Skip to main content

Big Stompy Robots: Battletech

The October Humble Monthly bundle included the 2018 mech combat game Battletech. I have always loved big stompy robot games and I have very fond memories of playing  Battletech: Mechwarrior games from a quarter of a century ago when they vied with Metaltech: Earthseiege for the mech gaming crown.

This latest Battletech game ticks a lot of boxes for me. It has a story based campaign set in the very rich lore of the Battletech  universe. Combat is turn based so no twitch shooting is required. The player controls a squad of mechs which are simulated down to the sub module level giving lots of of variables to play around with and control. All of this is right up my alley. Unfortunately my first couple of hours in the game tarnished this shiny picture some what. The game feels buggy and unoptimised. At times the action is jerky and have I experienced sound dropouts and a crash to desktop during combat. The crash happened as I was attempting the surprisingly challenging first mission that the game throws you into after a hopelessly inadequate tutorial. I thought I was doing well as I overcame the easy enemies of the first few encounters but the mission went on much longer than expected and ground me down by attrition. Even though the enemies were weaker than my forces the oncoming waves were smart enough to continually focus on the single most damaged member of my party. Given that the loss of a single member ends the game this meant I had to reload several times before I managed to successfully drag that most damaged mech to the end. 

Normally this level of hassle early in a game would cause me to move on. Life is too short and there really are too many games to play. I did mention however that I have always loved big stompy robot games and Battletech has done just enough to rekindle my enthusiasm. I can feel myself getting sucked in once again to logistical calculations of loadouts and tactics.

Aside: The fact that Battletech runs quite poorly on a modern PC highlights what an incredible job the programmers of earlier games did on much more limited hardware. Earthsiege  from way back in 1994 for example had a very similar level of complexity with real time simulation of mech combat down to sub component level. That game ran flawlessly on my 50MHz 80486. Battletech runs somewhat haphazardly on on a modern PC with a six core 3.6GHz CPU and decent GPU.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My First Gaming Mouse: Logitech G300

I bought a gaming mouse yesterday a Logitech G300, here my initial thoughts. What is a gaming mouse?  There are a wide variety of devices available classified as gaming mice but a few features  seem common: 1. Wired rather than wireless: Although some high end models are wireless wired connections are just better and faster than wireless so most gaming mice stick with wired. As a bonus wired mice don't need batteries so the mouse is lighter.  2. High response rate: 1 to 2ms response rate so the mouse immediately responds to input.  2. High DPI. Gaming mice invariable boast high DPI numbers from 2,000 DPI upwards. This makes the device very responsive to the smallest movements.   3. Adjustable DPI . High DPI improves responsiveness but reduces precision so gaming mice generally allow you to adjust the DPI down for precise work such as pulling off headshots in sniper mode. Generally the mouse allows dpi to be changed on the fly by pressing a button.  4. Extr

Android Tip 3: Sharing a Folder between multiple users of an Android device

Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access  then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein

Portal 2 two screen coop on one PC.

I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC. The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone. 1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904 A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / p