Hiatus of Blogging 20/3/2014

I do apologise for the lack of posts going on, as you may know from the years before this is our busiest time of year at work and I really don't have any time for blogging let alone anything else but work really. This has actually been our most busiest year so I don't think I'll even be able to post anything before April but we'll see.

In the interim I've been playing Battlefield 4, Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm, Minecraft, GTA San Andreas, Spyro 2: Gateway to Glimmer (on Emulator of course) and of course Star Wars the Old Republic. I've also started Diable 3 as a Warrior and have gone further then ever this time and am almost finished! just before the expansion comes out too lol.

Anyway happy gaming and I'll leave you with this 90's ditty I can't get outta my head.

JD



 Mr Magoo!

The Important Pieces of Paper: Skyrim, Came back Swinging

Oh Skyrim, when will I ever stop replaying you and actually play some expansions, well the answer is fairly simple: the next time I play. You see after playing the game through again as a thief/assassin type character I couldn’t help going through the game again as a beefy warrior class again to get back to the old sword-swinging mayhem. I did briefly have a go at being a Magic-user as there was now cinematic kills with spells which looked pretty cool when searing or electrocuting someone alive, but the more I played the more pointless I found it really, the reason I played Skyrim was for the swinging of the swords, the ‘thunk’ sound of the arrows into a body and the grisly hacking pieces off someone’s body.

The new Kill Cams as per the 1.5 patch (I think we're up to 1.9)

The other thing was, there was no “tailoring” aspect to Skyrim so you couldn’t make your own armor, or “robes” I spose and taking away all the fun times of mining and collecting the different coloured ore to make you’re super cool armor, and speaking of armor wearing robes gave you crap all armor too. So needless to say after getting pounded by everything from axe-wielding maniacs to other magic users I decided I’d man back up and start smashing heads. I did have a go at the Mace-and-Shield (or sword) combination which had some awesomely painful looking kill animations but I just couldn’t resist the lure of slicing someone up or bashing their face in with the good old giant sword or warhammer, and no I’ve never used axes in case you’re wondering as I just don’t fancy them.

Can I axe you a question?

I had a few reasons for playing through the original Skyrim again, the most prominent being I wanted to run in and whack things again instead of being all stealthy but I also wanted to set another character up to play the Dragonborn expansion as I wasn’t quite happy with my first character being the one to do that expansion as I hadn’t done the console-commanding-skills-in-as-soon-as-I-can-get-them thing so he wasn’t quite as powerful as when I finish off my new character. When I was creating him I chose Nord as before as I intended to be on the Imperial side this time but be a Nord like Legate Rikke who gives some very convincing arguments when you talk to her as why Skyrim needs the Empire. I have always had the contested view with my brother that the Stormcloaks are the “good” guys fighting the oppression of the Empire similar to most games but even when finishing the Civil war questline on the Empire side I still didn’t really feel like I’d done the right thing but anyway I’ll get into that later. 

Legate Rikke and General Tullius in Castle Dour, and me, looking kinda of out of place.

 As he was going to be on the Empire side though not an Imperial I made him look like quite a nice Nord with a thin beard and slightly longer hair then I think I’ve ever given any character in a game but I reckon it looks quite good. Though technically the face of my Dragonborn didn’t really matter as I fully intended to make use of the Psychosteve's DragonPriest Masks mod again and get that faceless-killer look going. I named him “Brogan” after a customer at work was trying to remember my name in an email and said it was that, also because both of my former protagonists names started with a Z (Zairne and Zalunar)

Here he is, Brogan the Imperial siding Nord he looks kinda tired, that's probably be right as this was taken when I was almost finished everything.

Another reason was the fact that I wanted to try out playing with a companion as I didn’t the first time and it wouldn’t work with a stealthy character. I could think of no-one better then Lydia as the ‘trivia’ section of the Elderscrolls Wiki states she can be the deuteragonist of Skyrim as she has quite a bit of programmed personality and due to the fact that she is the first housecarl that the Dragonborn is offered she is probably the most used companion in the game. And also for the fact that she is female and is able to show off a female version of any amor you put on her. And the final reason I was playing again is the fact of humble abodes and you know how much I love them, I started with the quite humble Pinewood Cottage with its enclosed space and objects and amenities at arms reach was the ideal starting house. After that going on to the not-so-humble but magnificent Deus Mons, and finally finishing by building my own house with my own two hands getting hitched and adopting kids with the Hearthfire Mod so hey at least I’ve played one expansion.

A detailed walkthrough of the Pinewoods Cottage player-made home.

So I started out in Helgen yet again following Hadvar this time which really felt weird as you were briefly in the company of Ralof and Ulfric Stormcloak and you really felt like you were on their side as the Imperials were about to cut your head off but anyway you go down and you say hello to the torturer and his assistant and they follow you out and then once you get out you find that Hadvar’s uncle is Alvor the blacksmith in Riverwood who by way of conversation is ideally on the Imperial side and you get free access to almost all the blacksmithing supplies they have which is nice. I searched around and found a patch of corundum ore and together with the iron ore from the always-fun-to-raid Embershard Mine I managed to make enough steel for a full set of steel armor though I didn’t end up making a steel weapon as I found a Honed Ancient Nord Greatsword which had a frost enchant.

