Minecraft Update September 2021

Well it's time for a Minecraft update and wow it's been a while, I have updated anything Minecraft since the Sunken Temple rebuild back in Feb 2019. I've decided to make this post for both the Minecraft Adventures and Minecraft Creations section as it encompasses both sections.

So since the last post I hadn't really touched Minecraft apart from seeing different updates on facebook etc but one day I managed to persuade my partner Casty to start a Minecraft world for ourselves, just over LAN. So we did, and as soon as we found a suitable location we hollowed out a hole in a small hill and started homesteading. Before long we had a nice little home hollowed out of the hill with a farm and lots of animals and plants that Casty and grown and bred while I went out hunting for supplies. Our home was not far from a lovely seaside with a coral reef where she found turtles to breed also. I must admit having a shield and wolf pet made dealing with skeletons so much easier. We had many pets including wolves, cats and horses. After awhile I decided to switch to creative mode as cutting enough timber to finish the house was getting way to time-consuming so I quickly finished it off and by the end we had a large two story house with no trace of the original hill.

External Shot of the main house

Afterward Casty suggested the challenge of recreating a house each from a real estate picture. We both agreed mine came out really well but Casty had trouble with the bulky size of the Minecraft blocks. I don't blame her as she plays the same which is much more realistic, When you are dealing with MC blocks you have to really adjust your designs to be large and wider as each block is about the size of a large treasure chest.

A flyby of Casty and I's world with all of our created houses.

After this I joined my friends Stefan and Fraser on their server which was chock full of machines. machines that gave you XP, machines that grew plants, machines that farmed animals, machined that farmed Slimes, even a machine that auto-harvested wood, Stefan was very interested in these things you see. While they were showing me all this they gave me some Elytra and then introduced me to what I think is the best thing ever to do in Minecraft. Apparently if you have firework rockets in your hand and fire them off when gliding with Elytra you are propelled forward (this works without using Elytra too) which basically gives you the ability to fly. And man I had heaps of fun flying all over the place and I even created new worlds to zoom around in, the amplified world was especially fun. After looking around the world a bit more I saw the nether and their huge open cavern that was dug down to bedrock and this gigantic hole which was some kind of sponge farm. I then noticed that the world was messy I mean really messy there was crap everywhere and when I asked them if they had a house they basically pointed to this red building with no windows.

 

Flying with Elytra and Fireworks in Stefan and Fraser's World.

This was apparently their first abode, a windowless shack with no floor, Minecraft tracks going into the ground and a villager for some reason. Well I decided to do what I did best, yep build them a house! I started breaking apart the current house and leveling out the ground. Fraser and Stefan were actually playing in Survival mode so I had to use what materials I had available. As i mentioned before the server was a mess with machines and constructs and chests all over the place, searching through them all I found what materials were in abundance. For example Stone brick, I had looooots of that so I made that the bottom area which would be the basement of the house.

Some shots of the outside of the finished house

So I toiled away listening to the sounds of the cactus machine and the baa'ing of the multicolored sheep. I was going to make the house three levels with three rooms one each for Fraser and Stephan and one for this other guy whose name eludes me, Nathan I think. So after much foraging and building and gathering supplies the giant house was finished, complete with three levels, one made of stone bricks, one made of iron blocks and one made of birch logs. Other materials used were birch planks, oak planks and logs, wool for carpet and glass and iron bars for the windows, and yes the stairwell looked sort of like a jail from the outside but the inside was fine. I was very happy with my contribution to the server, I don't think they ever used it but I was proud of it nonetheless.

Interior shots of the finished house. No furnishings as It would have taken forever in survival mode.

Probably needed a support pillar in there.

At some point I was invited to a friends birthday which was held in Minecraft, which was a great idea I thought. Except I probably would have done it a bit differently, for example he put the difficulty on hard and hard difficulty in survival mode is bloody hard especially when most of the attendees either hadn't played Minecraft or had little knowlege of it. It was a bit of a shemozzle with everyone randomly running around being killed by monsters and supposedly random players coming in to the server killing everyone through apparently he upped the security for his next MC birthday. Two lockdown birthdays? that must have sucked. I would have suggested playing on peaceful mode until everyone was relatively settled and had shelter but it was fun anyway.

Ahh chaotic fun times.

After some time I joined my friend Moofs on the Auscraft server, this had been the first time on a public server in awhile and I reminded myself how much I loved looking at game spawn areas. We settled in a Savanna biome and began building a home in a mountain. Before long Moofs had quite a big base going as he always does and I'm of course always just small time and simple.After playing for a while on that server we moved to a different one where we settled in a Taiga biome. I'd always wanted to make. I'm not sure where I thought of the idea though I could guess it was from the Woodland Mansions that were added in the Exploration Update. 

Explorin' the Nether in Auscraft server

 To be perfectly honest I could create a fortress in any type of biome, I have created many fortresses and temples over the years. This one was a simple design made of cobble and spruce wood which matched Moofs village, except this time I stripped some of the logs for a different aesthetic. I designed the fortress into the land as I usually do but it was a sort of plus symbol with extra corners instead of being square. The finished fortress had a top and bottom level with a balcony of course. One of my favourite bits was the window at the top of the front door which you could climb up and look out of.

The finished Forest Fortress! you'll notice I didn't furnish fully, wasn't too bothered about the furnishings.

So finally the most recent adventure was on my friend Tewdric's MC realms server. When I joined this server Tewdric and Moofs had already established themselves and had flattened out and built on what looked to be a plains biome. In the centre there was some sort of large purple building which I had no idea what it was for or what it was made out of, it also seemed to be full of eels. It was surrounded by fields of farms and a large barn. Speaking of farms, Moofs had been busy making his farming creations again, I'm not sure if these are like standard for maximum efficiency nowadays but what I can say is they would be incredibly inhumane and almost impossible to do in real life. There was a building where a builder of each speciality was stuck in a 1 block space in front of a lectern, chicken and beef 'vending machines' where dozens of chickens and cows were jammed into small space and bred then slaughtered and dropped into a chest. Though I suppose this is all done for efficiencies sake and not like I hadn't seen anything like it before in Fraser and Stefan's Server.

