South-East London, you are awesome but you are expensive

My most recent addition was Far Cry 2. It’s available for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

The following video gives you a nice feeling for the combat and some gameplay without any real spoilers:

As you have seen Far Cry 2 is absolutely stunning, the video really doesn’t do it justice. When you see the shadows cast by the branches of the trees, the beams of light through mist or your first sunset you will truly be amazed. It’s definitely the most visually attractive game I’ve played and this level of polish is consistent throughout the game. The voice acting is pretty good, the weapons sound meaty, satisfying and realistic and the open “world” is spacious yet varied. The best thing about Far Cry 2 though that it actually plays well on reasonable hardware unlike some other beautiful games we could mention. My machine hasn’t been upgraded for a year and a half and it still was the best looking game I’ve ever played. Obviously it’s not going to run on your Pentium III but if you have a reasonably decent machine or a console be prepared for a treat.

Something that really adds to Far Cry 2′s immersion is that you are always kept in first person, regardless of what you character is doing. You can see this used to great effect with the healing animations video below:

If you’ll excuse the clichéd simile, computer games are much like women. When they are excessively attractive (like my better half) that may initially pique your interest. However, if they are boring or no fun then it’s game-over (unlike my better half). Far Cry 2 is a beautiful woman but not one that will appeal to all those who admire her on looks alone. As I keep saying, it really is gorgeous but it’s gameplay is perhaps not what you might expect from a very mainstream shooter (like COD4 or Half-Life 2). Although it is filled almost wholly with action (don’t expect any deep RPG-style interaction here or a dynamic “quest”) it allows the player a large degree of freedom in choosing what to do at any current time. Want to avoid the enemies? Take a boat down the river or go diamond hunting. Want to get around quickly without any interaction? Take a bus. Want to just blow stuff up? Take an assassination mission. Want to get a better selection of weapons? Take an arms dealer mission. True, most of the missions involve blowing stuff up, capturing things and then killing the guards before they kill you but this is countered by the to travel between missions and and exploration whilst diamond hunting.

This may sound like a repetitive game and, to an extent, it is. Despite this, I can’t personally recall ever being bored as I was free to just chose to stop doing anything I didn’t feel like at the time as almost nothing is time-critical. This isn’t a game for RPG/RTS types; it isn’t particularly cerebral, the story is decent enough but not as strongly driven as I’d perhaps have liked through the main missions. The buddy characters you’ll meet introduce some nice gameplay elements and add a bit of diversity through their random assignment (you’ll get different buddies on each playthrough). I would that even with the above downers this is the best straight-FPS game I’ve seen since Half-Life 2 and its Episodes.

If you are at all into FPS games or ever have been I strongly recommend picking up a copy and giving Far Cry 2 a shot. I bought it for <£30 and played it for 30 hours before completion and then immediately started another playthrough. It’s now available on Amazon for just £17 so there’s not really an excuse not to check this game out.

Let me know what you think!

Personally, I hated all the SimCity games, I found them boring and directionless. I hated the Sims series, they just seemed to be either more boring than my life (in which case I wondering why I was playing them) or more exciting than my life (which made me sad ). Reading most of the build-up for Spore made me think it was going to be just-another-boring-sim-game. When I read that Soren Johnson, the lead designer of Civilisation 4 (a game more addictive than any drug), was working on it my interest was piqued.

I got the Creature Creator partly as it was £5 and I thought it might entertain me for a few hours by creating some grotesque creatures and watch my girlfriend make some pretty ones but, despite my expectations, I actually ended up getting quite into it. The intuitiveness of the tool and the sheer variety of creatures that were getting created really excited me so I bought the game.

For the last two weeks I have been living like an addict, waiting to get the next fix of the game. I think yesterday evening may be the first since I bought it that I didn’t played it (instead I just read about computer games). I don’t just play for fun, I play to elevate the Globby Empire to greatness!

