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Category: Video Game

Elite: Dangerous (-ly exciting)

Published August 6, 2014 by Leprekawn

I was into the beta approximately two weeks early from their July 29th release. It had been a while since I was in the cockpit of anything and even longer since I was doing so in space. There are some things you can’t forget easily. How to navigate an asteroid field is not one of them.

That being said I had a blast and I firmly cemented my desire for a joystick that arrived a week later: CH Products Combatstick

It’s more joystick than I’ve ever owned and I like it enough it could easily be the last joystick I ever own. Flying soon turned into an occasion of adjusting keybinds to accommodate quality control layout but I was able to turn my “I don’t know what I’m doing” into “Once more into the Breach!”

I can’t stress how excited I am for Elite: Dangerous, the potential and the quality of design. At present you can slip into full online play, limited group play or solo play with ease. The only difference being how many live humans you encounter in your travels. While EVE was a tactical game of space empires, Elite is showing to be a game of space piloting. I only hit the side of the station 4 or 5 times during my first day of full beta. Since then I’ve had a lot of close scrapes as I perfect my rapid departure technique and lost two ships to unpleasant collisions.

Elite has baked in a fair amount of forgiveness. If you lose your initial ship you have two options: a) The same ship again for a fee including all installed components or b) the newbie/Free ship all over again. For your first few days/hours this “Free Sidewinder” is easier replaced than repaired. I rather pride myself on keeping a ship operating as long as possible but even I gave in to Insurance fraud when repairs were too expensive.

You’ll likely hear more about this as time passes and updates release with more content for digestion. I’m not doing much else these days aside from prepping for the next D&D launch later this week.

If you choose to play look me up under CMDR Johann Vorga, I’ll be cruising the spaceways looking for wanted villains and loose cargo in need of a home.

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Elite: Dangerous(-ly fun)

Published July 14, 2014 by Leprekawn

I bought into the beta over a month ago on faith. I’d played Elite back in the wire-frame and low-res days of early computing. It was hard. 200 credits and starting out in space staring at a space station your first hurdle was to figure out how to dock without killing yourself. This was harder than it sounds.

Flash forward some 30-odd years and here’s the original developer under a new name, having built other games in the meantime, envisioning a return to Elite as Elite: Dangerous. Citing their original build of procedural content but small enough to fit on a floppy disk. Flash forward to Terabyte Hard Drives and HD monitors the new incarnation of this game is quite awesome. Following my beta investment I was watching various videos from people involved in their “Premium Beta” antics with docking, hunting pirates and hiding among asteroids. I was enamored with this one video where a player was using voice controls via Voice Attack to adjust power settings to enhance evasion and strafing runs as the need came. Another was in a npc dogfight defending a carrier under harassment by enemies, this player took some opportune damage that cracked his cockpit. Instantly a timer appears “Atmosphere depletion in 10 minutes” and starts counting. Said player lines up for Hyperspace jump and hops out to the nearest station for repairs. The whole time I’m watching with tensed nerves, this could be his death.

As of last week they opened the doors for normal Beta purchasers and I was able to play with a limited list of combat scenarios. The full game will give you a full sandboxian universe to crawl around in but for now I have several combat missions to practice against so that when the gates open we’re got some flight experience under our belts. I’d have appreciated a docking simulator as I’m sure that will kill more people on Day One than anything else.

That being said, I’m having fun. It’s very beautiful, well rendered and laid out. I’m horribly out of practice for dogfighting from my Wing Commander 2 days, but I’m picking it up quick. I ordered a CH Combatstick as the controls all but mandate a real joystick.

If you join Elite, I would love to see you and fly with you. It’s coming with what’s loosely described as three venues of interaction. Single Player, Multiplayer with Friends and Full Multiplayer.

Not quite as tactical and much more deeply sandbox simulator than EVE, if you liked one you might very well like the other and it’s hands-on approach to ship control. I’m about as excited for this game as I have been for anything and when I have a chance to delve into the docking and long-range flight on July 29th you’ll hear about it later that week for sure.

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Kingdom of Loathing

Published June 26, 2014 by Leprekawn

Once upon a time I worked with a person who was Internet Radio DJ for a game in an age when Internet was a newish idea and “Internet Radio DJ” was almost a joke.

I hadn’t touched the game for but a day at the time having rapidly become confused and lost and putting it down for forever. It wasn’t until very recently when a comment thread lead me back to KoL this time with more patience and a hell of a lot of determination.

Notably, it plays much like a MUD with limited actions per day and various rooms you can adventure in as part of your ongoing questing. At present I’m a Level 9 Pastamancer, delving into the dangerous arts of Cannoli Cannons and Ravioli Shuriken. KoL features a strong tongue-in-cheek design and approach, lo-fi graphical quality and the flexibility to play on any browser I can think of.

The game is totally free to play though they do ask for and reward donations with ingame things. For my $10 dollar contribution I was rewarded with a Galloping Grill. There’s a very robust crafting system and several unusually named classes to choose from.

Give it a spin. They have an inviting and unusual community and a ridiculously entertaining game.

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Not for me: Lords of the Fallen

Published June 18, 2014 by Leprekawn

And in one fell stroke Lords of the Fallen falls off my must-have list. Previously hailed as Dark Souls meets Fantasy-Borderlands now is more Dark Souls oriented with a difficult single-player story.

