Just a quick post to highlight a youtube channel I've been really enjoying recently. I wouldn't normally do something like this here, but I also wanted to have a note of it just in case I forget about it, as it's a long term project.
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheGreatWar
This channel is following WW1 week by week from start to finish, exactly 100 years after the event. So, those of you with their heads screwed on will realise that it has been running since 2014; consequently, there are many episodes to catch up on!
The channel also does special episodes about the various people, places and ideas of the time and also short and very interesting Q&A episodes.
What is very appealing about the channel is that episodes are short, about 10 minutes an episode. So, for those of you with short attention spans, like myself, it's perfect for getting a tasty dose of knowledge between doing other things.
Huzzah!
Thursday, 28 January 2016
Helldivers - another gem from Arrowhead
For xmas I was given Helldivers for the PS4 and I've been playing it for the last month, when I can get a chance with my girlfriend playing Fallout 4 endlessly!
Helldivers is set in the future where Earth is now Super Earth and you play a Helldiver, one of the mighty defenders of Super Earth desperately fighting back against their 3 hated enemies; the heavily armoured and tanked up Cyborgs, the hordes of the spikey limbed Bugs and the high tech, mind altering Illuminates. The game is presented in a tongue-in-cheek style, very similar to the film Star Ship Troopers.
It's a top down shooter with a whole lot more stuff than your average top down shooter. The game revolves around multiplayer with up to 4 players working through missions together to bring glory to Super Earth. There is full friendly fire and a vast array of weapons, military hardware and strategems to choose from.
Each mission requires the players to try and achieve several objectives, which could be rescuing stranded troops to pushing in codes to activate surface to air missile launchers. Players are constantly kept on their toes as the enemy will be patrolling the map, and if they see you and you don't take them out quickly, then the alarm will be raised and more heavily armed and armoured enemies will drop from the sky, or come out of the ground, or teleport in, all depending on which foe you are coming up against. So teams end up in a desperate battle where at least one of them will need to be focussing on tapping in lines of up, down, left, right arrow combinations at a computer terminal, while his squad mates blaze gun fire, anti-tank rockets and call in airstrikes on the ever increasing hordes of enemies.
It has a similar look to other Arrowhead studio's games, Gauntlet and Magicka; an isometricky-top-downy sort of view where all the players share the same screen space, which gets really annoying when players drag their feet and end up splitting players between the very edges of the screen! The graphics look excellent, with great weather effects and nice details, like leaving footprints in certain ground types, which can be useful for tracking patrols. Explosions, gun fire and flame effects are also exquisitely shown.
The sound design is also very nice, particularly the gun sounds. Guns, artillery and general hardware noises are so satisfying! Firing that 90mm cannon attached to the side of your mech will make you feel like a god of war or opening up, full auto, with a heavy machinegun is joyous, particularly when you see the enemy exploding into a fine red mist in front of you. This might sound mildly disturbing, but I can't deny it. I can only assume the developers have a genuine love for real gun sounds. The music and voices are ok fit the feel of the games overly dramatic, tongue-in-cheek style.
It's not all gravy though. After a month of playing I have to admit the game is quite repetitive. Missions are procedurally generated, so you will never ever play the same mission twice, but that doesn't stop them feeling very much like doing the same thing over and over. There are only so many different combinations of landscapes and objectives (although there are quite a few, to be fair) and the fact the map shape and features are in different places and the objectives are also in different places, doesn't change that really. In this way it's similar to Gauntlet, but I'd say Helldivers has more variation and is on the whole a significantly deeper game.
So Helldivers is a game really enjoyed with friends, although I've been really surprised at how cooperative the random people dropping into my missions have been. If you can form a tight team with different players specialising in different aspects of the mission, anyone who loves a big change and a healthy dose of pure gun violence and games that need teamwork will love this game!
Oh, and it's really hard!
And lastly, it is now out on PC and I feel very reluctant to buy it twice, but I know some of my PC mates would love this one... arg!
Helldivers is set in the future where Earth is now Super Earth and you play a Helldiver, one of the mighty defenders of Super Earth desperately fighting back against their 3 hated enemies; the heavily armoured and tanked up Cyborgs, the hordes of the spikey limbed Bugs and the high tech, mind altering Illuminates. The game is presented in a tongue-in-cheek style, very similar to the film Star Ship Troopers.
