Category: Gamery

Bulletstorm, a wild and unique, first person shooter from the now very defunct People Can Fly studios is a game I cannot say enough good things about it. I have replayed this game many times already and it is as satisfying each time as it was the first time. Why is this game so much fun time and time again … well let me break it down.

The game puts you in the boots of Grayson Hunt, Elite Special Forces soldier Space Pirate, who in a single stroke of brilliant revenge manages to get his crew killed and ship destroyed. Grayson ends up on this supposedly abandoned planet with the last surviving member of his crew and working together they attempt to get rescued off the planet by way of their former Commanding Officer. A General who used Grayson and his former Special Forces team to cover up heinous crimes the General had committed and framed Grayson’s team for.

Honestly, on the surface, not that complex of a story … and then you start to find out the story of this “abandoned” planet – a former pleasure retreat built and staffed by convicts … that have been mutated by hazardous waste and radiation from ion storms on the planet. The player, as Grayson, now has to fight through these waves of mutated enemies for a chance to get off the planet and help your last crew mate, and friend, who was seriously injured in the crash landing. `To fight through all the mutations on the planet you are given a fairly standard compliment of weapons – pistol, shotgun, automatic rifle, etc all with a primary and secondary fire mode.

However, there is one weapon that made Bulletstorm truly unique at the time – an energy tether called a “leash”. This weapon allows the player to grab items like ammo from a distance and pull it closer or pull environmental blockers out of the way, a very useful trick. The “leash” also allows the player to grab enemies and pull them closer to be shot or kicked into other enemies … or grab explosive cylinders and throw them into enemies … or grab enemies and kick them into spikes … or any combination of these grab and kick combinations for interesting kill combinations that reward the player with points that can be used for weapon upgrades or ammunition for the other weapons.

The whole game is a profanity laced, ‘turn off brain and play’, action movie disguised as a video game. The original PC version was released with Live for Windows integration and has been removed from Steam, but was re-released as “Bulletstorm : Full Clip Edition” which appears to have toned down some of the profanity from the original but kept the original story intact.

It required a relatively decent machine for the time (requirements by Can you Run It) –

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo, AMD Athlon X2, or equivalent, running at 1.6 GHz or greater
• CPU SPEED: Intel Core 2 Duo, AMD Athlon X2, or equivalent, running at 1.6 GHz or greater
• RAM: 1.5 GB
• VIDEO CARD: DirectX 9.0c compatible, 256 MB of VRAM; NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS, ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro 256 MB, or greater
• TOTAL VIDEO RAM: 256 MB
• PIXEL SHADER: 3.0
• VERTEX SHADER: 3.0
• HARDWARE T&L: Yes
• OS: Windows XP (SP3), Windows Vista (SP2), or Windows 7
• FREE DISK SPACE: 9 GB
• SOUND CARD: Yes

And for the Full Clip edition (requirements by Steam store page) –
Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system

• OS *: Windows 7/8/8.1/10 x64
• Processor: AMD A8-3850
• Memory: 6 GB RAM
• Graphics: Radeon HD 6850
• DirectX: Version 11
• Network: Broadband Internet connection
• Storage: 15 GB available space
• Sound Card: DirectX Compatible

When I originally heard about Stardew Valley I kept hearing the game being played by kids so I got the impression that it was very much a kids game. That was until I decided to kick the tires one day and loaded the game and started to play it. Now at the time of writing this I have almost 100 hours in, and while I do not have a lot to say about the game, I do have a way different view after playing.

The game starts off with your grandfather giving you a gift, but with the rule that you cannot open that gift until you are so tired of your city life and get back in touch with nature and people.

Sometime later, while at your desk job, you snap and open the letter to find that Grandpa left you the deed to his old farm… That you decided to move to.

It is a very simple story concept, and one that I think most adults can get behind, while being kid friendly. The game gives you a brief how to play and then sets you loose to build your farm, it is in need of a bit of work to clean up the rocks and weeds...