Some of the farms created on the server.

There was also the usual xp and monster farms and some nice looking houses, I noticed a chimney of one of the houses had smoke coming out of the top of the chimney which I hadn't ever managed before as the smoke from fire usually goes away before it get to the top of the chimney then I found Tewdric had put iron bars inside the chimney and a campfire on top of that allowing lots of smoke to come out form the top, this was an ingenious idea I thought and decided to try it with my next house. I noticed there was a Dark Forest biome near the main town and thought to myself "Well I haven't made a house in a mushroom biome before" so I did. Now this time I had really run out of ideas, I had previously tried to build a house around a mushroom and on top of one too but neither worked. This time the plan was to do a partially hidden house that was semi-underground nestled away in a ditch. So I immediately got to work chopping down dark oak to use to blend in. 

My hovel with the separated bedroom, at this point I was using Chocopic's shaders from Optifine

Now you would think I'd use dark oak logs but I wasn't going to make the whole thing out of logs it would be made out of wood with dark green and brown carpet and a nice brick finish for the walls. So I walled off the ditch with wood and started digging, there were actually a number of trees and tall mushrooms in the house area but that was ok I'd build around them it was supposed to be hidden anyway.After a lot of building and resource gathering I had a nice little cozy house with a bedroom and fireplace, bookshelves and work area. There was more room to add other things too like an enchanting table or alchemy lab.The house was square and I put dirt to grow grass on top to make it a little less conspicuous though I did make a skylight for more light. Another note when looking around the Dark Forest biome I found another very picturesque house and garden. I loved the design and architecture and I will use it for my creations in the future.

  

Walkthrough of Tewdric's Realms server and my Mushroom Hovel

So that's basically an update of what's been happening in Minecraft for the last maybe 2 years hah. Hope you all enjoyed seeing the creations.

JD

Forever building...

GTA Online - Cars, Bikes, Boats, Planes, Friends and a Sense of Purpose

Hello! well it has been a while, probably the longest ever time between posts, 8 months that's more than half a year. I was just thinking of doing another post and then checked how long it had been and wow that was a looong time. Well, a lot has happened since the last post. I now have NBN, and I've started streaming! FYI I now have my Twitch and Youtube channel link in the top right of my blog. When I finally decided to get NBN it took a very long time to get it installed in my apartment and since then I have been doing a lot of work streaming and building my youtube channel. Hopefully, I get more chances to update soon.

Now that's a good line of cool cars

What made me want to make a new blog post is that recently I have finally found a crew in GTA Online that does car meets on PC, which I had been looking for for a long time. I had made a post in the GTA Online Facebook group I was in and received a message from a member of the 'Killer Clowns' crew whose I will refer to by his GTA name "Mr Miyagi". He was also an Aussie but the guild itself was mostly European. So I went on to their Discord and signed up and saw that there was a car meet coming up soon and it was for offroad! This was awesome so I immediately started planning the time and what vehicle I would take. I found that the meets were scheduled at night British Summer Time (BST) which meant it was going to be pretty damn early, but I wasn't going to let that stop me. So at 5:40am on a Sunday I arose and logged into GTA to take part. We met at the car lot out in Sandy Shores and I rolled  in and lined up with my orange Injection Dune Buggy, which I will admit looked pretty damn small compared to the other cars and trucks which were a mixture of big 4x4 trucks, one person even had the Scarab from Arena War which did pretty well with its tracks. So we set off down the road and met up at the lighthouse on the western coast and lined up again. 

The lineup on the cliff near the lighthouse. Some of those wheels aren't suitable for offroad lol.

I learned pretty quickly how these meets worked. We met up in one arena, then traveled to the next area and stopped for more photos, this time we stopped on the edge of a cliff! By the time Miyagi rolled in and everyone was present we started off down a first road and then, of course, my GTA crashed. When I got back the group had finished the route around Mount Gordo and were on their way to Mount Chiliad. I decided that I might go a bit bigger in my vehicle choices so I decided to use my Australian-themed Marshal which worked really well as it has an Australian flag on the back. The monster was powerful and had lots of grip which made short work of the steep hills and ravines we were climbing up, in fact the only downside for Marshal is that's it's quite slow compared to other off-road vehicles but speed was not an issue at all for this run.

Convoy!

So we drove up and down the mountain and then along the beach and the swamp before finishing at Stab City. Apart from getting flooded a few times I went really well, the Monster truck made things really easy. The next part of the meet was motorcycles and I picked my favorite bike, the Nightblade. The bike meet was ok but the offroad one was far superior as we all moved slow and we all moved together. In any case I had a great time and took lots of photos and recorded the whole session. This was great this was what I had been looking for for a while. Playing with my friends Moofs and Tewdric and others is fun but the problem I always had is that I'd pretty much played until I'd done almost everything the game had to offer and bought all these cool things but most of the time whatever we did didn't give us a chance to use our custom vehicles. Yes when doing missions you could often drive to the location with your own vehicle or when doing things like doing CEO crate missions you could use your own car too but most of the time you were driving around in what was required for the mission like trucks or post-op vans or helicopters or your Oppressor Mk2

My edited music video of the Water Meet

Most of the time to use my custom cars I did classic land races but were hard to get going unless it was the weeks where they were 3x money where I found that lots of people started them. I did try to do the occasional car meet but impromptu car meets never really work, especially in a random lobby. Even the meets I did with other friends were small and short-lived and also were prone to people wrecking them. The best car meets are well organised and most importantly in private invite-only lobbies.