It's a top down shooter with a whole lot more stuff than your average top down shooter. The game revolves around multiplayer with up to 4 players working through missions together to bring glory to Super Earth. There is full friendly fire and a vast array of weapons, military hardware and strategems to choose from.
Each mission requires the players to try and achieve several objectives, which could be rescuing stranded troops to pushing in codes to activate surface to air missile launchers. Players are constantly kept on their toes as the enemy will be patrolling the map, and if they see you and you don't take them out quickly, then the alarm will be raised and more heavily armed and armoured enemies will drop from the sky, or come out of the ground, or teleport in, all depending on which foe you are coming up against. So teams end up in a desperate battle where at least one of them will need to be focussing on tapping in lines of up, down, left, right arrow combinations at a computer terminal, while his squad mates blaze gun fire, anti-tank rockets and call in airstrikes on the ever increasing hordes of enemies.
It has a similar look to other Arrowhead studio's games, Gauntlet and Magicka; an isometricky-top-downy sort of view where all the players share the same screen space, which gets really annoying when players drag their feet and end up splitting players between the very edges of the screen! The graphics look excellent, with great weather effects and nice details, like leaving footprints in certain ground types, which can be useful for tracking patrols. Explosions, gun fire and flame effects are also exquisitely shown.
The sound design is also very nice, particularly the gun sounds. Guns, artillery and general hardware noises are so satisfying! Firing that 90mm cannon attached to the side of your mech will make you feel like a god of war or opening up, full auto, with a heavy machinegun is joyous, particularly when you see the enemy exploding into a fine red mist in front of you. This might sound mildly disturbing, but I can't deny it. I can only assume the developers have a genuine love for real gun sounds. The music and voices are ok fit the feel of the games overly dramatic, tongue-in-cheek style.
It's not all gravy though. After a month of playing I have to admit the game is quite repetitive. Missions are procedurally generated, so you will never ever play the same mission twice, but that doesn't stop them feeling very much like doing the same thing over and over. There are only so many different combinations of landscapes and objectives (although there are quite a few, to be fair) and the fact the map shape and features are in different places and the objectives are also in different places, doesn't change that really. In this way it's similar to Gauntlet, but I'd say Helldivers has more variation and is on the whole a significantly deeper game.
So Helldivers is a game really enjoyed with friends, although I've been really surprised at how cooperative the random people dropping into my missions have been. If you can form a tight team with different players specialising in different aspects of the mission, anyone who loves a big change and a healthy dose of pure gun violence and games that need teamwork will love this game!
Oh, and it's really hard!
And lastly, it is now out on PC and I feel very reluctant to buy it twice, but I know some of my PC mates would love this one... arg!
Friday, 22 January 2016
What have I been doing recently?
It's 2016 and January's almost gone already!
This year is becoming a bit of a blur already. Looking for work up in Cumbria is trickier than I'd hoped and I may have to look at restarting some sort of education to make good use of my time up here.
The Yuletide was the best it's been for many years though, with some good gaming with friends and family. And with a good friend of mine in Southampton getting more to grips with his new PC, we've been starting to expand our game base; enjoying Dawn of War 2, Homeworld remastered and trying some other games too.
So, the last few weeks, in the land of gaming, have mostly been taken up with Company of Heroes 2. I'm going to write a lot more about this game in another post, but it's a difficult game to like at first sight, but once you get into it, it's a great RTS and is also working to inflate a thought of getting back into table top war gaming by investing time and money in a WW2 British force! Curse you, brothers of mine!!
I've not been so keen to play much World of Warships, I'm really waiting for some more interesting ships to come along. The Americans are a bit boring and generic and it's hard to relate to the Japanese, although I do enjoy their ships more than the Americans. And playing my German cruisers over and over again is burning out the enjoyment a bit. But, after saying all this, I do enjoy a few games with mates, a few times a week.
Plans going forward are:
This year is becoming a bit of a blur already. Looking for work up in Cumbria is trickier than I'd hoped and I may have to look at restarting some sort of education to make good use of my time up here.
The Yuletide was the best it's been for many years though, with some good gaming with friends and family. And with a good friend of mine in Southampton getting more to grips with his new PC, we've been starting to expand our game base; enjoying Dawn of War 2, Homeworld remastered and trying some other games too.
