Vindekarr

Well done! I tried out a few Assetto Corsa mods today. The game was originally designed to be heavily moddable, and the shear quality of what the community is making really rewarded the developers for that. They're a small team afterall, and they can only make so much content so quickly. The modders have already developed a standardised resolution that makes any modded texture almost 100% compatible with any game version, and means they're the exact resolution of the original HD textures. It also means more time is spent on the art, rather than just making them work. I guess this is all just an endorsement of modability in games. If you make the game moddable, you get great mods.

Jupiter's really pretty, I think we should send them to Uranus. *cough* sorry, someone had to make that miserable pun. On a serious note, I'm actually impressed more than anything. You really got this under control quickly, and apologising only made things better. Well handled, guys.

That's entirely assuming it sells copies, Thor. I think it's an idiotic idea: you never assume demand for a product, that's rule #1 page #1 of capitalism.

Poor, poor Xbox. I used to be such a fan of the original, because it was an excellent console. It had a lot of great exclusives, the graphics were excellent and it was nearly unkillable. The Xbox 360 wasn't too bad, either. Why did they have to ruin it? why couldn't they just keep making reliable, powerful consoles like the first one? I still have my "black crate" Xbox, although it doesn't work anymore. I could probably fix it, though, it's just an electric motor that's gone. The Xbox was special, it was actually more powerful than my parent's PC at the time and instantly made the 2-D consoles obsolete. If Microsoft had have made a direct rather than a spiritual successor, things would have turned out very differently for the brand. This fall wouldn't have happened. http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/R.I.P+Xbox_fd0839_4636859.jpg

My fondest memory of Rollercoaster Tycoon, was it's ability to compress working life into a microcosm. You always started out ambitious and wanting to do good. You were going to create the one park to rule them all, the greatest park ever created. From there it was a simple step from artist, to engineer. As your skills grew, they tempered your ambition but broadened what you could actually build. Then the money started to run out. From there you became the Capitalist. You had to make money, and this lead you to make bigger and bigger compromises. You still had the dream and the drive to create the ultimate park, but without even realising it you were starting become increasingly cynical. From the Capitalist you then fell further and become the Ultracapitalist. "Hungry? have a hotdog for $1.50, toilets are $40" You needed money, and to an increasing degree that began to override any empathy you had for your parkgoers. And while you now have enough money to take a scrooge-dive into, you've ultimately lost sight of the original goal you set out to achieve. And you don't even care. These human cattle simply bring money, it's irrelevant what they think of your park as long as they pay for it's upkeep. Once you're this calculating and cynical, you've become the Overlord, and from there it's all down-hill. You've been playing a few hours now, and you're becoming bored. You're rich beyond your wildest dreams but your dreams are shattered and you're quickly becoming disenfranchised. You become the madman. Your park's demeanour has darkened to match your own, with rides becoming increasingly dangerous. You like that: the point of a rollercoaster is to make them scream, so why not give them something to scream about? There's only one step further to fall. You've become a true Mad Architect, and your park owes more to SAW than Disney World. They'll scream on your rollercoasters, that's for darn sure, especially as they fly towards certain death at 180 MPH! Your primary purpose is to inflict abject misery upon all of your victims-because that's what they are, victims. Cattle to be slaughtered. You've finally achieved your dream of creating a fantastical, incredible, impossible theme park, but sadly for your visitors, the reality is a twisted nightmare. *bows* Hat's off to anybody who read all that. That was always the trajactory my games followed: I would start out with an idea, wanting to entertain and engineer, and inevitably I ended up creating deliberately dangerous death machines and firing people into the neighbouring park. Afterall, they technically didn't die in your park and early 2000s AI wasn't capable of working out who was actually responsible for the flying, burning rollercoasters.

The main problem is see is using the island from the original Crysis game. Anybody who played Crysis would recognise that mountain(and what's in it), the cove where you first got released into the open world, and the general ecosystem and location itself. You need your own map, or people are going to start asking ugly questions.

