Artificial Stupidity

You've heard of Artificial Intelligence of course...

This is artificial stupidity :) 

A friend and I had a joint xbox session of Fallout 76. We went to the Red Rocket large truck station, grabbed the workstation, and got several waves of attackers a little later.

Those attackers were the stupid Chinese head-crab "liberator" robots. The station has a few Protectrons. Generally those things aren't very capable, but these liberators are the epitome of Artificial Stupidity here.

In this video, you can see some of those head-crabs and a protectron (aka "red robot"). Red is standing there shooting some head-crabs. The head-crabs are too stupid for words. So stupid that they're funny, doing their very own Morris dance (imagine photo from The Holy Grail here that has those jumping ninnies from Launcelot's solo scene at the castle rescuing Alex Herbert; I couldn't find it and don't have time to frame-rip the entire movie and then hunt for that bit)

Similarly artificial stupid: when your NPC companion steps in between you and a target just as you shoot a massively hard range attack while zoomed in such that you can't see where your companion is and your companion gets killed instead. Or when a bunch of opponents stand around looking at you, but doing nothing, because altho they can see you up close, they can't figure a traversal path to get next to you to hit you--but they jiggle back and forth because they're in a weird math spot where they can't do otherwise.

Fallout 76 B.E.T.A. and released game

This game is several things right now (Nov 1 2018):

1) multi-player, which I do not do.
2) Aggravating, which I do not like.

I'm playing on the Xbox, a 1X, on a 4K TV, so it looks beautiful. Far more detail that F4/etc, and apparently a much larger map.

It really seems like you MUST do it as part of a team, because what happens a lot is that you get swarmed by opponents 10 at a time--by yourself you are dead fast. And while you can respawn, you dropped all your "junk" at the death place. You can go back and get it, which is good. But the swarms are aggravating.

It is like playing survival-mode F4. I did not do that mode--the excessive focus on food/water/rads is aggravating--you spend way too much time worrying about them. I don't personally burn through food and water anywhere near that fast, IRL, so it's quite aggravating here.

The card-based "perks" system is aggravating. The Skyrim approach to all this is best; F4 is ok...but it really should be the case that you get better at lockpicking by doing more lockpicking, not by finding a perk card.

You can do PvP if you want, or you can turn that off. Which is good, or the aggravation of having others attack you would lead to servers all being populated by assholes who go around killing newbies.

As it's the Beta, there are problems. One of the worst is that there is a serious issue about clipping. More than once I have found myself "inside" an opponent, that is doing melee hits on me, and because I'm inside it, I can't even see it, so I can't shoot, but I can't even know that it's there.

Do I recommend this game? Well, no, I guess I don't. Not yet. When it's $20. It needs to become less aggravating. Am I going to continue to play? Well, yeah, but not a lot. Can't really play at home, don't have enough bandwidth--or a 4K--but of course the worst thing about multi-player is how to you put together a team? Clans? Not interested even slightly. So if you play solo some, and team some, your team is going to be level-lopsided. That said, it does feel better than ESO; I have that, may have played 4 hours. It wasn't interesting. Only paid $10, not sure it's worth even that. ESO seems very weighted towards teams, too.

Events are weird things. Every so often, in various places, there's an "event", like X is attacking Y, help out for 20 minutes. Morgantown Airport has one, where five waves of "scorched" attack. You kill all scorched in all five waves, in the time limit, you get goodies, and there's a large goodie-box dropped on you. I did this battle once with a friend, and bumped into it solo...turns out if you don't participate, it times out, there's only the first wave, and they stand around being stupid.

You have a portable "C.A.M.P." that is a "base" location. You can build walls, crafting stations, etc. In fact, you really kinda need to. But it's portable, so if you DON'T build stuff, you can relocate the camp.

Excess weight doesn't slow you down, but it takes Action Points to run. Power armor is just like F4: there's a frame, takes fusion cores to run it, and you can eventually put armor pieces on it. I have seen some power armor crafting frames, but no armor, although I know of a place where it does spawn, because friend got it there. Not really that useful unless you are able to find/make fusion cores. In F4 I have approx 100 cores, perked them up to double-duration, and I use PA non-stop. In F76, not clear that you EVER use it.

As much as anything, F76 is about finding or creating useful loot. Occasionally you do find really interesting things: I have a piece of armor that does health regen--I love that stuff.

I think the BETA agreement is that I don't publish anything about the game until it's officially released, in a couple of weeks. So this waits until after that.

Have seen critters attack each other; saw a mirelurk fighting some rats today. Robots fight each other, too. This is good; it can't be true that all the opponents are friendly towards each other. One of the robot varieties is rather much like a headcrab, all jumpy and bitey.

Apparently there are giant bats that look like dragons that somehow create[d] the scorched. A swarm is scorched is aggravating, but they carry guns and ammo. (OK, that giant bat is the ScorchBeast, L50).

Not enough merchants, so you probably do more scrapping than selling.

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Released game

Not enough merchants. For sure. Altho I did bump into an L50 Super Mutant wandering Merchant named Grahm; he's friendly, you can trade/sell. Saw him getting attacked by the other SMs at Grafton Steel and doing nothing. Eventually he "woke up" and beat the snot out of them (they were L10, so there was no way it was going to go well for them).

Have found things to be glitchy. The released game seems to have more trouble than the BETA; I would bet that is server issues related to the sudden large increase in players.

It has "crashed out to desktop" on me several times, leading to the conclusion that the BETA was more stable. Well, the server load was less.

Found an L50 Queen Mirelurk. And a L40 "glowing one" protecting a loot cache crate.

A weird thing I've experienced a couple times: some actions suddenly cause the respawn of a batch of opponents. Right next to you. Which then kill you fast.

The weapon swapping UI is terrible. FO4 did ok with this. FO76 is bad. They need to change to the FO4 approach.

You can play OK by yourself. You will want to be careful and stealthy if you do, there are plenty of places where you can get unexpectedly overwhelmed by a crowd.

I don't think the ability to have a "Permanent CAMP" is going to work. Today I wandered past someone's camp...if that is permanent in all map/world instances, one of these days the entire map will be filled with CAMPs. How could it not? Imagine 100 thousand players, each makes a permanent CAMP, that will dominate the landscape as far as the eye can see.

Power armor shows up here/there randomly. You'll find it before too long. I have a frame, have seen several others (which is nifty because you can take the fusion core from each one, and they have had a couple of other pieces of armor...Armor that I can't use yet, but I do have T46 (L25) and T51 (L30) armor pieces.

This is a survival game. You have to manage your food, water, rads all the time. This is really mostly annoying, because you can find enough stuff to drink and eat that there's more or less zero value to having to craft it, or be extra careful about what you're doing here/there. It interrupts game flow.

I did find a piece of "regenerating leather armor" that I am wearing. It seems not to work in power armor? But I do like these items, they let you not have to use your stimpaks all the time. Sleeping works too, but I never do that--where would you be safe? (OK, your CAMP, if you built it in such a way that it was virtually inaccessible from the ground; seen this done...it of course violates physics and construction realities--in essence the weight of all walls/floors/etc is zero, but their strength is infinite...so you can build in a choke-point corridor killing field where a wad of turrets can shoot anything on an approach vector, because you control the vector)

Another Game: Elder Scrolls Online

Have been waiting a while for circumstances to line up properly before acquiring this. MMOs aren't really my cuppa. Played Guild Wars for a while, some years back. That seemed to have a slightly better aspect about forming an adhoc group.

