LAN – MRAAKTAGON

Xmas LAN of Quake 3 Gibbbes

The weekend before Xmas, we had the first LAN in a LONG ass time. It had all the yelling and crying out and gibbes of all the LANS that have come before and what we played, which was appropo on account of it’s 20th anniversary, was tons and tons of Quake 3. I think we hit all the maps at least once and several multiple times. Despite it’s age, the gameplay holds up COMPLETELY against anything else for FFA run and gun. While I love UT2k4 and UT3, nothing else comes close to Q3 after all these years, which is amazing if you think about it. I believe we are coming into a time where game design cannot be topped on certain genres or against certain titles. For example the best RTS is still Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 is not as good as the original and a fourth Warcraft would not be better than the third. Another perfect example is Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown. For 3d fighters, and even fighting games in general, nothing has come close. It’s entirely possible that because of the social and economic changes in the world, that these two games, along with Q3, may be the top games in their genre forever.

Rather than jag around with setting up a dedicated server on one of the machines, Maurice!Bastard got a Q3 server for about 8$ and had it running the entire time.

Other games of note were Vermintide (1) that is excellent fun but we had issues when there were more than 4 of us to play.

I did scooter a few times in Attila Total War which is still my favorite TW game by far, but there was some constant cheesy tactics on my side like wardog spam and use of the silly units that go berserk and become unbreakable so three units can be fighting a single guy remaining from a unit….while the rest of the army is surrounded and crushed.

Also of note was the $1.30 purchase of BLOODY GOOD TIME which is a strange FFA FPS where you score various points for kills based on the weapons you use. Using the same weapon over and over gives you less and less points as you go. While I sucked at it, it was well worth the buck or so to pick up for LANS.

The biggest miss is that we did NOT get to play with a group of players Red Faction Guerrilla Remastered. We played a bit with two players and while the shooting is stupid (aim cones) all the crazy power ups and totally destructable buildings would have made for an awesome LAN experience.

We tried to play PUBG a couple times, but it sucked. Everyone else is too serious and too good, so you land, get shot, game over. I think our time with that game is done. It was great fun while it lasted though.

While we didn’t have a ton of people in attendance, and some had to join virtually, it was a fantastic LAN and while everyone is an HPB now and no one needs to leave their house in order to play, you should STILL HAVE LANS. They get everyone together to yell and get drunk.

Spring 2018 LAN was goood

The weather this weekend was pure shit. rain, then snow, then rain, then snow, then a lot of snow and all shit until late today.

We played all day Friday and Saturday and I think my eyes bled while I slept fitfully last night with the retinal burn. Here’s what we got in on.

Zandorum Doom 2: both Free for All and vs the Monsters. If you are an FPS player and haven’t played doom multiplayer to see just how fast an FPS can (and probably should) be, play Doom 2! However, all the tricky giant maps with all the key searching was fucking annoying when playing with 5+ people. Getting lost in Doom isn’t so bad because you rocket through the level, but when there’s a hidden door that leads to the other 50% of a level where everyone else is at, and you can’t find the fucking thing even with the map, it’s real annoying.

Quake Super8. Maurice!Bastard got the multiplayer working with this excellent visual mod for Quake. This one looks THE BEST and closest to my favorite Quake renderer: Verite Quake, built specifically for the Verite video card.

Unreal Tournament 4: This was the most balanced deathmatch that we played. I had a ton of fun with this and it worked very well for the LAN, which is a rarity with new FPS games which are nearly all anti-LAN (Quake Champions for example) and take forever to get from one map to the next so players can get their ‘prizes for playing.’ This is most of a UT game, basically the team that was working on it went to go work on fortnight and it may never be worked on again. Remember what happened to UT3 after Gears of War came out…

Quake 3: While far more balanced than Quake, I still like the original Quake better. Q3 is super tight deathmatch though.

PUBG and the goddamn pubg event. There was an event this weekend where you could drop into a small area of the first pubg map with a group of 10 players and fight until a certain number of kills were scored by a team. While it gave a chance to use a bunch of weapons and constantly fight. It was pretty frustrating most of the time.

