S.T.A.L.K.E.R - Life in the Zone, Day 2

The Journal of "The Marked One", dated 6/6/2012:

Pretty good day today, considering. Sidorovich hired me to steal some documents from right under the military's nose at the ruins of the Agroprom institute. The fat git promised to point me in the right direction in my mission to find this "Strelok" guy - Still no idea why the only message on my PDA when I woke up was to kill the fellow, but I hope that as my amnesia passes I'll start to figure it out.

Turned out the quickest way into the institute was via the gate but, after some brief scouting, the dozens of armed guards soon showed that it wasn't an option. Another Stalker told me to talk to "Mole", who had discovered a old stash of Strelok's, but by the time I'd arrived at his location the military had moved in and a huge firefight broke out.

Decided to hang back and let the other mooks get perforated before I moved in and cleared up.

Mole was safe and sound, thankfully, and led me to an old sewer covering that led to the underground tunnel network he and his crew had been exploring, gave me a few rubles for saving him and suggested I keep my head down - A military task-force was on their way into the area.

The tunnels were pitch black and it was only when bullets started pinging off the pipes around my head I noticed that a group of bandits with night vision had set up shop here. Gunned down three of them with my MP5 before blinding the last with my flashlight and finishing the sod off with my knife.

The respite was short lived, however - As I made my way through the tunnels there was a huge roar and a blur rushed across at me. I barely had time to raise my gun before that bastard Bloodsucker was on top of me. A full clip to the head eventually took it down.

Found the stash, finally, including a heavily modified assault rifle and a flash drive that revealed the name of one of Strelok's men, a man named "Ghost". I'll have to track him down and ply him for information.

Going to get some kip, there's a bed here and it seems safe enough - Blocked off the ladder with some debris, all the same.

Waaaaaaagh-hammer

The aging dwarf pulled out his old pipe and put it to his lips, flicking the small toggle on the side to ignite the powder inside. Taking a long, luxurious drag on it he unslung his longrifle from his shoulder, carefully propping it upright on the small clockwork turret nearby.

Avoiding the bright green ichor and chunks of flesh that were splattered on the crates in front of him, he sat down on the makeshift barricade and glared out across the murky swamp at the ramshackle orc redoubt. It was barely visible through the mist and the flies buzzing around the multitude of large, green corpses strewn across no-man's land.

Taking another puff, Drugan Thunderbrew - proud engineer of the Oathbearer's, cast his mind back to when he had first been station in this thrice forsaken mire. Of course, he understood why the High King required the dwarfs to wrest control the Marshes of Madness away from the entrenched greenskin horde; the Oathgold veins that run underneath the area were required if they were to win this war.

No Oathgold meant no Doomstrikers and no doomstrikers meant the dwarfs would have no way to hold back the greenskins and retake the captured dwarf mountainhold of Karak-Eight-Peaks.

Drugan had sworn an oath to the High King himself: to do whatever was required of him to renew the steady supply of rare materials required to forge each of the magical weapons that held the key to dwarven survival. He'd rather die than see his honour tarnished by failing to hold the line.

A great warcry went up across the body-strewn field and the old engineer grimaced, once again picking up his rifle. Determined to hold back the green tide.

FarCry Some More - Part 1 - ctf_3fallout

This last time Heavy Weapons Guy spill Scout's bonk on Sandvich and eat whilst taking teleport, I tell you.

Sahsa and me find selves in strange brown landscape, looks like Dustbowl. I know not where am but starting to feel right at home after puny little coward attack with stupid knife and baseball bat, remind me of puny Blu team, who entire team made of babies. Stupid babies.

Friendly woman at store in town happy to give giant, hansome man like me advice on place - She tell me to avoid water as it radioactive. I not know why avoid radiation, radiation make heavy weapons guy STRONG - Scout bonk drink tasty and it radioactive, also doktor heal heavy weapons guy with nice red beam of friendly radiation.

Or that what doktor tell heavy, anyway.

Heavy happy to see that red team still about, as he sees BLU bomb in crater that no explode - So at least team able to stop little cart even in future. I miss team now, especially doktor.

FarCry Some More

Originally this was going to be the first part of a series of blog posts where I play the role of Team Fortress 2's Heavy after being dumped into a variety of games. I decided to start off with Far Cry 2 because this game, at least, has shotguns. All was going according to plan - Playing the Russian sounding character and waltzing through the few early missions with relative impunity.

