Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

Today was somewhat unusual in that I finished campaigns in two separate games: Total Warhammer 2 Lizard men campaign and Vanquish single player campaign. Of course I had played the majority of bot games over the last few weeks and it is just coincidence that I managed to finish them on the same day. The Lizard-man campaign (Kroq Gar to be exact) is perhaps my favourite Total War campaign of all those I have played. I just love the tough Lizard units and big stompy dinosaurs are awesome. The Vortex campaign is much more story line focused than previous Total War games which is an great direction for the series to go in. You race other factions to take control of the vortex through a series of rituals which spawn increasingly challenging waves of Chaos and Skaven armies. The race is a bit artificial because apparently even if one of the other factions beats you to the final ritual you get a second chance to stop them in a fairly easy final battle. I guess Creative Assembly had to inclu...

I have been playing a lot of Total War Warhammer 2 and I am really enjoying Kroq Gar's Lizardmen vortex campaign. As seems to be the case with every Total War game it took me a few false starts to find a rhythm.  Initially I started a Skaven Campaign but made some early strategic mistakes. I expanded too rapidly leading to problems with money and food supply and I wasted even more money on intervention armies.  Bankrupt and running out of food I have put that campaign on hold. I still love Skaven game play:  swarming enemies with cheap disposable units while pelting them from afar with magic and powerful artillery is very satisfying as is the ability to spawn clan rats(menace from below) behind enemy lines. I was able to pull off several heroic victories against impossible odds using spawned spawned clan rats before food shortages made this tactic un-affordable. I will definitely come back to the Skaven but I may start a fresh campaign. Second attempt was a High Elf c...

I built a new gaming PC about six months ago (Ryzen 5 1600) but I had a nasty shock when I went looking for a new graphics card. Crypto-currency miners were buying up graphics cards by the dozen to perform the hard sums needed to unlock virtual currency pushing prices for graming graphics cards through the roof. The €300 price bracket that I consider to be my comfort zone seems to be particularly affected with the result that there were no cards available in my price range that would give a reasonable upgrade over my three year old GTX 970. Aside: Bitcoin was the fore runner and still the most widely known crypto-currency but this year a new player called Etherium seems to be demanding all attention. A key feature of Etherium is that it is resistant to mass extraction using customised chips called "Asics" and therefore requires actual GPUs for mining. It is my understanding that AMD Radeon architecture is the favourite for this process leading to complete lack of availabili...

In February 2016 I ordered a set of really cheap ink for our Canon Pixma printer: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/251740970361 . That is just over €12 for four complete sets of ink. Contrast that with the official Canon price of €57.99 for a a single multi-pack of four colours: https://store.canon.ie/pixma-mg-5650-cartridges/cp928eed/ I am fully aware of the razor and blade model   that inkjet printers use and I had often bought third party ink before but I had never gone so cheap. At some stage you do get what you pay for and that ebay ink is only 1/18th the price of official Canon ink so I bought it as something of an experiment. Well here we are 19 months later and that ink is finally running out. I would like to share some of the fears I had when buying such cheap ink and my eperiences with it.  1. It won't work at all or have some annoying incompatibilty. Nope. Ink worked perfectly and is 100% compatible. Even has a little LED on each cartridge to show its stat...

My father was a practical man. He grew up on a farm and enjoyed hunting and fishing. He apprenticed as a carpenter and built houses for a living.  As a crasftman he knew the importance of good steel but he wasn't a knife nerd. I remember him  carrying a succession of knives over the years both cheap and expensive. The one constant is that he always had a pocket knife and he used it for everything. The same blade that cut carpet tile in the morning was used to peel the apple my father ate that afternoon. He firmly believed that every boy and man should carry a pocket knife and  I still remember him bringing me to buy my first knife at age seven or eight. The salesman talked him out of it that day sadly and I didn't get a knife of my own for a few more years.  I still have his last  pocket knife before he died. It is an old and battered knock off of a swiss army knife. It is my most treasured momento of my father. Given my father's habit it is hardly surprising ...

I was reading an article today about a rather shocking recent  incident where a policeman in Utah abused his powers to arrest a nurse who was doing her job. For some reason this reminded me of a situation I was in a few years ago where I was witness to a much more professionally handed policing incident. Time plays hell with memories so I thought to record what I still remember here for posterity. It started on the top floor of a double decker bus. I was coming home from work and I sat near the middle as I usually do. This day there was a rather loud gentleman sitting several seats back from me who was clearly intoxicated on alcohol or something else. He was determined to engage in loud conversation with those around him as he expounded his opinions in rather colourful expletive laden language. This happens occasionally on public transport and while it is annoying you learn to ignore it or perhaps move seats. I did my best to ignore the loud gentleman although those sitting close...