We're the self-Preservation Society!

Over time I have attended another 5 meets with two of them being organised by your truly. I ran a small vehicle offroad meet and roam where we used Dirtbikes, Quad Bikes, and Buggies and we raced haphazardly through mountain passes. And a water meet and roam where we bombed the rivers and sailed the seas with Jet Ski's, Speedboats and Yachts. Other meets that were organised were Movie-themed, Air Land and Sea, James Bond, and a second offroad meet where I used my APC. Using the APC was great fun as it was amphibious so I had no worries of being flooded. I even had to do two rescue missions where crew members were stuck at the bottom of cliffs and I had to ferry them out of there.

Full video of the second meet.

I am so glad I have found this community and that I have a chance to show off my custom vehicles, Grand Theft Auto is the best game to do this due to the variety of vehicles and customisation you can do. I have spent a lot of time recording and editing videos of the meets out of a passion for these events since I saw the very cool video by Atomic. I've been trying to record using the Rockstar Editor but it can only save to your C Drive where I don't have very much space but I'll see what I can do. I need to work on editing mine down a bit and getting them more precise.You can see all of these videos on my Youtube channel.

Atomic's excellently edited video of the first meet. You can see me!

I just wish now that I could find the same thing in the Crew 2 :) 

JD

We got ourselves a Convoy!

The Past and Times of Yore: Warcraft, Orcs and Humans, where RTS all began

I've decided to do a return to the original format of my blog I'll somehow try to get it done around my playing but as I said in my previous post may not be as detailed as before. Also because of my Covid and my lousy internet upload speed I will not be posting any videos, I could post other videos from youtube but I'd rather just update the posts when I can with my own work.

Release date: 23rd November 1995
Genre: Real Time Strategy (RTS)
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Platforms: MD-DOS, Classic Mac OS
Modes: Single-player, Multi-player

It was only a week or two ago when I saw that the Warcraft I&II bundle was on special on GOG (which is a great resource for games I might add) and I just couldn't say no. Yes it's arguable that these games should now be free but for $12 what the hey, whoever does the conversion of these games into a playable format does a great job and I have no trouble playing them. Warcraft: Orcs and Humans though is a special case, released in 1994 it's one of the oldest Real-Time-Strategy (RTS) games out there. In fact I was interested to know what could be considered the first, and after doing some research I found that the Sega Genesis game Herzog Zwei released in 1989 was regarded as the first, I had never heard of it, but then again I had never considered RTS games on console. The term Real Time Strategy was coined as a sub-genre of strategy video games in which the game does not progress incrementally in turns as many games such as Powermonger did. Back in the day I was a huge fan of RTS, and so was everyone else, what with the 1992-1998 golden age of seminal titles with greats such as Command & Conquer, Command and Conquer: Red Alert, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, Age of Empires and Total Annihilation which introduced 3D units and terrain. All these were a huge hit of course then came Starcraft, so RTS as well as online multiplay well and truly took off worldwide and when Warcraft III came around well I had the RTS time of my life and I can honestly say I have not played a better one to this date. 

The Humans, clean, noble and righteous, what you'd expect really.

Nowadays unfortunately I just don't enjoy RTS as much as a I used to, I'm not exactly sure, it may be the stress, the structured building of bases and starting from scratch every game and all the damn micromanagement, or maybe it's just the fact that seeing my army routed and defeated just makes me much more sad then if I was playing as a single entity. The last two RTS I played were the Starcraft II Trilogy and Planetary Annihilation: TITANS which was a fan-made reboot for Total Annihilation. But that was just for nostalgic value really and to see the series through, I faced it a long time ago my tenure with RTS was over.

The Orcs: A very different look, rough, ugly and crude

But that is now, back then I was really into these games. Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (WC1) was Blizzard Entertainment's breakthrough into the RTS genre and a big success for the company. It introduced the Warcraft universe which tells the story of the Orcs invasion of Azeroth from their homeworld of Draenor, which to my delight was the subject of the first Warcraft Film (to a degree). WC1 had great graphics and voice acting and I loved the intro sequences for the missions where the text would scroll and the actor would vocally read out the mission details which was unique for it's time then then part of the map would pop out in 3D as you started. It was all very good but there was a problem as the first Warcraft game that actually I played was Warcraft II (WC2), it wasn't until I got the famous Warcraft: Battle Chest that included WC1 that I had a go of it, and to be honest although it was still a nice and polished game with a great story and presentation, after playing WC2 it just didn't cut the mustard which I'll admit can happen going from playing a sequel to playing an earlier game. 

3D Map! it was a cinematic but I still loved this bit.

WC1 suffered from a few drawbacks including: Only being able to select 4 units at one time and no ability to right click to attack, you had to either click on the ability or use the hotkey, units didn't path well and often didn't react when an enemy was near them. Even on the fastest speed it took a long time to build your base and get things organised to attack the enemy and often you couldn't play on the fastest speed as you needed to slow it down to organise units in a battle. Plus every unit on each side had the same voices and said the same lines when clicked on or when an ability was used. So after a few hours of "My Lord?" "Yes my Lord" "Yes!" "My Liege?" "Yes my Lord" "Yes!" "Your will Sire?" "Yes!" "Yes my Lord" I was about to throw my keyboard out the window, the Orcs although a bit funnier in their speech were the same. The other issue was apart from the spells used by the Clerics, Conjurors, Necrolytes and Warlocks, each unit on each side was pretty much identical to the other in starting stats and abilities. I must admit I did love playing with these spells being able to summon a whole bunch of monsters including, spiders, scorpions, Water Elementals and Demons was great fun and lets not forget raising the dead too.

Orc Necrolytes summon skeletons from both my dead comrades and theirs, it was difficult in a sense that the computer controled army can move any units they like whilw you are stuck to moving four at a time.