Xora is a friendly fellow. By which I mean he’s eaten all his fellow cells, ripped his fellow creatures to bits, massacred his fellow tribes, nuked his fellow civilisations and blown up the planets of his fellow space empires. In Spore you can be friendly, evil or somewhere in the middle. Sadly, blowing up planets and eating other creatures has proved to be far more fun than talking to them or forming trade routes.

I realise you don’t care about Xora or his mighty empire but you would if you’d created this creature from a single cell (with a mouth, but I’ll give Will Wright the right to give cells mouths) and evolved it to a mighty space-faring empire.

Really this is just a really fun game. It continuously rewards the player through the multiple stages and in-stage checkpoints and the badge/achievement system strongly appeals to the more obsessive types like me (HAVE TO GET THEM ALL) it’s just a really enjoyable experience. Add this on top of the ability to subscribe to Sporecasts and your friends feeds, meeting them in game and you just get a really fun community experience.

I highly recommend buying and playing Spore. It’s one of those incredibly innovative games that everyone should play, regardless of their preferred genre.

Do you like computer games? If not then why are you reading a computer games post?

Anyway, those remaining like computer games. Do you have a computer with Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BSD or a GP2X, PSP or Windows CE device?

If so, goto the UQM download page and get it now while I tell you why it is such a great game.

I’m a real sucker for good stories. UQM is the open-source port of Star Control 2, one of the best game stories I’ve ever played (and I’ve played a lot of games). Humanity has been conquered by a brutal regime after attempting and failing to fight for their freedom. Their people are enslaved but safe on Earth and their allies have also been enslaved and trapped on their homeworlds or forced to fight for the Ur-Quan’s military. You come to Earth from a research mission on another world, cut off from Earth since the war and don’t know any of the above. The researchers discovered an ancient alien race and ancient technology. From then onwards it is your job to deck out your ship and kick some serious alien arse.

UQM is so good because it is full voice acted somehow, frankly amazing for a game released in 1992. The script is intelligent and amusing, each races having fatal flaws and how you talk to them has a real effect on your interactions with the races later in the game. You have multiple dialogue choices and a huge amount of dialogue available from every NPC if you choose to grill them.

As well as the discussion and interaction you need to gather resources to equip your ship by mining planets, some light trading or destroying enemy ships. No race is forced to be your friend and every race can be at least partially placated on occasion. Your ship can be decked out in the fashion you see fit depending on if you want to play in a bloodthirsty fashion, killing enemy ships, just carry lots of cargo or somewhere in between the two.

Every of the 10+ races has their own music, art-style, feel and area of space. The galaxy is huge with thousands of planets to explore and many nooks-and-crannies than can convey advantages through technology or pivotal diplomatic assets.

Combat is settled in a 2D shooter fashion, flying your little ship about with Newtonian physics trying to outshoot or flee from your enemies.

This game a strange fusion of adventure and action with RPG and RTS elements also thrown in. The bright, colorful graphics have actually aged reasonably well and don’t detract from the great game.

If you like computer games at all I challenge you to leave the Sol system in this game (<1 hour of gameplay) and not be enjoying it. I will be frankly amazed if you do.

This is a brilliant game, hats off to both the original developers and the open-source team that have made the game work so well on modern platforms.

Go and play it now!

Try as I might I couldn’t get the NAT traversal to work with the v1.1 patch. I read various blog posts informing me to use a STUN server but that seemed unnecessarily overkill.

I finally worked out the problem this evening! Epic added STUN support to v1.1 and added initialised the server variable in the configuration file to a dummy value which turns on the STUN NAT mode, breaking the existing NAT support.

To fix this change the:
“StunServerAddress=stunserver.org”
line in “My Documents\My Games\Unreal Tournament 3\UTGame\Config” to:
“StunServerAddress=”
and it should all just work

Like most people I’ve made a few New Year’s resolutions this year whilst trying to take on a few bits of advice on how to make them and keep them.