As do I. I think you'd like it here in Victoria, it rains nearly every night in winter and the ground is covered with frost and fog in the morning. Just don't go out of town at night, there are Silent Hill levels of fog that roll in around 12:30 and stay until dawn. They'll soak you faster than rain, and they're so cold they sear your throat. As for me, I went on an adventure today. My partner was sick last night, and the upshot was I was awake and dressed at 3 AM. Anyway, there are two ways I can get to work, either I take the highway like a soulless robot or there's a scenic route. The highway takes about an hour, and so I've only ever gone that way. Today I decided to do things differently. Either it was the sleep deprivation, or an emerging desire to stop acting like a bad Asperger's stereotype(the main trait of AS syndrome is repetitive behaviour) and actually live my goddamn life, I will never know. Anyway I parked my politically correct but rather soulless Land Rover and wheeled out my GT-R intending to hit that hapless fork in the road like a boot to a bank manager's crotch. Except that hapless fork-in-the-road actually turned into a 2 1/2 hour adventure on what could only be God's own race track, and a series of shenanigans that including being pulled over by the police(Sadly, it was only an random breath test) and overtaken by a Ferrari worth around a million US dollars, that was so new it's licence plates were still in plastic wrap. So yeah, I had an adventure. I think next time I feel curious about something, I'm going to just do it. I'm getting oddly tired of being a politically correct taxation statistic: maybe I'm developmentally impaired and this is a rebellious teen phase arriving in the early 20s?

I love getting up early. I live about an hour east of Melbourne, on the Australian south coast. My work schedule means I'm normally up at 4:30, and the early morning is definitely my favourite time of day, particularly in winter as it is now. Mornington(the region) is a bit unlike the rest of Australia. It's jagged and rocky, with grey skies and frigid, permanently stormy ocean(Bass Strait) It's cool and wet this time of year, with heavy fog and frost around dawn. I've always enjoyed driving, and it's almost worth getting up at 4 for the drive. You can either follow the coast and watch the sun come up over Bass Strait(which is always grey, forbidding and violent-both the sky and the sea) or cut through the ancient forests and Strzlecki foothills. Either way the speed limit is 70 MPH, and the scenery is epic. http://www.swellnet.com/sites/default/files/styles/swellnet_large_wm_557x418/public/surf-reports/images/img_50901.jpg?itok=4M-eGOGZ

I do find mass surveillance morally unpalatable, but it's hardly any different from the hundreds of CCTV cameras you find in any Western city these days. What I object to is the inefficiency of the program itself: surveying literally millions of people can't be an effective way to gather information, and I would expect better from an organisation of the NSA's calibre.

Try Space Engineers while you're waiting. It's a Minecraft/Garry's Mod hybrid in space(spaaaaace!) with one of the best damage and physics engines I've ever seen. It's also the only game that's ever provoked me to say "F*** YEAH! STRONTIUM CLATHRATE!"

I built my first truly successful combat ship in Space Engineers today. I'm genuinely proud of it: this is only a first-draft prototype and I could easily make something better looking and more functional, but you have to start somewhere, and this is my best design yet. I learn volumes about the game building this: how to "package" the ship's rooms in order to maximise space will minimising exterior size. How to achieve maximum armour protection from minimum weight. How to position the guns for optimal firing arcs. My next ship will be about 175% the size of this, as I can't expand the core functionality any further without adding a hangar bay, and I don't have the interior space to add one to this hull. EDIT: unfortunately I haven't yet worked out how to link the image. Unfortunately it's saved the image at my screen resolution, which means it's way too big to post here. I'll try again when I build the one with a hangar.

Actually, that isn't impossible. Solar power isn't viable for automotive use for a couple of reasons. Cars just don't have the surface area to provide enough solar power to move their weight efficiently. It would be possible to make a purely solar, but there would be no point. Solar cars produce obscene amounts of waste heat, are too large to fit in modern roads, and their internals require a tiny single-person cockpit. Unless Solar Panels can be made about 800% more efficient per square centimetre, Solar Cars are (sadly) not an option. So what options do we have? Hybrid technology is our best short-term option. A hybrid car has a traditional gasoline combustion engine, and a large electric motor as well. Hybrids are powerful, high-performance vehicles and easily out-perform their more conventional siblings. They still require gasoline and oil, but use it much more efficiently and are our best option until we can make effective pure-electric systems. Hybrid technology is best demonstrated by Formula 1 racing cars. F1 cars have a tiny 1.6 litre engine and a sophisticated Hybrid system with dual motors. When the system works in harmony, the tiny engine produces around eight hundred horsepower and can hurl the 700KG F1 car to 389 KPH in a matter of seconds. They also use 110% less fuel(half) for the same amount of power, and produce around 70% less Co2 and particulate emission than previous petrol race cars. Hydrogen should be the long-term goal. Hydrogen can be used two ways by a car: either you can convert it into a Hydrazine slurry and burn it like gasoline, or use it to generate enormous amounts of electricity. Both systems suit different kinds of car: Hydrazine for racing, and Hydrogen batteries for quiet road driving. The best thing about Hydrogen and Hydrazine, is that they don't produce any harmful byproducts whatsoever and can be extracted from almost anything, including garbage, sewage and nuclear waste. The only thing holding this tech back is the fact you need electricity-a lot of electricity-to generate any quantity of it. Until Heliostatic or Nuclear power comes of age, Hydrogen's refinement process does more harm than good. On the subject of Heliostats, I strongly suspect we'll see a lot of them in the future. A Heliostat is a reasonably efficient carbon-neutral power station: it uses powerful mirrors to focus a beam of blazing sunlight onto a central tower. This boils water in the tower, producing steam and driving a turbine. They're extremely useful for hot, arid climates like Australia and Spain, and are already beginning to see civilian use. Sevilla in Spain has the world's first commercial one. Anybody who played Fallout NV will know what they look like. Helios 1 is an example of one, although it's fairly primitive.

