Minecraft Adventures - Return to the Underground City with Richy D and other shenanigans

Well it has indeed been awhile since my last Minecraft post, would you believe that the last one was from 18^th of January 2016! though I guess I have not been doing much Minecrafting anymore, there has been a few updates since last I spoke about them which was in my last post about my Brick Mansion back in November 2014 which I believe was the release of the Bountiful Update. Since then there has been the Combat Update, the Frostburn Update, the Exploration Update and the World of Color Update. I’m not going to go through all the new things in detail like I usually do as it’s just all too much and you can click the links and read yourself if you want too. I will say there were some things that I really want to see and some point just haven’t had a chance to see them. There were come major updates to the End in the Combat update including End Cities and ships and new loot such as Dragon heads and the rare Elytra which are basically insect-like wings which allow you to glide.

An End City Building with Ship

There was also the Exploration update which brought in a while new host of mobs, including a sort of evil version of villagers called “llagers” (I swear who makes up these names?) which spawn in Woodland Mansions in Roofed Forests and do all sorts of crazy things like spawning teeth from the floor and flying ghosts that attack you. These mobs also drop the mysterious Totem of Undying. Man it’s getting more like CubeWorld all the time with all the new hostile mobs and combat stuff. They seem to have also finally added shields though they are made of a mixture of wood and iron so you can’t make a full iron shield like you can with a sword for example.

An Evoker and Vindicator villager with a skeletal horse

Well it was LAN time again with my good friend Richy D aka DickDatsun, and it was back to his world of Rralgon with the intention of continuing our ongoing underground city project. After seeing Richard’s shaders at work I decided to try them out myself, and man I never realised they were so easy to do using the Optifine mod, I’d used optifine before but never got the shaders working, If I had known all I needed to do was go into the options menu and activate them well really I would have years ago. I tried a few out and love the way some of them make the grass and trees move and sway and the shadows that are created just make the game look amazing. Not to mention the glowing of the torches, the incredible sunsets and of course the silky smooth water, it just looks fabulous and I wish I had done it before.

Beautiful

Saying that though it may look beautiful but Minecraft was not optimized for those kind of graphics and therefore gives a decent whack on your cpu and graphics card, I found that many of the user-made shaders that came with Optifine had different levels of graphical intensity so I had to go for medium most often to save my FPS from going down the toilet. From the testing I found that different shaders had different features for example some had grass, tree and flower movement, like they swayed in the wind which was really cool. Some were darker or more atmospheric, others had much more lightglow and varying degrees of shadows from the original. Though the most prominent effect was the water, oh man the water looked spectacular it was different for every shader pack of course it was either flowing slightly all the time or nice and smooth and still and made ripples when you dipped in.

A quick video I made showing off Chocapic's Ultra shader from the Optifine mod

Before we started more work on the Underground city we decided to have a bit of a faff around first on an Amplified world, as I thought this would be the best for trying out the Elytra. The ‘Amplified’ world setting turns the terrain generation to extreme levels, creating skyscraper-height hills, giant valleys and huge cave systems using the full extent of the 250 block height limit which I thought would be perfect for jumping off mountains and gliding through canyons, which it was except the terrain needs to be generated first and amplified worlds take a huge whack on your PC when just playing normally so there was quite a bit of slowdown when trying to fly through them. Often we had to move around slowly and let the terrain generate and then just fly around the general area so save the terrain loading, I also tried out the new Shield from the combat update and it’s interesting to use, reminded me a lot of Chivalry Medieval Warfare. After the amplified world we jumped back into Rralgon to work on our Underground City which you may remember from a previous post and yes we’re still working on it hah though at some point we decided to go summon and fight some Withers as I’d never encountered them in the game and they were pretty damn scary.


Fighting dem scary Withers, in creative mode though so it's not that scary

We then decided to fly across Richard’s world of Rralgon to the underground city entrance using our Elytra and man that was trippy with the shaders on as my computer couldn’t keep up and the terrain literally disappeared so all we could see was the glowing sunset under the landmass and wow it’s difficult to explain you’ll just have to watch the video.

Man I'm trippin, this is amazing though, I was using a very dark shader pack where the light had a brilliant warm glow to it.

So we eventually got back to the city and started work on a variety of new buildings, I’m currently using the KOP Photo Realism x128 Texture pack as it’s the one realism texture pack that is updated the most, it’s not the best but it’s ok, it has some interesting textures and is better than default. I had intended to create a town hall near the entrance and I made a sort of squat-diamond shaped building all in white marble. I then decided to looked more like a church so decided to make it one, then I had a devilish idea, since the prison of the “Underegg” (as we had dubbed our city) had a sinister side why not the church? So I created a “Church of the Damned” complete with an upside-down cross, flaming pyres and a back room where a Wither summoning was taking place, wooyeh now that’s something else.

A few shots of the church

Man it looks really good with this shader pack

I built a new orange clay house and a visitors centre near the entrance on the other side and then totally re-did the pond area with grass, trees and flowers and Richard made another house there too making the whole part of the city look nice with some much needed flora as all there really is stone otherwise, now we just need more fauna (apart from bats)

My Acacia wood house

Richard's 'Tree' house

The redeveloped 'pond' area

I unfortunately didn't get a good shot of the visitor's centre but it's the one with the red roof in the middle.

We then started toward the back of the cave near the skull entrance (which leads to nothing at the moment) I made this house out of the new Purpur blocks complete with purple carpet as I had never used that type of material before. I then created a sort of town-hall/multipurpose room out of all the different types of wood which took quite a while though I’ll have to update it at some point as there’s nothing in there currently.

