Benie's Games Blog

With my birthday now three days away, I decided to give myself an early birthday present; getting into the Kerbal Space Program bandwagon.
This game was originally free, and Nerd3 showed it off. Looked pretty fun. Basically, you help these little green men on their own planet to jumpstart their space program. Their rocket scientists have invented all the parts to build a rocket or a Spaceplane. But here’s the kicker; they don’t know how to build one!
Nor do they know how to fly it when it’s built! This is why you have to help them out.

So I’ve been playing around with it. You don’t really have to be a rocket scientist (ignore the pun) to know big things require more thrust to get off the ground. And to get more thrust requires bigger engines, which require more fuel tanks, which ultimately requires balancing of the whole thing. Don’t want your rocket to spin out of control and kill your crew, do you?

My first rocket was the tutorial one; a three stage rocket with a single-manned capsule and a parachute on top of it. It can get to Outer Space, but the rocket likes to spin out of control when the third stage launches. Soon, the capsule alone floats aimlessly into space, with no propulsion. You’re fucked there. 😛
I’ve tried adding fins to hopefully counter-balance the spinning. That seems to help until again, the third stage.

My latest was a crazy one. Five stages. Each one of them the big ones (the ones that NASA uses for their shuttles). The thing never got close to hitting outer space. It went out of control sometime after the first booster was jettisoned. I’m guessing it was due to the multiple fins, and it was very, very heavy.

Still, this game is fun because it’s a sandbox game, and it kind of reminds me of Spore’s Space Stage, without the stupidy of selling spice. And it’s worth the $18.
What’s cool, this game isn’t anywhere near completed. It’s in Alpha. There’s talks of a version where you can build a Space Station, plan Unmanned rocket missions to go to desolate planets, and other things.
So yeah. You should get this game. Help the Kerbals out! And get it while it’s still cheap! Because the price increases everytime there’s an update.

!! WARNING, THIS POST CONTAINS ENDGAME SPOILERS. AVOID IF YOU HAVEN’T PLAYED THE GAME YET !!

If you still want to see them, then just click the “Read More >>” button. You were warned if you do.

Continue reading →

This isn’t exactly fresh news. It’s been known three days ago that 1.3 is just around the corner. But today they released another snapshot, to hopefully fix the last snapshot of lots of people reporting serious lag due to the idiotic SMP/SSP merge.

A month ago, I got a response from the author of MultiMC. Instead of receiving a civilized “Thanks for your input, but MultiMC will not update on you unless you force update.”, he posts a “NOOB, Y U NO DELETE MCBACKUP.JAR?!” meme picture (that it and the posts about it have been removed by moderators since the time I saw it). Immediately I said “Really? Do you really have to be this immature?” as my reply to the picture. That too has been removed. In the #tropicraft IRC chat, I had some help to hunt down this bastard and get some help.
He said (not directly, one of them helped to copy paste what the guy said into the chat) that MultiMC shouldn’t auto-update Minecraft when 1.3 hits. Yet, he never answered what happened with my Aether install that was wiped out with 1.2.5.
Speaking of Aether, this guy is making an unofficial version to make the mod compatible with 1.2.5. “Unofficial” as in he never asked for permission. Yet no one seems phased by it and just wants Aether working again. I feel though, his thread won’t last long.
I still have to worry, then. Fortunately it’s still going to be awhile ’till August 1st gets here.

I wanted to play ArmA II ever since nerd3 showed his 13 ways to die of that game. The C-130J’s at the end is what sold me. Fortunately there’s a demo for that, and it lets you do nearly the same things as the paid version, except you only get two maps and no missions. It even has the editor that nerd3 showed off, and the aircraft carrier.

Getting the demo, I went through hell. I tried downloading it through Fileplanet (they have changed. Alot. Yet I’m still paying my monthly fee for prem speed) through Firefox, not expecting any issues. When I finally got it an hour later, Firefox decided it was OK to lock up on me, though I didn’t think as well. Coming back, I tried the executable, and it claims it doesn’t know what OS I’m using, and can’t install. So I just wasted an hour for a broken download. How nice.
The second time, I tried downloading through Chrome. Same hosting site. This time when it got done, Chrome didn’t lock up and I was able to get the installer past that point. Then when it tries to install, I get a missing file error and it can’t install…

And the 3rd time’s the charm time, after checking around I found out I could of downloaded it through Steam all of this time (“facepalm.jpg”). So I did that, and finally was able to play it.