I’m sure it’ll be good, but not quite for me.

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EA is pushing the line

Published June 16, 2014 by Leprekawn

And testing my patience. This video has a fairly clear rant on what’s wrong.


(I should warn you, the youtuber is vocal about his dissatisfaction and uses some colorful vernacular.)

If it weren’t for Sims, after Sim City I would have given up on EA entirely. I’ve cut Ubisoft out of my life, there’s a lot of great games out there that I think I could do it again. Though I’d prefer not to test my limits on this. That being said, if you walk into any FPS franchise in the middle, intelligently choose which game to play and vote with your wallet it’s not so bad. But when you start looking at the underlying details it gets ugly.

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I’m a sucker for procedural

Published June 13, 2014 by Leprekawn

E3 happened or is happening and games are displayed in their vestigial stages, cocoon only barely opened, to give us a glimpse of their final form. It should be no surprise I’m a great fan of Minecraft. In that vein I’m also a fan of Space Engineers and Limit Theory. All games featuring some level of sandbox-freedom and procedural design with near-limitless exploration potential.

These aren’t games you ‘finish’ but merely put down for a time in favor of more present concerns like food or water. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve invested into Minecraft nor how many more will go into Limit Theory. So far there doesn’t seem to be a lot of information on ‘Sky, but if it comes for PC you can bet it’ll find a home on my shelf of “Endless Fun”.

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Below Infinite Space, a naming mashup I hath crafted

Published May 14, 2014 by Leprekawn

Here’s a shocker, two posts in the same week. It’s like i’m trending with updates!

Capy has a new game coming down the pipe. Similar in graphical grain to Super Brothers: Swords and Sworcery (the misspell is intentional).  Below looks to follow a similar style line and provide a longer adventure experience.  I’m only guessing, i haven’t looked at it beyond a 30 second video.

If you’re familiar with the Rogue-Like genre of “play game, die in game, restart game” themes there’s a new one coming called Infinite Space III: Sea of Stars.  Some sampling of Infinite Space (the first) suggests I might put this one under my belt of side amusements whilst I struggle with committing to all the MMO’s that currently hound me for attention.

That’s it this time.  Thanks for reading.

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I used to fear the darkness..

Published May 12, 2014 by Leprekawn

This is a story I wrote in the throes of adrenalin and anxiety following a narrow capture at a gate-camp in EVE Online.
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Coming into k-space I was greeted with comm signals of various positions. I was in w-space for less than 24 hours and it had taken it’s toll. The quiet darkness, the solitude. A cargo of precious salvage I intended to market in my hold I spun up the warp drive and plotted a course to Amarr. I had choices. 31 jumps, 9 through dangerous null- and low-sec space. Or 29.

The lesser of two evils and a gamblers choice. I plotted for Amarr on the shortest run and punched it. Two jumps saw me exit Solitude and begin a 9 jump run through Null Sec. Dread turned to curiosity as jump after jump saw nothing on the local channels. Nobody. It was as though I was once again in the ‘hole. I had begun to wonder at the truth I’d heard, that Null-Sec was safer than Low. This bubble of curiosity popped as I reached the last jump. A location I feared would have a gate camp and would spell an expensive end to my route, 20+ jumps from somewhere I could call home.

As my ship aligned, it’s drive charged and spun to action, I spotted a warp dispersion bubble, mobile and placed along the route from one gate to another. A derelict of a previous battle? A trap waiting to snare travelers? My ship readied, it raced past the bubble, unaffected and unhindered.

A brief hiccup of curiousity radically changed to fear as I came out of warp 50km from the gate, mired in another such bubble and facing two ships and a handful of drones. Seeing my day ruined, I began an attempt to escape. Reversed course to crawl out of the bubble, I warped to the first planet I lay eyes upon, not the first in the list. Looming full in view I raced away as my would-be aggressors finalized their targeting locks.

Escape! Several seconds of safety I opened my mind to the escape approach and made another rush at the game. Thinking i could find a crack I tried again. No luck. Away and back again. Curiously, they planted 1 bubble entering the system from Null Sec but three from High. No crack but I started to see an opportunity. Where there was two ships and drones before now there was none. Wait!.. sensors picked up a ship appearing.. not from warp. It was decloaked.

I raced away to a nearby planet’s farthest belt. My thought, if i can cut an angle wide enough I can shoot past the narrow window between two bubbles. Using unconventional estimation and no math I pushed out to 50k from the belt and tried again. I hit the local grid at 50k, on the edge of the bubble. Giving in to my understanding I punched the afterburner and raced for the exit.

A Purifier decloaked and locked on, his missiles hammering me as I closed the distance to the gate. I closed closer and his missiles continued to hit me. I cleared 15k and I started to see the end. Shields down, armor at 5%, structure holding.. I expected the next hit to be the last..

Nothing. 10k, I started hammering the navigation control. System response reminded me we weren’t close enough. I didn’t care. Fear had gripped me. The ship, the bomber who threatened to end me, remained. But no death came. I cleared the critical distance and jumped out-system. I was free. Nagamor 1, Pirates 0.

This is the beginning of a new chapter. I’m no longer afraid to be captured and run to ground by people better prepared than I. The tables have turned and I’m starting to face into the darkness with a gleam.

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