TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Author: TallGuyCalif

  • Impressed by Star Trek Online improvements, but new bug annoys

    I played a bit of Star Trek Online yesterday and an mostly impressed with the improvements since I last played more than a year ago. Since STO is now free to play, there is no reason not to try it if you are a Star Trek fan. It looks like the strategy may be working, because space seemed more crowded than I remember it.

    The interface has been cleaned up a bit and made more shiny. The mission log is nicer than I’ve seen in other games, MMO or otherwise, so that’s an improvement. There are a few things that I’m sure used to work and don’t seem to now: dragging items into your bridge officers’ inventory doesn’t seem to work well, but I will keep experimenting. It certainly isn’t completely intuitive and obvious.

    For those not familiar with STO, bridge officers (BOFFs) are your helpers that you can train and upgrade. They provide abilities both on your starship and in ground combat and are generally a good thing. You earn BOFFs through some missions and as you level, so in the end, you can have a significant cadre of helpers. Most ships only have a few BOFF slots, so you can use skills from 3 or 4 of them on the ship. You can also take 4 BOFFs with you on away missions, so pick ones that can heal you or provide buffs or combat abilities. Because you can eventually have lots of BOFFs, it is possible to have a completely different group in the ship’s stations from the ones you bring along for away missions. This lets you allocate skill points among more of them so you can promote them as you rise in rank.

    Then you get a BOFF, you can customize the appearance. Well, at least you could a year ago. Now that mechanic is broken, so when I got a new BOFF, it showed the appearance of the last BOFF I got (or in some cases, my first one). That is a nasty bug that is unfortunate, since changes in MMOs are permanent – you can’t just reload a save file if the game has a problem. I hope they fix that bug soon, or else many teenage players will not be able to give their BOFFs huge boobs and skimpy outfits.

    Because the game is free to play, the money grubbing is more apparent than ever. There are now several forms of currency: Energy credits, which you earn in game; Dilithium, which you apparently also earn in game and is new since I last played, so I don’t know what it is for yet; and Cryptic Points, which you buy with real money and is the way to get cool ships and such.

    I have managed to recover most of the XBox 360 controller settings for the space missions, but am still working on the ground ones, so I’m a bit hampered there.

    Overall, the game has continued to get better since the beta version and is now a pretty polished thing. I’m disappointed by the BOFF customization bug and not sure how the developers haven’t caught it, but I’m sure it will be fixed sometime. So try STO – you’ll probably like it!

  • Enjoyed Saints Row the Third

    I thoroughly enjoyed playing Saints Row the Third! This is the first Saints Row game I’ve played, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I did expect something like GTA IV, but with wackiness, and that’s essentially what I got. The plot isn’t terrible, but you can do lots of other things besides the plot, as this is an open world game. As you get reputation and money, there are many helpful upgrades to your health, your weapons, your vehicles, your Homies, and your cribs and strongholds. The driving in the game is nearly as annoying as in GTA games, but you seem to be able to get away with a lot before people start shooting at you. As you buy up shops, crack houses, apartment buildings, etc., your income and control grow, but the added benefit is that you can run into a shop that you own to get rival gangs and the police to stop following you. This becomes important, as there are endless supplies of enemies.

    I played some of the game in co-op mode, which is great! A friend could join me (since I was the newbie, she joined my game) and help me through missions. The joining player keeps their abilities, including weapons and vehicles that the hosting player may not have earned yet, so my friend was able to summon VTOL jets for us to kick butt in. Co-op vehicle are great, because one of us drives and the other can target enemies and shoot them. Solo vehicle play is more of a challenge, because one player has to do both. Therefore, to compensate, the game makes the missions a little harder when playing with a partner. Since I played on the PS3, voice chat was seamless and worked perfectly.