As I've watched various people play it on youtube I think everyone can agree it's a lot of hard work and chore to play you have to do a momentous amount of mousework unless you know the hotkeys off by heart. In my most recent playthrough I found the incredibly helpful (heh) Warcraft Mouse Helper which made things a bit easier by adding modern RTS game functions but regardless I just couldn't find the game fun, then and now. I found myself looking forward to the unit-only missions where you didn't have to build and defend a base as in my later years these are the RTS levels I prefer. 

One of the Human, Unit-Only missions, these were usually always in caves

Unfortunately I just couldn't drag myself through the whole two campaigns again, I even resorted to using the cheat codes again as I was losing badly and just couldn't be assed, the ability see all map one is great as it allows you to see how the developers laid the map out and any easter eggs included which is fun. But really as before this is more a nostalgia trip then anything. I also never found any to play multiplayer with, and I don't think I ever will, not for a game this old, the multiplayer is only 1v1 anyway.

Youtuber Yshsod playing the multiplayer with a friend.

Warcraft:Orcs and Humans was a great game for it's time but just doesn't hold up very well. It would need a complete overhaul to the magnitude of Brutal Doom to be playable by today's standards. Nevertheless the sound, the music the colourful units and artwork and fantasy setting made this game what it was and a great base for things to come and I would regard it as a must try for lovers of RTS or Warcraft in general.

JD

Things I liked:

Over artwork and design, colourful units

Sound, Music and Voice work

Fantasy setting and story

Things I didn't like:

Clunky Controls

Bad unit pathing

Can only select 4 units

Repetitive unit speech

Not much replayability

Game requires a lot of effort to play

 

Youtuber WTii with a full playthrough of the game, wow that was a lot of demons and water elementals.

We've come a long way

Liero, The Unwanted Legend

Well hello there, it's been a while, I honestly didn't think I was going to make another post here due to changes in my work I had decided to leave my blog as I couldn't put in the effort I had before. I had just been sporadically updating my Youtube channel and now even less cause of covid. But my partner inspired me to continue writing and posting and I remember other friends and relatives commenting on how they saw and read my posts and how my blog was going and I wanted to thank everyone for that as it was inspiring to me. I must say the posts will not be anywhere near as long as before with in depth reviews and musing etc I just want to make small posts about things I'm doing and playing now. It will still be about games of course with videos and screenshots. I gotta say it's good to be back doing this again as I have missed it.

The year was 1998, I was in high school and it had computers and the internet, so what did we do? we played games of course. Yes back then flash games were the rage of course but also simple small downloadable games ones you could place on a USB drive and play anywhere without having to access the internet. I can remember Elastomania and Blobby Volley and Battle Painters to name a few, and of course there was Liero.

Liero is Finnish for earthworm and was inspired by the earlier game MoleZ, Liero provided inspiration for the later games Soldat and Noita. Liero was described a real-time version of the Worms games where two worms fought to the death using a choice of five weapons from a total of 40 in a two-dimensional map. The worm characters could dig through the dirt or destroy it with explosions to reach their opponent and gain extra mobility by using ninja ropes. So you could imagine there wasn't much in the way of narrative to a game like this.

A small preview of gameplay from Liero

I played this a lot, and during a creative writing session at school, I decided to write a story line for Liero, I called it LIERO , The Unwanted Legend as It wasn't really needed, or wanted, the game didn't need it but I thought it'd be fun to write. So I wrote most of it around 1999 and then it was left unfinished, until now, so without further I do, I give you Liero the unwanted legend:

Prologue

Liero is one of the most violent, chaotic and meaningless computer games I have ever seen. It consists of two worm-like creatures in underground tunnels each in bright colours and using ridiculously destructive weapons to blow each other apart. This may seem like a normal shoot-em-up game to some people with the amount of video game violence today but what makes this stand out is the mindless chaotic destructiveness with no plot or storyline whatsoever. Which does not mean the game is particularly bad, I myself like it a lot, But that’s what brings me to the point of this story, Yes unlike the game this story has a point to it.

I thought it would make an interesting scenario to try to create a detailed storyline to Liero, to create reason out of random violence and an explanation as to why this is happening and why Liero is what it is today.

Justin Durrant    

LIERO , The Unwanted Legend

CHAPTER 1 – The Imperfect Creators

When the Creators first came to the planet, it was young and rich in resources and full of oceans and underground tunnels and coated with an atmosphere which allowed lush plant life to grow . But other than this lush layer of grass and trees there was no life, no giant primitive beings, no scaly reptiles, no tiny insects, not even the slightest living microscopic organism. Creators knew that to leave such a perfect planet untouched, this was what they had been waiting for. The chance to create the perfect life-form.

The Creators were exited over the richness and complexity of the planet, the planet had everything needed, air, water, grass, trees and it’s relation to the sun brought interesting dark and light effects. As if it was dark on one side at one time and light on the other side at the other time. The Creators were efficient bringers of life, they quickly calculated the kind of life form that the planet could sustain and created seedlings of the one life form which they thought would be perfect to start off a whole chain of species on the newly discovered planet. The Creators laid these microscopic seedlings all over the planet, on the surface, undersea and in the underground tunnels. Over time the seedlings began to grow and to the delight of the Creators did not freeze or melt in the extreme conditions in some parts of the planet.

When the seedlings finally hatched what came out was an exact opposite to what the Creators expected. Instead of the white larvae of the proposed “perfect” life form, there were tiny colorless worms. The Creators were dismayed at the fact that these were not at all like what they had originally designed. They frantically hoped that if they failed to create the right species, that that species would not be able to survive in that environment and would die out quickly and they could start again. The Creators wanted to make sure that they had not wasted the planet with their embarrassing mistake.