The Purpur house

Add caption

The Town hall near the skull entrance

 

Richard built a couple of new houses, a shop and some kind of flame monument which looked pretty cool, the place is starting to come together but it needs a bit more work, we definitely need to make a new entrance as at the moment it's just this random hole with lamps out in the middle of the desert and you have to jump down into a body of water to get down there. Well at least the entrance hall in the city itself looks fine, or was it meant to be a secret city? I don't know, I don't think we thought much about it at the time.

Richard's shop

The monument of flame complete with skeletal horse

The inner and outer entrances

We also may need clean the edges of the cave  and start bordering off places as at the moment it’s just a street in a cave with nothing else around. If we’re not going to use all of the cave then we might need to start building walls to keep the undesirables out, I’m even thinking of coating the whole area in something nicer then stone but grass would seem too normal underground, maybe sand as the city is under a desert, or even mycelium and have an underground mushroom forest. I also gotta complete my house in there for fack's sake in face I may switch my house to my proper one that I made with two levels though I got the heights all mixed up so I gotta fix that too.

My 'normal' house in the middle there

Yes I have to redo the roof because there is no roof just the upstairs floor and also that texture doesn't look too good for floorboards, the bricks look nice though.

So that’s it for now, I don’t know how much more adventures I will have in Minecraft but if so I will certainly tell the tales right here.

JD

Now that's warm and glowy

 Everything needs a sinister side.

The Past and Times of Yore: Star Wars - TIE Fighter: Collector's CD-ROM, For the Emperor!

Release date: July 1994
Genre: Space Simulation 
Publisher: LucasArts
Developer: Totally Games
Platforms: Windows and Mac
Modes: Single Player only

When I was younger I played the much loved Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter (XvT) though due to a lack of story mode I couldn’t really get into it, I recall just doing the tutorial missions again and again as when I tried the other missions etc it was just too complicated. The problem was that I was starting off one of the most beloved Star Wars game series with a game that was (initially) conceived as a multiplayer-focused version of the first two games, and indeed it was a mishmash of different training exercises, “furballs” and only two “battles” that can’t technically be called Campaigns because they follow no chronological order. I had a vague understanding of the other games in the X-wing series but hadn’t made any particular effort to go back to them as I’m not really fond of flight sims, it was only many years later when I saw my housemate watching some videos of the original X-wing that I got interested again. X-Wing had a storyline as you are actively involved in a number of key battles before, during and after the Battle of Yavin.

X-Wing vs Tie Fighter basic gunnery training, ah the memories

My housemate recommended we purchase our star wars games from the Good Old Games (GoG) which I had not actually heard of at the time. GoG specializes in old games of course and they are different from Steam in the fact that when you purchase from GoG technically you own the game as you download the files and  play using the executable file without using any other program, whereas a game purchased on steam must be played through Steam itself, sort of like a jukebox. I couldn’t actually handle the freedom of GoG i.e. I couldn’t just put the icons on the desktop could I? it would be too messy, so I downloaded GoG Galaxy which is GoG’s own gaming client which is actually pretty cool. It allows you to revert back to a previous version of the game easily, which is a very good feature that Steam does not have. 

Anyway GoG had their usual “May the 4th be with You” sale of all of their classic Star Wars games and I got quite a haul with the following:

TIE Fighter Collector's CD (1995)
X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter
X-Wing Alliance™
Rogue Squadron 3D
Star Wars Starfighter™
Republic Commando
Empire at War: Gold Pack
Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II
Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II - Mysteries of the Sith
Jedi Knight™ II - Jedi Outcast™
Star Wars™: Jedi Knight™ - Jedi Academy™
Knights of the Old Republic
Knights of the Old Republic™ II: The Sith Lords™
STAR WARS™ Battlefront™ II (Classic, 2005)

Rogue Squadron 3D, originally on the Nintendo 64

And the original Dark Forces which I have previously reviewed, though Tie Fighter was the first I wanted to try. There was then the issue about how to control the game, as you know this would be nothing less than a joystick, I still had my almost 10 year old joystick though without a USB port that thing wasn’t gonna fly so Brok and both chose our joysticks of choice. Being a Logitech fan I went with the Logitech Extreme 3D Pro as it was nice and cheap and suited my needs, Brok being a lefty when it came to joysticks opted for the Thrustmaster T16000M (the names these things have... I know) being an ambidextrous joystick.

The Logitech Extreme 3D Pro, no fuss functionality

So there we were, we had our games and our sticks it was time to get it on, I would have liked to start with X-Wing but Tie Fighter was already released earlier then XvT and X-Wing before that so it was the most basic one and I didn’t want to go that far, plus Brok said that If I played any of them again Tie Fighter would be the one, and so I did. 1994 was a big year for gaming indeed and it’s only fitting that what is possibly the best starfighter game LucasArts ever developed would come out in the same year as classics like Donkey Kong Country, Super Metroid, Doom II and the very first Warcraft game, Orcs and Humans. The version of Tie Fighter was the Collector's CD-ROM Edition which was a re-release of the original game which came out in 1994 and it included the Defender of the Empire and the Completely new Enemies of the Empire Expansions.

Whee Tie Fighter!

From the very moment you enter the game you feel nostalgic with the the 8-bit theme music, speaking of which, it’s the only Star Wars game which does not feature the Star Wars main theme in the title crawl, instead using the classic Imperial March theme which is a cool difference. You get to see the Emperor, Darth Vader and the might of the Empire in all of its glory before you seemingly wake up in front of a man at a very tall desk and with a rather brusque tone asks you to “identify yourself pilot!” which is where you create your profile, well at least the stormtroopers stand at attention when you walk in not before aiming their guns at you if you try to do this before registering.