    In the game, you fight several rival gangs, each identified by colors (red, green, and blue) that are visually different from the purple color of the Saints. You also fight the police and a military group called STAG. Most of the time, rivals don’t attack you on site, though if you wander into one of their gatherings, watch out! If you hit one of their vehicles or do something too naughty in front of the cops, people will start shooting at you. When driving, usually you can bump cars and pedestrians with immunity, but sometimes, an enraged motorist will chase you for miles, occasionally ramming you. The best bet in this case, is to stop, get out, and shoot the bastard.

    Though I made a previous post about morals and not enjoying killing innocents, Saints Row the Third didn’t give me many qualms. For the most part, hitting pedestrians doesn’t kill them, and mostly the people who you kill intentionally need killing. Yes, the game involves drugs and hos, but you don’t see anyone using drugs, and only the baddies abuse their hos, and in many missions, you rescue hos.

    There are a number of very funny surprises that happen later in the game, so I won’t divulge them here, but there are many laughs in the game. The music is great too, from the music as you are doing missions to the radio stations in the vehicles. Very well done!

    So I finished the plot mission, but that doesn’t mean I’m completely done. I haven’t finished all the upgrades or neighborhood takeovers. Besides, since co-op play is so great, I will keep the game handy so I can play it with my friends.

    Saints Row the Third is wacky fun and well worth playing!

  • Finished main quest in Skyrim – Time to Move On

    Gaming has been odd for me lately. Many of the people in my kinship in LOTRO have dropped out of playing, as grinding for gear at level 75 gets old really fast. I have been on LOTRO a few times in the last couple weeks working on my lower level characters primarily, but my heart isn’t in it.

    Meanwhile, I’ve been enjoying Skyrim a lot. Mostly… There is a huge amount of content in Skyrim, some of it dynamically generated, so I could go on playing for ages, but it gets a little tedious. So I finished up the Skyrim main quest line over the last couple days. I’m already the leader of the Companions, the Mage school, and the Dark Brotherhood. I saved the Thieves Guild and fixed up the Bard guild. I haven’t chosen a side in the war yet, mostly because both sides are scumbags, so neither appeals to me in any way.

    So I’m going to step away from Skyrim for a while. I see there is a new update (1.6) that will allow mounted combat, which sounds kinda cool, but is only beta for PC, so I’ll wait until it is final. I also had the thought of trying a speed run through Skyrim to see how how low a level I could be to complete the game. I imagine it could be done at level 20, but am not sure. Could be fun to try. But not just yet. And, of course, when Dawnguard comes out, I’m sure I’ll have to send even more money to Bethesda (via Steam) to check it out, though I don’t really have any desire to be a vampire.

    I think next, I will try to finish Uncharted 3, then maybe move on to either Saints Row 3 or Final Fantasy XIII-2, all on the PS3. And I also think I will get back into Star Trek Online. I haven’t jumped back into STO because I lost my gamepad setup file when I rebuilt my PC (oops, forgot to back it up, because it was buried in the Program Files folder of STO), and I have been reluctant to spend the time to figure it out again.

    I will keep LOTRO on the back burner for now. I may end up buying the next expansion dealing with the Riders of Rohan, but not until release date nears.

  • Killing in Games-How Morals and Games Sometimes Don’t Mix

    I’ve played many games that involve killing things, from Space Invaders-type games in the late 70s and 80s to today’s Skyrim and Gears of War games. In the early days, you killed spaceships or vague blobs on the screen and it wasn’t terribly personal. Your mind made the games intense and interesting, even if the graphics were blocky. As game graphics improved, the enemies became more and more recognizable as either monsters or people, which has led some whack-jobs to call games “murder simulators.” For the most part, I profoundly disagree with that position, but there are some cases where games and my morals don’t mix well, which is the subject of this post.

    Typically, I don’t mind killing baddies in games, mostly because they deserve it. If the enemy is a zombie, or a space monster, or even a necromancer or bandit in Skyrim, I’m happy to kill them, loot them, and move on. If anyone did a real body count during most of these games, gamers would exceed the most extreme mass murderers by a hundredfold. In Skyrim alone, I’ve killed thousands of baddies. Same in LOTRO, Gears of War, etc. Heck in Star Trek Online, Sins of a Solar Empire, and X3, I wipe out huge enemy spaceships with no regard for the imaginary lives of the crew.

