Paintball Vid - EP12

I shot this video a couple years ago but never got around to publishing it. I think I hit a road block and got disheartened that the output video was getting letterboxed or something. Anyway, I did just about no modification to the video as I had left it those few years ago.
It takes place over the course of one day at Quins birthday. Went paint balling in a forest, then back to Matts place for some good ol' reminiscing. I could have been a lot more brutal on these final cuts but I decided I'd indulge everyone this time. Saves me having to do it again in any future videos.

New Role

Hey look! Some art from Mirror's Edge. Pitty I can't find a high enough resolution of it to use as a desktop background.

I've found myself at a new role in my job, moving all the shit from our old site onto our new site which will probably go live sometime tonight. Exciting times. I'm in a new office by myself, which is a mixed blessing. Well, I'm closer to the radio in the lobby, which cuts through the ambience that I listen to, people can see through onto my computer screen when they walk past so the know what I'm currently doing that isn't work. Also I'm divorced from the rest of the editorial team, which is probably the worst part. They're a great bunch of guys and it's weird how out of the loop you can get just by being situated in an adjacent room. They all pop in occasionally to make sure I'm still alive though.
Also I'm running our Twitter and Facebook pages now. Being an adversary of both, it's a complicated relationship. I wish everyone would hurry up and realise Facebook is the new Bebo in terms of usability and classiness. Seriously, it looks like the Sales department at Facebook took a big ripe dump on it.

Gum - Jet Set Radio Future

So I suddenly remembered Jet Set Radio Future & had to totally get it out of my system. I never realized that JSRF is actually the second game in the series, the first being sans Future & made for the Dreamcast.
The series is known for being on of the very first to popularize cell shaded animation. It was released in 2000, along with four other titles that used the stylisation. Only one was made in 1999 that used cell shading, and that was a Playstation game called Fear Effect.
The game had so much funk it could barely contain itself. The way it felt like it was always going to the music. Really I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's what I consider to be the proto version of Sunset Overdrive.

Wildstar - Screencap Review

Much like my "The Forest"  review I'll be doing it blow by blow until my first death. I've been hearing good things about this game from pretty much every corner of the internet, so when +Borne Mace was awesome enough to send me a Guest pass to give it a whirl then I leaped at the chance.
Getting the game running was a bitch. Apparently everyone in New Zealand (& Kuwait) are having an issue which goes along the lines of "ERROR: MESSAGE DEFINITIONS MISMATCH - CONNECTION CLOSED BY REMOTE HOST" when you try and log in.
I had to get Hotspot Shield and run through a VPN. Run the game from the launcher and it'l download a patch. Once that's installed you can switch off the VPN and get playing like normal. I found that when I opened it again it redownloaded the buggy local patch and put me back to square one, having to repeat the process to fix it again, downloading another patch.
This really tainted my experience from the get go. If your a NZ player, I recommend maybe holding off for a while till they deal with this pain in the butt.

Ok First up is the character creator. Instantly I'm reminded of Jack & Daxter and all those old PS2 games. If they didn't stylise it so strongly then I could see it falling into the Warcraft realm of cartooniness. There are a decent number of characters to choose from. They fall into two factions fighting over Nexus, the planet everyone is scrapping over.

I eventually picked this demon chick thing who's on the bad guys side. I figure if I ever do a pixelated version of her I'd never need to over emphasis the curves, because that's already been predone for me. You can muck around with the face quite a bit. Not on the level of APB Reloaded, but pretty close to Skyrim standards of face editing. Unfortunately you can't make their faces concave.

After completing character gen you get chucked at a pre-rendered intro which basically tells you you're working for "The Man". I'm gonna take this opportunity to say that the music is rad. I really enjoyed it. I'm not sure what it would be like after 200 hours of play, but at least the initial impression is great.

Then the game spawns you inside of someone else who hasn't moved yet. I was instantly freaked out by all the menus and HUD elements. Although looking at the screenshot above it seems pretty bare. It really isn't. Speech bubbles, chat windows, quest logs and everything else a seasoned MMO player has come slowly encroach on the real estate, driving out any sense of control a noob might have.

