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!
You should read about the development of a Ludum Dare entry called Ponk.
It’s a C64 version of Pong, developed on a real C64 with only a C2N datasette to save code. Back in the day I was lucky enough to have a 1541-II disk drive. I can’t imagine how painful it must have been working with a slow and unreliable cassette.
In the end he couldn’t transfer his game to a PC so he had to take screenshots of his game and OCR them, hand checking every byte. I did something similar about 20 years ago when I was tinkering with a C64 to Amiga cable and needed to somehow transfer a C64 programme from the Amiga to the C64 to do the transfer .. Painful.
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.
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!
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 ..
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!
On “final” approach. I had to repeat this several times to line up.Crew quarters and 3 Kerbals docked with the space station. Note the illumination lighting up the station.I messed up when I built the station. There’s a docking bay at the end but it’s turned the wrong way. Argh!
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!
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.
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.
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.
The two pods danced around each other, rotating silently and smoothly in the vacuum of space but firmly refusing to line up.
Eventually they did line up and slowly inched toward each other before clamping magnetically together.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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