I waited until I could have my games PC on a really good internet connection (I have 175 MBits, at work (home is abysmal)), and the price was good ($10 on Steam summer sale).

So here's a couple of pictures taken on my phone because I don't know how to screen-snap the game and deal with it afterwards (I know, not hard, I just haven't tried).

Here's something funny, and not even slightly new:

Bethesda has been making games for a long time. Their 3D is excellent. But they still have a few issues--either that or their mages can float everywhere. Granted, the setting IS Morrowind, and the mages DID fly there. Or, as Doc Brown said once "Is there something wrong with gravity?"

Here's a another classic:

What do you know? Somebody feels a disturbance in the force...Vivec: "that would be me"

The setting is still the island of Morrowind, and it's WAY prettier than I remember...and it's WAY more dangerous, too. The mudcrabs aren't all angry and can be ignored, but virtually everything else wants to kill you.

Party formation is weird, it's simpler to do the routine of wandering wherever, wait for others to show  up to kill things you don't want to fight, grab the target loot while they're fighting, and run away. (Guild Wars was better about the party formation...there were meet points where you could find others waiting like you, and agree to go somewhere together. Once that was done, you were back at the meet point.) That way you weren't stuck with a group where folks couldn't agree on what/how to do (shades of Leroy Jenkins).

I haven't tried talking to anyone here yet. You can just join in a fight, get credit for the kill, grab the loot, and move on, without even talking to anyone. Did that yesterday.

A stupid, but interesting tactic...work a task solo, grab the loot, then let yourself get killed...you get to respawn at a waypoint that is somewhere away from danger. I did this today by accident and got out of a cave place where I didn't see how to escape and it was jammed full of opponents. That probably cost me something, but I don't remember what. Probably now I need to get armor repaired.

This game takes place before Dagoth Ur arrives, but the Red Mountain is leaking lava. No ash storms yet. Lots of giant mushrooms. I'm playing as lizard-man again, because of the water-breathing attribute. That has always been very useful.

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Four weeks later: well, I haven't played more here as I got sidetracked pretty hard at work. Can't say this had felt interesting enough to hurry back to.

I bought SpellForce 3 during Steam Summer Sale. The graphics are better but I think the UI is distinctly harder to use.

Things that aggravate me in computer games...

Well, it's probably just one, really.

It's the situation in a game where the creators force you to play it *their* way, as opposed to allowing me to go at it *my* way.

Especially bad when you don't even know what you're doing at first. 

Cases in point:

Because I'm leading up to playing Wolfenstein 2...on Xbox:

1) Wolfie: New Order -- I played up to the point where you come back from the moon, and end up facing Mr Stompy. This is an arena fight, your ability to aim and do some other funky controller things that I am not good at, really it's the run+slide+shoot = too many things at once. So that's where I had to stop. My patience for these things is getting lower. I did, however, play through this successfully on the PC a few years ago, although I remember that being tricky then too.

2) Wolfie: Old Blood: You have to fight Jager, in the tavern. It's another arena, and it's tiny. Jager is in power armor. It turns out that you have to shoot the blue power nodes on his shoulders a few times; he powers down for a short bit, you have to go pry a piece of armor off while he's in that state. Then you have to do it again, several times. There's really not enough cover of significance to work with, the power armor seems to have dual-wield miniguns with infinite ammo, and he's in motion all the time. And this is after he smashes down the front door, but it's still blocked so you can't run outside where there's better cover--because you know he's going to come after you: you killed his dog.

3) Wolfie: Old Blood: Just before Jager, you fought the big mechanical dog out at the end of the bridge. This is really contrived, because you have to either be doing run-n-gun as soon as he shows up, or you have to find the one hiding place where he doesn't attack (except for the part where he does, and can hurt you *thru the walls*. I watched a couple youtube videos about this, and it turns out (at least on super-easy) that it takes two measly shots with the kampfpistole (which is essentially the single-shot grenade launcher). But I had to try various weapons a bunch of times to figure that out.

4) DOOM: there is the spot where, even on super-easy, there are two of those great big demons, it's an arena fight...

5) on PC: Wolfie: Return to Castle W: I'm in this cathedral thing, have to climb a ladder up a tower, and there's a grenade-girl at the top who is going to kill me before I get in position to aim at her. It's basically an arena except that it's really a tube, and the cover works against me. If I could actually turn around further...but you can't, your range of motion is explicitly limited.

OK, you get the picture, it's these arena fights. The arena is *always* a "locked room" and it won't unlock until your opponent(s) is dead. Mostly what I'd prefer is to be able to draw the opponent's attention and then run away. 

The problem on my end is of course that (1) *I* am not quite good enough to do this their way, and (2) the xbox controller isn't either, and finally (3) on PC I have to play left-handed for RSI reasons. That's less an issue on xbox, actually, b/c there IS NO left-handed-ness...on Windows, well, that's an imperfect modified key-mapping (but at least you can do that, which wasn't always true in the past).

This results in my preferring the Bethesda RPG vs FPS games, where I can fight and run away. 

The current situation with Wolfie is that I'm done playing those games. And not coming back to them later. Which is too bad, because I was near the end of (1), but not even halfway through (3) and (5).

Wolfenstein 2 is coming up, but I'm not sanguine about my chances there--it seems entirely too likely, in advance, that there will be some of this arena-battle stuff that I can't get through. (Later: yep, there was. The "courtroom" battle is an arena. With A LOT of opponents, and the scenery/furniture is destructible, which means you can't really hide behind it for very long.)

I played all the way through all of these things (exc Doom) on my PC when they came out. Mostly that was a few years ago and now I'm older.

Related to the "have to do it *their* way is the "I want to climb up to *right there*" but I can't. In (2), you're in the tavern, there is clearly a "trap-door" up some stairs to the second floor, but it's locked. (actually, it isn't even a door that *could* be opened, it's a visual decoration).

The visual aspect of "town" in (2) and (3) is fabulous--this is some really good-looking surface texture art.

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Later that night: played Wolfie 2 some. After the point, still on the flying platform, where you get the super-suit, you end up in an arena battle against *something* that is big, clearly tough, has dual-wield *something* that looks like big laser or railgun (well, not railgun, really seemed energy weapon, has a charge time with an associate noise). I've no idea how you take this one out, but it seems fairly stupid, and it certainly isn't fast--easy to outrun, but there's not really a safe spot. (OK, this is the "laser cannon", kinda like the minigun, you can't keep it). You need this weapon to burn a hole in a wall, so there's no way out of this battle. (At least it's not Jager in the tavern again). Ah, apparently there's a second one, a little later, before you get to leave the airship.



There's a play-style dichotomy in this game (as with the predecessors):
"You will see some icons with numbers appear on the screen. They indicate the positions of special enemies - the commanders - who are able to call in reinforcements. You should always prioritize these targets (preferably take them down quietly) first to avoid troubles."

This game is about killing nazis. Why would you want fewer of them? 

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Also: I hate "jumping games" where your jumping has to be perfectly timed/aimed/something in order to get around. You try to do that with wireless kbd/mouse...yeah, not so much.

I'd be more or less ok doing such jumping IRL, if I was, you know, 25 years old still (but I'm nowhere near)

A Skyrim question for those in the know...or willing to test this

I was talking to another Skyrim player today, who asked if I had ever resurrected/re-animated a dragon.