Saw something very cool on the news this morning: an aeroplane that can fly indefinitely without refuelling. The aircraft is solar-powered, and generates an excess of energy during the day. It then uses this energy to continue flying during the night, and can continue the cycle of draining and recharging itself ad infinitum. The only time it has to land, is to feed the people on board: there is no need to refuel it, and the engines require very little maintenance. From an engineering perspective I think it's a work of art. There's an elegance and almost ethereal grace to the design and the way it flies: because the aircraft is so astonishingly light, it almost seems to defy gravity. The mechanical aspects are beautiful in their own way, with Carbon Fibre being used for nearly every component. The complete aircraft has a larger wingspan than a 737 passenger jet, but weighs about as much as a Toyota Camry. http://www.solvay.com/en/binaries/SVL006367solar_impulse-149252.jpg?size=medium

Agreed, Billy. Although for different reasons. Victoria is at it's best around now, most of the trees are losing their leaves and the fields have turned yellow-gold. The sky is usually dark grey or even black in places, and it's overcast nearly every day. It's moody, dramatic and just plain beautiful. Especially with all the Ghost Gums.

My parents had a very mentoring approach to parenting. I was always given a lot of freedom, and expected to both make decisions for myself, and deal with the consequences. They were always there with guidance if I needed it, and any decisions about myself I had to make for myself once I was old enough to do so. They always treated me with respect, and that meant I was very loyal and obedient right from a young age. They never needed to punish me, because I didn't want to break what rules they imposed in the first place. In my experience the best sort of discipline is when people obey you because they want to. Obedience through fear of punishment always has a limit, and tends to create a certain resentment. Obedience through loyalty however, is always much stronger and I would also say much healthier. I've probably said this before, but my mother is an academic. Her field is child psychology and education, so I'm not surprised that her style of parenting was a bit different to most.

For me Watchdog's problems are quite frustrating because most of them could be solved very easily. Take the cars for example: give me a day and I could probably fix the entire issue. It's a simple calibration issue, and wouldn't have been a problem had the developers been paying attention. As for me, I finally tried Diablo's multiplayer. It's great, if not particularly innovative. It's largely the same system as Borderlands 2: players can drop in and out at will, and everybody gets their own instanced loot. You also get a lot more loot than usual, and a higher chance to get a Legendary. I was playing for about two hours, and got three Legendaries that I wouldn't have otherwise. Speaking of which, I feel compelled to mention just how fantastic the gear looks at level 70. The equipment is fantastical without being ridiculous or over-the-top, and it's nice to see an RPG without bikini armour. The legendary weapons are particularly good, and feel like someone really made an effort. Each one has completely bespoke Particle Effects around it, and unique textures and meshes. This is particularly outstanding given just how many different Legendaries there are.

I have long-ish hair, I've discovered there's a point to which it's long enough to be long hair but short enough not to be a problem. I can even wear a sealed helmet with it at the length that it is.

If you think that's frustrating you should try some of the sims I play. Endurance races in sim games are very enjoyable: they condense the world's great car races into a few real hours, and allows players to work as a team rather than rivals. They're normally 2-4 hours long, and players often share a car, taking turns to drive in order to spread the load. When they work, they're racing at it's best. They're also crushingly disappointing when they go wrong. My single most disappointing moment in gaming memory was an endurance event at Nurburgring. It was a full 24 hour race, so we had four players each driving three-hour turns. The first 21 hours were great: Nurburgring is racing nirvana and the car ran perfectly. I did my two turns, and during the dawn(in game) I handed over the wheel to the fourth player, having driven the difficult dusk-midnight-dawn part of the race. And the fourth players wrecked the car on his first lap. And that was it, 21 hours and a $20 entry fee wasted. Plus I had to replace the car. Leading for five minutes and losing because of enemy action hurts. Leading for 21 hours and then losing because a team-mate was being stupid, hurts a lot more.

