Category Archives: Games

Kerbal Space Program Docking Complete!

Today the world of Kerbin witnessed a momentousness occasion. Two Kerbal Space Program command pods launched from the surface of the planet docked together in an roughly circular orbit of 99300m above the surface. There was much fanfare and cheering from watching Kerbals in the Space Center but none were more relieved than the six Kerbonauts in the vessels.

alarm

The Kerbals weren’t very good pilots however, offering no help when it came to manoeuvring the two pods together. In fact, the looks of distress and alarm on their faces made me glad they weren’t helping.

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The two pods danced around each other, rotating silently and smoothly in the vacuum of space but firmly refusing to line up.

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Eventually they did line up and slowly inched toward each other before clamping magnetically together.

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Despite his earlier fear I couldn’t stop Rodlong Kerman going on an EVA and with his suit he flew around and inspected the newly joined craft. His attempts to join his Kerbonaut comrades in the other pod didn’t go so well as the pod was already full. Still, he even posed for a photo!

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Electricity in the pods was rapidly depleting until I shut it off. I hope the six Kerbals in the combined craft are ok. I’ll have to send some solar panels up next time and use one of the extra docking clamps. Maybe this calls for a rescue operation?

I’m still a noob at this game but doing this I figured out how to cancel my forwards and backwards movement correctly (it’s just like flying the rocket engines, boost towards retrograde rather than away from the target as you might not be heading towards the target!)
These 2 tips from r/kerbalspaceprogram were invaluable:

  • Use [ and ] to switch ships
  • Disable SAS when you’re docking as your pods will just roll around the docking clamp

Scott Manley has an excellent tutorial on docking which helped a lot too.

Frustrating Fun times.

The Weakest Link

As a Resistance agent in the game of Ingress it can be frustrating to see your local city or locality covered in green control fields. Blarney where I live is firmly blue but Cork isn’t so lucky. So when a huge control field popped up extending from Blackrock Castle to the City to Cork Airport to Carrigaline I had to find a way to bring it down.

green-fields

On Sunday I did just that. The Old Bridge portal was level 4 or 5 and had at least one level six resonator. I took down some of the resonators easily enough but the final L4 resonator proved tricky as OliverIE recharged it remotely while I attacked! The most worrying part of the capture was the group of 13-15 year old boys crossing the bridge who chanted penis jokes behind me! Idiots. One of the downsides of visiting some locations I guess. Oliver will earn a tidy sum of AP capturing the portal back again too. (You’re welcome!)

Ingress is quite limited as a game but it’s a very interesting experiment. The hack/capture portal gameplay is one where you have to cooperate or at least be mindful of the enemy. If your portals are too strong you’ll have a nice set of virtual points on a map but you won’t level up any time soon. The “winning side” in any area don’t get any points for maintaining a huge control field.
When you first start up the game there’s a quick tutorial where the players runs through missions designed to familiarise them with the game. Unfortunately that’s about as far as directed gameplay goes. Hopefully in the future missions will be added with objectives for players. Having said that, if this is a taste of what “augmented reality” games can be like I’d like more please. It’s a good excuse to get out walking if nothing else.

I still think it’s a devious ploy by Google to collect photos and information about monuments, statues and places of interest. We’re also feeding them very useful walking information connecting those places.

The Resistance in Cork make a come back

What happens when you severely damage a single Ingress portal?

Ingress map of Cork

Ingress map of Cork

From the logs it appears that 18 links were taken down when I destroyed all but one of the resonators in The Cork Vision Centre Ingress portal this afternoon.

Cork Vision Centre Resonator

So close!

Unfortunately the building was closed so I had to stand outside the gates and the single remaining L4 resonator was at the far side of the portal, away from me. I ran out of time to collect more XMP bursters to finish the job. Still, I think I got about 9,000 AP from that one single portal so I am very happy.

Walk around Cork

I also walked almost 12km in two and a half hours as I tried to scavenge supplies – XMP and XM to aid in my task. Even a month ago I couldn’t have imagined walking that distance. It’s not that far really but I had neglected my exercise. Making walking a part of a game certainly helped my motivation!