The game intro and one of the in-game missions, I'm flying an assault gunboat in this one.

Tie Fighter had some innovative features for its time, the menu screen was a concourse inside the Star Destroyer Vengeance and you moved your mouse around the various doors to access the menu options. Among these options was the Tech Room where you could view the technical specifications of every craft available in the game which I remember from X-wing vs Tie Fighter. There was also the ‘Film Room’ as the game had a camera capture feature which allowed you to record your flights and view your missions and amazingly jump into them and play at any time which was pretty cool for back then. Setting up the controls wasn’t too hard as you could map everything through the dosbox interface, though I only mapped controls to the immediate buttons on the stick itself I didn’t do any for the controls on the bottom as it was far easier to just remember the keyboard commands as I had the joystick set up on my mousepad with my mouse on the desk and used my left hand for keyboard commands, Brok did it this way and It worked much better then when I tried to only use all the buttons on the joystick base. I think the only other joystick controls I used apart from the trigger to fire were to target any attackers, target incoming missiles and spin my craft around so I was right way up.

The ship's concourse which acts as a menu

Then it was time for the training simulator which I thought was the best choice for starting out. And it was, I became proficient at maneuvering the various fighters though that circular obstacle course that got more complicated with every few laps and shooting those yellow balls for more time. I then tried the combat chamber where you flew your selected craft in different scenarios with some based on historical events, I did actually end up doing them all for every craft which I probably shouldn’t have as I forgot that this version included the expansion and I technically wasn’t going to fly things like Tie Defenders for a while so I got to experience the newer craft in the simulations which I thought was fine hah. Your choice of craft go from TIE Fighter, Bomber, Interceptor, Advanced, Defender, Assault Gunboat, and Missile Boat.  It’s remarkably simple flying a Tie Fighter, there are no shields, no advanced missiles, no beam weapons, it’s almost scary, just your lasers and missiles and flight expertise most of the time, I would have liked to stay with it for most of the game but I found that for most of it you were in the more advanced fighters unsurprisingly but I did get sick of being in an assault gunboat or missile boat. I’m still not exactly sure which is my favourite but it’s possibly still the Tie Advanced with the Tie Defender coming in second.

Tie Fighter Combat Chamber mission 2, oh it was damn simple back then

So after all the training it was time for the real thing, the Tours of Duty! Oh yes we’re getting canonical now and boy I was excited to take part in the historical battles. Of course before you get into the flying you go through the “New Battle” door and choose your first “battle” or “tour of duty” Tour of Duty I: Aftermath of Hoth and then go into the briefing room for your first mission Patrol Jump Point D-34 (Holy shit! Jump Point D-34 I can’t wait!) and there was another one in third tour of duty simply titled “Hold Position” (FUUUAAARR!)  The missions actually have a more exciting name in the wiki “Skirmish at Outpost D-34” and “Second Battle of the Pakuuni system” respectively and I can assure you in none of these missions does everything go exactly to plan or I’d have to start taking shots at friendly ships seeing how much I could piss off the Flight Officer. Speaking of which, you have various options in the briefing room, you can view the mission briefing, you can talk to your flight officer about the mission or speak to a mysterious figure who is actually an envoy of the Emperor, and he gives you hints for bonus objectives in the mission. Then that’s pretty much it, you choose your armaments (missiles, beam weapons) then launch.

Your flight officer near the briefing screen and the masked figure hiding in the back there.

Having played XvT before and practiced on it recently I didn’t have much trouble setting up the controls, I had basically just configured them through the dosbox setup to use the joystick buttons and only used about 3 or 4 of them. The trigger to fire of course and the thumb button to “roll” the craft around to the right way up, the rest were to target nearest fighter and nearest warhead and the hat was for looking around though I never really used them most of the time I just had the joystick on the mousepad and used my left hand for the keyboard controls which worked fine.

Oh no, not those pesky A-wings, this was before they had the red paintjob.

The improvements over X-wing are numerous, the most obvious improvement was the graphics which were much improved and the game engine supported much larger numbers of craft in the missions and higher detail and much more smoothly, the AI was also improved allowing for more challenging opponents. There were many more flight options added like flight dialogue and messages, a message log, a list of objectives, ships' status and behavior, three-dimensional map, and HUD, a sub-target system and other additions such as an option to choose armaments before flying. I swear I took these things for granted as I had started with XvT and watching my housemate play X-Wing just reminded me more of how I didn’t want to start with it hah, the HUD was heaps better as it had a 3D rending of the target craft with stats on their shields, hull, distance etc and you also now had a button to attempt to match speed with the target which helped a lot to stop you crashing into slower craft which I almost did many times trying to take them down (we all know the feeling, just one more lasercannon blast!)

About 3 minutes in I have a squizz at the interactive map, Imperials are red, rebels are green and neutral are usually blue or pink

The initial missions were fairly easy as the craft you were fairly simple (Tie Fighter, Bomber and Interceptor) The storyline was basically the events from the Battle of Hoth to the Battle of Endor though you do not have any direct involvement in each, in fact for many of the missions of the storyline you are fighting off pirates and Imperial defectors such as Admiral Harkov and Zaarin in the Zaarin Insurrection instead of the Rebel Alliance itself though you still fight them on occasion. The game maintains that you are playing as yourself never calling you by any name, the canonical pilot for the game is Maarek Stele an ace imperial pilot whose plight is written in The Stele Chronicles which actually came with the game itself similar to The Farlander Papers that shipped with X-Wing.

