Here is a movie of flying to a mission with slipstream drive and fighting a battle using my new Chimera Heavy Destroyer.
Tag: video
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Star Trek Online Videos
I’m enjoying Star Trek Online so much that I made a couple of videos. I bought the Constitution class cruiser upgrade, so I wanted to show it off, too.
The first clip is sector space leaving Sol and heading to the Delta Volanis cluster.
The second, much longer, clip shows one of the random encounters that occur in clusters. In this case, I got to fight some Orion pirates. You can see that the cruiser is not very maneuverable, but gets the job done. You can also see me pick up some of the “anomaly” crafting materials, including the frequency matching minigame.
If driving starships around and blowing stuff up sounds like fun to you, try Star Trek Online.
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LOTRO Tour Part 5: Hobbiton to Stock
Now I purchase a ride from Hobitton to Stock on the East side of the Shire. I pass by lots of places whose names are recognizable from the Lord of the Rings books. Next up: on to Bree.
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LOTRO Tour Part 4: Tour of the Hill
In this segment, my Hunter rides around “the Hill” suburb of Hobbiton. The Hill contains the Party Tree and Bag End where Bilbo and Frodo lived. As you can see in the video, the Sackville-Bagginses have moved in already.
I’m disappointed by how much the compression by YouTube muddies the textures. The game is quite sharp and generally looks good, as do my source videos, but YouTube needs to save bandwidth, so re-compresses quite a bit. I don’t fault them, but it does blur things quite a bit.
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Halo Reach Space Fighting is Fun!
The space fighting part of Halo Reach is the most fun, so far, but it was quite short, and since my Sabre was destroyed with the Covenant super-carrier, not likely to be repeated soon. The first video here shows part of the first space battle. It gets busier in the attack wave after the video, but is more of the same. As you can see, my teammates can’t seem to hit much of anything, so I have to do most of the blowing things up…
In the second movie, we’re going after a Covenant corvette to take it over and use it in the upcoming attempt to destroy the super-carrier. I get the task of taking out the engines.
Once we disabled the corvette, there are some fun battles inside to gain control. Then things go from bad to worse, but that’s for another post.
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Halo Reach Turret Shooting
Because Halo Reach put me more than an hour back in my game, I had a chance to relive some of my favorite moments so far. The first is as I’m being airlifted to a spire I need to shut down. I got to shoot from the turret and took out a lot of Covenant baddies and AA guns on the ground. Pretty fun.
The next video shows the launch of my Sabre into orbit. It’s a cutscene, but it looks pretty good. Both videos are available in 1080p if your machine has the guts and your display has the pixels.
I’ll have a couple more videos tomorrow. They’re uploading now, but I’m not going to wait for them to be done processing.
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A Closer Look at KOTOR
I played a bit more of Knights of the Old Republic and remembered the good and bad parts of it. The good (great) parts are the story and much of the combat. The combat is a combined real-time and turn-based mix that works pretty well. As you can see in the video below, I can pause the battle to look around, issue commands to each of my characters, then continue. Each character has a set of attack options, including power attacks, force powers (for the Jedi in the party) and grenades. In addition, healing and shield activation are also selectable. Each action takes a turn, so some things happen maddeningly slowly. In addition, once an action is started, you can’t stop it, so healing, for example, will have to wait until the next turn.
You can see in the video that I did a naughty thing by leveling up during combat, which replenished my hitpoints. Most games don’t allow that sort of thing just to prevent an unfair advantage, like I took here.
The bad thing about KOTOR is that the view is fairly fixed. You can rotate around your characters, but can’t zoom in or out, nor can you change elevation to get a better view. This feels a bit constraining. The graphics are okay, particularly given the age of the game. It runs in 1600×1200 just fine, but doesn’t support widescreen modes (without unofficial patches).
In all, Bioware did an amazing job of transforming D&D rules into the Star Wars universe with light sabers and vibroswords (really) replacing bastard swords, force powers replacing magic, and blasters taking the place of bows and arrows. The game works well, as does its sequel. Perhaps the new Star Wars MMO will turn out to bring some of the greatness of these games back.
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Star Trek Online Battle
In this Star Trek Online battle, my ship, the USS Ampere, is protecting a damaged ship from waves of alien attacks. Since my ship is a science vessel, it doesn’t have very powerful weapons, but does have good shields, so my hull is well protected. You can see that the battle is generally turning and worrying about firing arcs. The enemies are not very tough in this battle, so they don’t do too much damage. Against the last battleship, I call in a “photonic fleet” of helpers that take the heat off me as we weaken the enemy’s shields and I pump quantum torpedoes into it. This is an HD video, so be sure to view it full screen and at 1080p resolution if your machine can handle it.
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Big videos
Well, right after I uploaded the Star Trek Online navigation video to YouTube, I started uploading a longer Star Trek Online space battle video. This one was about 1GB and 10 minutes. It took several hours to upload, for which we can blame the pathetic ISP monopolies in the USA, but even once it was uploaded, it has been “processing” for hours. I can’t imaging it takes that long to convert to all the YouTube resolutions. I suspect that because it is more than a couple minutes, YouTube staff need to review it for copyright violations, since a 10 minute video is probably more likely to be ripped from somewhere than a one minute video of a crazy cat. Too bad the assumption can’t be that I own the copyright and it can be reviewed later if there is any doubt. Or maybe it really does take that long to process. Anyway, I will post it to the site once the upload and processing finish.
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Star Trek Online Sector Map Navigation
This video shows sector map navigation in Star Trek Online. My ship, the USS Ampere, is in the galactic map sort of near DS9 and Bajor. I turn around an enter the Rolor Nebula, an area with randomly generated missions that you can repeat over and over again (and must if you want to rise in the Diplomatic Corps ranks). Once in the nebula, I head over to an anomaly, which in this case is something to scan. Then you see the scanning mini-game where I match the waveform of the scan and get bonus materials. Note: This is an HD video (1920×1080) if you go full-screen and choose 1080p in the video size options.