Full steel armor

Doing the quests not really much happened in the way of Stormcloaks vs Imperials apart from the fact that I was nicer to Imperials and Imperial sympathisers which again made me feel kinda bad. Joining the Companions again was fun though their questline is quite short, I do like receiving a Skyforge Steel weapon though (yes I picked the greatsword again), I made sure though that I did the quests to lose  my Lycanthropy soon after I received it. I must have quickly upgraded my smithing skill as I remember as soon as I arrived in Riften I picked up the Grimsever's Return quest to travel to the Dwemer ruin Mzinchaleft where after finishing the quest I returned to quite a few times to get more Dwemer metal to smelt to Dwarven metal ingots which I got quite a lot of seeing as in some Dwemer ruins you can obtain almost 300 ingots in one visit by collecting and smelting Dwemer metal. After making the armor for myself and Lydia I used a lot of the leftover ingots up to raise my blacksmithing skill but unfortunately the armor and weapons also need steel and iron ingots to make so I couldn’t get that far. At some point during this time I acquired the Dragon priest mask: Rahgot which gives an extra 70 stamina points and with the masks mod overhaul looks pretty good with the Dwarven Armor despite being green in colour.

Dwarven armor looks pretty gold and tanky.

Lydia has a thoughtful pose here, I don't think she likes my mask, well I don't care if it doesn't match my armor (or doesn't give a set bonus) I ain't takin' it off.

For the sake of looking good I stuck to one set of armor for Lydia and I instead of mixing and matching the only difference being me wearing a Dragon priest mask and although I did lose the set bonus I still kept the original set helm and usually put an archery enchant on it and used it for taking screenshots. I found when playing with Lydia as my companion it was almost too easy. Because she was decked out in the same upgraded and enchanted armor as me (albeit slightly different enchants) we made short work of any and all monsters we came across. Basically the way I did it was that I ran in swinging with my 2-handed weapon while Lydia shot arrows at enemies from afar, because of this I gave her the best bows and arrows, as I only really used mine for Dragons and I gave her the best shield and either a 1h Sword or Mace as that was what she originally used. Because I was a warrior again and just running in, and also because I had a powerful companion with me, I completed dungeons much, much faster than the sneaking around during my last playthrough.

Lydia my faithful follower (and steward) in her bitchin' Dragone Armor

Playing with Lydia caused only a few problems, when you gave her anything better than her default armor and weapons, she would use those that were better which was all good, sometimes though she would not seem to wear or use the shield she was given, although it was much better in stats. Thankfully your follows can’t be intentionally killed by enemies and/or environmental hazards like fire or traps as when they lose almost all of their health they go down on one knee and are then ignored by enemies, the only person who can really kill your follower is you and I had to load a previous save sometimes as I accidentally hit her with a weapon or used a magical scroll. Speaking of scrolls and shouts, I couldn’t use most of the destructive ones as with spells like Scroll of Fire Storm you companion would be engulfed in the flames too killing them. Apart from that Lydia made things quite a bit easier with her shooting arrows and attacking small enemies and almost “tanking” dungeon bosses made it much easier for me to move around and finish off enemies without being challenged, I hardly even needed to use the Sanguine Rose (I had to get it just to do that questline again) and when I did we were practically unstoppable.

There are many sell-swords in Skyrim that can be used as companions.

I was living in Pinewood Cottage at this point and while it was nice and cosy it got annoying with Lydia following me around and blocking the stairs, so I used the very useful Ultimate Follower Overhaul (UFO)mod to set to ambient where she will walk around the location using various objects that are available (chairs, beds, alchemy tables etc) until I tell her to follow again. Pinewood Cottage as you can see is quite quaint, nestled in to a small area by a creek which ended up being quite close to the Lakeview Manor homestead. Around this time I also tried out Horseriding as I put in the baseID and the console command code from the Elder scrolls wiki page to place a horse near me, which always seemed to be the Palomino with no saddle, but I just took it anyway as I didn’t want to buy or steal any horses for the fear of losing them. I don’t know whether it was the follower mod that I had or just the system but if you travelled to a stable and some inns your companion would have a horse waiting as well so you could both saddle up which was fun though once you quick travelled somewhere their horse disappeared and Lydia unfortunately had to run along after me, heavy armour didn’t seem to stop her though heh. Also as of Patch 1.6 mounted combat was now available so you could swing away with your weapons and also shoot arrows at those pesky wolves.

Giddy up!

After finishing most of the companions questline and getting on with the quests through the world I was hungering for change, and change happened. Having upgraded Lydia and mine’s weapons from Dwarven to Glass (I had used a greatsword both times) I decided when I made our Ebony armor I wanted to use a Daedric artifact and had originally intended to use the Ebony Blade but like most Daedric artifacts acquiring it meant killing someone else and looking at the harrowing way that the blade works I decided against it. Instead I chose Volendrung which was a massive hammer of Dwemer origin, currently in the hands of the Daedric Lord Malacath who is worshipped by most Orcs as their Idol. I chose this as it was a warhammer and has a very interesting enchant that absorbs 50 points of stamina per hit effectively making it a stamina battery as you use a lot of stamina when power attacking with warhammers. So I completed the quite entertaining Cursed Tribe questline which didn’t involve any evil at all really to get the hammer and went on my merry way.