    The dilemma for me starts occurring when I have to kill innocents or commit cruelty in an up-close and personal manner. In the Dark Brotherhood quests in Skyrim, most of the people who are killed early on are baddies who attack you on sight, so killing them causes no pangs of conscience. Last night, however, the Dark Brotherhood boss ordered me to kill a woman (a relative of the Emperor, hence the mission) at her wedding. I had spoken to the woman on my travels around the city, so I didn’t like it much. I realize it’s a game and she wasn’t real, but it still bugged me. Almost as crazy was that I just had to pay a fine to avoid being hauled off to jail and was out so quickly that I was able to return to the wedding and speak to the groom and parents and all the guests. They didn’t attack me, which was even more surreal. The remaining Dark Brotherhood quests look like they will involve more unprovoked (at least directly) killing, so I will have to steel myself for that.

    This is not the first game that has bothered my conscience. I really wanted to like Grand Theft Auto IV and got a few hours into it. I had a girlfriend and a crappy car and a place to sleep, but then I was ordered to go rough up some shop owner to pay some protection money or something. I did it, but didn’t enjoy the cruelty and quit the game. Here was a game that was supposed to be an open world sandbox, but to progress in the storyline, I had to do things I didn’t like, so I decided not to bother.

    That doesn’t mean I’m totally opposed so such games. I haven’t played Saints Row III yet, but I have a hunch I won’t mind killing “innocents” in it, because it seems so over the top that I won’t associate them with real people. But in GTA IV and Skyrim, the people and actions are normal enough to give my morals a workout.

    I don’t have any good ideas to fix this sort of thing. Sure, I could have avoided joining the Dark Brotherhood in Skyrim, but it’s a significant body of story, so I didn’t want to miss it. I know there are moral choices in many games, such as one of the companion missions in Mass Effect 2, where I could save people (which I did) and let the bad guy escape or kill the bad guy at the expense of innocents. In many games, such as Dragon Age II, the moral choices are overly contrived and forced, but the consequences were less personal, in my opinion. Perhaps game developers should provide a way to move forward in quest lines without having to kill innocents, though perhaps with a lesser result or more work.

  • Are Fantasy Game Developers all Conservative?

    I’ve played many of the most popular fantasy/RPG games and I’ve noticed a very common theme: the past was always better than the present. So does that mean all the game developers are conservative? I don’t mean political conservative, which I’m sure most aren’t, but believing the past was better and it’s too bad it changed and got worse kind of conservative.

    In so many games, the past was “more powerful” and otherwise better than now, so the protagonist has to run around lots of ruins and find powerful ancient artifacts and secrets to fight the current evil. In Dragon Age, the Wardens were powerful in the past and rode flying mounts. In Elder Scrolls (Skyrim, Oblivion, etc.), the Dwemer had amazing technology and the heroes of the past had amazing powers. In the Lord of the Rings, Men and Elves of the past were greater and could make rings of power, an art long since lost. Even in the Harry Potter universe, the witches and wizards of the past could make artifacts well beyond what could be made today. There are many more examples, but I don’t want to bore the reader. Think about the games you’ve played – if they were set in a fantasy world, wasn’t the past better and now the ruins of the past hold the secrets that will solve the current problems?

    Sure, there has to be some sort of goal in the game, and it is easy to come up with some powerful artifact from the past that will solve the problem. But that doesn’t reflect real life, so why would it be appropriate in a fantasy world? In real life, technology advancements make things better than the old ways, so how about a game where the player has to invent new powers or abilities based on old abilities? Sure it could all be scripted out and such, but wouldn’t it be better for the protagonist to come up with something new that nobody had ever seen rather than “oh, you’re a Dragonborn. Go talk to those guys and they’ll train you up…”?

