Back again from the world of Eve Online. But the corp has been organising who wants to do what to try and get us organised into groups and I have opted for PvP. Because seeing ships fight and die is great! With this, we had started performing PvP roams to learn the ropes and to try and get some kills under the corp banner.

So we did our first roam in destroyers. It was more of a training exercise really. I took my Cormorant, a Caldari destroyer that seems to be good with Hybrid Railguns. I also fitted it with some shield tanking along with a rocket launcher and auto-cannon to protect myself even better at close range if there's anything giving me grief. Once we all showed up and I accidentally locked a teammate as a target. We were told the rules and how things work. So we set off for low-sec with aims to screw over some lone pilot in the badlands.
We followed orders to a decent degree. We had a guy trying to catch up nearly bring the enemy to us. But luckily we got away and finally we reached 0.0 space.
I’ve been to low-sec before when I joined a pirate gang for a short while before getting Eve out of my system but I learnt that low-sec isn’t much different to high-sec in terms of how the world works. But 0.0 had things I’ve never seen before like warp bubbles. A member of the fleet was explaining what these were to us but as he was doing so. A cruiser showed up. Launched drones and commenced blasting at us. The good news I was far away. The bad news was his ship was moving further away from the rest of us and manage to wipe 2 of us out. So we made a hasty retreat back into high-sec and called it a night.

Earlier this week. We set off for another excursion in larger ships. Cruisers and Battleships. This trip was a little more ill-fated. We were taking the same route back into 0.0 as we did before but this time we were spotted by an enemy ship. Our scout went on ahead to check out the next warpgate and things were bad. There was a gate camp out for us. We made a break for it and we starting jumping to planets to give ourselves some room. We were being followed, we saw more people were piling in. Soon enough a few enemy ships warped not far from us and managed to warp scramble both myself and another pilot. We were stuck to just fight and survive. I panicked and fired at my aggressor with all I had and turn on my defenses. It was no good. My weapons were shit compared to his shields and soon enough more and more poured in. We were done for and soon enough my ship had blown up.
We ran back with our tails in our legs again but we came back for more. I had to go to a smaller ship. We went back another way and this was a bigger success. We reached 0.0 and went deeper within. Problem was that we hit a warpgate and our scout managed to warp into a gate camp and got destroyed. We were trying to figure out what to do when another ship warped to the gate. He took one glance at us and went straight into the fight. Tanking up and taking out another one of us. We could do nothing to hurt him. We ran, he mocked us. We just ran back again and gave up.

One day, our corp will manage a kill. But the last few weeks were not that day. Maybe I’ll do the next roam in a frigate. It will certainly be a cheaper night out.

I have finally got round to finishing Need for Speed: The Run just yesterday. So I was going to make an article about my disappointment on Twisted Metal, but don’t want some disgruntled fan hunting me down in a fucking ice cream van.

But The Run is a take on the across the US sort of street race and instead of being just you gunning it for a shit tonne of hours going across the US as fast as possible. Where it could do some epic single runs through the game if the hardware could possibly handle the constant loading of new world whilst you drive. Oh no no no. This one wants to follow the story of a bloke called Jack. Jack starts off in a shit tonne of trouble where he is going to get crushed in a car. But this kicks off a quick time event and the success is where you drive out...
But after that ‘success’ you got told there’s a race going on and you go grab a car and off on your driving adventure of sorts.

So the game is broken up with overtake challenges (sound plausible). Battle challenges (ok... so you just pull over when you are overtaken?) and Checkpoint challenges where it says MAKE UP TIME and have to see no other drivers and get through the stage. They also throw in the odd challenge where you have to overtake these characters and win so it’s the same as the first type of challenge. It sometimes starts where they will ram or damage your car somehow and fuck off but that makes no fucking difference to the handling because the cars handle pretty inconsistent from what I played. Also some of the characters you beat will show up again for no reason as to why I think of apart from the last guy where I didn’t get to beat him as my car was fucked up.
Where the illusion of a big race is broken due to there being no reason why they bloody say you need to reach X position by Y location. But you can’t get ahead of that in anyway because of how the game works. You just have to gain X positions to move on. It’s making people’s dream summer of doing an illegal street race across a country feel binary and dull. I want to accidentally run a dude down in a my ill-gotten Ford Mustang and make the split second decision to just keep going and hope the car isn’t completely fucked to make it to the end.