But the Creators were successful in one way not the other, Each one of the tiny worms were perfectly suited to their surrounding environment and multiplied by the thousands, spreading across the planet with the highest population in their teeming underground tunnels. The Creators found that they had succeeded in making their creation be able to live and multiply in perfect harmony with the planet.

The Creators lurked in their colossal space-faring vessels pondering over what they could or should do with the ever-increasing useless mass of teeming worms that had shown no signs of evolution whatsoever. Knowing that if they tried to launch a second life form onto the planet it would instantly overrun by the worms no matter how fast it evolved, there was different opinions and views.  Some opted to try to launch a second batch of seedlings that would quickly spawn and ultra-being that would evolve and be strong enough to drive the worms to extinction, but this was almost impossible because of the sheer immensity of the worms population. Others thought that they should find a way to exterminate the worms without destroying the planet. Seeing as there was no way to get rid of the worms and start a new race, nor even save the planet the argument came to two final solutions.

One was to incinerate the planet and eliminate the race of worms altogether in hope that one day the planet will become what it once was. The other was insisted by particular Creators who were sympathetic or intrigued by the race of worms and wished to leave the planet and in time return in hope that the worms had changed beyond their original form. The Creators agreed that such a planet and the labor that went into creating the race should not be thrown away so casually, they agreed to leave the planet and search for a new untouched haven for another chance.

CHAPTER 2 – Growth, Evolution and Adaptation

Ironically not long after the Creators had left the planet’s solar system, the worms began to evolve dramatically, they grew bigger and fatter and eventually turned into what looked like a giant snake-worm. The most distinctive changes were the fact the worms no longer squirmed across the ground, they grew to an enormous size and reared up in an S-shape. They grew bigger, fatter, stronger and taller (up to 1 and a third metres). The other quite noticeable change was that the worms had developed arms and clumsy, fat but strong hands and fingers.

The worms adapted to the land and to the underground tunnels where most of them lived and even underground the planet was rich in resources as the worms had the ability to make a meal out of almost anything. But as the species evolved they started acquiring certain tastes, some craved large tasty flowerbeds other preferred watery lilies and lush ferns, and some ravenous minorities  had even started to get a taste for flesh eating small cave creatures and even other worms . This heightened intellect resulted in the worms quarreling over food, warmth, living space, even personal possessions such as large sticks or uniquely shaped rocks.

Years pass and the worms had virtually dug an underground city of tunnels and holes, and had uncovered water by drilling holes deep into the ground, they worms did quarrel from time to time but this was stemmed to the fact that they were still a primitive species with limited intellect. The worms seldom had anything to anger them they were all roughly the same height same shape and were the same pale white color from the darkness of the underground. But as the worms dug more and more this reasonable peaceful state could not go on forever and the inevitable was about to happen.

 

CHAPTER 3 – The Surface

In what was to be the most significant event in the life of the worms, the few that were at the highest point of the underground tunnels, felt warmth coming from the surface and small groups of them started digging upwards and upwards, this escalated into millions of worms shoveling out the roofs of the their tunnels toward the surface. After this happened it took barely a week for the first of the worms to reach the surface.

When the first worms broke through the surface of the planet they noticed at once that there was a bright glow coming from the edge of the horizon they reeled back at the harsh light of the sunrise as more and more worms erupted from the ground. Hours passed and the sun had reared up into the sky in the full light of noon the worms had barely adjusted their dark eyes to the sun when their skin made a dramatic change. As the sunlight beams down on the pale white hoards of worms their skin began to change shade into bright colors of the rainbow, some just turned a much brighter white other made a more dramatic change to pale red or yellow or even a dark blue, green or even black.

Weeks passed and the worms entire population had made it to the surface and as they explored the “new world” with new foods, plants, creatures and resources they began to build huts gain and new possessions and weapons, similar to what they had done in the underground but this time there was many distinct differences, on the surface the worms could use their vision to a greater extent and they could even climb tress and hunt other smaller creatures.

The worms explored the world their population ever expanding and gaining insight and influence and access to much more resources that they had previously, decades passed and the worm race evolved into the most populous and technologically advanced species on the planet making use of modern inventions, and weaponry. To counter their lack of limbs they used bungee style ropes to gain heigh and move quickly   There was no leadership within the worms, as they all managed to coexist peacefully.

 

CHAPTER 4 – The War for Resources and the return of the Creators

The Worm kingdom enjoyed years of peace but after the constant farming and desecration of the planets natural habitat, resources started to dwindle, the worms started to divide themselves into separate colonies by colour to safeguard their remaining resources. However this tenuous situation could only go for so long, soon various colonies began to attack each other on resource raids, leading to all out war between the colonies. The war went on for 500 years and terrible weapons were used on a global scale leading to devastated landscapes and millions of worms dead, the planet was eventually turned into a war-torn wasteland.

It was during this time that the creators decided to return to the world and saw with their horror at the consequences of allowing the worms to live, the worms had evolved so much that they had gained enough intelligence to be dangerous and that had led to them destroying their own planet. The creators had no choice but to incinerate the planet destroying the worms before they figured out how to travel the stars and infect other worlds. The entire population of the worms was destroyed as was whatever was left of their civilization. And so the creators left richer with knowledge of their failed creation.

However unbeknownst to the creators some worms had survived and fled underground to escape the scorched surface. But instead of rebuilding their society the remaining worms dig through the earth and hunt each other down with the weapons they have left, so ingrained is their will to survive is that they will fight each other until they are the victor.

