Tag Archives: Wars

Trooper Adventures…..the strip.

Posted by Steve on August 27, 2013 No comments

So on a whim, yesterday, I decided to try and make a comic strip. So, I can’t draw for crap. I have loads of talented friends who can draw so I am always jealous of them. Occasionally I get some decent ideas on something that I think would be funny in a strip but that lack of drawing kinda puts a damper on things. And don’t give me the whole XKCD argument, that boy can really draw.

What I can do is take pictures, and I have lots of material to use. So I give you the first Trooper Adventure strip!

I am still working on formatting and such so if I do more they won’t be near as big. Also, I may not stick with just the troopers. It’s a work in progress.

Praying Mantid!

Posted by Steve on March 29, 2012 No comments

Sarah is very happy with the garden she has in the front yard. On occasion I have taken some pictures out there of some cool looking flowers. Lately, though, there has been a flood of pesky bugs that have moved in. In order to combat this, Sarah has ordered an army! Well, an army of praying mantids. What I was expecting was this:

But what we got was these VERY tiny little mantid. They will grow to be larger, (maybe not a rideable size) but in the meantime, I get to do some Macro photography!

Those Wacky Internet People

Posted by Steve on February 27, 2012 No comments

Playing a MMO gives you the great opportunity to experience a whole different class of individual on the Internet. The douche-bag. Now this isn’t you ordinary garden variety Jersey Shore style of douche-bag. The internet douche-bag is a special breed. This is very similar to Penny Arcades “Greater Internet Fuck-Wad Theory” (“given both anonymity and an audience, an otherwise regular person can become a “total fuckwad,” i.e., a very disagreeable person.”) except in MMO’s you loose the audience and gain the Pokemon “Gotta collect them all” attitude.

In an MMO, it comes down to stats and gear. If you play online for longer than the average player, you can gain access to all sorts of good gear, higher ranks, and stat bonuses. This can be great when playing the game because it gives you an advantage that may take other players a very long time to obtain. There is nothing wrong with this “gear grind”, except when that douche-bag switch gets flipped in your head and you are suddenly leaps and bounds better than anyone who doesn’t have what you have. Apparently, on the Internet, this means that those people are somehow lesser than you.

In a game where it’s every man for himself, I would think that would be more tolerable (but still douchey). In a team based Multi person match, though, it’s the team you are on that needs to win, not just you. It is in every ones best interest to ensure that the team wins. These gear mongers spend all of their time in game just working to get the best gear possible so they can lord it over anyone who hasn’t spent 90% their game time working towards the best gear. People like this don’t care about the story of the game, or another outside of the gear grind.

So here is the fun fact. Once you have all the greatest gear in the game….what then? I am fully aware that I can spend all my time collecting stuff that makes my character better, but I will eventually hit that wall where it’s “Well, I guess I have all the best stuff, now what do I do?” The answer is “The whole rest of the game!!” there are other character stories, lots of exploring, group missions, operations, etc. Plenty of stuff that doesn’t involve berating those who haven’t spent elventybillion hours getting PvP gear.

What spurred this was an encounter I experienced the other day in Star Wars, The Old Republic. If you haven’t experienced the WarZone areas, it’s a PvP arena where the Imperials ad Republic get to fight for certain objectives. The winning team gets extra points that can be used to upgrade gear and stats. The losers still get points, just not as much. On our server, the empire players have been dominating. They just play better, are more organized, and due to their wining, they have some better gear. This is starting to balance out now that the Republic is catching up, but it’s slow. Many times you can join a match and someone will leave the group leaving the balance at 6 players vs 8. When this happens, it’s pretty much a lost match. Most people will play through to the end anyways to get some points.

TLDR: I met an Internet Douche-bag and had an argument. He got his ass handed to him and we lost a match because of him.

