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PC Gaming
My First Two Days Playing Eve Online
Feb 18th
It’s a lesser known trait of mine that I enjoy playing computer games, specifically strategy games for the PC. The only console I own is a Nintendo Wii – which is saying something since it’s the first console I’ve owned since the Sega Genesis! So this weekend, with all the free time I have, a new broadband connection courtesy of Eircom (after replacing the crappy Netopia router they give you for free; free as in scrap metal), and a little trepidation, I joined Eve Online.
Eve Online is a MMOG set in space. There are approximately 5000 star systems, 200,000+ subscribers, and perhaps 18,000 to 45,000 players online at any one time. Since I was playing at the weekend for extended periods, I noticed the numbers peaked on my GMT clock each evening. The idea behind Eve Online is to enter the vastness of space and make a name for yourself either through combat, mining, trading, production or research. These are not however true alternatives since any player can train any skill imaginable given enough time. So the name of success is called specialisation, not class leveling…
All star systems have a security rating from 1.0 to 0.0. I spent all my time in 1.0 and 0.9 star systems. The word is that going anywhere with a 0.8 rating or less is not something a Rookie should consider for at least a few weeks. Going to 0.5 or lower could charitably be called suicide. Check out YouTube for a few videos of what happens to players who get cocky and impatient and run off to a 0.4 system to mine. It only takes a high skill player with a few missiles…
As for strategic and tactical gameplay – Eve Online rocks. It’s a thinking man’s dream game. You need to select skills, compare weapons and ammunition types, review Market conditions for the best regional prices (some stations can charge double the average price for items), get used to how ships scale and how to assess which you can take on (which is pretty much nothing since 1.0 sec systems are heavily overwatched by the local race’s police forces and only suicides would attack you, or you them 
). Living in 1.0 space is quite safe and a more than a few corporations stay exclusively there. Even a few of the 0.0 Corporations maintain 1.0 sub-Corporations for you to join.
The game itself is beautifully rendered. Back in December CCP release the Trinity client was released which added an overall graphics update with high resolution textures. My PC was never taxed while running it. I have a pretty good gaming rig so I could easily run two clients at the same time (Eve also let’s you play three characters on your single account). Th only niggle was collision detection on large objects like stations and planets. While it seems an odd flaw, I suspect it’s a simple optimisation. The only annoyance it will serve is trying to reach anything on the opposite side of a station – my advice is to orbit around the station before making a straight-line approach to such objects.
My own experiences from a first weekend after the jump… More >
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
Apr 5th
I finally got my copy of the game at the weekend, played a little, got the patch, found my save games were incompatible, restarted, and replayed (sigh) a little more. It’s an interesting game, full of interesting ideas and sometimes exasperating combat. Surprisingngly, given the level of buginess so evident (and definitely not addressed by that patch) it’s a good game overall. So it gets a thumbs up from me, with a sidenote that you should have a pretty decent rig to really get the most out of the game, and should have a certain tolerance for the inevitable bug or two.
Even so, there are some spectacular misses. Gameplay stands by itself very well, so these aren’t as important as they would be to a lesser First-Person Shooter, but still… The most obvious is that the settings menu for Video Options is a mess – Antialiasing and Anistrophy are non-existent. One is simply not working, the other is useless because STALKER’s game engine uses a weird rendering system that doesn’t support it. I’ve been reading the TweakGuide.com examination released earlier and all is not lost – there are tweaks you can make since the game is capable of being modded by extracting the content archives (much like Oblivion and Medieval 2). TweakGuide also comments on the effectiveness of some low-level options (which don’t seem to work better than the “medium” ones). Also HDR, important for GeForce 6 series GPU’s, is not a separate setting to be disabled.
Back to the game play – STALKER excels at a few graphical additions (even with the above). The most obvious is the weather. When it rains, it pours. When it let’s loose lightening, your video card takes notice. The second is the day/night cycle – and night is something to really take care with. Unlike Oblivion, or other half-assed attempts at day/night cycles, STALKER just takes the realistic of approach of making the sun set and rise at genuine times. Simple, effective. Half Life 2: Episode One (the level with the underground garage populated by Zombies) is a close match for how you’ll feel when night arrives. Even bumping up the gamma level doesn’t help with visibility. Even the flash light isn’t much help beyond a certain range. This really packs a cool punch – especially when you have to spend the next 7 hours of gametime (a lot less in real time of course 
) stumbling around in the dark hearing the howls of a pack of mutant dogs and barely being able to see them when get close. Sychronising attacks with lightening strikes becomes a quickly learned skill .
The other cool thing is the “ALife”, watching mother nature at war with packs of Blind Dog mutants run into confrontations with those mutant boars around this corner, or something even weirder around another – all at random in a natural fashion. It’s cool to watch – especially once you realise those creatures have defining habits. At the start, I remember finding the body of a fellow Stalker surrounded by mutant dogs. After shooting up two, and scattering the rest I returned some hours later to find the escapees of my first attack had returned to the body and were apparently ravaging it – and their dead compatriots. I almost felt sorry for the poor sod whose pixelated body was being gnawed on, I was even tempted to use the “drag body” action to move him to a place safe from the local man-eating wildlife.
A few places where it goes wrong includes the mission system. Missions are obviously not finished in full – most are given by a handful of Traders, or Stalker leaders. Most come with no other in-game scenery, events, or NPC interaction other than the text descriptions. Oblivion was far better – of course Oblivion has voice overs for ALL the text which made it more immersive to start with. This lack of gloss in some areas, and the opposite in others is a sad thing – finished this game would have hit a few 90%+ marks in reviews, rather than the telling 80%+ it seems to be getting.
Overall, it’s flawed and buggy, but that’s easily forgiven once you jump into unique action. My score? I’d go with an 85% and hope it prods future FPS’s to new levels of originality.
