TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Category: Games I Like

  • Star Trek Online Swimsuits on Risa

    I’ve been enjoying the Star Trek Online Summer Festival on Risa, working towards the “pearls” needed for both the Risian Corvette and the Risian Cruiser. I’m also busy earning “favors” to get swimsuits for my two female captains. Now that I’ve achieved that (see below), I will look into better jetpacks and even shorts for my one or two male captains that are participating.

    My Bajoran female captain looks pretty good in a swimsuit:

    screenshot_2014-06-10-19-58-28As you can see, the STO devs have done a nice job lovingly modelling her curves and how well her bikini fits. All the pictures here are 1920×1080, so click them to zoom in for a better view. She looks good from the back, too:

    screenshot_2014-06-10-19-58-43

    The only problem with seeing her in a swimsuit is when she’s flying around in the jetpack. In this state, she is viewed from behind and often slightly below, particularly when climbing. I don’t like the angular and exaggerated calves visible in the next picture.

    screenshot_2014-06-10-19-58-07

    I bought a different swimsuit for my Klingon female captain. It looks pretty good on her:

    screenshot_2014-06-10-20-35-50

    Interestingly enough Klingons apparently have a strange-looking ridged spine, perhaps to go along with their brow ridges. It is clearly visible in the picture below (again, click to zoom in).

    screenshot_2014-06-10-20-35-13

    While I admire the attention to detail by the STO devs, I don’t think that spine is very attractive. If I had know about it, I would have considered a swimsuit that has more of a back on it to hide the ridges. But you may like it, and now you are aware of it.

     

     

     

     

  • Replaying Mass Effect with a FemShep

    After I finished Assassin’s Creed IV, I was looking for a new game to play. I’ve played all the Mass Effect games, but always as the stock male Shepard. I’ve been told that playing as a FemShep (female Shepard) opens up new dialogs, and the “sex” scenes may be different, etc. So I decided to give it a shot and have been having great fun!

    I played Mass Effect when it came out last decade. I’d forgotten most of it, but I remember it being a fun experience. While the graphics are quite dated, it still looks pretty good (except for the prehistoric textures – BioWare seems to have a problem with textures in the Mass Effect and Dragon Age games: the figures are modelled perfectly, but they wear very lo-res, jagged textures). The gameplay is good, and I chose to be an “Operative” so using pistols, sniper rifles, and tech, but no biotic powers.

    I’ve been busy doing all the side missions, so haven’t progressed too far into the plot missions, but it is still very compelling. I even like the bouncy planetary rover missions a lot better than the terrible scanning mechanic of ME2.

    I owned Mass Effect well before EA’s Origin existed. Origin discovered my other ME and Dragon Age games, but didn’t have a clue about the original Mass Effect. I tried entering the key, even tried installing the game so it could find it. Nothing worked until I tried again a few months ago, and suddenly Origin agreed that I own ME and would let me install it via download. So despite all our hatred for EA, they are improving things, and I’m thankful I can get rid of the case and DVD now.

    So if you have Mass Effect laying around, get it into Origin, and give it a go if you get bored. It’s still a great game.

  • Sexism in the Star Trek Online Graphics Engine?

    I really like the relatively recent update to the initial character screen in Star Trek Online. It shows your heroic Captain as well as the 4 main Bridge Officers (BOffs) with your majestic starship up above. I recently broke my long tradition of only playing male characters in MMOs by creating a Klingon female Captain (I also created a Fed one even more recently). That’s when I started noticing that when my female Captain was drawn in the character screen, her boobs would come in first, then her outfit top, as shown below:

    Klingon boobs

    Notice that her BOffs’ boobs are also there before their clothing is. Then I noticed that my other Klingon Captain has an Orion BOff, and her boobs showed up before the top:

    Orion boobs

    Finally, I saw that some of my Federation BOffs showed up with teeny little panties (not part of their uniform, as far as I know) before their skirts popped in:

    fed panties

    Now this isn’t horrible or anything, but it doesn’t seem to happen with the men. They don’t show up chest first, then uniform, nor in boxers or briefs (at least as far as I’ve seen in my not-very-extensive study). A movie of the character screen that these stills were taken from is below so you can see how it all works:

    I’m not offended by this, but it also isn’t they way I need to think about my BOffs and Captains – I’m not James T. Kirk, for God’s sake! If I wanted to play a sexy game, I’m sure I could, but I find the starships sexy in Star Trek Online, so I don’t need to see my crew in their undies. I also wonder if some of this isn’t intentional. It sure looks like that. There’s no real call for teeny panties, since there’s no viewpoint where anyone could look up my BOff’s skirt. So I’d prefer it if the graphics engine treated men and women the same and didn’t draw boobs and panties, but instead only rendered parts that were fully ready.