The Daedric Artifact Volendrung gifted by malacath after you have finished the Cursed Tribe quest

 At this point I was pining for a new house as I had an absolutely huge amount of items inc. armour, weapons, dragon bones, personal items and a crapload of books which I love collecting so much so without further ado I returned to Ivarstead to climb partway up those seven thousand steps to where the magnificent Deus Mons was located. You may have heard me talk about it before it’s one of the most magnificent play-made homes I’ve ever seen, a huge castle on the southern side of the Throat of the World which doesn’t exactly give it quite the best outdoor garden and facilities perched up on a windy snow covered cliff but technically it’s more of a Dragonborn’s private castle then a place where you’d bring a wife and kids. The interior of this place is amazing it’s no wonder why it’s arguably the most endorsed player-made house on the Skyrim Mod Nexus, it’s got everything you need and more, it is a bit large though, the Alchemy and Enchanting table are through two loading doors , and Lydia got a bit stuck and I ended up losing her a few times. But goddamn did I manage to pimp that place out with armour, weapons and book towards the end it’s got more storage space than I could use up at that time and a heap of places to store individual items, I especially liked the stack of six safes. To get in there though you needed to defeat a fairly powerful dragon but no dragon’s a match for us (macho pose).

Deus Mons (post dragon) it's quite misty up ere.

A fairly details move of the Deus Mons interior

After I had moved my quite hefty amount of personal items from one house to another I had levelled my blacksmithing up to Ebony so now it was time to make some. I quickly found that due to the amount of resources that were required to create and upgrade full sets of armour and weapon for both Lydia and I, I did not have enough Ebony ore I was not really going to wait around an in-game week for the ore to respawn in the mine I had just mined out so unfortunately I had to console it in but anyway, I got the armour made. I also had to select which Dragonpriest mask I was going to use, the main two I was interested in were Ved and Ikendov because (the masks) were all black and looked pretty cool, unfortunately I had to go with the classic style as with the way the mod author had attached the new masks to the new hoods I still had some minor issues with my face protruding from the mask similar to last time with my wood elf character. So I chose the classic hooded version of Ikendov and despite the hood being a dark brown looked pretty badass with my ebony armor and Volendrung. It did not however, look very badass while riding a palomino horse. So after some searching I found by going to the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP) wiki page on Skyrim horses that they had the baseID codes of all the horses you could get at the stables so I decided to get the black horse from Whiterun to match my current armour set and was happy to find out it had a saddle, this looked much better with my new armor.

The Ikendov mask works quite well with Ebony armor

You may have noticed in the screenshots that I am carrying a Daedric Warhammer with my ebony armor, this is because Volendrung even though it is a Daedric artefact unfortunately does not benefit from the Daedric smithing perk and thus the Daedric Warhammer had a higher damage ratio so I decided to make Daedric weapons for Lydia and I, but not Daedric armor as I had used that for my previous warrior and I had previously decided that the Dragonbone set would be my final this time. I finally reached level 100 in Blacksmithing which was a hell of a bitch I can tell you, I really needed to use some Fortify Smithing enchants but got there in the end by paying for levels from trainers but man it’s expensive. So it was time to make the Dragonbone armor and weapons and boy did I sure have enough materials for that by killing all those pesky dragons. I most definitely knew what Dragon Priest Mask I would be using this time and that would be Konahrik as the mod version of the mask looks freaking awesome. To get this mask you have to acquire all of the other Dragon Priest masks two unfortunately involve things I wasn’t willing to do like complete the College of Winterhold Mage questline and complete the last quest of the main storyline and I wasn’t about to became a Mage or finish off the story at this point so console commands it was. So I did that and went to the Labyrinthian and put all the masks there and I got it, and it’s as awesome as it looks, albeit some odd enchants.

My Dragonebone armor set with Konahrik

The entire set of masks with the dragon mouth open and revealing Konahrik

I’m skimming here but a bunch of stuff happened after that, I progressed through my world questing and further into the main questline, I also started the Civil war questline but remembered to not go too far into it in order to do the Season Unending quest which happens if you do the main storyline up to the point where you need to trap a dragon inside Whiterun. But this cannot be done as the Jarl of Whiterun says that he cannot divert attention away from his defences while the civil war is going on and thus you and the Greybeards have to organise peace talks with the two sides which I found to be quite fun.

The High Hrothgar meeting as part of the Season Unending quest.

After that I finished off all of the main world quests that I could then headed off to Dragonsreach to defeat and trap Odahviing, hitch a ride on him to Skuldafn then enter Sovnguarde and you all know what happens after that and if you don’t well go play the damn game. So after that was finished it was time to continue the war so Lydia and I, decked out in our upgraded and enchanted Dragonbone armor and weapons, defended Whiterun from the stormcloaks then progressively took back every territory until the Battle for Windhelm where we kicked so much ass it was ridiculous, I suppose with this quest being the last battle I’d ever do I was pretty powered up. So anyway we stormed Windhelm and defeated Ulfric and the Stormcloaks and then I was finally free to start up a new life for myself with...

 The Battle for (or against really) Windhelm

Fall of Ulfric and Galmor, this made me feel kind of sad, what's worse is their bodies stay laying on the floor even after the quest which is pretty gruesome.

Hearthfire oh yes indeed I am playing an expansion (or add on) for Skyrim and it was quite fun too. I first had to go to Falkreath and  made sure I’d done all the quests to become the Thane in which the Jarl allowed me to purchase the Lakeview Manor homestead where I could start buildin’ that shit. I must admit it was fairly easy building the house, you build it up in stages  so you start off with a small cottage that you can expand into a pretty fine looking house by Skyrim standards, it’s still nothing compared to some of the player made houses though but that’s a given it’s supposed to be a normal house not some giant and crazily extravagant castle. The materials you need are right by your plot of land Quarried Stone, Clay and Sawn Logs can be “acquired” indefinitely which is nice and I had built my house in no time.