No, I couldn't even imagine how such might be possible...right? You kill it, you take its soul immediately, no oppo to resurrect.

No, he says, there's a gap between the death and the soul capture where you might resurrect it. If your spell (and I guess your appropriate magic skill) is high enough, you can, he says.

I have not tried this? Any matching experience on this?

You do reach a point where you get to summon a dragon (Durnhevir or something like that). I haven't found it that useful.

Upgrading from XBOX ONE to XBOX ONE X

For unexpected reasons, I got to buy a new Xbox One X this month...i.e., it basically cost me nothing. Otherwise I probably would not have.

So Microsoft wised up re XBOX ONE the past few years, with several things:

1) you can finally attach an external disk and install games onto it, so that you aren't space-limited to the internal drive it came with that cannot be upgraded. So there's also disk-management tools in the XBOX OS now, to format, transfer, and delete games. Yay! I did not know this, but it was a long time coming, given that the One had 3 USB ports.

2) somewhere 2-3 years ago the finally released a 360 emulator, so that you could continue to play your 360 games. Well, some of them, anyway...after saying for some time that there would never even be such an emulator, all of a sudden there was. Yay! Fallout 3/FNV come back. Oblivion does not.

3) with the release of the One X, now there's built-in help for new owners to be able to upgrade from old box to new one. This would be me.

Unfortunately, it's not as smooth as it should be.

It should not take an Advanced Degree to figure this out. But it almost did...

But you have a bunch of things you need to do.

1) Update the entirety of the Xbox One. If you're me, this could be a problem--it requires a real no-data-cap internet service, which is not what I have. So I didn't even BUY the X until I could time it with a visit to mom's house where she DOES have such a thing. It still took several hours. First I updated the OS on the One, then all the games that wanted it. (Mom's internet speed is decent but not extra fast.)

1A) Make sure that while you are online at this point, that you launch every game that has saves, so that all those saves are synchronized to the Xbox cloud. If you don't, those saves are going away.

2) You copy the "personal profile" (aka login & prefs) from the One, onto an external hard drive. This takes maybe a minute or so total, incl power up/down. There's a size minimum on external drives, so you can't do this with a thumb drive (which is stupid, since your profile is tiny).

3) Attach that external to the One X. Start the One X. It will copy your profile from the external disk. There will be some login monkeying around, some prompting about little things, but you will quickly have a profile on a new, but empty, machine.

4) You need to have the One X update itself. This turned out to only be 800 MegaBytes for me, so reasonably fast.

5) OK, not a step, per se, but it was nearly 10 pm by this point, so time to go home.

6) Next day--power up the One. You have to find where you can tell it "allow game transfer" in Settings. The reason you want to do this is that you want to copy all the games from the One to the X, over ethernet. This should be fastest. You have to be online to do this. You could also pop that external disk back on the One, copy all the games to the external, move that external to the X, and transfer them off the external; I didn't try this. 

7) Power up the X. Also online. Go to Settings/Network something, where it will say "Transfer", and let you see the One. Clock on the One icon, and you will get the list of games that can be transferred. Click all you want, then Go.

8) Wait until done. My two machines ran that at about 300 megabits/second the entire time, but it did still take a while, because we are talking about 275 megabytes. I guess I thought the Xbox ethernet would be gigabit like every other machine I have, but maybe not.

9) Power down the One. Unplug it completely.

10) Restart the X. Somewhere along here it is going to ask you about changing your home machine to the new one. This will log you out of the One, which is fine, because I'm going to wipe it and sell it anyway.

11) Try things out. Every single one you transferred. Because some of this won't go properly. Be online for this, so that it recovers all those game saves you did in step 1A.

12) I lost my game saves for FNV. Granted, that's a 360 game, I've no idea how those work internally. But my FNV saves are gone. The game does start up ok. But there are zero saves. I don't know if the Dishonored 1/2 saves are there or not, but not important: if I touch that again, it will be to start over. Grow Up seemed ok. Just need Skyrim and Fallout 4 to work. Wolfensteins aren't here yet. Diablo 3 looked ok--did I test if far enough?

13) Oh crud. Fallout 4 wants to do ANOTHER UPDATE, 17 GB this time. Ouch. I can't do that. Skyrim wants to do a 7 GB update; small enough that I let that go, but it does mean data will be a little tight the rest of the month. F4 is not getting that update yet.

14) Try out other games. Mostly that worked, I didn't try everything, but you need to, to be sure that all online sync gets done ok.

15) Bad discovery: my Skyrim game saves won't load. Apparently they are not portable, somehow. I can see them, incl the little screen-capture for each one, but if I choose one, it starts to load, then the screen goes black and stays there. If I press the "Home" button, I get a seg-fault crash that is so hard that the machine powers down--and I don't see any of it: screen stays black until the power light goes off. Wow. This equals a loss of, um, how many hours was it? "a lot" comes to mind.

Update: that crash is so hard that the controller won't restart the device. You have to hand-push the power switch on the front of the X.

16) Tried "New Game" in Skyrim. That works fine, but I really didn't want to be throwing away the old character. No idea what is going on.

17) I wonder if the Fallout 4 saves are broken too...I'd be ok with starting over there

18) Try loading Oblivion. The box says "Xbox One and 360" but no, it won't even allow the attempt. Power up the One--same deal. Not going to be doing that...I was willing to keep the One around for Oblivion, but no need.

19) Fire up the One and wipe it clean (well, except for the two Assassin's Creed games that came with it).

20) EBay. 

Whew. Harder than it should have been.

Upgrading a Mac is simpler than this. You do it entirely over the wire--just did it last week. Coupla mouse clicks and that's it.

This is probably the first time MS has actually done this, really. I don't know what Windows 10 does for changes/upgrades...I recall it being nothing for Win 7, when you are changing machines.

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Update: I have just gotten actually high-speed internet at work yesterday morning.

So I did all the updates on X 1 X. All good. Forgot about checking the F4 game saves, will do that tomorrow.

Because it was the HS stuff finally, I went to the Xbox store and bought Oblivion. Was reading about it the day before, apparently it's gotten a fresh re-release with some kind of "Enhanced for X1X" activity. It's not new 4K textures, but it's something in that direction. I tested it on a 4K tv, and by golly it looks better than HD. Very impressive. Just couldn't install from the DVD.

Oblivion is of course still a 360 game, but there it is...4K. Yeah! The key things to remember is to boost sneak before leaving the training area, and do a custom character class so that the major skills are the ones you are going to use the most.

Skyrim interesting discovery...

Small, but interesting. Learned this from a friend.

If you have the Solstheim expansion, there's a location called Kohlbjorn Barrow a short distance SE of the dock you land at. There's guy there who needs help because draugr keep killing his archaeological dig crew.

It takes several rounds of dungeon delving to get this all resolved, but at the end is a "Black Book" in a greenish room on a pedestal in the center. You read the book, you are transported to wherever (Hermaeus Somebody's realm), you have to do a quick run to the far end, where there's another book you want to read. The Black Books have some options for a "power" that you can choose. Here you want to pick "Secrets of Arcana".

Why? The power is that once a day you get a 30-second window in which you can cast a spell and it costs zero Magicka.

Not actually that useful, unless you have a super-expensive spell you want to cast.

OR...

you can cast a spell that is a continuous spell rather than a point spell. i.e., a point spell is like Fireball and a continuous spell is like "Flames" where you hold down the key until the opponents are all dead or  you are.