But then I ran into a problem: I got my hands on my first sniper rifle.

Sniping in FarCry 2 is a delicious affair, where if you do it correctly (and many a time I haven't) and find yourself a vantage point where you can see the whole enemy militia post you can carefully provide its' residents with lead poisoning before they even know you're there. The best part is that you can do it from several hundred meters away.

My favourite vantage point whilst assaulting the Police Station was a tall tree hanging over a river. I sniped everybody and was patting myself on the back as I jumped out of the tree into the river. Only then realising that the river, in fact, was more of a brook.

Crunch.

MMOpocalypse

So, having decided to finally break free from the warm and fuzzy clutches of World of Warcraft I've recently been in the market for a new game to spend my (admittedly limited) free time playing. Handily, the latest PC Gamer demo disk contained just what the doctor ordered; a free to play, Steampunk/Fantasy RPG with multiple factions and a whole host of player classes.

Up stepped Neosteam: The Steam Wars Begin.

After creating an account you are, then and there, told to choose one of the two available factions (there is a third one, but at time of writing it hasn't been introduced into the open beta yet) themed around two nations vying for supremacy.

The two factions are the Rogwell Republic and Elred Kingdom who are, respectively, themed around either a dependence on advanced technology or magic. Unfortunately, once you've chosen a side you can never swap over to see how the other half lives, so being a fan of Steampunk and not about to throw away the world theme for slightly better magic spells, I pledge myself to Rogwell.



There are 6 races in NeoSteam, 4 basic races and 2 "Beastkind" races - one for either faction. Each one has very different starting attributes and as you level up your character you unlock more advanced racial feats. Humans, for example, start out with the relatively handy "get +10% cash on sold goods" and progress to the godly "+20% attack speed", while Elves start out with a bonus to consumable items and gain a "-20% aggro radius" ability. This ensures that the race you choose at the start does inpact your playtime significantly.

There are, to start with, 4 base classes; two handed hammer using Fighters, Mages, Rogues and gun using, seige engine producing Crafters. These classes each split off into 2 sub classes with slight differences between nations on which skills you get. For example, the Rogwell "Tracker" rogue subclass gains the ability to cripple their foes' movement speed whilst their Elred counterpart, the "Ranger" gains the ability to raise fallen comrades.



As the game is merely in the beta stages of testing, there are a few niggles which I'll go into later, but the advantages of the low server population is that pretty much any name you want is available. For example; I'm currently sitting pretty on top of the "Alexei", "Fixer", "Aegis" and "Sanctuary" names.

Now, the fact that it's in Beta shows through in the current bugs and the whole host of translation issues. Now, the development team have been pretty lazy by the looks of things; translating a Korean game to their native German and then back again to English must take some effort, pity that they seem to have run the code through some sort of online translation machine as quite a lot of the quest text requires deciphering by the player.

It can also be lagtastic.

The combat is good, with the class variety and whole host of skills providing much needed depth and the quests themselves are decent enough, though the storyline of the game would probably shine through if you can get past the aforementioned translation issues. The main attraction to the game, however, has to be the crafting.

Every class in the game can customize their weapons and armour with various upgrades such as increased defence or, in the case of the "Core Machine" items adding new faux-skills to equipped socketable items (such as Alexei has the ability to deal a whopping 1000 damage every 3 minutes due to an attatchment to his bow). Items can be crafted by handing over drops to friendly NPCs and all this is interspaced with the ability to build and customise your own mounts (for crafters, anyway), weapons, armour and accessories.

I'm only level 14 right now (though the level cap for the Beta is 40) so I haven't seen much of the content, but this Korean/German/English MMORPG has just the right balance between questing, crafting and relaxing grinding to tickle me the right way.

Swine Flu

I, for one, salute our new porcine overlords.

Blackout

Finally sorting out my sleeping pattern (Whoo, I can see the morning again!) and feeling pleased with myself, I got up and proceeded to try and turn my computer on for a spot of gaming before breakfast. Only to find it wouldn't turn on.

Fairy nuff, I remembered turning the plug off last night as I could hear a high-pitched whine from its' general area.


(Click)

FZZZZT!

"Oh shit."


This small, innocent action caused all the plug sockets in my room (and the kitchen) to fry and trip the circuit breaker hidden behind my TV.

On the plus side, I found the switch and everything seems fine now. Also, I now know that my switch causes all power in the kitchen to turn off so the next time my flatmates keep me awake during the exam period... There will be reckoning.