Vice Admiral Thrawn from the opening cinematic

I didn’t have much trouble doing most of the missions, just look at the mission briefing, talk to the cloaked figure, check the mission objectives and then go at it, I made myself familiar with the shield, cannon and beam weapon recharge rate and dumped energy into one or the other before the action started. The missions objectives vary from attack this and defend that to more involved things like inspecting and using tractor beams to stop fleeing craft. Objectives sometimes change whilst in the midst of playing: new friendly/enemy craft leave or show up, things get destroyed, people defect mid battle even, I tell you what I press G (the button to show your goals) a lot during a mission. Some of the most difficult missions involve safeguarding a friendly ship which were often very fragile and would be destroyed in a direct assault so you had to keep an eye on them at all times often destroying any threatening craft before they got close enough to launch missiles, I got stuck on a mission like this where I had to defend a freighter while being harangued by a Tie Advanced but apparently I got past it and I’m not sure how. I was up to the last tour of duty before Enemies of the Empire but by then I’d had enough.

New craft alert!

After the mission you can meet with your flight officer and debrief, and then that’s basically it, you go from different battles and the missions in between. There are a small amount of cutscenes to show the storyline and some awards ceremonies showing the medals you receive, the story is actually quite good with the betrayal storylines but then again I’m going from XvT which was basically just a big multiplayer combat sim. You can also speak to the cloaked figure again who after completing enough bonus objectives initiates you into the Secret Order of the Emperor and the more bonus missions you complete the more you gain rank and title in the order though it doesn’t give you anything special apart from an an arm tattoo. In the options menu you can see the medals you have earned, training certificates and gameplay records such as scores and hit rates, you can also see your arm on the left of the screen and when you roll your mouse over you can see how far you have progressed in the secret order of the emperor from the complexity of your tattoo. You change the difficulty level and other settings whenever you like too which is helpful as if you were having trouble with a mission you can change the difficulty to easily to get past it then change back.

Medals, Records and options viewing screen

The graphics although primitive looking now were very nice for back in 1994 and they run nice and smooth on modern machines so the dosbox conversion was done well, pretty much everything has been updated from X-wing, the ships look better, the environment looks better (well it is just space but it still looks looks good) the graphics system supported Gouraud shading which apparently is an effect that makes curves of low polygon objects appear more realistic. I can’t really say much apart from that as I didn’t play X-Wing only XvT in which the major new graphical feature were the  feature were the textured ships. But from what I can see from X-wing anyway the graphics are better on Tie Fighter, the game runs smoother and sort of has this timeless feel like Super Mario World and Yoshi’s island have. I think there was something different about pc graphics compared to console graphics in the 90’s as I was mostly playing console back then and from experiencing the transition from 2D to 3D on consoles (Super Nintendo to Playstation in my case) I think the PC just did it better.

Beautifully rendered Star Destroyer there

 The music of course is one of the best things about a Star Wars game and I don’t need to tell you that taking part in hectic battles with the Star Wars official soundtrack blaring is amazing. The good thing about the X-Wing and Tie Fighter is that they use the iMuse music system which basically is a system that changes the music depending on the events of the game, for example, new ships entering the battlefield, a change in objectives, a craft being destroyed, a mission being complete or simply just going quiet when there is nothing happening at the time. XvT didn’t have this system it just played the music consistently so I could really tell the difference between the soundtrack and it sounds so so much better and  I wish most games had this feature, in fact SWTOR has it to an extent when certain events or player abilities are triggered while in game. The audio was as clear you could expect with the speech being able to be heard absolutely fine and the voice acting done well. You can’t exactly hear everything that goes on in the battle as you are inside your star fighter in space so you mostly only hear your own activity unless you are being shot at or ships are shooting near you but it’s still great.

I have no idea what I'm doing at this point, you can hear the music change when I fail the mission

I’m not exactly a big fan of fight sims, or space flight sims I guess if you can call them that, but Tie Fighter isn’t quite that. At the start you are a bit daunted about all of the controls and functions of your craft (especially the later ones) and all the targeting and wingman orders and recharge rates and HUD information etc but it’s easy to pick up and pretty soon becomes second nature. I’m glad I played Tie Fighter though I didn’t quite get all of the way through up to Tour of Duty X if I remember correctly though that was far enough as I’d done pretty much everything I could in the game. Tie Fighter is one of those games that true classic gamers remember and get all nostalgic when talking about it, I certainly do but it’s for a slightly different game. Anyway it’s currently on Good Old Games but it’s best to pick it up on the May the Fourth sales that happen every year, if you’re a Star Wars fan or a fan of Flight sims or even if you’re not it’s still well worth a go. I remember sometimes going back and playing old games and just being underwhelmed with the magic of it seemingly gone, not so with Tie Fighter, nostalgia is rarely this good.

JD

External view is quite nice sometimes, though you can't swing the camera around yourself

Fighting for the Empire gives me a strange sense of purpose and righteousness

Hustlin' through The Old Republic - Server merges and bein' Evil

You know I never intended for these to be annual updates, but I guess they are, as I’m always updating once around the same time of year, so I guess it’s that time again. As far as the playerbase is looking the game things are pretty bleak, as of July last year there was another big server culling with the game going from 17 servers down to just 5, pretty scary for a game that once had 200. But it matters not, until they shut down the servers completely I will keep on going, as I’m not finished yet, not by any means, despite a couple of requests from friends to start playing Elder Scrolls Online.