     

     

  • We are not the chosen one! Why I like the narrative of #LOTRO and #STO

    Ars Technica has a very interesting commentary on The Elder Scrolls Online, an upcoming MMO set in the Elder Scrolls universe, like Oblivion and Skyrim. One of the points I found most interesting was that the game uses the old “you are the chosen one” story line, which is a little odd, given that there are thousands of said chosen ones playing an MMO. (Paraphrasing from the article)

    This is one of the reasons I like the Lord of the Rings Online so much. I am not the chosen one in LOTRO. Frodo is the Ringbearer, and Aragorn is the King, and I’m just helping out. Same with Star Trek Online: There are thousands of us Captains, and we’re helping the Federation, or the Klingon Empire, or the Romulan Republic (funny how my spellchecker knows “Klingon” but doesn’t know “Romulan” – must be weak Star Trek fans making the word lists), but we won’t rule them or otherwise change the leadership, for example.

    I don’t mind being the chosen one in single player games, so I enjoyed Skyrim, Oblivion, and Morrowind, but in an MMO, it does seem a bit much. We are not the chosen ones, dammit, so make games where cooperation and heroism can work together!

  • A few thoughts on #LOTRO’s potentially boring year

    There have been lots of recent posts and tweets predicting doom and gloom for Lord of the Rings Online. I sure hope they’re wrong, but I do wonder if this year won’t be quite a rough patch for the game.

    When Turbine announced no new major content this year, people assumed the demise of the game. While the devs quickly assured us that wasn’t true, the subsequent layoffs of several LOTRO team members seemed to confirm a pullback in resources going to LOTRO. Sure, they’ll redo some early areas, but that may not be compelling for all us level 95 players. But those areas are not exactly what I’m writing about.

    The problem that I see in LOTRO, even more than for Star Trek Online, is that the top-level content is becoming less and less compelling with each release. For example, when my first character, a Lore-Master, hit Mirkwood years ago, I loved it! I had so much fun there, running skirmishes and instances with friends, getting max reputation with the elves there, etc. Even the crafting location was great, so I worked hard to get the “return to” skill so I could use it as needed.

    Then Rise of Isengard came out, and everyone raced to hit level 75 so we could do the Dragioch raid and get the dragon cloak materials. I got lucky and got those dragon scales on my first run through (I think I /rolled a 99!). So life was pretty good. Then Great River came out and we all ran over there and finished it, but the repeatable missions into the Limlight Gorge were fun, but not great. At that point, half my kinship got bored and bailed out of the game, never to return.

    Then came Riders of Rohan. I was late to RoR, because I didn’t want to pay full price for it. Once I bought it, I loved the mounted combat. A lot! My friends didn’t like it nearly as much, though a few times, a friend and I would romp through the fields of Rohan thumping down any enemies in our path! The big end-game draw were the Erebor instances, but I didn’t have a high level Minstrel or Captain, so nobody wanted a lousy Lore-Master (emphasis on lousy) for those missions, so I didn’t get to play. Then I tried hard to level my Mini and Warden up to 85 so they could join in, but medical issues took me out of the game for a few months. I didn’t quite get them to level 85 before Helm’s Deep arrived.

    Not wanting to make the same mistake as with RoR, I bought Helm’s Deep on pre-order, so played it right away. But this time, there were no great end-game instances. Instead, there were the Epic Battles at Helm’s Deep, but they can be run solo and by any level over 20. So there’s no really compelling end-game content to make me want to level all my guys up to 95 so they can join the fun. They can already do those missions at their level.

    Now I really enjoyed the story lines in Dunland, East Rohan, and now, West Rohan. My Lore-Master does every quest and I enjoyed almost all of it. But I have a lot less interest in doing all the same quests over and over and over again with all my other characters. So they’re slowly languishing, while my LM is retired-in-place at the Aldburg crafting hall (nowhere better to be!), while I play more Star Trek Online than LOTRO.

    Might be a long year for LOTRO…

  • Star Trek Online at 4K Resolution Screenshots

    I’ve been saying Star Trek Online works at 4K resolution, but I haven’t offered proof. These screenshots are nice examples of how good things can look at 4K. Of course, my Ex-Borg Romulan isn’t the most attractive guy, but the pictures give a good idea of how the game looks at 4K. Click on the images to see them at full resolution.

    My warbird outside Earth Space Dock Earth Space Dock with Q

  • Gaming at 4K update: Star Trek Online Still On Top

    Since I got my 4K TV/monitor, I’ve been experimenting with games that can run at 4K resolution (3840×2160@30 Hz in my case). As I noted in my last post, Star Trek Online works very well at 4K. I’ve continued to play STO at 4K and couldn’t be more impressed. It looks good at that resolution (though the textures are still crap, but that is the case with almost all games – I’m looking at you, Dragon Age series), and plays smoothly, despite the 30 Hz update rate. So STO is a clear win at 4K.

    I played a bit of Saints Row IV at 4K last night and it mostly worked. It struggled a little bit, but was playable at 4K. The only bummer was the very visible tearing, because I didn’t turn vsync on. I didn’t bother with vsync, because I could see from the tearing that it was having trouble keeping up. So I turned the game back down to 1080p and it worked great. I suppose if my computer were a little faster, Saints Row IV might be a good experience at 4K resolution.