I ponder If I'm going to need a change of clothes while my horse butts in

Now that's cozy!

The completed house exterior

What did take forever though was furnishing the place, I had to run all over the world getting all the materials not to mention the huge amount of iron that was need for all the nails and struts and fittings etc and I ended up getting sick of it and just console commanded some things in, I said it before and I’ll say it again I swear I could not play this game on a console. Though annoyingly once I had made all that crap I found that some items weren’t in a  place you’d call aesthetically correct especially the display cases in the greenhouse (yes greenhouse) which were standing on the mushrooms and what made matters worse was every single one of the display cases did not work (i.e. you couldn’t place weapons) even things that did work like the weapon and shield racks still had glitches where the weapons would appear in the floor and ceiling etc and of course there’s always that problem with the mannequins moving around and removing their own armor as if they didn’t like it.

This is another thing I didn't understand, when you make the initial cottage the furniture stays there so you have a bedroom practically in your doorway.

The dining hall.

The greenhouse

Needless to say I was not amused, these issues happen in the player-made homes so the reason I wanted to try Hearthfire is that I thought with an official add-on that these issues wouldn’t happen unless it’s the mods I have running that are causing the problem, though I suppose it’s partly my fault for just building everything all at once and not taking enough looks inside but I mean STILL.

Basement with shrine stand.

Full smithy

Upstairs

But anyway at least the weapon and shield racks kind of worked and the house ended up looking pretty good. I nominated Lydia as my steward and got myself a very shaggy looking cow, a chicken a beehive and a horse of which I now have two, which is good because my current one thinks it has been stolen as it walks away whenever I dismount but re-appears when I quick travel somewhere so the only way of getting rid of it is killing it really but I don’t want to intentionally do that. 

Main bedroom with the non-working display case.

Exterior view of the house

The back of the house leads to this old Nordic grave, hope it wasn't an evil person.

After I’d made the house and everything I had to decide who to marry (like it’s a hard decision really) and picked Ysolda, as I’ve always kind of liked her and she doesn’t really have a stance on the war, so after finishing off the Book of Love questline and got married though I’m a bit concerned as although I told my newly wed wife I have a nice house in Falkreath though she still hasn’t shown up and I can’t seem to find her in Whiterun or Riften or anywhere. So instead of thinking about a certain Richard Gere film I decided to just go and adopt some children anyway in which I already had Lucia in mind cause she so sweet and pathetic you can’t help it and also Hroar for a few reasons, he’s a Nord, he has a cool name and I want to go through the adoption dialogue with Constance Michel and tell her I’m the motherfackin’ Dragonborn and see what she thinks of that.

My marriage, I don't really know those people, and don't know how they relate to Ysolda and I

My adopted daugher recently brought a friend into the house and asked if she could keep him, I was like "a fox?" which funnily enough was the dialogue said. It also made me think of this.

So that’s it really, been through Skyrim for a third time, been through a few new quests big and small, fought with a companion, lived in a cottage and a grand castle, wore Konahrik and the Dragonbone armor, had a high powered business meeting, won the war on the Imperial side and then settled in with my wife and kids in a home I built with my own two hands (and console commands) so I think it’s a job well done. After all that sword swinging and danger I’m itching to go back to my stealthy one-man-plan and shoot some vampires crossbow style in Dawnguard cause I ain’t no Vampire yo. And then back to my new warrior for Dragonborn which I’m quite looking forward to exploring my old friend Hermaeus Mora’s realm of Apocrypha  and hopefully I’ll be able to do all this before the next Elder scrolls game comes out.

JD

Off into the wild wilderness we go!

Occupation: Dragonborn

The Past and Times of Yore: Super Mario World, the Greatest

Hello and Happy New Year! I did mean to get this one finished off before New Years but unfortunately it didn't happen but anyway we'll start the new year off with a bang with the greatest game I have ever played. Looking forward to a new year in gaming and I hope you like the new look and colours for the blog.

Release Date: 1/7/1992
Genre: Platformer
Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Nintendo EAD
Platforms: Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES)
Players: 1 or 2 player
Classification: E (Everyone)

Of all the games I’ve reviewed, this one may be one of the most difficult, how do I review my favourite game of all time? Not to mention it’s one of the most popular Mario games ever, It’s like reviewing Pac-man and giving it a score out of 10, but I suppose I must.

Before I owned a console (or a PC for that matter) I, like my other gamers my age in their younger years, cut my teeth at arcade’s playing Pac-man and Space Invaders, and also on those crap little handheld devices with dot matrix screens. Later on I played consoles at friends houses who had  either Sega Master Systems and played Sonic the Hedgehog and other built in games such as Alex Kidd and Golden Axe or they had Nintendo Entertainment systems and played the Mario series obviously and other greats such as New Ghostbusters II and A Boy and his Blob. It wasn’t until my father brought home a Super Nintendo, one of the greatest and most popular consoles ever made, that my gaming career really took off.

The mighty Super Nintendo Entertainment System, PAL aka Europe and Australian version of course.

And the very first game we bought for that console was none other than Super Mario World.

Oh how do I love thee?

