A Little Minecraft Project.. and a Texture Pack

A few things have changed since I first set up my Minecraft server.. I turned off the mobs, to avoid creeper-related destruction.. and updated the server to 1.8, to take advantage of proper flight.  VoxelAir is certainly better than nothing, but the flight in the 1.8 update is much nicer to use, allowing tiny, fine-controlled movements.  I also started using the creative mode, because after all, this server is for creating things 🙂

I started on a Dwarven Fortress..

The rest of the fortress is inside the mountain.. carved out with VoxelSniper, and the rest created by myself and a friend.  In just a few days we’ve built most of a city down here! 🙂

We’ve got shops, a brewery, a Tavern and a vast mine leading all the way down to the bedrock.. lit by lava 🙂

After a little poking, I installed a texture pack.. Better Armour Dokucraft.. which actually looks far better than I expected, especially on the lava.. though I’m less keen on how unmined minerals appear.

While playing around with VoxelSniper, my friend managed to add some interesting new friends to the world.. though they were most definitely not welcome inside the Fortress!

DC Universe Online – A Very Quick Look

When I first heard about DC Universe Online, and especially the option to play as a hero or villain of your own design, I was rather interested.  However, after my experiences with Aion at that game’s launch, and poor customer service by their developer, I was reluctant to splash the cash on this game till it dropped in price, or unless friends got into it and were sticking with it for a while.

A friend bought the game, and played for the first month, but then didn’t carry a subscription on after that.. however, while at ScampLAN he discovered he had been given some free time on the game, and he kindly let me have a bit of a run around 😀

I decided to play a Villain, so here’s Arcady: a crazy dual pistol-wielding loon, with Illusion as her Power and Flying rather than Acrobatics or Super Speed.

The first missions had me escape Braniac’s ship, learning how to move around, interact with objects and fight..  I found the keys a bit odd to start with, and ended up flying around while I was only supposed to be walking 😉

Once in Gotham, I went to help sow disorder and chaos for The Joker.. starting by fighting the cops who attacked me while I was trying to find my way to the first mission.. more fool them 😉

As I had picked Illusion, the first ability I got was Psychic Blades.. which fire three spinning blades to attack enemies in their path.

Combat was rather easy, and I liked the effects.. I did tend to get carried away though, as it was so easy to do, and the cops spawned quickly, often near enough to aggro straight onto me.  Completing most of the quests led straight into others, without the need to go running back to a quest giver or even travel too far, which was great.

I didn’t explore as much as I would have liked.. flying certainly made it feel easy to get around without being interfered with.  However, there were quests to do and more abilities to pick up.. so I failed on the exploration front this time.

Entering the warehouse for one mission, I encountered Catwoman, who I ended up helping in a fight against The Huntress..

I thought this was rather cool 🙂
Letting players fight alongside known powerful characters rather than simply following orders from them makes you feel like you’re actually quite powerful in your own right, which is rather appealing.

Afterwards, I was let inside the Funhouse, which featured huge rolling balls that, contrary to expectation, didn’t crush and kill me!  The Funhouse turned out to be some kind of bonus-level.. there were various presents laying around for me to collect, with either money or costume items inside.. and it did look rather cool although a little disjointed from the rest of the game.  I’m used to bonus levels belonging to arcade games! 🙂

I guess it’s more in keeping with The Joker’s crazy mentality to have you go running around through a building full of bouncing balls and bombs to get your rewards, and more interesting than simply being handed it invisibly during dialogue with an NPC.

After this, I think I may still get DCUO if it ends up in a Steam sale.. I think I could play through enough content during the included month’s game time to be satisfied, though long-term I’d be unlikely to play without friends in the game to go with.

HOARD

A friend bought us all HOARD this weekend, as a 4-pack on Steam.  Yay! 🙂

HOARD is a mix of action and strategy, developed by indie team Big Sandwich Games, where each player takes on the role of a dragon in a table-top style medieval kingdom with farms, towns, princesses and knights..

Every dragon needs treasure, and this is obtained through burning down farms or towns, intercepting wagons full of tithes, and capturing and ransoming princesses.

The game has a co-op mode, which allows friends to work together to gather as much treasure as possible in one shared hoard, but you can also play competitively.. this can mean racing them to the treasure, or actively trying to get in their way or kill them!  Killing another dragon forces them to drop their treasure and flee straight back to their hoard, where they are unable to move while they regenerate health.. a great opportunity to steal the dropped treasure 😉

At the beginning of each game, your dragon only has weak abilities, but as you gather more treasure you are able to spend points and upgrade your dragon’s speed, fire-breathing capability, carrying capacity and damage resistance.  I prefer to improve the speed of my dragon, as well as fire-breathing, but I think this could change depending on the map and game mode.