OK, that's not actually useful here. What IS useful: there are a few, and only a few, spells that do not require actual targets in order for you to get skill point boost. Those spells include Telekinesis, Detect Life, Detect [Un]Dead. You just hold the "hit" key/button down and away they go. So with Secrets of Arcana, you can launch that power, then select Detect Life somewhere there are plenty of people (like Whiterun town square, or maybe Riften), and cast the spell. Keep holding down the cast button/key, and if there are plenty of Live or Dead things, Alteration will race to 100 pretty quick. (Later: I was hoping I could use "Clairvoyance" to boost Illusion, but no go; the spell has to have an actual target to act upon in any category to do any boosting. Detect Life doesn't have a "selected" target, just bodies in detection range.)

I did this by finding a skeleton that wouldn't see and therefore not attack me, telling my companion to go somewhere else and wait, then launching spell as above. I held it down for a bit, then I went and got a fat rubber-band to do that holding for me. Went from level 32 to level 90 on the rubber band.

Remember that I'm on an Xbox One here, so the controller is possible to do this way. Friend came back and said I could get Detect Life from Tolfdir so I did that...then I could go to Whiterun and do it again. I think that from 32-90 took about two hours on Detect Dead with just the one skeleton, but going from 90-100 on Detect Life took about 5 minutes because Whiterun town square has so many folks walking around.

The speed of level-up on these skills is based on how many creatures are in range. Same deal with Sneak--more people walking around nearby, the faster your sneak skill goes up. I suspect you could go from 30 to 100 in Alteration in 15 minutes, with those first ones going by ridiculous fast. Didn't occur to me to measure it, so I don't know.

The only flaw in here is that you will probably gain 4 overall levels at the same time, and you can't pause in the middle to go find someone to buy training from, so you lose that oppo.

You appear to only be able to do this in Alteration (grabbing and holding a something with TK works just as well, and you can do that anywhere), and Illusion, all the other spells/categories require targets of some kind and aren't continuous or they have "ends", like healing.

Same friend suggested that perhaps for Restoration if you could use Greater Ward in conjunction with one of those soul-gem-based lasers you occasionally find, if the laser is less powerful than the Ward that you could do Restoration too. But that requires finding a really weak one of those lasers, and I haven't seen one in quite a while...I tried this, with Steadfast Ward which is not strong enough, and when it has shield failure which is almost instantly you have to recast, which doesn't work with Arcana.

If you know of another spell this works with I'd like to find out.

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Later: OK, there's another way. You can boost Restoration interestingly to the top, and it doesn't involve the Solstheim thing above.

I'm sure there are some variations on this that will work.

Find the "Atronach Stone" and accept the blessing. This blessing is that magical attacks on you convert 50% of damage back into magicka. Then you want to find one of those bird-beak things that shoots fire continuously and stand in front of it. Note that I do NOT mean the soul-gem based things.

Now you are taking damage and gaining Magicka. You probably want to wear some enchanted armor pieces that do magic damage reduction, and maybe boost your magicka regeneration. Then, on top of all that, you want to choose "Healing" as your active spell and run it continuously. Healing takes a target, i.e., *you*, which means it works for skill-leveling. You want your magicka regen to be more or less the same rate as Healing uses it up, 8 pts/sec, and you want the actual fire damage to be about 8/second, so that these things balance. A little more complicated, but you can then run Restoration to 100. You might need to step out of the flame for a bit to heal full up on occasion, so it's not as easy as Alteration was. And you can do it without having to drink potions.

Watched someone do this for a couple minutes. Again here you'd want to stop when your character levels up so that you can go buy 5 training levels.

There's another blessing of Atronach you can get, worth about 20% attack=>recover_magicka that might help.

+++++

So these things are of course a little bit game-destabilizing, when you combine them with the rollover you can do by claiming "Legendary" on, say, Alteration, resetting it back to 15, letting you take those skill points and apply them elsewhere, run the Detect Life routine again, all the way to 100, declare Legendary again, etc. If you have the $, you could train up along the way, etc.

Or at least train things that aren't, all the way to 50. That's reasonably inexpensive; after 50, the price is quadruple, so you probably don't have that much cash.

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A generically similar approach can be taken with Blocking, and Light/Heavy Armor. You want to let a rat bite on you, but not really take health damage. Rat continues to attack, you cast heal. I found that holding a shield in left hand and Healing in the right did well. Block can be run to 100; again, you want to stop for training oppos. But if you did this with the Atronach/Heal-Self combo, you could stand there forever letting the rat work on you until Light and Heavy Armor are at 100, Block is at 100...

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Back in Oblivion, you could run Sneak to 100 without even leaving the initial training area, same basic deal. There's that point where you are told to sneak behind that goblin. Turns out there's a location opposite where you enter his room where you can aim yourself at the wall, lean on the move-forward key, and go AFK. If you selected Sneak as a Major skill, you can level your character up to 10 after a while; this will actually take several hours, but does not involve any danger for you, the goblin will NOT look backwards. The only trick is getting yourself aimed properly, and then managing the 25/50/75 perk points.

You couldn't really do the rat-bite routine, because getting attacked damaged your armor, too, which meant you needed repair hammers or spare armor. I can't recall if you could do repairs while in combat...

Also possible: On the Xbox (finally!) that sneak boost above can be done unaided, you can put a rubber band on the the controller and walk away.

New Wolfenstein

This really looks good. No, I don't have it yet, at 55 gigabytes, it's going to be a while before I can actually download that whole thing. Probably going to wait until xmas, when I'll be somewhere that has unlimited internet and I can allow the multiple-hours download.

In any case, I watched about 10 mins of play-through video (which was amusing, the guy doing the playing had it set to lowest difficulty and was getting killed often). Resolution and detail look impressive. Starting out in the wheelchair looks pretty hard. I'll need to go back and play the others (New Order, Old Blood) first.

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After christmas: Steam sale had this at half-price, so I bought it. AND did the download, which was only *45* gigabytes. Still took five hours. Just wait until the first serious update, that'll be another 30GB I'm sure. Yeesh.

Bought Return to Wolfenstein too, that was only a couple bucks, and 760 megabytes. Download maybe 10/15 mins…I only vaguely remember that one, there was some crazy Scottish guy and a fat lady who sang.

I supposedly have a Windows 10 installer DVD coming, so I can upgrade the PC, and then maybe play some of this stuff (Prey is still in the wings).

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March 1: If I'd been paying more attention, I'd have been able to buy this for Xbox for $30 at Best Buy. I'm sure it would have wanted an update that was huge. This one is in 4K. Geez that's going to be big.

The prior games are pretty cheap on Amazon, New Order + Old Blood for $18. First one seems not available. Since I have a new Xbox One X, with double the disk space, this looks like fun to do over again. Hope the controller aspect doesn't kill me.

Revisiting Oblivion

This is still my favorite Bethesda game. Newer ones do have improvements in various places, but I like the looks of this one best. Mostly because of inside the Oblivion Gates was so radically different. And the normal terrain wasn't snow. I hate snow.

So I re-acquired it on Steam last year. Decided I would play it without using Chameleon at all, and on much higher difficulty.

Well, the decision to not use Chameleon went by the wayside. The higher difficulty level pretty much killed the possibility of avoiding it.

I'd also forgotten the need to craft a character design better. So I picked a standard flavor, which resulted in most of my major skills being ones I don't care about, and skills I *do* care about aren't helping me level up.