Thus we have LIERO

JD

Oh the little joys

The Past and Times of Yore: Conkers Bad Fur Day

Release date: April 13th 2001
Genre: RPG/Platformer
Publisher: Rare
Developer: Rare
Platforms: Nintendo 64
Modes: Single-player

Well… how do I start? this game was quite something, I hadn’t really known much about Conker the Squirrel apart from my housemate Brok mentioning him, he made his first appearance in Diddy Kong Racing as a playable character with a limited storyline before Rare decided to grant him his own game. And so Conker’s Bad Fur Day (CFBD) was released in 2001 near the end of the Nintendo 64’s lifecycle and stretched the machine to its limits. When Brok used to talk about this N64 game with a usual cute character but dark adult themes and swearing I didn’t believe it at first, and then I saw some gameplay and was seriously like what the eff? This is actually a game, it really is like this, the swearing, the vulgarity and in something which looks from first glance like your usual cutesy platformer but then you look some more and oh wow it’s not at all. The very concept that a game like this could even exist on the Nintendo 64 was alien to me, even on the Playstation that would seem a bit odd. At first I didn’t really believe what I heard about it, but after seeing someone actually it I was like what the fackin hell? There’s a paintbrush and a bucket with eyeballs saying the F-word and at one point I swear I heard the C-word though some parts were still censored.

A particularly unpleasant dung beetle

Indeed the game was originally intended to be released as a family friendly platformer game similar to Rare’s other titles Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 however when the initial trailers were released there were calls that the game was just more of the same as they had done before so the game’s director Chris Seavor took the innovative decision to have lots of adult topics, graphic violence, sexual content, adult language, and dark humour. The change was a risky but a relative success however due to the content of the game it received little advertising as Nintendo Power Magazine and a number of toy companies who usually endorse Rare games refused to this time, understandably so. CFBD has since earned a cult following and no wonder, it stands as one of the oddities of the game world and a good one at that. I did intend to play the game via emulator to make full use of the massively better graphics but found that the rom had a few issues like right at the start it couldn’t render the drunken haze through Conker’s viewpoint and I wasn’t sure what else would go wrong so I decided to play on the Nintendo 64 cartridge.

Conker in the 'Hungover' section

The opening sequence is pretty awesome where an animated Nintendo logo walks in then gets sawn in half with a chainsaw by Conker who replaces it with the Rare Logo, now that’s an intro! The camera then swings into blackness then shows Conker entering a bar named the “Cock and Plucker” on a stormy night where he starts drinking with his military squirrel buddies and various other characters. The bar itself serves as the main menu of the game and you can access the save game slots as well as the multiplayer options. The game tells the tale of Conker the Squirrel and starts with him sitting on a throne in a medieval castle and through voiceover he explains the events preceding this moment as the camera pans out ClockWork Orange style, which I didn’t actually realise it was until I read about it. This is one of the many movie references in the game and I hope you like them cause there are tons more. It then cuts back to the bar where conker has had a little too much to drink and then calls his girlfriend Berri to say that he’s coming home before stumbling out. It then cuts to a scene in a castle where the Panther King is sitting on his Throne and accidentally spills his milk as one of the table legs is missing so in one of the most bizarre plotlines I’ve ever seen he employs his servant Professor von Kripplespac to help him fix it and for some reason Kripplespac concludes that a ‘red squirrel’ will make a great table leg so the Panther King attempts to track down and capture Conker.

The intro, man the first time watching this was weird as.

The next part of the game (aptly titled “Hungover”) is the tutorial where after walking out of the pub into the rainy darkness Conker finds himself in some kind of cavern and meets the scarecrow Birdy who tells you how you can use the B button on context-sensitive areas to do various things like shooting slingshots and crossbows and other weapons, however Conker can always use the B button to thwack things with a frypan. This tutorial introduced me to the somewhat challenging nature of parts of the game, as I was at a point where you need to smack a living key with eyes with your frying pan that was bouncing around trying to avoid you and seriously I just could not do it and almost gave up there. There were a few other times were I just gave up at that point too then tried again later, I can tell you now the game was not exactly what you’d call easy as was the theme back in those days. I remember when playing the NES most of the games were rock hard and didn’t have a save feature so all you could do was see how far you could get before game over.

"Birdy" explains the context-sensitive areas

But anyway I was determined to move forward so I persevered and after defeating a Gargoyle by one of the most cartoonish ways possible I was out into what you could call the main world hub titled ‘Windy’. From here you access all of the ‘chapters’ in the story (in a linear fashion), however playing the game I noticed there’s wasn’t really any clear path I just found myself walking around seeing what I could interact with. I did have to refer back to my housemate Brok an awful lot for tips and advice which was sometimes just simply where to go as he had previously completed the game. He was so helpful I didn’t even need to use a guide thought that would have helped as there was a lot of wandering around. The first task I did rescuing a hive for a Queen bee from some wasps and then it turning into an anti-air gun and shooting them down.

Running from the wasps in Windy

That wasn’t too weird but then I’m fighting a giant cyborg bale of hay, making a cows shoot diarrhoea then explode and then listening to a giant turd sing opera, you gotta see it to believe it. It’s sort of like you go from one crazy thing to the next mind you though it’s all a lot of fun (as long as you’re not easily offended) The game can roughly be divided into section as you go back to the ‘Windy’ hub world 3 times. One of my favourite sections was Spooky as most of it was truly frightening despite the cartoonish graphics, in fact all of it was frightening really. You never really know what’s going to happen next as the whole experience is so ridiculous anything and everything can happen though it plays out fine and the changes in theme/chapter happen gradually so it’s not like going falling into a giant toilet then landing in a prehistoric world, well almost. CBFD is jam packed with pop culture references from the Saving Private Ryan sequence in It’s War! to the Matrix Style Bank Robbery in the Heist chapter.


