The Little Blog of Games

I haven’t posted anything in a month or so. Haven’t had much to say, really.

My father died a few weeks back. He succumbed to a serious illness in a matter of days and the whole thing sort of took me by surprise. I knew he was ill and we had made all sorts of arrangements with the inevitable in mind, but even the doctors thought he would have at least a year to go. But things didn’t work out that way.

So now I’ve had much to think about and a funeral to organize and gaming just hasn’t seemed that important. I haven’t really played much anything the past few weeks, much less felt like writing about it.

I just wanted to drop a few lines for those of you who have been following my blog and wondering about my absence. I’m sure I’ll be coming back to this blog in the near future, but I can’t really say just when. Until then, keep yourself safe and enjoy the summer.

Last night I finally got into the game in Fallen Earth. I only played through the first tutorial but so far the experience has been generally positive. And totally limited to solo play, mind you.

The initial tutorial is rather well written and managed to immerse me in the game world. Without giving out too much spoilers, lets just say the tutorial walks you through the basics in a suspenseful instance that gives you a brief lecture of the FE world history and the different factions. It actually felt so much like Fallout 3 that I at one point walked away from the keyboard and remembered that this might not be entirely wise in a MMO upon returning. Of course the tutorial is probably safe enough for afk, but anyway…

The graphics aren’t much to write home about. I guess they do their job, but they are well below those of Fallout 3 and especially the characters look more like something out of 2006 than a modern game. They’re not exactly bad, but the semi-realistic style makes them somewhat unbelievable. But I’m sure it’s not enough to break the immersion; the guy named ’1337boydick’ jumping naked in front of you,begging for a hand out should accomplish that well enough…

The controls will take some getting used to and I’m almost certain that I will shoot someone in the face at some point when I mean to interact with them. The whole use either mouse button click to interact, especially combined with the combat mode setup, seems kind of weird. But again it probably just takes some time to learn.

The combat itself seems like a prime candidate for degenerating  into a chaotic click fest at times, but otherwise the pseudo-fps style seemed to work well for me. Producing head shots with a scoped rifle (even though I know it is stat based underneath) was surprisingly satisfying.

I’m going to be away for a few days, but we’ll see what the future brings in the wastes when I get back. Cya!

I can’t believe it is already day four since I woke up in the clone vats. I just hope they could open the vat doors already as it’s pitch black in here and I really want to see what the world looks like nowadays. The LifeNet techs say they still have some problems with the vat management software and a patch is required to get it working again…

It turns out I still can’t play Fallen Earth. Last night I was finally ready to launch the game. Only they had just released a patch which needed to be downloaded. I’m not entirely sure how big the patch was, but the launcher seemed to say something around 280 MB. Well, that’s not too bad for my 2 Mb connection. It should take around, hmm… that’s about 250 KB/s, but let’s say 200 KB/s to be conservative… about 25 minutes to download. Fair enough. But wait a second, what’s this estimate here in the launcher… 16 hours… WTF??

I guess the download servers at Icarus Studios aren’t the hottest things around. I’m sure there’s a lot of load to the system on patch days, but 16 hours FFS! Every MMO company that plans on releasing patches should implement a fucking torrent downloader in their updater. Period.

The download was finished in the morning, but of course I have to work for living…

I have a confession to make. I haven’t been very happy with EVE for the past month or so. Things have sunk to the level where I’ve logged on more from duty than from any real sense of enjoyment. Like the dutiful husband I’ve put in some hours to make things feel normal, but my heart has not really been in it.

What I’m feeling is a general lack of goals and purpose. I’ve just finished training my two gals to stealth bombers and now I’ve found that there is not a lot to do with them. My casual play style doesn’t really work for SB hunting. If I only have an hour or two to play in the evening I can’t really use three hours to hunt for targets in wormholes, now can I?

And otherwise I’m sure we can agree that the solo PVP in EVE is pretty dead. Hunting for targets in low sec is like constipation; you have to work really hard for a even the smallest of results.