Upgrades cost more at each level, so you need to gather more and more gold to keep upgrading.  The kingdom also improves over time, with towns becoming larger and producing archers, who will fire on you.  If you do enough damage to a town you can scare them enough that they ‘belong’ to you, and send you tithes.. a nice way of gathering money automatically 🙂

During a competitive game, you will need to keep an eye on ‘your’ towns, as other dragons will want to take them over.. either by damaging the town enough to turn its loyalty to them, or by destroying the town centre and resetting the town’s loyalty.  Giants also appear in the kingdom.. they will attack towns they come across unless suitably distracted.. say with some fiery breath.. 😉

There are also small towers around the map, which spawn knights.  The knights will attack you if you pass by, and if you capture a princess, all the knights in the vicinity will come to try and rescue her!  I found the knights were best avoided until you had levelled up a little, as they are rather strong and can kill you easily if you stray too close.  As the kingdom grows, the towers become keeps, with more knights being spawned.. increasing the danger but also the reward, as the ransom value goes up with the level of the keep!

Another danger comes from the mage towers, which fire bolts at nearby dragons: destroying one of these reveals a large gem which is worth a lot of gold, but slows the dragon and makes you vulnerable to attack while carrying it.  I found the upgraded towers harder to destroy, as one mistake in avoiding the bolts means death.. and as the bolts can travel a long way, I sometimes got killed by a bolt set off by another dragon!

On all the maps, there are a variety of power-ups, which appear at regular intervals.  These can give you stronger firebreath, icy breath, or allow you to shoot fireballs.. another increases your speed, while the last is maybe a little evil, allowing a player to steal from another dragon’s hoard.. aside from the obvious exchange of gold, this has the added advantage of resetting the victim’s score multiplier!

As well as the Treasure game modes, there is “Princess Rush”, where you need to capture the most princesses to win, and a survival mode, which I’ve not tried yet.

Global Agenda

Shooter MMO Global Agenda was recommended to me at the start of the weekend.. and while I wouldn’t ordinarily pick up a game with little idea about it, developers Hi-Rez Studios had pledged to give all the proceeds of sales during the weekend to the Red Cross Japan Earthquake efforts.  So, I signed up and paid.. knowing that even if I didn’t like the game, at least some good was coming of it.

I had the choice of Robotics, Medic, Recon and Assault, and for my first character I went with Robotics, as I’d get to play with turrets, forcefields and drones..

The game starts off showing my character in a stasis field, in a facility under attack from soldiers who start to free me.  During the scuffle the chamber is smashed and I am freed, but all the soldiers are gone when I get control of my character.

This is where the tutorial kicks in, with directions for basic running and jumping to start with, then a cool jetpack which allows short flights, and my first weapon..

While I have the Mace equipped, I also have the use of a shield, which seems to last as long as my energy reserves, indicated by the blue bar near the middle of the screen.

I reach the top of the building as directed, and I’m told I have to dive off the edge.. a nice cutscene follows where I jump off as instructed, bare feet on view, and eventually crash through the window of a storage room.  Here I get a nice ranged gun, and in the next rooms I get to try it out on easy enemies such as Watchers and Sector workers who try to hide.. and Alarm Responders, who are a little bit tougher.  I also get a ‘Rest’ device, which lets me heal myself.. so far so good 🙂

I’m heading for the roof again.. right at the top I’m introduced to a one-way forcefield, which will let me out to face the first boss, a flying Guardian who fires some kind of homing rocket and wipes me out.  I get a fairly quick respawn back on the safe side of the forcefield, and head out to finish the Guardian off.  Here, I was surprised to find he hadn’t been reset, so it only took another few hits to kill him.

My reward was a cutscene of my escape via train ride.. on top of the train, of course!  My stop is an armoury.. more weapons?  I level up at this point, and am given an off-hand, which for me is a deployable force-field.. which comes in handy because there are plenty more security androids to fight through.  Each roof leads to another, with markers indicating where I can jump off, and use the jetpack to fly to the next place.  Limited energy means I can’t just fly around without thinking about it, which I guess stops it becoming overpowered, but I’m happy being able to jump around for the time being.

Next on the list is a suit, which comes with a robotic arm sticking up over my shoulder.. this turns out to be a repair arm, but isn’t explained at this point.  A few more rooftop fights later, and I find my way into another building, where I’m jumped by this rather cool looking Elite Assassin..

I was expecting a tough fight, but I defeated him rather quickly.. it is still tutorial time though.

Another level up, and I have a Personal Turret, which I deployed here purely for the screenshot 😉

My next mission involves escaping through the sewers, and I suspect that’s where the tutorial will end and I’ll get into the main game..