All hail Gaben. The Steam Summer Sale is now on!
Actually, I haven’t bought anything in it yet. GMG had Bioshock Infinite for €5 cheaper and nothing has really tickled my fancy since. Day 3 is about to hit the store so get ready to hit F5!
Category Archives: Games
Oooh, look at the size of that will ya?
Games and apps are getting bigger and bigger. It wasn’t so long ago when games that came on more than one CD were a rarity. Yes, those were the times when a packet of crisps cost 15p and you’d have change from 30p when you bought a Mars Bar.
Oh, ok. It was long ago but you know what I mean.
This is the output from Space Sniffer after running it on the C drive. Besides the massive Steam folder there’s also GOG.com at 22.3Gb, the Witcher 2 taking up 22.2Gb of that, and the “Origin Games” folder makes an appearance in the app where Battlefield 3 consumed 34.2Gb of space!
The unfortunate thing is that I haven’t played many of these games but I’m consoled by the fact they were almost all bought during the insane Steam sales where price cuts of 75% are common. Thankfully backing up Steam games is easy but Origin doesn’t have a backup plan. You have to manually copy files to their backup destination!
Jump Around in Bad Company 2!
I spent way too much time in Bad Company 2 when it came out. I’m still rubbish at it and haven’t played the PC version enough to unlock the much coveted “magnum ammo” upgrade! It’s just not the same without the guys I used to play with.
Regardless. EA have never allowed mods in the game but with NexusBF, a reverse engineering of the BFBC2 server, you can install mods. This is a video of the jump mod and it looks insane!
Xbox One Reveal in 2 Minutes
If, like me, you missed the fantastic Xbox One reveal yesterday or whenever it was here it is in all it’s glory, but cut down to two minutes.
Via this post on r/videos where you will find such witty comments as:
Be sure to follow @collarduty too for the latest collarduty news.
I can’t see myself buying one of these, not when I have a keyboard and mouse on my PC and I looked in vain for decent replacements for those when I did play games on consoles. The thought of going back to using a controller for anything but flight/car/platform games makes me shudder.
Trials Evolution Gold Edition: Beach Head
Here’s an early level from the demo of Trials Evolution Gold Edition called Beach Head. I wasn’t expecting the war setting with exploding bombs, smoke and flames or the export to Youtube option either!
This was recorded on a PC with an i5 2400 CPU and an Nvidia 560ti GPU. Some people with Nvidia cards are having problems running the game but it worked ok for me.
I was a big fan of the original Xbox 360 game but this is more of the same, just flashier and bigger! It’s a simplistic platformer at heart so don’t go into the game expecting something deep and meaningful. It’s very accessible, with the quick restarts making up for the many inevitable falls.
Having had my fill of the game on Xbox, I think I’ll wait until there’s a deep discount on the Steam Store for this. Try out the demo, it’s fun!
Portals in the Sea
Garrettstown Beach in Co Cork boasts a number of attractions. Chief among them are the waves loved by surfers in one area and a long sandy beach next door.
There are also a few Ingress portals there and I managed to capture some of them. The two in the sea only have a couple of resonators and not the full complement of eight because I was standing at the bottom of the sea wall with my hand outstretched trying to reach them. After almost getting caught by a sudden wave I beat a hasty retreat.
When the tide goes out however I’ll be back!
Raiden, it’s not quite the same on Android..
I pumped insane numbers of 10p coins into the Raiden arcade machine twenty years ago. Over the years I’ve played the dire PC conversion in the late 90’s (argh, it used midi music) and played the arcade version a few times in MAME but the Android version holds up well against the arcade original. It’s a bunch of fun too and it’s part of the Humble Bundle now!
Oh yeah, it’s not quite the same on an Android device. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper and possibly easier. There’s no way I could move the ship around as quickly as I could by dragging a finger across the screen. Great stuff!
Michael’s Rebel Control Field
I think Michael Collins would have been liked to see this. An Ingress Resistance control field all the way from his memorial statue in Clonakilty to two portals next to Blarney Castle.
It’s certainly the longest control field I’ve ever created, probably stretching 40-50km. Unfortunately it’s thin as the Blarney portals are fairly close to each other and I don’t have a key for the portal in Clonakilty so it’ll disappear in about a week.
Ingress has a really high attrition rate. Unless there are portals within walking distance of you (or you have loads of spare time) it’s a chore getting to them to hack or capture them. I’ve seen several Resistance players who were initially keen on the game suddenly disappear, never to be heard from again. Thankfully the Enlightened have two French lads who are really into the game so there are always loads of portals for me and a few others to attack. Now if only I had the time thing sorted out ..
Oooh, looks like I have an invite to hand out!
KSP: docked with Blarney Space Station
Wow, Kerbal Space Program can really test your stamina. I finally docked a crew quarters with my space station this evening. It almost broke my heart and resolve to play this game but after taking a break from it I tried again. After a number of manual test launches I reluctantly enabled the “ascent autopilot” because my rockets were blowing up so often it was getting tiresome. I eventually went overboard and used 4 mainsail rockets and the huge orange fuel tanks. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked!
Kerbal Space Program is at times (most of the time) a frustrating and difficult game to play but also has these (too infrequent) joyous moments when something goes right. It took more than a dozen attempts to launch the crew quarters and monopropelent into space and when I finally managed to dock I had a tiny amount of the fuel left. Scott Manley makes it look way too easy!
Scott has some great tutorials but AddMeGamers has some very good ones too that are worth checking out too. Be sure to check out r/kerbalspaceprogram on Reddit as there’s an influx of new players and plenty of help given.
The game recently became available on Steam and it immediately jumped into the top 10 best sellers so I guess there are lots of people sharing my frustration. Great game however, I definitely recommend it!
Steam Games over USB 2.0 is painful
Somehow I have over 450GB of games installed. I went a little mad installing them when I bought this PC last year but now that I need the space I don’t really want to download them again. Luckily I have a number of external USB drives so I started copying games over yesterday evening.
Out of curiosity I used Steam Mover to copy and symlink the games back to the C: as I wondered how well games would play over and old USB 2.0. It didn’t work well. It was very painful. Assassin’s Creed wouldn’t even load but crashed on the Ubisoft logo. Arkham Asylum loaded but the graphics of the main menu moved like molasses. I think I’ll use Steam’s backup system to make archived copies of the games as that will compress the files too saving a bit more space.
External drives are simply enclosures with real disks in them so I opened up one of my external drives to see if I could hook it directly to my PC internally but the disk in it is using a different interface to the one in my PC. The last time I went diving into a PC was when IDE was the standard and SATA was only just becoming mainstream!
So, I’m going to backup games to the drive instead of copying them. I’ll also dump another copy of my photos there too as I started using Backblaze (aff) to do remote backups. It may take some time to squirt 681GB of data into the cloud though. Eventually I’ll have to buy a second drive for my PC but that’s something I’ll look at in the future.