Company of Heroes. This was the only RTS we played and since people had seen me on steam playing PA:Titans, that was a no go. People were OVER concerned at my skill at COH as well and it became obvious only after I was soundly beaten in a 3 vs 1 game. This isn’t a super hardcore RTS and is pretty n00b friendly with the pacing and defensive nature of the game, so good for the LAN. I really expected to be playing Dawn of War 3 instead of this but man– what happened to that game? Aesthetically awesome, but the gameplay was trash.

There was a mess of video captured during the proceedings, so I’ll get some posted as soon as possible for your viewing pleasure. mraak.

Monster Hunter World beta impressions

TL/DR: Good, possibly very good.

It’s been a LONG time since Monster Hunter has been on the consoles and we’ve been relegated to the DS to play it. It is an excellent series on the level of Torchlight and Diablo for it’s item management, customization and level of skill needed to play well. The game was obviously a huge influence on Dark Souls (both at their core are boss-battle games) and the new version looks poised to bring everything that was great about the 3DS version into the modern graphic world of the PC and PS4.

First play was to kill off a fatty lizard thing. I was interesting only because it puked all over the place when you got a knock down on it. I was not able to get it mounted for more fun. The map this fatty is on has a winged T-rex thing wandering around, and if you draw aggro with both, you are going to be in trouble. I was not able to take down both of them in one go (killed the fatty lizard first and ended the scenario).

The second beasty is a rock lizard thing. It has a transform into some sort of bull-type creature and then retreats to a muddy area, and this is where things got good. Instead of swampy stuff just being poison, the mud area was very interesting as it had not only places that slowed you down, but places where you would actually get stuck and have to struggle out.

I’ve seen some other really cool things, like swinging on vines, monsters fighting each other, swinging with a grappling hook and somehow my Palico tied down one of the monsters for me to beat on. The environments are awesome and they still have the same FEEL as different ‘areas’ but there is no loading or break in between them. You can follow the monsters as they run away without hitting the loads, and that’s fantastic.

The game has a unique way of tracking the monsters with some sort of glowing flies that point you to clues where the monster is, such as footprints or ass-wipes on the ground. When you put attention to a clue, the flies point to the next one and when you get enough, they can point right to the monster. I thought this was fucking handholding at first because in the old game you had to hit the monsters with paintballs to track them when they fled, but it seems fairly decent. It is fun to track, but it’s also a bit more fun to get in the fights…

I didn’t see any mechanics yet for bombs or trapping monsters, but I’m sure that’s in there. Also you can’t really craft in the beta just yet– that’s a whole huge ball of complexity I still don’t fully understand in the old game anyway.

Color me impressed. I was hoping for a new version for the 3DS, but this is FAR better because I can play it with my friends on more common consoles and with these graphics? YEAH. Lots of impressive stuff to look at here. When this is out for PC, holy shit.

Fall LAN of MRAAAK

We played a lot of Quake and zDOOM and, inevitably, we played some PUBG while all sitting in a room. Hilarity ensued as we found out just how bad, collectively, we are at military shooters.

There will be a bunch more videos posted by various sundry persons that attended the LAN, and I’ll place these here where applicable.

Steam sale wallet rape – week 1

So far I have either held strong or already had the stuff I wanted from the sale. the one game I picked up for 4$ was APOTHEON which is a side scroller fighter where you need to go fight the Gods to get to Olympus. I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks pretty cool. My thumb is still healing from some glass up in there so I can’t play Dark Souls 2 or anything on my controller quite yet but this is one I wanted.

Shit I’m checking out:

Invisible Inc. – Sneaky spy game that may scratch the Jagged Alliance itch.
Road Redemption – biker gang in real time. Reminds me of Mount and Blade a bit, except on motorcycles…
Shadow of Mordor – still expensive at 25$ but this is supposed to be a good one.
Abyss Odyssey – another side scroll fighter (like Castlevania). Looks great, but I need my thumb to heal up a bit before playing.

And what the hell is this monster game on steam?