This happened to me and I made a comment about it. Only to be yelled at by another player and told to “STFU” because I was under-geared. That somehow my having less than the top tier gear was causing the match to be a loss. (Mind you, I have won quite a fair share of matches, and have pretty good gear). I mentioned to this person that, if we were to play as a team and work towards a win, everyone would be better geared and it’s puppies and kittens for all! (paraphrasing) The slew of arguments that flowed from this person about how “Under-geared n00bs” were ruining WarZones, made me (and several other players) not want to aid him in the rest of the match. (Naked Dance Party time!*)

Sure enough the very next WarZone we were matched up with this player and 3 others from his guild. The warzone we were on was the Alderaan turret capture map. He asked if I was “Planing to throw the match again”, I asked if he was “planning on working as a team?” Myself and one other player went to capture and hold the left hand turret while he and his guild members, along with two others went to the middle turret. On the left, we had a few invaders that were quickly dispatched and we held the left turret. The max geared Internet douche and his team were wiped out repeatedly and never captured a turret.

I didn’t hear anything else from him.

Remember kids, Wil says “Don’t be a dick!”

*Naked Dance Party in a warzone is were everyone strips off their gear and uses the /dance command. It basically means we know it’s a lose.

Testing FRAPS with SWTOR

Posted by Steve on January 30, 2012 No comments

A long time ago (blah blah galaxy) I tried my hand at some Machinima video capture. For those who don’t know, Machinima is using video game footage, re-edited together to make a video. A lot of folks use the medium to make music videos, some people have ran with it and made full series of funny videos (like Red Vs. Blue). Well, a few years back some friends and I tried to make a series called Stupid Hobbitsess. It was made using the Lord Of The Rings Online game. Unfortunately, the videos were pulled from YouTube because of Digital rights for some of the music used. (less than 30 seconds worth). So now, they only exist on my Hard Drive. I may see if I can get them up here somewhere.

Anyways, I used a capture software called FRAPS. It’s one of the popular choices for Video Game capture. Problem is, back in the day, when I ran the capture on my old system, it would lag the game…..a lot. On a while I decided to try and run FRAPS behind The Old Republic and see what the hit would be. I was amazed to find that there was no lag at all. Now, it is an updated system and FRAPS has been updated quite a few times since then so it may be more streamlined. Below is a sample capture of some in game footage. This kind of stirs the creative juices a bit, well see if anything comes from it.

Ninja Edit: Looks like the old Myspace page for Stupid Hobbitsess is still up with the videos. If you dare venture into Myspace land, you can see them here

SWTOR Crew Skills, or “Corso Shakin his Money Maker!”

Posted by Steve on January 23, 2012 1 comment

Next in my line of talking about Star Wars The Old Republic, Crew skills!! Crew skills are TOR’s form of crafting. In other MMO’s they incorporate crafting in the form of “Hunting and Gathering” where your character would come across materials out in the world(s) and use that material to build armor/weapons/stuff back in some special location. In WoW you could find an Anvil somewhere or cooking fire, etc. You would have to stand next to that location and toil away your time watching your character move his arms up and down.

TOR sought to make that a little more enjoyable. For starters, in general game play they give you a companion to aid you in your quests. The companion ties in to your story line and can change the way the story plays out depending on which companion you use (through out the game, you gain more Crew Members). For crafting, the added the ability to send your companion out on a Crew Skill. This is a mission that your crew ventures out on for a set amount of time, and then comes back with materials used for crafting. While your crew is out, you are free to continue questing un-hindered. They still include the random nodes in the world(s) that you can harvest for materials, but this allows you to pull in specific materials for your crafting by sending your companion out to get them.

The actual crafting part works much the same way. You can send your companion out to make up to 5 items at a time and then go about your business. When he/she is done the items will be in your inventory. The best part is that all the materials can sit in your vault. This is a huge step beyond any of the other MMO’s that force you to carry everything you need and tie you to a work area to build things.

Now, the down side. Unfortunately, not all crew skills are created equal. All of the discovery crew skills (the ones that gather materials) cost credits to send your companion out. Essentially you are paying for them to gather instead of you doing it. This is a double edged sword since you get your materials, and your skill increases, but too much and you end up broke. Except for one skill, Slicing.

Slicing used to be overpowered to the point where it was insane to not have it because it was a steady flow of large sums of money. Sadly, they “fixed” that and brought it down to a slow trickle of money. If you have the ability to run slicing missions non stop, it can still turn you a profit, but it takes some time and you have to face the consequences of a loss from time to time. In the long run you will make money.