I did capture a portal today, the Flower Pot Man on Carey’s Lane. The actual statue that portal is based on appears to be gone now but I remember seeing it years ago. I broke through to Level 4 doing that!

It’s nice to see that gap in green in the Ingress map of Cork now. It’ll give the Enlightenment something to do over the coming week. They were probably getting bored recharging those portals all the time..

4:29PM donncha destroyed an L3 Resonator on The Cork Vision Centre (88 North Main Street, Cork, Co. Cork, Ireland)
4:29PM donncha destroyed an L3 Resonator on The Cork Vision Centre (88 North Main Street, Cork, Co. Cork, Ireland)
4:29PM donncha destroyed an L4 Resonator on The Cork Vision Centre (88 North Main Street, Cork, Co. Cork, Ireland)
4:30PM donncha destroyed an L4 Resonator on The Cork Vision Centre (88 North Main Street, Cork, Co. Cork, Ireland)
4:31PM donncha destroyed an L3 Resonator on The Cork Vision Centre (88 North Main Street, Cork, Co. Cork, Ireland)

Continue reading “The Resistance in Cork make a come back”

Natural Selection 2: survival of the fittest

Natural Selection 2 went on sale in the Steam Winter Sale and I bought it yesterday. First time playing it this evening and for complexity it blows any other team based shooter out of the water. Just take a look at the video above for a taster.

I have to admit I didn’t know what I was doing most of the time but it was a blast. Lots of other new players too judging by some of the chatter I saw and heard. Glad my friend Brian is an old hand at the game, he was a huge help.

If it goes on sale again you should grab it if you’re interested in a great team based game that rewards communication. For once I finished a game at the top of the leaderboard too!

Natural Selection 2

A portal in Blarney

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The first Ingress portal in Blarney appeared this morning.

It’s on the site of the Blarney Castle Hotel and I was the first to hack it and add resonators. Hopefully some of the sites I submitted as portals get picked soon and we’ll get a field over the village. I’m sure I have confused anyone who comes here now looking for a hotel in Blarney, oops.

No sign of the apocalypse but it is very foggy. The four horsemen could be hiding in it!

The War Z: Devious criticism in an unfriendly forum

The War Z

When the developers of a game, The War Z in this case, are deleting all negative comments on the Steam forum you have to be clever to get your critical message across. (via)

I played The War Z briefly when Paul gave me a 2 day pass. It’s very like DayZ but monetised. You have multiple character slots and when one character dies you have to wait before using that character again. Apparently they’ve increased that wait from 1 hour to 4 hours except if you pay money to respawn instantly. This is after paying for the base game too! There may be issues with getting refunds too but in an interview the developers say you can get a refund from Steam. Not a great way to launch a new game.

The War Z is not for me. Running through empty scenery between locations, crawling around in the dirt avoiding zombies, watching out for other players gets boring very quickly. At least with DayZ I was able to play the excellent Arma II when I got bored of running away from zombies or dying of thirst after running across the map to attempt to meet up with friends.

TIL how to play minesweeper

minesweeper

I never bothered learning how to play Minesweeper. I remember seeing it in Windows 3.1 but I thought it was similar to Battleships and frankly, it looked basic and boring. Basic it may look but today I accidentally learned how to play it. I hope these instructions don’t knock something important out of my brain!

The number indicates how many bombs are within 1 square of the number. A 3 indicates that 3 of the 8 squares directly surrounding it are bombs. Clicking a space with no bombs, which also has no bombs around it, is like revealing a 0. When this happens, the game automatically reveals all spaces surrounding the 0. If those spaces are also zeroes, it does this again. If it reveals a number, then it can go no further in that direction. That’s why clicking some spaces reveals large sections of the board with numbers at the borders of the newly empty section.
Edit: Forgot to mention that when you determine which squares are definitely bombs, right click to flag them

Finally met Michael Mamaril

I finally came across Michael Mamaril in Borderlands 2. He’s an NPC who gives loot to the player but the interesting thing about him is that he’s based on a real Borderlands fan who passed away in October 2011. Michael’s friend emailed Gearbox and they produced a eulogy and included him as a helpful character in the next game.

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