Thinking back now I can’t really remember my thoughts about playing it, I guess I just really liked it as I always looked forward to coming home from school and playing. I never owned a NES and had only played a bit of the previous super Mario series but this one, being on the a new console was obviously something else. I still view the crispness of the 2D graphics, the simple controls and the gameplay that was easy to pickup but difficult to master as something of true gaming genius, and have never regarded it as inferior to any game that has come out after it, no matter home good the graphics, gameplay, complexity or replay value are.

BANZAI!, Giant enemies like the Banzai Bill became more common in the Yoshi Island sequel 

So we’ll start with the story. After the Events of Super Mario Brothers 3, Mario, Luigi and Princess Toadstool decide to have a vacation in Dinosaur Land. Which contains Yoshi’s island and the “race” of Yoshi’s (see explanation on previous Yoshi’s Island post here) who have been captured and trapped in enchanted eggs by none other than Bowser, who has returned and is building his Koopa army up again in Dinosaur land and inevitably captures Princess toadstool again and Mario and Luigi have to save her again. Storyline-wise it’s pretty simple but if you’ve played the entire series before this one it’s just another episode in the Mario world and plus you’ve got a whole new world to explore.

And a new world it is indeed, I’ll always remember that starting music where you see Mario standing there with that beautiful background of the dome mountains and the welcome text come up, before you appear on Yoshi’s Island right outside Yoshi’s “house” which is a nice little sub level where you find out that Yoshi is out at the time.

Hey Yoshi there's something I've been meaning to ask you, if this is your house where the hell do you sleep, or live?, in the tree?, on the ground? Forgive me I'm just curious

 I was glad that Nintendo kept the ‘world-map’ format from the last game where you traversed across the screen as a “Mario icon” before entering levels except this time Mario actually appears to walk, turn and spin around while moving across the map. The map is beautiful looking in itself though it lacks the constant movement of SMB3 though it has movement in little areas like fish jumping in the lake and ghosts circling round the ghost houses and it also transition into several sub zones with their own music, like the awesomely named Vanilla Dome and the Forest of Illusion. I also like it how the world changes as you complete things i.e. bridges and hills grow, new paths are made, new geographical elements pop out of the land or sea, it made the map quite an interactive experience. Dinosaur land has a range of environments including grassy plains, wetlands, underground caverns, forests, ghost houses, castles and an Island resembling chocolate.

A full map of Dinosaur Land plus the interior and special areas.

 It’s hard to put into words the impact the graphics had on me just seeing the crispness of the image and the new effects of the Super Nintendo, it certainly had much more of an effect then the NES or any of the older PC games I played before. The graphics were perfect for the game you could see the detailed backgrounds with many layers that later got added to the original Mario series and got upgraded even more with the Yoshi’s island sequel and sometimes they actually move and spin with the level itself, you could see the grass and the dirt and the bushes and trees and those shiny pipes all in great detail. The effect like water splashing and lava flowing look great and at certain times (especially during the castle cutscenes) there are some great animations where sprites fly towards and away from the screen. With the enemies you can see how some of them actually have animated reactions and sometimes appear visibly distressed when jumped on, something that you never saw with the mostly static-faced enemies of the previous games until they got the Mario All-stars reboot. Mario himself looked great with visible eyeballs and more humanlike features, especially in his bigger “super-mario” form and I admit the Yoshi’s look the best in this game. 

Beautiful, it seems so minimal but there's so much detail.

The controls this time around are a bit different seeing as there are two other buttons on the controller this time, the B button is to jump and jumping is still the predominate way to defeat enemies. The X and Y buttons are a composite of Dash/Interact/Special ability and the A button is used to do the new spin jump allowing you to do a number of things which include causing some enemies to disintegrate completely (instead of jumping on them twice), breaking certain blocks and as a way to bounce across enemies you wouldn’t normally be able to jump on. Other controls include being able to scroll the screen using the L/R buttons and Start button to pause as usual. The select button has an interesting new feature that when you have any kind of powerup already and you grab another one, your previous powerup is kept in a blue box at the top of the screen and drops down for you to pickup when either 1. You hit an enemy and lose your current powerup, or 2. You press the select button.

There was some levels, like this one in particular which emphasized breaking blocks with the new spin jump

There powerups in the game include the Super Mushroom, Fire Flower and the new Cape Feather which turns Mario into “Caped” Mario (not Super Mario obviously that’s what the mushroom does) which allows you to fly like superman after taking a running start similar to the Super Leaf in Super Mario Bros. 3 though flying with the cape is a little more complex and it wasn’t till later in life that I realised how to use it properly. With the cape you could spin it around and defeat some enemies you usually couldn’t, you could also spin jump higher and when holding B, use the cape to float down slowly when jumping or spin jumping. Flying with the cape turned out to be quite a complex matter, you could fly up into the top of the map and then zoom down and slam the ground cause a quake killing enemies nearby, though you could also use  the left and right directional buttons to use the cape to float so for example when doing a dive you could pull back and zoom up higher and if you were good enough you could float along for awhile which was actually required for a couple of the secrets in the game. There was this bit on the first level you get the cape which had heaps of coins in a row in the sky and I never figured out how to get them all until I’d played the game through many times. It’s true the different suits have gone missing like the Tanooki Suit, the Frog Suit, the Hammer Suit, and Kuribo's Shoe but their really not needed in my opinion.

