Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

A combination of Winter sales, Christmas spirit and a few days holidays always puts me in the mood for some video games. Here are the titles which have gotten some of my time since the start of December:  1. Neverwinter Nights 2: A buggy launch cast a shadow over this sequel but fully patched it remains an engrossing gaming experience. Even though I have a boxed copy I rebought it from gog.com to save the hassle of patching it myself and I got all the expansions as a bonus. This is actually the third time I started the main campaign of NWN 2 and each time I get about half way through and then move on to something else. That is still many hours of gaming goodness each time however.  2. Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone. Witcher 3's expansions have been on my wishlist for quite some time so when isthereanydeal.com  informed me that they had finally fallen into my price range I jumped and bought them both. I have only played the shorter"Hearts of Stone" and it was excellen...

If a company has a live chat service I will always use it in preference to phoning the company to try and get customer support. I find it is is quicker to get in contact with someone and I find that it is generally quicker to get a problem resolved using live chat. This is despite the fact that the actually chat responses can be slow coming and the support reps are almost certainly multitasking multiple customer queries. I suspect that companies put a higher level of support staff on their live chat lines than on their phone lines because of the savings associated with multiplexing. An added bonus of live chat is that you can keep a transcript of the conversation. Many companies will actually email a transcript but you can usually screen capture it yourself. This can be handy if ever you need to refer back to it.

I am currently playing Enderal a free total conversion mod which offers a totally new RPG using the Skyrim engine. It is great. Not just great for a mod or a free game. It is just great. The story is great. The quests are great. The graphics and sound are great. The voice acting is great (even in English translation). The game is remarkably stable and bug free.  How did they achieve all of this on a budget of zero euro? I have no idea. If you have Skyrim (any version) then you can download Enderal here  in either English or the original German versions. You need to download both the installation package and the launcher. Put the launcher into your Skyrim directory (probably C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\skyrim). Run the launcher and hit "install now". Navigate to the installation package when prompted.

I have 46 hours recorded in single player mode on Steam and the campaign only takes about 11 hours to beat. This game seamlessly combines old school running and shooting with new school collecting and achievements and it is a tonne of fun. Favourite weapon has to be the Gauss cannon. It fires a high damage accurate single shot which works great for running and gunning. You can't afford to stand around waiting for the automatic weapons to whittle down opponents. The Gauss cannon takes low level enemies out in a single shot even the really annoying shielded guys. The siege mode upgrade path allows it to charge up a massive area of effect shot. In my opinion the most powerful weapon in the game apart from the BFG. The only disadvantage of the Gauss cannon is that it does some much damage that it kills enemies before you can pull off glory kills.

I have been subscribed to Humble Monthly for three months. There are usually one or two games I like along with a bunch of stuff I have no interest in or already own.  Every month I dither about whether or not to cancel my subscription so I have decided to go about this in a more scientific fashion. I present to you the Humble Monthly personalised value spreadsheet. The spreadsheet takes a conservative approach and values games at the lowest price they have ever been on sale at according to isthereanydeal.com . I have multiplied each price by my own level of interest in the game on a subjective 0-100% scale. In this way games I have no interest in are valued at zero. I have also set the value of games I already own to zero even though I may be able to find a home for some of the duplicate keys with younger relatives. The summary shows that the Humble Monthly bundles are worth an average of over $21 to me which compares favourably with the monthly subscription of $12. Also of n...

I used a gift voucher to buy three PS3 games I don't have time to play. I am feeling somewhat perplexed about it even though the voucher was a gift.  Over the years I have paid real money for hundreds of PC games I never got around to playing but somehow this feels worse. Most of those PC games are digital products that can be hidden away in my Steam library causing no offence to anyone. These PS3 games however will sit accusingly under the TV, increasing clutter and reminding me of the fact that they add negative rather than positive value to my existence. 

To be more specific I don't like the combination of permadeath and random chance that is a hallmark of all true rogue-likes. It has taken me a while to admit this because serious gamers are supposed to like rogue-likes and respect the many classics of the genre.  I know that permadeath is supposed to make a game more engrossing by increasing the stakes. I know that it makes your achievements seem more worthwhile when you finally do overcome the game's challenges.  I also know that randomness makes a game interesting. It means you never know what to expect. Randomness is one of the things which differentiates a game from a puzzle.  However when you combine randomness and permadeath you condemn yourself to the bitter despair of losing many hours of effort due to a random toss of the dice. In most true rogue-likes a pointless unavoidable death is almost certain. You may die nine times out of ten. More likely you will die ninety nine times out of a hundred but the ...