    So, game developers, the past is typically NOT better than the future, so quit pining for the old days and make games that properly look to a brighter future (as appropriate to the period setting of the game). Then we will all be shocked and surprised about an original plot!

  • Steam makes Skyrim mods easy

    Adding “mods” to games is a distinct advantage PC gamers have over console gamers. Sony and Microsoft wouldn’t want to allow modding of console games unless they found a way to make money from it. So, many PC games have active mod communities, and the Elder Scrolls series are no exception.

    Mods can be anything from new looks for weapons and armor to new user interface elements to new quests and regions. Many mods involve skimpy outfits and female followers to satisfy horny gamer males, but others are extremely valuable and helpful. To be honest, when Oblivion was new, I tried some of the “better bodies” and skimpy clothing mods, and promptly turned them off. I didn’t do this because I am opposed to nudity and hot bodies, but it was disturbing to kill an enemy and loot her to see a smoking hot body and bare boobs and more. Particularly if it was a female orc you just killed. Perhaps it humanized the enemy too much or something, but it made me feel creeped out. So out those mods went.

    In Skyrim, I am taking a very cautious approach to mods and only using a few, at least until I beat the main mission. I have one frivolous mod, which is the Asteria, an abandoned dwarven airship that can be an awesome player home. It has all the crafting equipment and looks great, and doesn’t seem to interfere with anything else. I am using a mod called Lockpick Pro that helps with lockpicking by showing a bar that lets you hit the right zone for the pick to work. This is a cheat, but frankly it saves a lot of time and I was pretty good at lockpicking before it, so this just eliminates a bit of frustration. I’m also using a mod that shows markers for my house (I only have one) and other important halls on the map, making them suitable for fast travel. This isn’t a cheat, because they only show up after you have discovered them. Finally, I am using a better map, since the original doesn’t have the roads drawn on it. What were the Bethesda folks thinking?

    Steam makes dealing with mods easy, because of Steam Workshop. This lets me pick the mods I want, then they are automatically downloaded and kept up to date, like Steam games. This is very handy and is the primary reason I wanted to buy Skyrim from Steam rather than on a disk. There are some problems, though. Steam Workshop has been extremely unresponsive at times, which is frustrating. The search function is terrible. I tried to search for the map mod by typing the word “map” into the search box. Nothing resembling a map mod showed up, but a bunch of texture mods and other things were shown (presumably they used words like “mipmap” or something). So I had to click through a few more pages to find the one I chose. I think the benefits of Steam Workshop outweigh the problems, and hopefully those problems will be fixed over time. So Steam Workshop is good and worth trying for Skyrim!

  • Observations on Skyrim

    I have been enjoying Skyrim very much. My character is level 14 and is slowly progressing through the story missions and other quests. He has joined the Companions and completed their ritual (no spoilers, but if you’ve gone through it, you know what I mean), bought a house in Whiterun, and has started wide exploration of the world. He has been concentrating on one-handed weapons as well as destruction magic, though has recently learned the advantage of conjuration magic (try calling your familiar into being over a trap/ward – it kills the poor spirit wolf, but prevents the player from taking damage). Last night, he started with the mage school and had a nice time in the mountains. He has completed his shout training with the Graybeards, and has even discovered a few other shouts by himself.

    I have picked up a few companion offers along the way, and have adventured with 2 of them: a woman who fought me in a bar in Whiterun and my “housecarl” Lydia, also from Whiterun. My problem with these companions is that they can die. Most of the time, they fall in combat and get up when the player has resolved the situation, but sometimes they are killed. Since I don’t want to have them die, I reload and try the fight again.

    Another problem with companions is that they often get lost (or choose not to take the same path the player does). Most of the time, I can just fast-wait for an hour and they will magically appear. Sometimes not. There should be an indicator on the compass showing where your companion is.