Doin some heroics on Balmorra, was glad I got the chance to do em with someone

So we begin with my Trooper and the conclusion of his storyline which occurs on Corellia which in case you didn’t know I the planet where all class storylines conclude. But actually before that Havoc Squad was off to Voss for the conclusion of Aric Jorgen’s mission to rescue his old Deadeye squad companions on Hoth, and when we found that two of his squadmates were dead due to a careless Republic officer so I decided to let Aric shoot the bastard.

Senior Agent Zane gets what's coming to him.

 I’ve been doing Dark side options a lot more now while playing, maybe it’s because quite a few companions I have prefer the naughty things. From the start of the game I’ve had many characters who were very light-side orientated, on my Jedi Knight T7-O1 and Kira Carsen were good examples of this, on my Sith Inquisitor it was more difficult being a Light-side with Khem Val but as soon as I got Ashara Zavros things got easier. Playing my Trooper was a mixed bag, Elara Dorne was very light orientated, Aric Jorgan and M1-4X were mostly fine but their fanatical devotion to the Republic favoured some Dark side choices and towards the end of the storyline I just started choosing them for a change of pace, I didn’t use Tanno Vik or Yuun much at all but Tanno is definitely Dark side orientated. I guess after playing purely Light side characters for so long I wanted to have some fun with dark side options, and you can have some pretty messed up fun indeed. Also I am actually seriously considering creating a female character as either the a Sith Marauder or a Smuggler Scoundrel it’ll be a bit weird romancing guys but then again it’s the same thing you’re just on the other side.

Companion's play a large part in your class story, but you don't always have to do things that get their approval.

 I actually regret not promoting Aric to Lieutenant now as when I decided to promote Elara that was for the selfish reason of trying to curry favour to get into bed with her, but that was the time previously where you needed to build influence with your Companions in order to continue their story but now this happens progressively as you complete each story chapter. So anyway after that it was on to Corellia, another city planet with a confusing layout like Coruscant. The story was mostly about the Empire vs Republic and the showdown with General Rakton which I and the forces of the Republic collectively kick his ass, I’m not sure whether I killed him or sent him to jail but I think it was the latter. At some point I had decided to replace my green striped armor with orange striped armor and a new helmet in an attempt to standardize the squad colours in preparation for the coming grandiose congratulatory ceremony and meeting with the Supreme Chancellor.I decked my squadmates out pretty well all except for Yuun who had appropriate armor on but I forgot to change the colour, oh well, they still looked good.

Havoc squad in full force

I’m finding the new adaptive/customisable gear vendors on the fleet are a great source of custom gear as an alternative to the Cartel Market especially when you hit level 60 where you start receiving only Knight of the Fallen Empire gear which all looks the damn same. I’m basically building collection a set of ‘Outlander’ and upgrading it as I obtain more gear from the Command crates though I’ll have to work out how to get the gear to the character as the Fallen Empire chapters are basically just go-go-go and I have no idea when the first mailbox is though I suspect it’s at the Gravestone but even then that’s a couple of chapters in. I have decided to do Knights of the Fallen Empire on my Trooper as I want to see what it’s like when you do it with a non-force user though I feel like doing it with my Imperial Agent as I reckon he’s my favourite character at the moment.


Doin my part for the battle of Coreillia

So that was that, end of the storyline for my Trooper, three class stories down, 5 to go, hopefully I get through em. It was then on to my Consular Sage who was sporting some pretty cool looking white and bronze gear. With the start of the Consular Chapter 2, I was tasked with finding a group of leaders of various planets trying to break away from the Republic called the“Rift Alliance” and to do this I was to be a Jedi Master! so I graciously accepted of course then went to their ship which was being attacked by the Empire so I saved them and met them all, one of which was a future companion Nadia Grell which was odd as she is the last companion you get so it was strange to see her so early. Then they end up being passengers on my ship, geez I don’t even think the Defender had enough bunks. I enjoyed the process though as in this chapter I’m really doing a lot of mediation work and keeping all these ambassadors happy, which is fun because some don’t trust me and it involves a few arguments. So we first went to Balmorra to assist Tai Cordan and met the future companion Zenith who is a Balmorran resistance fighter. So I go to war with Darth Lachris (again) and reluctantly slash through her fit body with my lightsaber (though all female bodies of that size are the same really) and pick up Zenith along the way who I now use as a ranged tank. At one point I decided to use the ever popular adaptive gear vendor to make myself a new more-consular style armor set which looked pretty good with the orange highlights.

I like this shot, even if my armor is a bit glitchy

So then I’m off to Quesh and finished it off pretty fast and I also find out Nadia has force aptitude, then we go to Hoth after yet another costume change from the adaptive gear vendor. This time I added this really strange headpiece which seems to be some sort of weird leather visor around my head but It’s cool and as it’s highly unusual think it looks ok on the consular. On Hoth I defeat some more Rift Alliance enemies and another companion, Lieutenant Felix Iresso, I save the King and Queen of Sarkhai and also find out that one of the Rift Alliance ambassadors on my ship Blaesus is a special Sith called a “Child of the Emperor” and I kill him and another random Sith called Lord Kyrus. And that was that for the chapter, next up I’m back to the Academy again to check on the Noetikons.

Lookin good, me of course not that guy's arse

Bounty Hunter time again and from what I can remember I was still on the perpetual-night-time-though-only-for-the-Sith-Empire-instance planet of Taris. Here is where I had met Torian Cadera and we were hunting his dad cause his dad was on the bounty hunter blacklist so after a pretty cool scavenger hunt over Taris to find Jincoln Caldera, Torian and I found him and turned him over to the Mandalorians. Not much else happened though I managed to do the heroics on this planet and soon it was on to Quesh for a very short amount for a very short amount of class story where I am invited to endorse some battle stims then find out it’s a republic trap, I also did the planet storyline which didn’t take too long. It was then on to Hoth and I defeat a Trandoshan Warrior with the help of Blizz the Jawa who then joins the crew. I didn’t finish off the story but I did re-mod the old orange and maroon insect themed outfit I had on before it got outdated rather quickly as now I am level 70 I won’t be getting any new armor.