The below chart is a great display of which crew skills tie together for crafting (Credit goes to http://www.swtorcrewskills.com):

http://www.swtorcrewskills.com

Enjoy your Crafting!

“Corso, get back out there and shake your money maker!!”

The New Old Republic from a long time ago is now!

Posted by Steve on January 11, 2012 No comments

The game that nearly all Star Wars fans have been waiting for since Star Wars Galaxies rolled out it’s new combat experience. Bioware has filly come out with an MMO that changes how we really play MMO’s.

I have played quite a few MMO’s in my life. I think my first dose was back with SWG came out, and that’s what it took to make me jump, Star Wars. Since then there has been Everquest, FFXI, LOTRO, and the ever popular WoW. One thing that was a constant was that, while the gameplay was fun, I never really got into the story. That’s not to say that I didn’t like the story much, but it never grabbed me. That is until The Old Republic.

In single player games, there is a lot of emphasis put on the story. You are telling the story from the players point of view. These are the games that grab you and make you care about your character and drive you through the game. In most MMO’s the story is told through the quest givers and usually there is a lot of reading. Most of this reading breaks down to “Them thar cyotes are killin mah chickens! Go kill 10 of them and bring me their pelts!” Because, surely the other “cyotes” will take the hint. With TOR, the quest giver tells you, through actual conversation, what he needs, and you steer the conversation with your reactions. Fully voiced characters help with that. I can see that my character is making the decision to kill 10 “cyotes” and I can hear the impact that it has on the NPC. It’s not just a paragraph of text that I probably wouldn’t be reading anyways. Span that across 50 Levels….that’s a big story.

So now we have taken the Single player aspect of story telling ad brought it to a MMO. But what about the M in MMO? (yeah I know there are two, we are talking about the Multiplayer one.) That’s what makes the story telling part that much more interesting. Lets throw a second player in the conversation now. Farmer Frank is worried about his chickens, Jedi Joe is very interested in Farmer Franks plight, but Smuggler Steve just wants to get paid. This changes the conversation! For each conversation choice, the players roll to see who gets to answer. Depending on the response, Farmer Frank could reply with something different. The outcome of the quest could be, less money, or no money, or lots of money!

I found that I was really interested in my story quests, so much so that I started bypassing some of the side quests that everyone can get just to progress my story. The downside to this being that my story got too hard for the level I was at. Side quests are there to help build you up more. I have become more attached and actually care about my characters story line more so than any other MMO. Add into this the actual moral choices that Bioware is known for throwing into the mix, and now we have different story trees that make even the same player class re-playable! I wasn’t so sure on this until I watched a friend, who was the same class, in his story quest and the outcome of the conversation was vastly different because of his choices. (it’s no wonder this game took so long to come out!)

All of this is not even getting into actual game mechanics and game play. I might try and cover that in a separate post since I don’t want to make this terribly long. A quick side note about interesting game mechanics. Everyone knows that you can press a key combo to hide your UI and then press “Print Screen” to take a screen shot. Bioware took this to the next level by giving Collectors Edition buyers a “Holocamera” in game. When used, it creates a screen shot from the players POV. Not too different from the key combo right? Nope, but the in game character will actually pull out a camera and take a picture. This made my trip to Tatooine a bit more touristy! Enjoy the pics and expect more from a galaxy far far away soon!

Malware sucks!

Posted by Steve on January 10, 2012 No comments

Well, not sure if anyone noticed, (given that I probably only have like 3 people that read this) but my main site came under attack recently. Apparently there was a wordpress exploit that someone got a hold of and it set up all kind of weird re-directs in my site and in Sarah’s food blog. This cause some posts/pages to browse to some Russian malware site. So, yea, huge apologies for that screw up. BlueHost (my hosting company) help me clean out the junk and get things updated and fixed.

I took this opportunity to clean things up around the site and try out a new theme/look. This only affects the main site, not my Tumblr site (which usually has the same posts).

As per usual, I am going to try and do some more posting with the new year. So far 2012 looks like it’s going to be a busy/crazy year. That is, if I can get off my butt and not play Star Wars: The Old Republic so much. I’ll see if I can get a post up about that in the coming few days.

As per usual, Stay Tuned! (and sorry for that Malware thing, really….you may want to see a Doctor and get checked out)