Spiral Knights

Steam added a few free games to the list this week, including Spiral Knights, a co-op RPG published by Sega but created by independant company Three Rings.  Three Rings have a rather interesting office, modelled after The Nautilus from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.. I can’t claim to know the book, but this still counts as an Awesome Office!

The Spiral Knights have been stranded on Cradle, an alien world, and need to work together to explore the Clockworks, the machine in the centre of the world.  This houses the dungeons, which are for 1 to 4 players, and contain a variety of enemies, puzzles, and minerals which can be collected to sell or craft better gear..

When you launch the game you’re first prompted to create your own cute little Knight with a choice from a small selection of helmet and body armour styles, which is customised a little by your choice of colour.. purple for me as usual 😉

You’re then sent through the tutorial, learning the basics at the Crash Site and going through to the Rescue Camp, where you first meet other players and learn about Cradle, the world itself, and take the elevator down to the training dungeon, Abandoned Depot.

As my friends were already in the main game, I joined a random group..

I think this is a fantastic inclusion, allowing a look at how dungeons would work in the main game.

Little communication was required.. it was all fairly simple with all players needing to be on the elevator to move between levels, and a variety of enemies dropping coins and ‘heat’, which are automatically shared between party members. After the dungeon was complete, the heat level of my equipped gear went up, though when I compared my sword with the sword of the same name from the merchant, I couldn’t see any improvement on the listed attack power and speed of the item.

In addition to heat, players also have energy.. you have up to 100 energy per day, which is used to enter dungeons, craft and purchase upgrades and to activate various devices.  Energy comes in two forms, Mist and Crystal Energy.  Mist Energy is replenished over the course of the day, but can also be refilled via rewards such as a Mist Tank, while Crystal energy is available via purchase from other players or with real money.

This means there is a limit to how much you can play without paying, which I think is fair enough.

After the training dungeon, there was one more dungeon, The Final Test, to get through before joining the main game and being able to play with friends.  This was still easy enough, with the addition of gates requiring keys or puzzles to be solved, such as placing statues on pressure plates or cogs which needed to be shot to allow the next gate to open.

Completing this dungeon brought me to Haven, the main area of the game with various different areas full of merchants, Strangers (Cradle’s natives), and the Arcade, where gates allow players into the Clockworks.

Here, I finally joined up with a friend, and we entered one of the easier dungeons together.  These were larger than the previous dungeons, with extra little rooms with treasure in them.. or hidden mobs!  Outside of the tutorial, I was also introduced to mineral gathering, with deposits hidden inside the dungeons.  As with the other loot, all minerals gathered are shared between party members, which removes the problem of fighting over it 🙂

After clearing the dungeon, the elevator allows you either to go back up to the Arcade, or down to the next dungeon.. we worked our way down a few levels meeting progressively harder enemies.. the zombies were fairly tough, taking a while to knock down.

The graveyard ended up being a bit too much for us as more and more enemies appeared! 🙂

When a player dies, a party member can revive them, or they can spend energy to revive themselves.  On dying, a player loses 30% of the heat they have gathered so far, and if a party member revives them, they gain that 30%.  This means that weaker players take longer to level up, while good players who are able to remain alive and revive others will level up more quickly. 🙂

The cost of reviving yourself also goes up with each death.. we had to quit after the cost of reviving ourselves was more than the amount of energy we had left.

As yet, I don’t have enough resources to craft anything, so that will come next time!

Free to Play Games on Steam

Steam announced some free to play games this week: RPG / MMOs; Champions Online, Global Agenda: Free Agent, Spiral Knights and Forsaken World, and an action game, Alliance of Valiant Arms.  Free-to-play games usually include some sort of paid features.. extra skins, more equipment, or faster levelling.. or serve up adverts or limit the places you can go in the game while free.. so this announcement got my attention..

Champions Online requires payment to play past level 40, which at least allows a good trial of the game, in which you play a hero going up against Dr. Destroyer and his minions.. the game also apparently allows you to customise your own character, but more interestingly, your own customised enemy to harass you throughout your superhero career.  This sounds rather interesting, though.. another game with a big open world?  I need more free time 😉

Global Agenda: Free Agent‘s free version allows all the game’s content to be played, but you can pay to speed up levelling and purchase better gear more quickly.  I actually bought Global Agenda back in March, just prior to it going free, but having the option of adding it to Steam is a nice one.  This might also help me keep it updated, though I’ve not actually played the game recently..

Spiral Knights, is also fully free to play, but as a co-op game, this will require friends to play with..

The fourth MMO, Forsaken World, has races and classes as I’m used to with WoW, but with dungeons where the difficulty scales with the players’ experience, and weapons and gear which evolves and changes.. another one worth a look.

