TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Tag: PC

  • Playing Far Cry 3 and enjoying it!

    In between getting my Risa starships in Star Trek Online and getting my Rune Keeper his war steed in Lord of the Rings Online, I’ve been playing and enjoying Far Cry 3.

    Far Cry 3 is an open world first person shooter/RPG game, in which you take out bad guys and wild animals on an island or two after you and your friends are captured by very bad guys. It is RPGish in that you gain skills and and crafting abilities with experience. Crafting is everything in the game. When you start, you can carry nearly nothing in your loot bag, ammo bag, syringe (for healing and buffs) bag, etc. You kill animals to craft better gear, which is mostly great, but sometimes frustrating. The animals in the game are not pushovers, either. The dogs attack in packs, the tigers and bears are tough, and snakes bite you while you’re sneaking through dungeons.

    Guns, on the other hand, are plentiful, and more unlock as you climb radio towers to scope out the landscape (much like synchronizing in the Assassins Creed games). Combat is fun, but not always easy. Many side quests require you to kill your target with a knife, so sneaking is important.

    A feature of the game I really like is that you actually have an impact on the world. As you capture enemy strongholds, the friendly islanders occupy them and the area around them becomes less dangerous.

    The checkpoint system is hit and miss. Usually, it doesn’t take you too far back when you die, but there have been a couple of missions (so far) that were very frustrating because of how far back the checkpoint took you.

    An unfortunate part of the game is that you kill the first boss (Vaas, the guy on the cover of the game, and a really bad dude) in sort of a drug-induced haze/dream sequence, so I didn’t get the satisfaction of putting a bullet into him and knowing he’s dead. I keep expecting him to pop up again at some inopportune time. During the first half of the game, he always has the jump on you, which was quite frustrating. I’ve just started the second part, which aims to kill Vaas’ boss, so we’ll see how that goes.

    But if any of this sounds fun, get Far Cry 3 (it isn’t too expensive these days) and play it. It’s pretty great!

  • Finished Battlefield Bad Company 2

    Yes, I know Battlefield Bad Company 2 has been out for quite a while. I had to wait until it was on sale to buy it, which I did a few months back, and finally got around to playing it. I’m very glad I bought it on sale, because it certainly isn’t worth a full-game price. I’ve seen in on sale on Steam recently for as low as $5, so that it totally worth it. Even $10 is worth it.

    Battlefield Bad Company 2 is a first person shooter that has the reputation as having the best single player story of all the Battlefield games to date. While that may be true, it’s a very short story and not a very good story, so “best” doesn’t actually mean good or great.

    That isn’t to say everything is bad about the game. The combat is good fun, with lots of guns to choose from. The banter between your squadmates is well done and funny and sets the mood well. The graphics are okay, particularly for an oldish game. The destructible buildings and scenery are great – you can’t hide behind cover forever, because the enemy weapons may damage or destroy your shelter. So the combat, gun selection, and game mechanics are good, and it is lots of fun to take out enemy held villages and such. There are even occasions where the player drives tanks, jeeps, quad bikes, and is a helicopter gunner (the latter is fun, but only happens once and is too short. It also isn’t quite as great as the door gunner part of Halo Reach).

    Sadly, the game uses a checkpoint system, which isn’t done very well. Most of the checkpoints are fine, but there are a few where you need to wipe out a bunch of baddies, then when you move to a certain spot, helicopters or other very deadly enemies are triggered. The problem occurs if you die in this latter stage, the checkpoint was before the initial fight. This only serves the purpose of being frustrating and dragging out the game (possibly intentionally, because it is so short). Some games have good checkpoints. The Gears of War series never put me too far back after a death. I just started play Far Cry 3, and it also seems to have a very good checkpoint system (although a save-anywhere feature would be better).

    I didn’t play the multiplayer, which is the big draw for Battlefield games, but if I were going to play multiplayer, I’d play it in Battlefield 3 or 4, not Bad Company 2.

    In summary, Battlefield Bad Company 2 is pretty fun, but has a short single player campaign. If you’re primarily a single-player person, get it on sale.

  • Oops! I may have made a mistake buying X Rebirth

    I’ve been a big fan of Egosoft’s X series of space games. I first played X2:The Threat many years ago and loved it, logging hundreds of hours building stations and fleets. Then came X3: Reunion, and that was good too. I also played X3: Terran Conflict, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I skipped X3: Albion Prelude, but I have it in case I want to experience that universe again.

    I may want to step back to the older games, because I bought X Rebirth on sale on Steam a few days ago, and it isn’t too fun, so far. When X Rebirth came out, it got horrible, scathing reviews. But, all Egosoft games are barely playable at launch, and Egosoft is very good at patching and adding content to make them whole and competent and fun. All Egosoft games also have atrocious voice acting, so that didn’t bother me one bit – in fact, I laugh whenever I hear terrible intonation or pronunciation, so it’s what I have come to expect. So I figured that since X Rebirth is up to patch 2.1, then it is likely to be pretty much fixed up and OK. Well, maybe…

    The game looks pretty good and makes reasonable use of my Xbox 360 c0ntroller (the earlier games were best played with a joystick), but it has a very different idea of space than the earlier games (or pretty much most other space games). Space here is crowded, with just kilometers between space stations and asteroids and battles and such. The usual terrible Egosoft collision avoidance is still present, so other ships collide with you in the fast lane highways that let you zip between regions quickly. The old jump gates seem to have crapped out, so we’re stuck with these express ways to get around.

