Narkaleptic Thoughtless

Wow, it is amazing how many projects a proctrastinator can take on and ever accomplish anything.

Fallout 3, started playing, lost my steam when I have to head across the world to some stupid Vault furthest end of unexplorer territory.  Oblivion has horses, as if nobody can get a car working 200 years after a nuclear apocolypse.

Grand Theft Auto 4.  Both on the PC (runs like poop) and the Xbox (no HD tv), I’ve gotten nowhere in single player.  I just need ambition to go back to playing it.  Unfortunately I’ve got too many more important things on my plate than playing games.  Hence why I haven’t touched my new 360 in a month.  The only thing I play is Garry’s Mod, probably because I can develop for it.  I’d love to get into professional game development.  To have artists to actually make something I code pretty would be the difference between abandon project to indie hit.

Waterworld gamemode for Garry’s Mod.  Flood sucked but the premise was delightful, so I made my own from scratch without a sandbox base.  Now that I have made it a bit past Flood, I don’t have ambition to go back an add the perks and bonuses.  I have excuses though, no artist to draw my icons and Garry is ignoring my bug reports (nothing new there).

Contracted web development and automated data entry.  Who knew there would be a high demand for this?  I’ve started two projects and I’m stuck learning everything Drupal.  For such a smart platform it is a bitch to comprehend the reasoning behind form field names.  Good thing people pay me after the work is complete.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec augue. Vestibulum sollicitudin. Nulla facilisi. Nam feugiat porttitor neque. Proin neque libero, tempus sit amet, interdum vitae, lacinia vel, elit. Maecenas dictum, lectus fermentum bibendum vulp.  Sorry NDA.

Electrical engineering… A fantastic hobby but requires a lot of cash to order new toys.  Still need to shell out $80 for a USB AVR programmer because my bloody mobo doesn’t have a parellel header.  Getting good with soldering though.

Upcoming daughter.  While I’m extremely excited and distracted by the prospect of my daughter, I just have no ambition to read books about parenting.  Isn’t that shit supposed to come naturally?Last half year at quarter-century.  While this is my last year at 25 and I’ll be starting the next quarter century of my life in June, I’ve accomplished only one life goal (see above) and absolutely nothing else.

Josh Daughter, Gaming, Life

I had higher expectations.  BioShock’s choices in the story are really only one.  How do you want the game to end, obviously the good ending or the bad ending.  The choice is obviously clear once you meet your first Little Sister.  Besides choosing what Plasmids to purchase and weapons to upgrade and where to spend your loot, there isn’t another damn choice to be made.

The story is great and the lack of choices fit in nicely near end game but I was really hoping for more.  It is a kill everything you see that reminds me of the likes of Wolfenstein.  The only difference is you have more combative options available.  Playing on medium difficulty, I found the whole game to be insultingly easy.  Hints pretty much move any element from puzzles.

The graphics and the gameplay is a fresh break from everything else but I would really like to see this revolutionary combination of RPG and FPS that was claimed to rival Deus Ex.  Even the second iteration of Deus Ex has this looking like every other FPS out there with a couple new bells and whistles.

Story and combat still make this a great game, I just feel lied to.

Tags: BioShock

Josh Gaming, Review

I have begun development on a new mod for Garry’s Mod 10.  You can nab Garry’s Mod 10 for $10 if you already have one of the compatible Source-engine games.  Garry’s Mod 10 is a sandbox game which allows players to pretty much do anything they want with the Source physics engine.  Using ropes, thrusters, welding and any tool you can imagine to build contraptions and play home-made games.  The “plug-in” system is Lua-based.  Lua is a fairly complex and expandable scripting language with a C-like syntax, well Pascal-like too I guess.  So there’s the intro to the platform.

Discordia is going to be a Cyberpunk-themed singleplayer or cooperative gamemode with server controlled missions and persistance.  You carry your same equipment and progress each time you visit a server.

Here is the feature short-list:

• Drag and drop inventory system
• Interactive non-player characters
• Ingame stores and trading
• Story-line missions
• Faction reputation
• Weapon modifications

It is going to mimic the original Deus Ex in many ways.  The inventory will be similar in that you have limited space to prepare for the next mission.  I will remain true to the cyberpunk theme and include (basic) hacking of security systems.  The plot will, of course, include super-corporations and secretive factions.  I will not be (at this time) including a skill system.

Weapon modifications can be transfered from weapon to weapon.  Ammo types are a bit more specific and will each be targetted in a paper-rock-scissors manor to each type of enemy.  Death will be handled harshly but I’m not sure how yet, still looking for ideas on this one.

Anyway, check out my GMOD site if you want a little more information.

Tags: Steam, Garry’s+Mod+10, Discordia, Lua, Source+Engine, Programming, Games

Josh Discordia, Gaming, Garry's Mod 10

So, I saw an ad.  It mentioned Eve Online and a 14–day trial.

I said hell, two weeks of free gaming, why not?

After the awesome intro video, it starts off by overwhelming you with the interface.  Nearly a hundred clickable chunks of text and pictures.  Taking a deep breath, I click next on the tutorial.  It starts to go over the tutorial structure, the context menu.  That’s right, every damn clickable thing has a menu too. Eventually, I got my ship on its way to the first agent to get a mission.

I started to think… Hey, it is no twitch-action, space-combat Freelancer but has ten times the potential elsewhere.  The trading commodities show fluctuating graphs over the past few real months.  The galaxy map is three-dimensional.  The is tons of ships and equipment.  I definately miss the interactions of my avatar on space stations that I had in the late Earth & Beyond.  A combination of this and Auto Assault would make the perfect game for me.  Speaking of AA, it’s going down soon.  :sniffle:

Anyway, I’ve found it worth the first day, until…  The tutorial neglected to mention the fact that anything you’re carrying is pretty much lost when you die.  This being after I spend all of my initial 150,000 credits on a ship and weapons.

By the way, don’t buy a shuttle.  They have no hard points for weapons.  Big waste of a few hours of credit gathering.

I understand it’s a complicated game but EVERY game goes easy on its newbs.  How about, no loosie of expensive stuffs for a little while.  Until AFTER the annoying tutorial can warn you what will happen.

Hopefully, after starting a new character and wasting some hours, I can get the ambition to go back and maybe experience the corporate world.  Well, the in-game corporate world, I already know the real-life corporate world too well for my liking.

Tags: Eve+Online

Josh Eve Online, Gaming