Showing posts with label Gaming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gaming. Show all posts
Sunday, August 14, 2016
GoldenEye Returns!
If you're like me and you spend a fair amount of time playing the greatest game ever created, you'd be pretty excited to hear about the newest version of GoldenEye: Source. It's basically an HD recreation of GoldenEye 007 running the source engine from Half-Life 2. Eventually when I have some free time I might check this out...
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
Cities: Skylines
Cities: Skylines has been out for a while now, and I've been having a lot of fun playing the game. It's basically almost everything you wanted the Sim City franchise to be, and it's much more addicting than any previous Sim City game.
My favorite part of Cities: Skylines is how you can turn the game into a sandbox for whatever your creativity comes up with. The game allows the build of custom assets so that you can supplement the stock assets the game provides. Additionally, the game allows for modding, allowing for amazing user-generated content. If you can imagine it and build the mod, it's available for your use. For example, the Traffic++ mod can be used to create bus lanes in the road and can restrict turns at intersections for better traffic control. One of the built-in mods allows for infinite money so that you can be completely free to do whatever your heart desires without having to make your city viable at all.
Cities: Skylines also improves upon a lot of other things that were wrong with Sim City. When you start building the city, it becomes very evident that the Cities: Skylines road-building tool is much better, allowing for customized curved roads, and roads at different heights (and trying to create crazy interchanges as a result). In addition, the engine itself for Cities: Skylines would simulate every individual and assign them to jobs at specific locations and to specific residences, instead of the nearest location. The traffic simulation is also much better, with Cities: Skylines providing a detailed simulation, leading to emergent puzzles where players will have to adjust how the build their road system to better cope with how traffic develops (and this is easily one of the most challenging things with the game-developing a smart road system that can handle high traffic without huge backlogs). With the detail in the simulation, you can see where each person is going, where they work, and where they live. The same works for vehicles, such that each person/car/building/etc actually serves a purpose instead of just being there, which is what Sim City does.
What's also great is that Colossal Order, the minds behind the game, continue to develop the game. For example, the first big update included the use of tunnels for roads and trains and multi-levels underground in addition to controlling the height of the roads in the base release.
Naturally, playing the game doesn't mean I'm any good at traffic simulation, and I often continue to create huge traffic messes. However, the dynamic nature of the game prevents me from settling on anything and provides an ongoing challenge to keep me interested long after I stopped playing other games.
My favorite part of Cities: Skylines is how you can turn the game into a sandbox for whatever your creativity comes up with. The game allows the build of custom assets so that you can supplement the stock assets the game provides. Additionally, the game allows for modding, allowing for amazing user-generated content. If you can imagine it and build the mod, it's available for your use. For example, the Traffic++ mod can be used to create bus lanes in the road and can restrict turns at intersections for better traffic control. One of the built-in mods allows for infinite money so that you can be completely free to do whatever your heart desires without having to make your city viable at all.
Cities: Skylines also improves upon a lot of other things that were wrong with Sim City. When you start building the city, it becomes very evident that the Cities: Skylines road-building tool is much better, allowing for customized curved roads, and roads at different heights (and trying to create crazy interchanges as a result). In addition, the engine itself for Cities: Skylines would simulate every individual and assign them to jobs at specific locations and to specific residences, instead of the nearest location. The traffic simulation is also much better, with Cities: Skylines providing a detailed simulation, leading to emergent puzzles where players will have to adjust how the build their road system to better cope with how traffic develops (and this is easily one of the most challenging things with the game-developing a smart road system that can handle high traffic without huge backlogs). With the detail in the simulation, you can see where each person is going, where they work, and where they live. The same works for vehicles, such that each person/car/building/etc actually serves a purpose instead of just being there, which is what Sim City does.
What's also great is that Colossal Order, the minds behind the game, continue to develop the game. For example, the first big update included the use of tunnels for roads and trains and multi-levels underground in addition to controlling the height of the roads in the base release.
Naturally, playing the game doesn't mean I'm any good at traffic simulation, and I often continue to create huge traffic messes. However, the dynamic nature of the game prevents me from settling on anything and provides an ongoing challenge to keep me interested long after I stopped playing other games.
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Theme Hospital
For a limited time, Theme Hospital is available for free on Origin (this is slightly old news). It's great that Origin is offering the game for free, but the bad news is that you have to deal with Origin.
Theme Hospital came out in 1998, long before I started any sort of gaming, but it comes from the era where games were much simpler (mostly because they couldn't be complex), but the games were still difficult. It's not like today's iteration of FPS games, where you have to memorize map layouts far in advance to beat the game at its highest difficulty levels bundled together with complex structures. With these older games there are only a few basic mechanisms, and really seem to relish in you failing (like trying to beat Super Mario on the SuperNintendo).
Theme Hospital, as the name suggests, is a game where you try to manage a hospital through increasingly difficult scenarios, trying to maintain a profit and happy patients combined with a few other objectives. It's actually a lot of fun and I'm having a difficult time putting it down...
Theme Hospital came out in 1998, long before I started any sort of gaming, but it comes from the era where games were much simpler (mostly because they couldn't be complex), but the games were still difficult. It's not like today's iteration of FPS games, where you have to memorize map layouts far in advance to beat the game at its highest difficulty levels bundled together with complex structures. With these older games there are only a few basic mechanisms, and really seem to relish in you failing (like trying to beat Super Mario on the SuperNintendo).
Theme Hospital, as the name suggests, is a game where you try to manage a hospital through increasingly difficult scenarios, trying to maintain a profit and happy patients combined with a few other objectives. It's actually a lot of fun and I'm having a difficult time putting it down...
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Gun Game Server!
I'm in a gaming clan (Military Clan), and we recently opened up a new Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare server with the gun game mod. Basically how it works is that you have to get kills using a series of weapons in a specific order. We've modified it to make the weapons progression slightly more difficult (especially by moving the pistols towards the end) and removing level-stealing through humiliations. It's a nice change of pace from the regular TDM and SnD modes.
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