The last race though takes the piss in terms of how a racing game cannot be cinematic and a racer at the same time as it shows how clearly it doesn’t care if you are good at racing. The race is 9 miles long and at one point you get separated pretty badly. When you re-join the race to the finish. The other guy is just a little ahead of you. So you go back to the race and if you get close enough. He will boost the fuck away. But don’t worry, you will see both of you together at the next bend and then it’s just a drag race for the last straight. It’s the only way you are challenged.

The Run should’ve been a game where you can just concentrate on hammering through a massive race driving 50-100 mile stretches overtaking so many before hitting a checkpoint. We could’ve left out the Frostbyte engine. We don’t need that to make a good racing game by making flashy effects and a terrible story. I want to be just straight up racing like a nutter across a tonne of ground finding the quickest way. The fastest way across the country. Not a linear story you will hate. I want to be speeding speeding past the desert bus and have to keep pumped on speed to not fall asleep at the wheel but start wigging out thinking spacebats are sweeping down at you. That would be fantastic.

Right I’m off to offer my script to EA to RETAKE NFS THE RUN! It will have the graphics of Outrun and the questionable ethics of Saints Row.

It’s been a long while since I told the story of my fast loss of a new Retriever in a sketchy part of space. But things have improved for me. I am currently working off my debt from receiving a Drake from the corp. I agreed to mine/ aquire the materials needed so I’ve spent a few hours playing other games whilst mining like a bastard.

I noticed when I made one trip out to the rocks there was another mining ship. He had heavy drones circling his ship. There was also another ship hanging around. That ship was a pirate pecking at the guy’s ship. I was thinking I should leave them to it as I have got lots to sort myself out with. But I then thought: I could help out with my little drones. So I changed my path to give chase. Problem is that my ship is slow as fuck so during my time of flying towards the pirate to get in range with my drones to save the day. I did even consider taking the spoils of the mining ship by attacking as well. But figured better of it as I am fairly sure my light drones would get smashed and only having one more in reserve if another is blown up. So I kept to the plan to help the fellow. It took a while to get into the fight.

It didn’t take long to kill the pirate once I managed to reach the damn ship and got to mine what I needed. I started a private chat with the guy thanked me for helping him out. He also wondered why his drones weren’t working for him and I simply told him straight about it. He was thankful for that too.
That was my one good turn in the world of Eve Online. Hopefully the dude doesn’t gank me in the future.

I might try and keep up my goings on in New Eden. Might get something more interesting to type about. The corp I’m in seems to be getting the attention of undesirables so probably going to get into some fights if I’m lucky.

Nearly a month ago, I was on call and my girlfriend came over for the weekend. So we were trying to figure out what we can do. She wondered what the new free Onlive box I had was all about so I demonstrated it to her (she is a gamer so she liked the idea of it). So I showed her all the games that I have access to in the Playpass bundle and she noticed a game she likes to see. It wasn't Red Faction: Guerilla. Not Lego Batman.

She liked the looks of Saw: The Game. Fucking Saw. She hits the A button on the controller and away we went to start playing that game. The start of the game has a quick time event. An event that isn't very well explained. The dude dies in a pretty instant way of getting his head crushed. I try and the same occurred. Finally I mashed the controller like an absolute bastard. That worked.

So we got playing. The game is not too bad if it was shorter and tried to vary it up a bit and removed combat because it's complete shit (be more like Amnesia damn it). But what was interesting is that people kept spectating whilst we played and were cheering and jeering depending how things went at times like surviving a trap room that has some one else on the line or punching said person after they survived. Like usually some one might watch for like a minute and get bored but some people were watching for like 20-30 minutes at a time and it was always someone different every time. It's a lot more often. It did make me think: Do people like watching people play shit games? Have you ever played a bad game and people just like to sit and watch you play? Is it just that people like to see someone else go through a crappy game.
My supporting evidence is that people never watch me play a game I have fun on like Darksiders, Just Cause 2 or Pro Evo.