I remembered the need to run Sneak to 100 during the training tunnels, and I invented a new (for me) approach to boosting various magic skills (you have to get into the University, but once you do you can craft a micro-spell that takes 2 magicka per cast and then lean on the "cast" key until you hit 100. Can run around at the same time, but I think that before I do this ever again I'm going to make myself a small weighted gadget that will sit next to the keyboard and do the "leaning" for me; it's a thing that will take several hours, and I don't want to sit there the entire time.

So for that to work interesting for you, you also need to pay for training 5 times each level, to maximize the speed at which you can level up. You do this because at the bottom loot and gear are really uninteresting.

On easy mode, you won't see glass armor until level 10. On "hard', not until you pass 20.

So I'm a weakling character, at Level 23 I have 225 Health; the only way I can take on an opponent is with Chameleon > 100%. So I had to get into Unseen University to craft spells and enchant armor. With Chameleon > 100% you are, to all intents and purposes, permanently invisible. This is, of course, an unfair advantage, and the game becomes less interesting overall. You can't be attacked, you WON'T be attacked, because nothing can see you to do it.

At this difficulty level, opponents are significantly stronger than you, 2-3 hits and you are dead.

(In Morrowind the ability to levitate/fly was similarly "cheating", because only those attack birds could come after you. It may have been that chameleon was equally bad, I never even tried it as I didn't know what it was.)

But when you don't ever have to fight, then you're really going around collecting loot. The best loot is found inside Gates.

If I decide to go through this again, I'm going to try harder to remember how to create my character up front, and avoid Chameleon. And probably play at a lower difficulty.

Number 200.

Blog number 200. And it's a game blog :) (ok, technically I've only *released* 196; four drafts are pending, perhaps forever, not clear they are topics that can really be discussed)

Witcher 3.

These guys love their mo-cap and their cutscenes. Much of which leads to things I don't like.

They want you to play the game their way, which is not how I want to play these games.

If you want that, to the point that you are going to force me into it, just make a cutscene I can watch without participating. Better still, say so up front so I can skip the game entirely.


Things I like about this game:

It's gorgeous. Probably the best-looking game I've played. Elder Scrolls 6 will look at least this good.

Saves are right. Lotta folks fail on this one.


Things that annoyed me about this game:

The need for mo-cap everywhere, and the idea (like in the Batman games) that what I want to look at most is the mo-cap, and that hyper-realistic is the goal of games. Mo-cap is not the be-all/end-all in games.

The cutscenes that go on forever.

The large amount of pointless profanity.

All the apparent prostitution--was there really that much of it in the past? Walk through Novigrad and count the various prostitutes--it's a lot.

The movement that is scripted. The problems I had over and over about UI control over what I was doing--most of the times I got killed were keystroke failures because I felt my ability to control Geralt was constrained. I use a wireless mouse and keyboard. They are slightly laggy, this causes trouble. Example: you are too close to an opponent, you automatically go into a crouch and slow down--no, I want to run, not creep.

Being unable to use a real bow and arrow. That little crossbow you have is just about pointless.

Having to play as Ciri once in a while without having much practice at it, and her controls are for completely different abilities. And her only health recovery is to run around out of reach. And when the movement controls force those crouches...and she has no armor...and she has no food/etc for health recovery...

The fact that combat does nothing for your Level-up advancement, only quest completion does that.

The fact that quests need to be worked on when you're near the same skill level, else they aren't worth much in XP points. You wait too long and their value drops to one single XP.

You can't drop a quest. Several times where that was really the better solution, esp once the XP had dropped to be worthless.

All the quests that are about finding diagrams for better gear are a waste of time--the gear isn't better. Even the master-crafted stuff; when you finish with Hattori, he makes a freebie for you. It was 3 levels behind what I was already using. Boring--it should scale exactly to where I am.

The 40-mph wind that never stops.

Potions are incomprehensible. And look largely useless. I have yet to use one.

Magic that is relatively useless, and way to weak to do much for you. Part of the story in this game is that some large-ish faction is trying to eliminate all of it. OK by me.

The local "economy", which is pretty feeble. Why is that this is so common in games? All the Bethesda stuff has this problem until the mods get made that fix it. (Remember Morrowind? That was the worst. You could easily find Daedric items that were so high-priced no one could buy them from you. Even after I found several mods that boosted merchants and made more of them, it was still possible to come back from a dungeon crawl with so much stuff that you'd have to drop a bunch on the ground, where it would sit forever. You want the merchant to have cash again? Sleep 24 hours. How many times are you going to do that when they have 5000 gold and you have 150,000 of items?)

It shouldn't be this easy...

I got the new DOOM version on the last day of Steam summer sale. Half-price, good deal.

It only took me about four hours to find a bug in the game.

Really, people? This is neither a new problem or needing a new solution.

Does it take an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure this out? Surely not...

and yet, here we are again.

The situation:  this is the outside area before you move on to the Foundry, so it's early in the game. I've run into a group of opponents. Most are "possessed", shamblers like zombies. One of them is one of those guys with the blue full-height energy shield; they are tricky, your weapons at that point are completely inadequate for this, unless you manage some other advantage. So I run backwards, out through the airlock, and wait. Actually, this isn't a good idea, it's going to allow them all to catch up to me.

The airlock door is going to be very strong--it's an airlock. But it's also mostly transparent, so I can see them and they can see me. And I can see them wiggling around as though the path-finding math is trying alternate movement plans to get at me.

The thing with the shield has an organic "machine-gun" thing as its right arm. The thing has a center of gravity, that CoG is stuck on the other side of the door, it can't come through. But apparently the weapon has its own independent CoG, and that isn't being given position test that keeps it clipped behind the door.

So the gun is actually on MY side of the airlock door, while the thing's body is on the OTHER side of the door. And I don't realize that this is a bug until it kills me.

And then you bump into the other major-league suck about DOOM and that is what's casually known as "checkpointed saves". Which means I have to run this whole level over. More than once, it turned out, while trying to figure out how to attack properly, although I only got clipping-bug-killed once. (So the guy with the shield is a little slow, you can run around behind the shield and blast it in the back.)

and I have no idea how to report this bug. I don't know how to take a screen-snap, so I don't even have proper evidence that it happened. Others do know, so you can go look for something like this: google for "doom arrow knee", and yes, you'll see a long-dead humanoid body with a Skyrim helmet and an arrow in its knee.

Back to the original point: it should NOT take an Advanced Degree (tm) to understand that the gun has to exist on the same side of a door as the body, and therefore CANNOT mathemagically kill me.

Sheesh.

And of course having to take on two Hell Knights at the same time is a disaster. You should avoid that. I backed down to difficulty=1 for that.


Later: couple of updates. I crashed out to desktop around 10 hours. Just the one time, not sure why. This game is a massive resource hog--my PC is a quad-core, and all four are running over 90%. Plus, RAM is maxed out over 90% too. I can imagine those resources being the cause of a seg-fault.

Glory kill of one of the demons is amusing: you rip its heart out, and then stuff that heart down its throat, and it then explodes. There's a different one where you rip its arm off and bludgeon it with the arm.

Major flaw #2: WAY too much jumping. I hate that. I use a bluetooth mouse and keyboard. That REALLY doesn't work with this jumping crap.