    I also bought a horse so I could get around faster. Horses are more expensive than in Oblivion, but apparently smarter and hardier. It was a common occurrence in Oblivion to leave your horse outside a cave only to come out and find it had been killed by something. So far, that hasn’t happened in Skyrim. Horses often run from fights, which is good, though sometimes they will join in. I fought a dragon last night when the horse was nearby and even though the dragon attacked it sometimes, it survived. The problem with horses (other than the fact that they aren’t that fast and look funny when you’re riding them) is that you can’t get rid of them! Whenever you fast travel, there’s the horse. Even if you are going into a dangerous place, it comes with you. At least with companions, you can tell them to go home or wait somewhere. There doesn’t seem to be an option or sell your horse or keep it in the stable.

    Because of the problems keeping my companions alive, I’ve stopped using them for the moment. I don’t know what to do with the horse. I don’t want it to be killed, but I don’t always want it with me when I’m out exploring. I’ll have to look for a “mod” solution.

  • Skyrim and its hardware requirements

    I bought The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim because it is on sale on Steam. I have wanted it since it came out and skipped a couple of previous Steam sales, but then regretted skipping them when it remained it its confiscatory retail price for months on end. I wasn’t too upset, as I had plenty of other things to do and games to play, but every day, I checked Amazon and Steam for a sale.
    Now that I have Skyrim, it’s pretty great, even though I haven’t played it long. I have been experimenting with all the different damage types and am dressed in heavy armor, mostly using mace and shield, but becoming more attracted to magic all the time after frying a bunch of skeleton dudes way faster with magic than I could thump them with my mace. I remember that heavy armor inhibited magic in Oblivion, so I will see if the same effects apply. I really wanted to use a bow, but even with a nifty bow that is better than the starter bow, it doesn’t do damage that fast and is slow to shoot. So I’ll probably become more of a magic user than a melee fighter, though will keep some nice weapons handy just in case.
    On my home machine, which is a high end machine, Skyrim runs beautifully at 2560×1440 with ultra-high settings (though I did turn down the anti-aliasing a little from the recommended level, because I don’t think AA adds that much at super high resolution). The game is smooth as silk and looks pretty good, though not quite as amazing as I had hoped. I killed a bunch of bandits in a snowy hideout and the snow-covered floors looked like plastic (and this was with the high-res texture pack) and the falling snow was cartoonish.
    As a comparison, I installed Skyrim on my laptop, which is a pretty good laptop. It has a quad-core mobile i7 processor, though it is only 2 GHz, rather than the 3.4 GHz of my gaming PC. Both have 8 GB of RAM, and both have AMD graphics cards (because of the bad luck I have had with NVIDIA cards). The home machine has a 6970 GPU, which, at the time, was the fastest available, while the laptop has a 6770, both with 2 GB of graphics RAM. The laptop is 1920×1080 resolution, while the gaming PC is 2560×1440.
    When Skyrim launched, it autodetected the settings for the laptop and chose Medium with some AA. I took its advice, launched the game, and after waiting nearly forever, the game started with a frame rate in the maybe 5 FPS region. It was a slideshow. So I quit, turned off the AA, disabled some of the reflections, etc., and tried again. It got better, maybe 10 FPS, but not playable. After switching the textures down to medium, it may have been 15 or 20 FPS, but still horribly disappointing.
    I would imagine I could do some of the things in the various tweaking guides, and make it playable, but it is sad that I should have to. This laptop is much better than most people’s gaming rigs and is certainly miles faster than what I played Oblivion and X3 and most other games perfectly well on. So how is it that a game can look perfect on my gaming rig and look horrible on a machine that is at least 50% as capable, even at reduced settings? And does that mean that the majority of Skyrim players either had to buy a new machine for it or suffer with crap frame rates?
    Since I have a good machine that I will play it on, I’m not particularly outraged by this, but it is concerning. I remember when Crysis came out and my machine at the time was as fast as could be (and certainly way faster than anything that had been using in the game’s development), I had to reduce some of the settings a bit to make it smooth. At least in Crysis’ case, that worked and I got a smooth and good looking game. With Skyrim, I would probably have to reduce the resolution to make it playable on the laptop. Game makers should try a little harder to make things playable with reasonable, but not great, hardware.