The 'Blood Hunt' scene from the spooky section

Controlling Conker isn’t too hard, the game is basically a platformer, you can do all the basics like running, jumping, swimming, crawling and balancing across tightropes, you can also do a tail hover thingy for aid in landing. Conker’s only permanent weapon is a comically huge frying pan which you can pull out and whack with the B button, all other abilities are context sensitive when you stand on an area which obviously has a big B printed underneath it so you know you can shoot your slingshot or crossbow or whatever. Conker also gets to use other weapons like the shotgun in the Spooky section and rides and drives everything from a raptor to a tank and gets turned into a bat at one point. Controlling Conker isn’t too hard but as I was playing the game on N64 with a TV that wasn’t made for it, I wasn’t always aware of where I was running or jumping i.e. what was a ledge or not.

At this point I am riding a living pitchfork

Being a game from the N64/PS1 era in the mid to late 90’s CBFD was remarkably difficult at times and more often than once I just gave up and left it to come back up to a week later to have another go or enlist help from my housemate Brok. One of the examples of this was fighting the Zombies in the Spooky Chapter and the ‘Mugged’ sequence in Uga Buga where you chase on hoverboards across lava, I swear that took me at least 20 goes to complete it. There is no difficulty setting so I couldn’t just put it on easy and coast through like I do so many other games today haha though I am proud to say I have completed the whole thing in its entirety. And this was no small effort, it was bloody hard and frustrating at times a much different from how I usually like to play games. But I beat it and that’s something as with these older games I usually just conk out towards the end where it starts getting tough and I think I’ve done enough.

This 'hoverboard' bit was very annoying indeed

As I mentioned before the game stretched the Nintendo 64 to its graphical limits and there was some notable slowdown in some places but overall it ran pretty well, the characters although crude and cartoony still had lots of detail and the animation was hilarious at times the way characters and objects hopped around, almost everything was a character really even the money you collected had eyes and talked. Speaking of the money that was the only thing you collected in CBFD in contrast to Banjo-Kazooie’s extensive item collecting. This time you had just one thing which talked to you, well I guess the Jinjo’s did too sort of. Conker plays an unlikely hero throughout the whole game, bumbling from one place to another and giving witty remarks no matter what situation he’s in comedic, dire or otherwise. There are so many movie, pop culture and historical references that you might only see the second time through. Rare shine again with their soundtrack offering a range of boppy tunes and orchestral music complete with hilarious sound effects. However the voice acting is what really shines for this game, it’s utterly amazing even with the limited quality sound that the N64 can provide. There’s no yabbering and twittering like in Banjo Kazooie, just straight up acting talent, especially in the ‘Sloprano’ section, I swear that was one of the best moments in my gaming history and I had already seen it before.

SPOILER ALERT, Possibly the greatest scene ever, if you're not going to play the game, then at least watch this.

I haven’t played much of the multiplayer modes but like the singleplayer mode they are fun, nasty and well made. You’ve got a wide variety of gamer modes to play which are themed from different parts of the game which is pretty cool in itself. For example you have Beach which is basically like the beach assault section of the game and a LOT like Unreal Tournament’s Overlord Assault map where one team has to storm a beach and get to safety while the other team hides in sniper towers and tries to stop them. There’s also a mode where you play as Uga-Bugas trying to steal raptor eggs or Raptors trying to eat Bugas, there’s your usual capture the flag mode between squirrels and Tediz and also a Heist mode where you play as weasels and try to bring a money bag back to your safe. Probably my favourite was the Total War mode which was sort of like a team deathmatch with a twist, you could capture a canister from the enemy base then bring it to a sewer and release poisonous gas killing everyone unless they are down in the sewer with you or have a gas mask. There is even a lava racing mode from that damn mugged section of Uga-Buga.


A bit of multiplayer in the Total War Mode

I can honestly say of all the games I have played this is one of the weirdest and most unbelievable, you would never have thought a game like this could exist, I mean yes there were controversial games like Carmageddon and Duke Nukem 3D but this I dunno, maybe I wasn’t paying attention but I never saw a huge media row over Conker which is surprising seeing what it was actually like, maybe it just wasn’t that popular and as I said before it was released at the end of the Nintendo 64’s Life Cycle. However it was successful enough to warrant a remake, Conker Live and Reloaded was released for the Xbox in 2005 and I’m looking forward to seeing what that the game looks like with some updated graphics to really display it’s craziness. Whether you think you’re into this type of game or you think you may be put off by the vulgarity you just have to have to play it trust me you have never seen anything like this before and with today’s PC nanny state you probably never will again.

JD

9/10

Things I liked:

There is seriously almost no game like this anywhere

Endless fun movie references and humour

Very creative platforming and minigame experience almost no section was the same.

Non structured level layout you had no idea where you would go next.

The Great and Mighty Poo

Many multiplayer modes with bot support.

Things I didn’t like:

Can be difficult at times.

Some slowdown and graphical issues due to limits of the N64

Sound quality a bit rough (again due to limits of N64 cartridges)

The original trailer

Going for number two will never be the same again

The Past and Times of Yore: Star Wars Rogue Squadron 3D, Arcade Starfighting at it's Finest

Release date: December 7th 1998
Genre: Action, shooter
Publisher: LucasArts
Developer: LucasArts, Factor 5
Platforms: Nintendo 64, Microsoft Windows
Modes: Single-player

Continuing on my crusade of all Star Wars space combat games I moved on from the PC games to the console, or though technically I’ll be going back to PC ones at some point. I finished Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire not too long ago so that's two down of the 4 Star Wars Games on the Nintendo 64, the other two being set in the prequel years. I have always been more of a fan of the Jedi lightsaberin’ rather than space combat so when I saw Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 3D with its simplistic controls and gameplay and arcadey feel I was interested to give it a go. I had previously purchased the game on GOG.com and decided to play on PC rather then the Nintendo 64 version mainly so I could use my joystick. When I booted it up and saw that excellent intro with the LucasArts and Factor 5 logo I was really impressed. I’ve always liked the Lucasarts and other logo intros especially in the Jedi games but this one was something else: You see a Rebel Snowspeeder speeding its way through what looks like a shallow canyon on Hoth and firing on some AT-PTs and TIE Fighters but then the camera pans out and you see that it’s the Lucas Arts Logo made into mountains resembling Hoth, then in the next scene you see an X-Wing flying through what looks like the Death Star trench avoiding the lasers then shooting a torpedo then it pans out and you see it’s the Factor 5 Logo before exploding, I don’t know why it’s just so good, they just don’t make things like that anymore.