So, the last few weeks, in the land of gaming, have mostly been taken up with Company of Heroes 2. I'm going to write a lot more about this game in another post, but it's a difficult game to like at first sight, but once you get into it, it's a great RTS and is also working to inflate a thought of getting back into table top war gaming by investing time and money in a WW2 British force! Curse you, brothers of mine!!
I've not been so keen to play much World of Warships, I'm really waiting for some more interesting ships to come along. The Americans are a bit boring and generic and it's hard to relate to the Japanese, although I do enjoy their ships more than the Americans. And playing my German cruisers over and over again is burning out the enjoyment a bit. But, after saying all this, I do enjoy a few games with mates, a few times a week.
Plans going forward are:
- Figure out what I'm doing with jobs/education.
- Get back into creative mode; Wastelands is begging for an update.
- If I can earn a few coins, then think about how to approach building a small British WW2 force. Warlord games have some fantastic deals of building small armies.
- Find/develop a recipe for my first all grain beer brew.
- Play guitar and watch hockey with a friend in Newport.
- Learn more Swedish and maybe plan a mission over there for later this year.
- Find friends in Carlisle... I'm such a loner.
Wednesday, 13 January 2016
Results of the first brew - it's quite good!
Thought I'd quickly write about the first batch of beer I brewed, back in September '15, because we had originally thought it was a little flat due to a mistake in the bottling process. Well I'd like to say that the beer is very drinkable! I think our unconventional bottling process meant the beer needed a little extra time to mature.
I should explain, due to me not being able to get up to Edinburgh around when the first batch of beer had finished secondary fermentation and my friend up there not having much time, he syphoned all the beer into a keg, with the bottling sugar and left it there, sealed, until we had time to bottle it. If we had just left it in the keg from then on, this would have been fine, but this would have only been useable if we were going to take the keg to a party or something as it would have gone off quite quickly. So, a few weeks after this, when we had time, I came up to Edinburgh and we bottled the beer. This seemed to have the effect that even after a month of further maturation the beer was a little flat and we thought.
This latest batch we've done has been more strictly processed and in a month we hope these bottles should be ready to go. For now though I am enjoying drinking my way through our first batch.
I should explain, due to me not being able to get up to Edinburgh around when the first batch of beer had finished secondary fermentation and my friend up there not having much time, he syphoned all the beer into a keg, with the bottling sugar and left it there, sealed, until we had time to bottle it. If we had just left it in the keg from then on, this would have been fine, but this would have only been useable if we were going to take the keg to a party or something as it would have gone off quite quickly. So, a few weeks after this, when we had time, I came up to Edinburgh and we bottled the beer. This seemed to have the effect that even after a month of further maturation the beer was a little flat and we thought.
This latest batch we've done has been more strictly processed and in a month we hope these bottles should be ready to go. For now though I am enjoying drinking my way through our first batch.
Monday, 11 January 2016
Beer update - 4 demijohns bottled up!
Last weekend I drove up to my brewing buddy's place in Edinburgh and we bottled up the 4 demijohns of our latest brew, which we setup 3 weeks ago.
We didn't do the brew entirely properly, we used a hopped malt extract as the base, then added additional hops to 2 of them and a Lebanese herb to 2 of them. The 4 varieties were: one with just the malt extract, one with added hops, one with added herb and one with added hops and herb.
When bottling we could make out the subtle differences in the smell between the brews with the herb, but it was harder to smell the added hops. The bottles are all labelled appropriately though, so we'll see how they taste in a month.
For our next brew we are planning to do it from scratch and I've been tasked with finding a suitable recipe, so I'll be looking for something dark and malty...
I can't wait!
We didn't do the brew entirely properly, we used a hopped malt extract as the base, then added additional hops to 2 of them and a Lebanese herb to 2 of them. The 4 varieties were: one with just the malt extract, one with added hops, one with added herb and one with added hops and herb.
When bottling we could make out the subtle differences in the smell between the brews with the herb, but it was harder to smell the added hops. The bottles are all labelled appropriately though, so we'll see how they taste in a month.
For our next brew we are planning to do it from scratch and I've been tasked with finding a suitable recipe, so I'll be looking for something dark and malty...
I can't wait!
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