Tag Archives: Games

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

image

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.

Android gaming with an Xbox 360 Controller

This afternoon I took delivery of an OTG USB cable for my mobile devices. I’ve previously blogged about using a PS3 controller with an Android phone but I was curious how well my wired Xbox 360 controller would work.

Plugging the OTG cable into my Nexus 7 and then into the Xbox controller was of course simple, and I had mixed results with the couple of games I tried. If you’re willing to root your Nexus 7 you can install another app that makes it easier to get things working but even with a stock Nexus 7 it worked.

First off I tried Frodo and Vice, the C64 emulators. I thought they might have support for this. Unfortunately not. Luckily Mupen64 Plus, the N64 emulator, does support an external controller! I had to redefine a few buttons, and the left analog stick but I was soon leading the races in Mario Kart 64!

I tried Shadowgun: Deadzone next. It was my first time playing this multiplayer over-the-shoulder third person shooter. The game picked up my controller perfectly! All I had to do was invert the Y axis as I normally do. I’d like to say I kicked ass but I didn’t. I got one kill to six deaths before I gave up. Looks like a good game, but it must be next to impossible to play on a small screen.

I wanted to try GTA III but I never got past the loading screen on my Nexus 7. Dead Trigger is next on my todo list. That should be fun.

I used the OTG cable to connect an external USB flash drive to my devices too. Unrooted the Nexus 7 ignores it unfortunately but my Galaxy S II picked it up and displayed a familiar USB storage notification. Here’s a video of someone playing GTA III on an SGS III. I really have to get that game working on my Nexus 7!

The Wonderful End of the World grows Companion Cubes

As part of the Potato Sack promotion last year a number of indie games received updates featuring content from Valve games. I didn’t take much notice of them at the time but I just found out that The Wonderful End of the World got a secret level with companion cubes! Love the cover of the similarly named Portal song!

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