Category: Games

My love for Oblivion has found new life, thanks largely to Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul. The main feature of this mod, other than adding some new items and NPCs, is to disable change level scaling. In vanilla Oblivion, NPCs will be, at most, your level. Making their levels closer to static does not allow you to go anywhere and beat anything, but it does allow for a feeling of gaining power, something that level scaling does not.

I’ve been ignoring the main quest, and just exploring caves and forts, looting what I can manage. I’ve run into a share of amusing glitches on the way. Not only have I heard the hilariously inconsistent voice acting of the beggars, but once I ran into an NPC that had, for some reason, fallen inside a set of stairs. She was jittering back and forth. I could still talk to her. After leaving the building and spending some time elsewhere, I found her standing at the foot of the stairs, unstuck.

I haven’t been able to replicate this, but I was crouched on a roof in Bruma and, on a whim, I shot a guard with my bow. He ran past me, up a staircase and onto a higher level, ran into a small raised barrier for a bit, then fell off the ledge, and climbed back up. Another guard joined him. I really should have saved then. The next time I tried, the guard just ran around in circles below me. Why not let them jump? I shot another arrow at a random passerby, who turned out to be a powerful wizard, and threw powerful bolts of lightning in my general direction. That’s more like it. Then there are the amusing times when AI will get stuck on a fence, or in a rocky outcropping, at which point they become much easier to take out.

I was in Fallen Rock Cave and there was this huge Mud Golem that could take me down to a sliver of my health bar with a single hit. I slipped in and out a few times (while sneaking) first to get a journal for a quest, and later to try to empty a chest full of shineys. When I got a gigantic battle axe, I thought I might be able to take him. (This is the part where I found out how much damage the guy did.) I ran to the start of the corridor leading into his room, and started bombarding him with arrows. It turned out the corridor was too small – he couldn’t get to me!

That being said, it’s still an enjoyable experience. I’m willing to forgive the occasional outdoor framerate chugging, which may be due to both an environment mod I’m running and my aging hardware, and the lackluster story, which is a canned tale of the entire world in danger. I find myself wondering why if many of my enemies can make short work of my health bar, I’m the only one that can save Tamriel.

EDIT: Feel free to check out my screenshots.

EDIT 2: Realized the OOO link I had was old. It is now updated.

EDIT 3: There’a also an excellent unofficial wiki.

EDIT 4: It doesn’t make them completely static, but more static.

Valve gave the Steam interface an overhaul! It looks awesome! Fire up Steam and give it a look!

Many of you may have heard about Audiosurf. I would like to now officially lend my voice to the chorus proclaiming its awesomeness. Audiosurf is a game where you play as a character moving down a highway. This highway is remarkable in that it is dynamically and automatically created by the game depending on what song you feed it. It seems to support all formats that matter, including OGG and FLAC, which is a pleasant surprise. The object of the game is to collect colored blocks, forming groups of three or more so that they disappear. There are different characters, each a different game mode. High scores are integrated. There are worldwide and statewide score charts. Your score is automatically added to any charts you managed to get on to, provided you are logged in. You can also add your friends’ usernames and compare your scores to theirs.

Pics:

In calm moments the road slants upwards, in tense parts the road shoots downward, making a very intense experience. The game isn’t so much like Frets on Fire, Guitar Hero, or DDR in that it’s not really about hitting everything. It’s more about having a more interesting experience with your music. The song analysis works amazingly well. A song with a strong beat is recommended. The only thing I’ve seen that didn’t really work was a very soft one from my sister’s MSUCC practice CD.

Everything else has worked marvelously. Rock, techno, Orange Box tracks, even Bach! I strongly recommend this game. There’s a demo on Steam if you’re interested.

EDIT: Yes, there is a typo in the Portal Orange Box songs. It reads “10 – Your Not A Good Person,” and it should be “You’re Not A Good Person.”

As you might have guessed from the above, I’ve been playing Black & White 2, a game in which you play a god. I like the concept. At its best, it gives a feeling of absolute control as people worship you and you perform acts of godly power. At its worst, the game is maddeningly hard to control. It seems the game can get in the way of what you want to do, something that should not happen. Take, for example, building a gate in a wall. I selected a gate in the build menu, and tried to line it up with the wall. I tried for several minutes to get a valid position without success, during which time an enemy army charged through the gap I was trying to close.

The manual is too short to tell everything, and it seems to me that in the lack of a complete online manual, the only way to learn is either by painstaking trial and error or by suffering through the horribly annoying and poorly constructed tutorials. The ability to skip the tutorials was added in the latest patch, (Edit: announcement down, patch still seems available.) before which the earlier patch must be installed. Why they didn’t bother to package them both together I do not know. The patches did seem to fix many a glitch, among them a problem where if there were too many roads crossing in a small area people would get stuck there. If I picked them up and moved them somewhere else they seemed to just turn around and run right back over there. Strange.

The creature is fun. As a god, you get to choose an animal to represent you. The choices are monkey, lion, wolf, and cow. (In a baffling turn the cow is referred to as male and yet sports udders.) All of these animals start out rather small and cute-looking. You must train your creature what to do and what not to do, which for me meant not pooping in the village or eating the villagers. I’ve tried to make my creature run over to the side of the village and poop in the trees, which seems to be working somewhat. I’ve never had the courage to just see what happens, as the results can surely be devastating. The creature does not have to be in free will mode, as you can assign it various roles, although not for too long otherwise the creature will lose free will. I found myself becoming attached. My creature is also quite able to make mincemeat out of an enemy army. 🙂

The game is beautiful, despite being a bit old. The sun changes the lighting on the landscape as it goes throughout the day, the water ripples, and fire looks very nice. The forests and wheat grow! It is strange that the graphics are pretty while the UI leaves a lot to be desired. I would happily accept it being less pretty if it were more playable.

Another area of significant weakness in this game is its voice acting. The writing is cheesy, especially that of the prayers you receive. Coupled with the overacting and awkward emphasis, I found the prayers (given only in cinematics) to be laughable. You have two advisors, a good one and an evil one, who won’t leave you alone and sometimes seem to be designed to be as annoying as possible. I will use as an example the first tutorial island. You are given a pile of rocks and told to throw them at a small target across a gap. Every time you miss (as you surely will, the target is really small) the evil guy pops up and says something about your miss. Every time. If you sit there, the good one pops up and reminds you you’re supposed to be chucking rocks. This kind of thing happens elsewhere, like on the third tutorial island. You are told to create a forester by picking up a villager and dropping them next to a tree. If you drop them anywhere else, the good one criticizes you and reminds you to make a forester. Is it that important that I do it now? The point of a game is for the player to have fun, not to be bossed around! This is another contrast I found jarring. The advisors refer to you as one might to a god, and yet they boss you around. It just doesn’t fit. I found myself wishing the game would shut up and just let me play.

Zero Punctuation has an Orange Box review up!

Valve’s Team Fortress 2 Linux binaries. I can’t run  a server natively because for some reason Valve has required an obscure FCMOV processor compatibility on Windows but not on Linux! Argh! I could run it under Wine if I really need to but that’s annoying…

It seems the Companion Cube is making quite the impact. The kind on magnitudes of desktop backgrounds and freezers. I should make my own Companion Cube…

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has completed their TF2 class overview.

EDIT: Sweet!

EDIT2: Metastasis has updated its installer again.