The action game, Alliance of Valiant Arms, looks to be another squad-based shooter with teams of 4 or 5 players per mission.  Players rank up as they play; the highest ranked player becomes the Squad Commander, hopefully meaning good players can lead others, rather than a recipe for griefing.. another one I’ll have to rope the guys in for 😉

Rivals to Steam

Update: it was apparently Valve who removed Crysis 2 from Steam, due to some disagreement over their contract..

Today I see a number of posts on the web announcing that Crysis 2 has been pulled from Steam as EA begin to push their digital distribution store, Origin.  The Star Wars game and  Alice: Madness Returns are also to be ‘Origin exclusives’.. so we can only assume that other games will follow suit.

I like Steam.

I have easy access to my games library, I get automatic updates.. the Steam overlay allows me to talk to friends, invite them to my game or join theirs, without having to stop playing or mess around trying to find a server that we can all get on.  Steam is not without problems, most notably when a new game is released and the servers just can’t cope.. so I like having a few games that don’t rely on it to run.. but that’s all I want.

I picked up Bulletstorm and Crysis 2 from the EA store because of a 50% discount, and in order to have a few games that don’t rely on Steam, and then reluctantly installed Origin.. but now I wonder how long it’ll be before these games will require Origin.  I also have Dragon Age and Dragon Age 2, bought on Steam, but if Origin doesn’t fall on its face I guess I’ll soon need to add them there too, if I want to receive updates.

My friends play these games, so I know they’ll also be forced to install and run Origin.. but what when the next publisher decides they want in on the act?  A client per publisher?  Eww.

I don’t want to run multiple clients to do the job that one is doing now.

It’s going to mean hassle adding the same people to my friends list, hoping I’ll still be able to chat and invite them to games as easily as I can now.  I don’t really want to be forced into  advertising the latest new client at my friends: “Hey, I bought a game off this company, go and sign up to their website and forum, get loads of annoying emails, download their client, add me to yet another list.. then we can play”.

I can only hope that I’ll still be able to add games to Steam as “Non-Steam games”, at least allowing me access to the overlay so I can still talk to people who refuse to install all the clients I guess I’m going to be stuck with.

What about clients that nobody else installs?  A while ago, I was introduced to Green Man Gaming, another digital retailer.  I was given a free game, which is why I consented to downloading their gaming client, Capsule.  I have launched this client only a handful of times.. I don’t think I’ve even reinstalled it since reinstalling Windows.   I’ve not even bought a single game from them despite the fact that they allow you to sell back your games for credit, and despite the fact they have offers on from time to time.. my friends are on Steam, the majority of my games are on Steam, so I find myself barely thinking about Green Man Gaming and Capsule, let alone running it.

Bulletstorm Completed!

As well as completing my cube skin, I also completed Bulletstorm!

The rest of the game turned out to be just as much fun as the first part.  The sniper was the next awesome toy to be placed in my hands.. with added bullet-steering abilities!  I loved how the enemies tried to dive out of the way as the bullet got near to them.. but there was no escape!

Heading through the dam section, and ultimately destroying it was awesome too!

After this I encountered the Maneaters.. huge carnivorous plants which caught human-sized snacks!  I was caught by surprise a few times.. they move quickly and you don’t have a lot of time to press the button to try and escape once caught.  After being eaten by a plant I endured some mocking from a friend.. I’m looking forward to seeing how he manages!

The boss fight at the end of this level took a while, killing me with spores on the first attempt.  The sliding move turned out to be very useful for getting away from attacks and quickly getting around the boss to catch all the vulnerable points.. eventually killing him off to earn the Weedkiller achievement 🙂

After this, and knowing we were about to catch up with Sarrano, I thought I was heading towards the end of the game, and ended up staying up far too late.. in the end I had to give up and sleep.  So for length of game, I was rather impressed..  I was also impressed with the variety in the levels and enemies, as well as the story allowing us to meet up with Sarrano but in a twist, not letting us actually fight him until later.

There were a few tougher sections.. or at least, parts of the game where I stuck for a little while.. one started with a miniboss in the centre, and other enemies around the room, then more and more enemies and minibosses arrived while I was fighting which led to a few restarts 😉

These were especially satisfying to get through, especially after rampaging through previous sections.

I’ve now started playing through on Hard.. so far it doesn’t seem all that much harder, but I am used to the weapons now, and know what to expect.  Next up has to be the multiplayer, though 🙂

When Bulletstorm was originally released there was a lot of complaining in the media, with some idiots trying to claim that people would become rapists after playing, because of bad language, the fact you are rewarded for shooting bad guys in the nuts, and so on.  I took pleasure in shooting my enemies in the nuts (I struggled to get the ‘Mercy’ skillshot as I was killing them off too quickly), whipping them into environmental hazards with the leash, and gagging them with my flail-gun, as well as being rather amused at the language.. do I now want to go outside and rape people?  No.  That’s because I can tell the difference between a game and reality.. those who go out and commit crimes like that are going to do it regardless.