Up, up and awaaay!, this was quite an awesome feeling much more so then the Super Leaf in my opinion

Other powerups included the P-Balloon which made Mario expand and allow him to float, the Star which was the usual invincibility and Yoshi's Wings which could only be used when riding Yoshi and flew you up to Coin Heaven and also turned your current Yoshi to a blue (or purple really) Yoshi. New items include the Dragon Coins where you collect 5 in a level to earn and extra life, Key and Keyhole which lead to an unlockable alternate area and the rare 3-Up Moon which does exactly what it says. The P-Switches also make a comeback with a grey variety that turns enemies into Silver Coins and goddamned did it take me awhile to realise that some of the timed ones that leave a trail of coins are actually able to manipulated by the player as to which direction they go.

The new dragon coin

Having played the game through again recently, I thought to myself that I really never came that close to how good I used to be at this, playing it on emulator now with a PS2 style controller also was a slightly different feel and I had to fight off the urge to use the ‘save anywhere anytime’ feature that emulators have before difficult sections or boss fights. As with all Mario games you quickly get a knack for the gameplay and pretty soon you’re jumping and flying and riding along with ease. Speaking of pace, the pace of the game is great, with the exception of the levels that automatically move the camera and you have to keep up, you can run and jump along at your own pace (though there is a time limit) and even run back through the level to finish something off or chase after a powerup. I never really liked the Sonic the Hedgehog games, sure it may have been cooler and faster, but I’m the type of person who likes to explore a level, and barrelling at top speed around a ramp and then crashing into some horizontal facing spikes is not my idea of a good time.

V for Victory!

The game can be player either 1 or two player with the 2^nd player playing as Luigi and the two players taking turns. All the usual Mario mechanics are in there, hitting question mark blocks, getting coins, getting points, the end goal this time is an actual goal which is often guarded by an interesting new enemy called Chargin’ Chuck who resembles an NFL player, the Giant Gate that acts as the end goal has a beam moving up and down and depending on how high Mario hits the beam he gets a certain number of points and after reaching 100 points he gets to go to a bonus game to gain some free lives, some bonus levels are also hidden throughout other maps. I remember in my childhood finishing a level and giving the V for victory sign with my hand at the same time that Mario did.

A  Chargin' Chuck near the Giant Gate

As we all know, this was the first Super Mario game to include Yoshi who (after taking a brief visit to his house) is found trapped inside an egg in one of the first levels of the game, he explains to Mario and Luigi that he and many other Yoshio’s are trapped inside eggs throughout Dinosaur land some of which are held by Bowser’s children aka the Koopalings in their castles. Riding Yoshi was great fun I especially liked the bongoes that got added to the music when you were riding him. Yoshi could eat almost any type of enemy as well as explode them when he jumped on them, he could also eat the berries which were hanging in various levels which I’ve only just found out actually did something. You could fly with Yoshi if you had a cape albeit just up and down and he is able to hop across surfaces or enemies that Mario cannot such as Spinies he also had that special Yoshi's Wings powerup.

Yoshi launches a shell at the enemies inside the Forest of Illusion level

There are other colours of Yoshi’s that you could get such as:

Red Yoshi, a Yoshi that spits out all Shells in the form of three fireballs. It loses any Shell Power by spitting the shell due to all shells being used for fireballs and thus being unable to be recaught.

Blue Yoshi, a Yoshi that flies as long as a Shell is in its mouth. 

Yellow Yoshi, a Yoshi that can shake the ground by taking a Shell into its mouth, defeating enemies with its impact.

These Yoshi’s are obtained usually through the Star World which I’ll get into later with the exception of Blue Yoshi who you also receive when using a Yoshi's Wings powerup. If Mario is hit while riding Yoshi, Yoshi will run away but Mario can run and jump back on before he runs into a bottomless pit or whatnot.

Mario with Purple (Blue) Yoshi in a night version of coin heaven

If there was ever a game where I enjoyed almost every bit of music and sound effect from then Super Mario World would come quite close. The sound of Mario jumping, the sound Yoshi makes when he breaks out of the shell and when he shoots out his tongue, the awesome sound when you get your first Cape Feather and the very satisfying sound of a castle, fortress or switch palace going under. The sound effects make Super Mario games what they are and this one was no exception, it’s kind of hard to describe but everything just works, the sounds are much smoother then Mario Bros 3 (yes even the All-stars remake) and make for a better feel overall.

Boing!

The music in the game in none other than exception, from the very moment the circular transition opens and you hear that magnificent intro music well I can’t think of anything better. I also love the tune that plays when you start the game but basically every bit of music is amazing, even in the overworld map which has different tunes for different areas, the homely juvenile tune of Yoshi’s island, the plain and simple overworld tune, the cool drum beat of the Vanilla dome and gentle violin of the forest of illusion. I like the way the music changes with the level for example normal level have happy slower tunes while athletic moving screen and jump levels have a faster ragtime beat. The caves, Castles and Ghost houses are equally good, the caves with their quiet solemn beat and the castles and fortresses with their haunting music have one of the best soundtracks in the game. The music in Super Mario world is a large part of what makes it the best game I’ve ever played so hats off to you Mr Koji Kondo

The castles had one of the best (if not the best) soundtracks in the game. Here Mario is climbing on a fence and could also punch koopas off, something we'd never seen before.