Anyway, here goes:

1. Hack more on KDE. I think the combination of starting a new job and not running KDE4 as my desktop (until recently) has made me slack from working on KDE. Once I actually am using it daily then I reckon I’ll be able to do more work and help with KDEPIM for 4.1.
2. Practise my bass more. Playing every two weeks with a bunch of music teachers and session musicians is making me feel a little insecure about my playing! I need to practise more, especially working on my soloing and probably buy a Fake book.
3. Study rather than just reading my Bible. I’m normally alright about reading my Bible regularly but I’ve just been reading it like a novel rather than actually using commentries and then like to properly study the passages. I’ve done this a few times lately and it is far more beneficial, I need to get up earlier and try and do it more often
4. Play less computer games. I do enjoy gaming but it is one of these activities that really benefits no-one except myself so I want to try and divert more time into things like hacking/music where I can benefit others whilst enjoying myself.
5. Be a better friend/boyfriend. Just generally take more of my time to try and focus on others and help them with their problems.
6. Become a better software engineer. Improve my knowledge of my main languages, maybe try and pick up some more and improving my algorithmic math skills.
7. Take more of an interest in politics. Now that Nick Clegg has been elected the leader of the Liberal Democrats I’ve felt myself want to try and get a little more involved and interested in British politics in the gradual run-up to the next UK elections.

I’m sure there are more but that’s all I can think of for now!

Human-Computer Interaction was yesterday and went pretty well. Was nice to see that the lecturer keeps up to date, with questions about robot tour guides, the iPhone (which I predicted would come up as a case study several days before the exam) and David Cameron’s blog.

Distributed Systems was today. I had some disastrous past-paper run-throughs yesterday with Duncan and Alan which left me in a suitably foul mood, convinced of my beckoning failure today. Thankfully the exam today actually went alright. Could have gone better but could have done worse. Some pretty stupid ambiguous questions and insisting on covering every topic in any subquestion meaning you couldn’t get away with not learning any topics. Thanks Bjorn!

If doing stupid finals wasn’t enough pain, my nVidia GeForce 6800GT decided to break on me. I’d been planning on upgrading my system this summer so, as I kinda need my PC working properly for doing my Google Summer of Code project, it looks like my upgrade is gonna happen a lot sooner i.e. when my exams finish.

At the moment I’m thinking:

• A nice new aluminium case
• A nVidia GeForce 8800 GS or GTX
• The cheapest Intel Core Duo with 4MB cache
• A nice motherboard, preferably with memtest86 and some easy overclocking capabilities
• A Western Digital Raptor hard disk
• 2GB RAM
• A 500GB or bog-standard HDD

Hopefully this will sate my desire to play the latest games and actually have a working system!

Anyway, apparently you’re meant to tell your blog readers 5 things they might not already know about you. Sounds a lot like a CHAIN MAIL to me, things which I loathe with a passion.

So here we go:
1) I’m currently the fattest I’ve ever been, at about 10 3/4 stones. I want to try and get the fat off and regain it in muscle, as it’s clearly due to me having only one source of regular exercise this term.

2) I first kissed a girl aged 16, which I feel is a bit of a poor show, due to being a late starter, and due to the fact all women now love me. Note, I have never kissed a boy or animal before you hilarious people make hilarious replies.

3) I became a Christian aged 17, and I’m not from a church-going family. I’ll probably stick my testimony on here at some stage, but that’s a long story for another day.

4) I once got brought in front of the year head for bulling my now flatmate, Patrick, about 8 or 9 years ago. I didn’t though, honest.

5) My favourite computer game of all time is Deus Ex. It’s available for like a fiver now, and has the best story of any game ever, and will run on any even remotely newish system. Buy it and play it now. If I know you in person, you complete it, and don’t like it, I’ll actually give you the price of the game back.

Apparently you are meant to tag some others, so I tag:
Gareth, Andrew and Dave Dickson (blog now offline).