Halo Single Player Version 3 (SPV3) is a rather wonderful fan made re-imagination of the original Halo Combat evolved. The mod is free but does require a valid key code from an original game to install. Sadly only the first two Halo shooters made it to the PC along with a more recent RTS game called Halo Wars but I still love the series. SPV3 replicates all of the missions of the original game and extends them with extra sections, extra enemies,  new weapons, new vehicles and new abilities. Did I mention the extra enemies? There are a lot of new enemies.  Happily they game supplies you with a lot of extra firepower to deal with these enhanced threats. The mod is incredibly polished and feels like a professional game. If you are interested you can grab the latest version from this Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/halospv3/

I don't have a moral objection to DLC but as a general rule I don't buy it. I don't go for cosmetic enhancements and I already have  too many games and too little time to play them so mission packs don't make sense. Furthermore the modern trend is for DLC to retain its price even after the base game has been heavily discounted. "Game of the Year" bundles with all DLC included used to be a thing but that practise seems to be dying out. The net affect of all of these things is that I don't buy DLC ... Except .... Occasionally I enjoy a game so much that I just want more of it and in those rare cases I am happy to spend the money. Two cases in particular come to mind. Several years ago I did a marathon play through of  the Mass effect trilogy and I got so sucked in that I really wanted the additional story line DLC. I spent far more on DLC missions than I did on the games themselves but I didn't regret it at all. I even felt happy to give a bit mor...

"A Story About My Uncle" and "Inside" are both puzzle / platformer games set in weird quirky worlds that are beautifully imagined. Inside is a 2D game with a dark almost monochrome aesthetic while Uncle is 3D and wildly colourful. I recommend both but Inside was a more enjoyable experience for me overall.  The thing about this type of game is that there is very delicate balance to be struck between offering the right level of challenge and frustrating the player to the point where they quit. This is made all the more difficult by the range of player abilities in both puzzle solving and precision jumping. However there are plenty things a developer can do to make things better or to make things worse. The position of checkpoints is huge. Never put a tricky challenge at the end of a long boring section. Good visual clues are also ideal so that the player always know what they are supposed to go even if it is not obvious how they are going to get there. Inside get s...

I am playing a "Franks" campaign in Total War Attila and having a bad time of it. I am currently at war with six other factions each of whom seems able to field multiple full armies while I struggle along with depleted units and a few mercenaries. The Thuringians are being particularly annoying at present and after overwhelming my tentative attempts at expansion they followed my armies home with two large armies intent on destruction. For some reason (perhaps related to difficulty setting) they just seem to be better than my armies. Their troops are more robust in battle than mine and they seem to replenish faster between battles. Particularly annoying is the fact that they seem to be able to travel further than I can in a move. They always seem to be able to catch my armies when the odds are in their favour while I am unable to catch them when the situation is reversed. Happily they finally made a mistake. Their main stack captured one of my settlements (a crushing defeat, r...

My biggest mistake with the dwarven campaign in Total War Warhammer was not really playing it until after I had already spend a lot of time with other factions (Empire, Bordelaux and Vampires). Having a good grasp of the basic game world and game mechanics from those other campaigns the only challenge remaining is dealing with the strengths and weaknesses of the dwarves themselves. Dwarven strengths:  Even low level dwarven warriors are very tough  and tend to win battles just by standing still and letting the enemy come to them. Dwarves have easy access to some of the best ranged troops and artillery in the game. The dwarven economy is very strong so it is easy for them to make lots of money. The dwarven building tree is very streamlined that and allows a player relatively quick access to high quality units. The dwarven starting position is easy to defend with nearby access to weak green skin armies and settlements for early game combat experience. Dwarves have ...

Confession time: The Bordelaux campaign is the first full total war campaign that I have completed since Napoleon. I have explained before that Total War campaign games have a habit of bogging down into tedium so I usually give up before achieving the final campaign objectives. The fact that I persevered this time reinforces my belief that Warhammer is indeed the best Total War game to date. The Bordelaux campaign is a free DLC campaign that was only released in February but it is both unusual and interesting so I can highly recommend it. Bordelaux like all Bretonnians are a knighly race who love their horses and put chivalry above everything. Indeed the main victory condition for the Bordelaux campaign is to amass sufficient chivalry. Chivalry governs how you must play a Bordelaux campaign. Several common actions such as raiding, ambushing and pillaging human settlements  actually cause you lose chivalry so they are best avoided. Victory on the battlefield gains chivalry whil...

I have enough background in electrical engineering to be able to say with certainty that there are several absolutely objective criteria that can be used to gauge the overall performance of an audio playback system. Criteria such as distortion and frequency response can be measured and compared with high precision. I can also say with certainty that the build quality of a USB cable in a purely digital signal path has no impact on these objective criteria once the cable meets the minimum standard to ensure that the digital signal is transmitted in the first place. Yet experts who have spent years enhancing their knowledge of audio systems are adamant that they can hear the difference when they use $1000 USB cables:  http://www.hifiplus.com/articles/first-listen-audioquest-diamond-usb-cable/?page=2 Frederic Brochet's famous 2001 study showed that expert wine tasters cannot even distinguish between red and white wine in a blind taste test. http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014...

