Red Dead Redemption, another win for Rockstar, GTA4 revised

Rockstar Games has done it once again for me, this time in the form of a Wild West Style RPG if you can call it that, I spose you can. For those of you who don't know Red Dead Redemption is third person style RPG where you play as John Marsden a Rancher/Cowboy/Bounty hunter who is on a government mission to capture or kill his former gang members and save his family from government clutches and start up his own ranch and goes on an adventure through the Wild US West and also Mexico etc. Being made by Rockstar, you can probably guess this is practically a Wild West version of Grand Theft Auto 4, which with all the main parts ie. big place to roam around, npc's doing random things, side missions, story missons, etc, I think the main difference between the two is the huge amount of untamed landscape teeming with dozens of different kinds of animals/plants places in which you can meet anyone and anything and where certain random events take place (people being chased by wolves, stolen carriage etc) in which you have to decide whats the right (or the wrong whichever you prefer, to do).

What the hell are those damn posts sticking out of the mexican buildings for?

Maybe it's cause I'm playing this on the PS3, or maybe it's because it's set mainly in the wilderness rather then the city, but Red Dead just seems to work, compared to GTA4 which is polished but seems to be awkward. I think the PC is the problem in that regard, I play GTA3 on the PC in order to use a mod called 'simpletrainer' which allows you to do a large amount of fun and useful things which would be unavailable on the PS3 version, that said my brother does have the PS3 version at the moment and I suppose I should have a go of it.sometime. I can't use my PS2 style controller for driving in GTA on the PC so that does have an effect, while running and shooting is much easier with a keyboard and mouse. Maybe whats missing from GTA is the ways you can make money, you do things like skin animals and collect herbs in the field and sell them at the general store.Maybe it's the various costumes you can unlock and wear rather then buying your own clothes in GTA4 or maybe it's the ambient challenges i.e. sharpshooter/hunter/survivalist that are an addition for you to do as well as the basic story missions one major flaw with the game as the outfits you unlock do not carry over between saves, there is one very cool looking outfit which I was only able to obtain pretty much once I'd completed the whole game and was kind of annoyed when I could not use it in a new save.

Scenery is awesome to look at, the world is quite large cause i can't exactly remember where this is.

Red Dead Redemption also has a few multiplayer feature packs and an expansion entitled "The Undead Nightmare" which you can pretty much guess what it's about it introduces zombies to the game and allows you to play through a fictional storyline as John sets out once again this time to find a cure for his family who have turned into zombies, visiting and meeting up with familiar faces along the way, doing the original storyline is an absolute must for this as it won't make much sense if you haven't done it.

Whatever the difference is both are very good and deserve a place on my list of favorite games. I have currently started Red Dead over again and can say that I look forward to going home and playing it each day.

Bears, Boars and Wolves! aaaaargh!
JD

Tribalfield update: PvP & "Tribal Wars" in Minecraft

Life on Tribalfield is becoming quite busy, my good friend Richard Datson (aka dickdatson) has joined the server and is currently with us in the League and there has been quite an influx of new players which are more or less building up the numbers and the rivalry between the Rebel Alliance and the League Tribes, though to be honest the rivalry is mainly the animosity between certain players on the server.

I have never been a supporter of PvP (Player vs Player) in Minecraft, for the rather large fact that when you are killed, you have to respawn at the spawn point again and all of your belongings on you at the time are strewn across the place of your death and are often unable to be picked up again (which is most definately the case when dying in Lava). I recently forgot to log out of the server when walking away from my pc and subsequently was killed by a zombie and as I had been auto-dced by the server was unable to get my belongings.This made me annoyed, but only with myself, but what would it be like if another player came up and killed you and subsequently stole your belongings? would you be more or less mad? If you ask me it's a nerd rage drama waiting to happen and what if some of these players were actually server moderators? There's also some talk on our server about buildings being regenerated but not player inventory items.

Go near my items and I'll chop your f**king head off! thats right I will! arrgh! errgh!