The media also rolled out the usual irrelevant whinge about children being affected, by seeing the violence and wanting to copy it.. well, young children shouldn’t be given access to games rated for adults, and if they are, then you have to ask what else their parents let them get up to..

Blender and Painted Models 2

I finished my cobblestone skin and sent it over to be mapped onto a cube..

I preferred the look of the cube with sunlight, though I could really see where I’d not painted the grooves enough.

Apparently the next steps are bump and normal mapping.. *blink*.. I also really want to file those corners off 🙂

Blender and Painted Models

A friend is learning to use Blender, and has now come to the part of his tutorial which requires him to use painted models.  Now, I think his two cubes are quite cute and serve the purpose well enough, but he asked me to paint a mesh for him..

This gave me a needed kick towards learning to use GIMP, which I’ve been meaning to look at for a while, as well as digging out my tablet from underneath the clutter on my desk.

I decided to attempt to make a cobblestone-type cube..

I don’t know if this is the best way to go about drawing it, and this may not turn out to be any more useful than the two existing cubes, but I’m rather interested in seeing how it looks in 3d 🙂

Bulletstorm

I picked Bulletstorm up back in April, at i-42 after playing the first section on a friend’s PC, where Grayson and his group of ex-assassin-turned-pirates try to ram the General’s ship, the Ulysses.. and fail, crash landing on a planet filled with crazed gangs..

I finally got around to playing properly over the last few days, repeating the first section and then moving on to the planet where I came across the awesome Energy Leash!

I came to love this weapon when I found how easy it was to grab enemies from behind cover, dragging them to me and impaling them on nearby objects.  This also earned me Skillshots such as Pricked and Voodoo Doll.. and when I’d earned enough points, I discovered the Thumper upgrade, allowing me to fling all the enemies into the air.. this was more awesome still, and came in really handy when I found myself over-run 🙂

The Flail-Gun was also amazing fun, if a little sadistic a weapon.. two explosives tied together by a short chain, which easily wrap themselves around the targetted enemy for you to detonate at your leisure.. preferably near his friends to take them out too.  Normally I don’t really focus so much on guns, to the amusement and/or despair of those I’m with, but it seems the guns in this game are all rather fun.  Next up was the Boneduster, an insanely powerful gun up-close.. I discovered this just prior to heading into a miniature city in the Worst Family Fun Vacation Ever section, which meant all my enemies were up close!  Those who didn’t get shot by the Boneduster were kicked or whipped into surfaces which electrocuted them :>

I recently tried out the Duke Nukem Forever demo, and was disappointed by the fact you could only have two guns at a time, only changing them if you came across another on the ground.  Bulletstorm allows you to carry three, including the standard weapon, or four if you include the leash, with changes available at the Drop Pods.  So far, I’ve not felt that I’ve been limited.. maybe because the guns  are more fun to use, maybe because there are more enemies coming at you.. though I wouldn’t object to the Shrink Ray in here too 🙂

After escaping the miniature city, I got hold of the best weapon so far.. the MechaTon, aka “Waggleton P. Tallylicker”, a remote-controlled robot dinosaur which fired lasers from its eyes!

This section lasted longer than I’d expected.. many games don’t really let you play with the biggest weapons for very long, but this level let me kill lots of enemies and destroy rather a lot of buildings 🙂

Angry Frogs!

A long while ago, I was introduced to Angry Birds, an addictive puzzle game which has you firing a variety of birds at the homes of Pigs.  I played this first on Tim’s phone, and then more recently on the PC, where I made a little more progress as I was able to sit down with it for more than a few minutes.

Today, I spotted a mention of the game on Twitter, shortly followed by a mention of “Angry Frogs”!  It appeared to be a copy of Angry Birds, but still.. I had to try it.. but I soon wished I hadn’t.

The gameplay itself was no more than a copy of Angry Birds’, with frogs instead of birds being fired at their target via slingshot.

Something was missing though.. Angry Birds had a nice little intro, where you saw that the pigs had stolen the birds’ eggs to cook for breakfast.. enough to see them as the bad guys.  No such intro on Angry Frogs.. and even having played the first three levels, I don’t know what the enemies are meant to be.. red frogs? dragons? snakes?

The graphics though, were really poor, lacking the polish and clear effort that Rovio had put into Angry Birds.  Weaker backgrounds could have been forgiven, but the graphics for the frogs, enemies and their bases were also bad, despite being something so simple.

Angry Frogs really is a shameless and charmless rip-off all round.. one to avoid!

Datacentre!