Heroics again, I like this shot

Now it was time for Knights of the Eternal Throne except this time on my Sith Inquisitor, not that it’s much different from a Jedi really it’s just down to the choices you make, and I did make some different choices this time. Firsty I decided to kill Supreme Chancellor Suresh instead of sending her to jail, I also decided to leave Vette to die instead of Torian and possibly most important of all, I decided to rule the galaxy as an emperor instead of heal it as a peace keeper. Surprisingly this didn’t give my allies too much ire of me, Theron and Lana and everyone else just seemed to accept it with no private conversation expressing anything, and now they say “May the Force serve you” wow. So after that I went to do the brief Iokath storyline where this time I sided with the Empire of course, and this time Jace Malcolm got the old hot seat messin’ with the Iokath chairs. But after that was finished I had had enough and moved on.

A lot goin on in this shot

Before I have been thinking a bit about what I’m going to do with the future of my characters and SWTOR in general, specifically with my Jedi Guardian and Sith Inquisitor, I can’t call them ‘max level’ characters as because of the ridiculous speed in which you level up almost all of my characters are max level now . Anyway they have now both done their individual class stories, Ilum/False Emperor story,  Rise of the Hutt Cartel/Makeb Expansion, Rhakgoul Outbreak, The Dread War, Shadow of Revan, Knights of the Fallen Empire/Eternal Throne and the Iokath war. There’s always something to play when I come back to them but once I’ve finished that do I stay and look for more things to do, operations? flashpoints? other high level content? Etc I guess it depends what’s currently going on in the server, whenever I’m on the fleet on whatever character I’m always checking the chat to see which ops (aka raids) are going on but with less and less people it’s getting harder.. And that’s what did, While playing my Imperial Agent Sniper I saw a call out for the last boss of The Ravagers Raid, Coratanni. So I moved to my Assassin and did the raid, I was a bit disappointed that it was only the last boss, but I still managed to get to Rishi first and get the main quest in order to complete it and boy did I also get a lot of command xp and items.

The Ravagers Raid final boss, Coratanni

Now back to what could possibly be my favourite character at the moment, my Imperial Agent Sniper, you may have seen in my previous post that I had finished Balmorra and you may also know that because I did this on a two week special event of triple xp while levelling I was level 61 when I finished the planet. I decided that I had levelled too fast and acquired all of my abilities too quickly. I also wasn’t happy with a lot of choices I had made on the way and decided this time to go full badass. My reasoning for this was if I was going Dark side on my Sage then I have to go Dark on at least one Empire character and technically my character is supposed to be a cyborg but I was roleplaying that I’m actually a droid so I got no feelings, which definitely makes things easier. The other thing that makes things easier is that Kaliyo as annoying as she is prefers the Dark side options so this was good at least. So I decided to cut my losses and transfer any items I wanted and sell off any I didn’t or were bound to me. Unfortunately I had already put on my Series 212 Cybernetic set binding it to me so I had to buy the damn things again but I had all the credits that I needed so I bought it again and thankfully it wasn’t too expensive. I also might have to end up wearing the a helm similar to the Citidel Duelist’s set which I wore on my Sith Assassin as it’s a perfect helm both with voice modulation and even moving droid eyeballs though it’s a shame I already used it with my Assassin, the only other ones that could come close would be the helm from this set and that helm which looks like General Grievous which I’ve forgotten the name of.

Kaliyo and me, a entertaining relationship

And so I started again going through Hutta, Dromund Kass and then Balmorra making different choices along the way and boy was I bad, I can’t think of any light side choices I made. Speaking of Light and Dark side choices, I may have mentioned this before but on my Sage I am going Dark Side, but I forgot to set myself as “Fighting for the Dark side” on my “Force Alignment” feature thingy so I ended up just gaining more light side points which I didn’t want. So now I don’t know what I’m going to do I wanted to see my Jedi Sage all evil with the Dark side effects on his face but I’ve wasted all this time going Light side and I don’t think I’ll ever get be able to get to full Dark unless of course I want to go through every expansion like I have with my Guardian and Assassin. I am going full Dark with my agent though there are a couple of problems, as you might have seen I got the “White pupil” cartel market item for my Agent who is supposed to be secretly a droid, and one of the first effects of dark side corruption is yellow eyes, so there goes that side of the corruption as I’m not getting rid of my white eyes, and then of course I’m going full on droid so I won’t see anything anyway which sucks, so If I don’t get my Sage onto the Dark face (heh) I’ll have to do it with either a Marauder or Smuggler. Anyway so I conquered Balmorra and killed Grand Marshall Cheketta this time and boinked Darth Lachris for the third time and it looks like I’ve still got the Balmorra bonus series to do but then my subscription ran out.

You makin fun of me boy? These eyes will be the last thing you ever see.

After some deliberation I have decided to get HK-51 on my Agent as he uses a Sniper Rifle and with us both as Droids we’d go well together though I’m not looking forward to the questline as it seems pretty involved, I hope I can get someone to help me. But anyway that will be in the next time I get on my Agent, for now it’s on to my Guardian and the mysterious ‘Crisis on Umbara’ flashpoint of Game update 5.4.

JD

Pew! pew! pew!

