTR? I hear the world call out as the entirety of the internet voraciously consumes my latest blog post. Worry not gentle reader, the mysteries behind the acronym will be revealed in the very next sentence. It stands for “Games I want to run”. I’ve mentioned in the past how for some odd reason spending time playing/running rpg’s makes me feel weirdly guilty these days (still cant really decide what makes it stand out, its no more time consuming than my other pastimes) so thats one barrier to getting games off the ground. Though its largely a theoretical one as the main barrier is the geographic dispersal of my usual gaming group and our seeming inability to schedule a game. But I’m sick of thinking “Oh I’d like to run this game, oh but I wont get the chance or I should be thinking about something more productive”, fuck it, from now on I’m just going to throw up whatever ideas I have whenever I have them. I’m going to think about them as much as I want and spend as much time on them as I want. You hear me brain? Anyhow the idea I’m kicking around at the moment is a post-historical reskinning of the King Arthur mythos where plate armour and warhorse’s have been replaced with anachronistic pieces of super hi-technology, specifically big fucking robots. And not “Real robots”, no sir, “Super robots” all the way. Well perhaps not. Somewhere inbetween really. Functionally equivalent to real robots but treated in terms of technology as super robots would probably be the best (if slightly unweildy way) to put it. Continue reading…