Tim’s new server now lives in Ice Colo’s datacentre in Manchester.. this is a better server than the one in the US, with more bandwidth for the ever-expanding TV guide: On TV Now and any future hosting opportunities.  We arrived early, as we were also heading to the Trafford Centre for shopping afterwards, and found a shiny new building with an electric gate.. authorised access only 😉

I hadn’t expected to be able to go into the data floor, but when Tim took the server in I was also waved through the door.  I was impressed right away by how cool it was.. and how neatly ordered the racks were.  We stood in the ‘cold’ row while Tim and the technician tried to fit the server, having a few problems with the rails at first.  I also got to look at the ‘warm’ row, with all the cables.. many, many cables 😀

Upstairs there was an office.. again, lovely and cool, and aside from the sound of the cooling, quiet.  We saw only two people on the site, too.  I know a few people who would love to work somewhere like that.. in fact, somebody who would like to run one himself 🙂

Back to dreaming about an Awesome office 😉

Duke Nukem Forever

Duke Nukem Forever, long thought of as the ultimate vapourware, is finally on the way, and a demo is available via Duke’s First Access Club.. I got a key thanks to my copy of Borderlands 🙂

I played Duke Nukem 3D back when that was new, when my access to multiplayer back then was via LAN.. which meant very few people to play against.  This led to frustration, as I knew nobody else who wanted to play as often or for as long as I did, especially if I did too well.  There was a good selection of weapons, steroids for speed boosts, multiple routes around the map and little secret areas.. and the jet pack and a hologram device used to pop out a hologram of Duke as a distraction were fun and great for getting the jump on a rival, and usually the reason for me doing so well.

The game had very little in terms of story.. aliens invading, humans being mutated, Duke being the only one able to save the world..  so the single-player was about shooting aliens and mutated pig-cops, with Duke’s random comments and references to popular films here and there too.

So.. the demo.. starting off, I find myself being taught how to use a urinal..
Done with “pissing around”, as the first joke has it, I decided to try interacting with everything else I came across.. a little indiscriminately.. which is how I found myself flinging poo in the shower room.  Duke wasn’t too happy.. “What am I, a chimpanzee?”!

The graphics are better than I expected, though I guess they’ll have been undergoing tweaks throughout development, and the sounds are pretty good too.. but the jump animation.. uh, wow.  Disappointingly bad. 🙁

Outside of the shower block there were soldiers preparing themselves for the enemy.. they ran off as I headed towards them, leaving me to discover that I could draw on the tactics whiteboard while the remaining Marine cheered me on.

I left this room and headed out down the tunnel, where I got a glimpse of the enemy before he fired a rocket into the tunnel and collapsed it.  In the next corridors I met more marines and was given a dual-rocket gun before being let out onto the field to face the Cycloid, a one-eyed rocket-firing beast which is meant to represent the final boss from Duke Nukem 3D.

I felt like I ran out of ammo a little too fast during the fight, and although more ammo was available via airdrop onto the pitch, I felt like I spent too long running.

After knocking the Cycloid down I was able to climb up onto him and pull out some tubing from the back of his head.. killing him resulted in a slightly gruesome opportunity for a goal kick with the eye..

This led to a short cutscene which slightly irritated me as it featured a pair of bimbos kneeling before Duke, wiping their mouths.
This was a bit too gratuitous for my liking..

Back in Duke Nukem 3D there was a bit of a controversy over the “exploitation” of women.  There were strippers in various locations in the game.. 2d sprites if I recall correctly.. which if shot would be replaced by falling money, or in one case, by an enemy.  There were also a few XXX posters and porno shops, and Duke was supposed to be some kind of babe-magnet.. but it certainly wasn’t anything to take seriously.

With Duke Nukem Forever, it seems they’re using the strippers and seedy side of the game as a selling point.  I’m not overly bothered if there is sex or prostitution in my games, but being put in the role of a man receiving a BJ.. I feel more like I’m being forced to watch some guy’s fantasy than playing a video game.

Next up was a driving segment with a monster-truck and a turbo button.  Pressing space allowed four-wheel driving, and tight turns..

Running the pig-men down may or may not have been the intended way of getting through the level, but it was fun and fast.  Once I ran out of gas for the truck though, I hit the two-gun system.  There were plenty of weapons laying around, but aside from my pistol I was only able to have one of those at a time, meaning more running around if I wanted to play with a different gun.

The shrink-ray was pretty cool, and I liked being able to stomp on the shrunken enemies.. however, when it came to the explosives I got annoyed with having to press ‘3’ to throw the pipe bomb.. perhaps this is something that can be mapped to another key.

A ship was the boss for this section, and again I found myself having to run around more than I wanted, looking for pipe bombs and hiding behind rocks when the EGO (health) meter got too low.

Overall, I felt a bit disappointed with the demo.  It lacked excitement.  If this demo is representative of the full game, then it’s basically going to be Serious Sam without the hectic fun of swarms of enemies.. in that case I’d stick to Serious Sam..