On the PVE side I feel I’ve pretty much seen everything the low sec exploration I’ve been doing has to offer. I don’t think there is much to do about that other than to move out to null (or wormholes) if I want to experience something new.

I’m sure things would be a lot different if I joined a good corp, but I feel that that requires a level of dedication I’m not ready for. Red vs Blue would most likely offer some nice PVP opportunities, but I’ve never been a fan of pointless PVP. If I’m hunting for targets in wormholes I’m doing it partly for fun, but I’m also hoping for some profits. Staged fights may be fun, but it still feels too artificial to me.

The previous time I felt like this was in the fall last year. Back then we were just about to head out for a month long vacation in the States, which brought a month long break from all things EVE. When we came back from the trip things felt new and it was easy to pick the game up again.

Which is why I’ve decided to take another break from EVE. I’m going to set up some long time skills for training and just forget EVE for a while. Of course, things wouldn’t have the required drama if I hadn’t also met someone new…

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Wow, it has been three weeks since my last post already. I knew it’s been a while, but I didn’t think it was that long. Time goes by fast these days.

My main reason for not posting is really that I haven’t been playing Eve much the past weeks. I could blame the new version of Dwarf Fortress but it is only partly at fault. I played Empire: Total War for a spell and then killed some zombies in Left 4 Dead, but gaming has really been a somewhat secondary (or tertiary) activity lately.

In Eve I’ve spent some time setting up skill training and some long term trades. It was only last week that I finally found the energy to get my deadly duo to the long planned wormhole hunt. Results have been somewhat disappointing.

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I haven’t really logged into Eve the pasts few weeks, but it is not entirely because I haven’t felt like playing much. You see, I decided to upgrade my gaming rig to a more capable system. My old setup with its AMD Athlon 3200+ processor and a Nvidia GF7600 GS graphics card couldn’t really handle most modern games. Running two Eve clients dropped the framerate on the other window to just above 10 fps, while the focused window would top at about 20-25 fps. Hell, I couldn’t even play Dwarf Fortress smoothly on the machine.

I really like building computers. It’s a sort of hobby with me, but of course I can’t practice it too often. Computer parts are really prohibitively expensive when you move out of the entry level and where’s the fun in building just adequate systems? =)

Of course, nothing ever goes as planned when building computers. Much exasperation ensued as I tried to get the damn thing to work…

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Past week went with a few nights of null sec ratting and that was pretty much that. I eventually got the gals home safely and I’ll tell you how the stealth bomber felt like for ratting. But I’m not getting much done in game at the moment.

I seem to be hitting the mental phase in which I tend to drop any demanding activities and opt for more passive ones. My interests seem to follow these cycles which often follow the same pattern.

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I haven’t done much exploration the past week as I have been organizing my things and test driving the Hound with Lassie (well, that’s a pun I guess). Since I haven’t done much invention lately I decided to move closer to my exploration area. The station there doesn’t have labs, but otherwise it is much more conveniently located. Hauling is still a PITA though…

I really wanted to try out the Hound as a ratter and so I sneaked in to the nearby null sec for some fun and games. Some problems became apparent and I came up with some nice solutions which I then tried out.

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There has been a rather interesting discussion on the science and industry forum regarding the effects of Dominion on mineral prices. I’ve been following the discussion for some time now and since the issues started bouncing around a lot I figure I would write myself a synopsis of the whole thread to clear my head.

Of course this list of issues got too damn long and what I ended up with was a reply to the thread in which I try to collect the wisdom in one or two (or maybe just a few) posts. However, it is getting really late and I don’t dare to post my stuff at this time so I’ll just put it up here. The original thread can be found here.

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Last week went by while I was putting together my stealth bomber fit for Lassie and generally just hang around in FNA chat. It is really easy to just forget the business at hand and spend a few hours getting nothing much done. After Lassie got her skills to the point where I could fit everything but the probe launcher on her Hound I took it out for a test spin. The results weren’t exactly what I had hoped for.

During the weekend I also got back to exploring a bit and ran some new sites I had never done before. This involved a dip into a C1 wormhole system too. Here, I’ll take you through the week…

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