Dominions 3 on Steam Green Light

Dominions 3 is trying to get on Steam. It is the best Fantasy Strategy game in existence– and it looks bad and has a tough interface with ridiculously amateur sound effects– and yet everything they needed to nail in a strategy game they NAILED TO THE GIANT ICE WALL. The depth and minutiae is amazing to behold.

Give it your vote here.

Windows Live on PC: what an awesome idea!

unfortunate2 — Hang or defenestrate, it makes no difference to me.

Thence, I got Bulletstorm off steam the other day for 19.99 and thought: alright, People can Fly is a pretty good shop based on Painkiller, and even though the main voice actor is the same guy from URBAN REIGN and a thousand other games, it couldn’t be that bad– and it’s not. Though it follows the whole “you are playing a movie” style, it’s fun and despite the whole redneck’s in space vibe (yet again), the dialog is snappy and filthy and far better than the embarrassingly strained Redneck’s in space babble of Starcraft 2.

However, like Dawn of War 2 and lots of other games I try to avoid for this reason alone, if you buy it from Steam you then have to sign in to play it on windows live. Like the true measure of gaming ennui, Diablo 3, Bulletstorm, a primarily single player game has an online all the time requirement? And WHY did this get pirated? Simply put, without Windows live the pirated version is a better experience than if you, like me, did the right thing and purchased the game legally for the PC. Now call me an idiot because I forgot my Windows live login first off, then apparently if someone else is logged in as you (like some childe watching my little ponies) you cannot validate your game or even play it. All of these things make sense, but of course, I just wanted to play the SINGLE PLAYER game and not be connected to the internet in any way. I don’t want achievements, I don’t give a goatsee about anyone seeing on my gamer tag that I have been playing Bulletstorm and finally it seems like it would be a crap multiplayer game, so I have no interest in that (which is sad because Painkiller’s DM was great!).

So to end this rant, I want to say that I do like Origin and Steam (of course) because they offer VALUE to me. Windows Live for PC offers absolutely nothing but total annoyance for all users.

Oh the timing…

Getting the notification for the Diablo 3 beta while in the Virgin Islands (granted, for work and all) is quite a good bit of timing. If I was to pick, karmically, when I was going to be in the 100k for the next beta key release, of COURSE it would have be where I was over 2K miles from my gaming rig and could only wince every time I looked at my personal email. Needless to say, I wouldn’t trade it as VI is, for all it’s quirks, and amazing place on the planet–D3 was nice to come home to. Unlike Starcraft 2, the D3 beta loaded FAST, within half and hour it was ready to roll. I haven’t gotten in on it yet, but tonight!

Like I’ve said before: Torchlight 2 is being made to be the game we all want to play while Diablo 3 is the game Blizzard wants to make and will let us play. D3 will have to be played through once, but due to mods and all that madness, Torchlight 2 is the one I think will have the most longevity.

Mraakness!

Though it’s sad to see the socket 939 up and die and then be disassembled forever anon, the new beast that’s soon to take the stage makes that look like a 3rd grader’s public school issued laptop.

themachine — Asus P8P67 (rev3), GTX 560 Ti, i7 2600,

I stuck the DVD drive and the PSU up inside and will wrap the rest tomorrow. Then the deluge from Steam will begin.

Artemis Bridge Simulator and true Space nerdery

I got in on a LAN over the weekend with THIS going on. It was a ton of fun, and quite challenging. We had just the right number of people for the roles: captain, engineering, helm, weapons with science and communications combined and the ideal set up: a main screen plus each of the station screens. We each got better at our individual roles, but most important, we got better as a team. I dug the engineering the most as you are constantly shifting power around the ship for a myriad of reasons and you’re never sitting around waiting as you can always make some tweaks or prep for upcoming power needs if you are idle. Weapons is my second favorite. While firing the weapons themselves is sort of boring, you have a ton of information on screen you are trying to relay to the team. You also control the main screen view for the captain.

I really dug the fact that this is a LAN game– at this point it cannot be played over the interweb tubes at all, but I assume that will happen eventually if there is $ in it for the developers. In the time of extreme anti-LAN (even fake LAN’s over hamachi) from the major publishers, this is really refreshing to see.