This universe needs more sexy times

My Usual Spiel - Aragami: Back to the stealth

Release date: October 7, 2016
Genre: Action-Adventure, Stealth

Publisher: Lince Works, Merge games
Developer: Lince Works
Engine: Unity
Platforms: Windows, Linux, PS4, OSX
Modes: Single Player or Coop Campaign

I have fond memories of stealth games, or simply choosing the stealthy option in games such as Skyrim and Far Cry, I even refused to play the Witcher series simply because you couldn’t really stealth. Though the greatest of all stealth games in my view was Tenchu, playing Tenchu 2: Birth of the Stealth Assassins on the PS1 and Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven on the PS2, lately I have had the good fortune to be gifted an Xbox 360 from a  friend and now have the ability to play Tenchu Z though It’s not exactly of the quality of the previous games I’ve mentioned it’s at least something. 

It is I, the Aragami

But this was actually before I had the Ex-bax Tree-Sixty and was having a long drought of stealth games, I had tried to go back to Tenchu 2 using an emulator on my android tablet but it just didn’t really feel the same (does it ever?). So when I saw Aragami on Steam I was fairly interested. Why wouldn’t I? it had a Japanese theme, a cool looking ninja-like character and of course stealth and stealth kills, it was cel-shaded but looked absolutely amazing so there was nothing wrong with that. The setting for Aragami is in a sort of fantasy feudal japan with lots of mystical magic elements, it tells a somewhat cliched story that you, the Aragami, or ‘an’ Aragami I’m not sure, were summoned by an ‘astral projection’ of Yamiko, a girl whose ‘Nisshoku’ kingdom of shadow was defeated by the ‘Kaiho’ kingdom of the light and she is now held prisoner by the Kaiho and she has summoned you to take her revenge and rescue her, and I’ve only just realised now this was all done in one night.

Yamiko as she appears in one of the graphic novel cutscenes

Yamiko returns on occasion to give you advice and show you the way towards the main castle, you do actually converse with her sometimes which apart from overhearing the guards conversation is the only comic relief in the game. So anyway you have the setting, the story, the struggle between kingdoms, the bad guys, the damsel in distress and you, the unlikely hero etc, so now this is where it starts to differ from Tenchu and I’ll try to not compare them over the course of this review hah. 

Yamiko in the game world, she appears and dissapears at will, often just speaking in your head.

As the Aragami you are a being made of shadow and vengeful spirit, and thus your powers come from shadow and your weakness is light, you must always keep to the shadows. For reasons I’m not sure why your character can’t actually jump instead you use the right mouse button and click another patch of darkness to “Shadow Leap” through to it (similar to Dishonored), allowing you to silently move to ledges or through light sources to stay in the shadows. Of course to do this you need shadow power, shadow power is accrued (surprise, surprise) when you are in the shadows and it’s level is cleverly displayed on your cape, moving too close to light sources drains your shadow power but you can gain it back easily. Though I’ve had some scary moments where you can get caught out in the open when an enemy walking towards you and end up frenzily clicking around looking for a shadow to jump to, but this gets easier when you start to gain more ability such as the one where you can ‘summon’ a shadow in a particular area as an escape route.


I achieve the highest rank 'S' in the first level by complete stealth, this was the only level I was able to manage it XD
 
Moving near any light sources drain your shadow energy so it’s no wonder enemies walk around or near them to make it more difficult for you to get past, the ‘Kaiho’ soldiers have light embued weapons and if you do get spotted they can kill you with one hit, so usually when spotted I often just give up and start again from the quicksave if I can’t get away in time. There are only a few variations of enemies, there are the basic light-sword wielding enemies (who also have a medium range light-beam slash) and then there are the archers who aim beams of light as if they were snipers, shooting a ball of light in a location if they detect something. These balls of light act like mines and can kill you if you stray too close and be found more frequently in the later levels, blocking off paths and forcing you to shadow leap through them or take a different path. some enemies actually walk around with these ball of light surrounding them making them difficult to stealth kill.

Archers were particularly dangerous if not taken out first

An emphasis on stealth in this game is paramount primarily because you cannot even swing your weapon in normal combat as you are only seen using it in stealth kills or sometimes destroying glowing orbs that control force fields. Unlike the Tenchu games if you are spotted there is not staying to fight and finish them off unless you are quick with your abilities as you can be killed in seconds. There are only two “boss fights” in the game and neither of them have you engaging in full-on combat, it’s really down to stealth and using your powers. Speaking of which you use these powers for pretty much anything, you can’t jump, open doors, climb ledges or up ladders, you are relying on shadows for everything more complicated then walking and running which makes you feel a bit fragile, which you are I guess you’re just a damn shadow heh. Conveniently you start in a very dark graveyard, then as the game progress there becomes less and less shadows with you having to rely on your ‘shadow-creation’ ability to get places.

 

Ares like this required careful planning and tagging of enemies (if you had the ability) to see their movement around obstacles, especially if you were doing a complete stealth run without eliminating any enemies.

Your main arsenal are your abilities which include offensive, defensive and Aragami abilities. These available are gained by finding scrolls hidden throughout the levels, the more you find, the more abilities you can unlock so being the only the collectible in the game too they are fairly important. The Aragami abilities include very useful skills, such as hiding bodies, ability to cast shadows and allowing your Raven companion to keep track of enemies and even revealing the location of hidden scrolls. The defensive abilities include summoning decoys, invisibility and revealing enemies through walls. The offensive techniques include a lethal shadow dart, a blinding wave of shadows and an entertaining ‘mine’ type trap which pulls enemies into the void. These abilities can usually only be used twice before requiring a cooldown but can be accessed again by performing a “Shadow kill” which is sort of like an advanced stealth kill which takes about 1.5 seconds to activate and then unleashes shadow dragon head which swallows an enemy whole in spectacular fashion. As you can guess all these abilities work well when used wisely though I didn’t use many at all, only when I was in a tight spot, but only now watching a video of someone else using them I understand a bit more.