  • Bought Dungeon Siege III and Deus Ex: Human Revolution from Amazon

    Yesterday, I bought download versions of Dungeon Siege III and Deus Ex: Human Revolution from Amazon. While neither of those games were on my must-play list, they were such a good price that I had to pick them up to see if I like them.

    I enjoyed the first two Dungeon Siege games a lot which made me hope the third one, which got not-great reviews, would be okay. When I downloaded it from Amazon, it added itself to my Steam account, which is great, because Steam can worry about keeping it up to date, etc.

    The game is very console-oriented, with few character choices, no customization, loot items specific to each character, and combat tailor-made for a game controller (I use the Xbox 360 controller for Windows). The game looks good at high resolution and doesn’t stutter on my system. Dungeon Siege III starts amazingly quickly and has very little in the way of delays or loading screens. It’s very well done.

    I chose a character that uses guns, both a long rifle for ranged attacks and a duel-wield shotgun/pistol combo for short range. There are only 4 character choices, so my guess is that the party will eventually end up with all four: yourself and three companions. Each has different skills, armor, and appearance.

    So far, the combat is pretty good. Before I got better with the controls and switching between short and long range, I had a lot of trouble when mobs would close on me and surround me. The long rifle is powerful, but not useful up close. Once I figured out my stun skill, how to roll and avoid hits, and spamming the shotgun/pistol blasts, I got lots better.

    The plot is the usual kind about how you are of special lineage and everyone around you was betrayed and killed, etc. The plot missions, so far, are very linear, and the number of side quests is reasonably few, so you can focus on progressing the story. You start off solo, but so far, I have rescued one of the other characters, so she is now my party companion and does fire damage and helps a lot. I presume our goal will be to rescue the other two soon.

    In short, Dungeon Siege III is a fun, simplified action RPG that is worth playing, especially if you can buy it on sale!

  • Finished Dragon Age 2

    I recently finished Dragon Age 2 and generally enjoyed it. While I didn’t find the story as compelling nor as epic as the original Dragon Age Origins, it is still well written and fairly interesting and entertaining. All the criticisms you read about Dragon Age 2 complain that the environments are used over and over with only minor changes. That is entirely true and could be annoying if you let it get to you. On the other hand, if your goal is to do missions and fight baddies, it is fine.

    Dragon Age 2 is somewhat dumbed-down from the original Dragon Age or from most other RPGs. While the skill trees are there, they are a bit simpler and better grouped. Inventory management is good too. In general, you can only equip armor for yourself. Some of your companions have weapons that will stay with them for the entire game (Varric’s Biana, for example), while you can swap others out at will. My wife was so intrigued with the simplified aspects of the game, she may even want to give it a try sometime.

    I did all the companion quests, so they all loved me at the end. Even when they disagreed with my endgame choices, I convinced them to fight for me. The companion missions are good and many of they tie closely into the main story line, while others are just fun distractions and ways to gain XP.

    The endgame is a little disappointing (much like Mass Effect 3’s endgame apparently is). I only played one ending, but it turned ugly and we needed to kill the leaders of both opposing parties. My hunch is that by making the other choice to get a different endgame would have resulted in killing the same two bosses, just in different order. There was no pleasant finale in this game, much like there apparently isn’t one in ME3. Apparently the Bioware folks like cataclysmic, world-changing endings, perhaps because they want to develop new story lines rather than being stuck in the Mass Effect and Dragon Age universes.

    If you like RPGs, Dragon Age 2 will not disappoint. It looks good, plays well, and is fun. It is well worth the price, particularly now that it can be had for a decent price. Check it out!