I have had my Asus Xonar DGX for  few days now and I have had a chance to try it out in a few games. First impressions are a little bit mixed. On the one hand the card sounds good and the Xonar control panel has a few nice features that work well with headphones (which I use a lot). On the other hand my attempts to use the Xonar to get EAX support in older games has met with mixed success. and has even led to a few crashes. I tried enabling EAX in the following games: Far Cry (seems to work but occasionally crashed), Painkiller (seems to work), Rome Total War (EAX 2 works EAX 3 doesn't), Prey (seems to work), Battle for Middle Earth 2 (says no supported EAX hardware found). I also tested the card in a few more modern games (Alien Rage and Fallout 4) and it works without any problems but neither of those games use EAX. Asus claims that the GX2.5 feature on their xonar cards supports EAX 5.0 so I am a bit surprised it seems to have problems with EAX 3.0. There are very few games t...

It is at least ten years since onboard sound became good enough to obsolete discrete sound cards yet I have just bought an ASUS Xonar DGX for my PC. I have no illusions that this €30 card will give any noticeable improvement in sound quality for modern games. I bought it because it comes with an emulator for Creative Labs EAX technology.  EAX was the dominant environmental sound method used in PC games until the advent of Windows Vista. EAX was proprietary to Creative labs but every sound card manufacturer had some form of EAX compatibility back in the day and a huge number of games used it . Vista and all later versions of Windows changed the way sound is handled and EAX no longer works. Modern games achieve rich audo environments through other means but older titles that relied on EAX are left high and dry. I enjoy playing older PC games and it always irritated that I could no longer get the full experience due to the lack of EAX. Many of these games relied on EAX for positio...

I am currently about two thirds of the way through another replay of the 2004 classic fps Far Cry. It is one of a small number of games that I repeatedly return to. The PC has always had the best back catalog in gaming and it is one of the joys of being a PC gamer that it is possible to play the old classics on a modern PC. The lush tropical setting is still beautiful and the monsters are as ugly and nasty as ever. The huge open levels are still magnificient. The gunplay is still  good as are are the stealth features. I am enjoying Far Cry but I also have a niggling concern. The experience has not been as satisfying as I expected this return to one of my all time favourite games to be. The cause of my discomfort is straightforward enough. I find myself wondering if the effort required to get this classic game to run on a modern system is justified by the experiece. Time is doubly cruel to older video games. Every new generation of computer makes it harder to get old games runni...

.. in a 200 year old creepy building with a bunch of teenage girls? Well apparently the school my daughter goes to would. Have these people never seen a slasher movie?

Divinity Original Sin: This is a wonderful content rich turn rpg that manges to combine old school turn based party combat with modern graphics and a lovely bright aesthetic.  I have over 130 hours played and still plenty more to do in game. Civ V (again): Despite having 70+ hours in game I don't think I have every finished a full campaign of Civ V but it is a perennial classic that warrants revisiting over and over again. Just Cause 3: I actually bought this to entertain some young nephews who were visiting. It did the trick and after they left I played through the campaign myself.  It is temperamental (on PC) and the story is rubbish but it retains  the whacky go anywhere do anything and blow everything up style of its predecessor. Call of Duty: Black Ops III: Even though I have long since given up any hope of keeping up with teenagers in multi player shooters I still try to play each Call of Duty single player campaign. Black Ops III is actually one of the better...

How do you feel when something you like is judged to be worthless by the court of public opinion? I recently starting watching the SyFy show Z-Nation on Netflix. I like the show a lot. Unfortunately I am not going to explain why because I cannot do so without sounding like I am trying to justify my opinion and make excuses for it.  The problem is that Z-Nation was panned by critics. It was reviewed so poorly that if I had read reviews before watching the show I would never have risked it. Instead I stumbled across it by accident and didn't look at a review till I was six or seven episodes in. It was only then I became aware that the show I was enjoying was actually terrible according to most knowledgeable critics.  How should one react in such circumstances? Shouldn't one dismiss the views of critics because in the end it is only our own opinion that really matters? That sounds like a sensible position but I think we need critics. Today's world offers every one ...