So anyway, I went straight to the Boot Camp to learn what to do. And even as I type this, I only know 1/4 of the controls. Once I finally had basic movement down it was time to use my gun. Playing FPS’ before, this would be easy. And I managed to pass that part. First Aid wasn’t so easy, especially when you pick the guy up and suddenly you can’t move. You can only turn. And then when you put the guy down, you’re in a posture of looking like you’re going to shit on the guy (I would link a picture, but for some reason Puush doesn’t work with this game).

Flying… this was the “fun” part. First it started with helicopters. First time I took off, about, oh, 10 seconds I was heading for the ground because I pitched the nose too far down. When I finally figured out how to do basic movement controls for a helicopter (it has an Auto Hover option. Very handy), I had to land the damn thing in a precise location to pick up troops. An LZ (Landing Zone) if you will, though they didn’t call it that.
This ended up going nose first into the ground, landing onto a tree, landing onto a fence, missing the LZ by several miles.., and when I finally got the hunk of metal as close as I could to the LZ, “our guys” weren’t even running over to me to be picked up.
Now we go to ArmA II: Flight Simulator 2012. Flying planes! I got to fly in a plane they call a VTOL, that looks nothing like a true VTOL, or even a Harrier jet. Anyway, I never completed that one because my flight instructor wanted me to land the plane. And I’m all “fuck you, I’ll fly around!” while trying desperately to not crash at the same time.

So let’s talk about the flaws I’ve seen that I feel getting this demo and not paying $19.99 was the right move. Note that some of these might of been fixed in the beta patch that I still don’t know how to acquire at the time of this post;
– When I told my existing plane squad to take down the final enemy plane infront of me, they did nothing except fly around, and I was out of ammo for all my weapons.
– “All. kill. enemy. MAN. infront. of. US.”, “Medic. heal. that. MAN?”, and “All. move. 50 meters. to our. front”. lol.. bad command sounds are bad, yet funny at the same time. It sounds like I’m listening to sound clips in a Youtube video. What kills me is in the Basic Training mission, their voices are perfect.
– Trying to get the Waypoint controls to work in the editor is hard. Sometimes it doesn’t even work. That’s not really selling the product to me.
– Too many damn controls! They bounded zoom in with the look through scope key!
– No screenshot button. Not really a bad thing, but forcing you to use an external program to do it, sucks.
– Incompatible with Puush.
– Some of the controls for the editor are complicated. And there’s no tutorials ingame of the editor.
– Flight/Vehicle Movement controls are too sensitive. Way too sensitive. It seems if you want to fly a plane perfectly without crashing, it’s recommended you use a joystick.
– Some of the Boot Camp tutorials don’t teach you everything, like how to get into a plane/helicopter.

The editor still makes the game fun, though. I’m just very glad it was included in the demo. Which leads me to believe nerd3 was using said demo when he was doing his videos.
Having several C-130J’s set via waypoint to fly over to me, go around in a circle and having 2-3 of them still in the air is always fun. Still, you can’t help but think “Just Cause 2 is more fun than this.” And that may be true. Especially in nerd3’s hilarious multiplayer video. With JC2, planes respawn and the grapple is always a laugh (when you manage to flip a fucking 737 upside down on its back during takeoff. I nearly blew chunks laughing too hard). In ArmA II, you have to create your fun via the editor.
Both games are fun, but you seem to be able to do more in JC2. But JC2, you can’t have an airshow of C-130J’s flying in formation.

This is a highly-popular Minecraft mod, capable of testing the limits of your video card. And my Geforce GTS 250 seems to handle them with some studdering. I’m getting like 15-30 FPS at times. Still, it works quite well. Here’s a few pictures of the shaders in action of random maps that I took, using the “Ultra No Motion Blur no DOF” shaders.

How I got them… well… it wasn’t easy. It didn’t start easy, then I realized how I can install it. It’s a thing with MultiMC being great and all, but it has hidden bugs that no one but me (it seems) that sees and bitches about them. Namely, its little thing of “MINECRAFT.JAR VERSION NOT MATCHING CURRENT MINECRAFT VERSION, WIPING EVERYTHING WITHOUT WARNING USER!!!”, and this is how I lost my Aether install. 😛

As for this mod, well, it now is obvious why the author has an installer in the .zip. It puts in and changes alot more than the folders that are in said .zip. Someone said that one could put the shaders folder in via MultiMC, so I tried. Yet every attempt, I couldn’t get the shaders to work for the life of me. Yet using that installer always does it, every time. And it was pissing me off I couldn’t reproduce the working shaders without using the damn thing.