This is one of the things I've found so unappealing of PvP in minecraft, to be honest I never PvP'd in World of Warcraft cause as far as I was concerned that was not my main interest in it and it was what I thought not what the game was about, the principle is the same with Minecraft, I enjoy building, mining and fighting monsters with other people, I don't enjoy fighting them or them fighting me though this thought of war does excite a few people as per the below from the powers that be of my tribe as evident below:


This was taken off the League's facebook page, yes we have a facebook page for the tribe

From the Office of the Council:
~ THE WAR PREPARATION ACT ~

Under this charter, which passed unanimously in the Council, 6 votes recorded out of 9 (with 3 votes not made), The League will go into a state of readiness, defined as a State in which The League can successfully conduct warfare, or defend itself, without being in a State of War.
This bill has been passed under the awareness of certain political events unfolding around the league; the annexing of SWM and TC; the regrouping of their members into RA - "The Rebel Alliance", and the analysis of their intentions according to intelligence gathered via the tribalfieldies Facebook page among other sources.
THIS BILL DOES NOT STATE WE ARE AT WAR.

WE ARE NOT AT WAR.

With this in mind, certain legislation has come into place stating:

1) War facilities must be established; an Armoury in every town, and a defence Fort in the centre of Fiendfield (a house must be removed to make way for this) an a defence Fort in Skyreach (probably the First Battalion Camp).

Blah, blah, blah, sections 2-6 etc etc

7) If war occurs, and loss of all claims is inevitable, The League must remain as an organisational body to guide us all to the formation of a new State and Claim at the soonest date after.

Thank you for reading, and may ~L~ Guide us all.

The COMPLETE BILL as passed by Council, may be made accessible to this page at a later date, at the discretion of a Council Vote.

~Wags


Well holy shizzle dizzle thats some serious shit right there


The original bill was about 1000 words, I mean well done to wagapm for putting in the effort but isn't this a making things overly complicated for a game which is made of blocks and you destroy and stack blocks and make them into other blocks? But who am I to judge, not everyone enjoys the 'we're all a happy family building and surviving together' type of play that I prefer, there are entire servers of who thrive on PvP and live for the danger of being ambushed by something much more dangerous then a creeper.

I ain't no traitor, I'm just statin' the facts yo

JD

Minecraft Creations: The Skyreach Plateau Fortress

Since I've had relatively nothing to do recently I was assigned by wagapm to build a fortress in Skyreach, in case of invasion, It wasn't  too hard to decide that the best place for it would be at the top of the plateau in Skyreach.

This was mainly a joint project with my fellow tribesman lupidoo I built the outer wall, the main fortress and the middle tower & lupidoo made the southern fort & stairs. I didn't really know the whole point of the fort, supposedly it was supposed to be some sort of refuge when we are 'attacked' by a rival tribe, which brings me to my next post.... (which I decided to make an entirely seperate post for)

On another note my real-life friend dickdatson has been busy it seems, and has  a rather impressive setup just a meander away from Skyreach as these shots show

A man's home is a castle, but it doesn't have to be a fortress, I now have both :D

JD

Magicka: Why I never liked it, and now even less

 

A little while ago I was persuaded to  buy and download the action rpg game Magicka  which I was told was a great game and fun to play with friends, but after doing that, and a bit of singleplayer as well I was still relatively unimpressed and found it hard to explain why.

For those of who who don't know about Magicka here's a little idea from the Steam description which has a few videos and pictures

Magicka is a satirical action-adventure game set in a rich fantasy world based on Norse mythology. The player assumes the role of a wizard from a sacred order tasked with stopping an evil sorcerer who has thrown the world into turmoil, his foul creations besieging the forces of good.

Players will be able to combine the elements to cast spells, wreaking havoc and devastation on the minions of darkness. They will also be able to team up with friends and fight their way through the campaign, or test their skills in the magickal arts through other challenging modes.

In Magicka, up to four players take on a grand adventure to save their world from certain doom using a fully dynamic spell system. The adventure mode takes the players across three different levels, ranging from the lush forests of mountain valleys to the frozen halls of the Mountain King where wits and creative thinking are the keys to victory.

Now all this seemed to be well and good but the main problem I had was that we were ALL wizards and we could all do the same thing, I've grown to like the idea of parties or groups where every member is different and can do different things i.e the warrior, the healer, the long rang archer etc it's just disheartening that everyone could do the exact same things as me and always better in some way of course which took out what I feel makes me different, also It just feels so hectic and linear it's what ruined the Spyro series with the introduction of round based combat, go there fight these guys off, go to another place but i guess some games are the same that way. The other thing was you actually know all the spells from the beginning so it's a fairly steep learning curve and you can't sort of play in favor of whats coming.