The game loop is simple, you grow crops and raise animals …

Craft things for your farm …

Including machines to make products (like cheese and jams) to sell …

The game has a sort of 8-bit cartoony art style with a day / night cycle – you do not want to stay out too late though, or you might just sleep wherever you drop when your fatigue hits zero. Farming and tending animals is the majority of the game, but there are other things to do like fishing, cave exploration, and the yearly seasonal system means there are holiday celebrations in town to attend and participate in. The game also supports adding mods too, on my game I have added a weekly market day for more options to sell things that I make. `

The requirements to run Stardew Valley are not so high either (as noted by the Stardew Valley Steam page) –

• OS *: Windows Vista or greater
• Processor: 2 Ghz
• Memory: 2 GB RAM
• Graphics: 256 mb video memory, shader model 3.0+
• DirectX: Version 10
• Storage: 500 MB available space

All in all this all makes for a very chill game and I highly recommend it, especially if you are into sandbox style games and it supports multiplayer if you want to bring along friends for the fun.`

Rolling the clock back, I got into the post apocalyptic survival games after playing Fallout 3 (I sort of missed the rest of the Fallouts to that point) and kept playing through Fallout New Vegas, Fallout 4 and so on (we do not speak of 76). I have had a lot of fun with the Fallout series, so image my surprise when I find out there is similar post apocalyptic game coming out in Wasteland 3 … and that this game was the next entry into THAT series.

At first I was under the thought that Wasteland was a rip off of Fallout – all be it a good rip off. Then as I started to look into the game and play it, I found out it was quite the opposite – Fallout took elements from the Wasteland series. The plot of Wasteland 3 feels a little more believable, true to real world events (that is taking on the role of a soldier type trying to secure supplies to save people from your home); and I have to admit, I think I am enjoying Wasteland 3 just a little more (I say enjoying because as of writing this, I still have not finished the game).

The game is played from a 2.5D isometric perspective with turn based combat and a sort of morality system where decisions you make have effects on later game play. The more you do for a particular faction the more you are appreciated and rewarded by said faction and vice versa of course. However there are special interactions, say bringing in certain characters into dialogs that will effect the choices in that interaction. Nothing exactly new, but the way the events are played out in this game makes them feel different and interesting.

The weapons in the game are a variety mostly close (or copies) to real world weapons of the 80’s and behave just like those weapons. There are interesting gadgets that make combat a bit easier to survive and, along with some dialog choices add replay ability if you want to twist the story in a certain direction. Of course during your travels you run into so many moments of “What did I just see??”

There is a lot of subplot to the game that I cannot do justice in anything less than a few dozen pages, probably ruining the game. Suffice it to say though, the Deluge of Fire did nothing to help the stability of Colorado and Wasteland 3 is definitely a game to pick up if you were on the fence about it.

I had some down time recently and decided to go through the backlog and find pulled up an entry from an old favorite series. Well I say old favorite, it is more like a game who’s entries have annoyed and amused me both in equal amount. That series is Sid Meier’s Civilization and the game, Civilization VI… and looking back I wish I would have taken more screenshots.

Originally I did not think about writing this post so I am wishing I had more pictures, but oh well. Normally Civilization games frustrate me to no end as they always seem to end up where I get stomped by a random victory condition I was not even paying attention to like .. culture or diplomacy. Civilization VI though was an exciting twist, I actually won the second game that I played. As usual the graphics were much improved over previous entries in the series and the gameplay feels more smooth, still turn based but very smooth to play.

This entry in the series threw in some very interesting features that I ran into during my first play throughs. First was the fact that for the most part, the other factions were not that busy threating or declaring war on me. Barbarians now form city-states, instead of those states just being in on the map from the word go and manufacture and field military units. Military units now stack so that there are fewer left lying around the field and making turns confusing while creating stronger units on the battlefield. The use of Nuclear weapons does not immediately earn the condemnation of every other faction on the map!

While the game is an improvement over other entries in the series, both visually and functionally, there is one thing that frustrating thing that I did not enjoy, workers cannot be automated … you cannot just tell a worker to just build just whatever is needed. For now, this worker automation is really my only major complaint about the game – otherwise I suggest picking it up when it goes on sale and give it a go.