    As with the other X games, you can trade, build, or fight your way to success. In this game, you get a bit of money to start, but you spend most of that hiring crew for your freighter that hasn’t done anything other than follow the player ship  around like a  puppy. In the old games, you could fly your freighters and, eventually, managed a fleet of freighters trading for you as you fight pirates and Xenon and whoever else needs their butt kicked. Of course, it takes a long while to build up those resources, and I’m still early in the game, so things may make more sense eventually.

    I’ve done a tiny bit of fighting so far, and it seems competently done, though without the flexible loadouts we had before, but again, that may come. In the earlier games, sectors had stations in them that bought and sold goods that you could trade (or use). In this game, a single station has multiple modules, each of which has products or people or docking ports, and you need to scan the modules to figure that out. It seems that we need to fly from module to module to trade, but as I haven’t done much of that, perhaps there are easier ways.

    So how is X Rebirth better than the other X games? Docking is much better. It used to be that docking (or doing anything on autopilot) in a fast or large ship had a reasonable probability of smacking you into the  station and killing you. Now, it happens safely and quickly, as far as I’ve seen.

    So I’m not far enough into X Rebirth to recommend it or not. If you are looking for great space games and haven’t played X2 and X3, get the X3 Gold Box from Steam and be assured of a fun, challenging, and open-ended space game experience several times over. In the meanwhile, I’m going back to finish Battlefield Bad Company 2 and will put X Rebirth on standby. I will also continue with the Horga’hn hunts in Star Trek Online and getting my LOTRO Rune-Keeper to Rohan to get his warsteed.

  • Star Trek Online: Making a Fat Bajoran on Risa. Adventures of Lt. Cmdr. Fatass

    I decided to experiment with the character editor to make my Bajoran Female character look more like the reality of myself and many other ‘Muricans with a little (or a lot of) extra weight. Unlike all the other avatars I see in their tiny swimsuits on Risa, Lt. Cmdr. FatAss here has as large a belly and legs and torso width as I could make. It makes her more representative of most of us playing the game, I’d suspect, and I couldn’t stop laughing as I flew her around Risa and compared her to all the petite lovelies that everyone else uses. I’m surprised her floater was even able to lift her! That being said, she’s at the limits of the fatness scale of the editor, so she looks stout, but not enormous like the stereotypical fat person we all know or see on TV. Admittedly, it is a game, so we don’t want it to reflect reality too much, but it sure was fun being different from everyone else on Risa!

  • Star Trek Online Graphics Bug: Flying Without a Floater

    Even with yesterday’s patch, my studly Joined Trill Admiral in Star Trek Online is so badass that he can fly in the Risa events without a floater. Or at least he’s pretty good at hiding his floater (the jetpack thing used on Risa). The video below shows it. I think it is the outfit he is wearing, because when he was in his boring old uniform, the floater was visible. But now that he’s trying to relax from his stressful job as an Admiral in Starfleet, he changed into relaxing off-duty robes (and, no, he won’t say if he’s wearing underwear, ladies), and his floater has become a fancy stealth unit.

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • 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!

  • Gaming at 4K: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

    Since Amazon had the Seiki 39″ 4K TV for a great price last week, I picked it up in the hopes of gaming at 4K. I have a reasonably decent PC with an NVidia 670 that can drive 4K monitors, so that part worked well, but there are some issues.

    The monitor itself is a great piece of equipment. It is very vivid, with amazingly deep blacks (like almost no backlight bleedthrough). The color is pretty off, but with some calibration on my PC, it looks good. The downside of 4K is that it can only be driven at 30Hz over HDMI. There are some higher end 4K monitors with DisplayPort that may be able to do 60Hz, but they are much more expensive. Having a 3840×2160 desktop is so amazingly spectacular that I was, and still am, tempted to bring it into work so I can be more productive there. And with my first gaming experience with the monitor, that thought was reinforced. Since I spent the weekend mostly doing things around the house, I haven’t done an exhaustive survey of games on the 4K monitor, but I’ll share what I learned.

    The first game I tried was Lord of the Rings Online, which can drive the monitor at native resolution and at 30Hz. The problem was that there was some odd and very distracting smearing during movement, particularly on grass and flowers and such. It was so distracting that I couldn’t stand it, so I switched back to 1920×1080 at 60Hz. Sadly, this is lower than the 2560×1440 resolution of my previous monitor, so I was losing out a bit. And since the lower resolution was at such a large size now (39″ vs. 27″), it looked muddy and unappealing. At that point, I was ready to declare failure and bring the thing into work.

    Then I tried Sins of a Solar Empire, which won’t even try 4K resolution, so I gave that up, just reinforcing my plan to ditch the monitor at work.

    I tried Skyrim on a lark, and it looked amazing! It played like crap, but it looked fantastic at 4K. For some reason, though, the game was super sluggish and annoying. Again, my though was that I was not going to continue using the monitor for gaming.

    Finally, I tried Star Trek Online, and it was perfect at 4K. It looked great, and it played just like before. I tried both space and ground scenarios and it looked amazing. I presume the newer graphics engine in STO vs. LOTRO made the difference, but clearly MMORPGs can run perfectly well at 4K and 30Hz. That convinced me that maybe I need to rethink my plans for the monitor.

    Last night, I played more LOTRO as I am trying to get my poor Rune Keeper through Lothlorien and on to higher levels. Again, it was only at 1920×1080 on this large monitor, but I quickly came to like it. Sure, it is lower resolution that I used to play at, but it now filled my vision, so was more immersive.

    In short, gaming isn’t quite ready for 4K, but if you get a good enough deal on a 4K monitor, it is a nifty thing.

    I will post pictures and screen shots when I get a chance.