I have put over sixty hours into Warhmmer Total war at this stage and despite my earlier love/hate post  I haven't gotten bored yet. Here is a quick summary of reasons why I think this is probably the best Total War game ever: 1. Streamlining : Total War has been getting more streamlined for the last few iterations but Warhammer has brought a new ruthlessness to this process and has not been afraid to sacrifice once loved aspects of the game-play to deliver a slicker faster paced game. I miss the old epic city assaults for example but have to agree that the simplified versions in Warhammer speeds things up a lot. 2. Polish : Total War games have always looked and sounded great but they were often let down by niggles underneath the hood. Thankfully Warhammer seems to have overcome this and the game is very polished. Everything seems to work pretty much as it is supposed to and for the most part it works as you would expect it to. 3. A combination of streamlining and polish me...

I am posting this here rather than on something like Reddit because I don't want to get involved in the usual internet fanboy wars but the plain fact is I find myself somewhat disappointed by the release of AMD's Ryzen 7 CPUs. Brief background: My current gaming rig is long overdue an upgrade (currently running a 2009 era Xeon 3470). In 2014 I was due to replace this system completely but put it off in favour of an overhaul initially to wait for Windows 10 and then later to wait for AMD Ryzen. Well here we are in 2017. Windows 10 is old news and Ryzen 7 has finally been released. I have run out of excuses. I am old enough not to have completely gotten lost in the hype about AMD Ryzen but I was very much looking forward to a new competitive CPU market that might bring bring high end CPU power down into my mid market price range. I guess my hopes were that Ryzen would bring i7 level performance at i5 level prices. Realistically I was expecting half way between i5 and i7 pe...

Thanks to Humble Monthly I am playing Total War Warhammer. Now a few days in I am once again reminded of why I absolutely love Total War games and also why I absolutely hate Total War games. I love them because of the ridiculous ambition. Every total war game allows you to play grand strategy with empires and kingdoms and then zoom in to fight individual battles with thousands of soldiers on each side.  I love them because of the incredible scene setting and ambience. Every single total War game really knocks it out of the park in terms of sound, music and graphics when it comes to portraying their chosen world.  I hate them because of the many things that just don't work as well as they should. I am not even talking about many bugs that each new iteration of the game launches with because I always wait a couple of months until they are patched out. I am talking about the basic structural flaws that never get patched out. The AI which struggles with pathfinding in ...

This morning  I signed up for Amazon's Kindle first service. It is a kind of book club where you pay a monthly sub and get to pick one of six pre release books on Kindle every month. At only £0.99 per month it is a very low risk commitment and it can be cancelled any time. My reason for joining has nothing to do with hoping to read the next blockbuster at a bargain price before it goes on general release. It is simply my latest attempt to solve the ever growing problem of what piece of media (book, film, game) to consume next. There are too many new books out there just as there are too many news game, too many new TV series and too many new movies. I am willing to give Amazon's editorial staff a go at suggesting what I should read next.  There is simply too much stuff out there. How on earth does one choose which stuff to spend the time and effort consuming? Mega corporations like Netflix, Google and Amazon have spent millions trying to answer this question with algorithms ...

I do love finishing games even when they are relatively casual indie games like Broforce. I highly recommend the game by the way. It is an action platformer with a couple of twists. Twist 1 is that you play as a random selection of "Bros" (translate: thinly disguised action heroes from 80's movies), You never know which character you will get next and they all have very different weapons and skills. The second twist is that the terrain is completely destructible. Altogether this adds quite a bit of strategy to the usual shooty carnage. A major bonus is that the game is very co-op friendly and it is a complete blast in co-op. Now what game will I try next? Another indie game will be quick to pick up but I have a few AAA titles in my queue that I also want to try. Deus Ex Mankind Divided is tempting.

The original Hill Climb Racing was something of a misnomer given that it was a single player game with no actual racing involved. The sequel addresses this and features four vehicle cross country racing. Hill Climb 2 has topped the app charts and the game's leader board is filled with thousands of players from all over the world. It is a lot of fun and it certainly adds excitement to the game as you speed past Joe from USA and Jim from Bulgaria on your way to winning a race.  It is all very slickly presented so it took me a while to realise that there is some slight of hand going on. It wasn't until I noticed that you can pause and restart races that it dawned on me that I wasn't racing other players in real time. The game actually pits you against pre-recorded runs by other players in asychronous multiplayer. Asychronous multiplayer is very common in mobile games and I have tried several where you create an army or a base which other players can attack while you are away...