LOL! too true Thor!

Yep, they're like that. When you see a plot-twist coming a few weeks in advance, it's not a plot twist. I'm very glad I didn't buy into the Watch Dogs hype, everything I've been able to find of the game looks very mediocre to me-like a fairly typical bad GTA clone but with most of the good bits removed. Of course being Ubisoft it'll probably just get worse from here. Watchdogs 2 will probably be out tommorow some time, with Watchdogs 3 on Monday and Watchdogs 4 on Tuesday. Oh and DLC that was originally part of the game; you'll probably have to buy Watchdogs 4 as a series of 1.5 GB "bites"-for $40 each.

Finally finished Diablo's main story today. I was very pleasantly surprised by just how much content a playthrough has, and even more pleased to discovered that once you complete the main quest, the game immediately switches into "adventure mode" for that character. Adventure Mode is like Skyrim's Radiant system on steroids. Every time you log in, the world geometry is re-arranged and filled with a huge pile of new side-quests, which in turn tie into a system for getting endgame gear. It basically means that the end of the main quest, is where the game actually hits it's stride. Adventure is near-perfection: drop-in drop-out multiplayer co-op in a world that's procedurally rearranged and rebuilt every time you log in, with an infinite supply of quests to complete and another five classes waiting to be tried out. I would rate this game roughly 9/10. It's well-crafted, well-rounded and extremely polished. It's also got a subjective fun-factor and never feels frustrating or samey like Torchlight did. The only serious complaint I have, is the process of building a new character. Diablo was designed to be played at level 60+ and above to properly enjoy the game, and it takes 2-3 days to level a character enough to enjoy the full content. This is my only complaint however, and is tempered by the extremely strong endgame.

What's he going to do now? He used to be an adventurer like you, then he took an arrow in the knee. Afterwards, he became a guard only to have the same misfortune again. To become a guard you have to take an arrow in the knee, we all know this. What I'm wondering is what happens now he has received a second one: does he become a Guard Captain or something? http://i.imgur.com/zBxmu.png

Normally I wouldn't mention general racing games here, but I finished one tonight and feel compelled to underline just what the developers did. It was called Gas Guzzlers, and it was made by a brand-new studio called Gamepires, who I strongly suspect are Croatian. Gas Guzzlers is their second ever game, and what they've achieved with it is astonishing. It won't ever achieve global fame, but I would vouch for it being the best "Arcade" racing game I've played in half a decade. What makes Gas Guzzlers amazing, is that a little studio that nobody has ever heard of, has made a game that's undeniably superior to the current Need For Speed game, Rivals. On any objective level, Gas Guzzlers is simply better than Rivals. It has prettier graphics, it's more reliable, it's got roughly twice the content and it's just more fun to play. GG is crass, and rude, and has a rapacious appetite for violence, but as a technical achievement it's just staggering. That's all I wanted to say: Gamepires have pulled an exceptionally good game literally out of the ether, and I feel as though that deserves some recognition.

That's my feeling about it at as well. A very impressive game that's the victim of hype: this occurs in all industries, and is why smart corporations employ their right to Embargo the press until their product is actually released. Speaking of games, I had the pleasure of trying the Wolfenstein Reboot this afternoon, thanks to a friend. As reboots go, this is possibly the best I've ever seen. It completely re-imagines Wolfenstein and takes it along a new, far more serious direction. The new game is a very unusual and atypical FPS: there is no DLC, no multiplayer and no generic "modern realistic combat scenario" This games tries to focus on telling a story, and amazingly it achieves just that. The shooting mechanics, the graphics and the combat are all superlative, but they aren't the purpose or the main attraction. If the "main event" in a typical shooter is the multiplayer, then here it's the interactions between characters and the cutscenes, which are superb. It's also quite shocking: this is the first game that this studio has ever made. All in all it's nothing like what you would ordinarily expect from a modern FPS. It's intelligent, well crafted and by far the best FPS on the PS4 right now. If you can find it cheap, you'll absolutely love it. It melds '90s FPS goodness with modern refinement and the sort of characters and story that FPS games just don't have anymore. Every few years an FPS appears and breaks all the rules, this is one of them. Keep your eyes open, it's one for the collection once it's on sale.

Good luck with that, I hope it turns out well. I have my concerns about Watch Dogs, but I think they mostly center around the game seemingly being too good. I don't doubt it would be truly awesome if it met it's potential, my concern is whether or not Ubisoft has bitten off more hype than it can chew.