I think my girlfriend proved this even further when she decided to play a dumb horse game as she likes horses but even she thought that game was shit. People liked to see her play that on my account. It probably doesn't help that it got me friends requests...

Once upon a time in the year 2010. There was a game called Starcraft 2. I pre-ordered it for my aging gaming laptop and so started my journey into the world of Zergs, Protoss and human assholes.
My flatmate and college friend was well versed in the ways of Starcraft 2 because of the beta but he didn't pre-order in time. So I kindly gave him a time code card that came with and my installation DVDs and off we went!

At first I gave the multiplayer a try and was surprised by the way the multiplayer was structured, compared to the original where by the time I started the only ones remaining were the good and the pro that pummelled newcomers in a matter of minutes.
But SC2 was different it asked what race I wanted to play and practically said "We want to see how good you are. Have a few matches against people." It seemed nice, comforting to know that I can show what I am worth and be put with people of similar skills to breed some actual competition.
Now this is where the game got smart on me. Despite me winning most of my games. It still put me in the bronze league. I asked my friend about this and he explained it's all about how well you use what you know and APMs and such. This gave us an idea. We will play really dumb in the five 2vs2 games to see what league we will join, we were aiming for bronze so we could try to dominate the league. We decided to be protoss and just spam zealots at one base until they crumble. We thought it would never work. Surely people will defend their bases and destroy us. How wrong we were.
The first match was won in a matter of minutes. Getting zealots churning out was easy. Simply harvesting minerals and building more gateways and pylons just did the trick. We overran the opposition.
I went downstairs to my friend and burst out laughing. We wanted to let this tactic roll and see where it led us. The next 4 matches weren't as straight forward. So we built more gateways practically outside people's bases. We got determined. We got ambitious. We got into silver league.

This was a big mistake for us as we were over our heads. My friend wasn't good enough to carry me into winning matches. It broke us down. We tried more matches using different tactics and that didn't work either. Whoever we were pitted against were better prepared and possibly used comms better than shouting up and down the stairs.

I still play SC2. Not that often as the changes that have been made and the skill of the players are definitely a lot higher than I can get now. But I have taken to League of Legends really well! But that's another story (well a shit story to be honest).

Well 2011 had no gaming resolutions as I knew it’d be a crap year. I did foolishly believe I could drop below 14 stone. Back then I was about 15 and a half. Now I am closing in on 16 stone but I have been hitting the gym at least 3 times a week in the last month. But 2012 will be different. I will challenge myself over this new year.

My first resolution of the year will be to try and review a game in each quarter of the year. More if it’s possible but start with one every three months. The main reason being was that I enjoyed reviewing games when I was younger, in the college years. I had the time to play them. I just had a Gamecube and a shit PC. Times were simple back then. Now I write a paragraph. Think it’s utter bollocks and delete the file and never start over. I think trying to write about small games will help. Also any tips and info any reviewers have will be welcome too... Unfortunately America is a long way for me to go to give blowjobs. ;)

My 2nd will be to play more Starcraft 2. I used to play until the end of last year where I was managing to reach the silver league. But since then I am getting battered by every bronze league player that is coming in, mainly because I took a 6 month hiatus. I have already took some steps towards this. I have a spanky new Razer Starcraft 2 Spectre mouse and Marauder keyboard, it handily flashes alerts at me during matches (so far it’s helped me notice what’s happening). Plus I have been playing about 5 games a week so far. All losses but I am learning from mistakes and soon one day. Only the gold league players will be left and eventually I will drag one down to my level and win!

My final resolution is to hammer through my backlog of games and stop looking at the Steam sales. Every Steam sale week has given me up to 20 games in a week that I will end up buying on impulse. Like I bought Serious Sam 3 because it was half price along with the Serious Sam Indie games as they look fun to have a go as well! What have I become! Does all my disposable income have to go on games! It could be befitting myself with money towards a new house. Even a new car! But it just goes on Steam sales! But once I stem the tide of buying things. Hopefully the number of games I will be still playing will drop too.

But that’s it. I think I’ve set myself enough gaming resolutions that I believe I can complete before the end of next year. Hopefully I'll get back on track with losing weight as well.