One of the things I liked most about Super Mario World was the secrets, there were heaps of them, every level had a little secret of some kind, the many pipes in the world still led to secret areas inc the bonus 1up areas. Many of the levels had a key and a keyhole and led to alternate paths and secret levels, the cape feather was most often the catalyst of this as many secret were in areas above the level  either in the sky or on the roof of the cave. The Star World where the baby coloured Yoshi’s are found requires you to reach the various star roads where Mario does this amusing spin and flies off into the sky (damn it took awhile to find a path to the last one). The levels of the star world to find the key and keyhole to get to the next area and I won’t spoil anything else in the rare case that you haven’t played it. 

It took me quite a while to work out all the secrets that I’ve currently found and no matter how many times I finish the damn thing the highest I’ve gotten is 97%, something about getting all the level exits and I didn’t even get that far. Until a couple of years ago when I was playing on emulator and finally found the Soda lake secret area which had the Torpedo Teds which I saw in the ending credits but never knew where the hell they were for years until I finally couldn’t take it anymore and had to look it up and there was a few other things I had to look up too but I guess that’s why games used to have strategy guides.

The Soda Lake secret level with the Topedo Teds

I can’t say much more about Super Mario World other than that it was the game that shot my gaming career into life, and I’m definitely not alone in my praise, you look at the reviews on Gamefaqs and there’s barely a score below 9 (out of 10 of course) Shigeru Miyamoto himself has often stated that Super Mario World is his favourite Mario game and needless to say I fully agree. There’s not many games I experience anymore that come close to what Super Mario World did for me, I remember even thinking about it while in class at Primary school but I guess I did that for a lot of things.

It's nice to get a thank-you

This game was the epitome of the Mario games on the Super Nintendo (along with Yoshi’s Island) and I have never and will never care about any Mario game that was made after the SNES as much as I did the original series and Super Mario World has always been and is still my favourite game in this world.

JD

Others come close, but never conquer.

Minecraft Christmas Time 2013

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Minecraft Creations: The Brick Mansion Chapter 5, That tops it and 1.7.2, the update that changed the world.

Greetings fellow Minecrafters, I originally wanted to make this update to my brick mansion after I had finished the entire outdoor area inc the gardens and farms etc but since the 1.7 update had come in I felt that I needed to discuss this now and can leave the full unveiling of the house to when it’s finally goddamned finished.

Though I will start with the rather large and exciting 1.7.2 update, as you probably know this resource brought a major overhaul of the game’s code meaning that the resource for mod creators the Minecraft Coder Pack (MCP) is still in the process of being updated so until that has happened unfortunately we won’t be able to use any of our beloved mods.  This doesn’t really bother me as I’ve still got 1.6.4 available and can use that whenever mods are needed but I may be curtailing my Minecraft business for a while until the mods are back up to business.

But anyway let’s go through some of the major changes...

There has a been a few changes to the options, the resource menu screen overhaul which apparently lets you select more than one resource pack at once?  and the fun “super secret settings” which adds in a random filter to your view such black and white and inverting colours. Lighting has been changed with black spots in the terrain being almost fixed and thunderstorms make the day much darker. There has been new changes to both fishing mechanics and items as you can now fish up more than just fish and we now have more fish including Raw Fish, Raw Salmon, Clownfish, and the Pufferfish which we can now use to brew the water breathing potion. There’s also some plans for players to create Nether Portals bigger and with different shapes  that may even allow ghasts into the overworld.

And in case you ask, no it automatically shrinks to a smaller portal when you actually go into the nether so I'm not exactly sure how a ghast would get to here.

 Probably the biggest addition is the changes to the Biomes featuring 11 new ones inc the Mesa, Savanna, Sunflower Plains and Roofed Forest as well as some variants of existing biomes inc the Flower Forest and the snowless Taiga biome and speaking of temperature each biome now has a base temperature to determine whether it rains or snows or whether rains at all. There’s lots more changes but I’ll let you read the version history for the rest. Thanks to the new biomes there are new Wood varieties inc Acacia and Dark Oak (as well as new saplings and leaves). New Fish have been added inc the Pufferfish which can be used to make the Potion of Water breathing which creates an alternative to the respiratory enchant for armor. 

A new Savanna biome.

There is lot of new Flowers for you to pick so you can make some different coloured wool other then red, yellow and orange and there is also flowers which are two blocks high that can be grown with bonemeal! As well as two block tall grass, all this is perfect for my upcoming garden with hedge maze for my Brick Mansion. And what’s more once you have crushed those flowers into dye you can now not only dye wool but glass! Yes Stained Glass windows are now possible so you can stain away all 16 colours. 

Stain that glass

So that’s that for the update, there are a few other improvements and changes which are listed in full on the Minecraftwiki version history. I leave you now with a video by autotroph who very nicely details the features of 1.7 in this 3 and a half minute video.

So now on to my quite extensive Brick Mansion...

After I had grown bored of building on the Vancraft server I decided I had to have a crack at finishing off my Brick Mansion, well the house part at least and I started of course with the main roof though I’ll first need to talk about the roof of the lobby. Apart from the stone bricks and pyramid the lobby roof was mainly constructed of oak wood planks unlike the stairs design I currently use, probably because there was no stair edges like there is now, though I did add some stairs in to finish off the roof as well as a oak wood slab trim to add a bit of overhang and it looked much better. When I started the roof of the main house I went for relatively the same effect with oak planks except I would use oak stairs to join the levels for a much cleaner look.