At first I thought it was because of the fact I didn’t have Forge updated. I was still using 102 for some strange reason. I had never updated. So I reinstalled everything and that still didn’t work. So then I tried something and just used the installer, and managed to get them “working” through MultiMC. What baffled me is it wasn’t using the version of the shaders I put in it. So I removed the folder through MultiMC which caused the .jar to get overwritten, which wiped out the installer.
Tried it again, put the newer shaders into the jar as it says to (not through MultiMC), and that got it working. So then it finally hit me; wait ’till I get everything else installed, THEN patch. As long as I don’t touch MultiMC’s minecraft.jar section, the .jar won’t get touched which will keep the shader installed.

And indeed, it worked. So now I have everything I had before, plus the shaders. I’m very, very thankful it allowed me to pull this off with no problems. But seeing the beautiful shaders, I can’t help but think “this is wrong”. Wrong as in Minecraft isn’t supposed to look so… nice. It’s supposed to look blocky as shit.
Another thing I don’t like, too much damn bloom. It’s too bright to be realistic, IMO. Also, it applies this grainy effect. I don’t really like that.

Unfortunately, with the reinstall, all RP2-related blocks have been changed to other blocks once again (you can see this in the pictures). I have posted this issue on the thread, but I have a gut feeling they’ll probably tell me something I already know — how there’s nothing I can do, that it isn’t Elorram’s fault, and I fucked up. If it’s that, then I really have no choice but to redo it all over again. I was hoping I would never have to do this again.

It’s starting to make me think to maybe ditch this thing all together and use frumple’s stations and tracks for the next W2TS. Because I can’t keep doing this. And there’s nothing wrong with using frumple’s schematics. Infact, he actually encourages it.
The reason I don’t want to, because it isn’t my work. The W2TS since v1 has been MY work. MY designs. MY stations. It…, would be hard to break from that. But I got to face facts here. No one’s going to want to download a bunch of mods that are specific for that map. They would want what frumple has; a system that uses no mods.
In ways I like mine over his, because I don’t need or want a humongous station for just two ways in and out.

Here’s what I thought so far for playing it. It’s actually pretty fun, but at times it can be frustrating. Some puzzles take me nearly an hour to solve. But when I finally do I feel stupid that the answer was right there infront of me.
In some, I wonder why I bought this game since I hate puzzle games.

There’s these devices called a “DOLLI” (Dynamic Object Linear Ligation Interface”; a cloning device) that will belch out something that will be used for that puzzle, be it a Sofa or a Safe. In some puzzles, the DOLLI machines are malfunctioning and spit out alot of shit that you have to jump and leap over to get to the other side.

But what’s probably one of the fun things of this game, is surfing on moving furniture when in the Slow Time dimension.

The professor’s puns really get under my skin. He should have his own soundboard in Ventrillo Harassment. Ones like “We’ll have to table this” when you’re riding on a table, and “Safe Travels!” in one puzzle when a DOLLI belches out a safe. Also one where he says “You can never be too Safe”… Ugh.

But some of his lines are funny, like this one where he talks about his cat. What happened to the second one, and the cat that responds to ‘DERP’. You’ll also learn of the Professor’s travels through time and space, and the inventions you saw when you showed up at the house in the past.
Some of his lines also reveal hidden clues to that puzzle, such as when you get Anti-Gravity and you’re faced with a room with conveyer belts and safes. He mentions a song; “Get down, go up” which is indicating what you need to do to solve that puzzle. This is why it pays to listen to your elders. Even though your Uncle is crazy. Laser beams? Really? He should work for Aperture.

Some of the tiles are music-related titles. Some are movie-related. There’s one called “Our Safes Will Blot Out The Sun”, which is from 300. “Mind The Gap” seems to be a Portal reference.

The ending seems.. anti-climatic for what’s been going on. I guess the world just wasn’t made for the Uber IDS. And now you’re safe yet trapped in this “Pocket Dimension”. You never managed to meet your Uncle. At first I had thought Ike was involved but he isn’t. And now the mansion has fallen off the edge, and the world is now experiencing the affects of the dimensions, getting Fluffy and Heavy.
The ending could of been alot better (not as bad as ME3’s ending!! OOOOHHHHHH!!). It didn’t help with the tremendous rage of trying to solve the puzzles to get to him. But I’m glad I finally got it done. It’s still worth the $15, though. It’s got alot of levels, and defying the laws of physics is fun.