I have had the recent fortune to host some Project Zomboid servers, and play with good friends … I have also learned a few things that I would like to share as well …

See, getting the Project Zomboid multiplayer server off the ground and running is not too hard at all, one just needs to follow the instructions on the Project Zomboid wiki for the dedicated server, here … well, I mean you can probably host a server or server like incarnation from the game itself, but that is not as much fun. The major thing that is not fun about running a dedicated multiplayer server for friends is … the dedicated server is written in Java, and Java can be extremely painful, I will elaborate a bit more in a moment.

Now, adding mods to a game can really change the whole way the game looks and feels, obviously, and Project Zomboid is no different. However, something to keep in mind is that all mods are not written the same … they can conflict, crash the game .. and they had to be put in lists using the hide and seek champion of forever, the semi-colon (;). After standing up the server the addition of mods is done in the server settings (either in the file directly or the game GUI), with each mod and name separated with SEMI-COLONS! This little detail took me a week to finally work out, and seeing as I graduated college knowing how to program in languages that use semi-colons … I felt really stupid. Thankfully the folks playing on the server were really understanding and brushed the trouble. Which was good … because once we got started, there were over 90 mods running …

Now as I said before, mods can be cool, and we had some cool music and vehicle mods. We even ran with a dance mod, which led to some funny videos and a hilarious night of running over hordes with riding lawn mowers. The problem, however, is that eventually you have to pay the price for having so many mods. I paid that price pretty quickly, and several times at that – java will chew through available configured memory pretty quick … which in the case of our server was about 30 minutes at full load before the app crashed restarted itself (a little automation foresight on my part … restarting the crashed process automatically). Thankfully this crashing was quickly remedied of by modifying the launch file to increase the amount of memory for the java virtual machine (but had to raise it an obscene amount for the server to be completely stable with our concurrent 14 – 15 players … it might not be java’s fault, but java is getting the blame).

Project Zomboid servers (in my experience) require a little more attention than other game servers, you cannot just set it up, forget about it, and still have an optimal long term experience. Somethings that help a lot are to have a goal for your server .. more than just survive something like building a shrine to side corn within a certain amount of time, having a time limit on your server helps keep the experience going and on topic. The best advice I can impart though, is allow your friends to help guide where the story goes, be that story teller that lets the players help guide the narrative … but no request is free.

Above all else … have fun, it takes some work to keep it all running smooth, but it is really worth it.

Edit: After a new server with a new build of Zomboid, and having to do way more troubleshooting that I really should have, I feel that I have to make a bit of a correction. Yes the server was written in java and I am bias against java, having so many headaches learning the language many years ago. Times have changed and one thing that I definitely did not mention when I wrote this post was the fact that reading logs goes a long way to finding problems… that could be just easily dismissed as bad programming.

Man, the future sounds so violent …

I have had this topic on my to-do list for a while now, seeing as how I put my original Unreal Tournament servers online just a little over a year ago now. Originally this was going to be a lot more complicated posting, the servers had a whole lot of steps and hoops to get them working not to long ago. Now, its more complicated to configure the game settings than it is to actually install the server.

Back when I built the Unreal Tournament 2004 server back the ways back I started to the LONG road of installing and trying to make sure that everything (files, config settings, etc.) were where they need to be. Guides like the one from the Unreal Admin Wiki for setting up the Unreal 99 server call out quite a few steps and have several pitfalls, such as copying files from the game media, that are easy to fall into if you are not paying attention. However the whole process is a LOT simpler if you skip the long guide in favor of a packaged installer from Linux Game Server Managers. I discovered around a year ago when I set up the Unreal servers the first time and that is how I built the Unreal 99 server.

I logged into the game servers the other day for routine maintenance and saw they were both behaving really odd, so I decided that I would rebuild and document my experience. Honestly though, the process is so straight forward that I cannot explain the process any better than the build documents, so I will link them along with the addresses to both servers (both can be found in the Internet Servers list starting with “Fallingstuff”). Walking through these docs the process took about an hour per server from start to finish, including setting up game settings like number of bots in a match.

• Unreal Tournament 99 – https://linuxgsm.com/lgsm/ut99server/
  • Fallingstuff Unreal Tournament 99 – ut99.fallingstuff.net
• Unreal Tournament 2004 – https://linuxgsm.com/lgsm/ut2k4server/
  • Fallingstuff Unreal Tournament 2004 – ut2k4.fallingstuff.net