EVE online used to inspire the best writing about games. The sandbox universe of New Eden gave rise to a million stories and the uncompromising ruthlessness of the game ensured that many of those stories were worth reading. Epic stories like the Guiding Hand Social Club's meticulous evsiceration of Ubiqua Seraph  caught the attention of main stream media but I have always enjoyed more mundane stories of the day to day experiences of capsuleers: tales of piracy and revenge, tales of exploration and discovery, tales of incompetence and mastery. I myself was never more than a very casual EVE player and yet it inspired some of my own favourite writing Where have all these great EVE blogs gone? Some stalwarths like Wilhelm over at the Ancient Gaming Noob   still write regularly about the game but these are stories of participating in mega alliances and huge wars. This seems to have become a feature of EVE writing lately. The politics of mega alliances dominates everything and g...

I actually bought a second hand PS3 in order to play this highly acclaimed game.  I love the strong characters. I loved the atmospheric music and settings. I loved the attention to detail in the rendering of a post apocalyptic world.  I loved the fact that  the game had such a strong story line. I am still trying to figure out whether or nor I actually enjoyed the story but that doesn't take from the fact that I know it is an exceptionally well done story.  I have more mixed feelings about the game-play. Shooting was awkward although it did get easier towards the end when I had a better selection of weapons and was more used to it. Melee combat is actually easier than shooting and more effective but melee weapons break after a few hits which severely limits the usefulness of melee. The stealth abilities in the game are really superb but there are many section s where you still have to kill all the enemies even if you use stealth. My biggest gripe with the ...

Perhaps that is not surprising but you might be surprised to know why it scares me. I have dreamed about virtual reality and virtual worlds since I was a kid back in the 1970s. The distopian fiction of William Gibson didn't put me off virtual worlds  instead it opened my eyes to the incredible possibilities. Virtual reality would offer humans a chance to escape from physical limitaions and the fictional representations of virutal reality in books, TV and movies whetted my appetite for it. During my formative years in the 1970's and 80's the hardware available could barely host crudely pixelated 2D environments and yet they fed the spark of my enthusiasm. When three dimiensional game worlds became possible with 1990's hardware I got further sucked in and PC gaming became my main hobby. The advent of online multiplayer worlds in the noughties was further proof that this was really going to happen. At the time I thought  / hoped that the mmorpgs might develop over time t...

It must be middle age that has recently inclined me towards nostalgic comparisons of past and present technology.  Last week I was musing about internet speeds but today I got to thinking about the prolifieration of internet connected devices in our home over the last couple of decades. 1991: 0 devices (I hadn't even met my wife at that stage  but I give this date as a zero reference point) (1 adult living in my home, Peak internet speed 0 kb/s) 1996: 1 desktop PC with dial up (2 adults living in my home. Peak Internet Connection speed 28.8kbs) 2001: 1 desktop PC with dial up modem           1 Laptop with dial up modem (2 adults and 2 infants living in my home. Peak internet connection speed 56kb/s ) 2006: 2 desktop PCs with wired broadband            1 laptop with wifi connection to broadband (2 adults 2 children living in my home. Peak internet connection speed 2Mb/s) 2011: 2 desktop PCs with wired br...

The iconic Halo series has had a poor relationship with the PC. Halo 2 didn't come out for PC until two full years after the Xbox 2006 release and even then it was artificially restricted to those who had upgraded to Microsoft's unpopular Vista operating system. If all that wasn't enough to annoy PC gamers the port was badly optimised and buggy. The game has never been made available as a digital download so it has pretty much been forgotten by the PC community. Yet Halo 2 remains an important milestone in gaming history and I have long intended to play it so I finally bit the bullet last week and did so. The original Halo (Combat Evolved) was important because it showed that first person shooters could work well on consoles and introduced a number of innovations that have become standard to this day (the game pad control scheme, the two weapon carry limit and the recharging health/shield scheme). Halo 2 introduced on-line multi-player with automatic matchmaking  and its ...