At first I attempted to read everything that was charging it's way across my screen, but the fact that the voice clips of the NPCs didn't match what they actually said kind of threw me, and no interesting story details made their way into my brain. So eventually I just said "Yep" to whatever was said at me and everything started to chug along quite nicely. Fortunatly you don't actually need to listen to anyone. The bottom left displays quest info and if you click on it, it points you in the right direction.

The spaceship acts as Noob Island, so when you're done it shoots you off onto the planet to go do what's gotta be done. Along the way it introduced me to my Explorer Path, something I chose back during character gen. This appears to be some sort of specific storyline or set of tasks that are tied to this one path. Pretty much it makes me do little jump quests and cave delves to set up science equipment. It's pretty cool, and I enjoyed the quests it threw at me when I randomly triggered them.

I didn't pay that much attention to all these types of menus, only going in them when I was prompted. I didn't have to do much inventory dicking around which was nice. The amount of random shit I collected was very minimal, through no fault of my own.

It then shot me off onto this barren part of the planet where I was a part of some sort of offensive. I was pretty pleased with everything going on in the environment. There was sharp grass you can't touch, landmines to lure your enemies over (or to blunder over yourself) and random effect fields, that when you walked over would trigger a slow mortar on the location (fired by the enemy somewhere). I assume it'd be great for luring enemies into as well, but I never bothered testing the theory.
With combat I felt like I had a lot of options available to me. You have to aim at things and dodge around, none of this WoW "click to automatically wale on 'em" mechanics.

The quests led me along quite well and I always had something to do, none of which felt like I was collecting wolf hearts or whatever you do in MMO's. I have stuck away from MMO's for years and years, finding them a waste of time and all cookie cutter unoriginal, with nothing new to offer me. But I wouldn't scoff if a friend told me they were playing Wildstar. There's always something to do and it doesn't feel dumb (in my 2 hours or so of play.) I even killed a random mob and somehow triggered a GTA style "Kill a heap of these as quick as ya can! Go on!"
Although I don't like the idea of paying a subscription for the privilege, especially when the base game is 60 bucks. Like holy shit. Although they do give you the option if you're a hardout player to be able to buy more gametime with the ingame gold, which is pretty rad of them.

And this is where I died. You can either spend gold to regen right where you are, or spawn back at a camp like a cheap bastard. I went with the latter option. I never made it to any sort of big city with merchants and stuff, so I don't know how crazy that sort of thing is.
Personally I recommend Battlefield 4.

Rachel - DoA5 & Ninja Gaiden

Rachel is another Ninja Gaiden character that's been purloined by DoA5. She first cropped up in the first Ninja Gaiden game in '04. But wasn't playable till Ninja Gaiden Sigma. Apparently she was half way through her Grid Iron Bondage career when she got yanked out to beat the crud out of schoolgirls. Oh wait a minute.

In other news Dwarf Fortress is heating up for another release. I started playing around the release of the last update. I just noticed a gif I made on this one post has been reused over on this podcast interview with Toady. I recommend you listening to it if you're a fan of either roguelikes, game design in genereal, or Dwarf Fortress. It'll be interesting either way. I sense some more Dwarf Fortress stories brewing in the near future. I'm gonna have to relearn how to wield the keyboard on that game.

Momiji - DoA5 & Ninja Gaiden

Momiji first popped up in Ninja Gaiden in '08 and reappeared in DoA5 Ultimate in 2013. I'm going to be categorising her under DoA though, because most of the other Ninja Gaiden chicks have already been pilfered from that series and are probably more stand out and iconic in DoA, not to mention actually playable. So I hope that clears up any problems with associations fans might have.
With that said I probably won't be saying that Princess Peach and Zelda should be under the Smash Bros umbrella.

The Forest - Early Alpha Screenshots

All these survival alpha version games are getting out of hand. I don't think I've actually played one that's finished yet. The Forest is one that's particularly alpha, but that didn't stop me from getting my hands on it. The trailers looked freaky and interesting so I had to give it a go. Only 15 bucks! That's a steal! That's a movie ticket these days, albeit a rip off one. I'm sure I could get more than an hour and a half out of this game. Anyway. If you're worried about "spoilers" for this or whatever you can close this tab right now.

The game starts off in a really empty plane that contains nothing but you and a silent child. The motion blur was insane and it was the first thing I turned off. Motion blur just shouldn't be a thing. It sucks universally.