The amazing intro sequence

The story to Rogue Squadren is set during the war between the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance six months after the Battle of Yavin, you fly as good old Luke Skywalker with his buddy Wedge Antilles as you fight the empire across a number of different planets some known and some new and run into some familiar faces voices along the way as all you can see is the ships as there are no cutscenes in the game just voice acting. It’s somewhat fun playing games that take place in the interim of the movies as you get to see what events happen between them, some bits that I enjoyed were rescuing Wedge and the defection and recruitment of imperial pilot Kasan Moor. The game culminates (sort of) with the battle against the antagonist Moff Kohl Seerdon which I unfortunately couldn’t finish but felt that was enough. Oddly there was only one last mission after that on the Mon Calamari world of Dac, set after the Battle of Endor where you played as Wedge.

Liberation of Gerrard V

When completing missions you are giving a rating and receive bronze, silver or gold ratings, with gold ratings unlocking the secret missions which I won’t spoil but are from famous battles in the movies, you can also unlock new craft via codes. Starting the game I had a bit of a slowness issue with the main menu but managed to fix that. You start off with creating your pilot then you view the intro for the mission and then you get to select a craft! It’s pretty cool the way the camera swings around the docking bay when selecting a craft as it makes you look forward to when you can access the others. Starting off with the trusty X-Wing  I unfortunately had some trouble trying to use different controllers with the game, the times I tried to use my joystick it just didn’t work, which kinda sucked as it’s probably be the ideal controller and my gamepad didn’t work either, then I tried with the mouse but that was less then ideal. Then I remembered I could fly and shoot perfectly well with the keyboard in the Battlefield series so I just did that and it worked fine though aiming is a bit of a bother, I was getting pretty bad hit ratios at the end but it got better. You see your objectives in your briefing so you basically just fly around following your radar which very helpfully points to the next objective.

A few levels of gameplay, I only noticed now but for some reason the CPU controlled vehicles look like buzzing flies, was it always like that? I can't remember.

Most of the time you are flying around destroying things, escorting things, locating things, or defending things and while most of the attacking is done with lasers you also have things like proton torpedoes, concussion missiles, ion cannons and space bombs to play with and you can also upgrade them by finding various powerups hidden throughout the map. There is a default craft for every mission and most of the time you are using the X-Wing but I did enjoy using the Y-Wing with its increased shields. You did use the T-47 Snow/Airspeeder and V-Wing Airspeeder a lot and they were a bit hit and miss, I came to dislike doing that damn grappling hook AT-AT takedown as the way it as set up was that the camera angle changes making it kind of hard to see how far away you are from the AT-AT and how close to turn but then again it’d be just as hard in third person I spose. There were also some secret vehicles like the Naboo N-1 Starighter and of the course the Millennium Falcon and also a Chevy Buick for some weird reason as it was just a V-Wing with a different model but it looked hilarious especially the “cockpit” view.

Eeyurgh this was difficult

As you’d expect the game is packed with Star Wars, ships, locations, terminology and quotes, there even cameo’s from other well-known characters. You blast away while listening to what is happening around you with occasional cutscenes of events in the battle. You get a finite number of lives depending on your difficulty, on easy it’s usually about 3, usually I just died to stupid things like crashing into things I’m shooting at and not slowing down though the trick was to put on the brakes while you were zero’ing in on an enemy so you don’t surge toward them so fast. I mostly played in third person view but cockpit view was sometimes fun and useful especially when trying to dodge things. The graphics were pretty good for the N64 though it’s difficult to judge by today’s standards, distance fog featured heavily in the game as the N64 just wasn’t powerful enough, while it was nothing compared to Superman 64’s level of fog it was still noticeable but otherwise it was good enough. Like Battlefield 1942 the main menu was stuck in 800x600 through the resolution went up to 1280x960 there didn't seem to be any way to make it higher so I just settled with that.

The distance fog was particularly visible in some levels

The music and sounds were pretty spot on to what you would expect from a Star Wars game, all official sound and licenced soundtrack and everything, the voice acting was pretty good too. I swear it sounds so much like the actual actors, do they keep doing this voice acting stuff forever? Or is there like a recording archive that all these spin-off games and toys and other things refer to, but then again there is stuff that is relevant to the game so I dunno, did good old Harry Ford do a couple of lines of voice acting for this game? Surely not.

The search for the Nonnah, I quite enjoyed this level

There really isn’t much more to it, you just fly around and blast things and try not to get blasted yourself, it does get more difficult in the later levels and there are many more dangers including more of those pesky missile towers that are quite dangerous, there was only a few missions where I struggled but I got through it, as I mentioned before I didn’t end up finishing the game, I may go back and have another crack at it but really I’ve had enough, it’s been like Star Wars overload for a while but I’m up to the last one which is X-Wing Alliance. Well the last one of the Star Wars games I have, technically I haven’t played X-Wing yet but It’s pretty damn old and maybe I will when I want something very retro. Of course the next iteration was Rogue Squadron II on the GameCube which I remember seeing all that time ago, I don’t think I’ve ever played the Gamecube actually, it wasn’t really that popular. So to sum up if you want a Star Wars Space shooter and don’t want it to be all technical or you’ve been playing X-Wing or Tie-Fighter and want something a bit simpler like me then Rogue Squadron is the way to go.

JD

Original 1998 Trailer

One more pass…