    I’m continuing to run LOTRO at 1080p resolution, because of the distracting visible artifacts at 4K, and I find 1080p mostly OK despite all the pixels being doubled in both axes.

    In short, we have a big winner at 4K in Star Trek Online, and we have a pretty good candidate if your machine is great in Saints Row IV. So cheers to 4K monitors!

  • Knack is my favorite Playstation 4 game so far

    I bought 3 games for my PS4 thanks to Amazon’s buy-2-get-1-free sale: Knack, Killzone: Shadow Fall, and Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag. I haven’t even opened AssCreed, but have tried both Killzone and Knack, and like Knack quite a bit. I’m not normally a platformer kinda guy, but Knack is very well done, mostly fun, and very whimsical. The graphics look good, but not in a photo-realistic way. Instead, it looks like a finely animated cartoon that we can participate in. The video below shows a short snippet of my gameplay, including me making a stupid mistake at the end and getting killed.

    While the game is fun, it isn’t easy, even on easy mode. Some of the combat gets quite easy, but some of the enemies can take you down in one hit. A few of the puzzles take a few minutes to figure out, but they haven’t been too hard as far as I’ve played.

    The biggest problem with the game is the checkpoint save system. Games and developers that use bad checkpoint systems like this one don’t respect their players. Yes, there are mini checkpoints during the gameplay, so if you die, you don’t go back too far (Killzone: Shadow Fall also has these), but they don’t stick if you need to quit the game. If you quit, the game restarts you at the chapter checkpoint, so I lost quite a bit of progress when I so nastily discovered this. Infuriating! Killzone saves the current checkpoint so you can quit and come back and not lose anything, so it is much better than Knack in this case.

    So do I recommend Knack? Yesterday when I lost so much progress due to the pathetic checkpoint system, I would have said “NO,” but after calming down a little and playing some more, yes, it is a worthy game and is fun to play. I’ve yet to try the co-op mode, but I look forward to that.

    And, of course, it’s killing me that the PS4 came out at nearly the same time as the new Star Trek Online season (The Sphere), which has a really fun battle zone for ground combat, as well as the new Lord of the Rings Online expansion (Helm’s Deep). Oh how will I get time to play all these things?

  • My Love/Hate Relationship with Borderlands 2

    Having played and thoroughly enjoyed Borderlands 2 when it first came out, I bought the Season Pass, but let the game languish as I played a few other games, had health issues that totally ruined my gaming ability for a while, and kept up with my Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) and Star Trek Online (STO) playing.

    A few days ago, however, while waiting for the new STO and LOTRO updates coming this week, I jumped back in to play the Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep DLC. In this DLC, you and your NPC friends from the original Borderlands are playing a dice-based RPG similar to, but not infringing on the copyright of, Dungeons and Dragons. Of course, that means the player gets put into this fantasy world. And while you still have all your guns and grenades and powers, the enemies are using swords and arrows, though with deadly precision.

    The area in the DLC is quite challenging because of the various monster types. Some, like tree-based creatures are easy – just use fire, as are knights and others that fire works on. The damn skeletons are the problem. They are immune to nearly everything other than explosive damage and I just don’t have a good, accurate gun that deals explosive damage. But it’s a puzzle set for us by the developer to figure out how to overcome some of these tough enemies.

    That leads to my problem with the game. When you die, you reappear at a nearby respawn point, which is fine. But if you need to quit the game because it is way past bedtime, I will have to restart the area and all the monsters will have respawned. This concern was so great that I was trying to rush through a quest last night before bed, yet kept making mistakes and dying. I never did succeed, so I went to bed furious!

    Now, in the calm of morning, I can dispassionately look back at the game and not be quite so mad at it. Last night, I was sure I was going to drop the game again and go on to other games I’ve been waiting to play. Especially with the new STO and LOTRO content plus my PS4 will arrive on Friday, I’ll have plenty to do. But now that I’m not as furious, I will perhaps give Borderlands 2 another shot. When I’m calm and collected and have time to finish…

  • Two #LOTRO Videos: Mounted Minstrel and Michel Delving Horse Race

    I took two videos in LOTRO recently and thought I would share them.

    The first is very short. I was experimenting with NVidia’s ShadowPlay in LOTRO and happened to turn it on just as a not very bright mounted orc started attacking me. I’m posting this to show how dangerous a mounted Minstrel can be. I was able to take the enemy down in seconds even from a full stop, though he was higher level than my Mini. I’m really liking the Minstrel class for combination of damage and healing, though when I managed to get a bunch of enemies attacking at once, he died. However, he was able to take down the Craban Master Warband near Garsfeld solo, even though it’s a small fellowship one.

    The other video is the horse race near Michel Delving. This run got my Hunter enough Fall Festival Tokens that he could buy the Spooky Caparison of the Bat to decorate his War Steed.