And now, I've just "returned from Hell" and I'm stuck. There seems to be no proceed point. You run around a small amount, on what looks like a self-contained area of the map, from which you cannot proceed to the rest of it. It's showing no named task assignment, no description of what I'm doing next. And I can't see how to get off the map area I'm on. Dude--where's my jetpack? (Later: watched someone else's video-capture walkthrough, saw that there was another jump point upwards that leads on.)

Flaw #3: this game basically forces you to play it their way. Not what I want to do. There is a map-load message that says something to the effect of "standing still gets you killed". I want to do a slow play-through where I get to sneak/crouch/crawl around and eliminate things one at a time without getting into a run-n-gun with 4 or 5 Hell Knights and a couple of those flying shoulder-rocket things and other stuff. So I'm playing on god mode. Feels like Ultra-V--no way this is difficulty 1.

It's gorgeous, but I can't recommend this game. I may play through to the end, but I won't do it again.

Last: well, I won't even be playing through to the end. Remember Flaw #1? Checkpointed saves? Yeah, that doesn't work. Not completely. Started up again, having watched a video walkthrough, knowing what to do next, and the game says my one-and-only (because checkpoints, right?) save is corrupted and cannot load. How to proceed? Well, start over.

Goodbye. It's pretty but it sucks.

Later later: forgot this. Flaw #4: Another bug. There was a demon that had somehow spawned inside a wall (well, not that exactly, but on the opposite side of space where I can see it and shoot it, somehow inside. It was the one that throws fireballs. So being where it is, the walls behave differently in the math, it can see me, and throw fireballs at me THRU THE WALLS).

I guess it DOES take an Advanced Degree (tm) to do this right.

One last thought. It was entertaining seeing the demons occasionally attack each other. That didn't happen often enough. There were a few places in Quake 1 where that could happen, but it was rare.

Elite Dangerous

Got this on the recommmendation of a co-worker.

Without a doubt, this is THE WORST GAME UI I HAVE EVER SEEN.

I quit permanently after entirely too much difficulty doing the most basic of things. Things that you are never going to do IRL.

Like docking. Docking will NEVER be a manual process where you steer by mouse. It will be 100% automated at all times. As will launch.

I simply don't have time to waste on this kind of crud. Fortunately I only paid a few $ for it.

Fallout 4, finally!

Fired this up moments after midnight 2 weeks ago...(i.e., right when it was released; had already done the download)

Should explain part of that...last year at the company xmas party, which has door prizes, I won the grand prize, an Xbox One. I'm not a console guy so this was an interesting opportunity...

Can't say I'm overfond of the handheld with these things, it's WAY too hard to aim effectively...

But after a few months I thought -- I should get F4 on the Xbox. Then, in the fall, when I decide to advance order it, I discover that Microsoft has reversed their prior statement about it being too hard to produce a Xbox 360 emulator that will run on the One, and now there is such a thing, and a number of 360 games (but not all) will run on it, including Fallout 3, and that what you can buy is actually the F3/F4 bundle.

OK, that sounds good...I don't think I even finished playing F3. Parts were confusing and I was unable to find certain locations you had to go to, so I stopped trying to do that and just wandered around.

So, F4. Have played ~60 hours in the last two weeks. The controller is just as sucky as you will get told in PC Gamer--mouse is better for aim. Otoh, those little joystick things are better for very slow motion--you can walk at a very slow pace, turn very slowly. It's the fast turn that is very poor.

I crashed it once, yesterday. Loading a map for a building interior, bam, down it went. I could tell it had crashed, in the middle, and then the audio went bad, too, and it dropped back "to desktop". It was fine restarting again, so no loss. [Later: this has happened a couple more times, no indication why]

Overall, this is exactly the increment forward you are expecting from Bethesda. It is not pointy-end-of-the-spear state of the art, that seems to go to a PS4 game I forget the name of, but this is Bethesda's best. (Elder Scrolls 6 will be fabulous.)

The amount and precision of detail is amazing. This is a wander-around-and-look-at-things game, so I do a lot of that, and there's a lot to look at. I haven't yet felt I was looking at clones of anything yet, other than things like burned books n stuff. Watch out for Deathclaws until you have power armor.

You'd think that after 200 years, the local population would have done some actual cleanup, but there seems to be very little of that--and you can't tell them to do it either.

The color scheme overall is much the same light-brown-various-gray-earthtones that F3 and FNV had, which I think is kinda wrong. Plant life would recover at some point, esp after 200 years, as often as it rains, weeds especially would recover--just think about how many buried seeds there in your back yard. There would be plenty of green around. (OK, it turns out that if you are running Steam, there are user-mods that green things up. No good for me.) And there would be things like bicycles and brahmin-carts as transportation--and thus there would be more-or-less cleared roadways--if a brahmin can be a pack animal, it can haul a four-wheeled wooden cart.

I've meandered over about a fourth of the total map so far. Quite a ways to go...no hurry to do it all, I'm not one of those crazy folks who has to do a speed-run on it. Ultimately this game will have cost me 10 cents/hour to have played it, AND I get to go back and retry F3.
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Later (post xmas): have about 150 hours on this now. Other than two things (lack of color, and the endless amount of trash around that no one cleans up, even in a settlement that has people just standing around), this has been good fun. I still have a fair amount of territory to cover.

Definitely worth the price.
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Update: ok, the first DLC was just released. Apparently I had already paid for this with the Expensive Bundle back in the beginning. Time to build a robot!

Update 2: next DLC comes out in 2 weeks.

Bio Schockers

I finally went through Bioshock 1 for the first time. Got this on steam a while ago...actually played through successfully this go-round...I had the DVD-installed game 10 years ago, but it had a problem with crashing, and then I got to an airlock/map-level-change that wouldn't work, so I had to give up.

Didn't really get the supposed Ayn Rand feel of it, tho. I've read Atlas Shrugged, 40 years ago. Maybe it's been too long since I read that. This seemed more about generic power struggle between Ryan, Fontaine, Tennenbaum, etc. I played about half of it in silence, as my computer's internal audio was broken (still is, but I got a usb-audio stick).

Well, this new version from Steam got all the way through to the end, but not without some of the same flavor of seg-fault crashes. Gad. Isn't anyone able to do anything about this? *My* software doesn't seg-fault (well, actually some of it does, and those seg-faults are caused by third-party tools, and they crash in strange ways; usually I have to alert the 3rd-party-manuf about them: you know, "the JVM has detected a failure in native code" and then you get the damn core-dump, which doesn't actually terminate properly, so I can't have an auto-restart; I have a different thing where a sub-process called in a shell crashes on me so hard that it doesn't just kill itself, it takes out my code too (on Linux! no less); man I hate other people's software).

Bioshock 2 crashes on me too...entirely too often. WAY too often. Piece of crap.

At least Windows doesn't get killed along with it. But still...I wish there was some way to complain to Steam about this--entirely too many games that I have bought from Steam have had serious crashing problems (or completely failing to start at all).

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Anyway...B1 was ok, although I found the controls a little hard to work with again. The worst of which was discovering repeatedly that I had bought a plasmid upgrade only to find that the slot for the plasmid had been moved, so where I thought I had dropped it was different, and then I'd have a time cycling through them to select again. I think that happened every time--making them not that useful.

And I think that the only really useful plasmids were electro-shock and TK. Incinerate was ok once in a while, but it drank Eve like a sand-dune.

With TK, you can grab an opponent's missile/grenade out of the air and throw it back at them. *That* is nifty--except that when it came time to take on Fontaine at the end I completely forgot about doing that and just did the usual run-n-gun with occasional grenades.