The kid starts bobbling up and down on his seat silently and the aircraft sounds suddenly change. The front disappears unceremoniously and you shudder around before blacking out. Alpha.

You come to on the ground. I was actually a bit startled when I saw the guy stooping over the kid and then carrying him off. The animations are super good. Did I mention that I was playing this at almost midnight with the lights dimmed, alone in my house with my surround sound headphones on?

The surround sound stuff is pretty primitive at the moment. You can feel the definite position of where ambient sounds are coming from.

So you wake up. The ground is spammed full of litter and shit for you to pick up. I did what I always do when I start an Elder Scrolls game, pilfer indiscriminately because you never know. I'm pretty sure I just started automatically stuffing my face full of chocolate because my inventory decided it couldn't handle any more of it.

Grab the axe out of the Hostess. Looks like she won't be joining the mile hile club any time soon. If you know what I mean. Protip: It's because she's totes dead.

The ground and surrounding area is littered with Luggage that you can smash open for useful things like medicine and tennis balls.

 

Cutting down trees actually kind of feels like cutting down trees a little bit. After a while it splinters and then eventually crumbles down, then popping and turning into individual log chunks that are still pretty large. You can only carry one at a time and you have to carry it over to whatever you're building. Sticks and stones litter the ground and seem to have their own inventory space that chocolate bars can't encroach on.

My character kept looking at his bloodied hands and a message flashed up that I should clean that shit off if I didn't want to get infected. So I went downhill to a little pond and just kind of splashed around. It didn't have any cleaning stat bars or anything so I just got out when I thought it was appropriate.

Learnt how to get out my lighter. Nice touch with the parody logo. It goes out every now and again and your character has to flick it back on.

This is what the inventory looks like. You can highlight different things and they get combined on the mat in the middle. I acquired teeth. I'm not sure who's they were. I'm also not sure if it pauses the game when you go into it.

Survival book. as you flick through it there are buttons next to the things you're learning about which allows you to whip them into existance. You get a ghost outline and then you have to go and click each individual piece onto it. You just spam click, it does the work.

Checking out how fires look. Burnt some inventory. Hope it wasn't important leaves or anything.

It looks like it is very survivaly by the looks of this foraging guide. I didn't survive long enough to appreciate how intricate it all was.

Started happily building my survival hut when four figures walked into my glad. It was actually terrifying. They're very much alive. None of this shambling zombie business. It was actually really surreal the way the silently moved into my camp. All four are in the image below believe it or not. They didn't rush me, they just kind of walked, slowly spreading out. I think that's the most terrifying part, how human it all felt.

When they started to jump at me it wasn't so bad. I could just concentrate on dodging and smashing. I didn't manage to kill any. Not sure if that's because I had a shit weapon or because it's a scripted moment, because when you get beaten you wake up in their cave.

You get all the dangling bodies and some handy tools to get you jump started again. The little glowing hammer in the image above is my base I was working on, still waiting for me to finish it off. Apparently it doesn't care that I almost got killed.

the sounds in the cave are freaky as well. The minimilism of the unfinished sounds actually enhance the scariness. They haven't leveled all the sounds out yet so some rocks get unnervingly loud when you approach and get "HollowWindyCave.wav" emanating at you.

The cave is way deeper than I thought it would be, and branched off in a couple different directions, but I kept just going uphill. Screw hanging around in there. The reflections of water cast on the ceiling is also quite well done! For an Alpha it already looks quite pretty.

Found some uninteractive tents on the way back to my home.

Found my way back to the crash site and a bird decided to perch on my hand. I'm figuring I should have triggered it when I first got out of the plane or something but missed it somehow?

I decided to stay at the plane this time, even though my guy kept piteously staring at his hands. I built my hut easily enough and decided to have a quick sleep in it. It booted me out into night time, which I did not appreciate. Little rasping sounds emanated from the darkness and off key music plunked away in the background. A woman wandered into sight, suddenly jumping and clinging to the lower limbs of a tree. She watched me for a bit then attacked. I managed to beat down the first 3 attackers this time until the fourth one sucker punched me with his cannibal hands.

 And that's the origin story of all the nightmares I'm gonna have tonight. I'm a lilly livered wimp, I know.