If you want to get Just Cause 3 to run smoothly in high quality settings then you need more than 8Gb ram in your PC. I have 12Gb which is enough but even so I still need to be careful not to have too much stuff running in the background in order to play the game. For some reason the games official requirement is only 6Gb but many players have criticised the game for being a poor quality buggy port and adding more ram  solves most of the issues. Whether this is due to bad programming or not the fact remains that you need more than 8Gb ram to get the best experience out of Just Cause 3. This is the first game I have come across that actually needs more than 8Gb. Until fairly recently even 4Gb was enough,  a legacy of the memory limitations of 32 bit Windows but just over a year ago games like Witcher 3 started demanding up to 8Gb. Now it seems even that barrier has been breached. As for Just Cause 3 itself? Once I got it running I liked it a lot. It is very repetitive and th...

Back in the 1990's I connected to the internet with a 28.8k dial up modem. I remember one one occasion trying to download 20Mbytes of data over this ever so narrow pipeline and it proved such a long and tortuous experience that eventually I had to leave the computer running overnight in order to complete the download.  Yesterday I downloaded a 3Gb file in just under 2 minutes at an average rate 25 M bytes per second. I just had time to browse a couple of web pages before the download was finished. We take it for granted that everything to do with computers has gotten orders of magnitude faster over time but this still strucke me. Three billion bytes is an enormous amount of data. Back in 2000 I bought a computer with a "massive" 10Gb hard drive that managed to serve all of my IT and gaming needs for several years. EDIT: Make that 25 Mbyte per second. Seems I got the math wrong the first time.

It takes so long to boot my Windows laptop that it just isn't worth it any more. I am not talking about the minute or two delay caused by booting from a normal HDD. I am talking about the 10 to 15 minute delay due to Windows updates that seems to be required every time I want to use the laptop. I guess this wouldn't be as much of an issue if used the laptop every day but I don't. I use it perhaps one every two to three weeks in order to give a talk or presentation when I am out of the office. I can assure you from first hand experience that three works worth of accumulated updates makes booting into Windows a slow nightmare. I do have a nice Samsung tablet that I use for normal mobile computing (meetings / email / web browsing) and I even have a HDMI adapter for that tablet but if I am going to an unfamiliar location with untested facilities it is still far safer to bring a windows laptop with old fashioned VGA connector to ensure everything works out. Solutions: 1. B...

A recent price increase from our long time cable TV provided prompted me to bite the bullet and switch to satellite. It isn't a whole lot cheaper but the satellite service offers more channels and some better channels hat were not available from our old provider. Almost every channel we regularly watch is actually a free to air channels. This means that anyone with the appropriate equipment  can receive these for free along with hundreds of other channels without any recurring subscription. A disadvantage of living in Ireland is that we would need both antenna and satellite dish to receive all the relevant channels but a once off investment of perhaps €500 would ensure we could watch hundreds of channels for free without paying a subscription. Why on earth did I opt to pay €20 every  month (rising to €30 in a years time ) for a curated satellite service? Because we don't watch TV the way we used to. Instead of sitting down to watch scheduled programmes at the same time e...

I am currently multi-tasking between two seperate games of Divinity Original Sin, one solo and one co-op with my daughter. It is exactly the same game played on exactly the same computer and yet it feels like two completely different experiences. (Side note: Divinity allows split screen local co-op on one PC (couch co-op) as long as you have two game controllers. It would be nice if one player could use keyboard and mouse but it is still pretty sweet). My solo game is slow and thoughful. I regularly spend half an hour in the inventory screen sorting gear and comparing stats. During combat I ponder skills and tactics carefully before making a move and sometimes I go back and re fight battles I have already won just to see how a different strategy might work. In the co-op game momentum is everything. You can't spend long browsing your inventory if your partner is barelling along to the next encounter. Each new area is looted at twice the speed and snap decisons are made about the...

Somewhat surprisingly the game I spent most time playing over Christmas was Lichdom: Battlemage. The game is an intense first person zapper with lovely graphics and an incredibly comprehensive magical system. I enjoyed it enough to complete the full campaign but there are a few things worth knowing if you ar ethinking of playing it yourself. First off the good bits: It's a first person game with fireballs instead of bullets. What is not to like? Better yet you are a kick ass battle mage who never runs out of mana meaning you can rain down destruction to your hearts content. You fight your way through a series of frenetic battles across an array of stunning maps. The graphics in the game are really lovely both in design and implementation. Once you figure out how magic works you have a huge range of options for winning battles and eventually you will develop y our own blend of destruction and control for dealing with all of the enemies the game throws at you. Before you dive int...