And what's with the deal that when you're using a gun, and you run out of one flavor of bullet, it doesn't auto-switch you to another one? You end up using the wrong ones most of the time anyway...

A rule of thumb--you should either hack or destroy every single health station you come across; hack the easier ones, and destroy the hard ones--otherwise splicers you didn't quite kill are using them against you by re-healthing.

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B2 was properly harder than B1. The controls are essentially identical, so no re-learning what to do. Big Sisters were appallingly hard to kill.

Which brings up another point: there's limited value to trying to dodge death, since you just get re-vitalized nearby.

Another rule of thumb: Bee Swarm is your friend. Upgrade that to max *early*, because the swarm is independent from you, can detect targets around corners, and will attack things out of sight. And out-of-sight opponents won't come running at you. You can take down anything with bee swarm if you're patient and they don't see you. Also: upgrade Hypnotize as fast as you can--that's your other best friend--get the opponents to fight each other, esp the big ones. Then get killed, stay in the Re-Vi chamber until they are done, then prep bee swarm for remaining singletons, or another hypnotize for small crowds.

One tonic you can take will do something unusual: prevent you from using nearly all your weapons, but also cuts the Eve cost down 90% or so, which means you're the magic man, but weapon limited--the drill just doesn't do that much for you. If you want to play this mode (which I did for a while, it was distinctly harder), you probably also need the shock/fire-protection add-ons, since you'll do a lot more melee. I did not try Decoy @ max here, which would be interesting too.

I mostly didn't listen to the audio diaries. Once in a while they contain a passcode for a locked door, but other than that they're pointless.

This crashed-out-to-desktop on me 2-3 times a day while I was playing it. Really. Talk about crappy software...

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[March 6, 2016] So this past 10 days I played Bioshock Infinite. Wonder of Wonders, it did not crash even once. Hooray!

Didn't understand it, tho. As with the others, you have to die at the end. And apparently, if you do like I did, and quit during the credits, you don't see the end thing that explains how it turned out (ok, well, it doesn't, really). So the ending is pretty meaningless. I'm still not sure I understand the explanation. You begin the game as Booker DeWitt. But maybe you are also Comstock? How is that possible? There's a baby. Comstock's baby. Maybe; that seems to have been a lie. Or maybe she was a created thing? Or something? Anyway, at age 19, she's been able to open "tears" between, well, "places", that might be parallel universes. One of which was Rapture. You have to rescue the girl and trade her for something, not clear what that is, maybe it's death. Or someone else' death? Huh? Why does your dying fix anything?

I'm told the "infinite" part of the name is about the multiple worlds...I've have believed that more if it was made more clear that you were traveling between them. And that each one had more that was different. It really only felt like two of them.

The setting feels like The Music Man. Or maybe a little older than that.

In the end: (spoilers!) it's your daughter, not explained how/why, you are/were/could-be Comstock, you have to time-travel to undo something that prevents him from being born, but that means you aren't born, something something something. I didn't understand it, such as that was. And I'm well familiar with the parallel universes routine.

I didn't find the "vigors/plasmids" to be that interesting. Except levitate. That was fun. Except when it didn't work on George or Abe.

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and of course this is just killing time before Fallout 4 arrives on Nov 10. I did the XBONE pre-order last night, that took hours to d/l, but I'm ready. And F3 comes with it, apparently. That was interesting. That's a 360 game, sounds like it's had an update for X1? Or something like that...I hope so, F4 cost was $90, which is pricey.

Only a few days left.

[Later: Fallout 3 bundle with F4 is because Microsoft did something they said they couldn't, which was to create an X360-emulator that runs on the XBOne, so that 360 games don't just go dead. But not all 360 games make the grade, but as I have zero of them, so what?]

Far Cry 2 and 3

There are a few things in computer games that REALLY REALLY torque me off.

1) Not letting me save where *I* want to. I.e., checkpointed saves, only when THEY want to let it happen.

2) Forcing me to play some scenes THEIR way instead of MY way.

3) Stupid and un-changeable keyboard settings.

4) Timed scenarios or sections.

5) No auto-saves at all. So that way, when the game crashes, you are going back to whatever was the last save, and redoing a bunch of stuff, as opposed to the autosave that SHOULD have taken place a few minutes ago when you made a huge transition in the game (Spore just screwed me over on this, I have to replay the entire third section ("Tribe") of the game; maybe I'll just punt--seriously, people? How hard is it to automate this? Does it take an Advanced Degree to understand this?)



Checkpointed saves mean you have to repeat actions that become annoying. This is generally compounded by being forced to play certain areas a particular way, AND being unable to modify control settings in such a way that I can do better. This is what killed Far Cry 1 for me.

Forcing me to play it their way--seriously folks? If that is what you want, just make a cut-scene of it, and let's move on. I hate that routine, and it will cause me to stop playing and then delete a game.

Un-changeable settings means typically that someone doesn't understand what other people need to do. *I* have to play with left-sided-left-handed mouse, because of RSI issues 15 years ago. I want to pretty much completely remap the keyboard/action settings, as well as flip mouse buttons.


Far Cry 2 was ok. I was able to finish it, and pretty much play it my way. That was good. Didn't like the ending, tho. You get two choices, but you die either way.

Far Cry 3 eventually pissed me off about action/controls, so I've quit playing. I was about 1/2 way through when I decided I couldn't tolerate it any more.

Steam Summer Sale 2105

Once again the Steam summer sale has killed my budget. Not the $ budget, the time budget. I spent about $125, got something like 25 games, and they will take me a couple of years to complete, during which time OTHER things will come out, or go on sale cheap, etc, an endless cycle.

I hope I don't run out of disk space too soon...There are games I already had that I haven't reloaded following the crash disaster last fall...

What all I got: Hitman series (5 titles), Rez Evil 4/5/6, Far Cry 2/3, Baldur's Gate 1/2, Icewind Dale, Just Cause 1/2, Shadowrun 1/2, Starpoint Gemini 1/2, Wolfenstein Old Blood, and some others...nearly two dozen...



So I'm playing through Far Cry 2 first. That's the Africa one. You can kinda stealth through a lot of it, and the sniper rifles are pretty good, super accurate. You get to drive vehicles and boats. The in-game currency is conflict diamonds, appropriately questionable morality.

There's even a little of fast travel! OK, it's just the bus lines, but still...

The one thing that really bugged me about this game at first was the fact that as soon as you clear out one area and leave, when you come back by it's been repopulated with opponents. The game does dynamically load/unload around the edges as you travel (Skyrim/et al do this too), and you don't have to go very far, maybe just out of sight, to cause map territory to unload and reload with more opponents. That was really aggravating, but it does give you plenty of tries at optimizing how you tackle any given spot.

One thing it needs: a compass, small, upper right corner, or at the top a la Skyrim, with a direction indicator in it.

Later: well, I broke it. Reached a point where I had to talk to an "associate", and it hung badly. No solution. Well, not to that interaction--I reloaded slightly back, and finished that specific mission a different way, all was ok, but that one path had no forward motion. It's the one where you have to take a bomb fuse to a guy waiting on the bridge at the far east edge of the map, so he can blow the bridge. I went there, he says "give me the fuse", and then the game hangs--not broken, there is still the standard Brownian motion in the graphics, it's just stuck somehow in the interaction. You have to either go to Task Manager, or log out. I had to log out. Sheesh.