Buildin' that roof

Night time, I added torches around the roof to keep monsters from spawning (when I eventually turn then on)

The finished roof

 I think I used about a two block overhang (which I hope was low enough then did the usual trim of oak slabs, I then went 3 blocks across then 3 stair blocks up in sections right up until I’d closed off the roof, didn’t run into many problems apart from forgetting to extend some of the chimneys. When I’d finished off the top I went to work on the upper level and quickly decided which rooms were going to use the main roof as their actual roof as the rooms looked quite cavernous without a roof of their own (which is lower down obviously). So I designed rooves for the activity room, band room, gaming room, home cinema, lavatory and the inner guest rooms as the roof was low enough for the ones on the edges. I then heightened the walls of the rooms and boy did those rooms look big especially the main upstairs hall.

Band room roof.

Activity room roof

One of the inner guest rooms which have a roof and also has a tree growing out of it.

Viewing the inner roofs from above is an interesting sight.

The Main upper hallway, that's some high walls yo.

I decided to do a sort of lookout deck at the very top of the house, and I would use my favourite type of stone: stone brick to do the floor and made a sort of fenced platform right round the top layer of the roof, I also made a mini tower to get even higher up, then it started raining and I realised as always when it rains I had to make a roof over the platforms so I decided to put some glowstone on the top of the lookout roof as a sort of beacon. I then had to create the stairs down (or up) to the platform which I basically just made over the stairs down to the middle level which I did in the usual design.  I also added some hanging light in the form of lightstone on wires though I had to use fences as always with these things as there’s a lack of any type of wire, but I guess Minecraft is mostly blocks and I’d have to look at mods such as Industrialcraft to get any semi-proper structure building items but this house was always supposed to be vanilla Minecraft and that’s the way it will stay.

The "lookout deck" at the top of the roof with light tower

The stairway up to the roof in the main upper hallway.

Hanging lights

With the rest of the lighting the activity and band rooms had the glowstone light worked into the ceiling, the great library was chock full of torches (which is kind of dangerous around books now I think about it) but I made some spruce log chandeliers so the roof wasn’t this big dark mass. The “Hot Box” cinema obviously had minimal lighting and the games room had lighting worked into the roof but I made some mushroom lamps for the games tables to keep in theme with the mushroom-style roof. I had decided when making the staircase up to the lookout platform to include a gap in the wall with a fence overlooking the guest hall so I had also decided to not put a secondary roof over the guest hall or the very eastern guest rooms.

Library Roof Chandeliers

Games room mushroom roof

Guest room hallway

The gap in the wall on the stairs down from the roof which I thought looked better then just a plain wall.

 So because of that I decided to my some wall windows or ‘skylights’ I suppose you’d call them and some jutting out glowstone lights to give a bit of feature to the upper wall of that long hallway I also added some chandeliers which were supposed to be oak wood then I realised I’d done them in jungle wood but meh. For my own room  I didn’t need too much more light but I made a golden chandelier of lightstone. I also made some more windows for my room and the activity and band room and this made the southern facing upper wall of the house look much better. I added all the rest of the signs that weren’t there for the rooms that I could think of, inc some with some fairly funny names.

"Wall windows" and jutting out lightstone

Jungle Log chandeliers

My cool golden chandelier

More windows for my pad

Windows make house look better

My dad would get this...

Another thing I’d been meaning to do for awhile was a pool/sundeck, I was going to make this a sort of extension to the inside pool but ended up just creating a triangle shaped pool and deck outside the window and removed some of the plant features to make two entryways outside. I made the pool and deck raised up to the floor height of the middle level though the pool gets deeper from the top down for the diving board, didn’t know what else to put so I put lots of deckchairs around, might add yet another bar later, not sure.

Pool party baby, it was a cool party, cool pool party, lalalalaa

New exit out to the deck, there's also one on the other side of the indoor pool.

While I was doing this I had a bit of a crisis when I found out that the flaming netherrack from the forge entrance had set fire to the stairway above it yet again ( I stupidly though I could block it’s effects with a single cobblestone block) and had spread and destroyed whole walls, I couldn’t even put it out so I had to revert to a previous save and thank god I had made one as it would have taken days to rebuild the quite details corners of rooms it had destroyed. Unfortunately this meant I had to do a few of the changes inc the pool and deck again which was not fun. I also realised that I’d made this area on the east side of the house where the sun obviously rises not sets so this was a bit of a blunder (I definitely wouldn’t be the best architect).

The sun sets in the west you dumhead, though I spose the dancefloor balcony can see the sunset making a fairly romantic setting (with myself).

Probably the last thing I did was create a wall around the entrance to the main mine and the surface material processing with the secondary mine entrance. I’d original intended for this to be the finish of the house but really it isn’t. I haven’t done any of the garden or farms and I think I might extend the wall to go around the pool area and in fact I make might it cover most of the east side to make room for all that and maybe do a hedge maze or at least fence off a small area so the pool didn’t have to have monsters lurking underneath lol. I think I will make a decent garden or at least line the walls or patches of the grass with the multitude of new flowers that are available. I do feel a bit disappointed that I’ve made the house with a lot of emphasis on different types of wood and now there’s two new types but meh could have been worse, I could have done this when there was only one.

The wall around the mine entrances

The quite bare west side of the house. Mainly because of the Library and the movie theatre but might add some windows to the library and band room if I can fit them in

Southwest side of the house.

The house in all it's grandeur

So that’ll be the next job, walls, farms inc horses/cattle, gardens, hedge maze, maybe a gazebo or two but I ain’t makin’ this place too high class ;D

JD