All in all Magicka is a rather small game and fun in it's own right it's just not my cup of tea. 

That said though there's a new DLC thats kind of lessened my respect for the game even more

 

 

Ah Magicka Vietnam indeed, complete with the Trashmen - Surfin Bird remix, I mean I know this game is satirical but this is just ridiculous in my opinion there's just some genres you don't mix with one another.

I'm a cow, I'm a cow, I'm a Magicow

JD.

Minecraft Creations: The Grey Tower, The League HQ

Hello again folks, well we've all been pretty busy on the tribalfield server, I've finally finished my new home aka the Grey Tower and also Laver and I have been created different things for our tribe the League, my peice was a tribe HQ which I'll go into details about later.

The Grey Tower

This is my 'house' in the new Tribalfield server created in Skyreach. As soon as you see this you probly have the idea that I had Lord of the Rings in mind but really it's only the name, I was racking my brain for ideas then had the thought of making a pillar like structure, except I wanted it to start from deep in the ground, The tower actually goes roughly level 47 right up to 125 making it quite a tall tower! though you cant really see the lower part because of all the lava, interior was a bit of a challenge because of the small space, but I put the rooms one different levels with each having a different function so it wasnt too hard, I do quite like the Nether area down the bottom with the portal and the flowing lava out the windows sides.

 

And this is the cave i mined out getting most of the cobble

 

The League HQ

While I was in the League I was asked (quite spontaneously) to create a HQ for the League Tribe, it needed to have a meeting room, a library and a reception. The design was quite out there but i think I pulled it off ok, I went for a smooth stone structure base which the bottom level would be the reception and league gallery (members and ranks dsiplay on signs, something like that) and the top would be the library. After that I enclosed a large area above the library in glass and placed floating smooth stone blocks where the tribe members would stand for a meeting and make some steps out of smooth stone and glass top get there. I think it worked quite ell allthough most of the time I didnt have a solid idea what I was doing, ah well.

Grand Theft Auto 4 Episodes from Liberty City, The Ballad of Gay Tony Skydiving

This is old news but I purchased myself a copy of Episodes from Liberty City which included the two smaller "spinoff" games which are tied to the original GTA4 similar to the "Vice City Stories":The Lost and the Damned & the Ballad of Gay Tony. The Lost and the Damned is about a motorcycle gang which featured in GTA4 where you play as a veteran member of the Gang, it was fun and also quite tame compared to the ludicrousness that is the latter.

In the The Ballad of Gay Tony, you play as Luis Lopez who is an assistant to the nightclub owner Gay Tony which seems that this is also some some small time hoodlum bashing, drug getting, gang fighting fun etc but it soon becomes apparent that TBOGT aims to bring back in all the high flying, terror instigating, action film style antics from the previous installment of GTA San Andreas that was missing from GTA4 I've barely got halfway through the game and already I've shot SWAT police off of the empire state building with an automatic shotgun full of exploding rounds then base jumped off the top, butchered a large group of arms smugglers and hookers and blew up a giant yacht with a hail of machine gun and rocket fire while piloting an armed helicopter, and also shot down a police SWAT tank which was being airlifted by a skycrane, to say this game was action packed just doesn't do it justice.

 But the thing I was most excited about was the re-introduction of parachuting/base jumping which I had always loved from the many games of skydive into the pool from San Andreas and with the addition of multiplayer, this makes it no less exciting.

 

And I... fly through the sky so high... with pie.

JD.

Minecraft Creations, Fortress and Brik Howze Singleplayer rebuilds

Just a quick update finished rebuilding my old fortress in singleplayer. This was possibly the hardest rebuild I had done mainly because of the unusual land layout and basis of construction which just were too hard to mimic, but I think I did a good enough job anyway, the building had a few chnages, especially with the lower level of the inside which is apparent when you look at the old pictures, the texture pack as always is a nice chnage too.

Fortress rebuild, from previous post

Brik Howze

The Brik Howze in stark contrast didnt go through much chnages as i'd hoped to keep it the same, only major differences was the terrace on the top level and the different colour carpet on the bottom level. I've included the two similar screenshots to compare.

Brik Howze rebuild, from previous post

Original (which is still on AEF server I might add)