You will do a lot of driving in this game, or boating. I did find a couple of hang-gliders, which is amusing except that those are terribly hard to fly, and they don't go anywhere useful.

Games for Girls

or Women, if you prefer.

several years ago I came across someone else's blog, in which she did one of the classic rants about games being created by males for males, and where were the games for females?

and of course I gave the classic response of "if you want one, make one" -- that really is the surest way to bring about something you want. Complaining about it accomplishes nothing.

In the general case, this is the most classic complaint you see about most any creative/consumptive endeavor. You see it here, you see it with music, movies, magazine articles...

Magazine articles? well, for smallish, single-topic magazines...there are a few writers, they are all free-lance, which means they are not being assigned stories by the editor, they write what they want...and then there are the readers, some of whom will complain something along the lines of "why don't you publish an article about X?" because they want to read an article about X. But they don't want to WRITE an article about X, they want to read it. And of course the editor always responds "how about if you write the article about X? and then we'll publish an article about X" but the complainer doesn't want to do the writing, just the reading, and generally seems to think that the magazine has this room full of writers just waiting to be assigned a story...well, maybe big mags and newspapers work like that...but I imagine they get the same kind of complaints too :)

back to games

it turns out there is a category on Steam called "Female Protagonist" (ok, you can play Skyrim as a "female", but I've done that, and I couldn't detect any differences; I seem to recall Voyager Elite Force 1 allowed you to play as female, and you'd have a different romantic interaction with an NPC (if you chose to) than if you played as male.

So are the "Female Protagonist" games any good? There are 400 games tagged with that label (not clear how/why "Zombie Army" got tagged with "FP"). "Neon Struct" and "Toren" look good, but too many of them look sprite- or anime/manga-based ("Hyperdimension Neptunia"). "Republique Remastered" looks excellent, but it's developed by pros.

How many were created by women programmers? Does that really make a difference? (I'm expecting it would, but in what ways?)

What would you say constitutes a Game for Girls/Women? What are the criteria?

I've put a couple on my wishlist, we'll see if they go on sale during the summer "Steam sale".

Fallout 4

FNV was better than FO3. No argument there.

FO4 is in Boston. Local outdoor stuff, like statues n such.

You will have a dog. And a jetpack. Dude. About time.

And more color. Seriously, folks, photosynthesis is not suddenly go from green to brown because of radiation. "life will find a way" (Jurassic Park)

There will be plenty of plants around, along with dead spots.

11-10-2015.

Yeah. That's what I'm talkin about. There goes another 1000 hours of my life :)

Probably on the XBone this time. Think I'll try that.

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Later (nov 7): it's almost here. I have to be sure I can do this offline, at The Ranch. First opp for that is nov 14, then xmas.

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2 years later:

OK, no jetpack, far as I can tell. And other subtle things. I just got informed that it's possible to see the extra-perk-points options, so that apparently there IS one where you can fast-travel while over-encumbered. But it's six levels away, so at Level 72 that's going to take a while to get there. I couldn't leave the institute because I was carrying too much, and lacked that perk. Geez.

Did discover something interesting, although I didn't test it long enough to see if it's permanent: The time comes when you are going to help a synth courser, but if you go collect him, you can then go do other stuff for a while and have a SECOND follower (I have the reporter (fewer paper cuts) already, AND then the courser). Only flaw with this is that your followers all bop around a bit, get in between you and targets, etc, meaning that you have to let them fight for you lest you shoot them in the back.

Crytek games

Steam had a sale of their usual style a few months ago, and I got a Crytek bundle:

Crisis 1, 2 + plus some expansions.

I also had a DVD of Far Cry from a while ago that I had not installed or played.

They'd had good reviews, as I recalled.

Far Cry 1: well, it's interesting until you get to that derelict ship (actually, this is fairly early). That was a nightmare for me.

Why? Checkpoint saves. Only. I hate that. That is nearly a complete deal-breaker, because those saves are generally not where I'd want...one of them is right before you climb out onto the top deck of that derelict, which is good, because that is a really really hard segment to run...and when you've cleared it, you have to get into this little dinghy that is hanging, I fell out of it twice all the way to the bottom where there is no way back up, meaning you have to reload the last checkpoint save and try to evade that damn helicopter AGAIN. Quit, and deleted the game--the annoyance is too great.

Crisis 1 is better. Actually, it's REALLY good, for a lot of reasons. 1) the enemies are North Koreans. That's almost as good as Nazis, except that I really wish they'd been wearing those ridiculous bouffant hats you always see them wear in photos. 2) Quicksaves and named saves. 3) The tank battle. 4) You drive the cars, the tanks, the boats, eventually a VTOL (which was weird). 4) It's much more about stealthing your way through some areas. 5) It's not terribly linear. It does get harder as you progress. 6) Lots of open territory. You don't have to go through it the same way every time. 7) There's some semblance of real story there (rescue a science team, discover the NKs, then the aliens, then the BIG aliens).

Crisis 2 is ok. I thought the end was a little disappointing. The aliens were individually interesting, but we're back to checkpoint-saves only. The settings/levels were all WAY too linear--but the setting kinda forces it that way, since it is basically outdoors in NYC. I'd have rather been able to just walk around in NYC, but there's a lot of jumping large distances between levels. Felt a little too episodic. Not much vehicles action--what little there is is unimportant (well, in C1 you can probably do the tank battle on foot, but that wouldn't be as interesting). Too much cut-scenes (arrrrg, if you want me to watch a movie, just make a movie).


I'll play Crisis 1 again (altho probably NOT that final battle on top of the carrier). Crisis 2, maybe. Far Cry, not a chance.

new Games via Steam pt 2

So I also got/played Batman Arkham Asylum over christmas vac. Only paid like $5 for this, so there was no way to be disappointed.

Annoyed, yes, but for $5 you can't say you didn't get your money's worth.

And what was annoying was the UI. It really feels like it's a console game, and that you should play it like that. (Something else that annoys me is that Batman doesn't use any hand-weapons; pretty sure that wasn't true 70 years ago.)

The thing I have the most trouble with in this sort of game is how the UI behaves (or fails). Example: about mid-way in the game you have to go find "Killer Croc" and collect some stuff. Then you have to get out. This is mostly about stealth, and knowing that you have to throw batarangs at him when he charges...except that when it comes time to leave, as you begin the final stretch suddenly the camera changes position--instead of being 3rd-person look forwards over the right shoulder, now it's in front of Batman, looking back at him--and you still have to run and dodge. So what, you say? Well, the camera has changed position to be in front looking back instead of in back looking front--which means that your key and mouse movements are now backwards, and for just this stretch the direction you run is not 100% under your control. I had a terrible time with this.

When you have to tackle Scarecrow, that game turns into a side-scroller. I hate those. When you take on Poison Ivy, that too is a side-scroller. And there's NO caps-lock=always-run.

Most of the combat is many-to-one kung-fu-punch-n-kick stuff, all about the "move" combinations, where opponents are mostly auto-targeted

I.e., it's a button-masher. That is quickly tiresome for me, partly because I can't do it all that well.

So I gave up in the middle of trying to beat Poison Ivy--that one has a little too much going on for me when I don't have control over the camera.

Still...only $5.

One thing that was useful was the character info, and dates. There's a lot of modern Batman that is things I don't know (Arkham Island/Asylum didn't exist in the old Batman I remember from 50 years ago).