Here I try out a custom map and use a few shadow abilities, I also try out the map editor

I tried to play this one the usual way I play Tenchu, lots of stealth killing, minimal weapon/item use but I quickly found that it was actually more encouraged to go complete stealth though it was harder. There were a few bonuses including not dying and respawning, not alerting enemies and complete stealth and I’ve actually just learned now that you cannot obtain the highest “S” rank if you kill any enemies. I thought this was a bit annoying but it’s ok I guess as it’s much harder to stealth through the level avoiding the enemies instead of eliminating them as you go, I did still get a good score by defeating every enemy but I guess that’s still not the point. This is a good change as historically with the Tenchu series it didn’t seem to matter how many times you were spotted as long as you did enough stealth kills to bump your score up so you got Grand Master every time. 

Got spotted way too many times here.

Like Tenchu also I found myself getting too impatient and getting caught out leading to some bad scores, sometimes I tried to avoid but the amount of enemies in a level was quite large some places it seemed almost impossible to get past without getting rid of at least one enemy. As you progressed it got harder leading to more mistakes, you start of the first few level being very careful then after the 6^th level you just want to get through it as your objectives don’t really change, each level involves getting from one place to another without being spotted or dying and involves stealthing or killing enemies and also clearing “force fields” that block your way by finding the orbs of light that generate them. There’s only 12 levels but it did get slightly repetitive.

Chapter VI: Mausoleum of the Fallen was a difficult one, it was like a huge museum filled with light and archers and guards everywhere and made movement difficult, ended up trying to kill everything and got a horrible score.

 Probably the best thing about the game is the graphics, the cel-shaded loveliness of this game is amazing, not to mention the beautifully drawn comic-style cutscenes. Unlike games which are trying to be photorealistic and end up overdoing it sometimes the visuals are sharp and just flows and I’m going to stop before I sound like an artistic wanker. There’s not exactly much colour in the visuals as the game takes place over one (very long) night but it’s anything but dark, the moon is always out and shining bright enough to cast moonshadows everywhere (which you need) and the enemies are champions of the light so there’s candles and lanterns and fires and glowing swords and bows and orbs all over the place all of which makes a very bright night, of course if it was an incredibly dark clouded-over night then the game would be too easy wouldn’t it? You progress though several different areas, including, graveyards, towns, forests, lakes, castles and temples and I noticed the colour hue of the visuals change, from blue in the graveyards to green in the forest for example. 

The game had this beautful haunting feel, this shot is mostly dark but I think it looks really good.

Though your character was well detailed the enemies I loved the effects of the shadow abilities and just the way you and your cape shimmers in the darkness and light and I could probably say this is my favourite cel-shaded game, though I haven’t played much apart from Katamari Forever which I didn’t really like with that sort of graphical style. As for the music and sound it’s fitting of the subject material, I was impressed with the way the voice acting was all in Japanese as this definitely wasn’t the case in Tenchu though having all Japanese voice acting did make the storyline sound a bit dull as everything had this sort of formal tone to it. There isn’t much music but when there is it’s appropriate, it’s more like ambient sounds then the occasional spasm of music, no that doesn’t sound right, tremor of music? Anyway it really did sound like a game set in Japan and the haunting sound effects and Japanese cultural themed soundtrack was great.

One of my favourite places to hide heh especially good for listening to enemies conversations, I was impressed that they did have Japanese voice actors.

Aragami also has a two-player co-op mode which is pretty cool as you don’t see it much anymore, though I’ve yet to try it, I’ve seen it in action in some videos and like the Sniper Elite games doing stealth co-op requires some practice, probably even more so as you’re relatively close to the enemy. There is also a fairly detailed level editor, which harks me back to the days of messing around with the Tenchu 2 level editor though I’m not sure if this one is more detailed but it certainly is polished with the items you set on the ground coming falling down and bouncing onto the ground with a satisfying ‘plunk’ I’ve played some (quite hard) user-created missions with it and yes I’m proud to say someone has attempted to remake one of the most famous Tenchu missions though not correctly as it’s rock hard, and then there are your usual experimental challenge levels where you have to get from one side to another alive. I didn’t spend too much time with the editor as I didn’t have any big plans for it though If I really wanted to I could re-create a Tenchu 3 mission though that would require a lot of screenshots which I can’t get on the PS3 and screenshotting a youtube video would just take too long and be too annoying.

Here I try out several fan-made levels and also make an experimental archer-infested custom map

Overall Aragami is one of those games that I almost love/hate to play similar to L. A. Noire, Katamari Forever and of course Tenchu. I wanted to do so well but ended up getting impatient and not doing well enough though this could be down to the fact that I wanted to play it just like I did Tenchu with my “weapons and abilities are for the weak” mindset where I try to stealth kill everything and everyone which of course always seems to end up with me being spotted multiple times. But this always comes down to how the game is scored which is different from the Tenchu games where as I’ve said before this one is focused on stealth as a necessity for survival rather than a way of making things easier for yourself. 

Well, I've really messed things up now.

When you were spotted in Tenchu you had more than enough health points, combat abilities and even armor in some cases to be a force to be reckoned with, especially Tenchu Z which has so many combat moves you can unlock though there’s only 2 boss fights in the entire game. Aragami Is a stealth game very much based in the mystical ancient world, you aren’t a Ninja in the traditional aspect, you’re a creature of shadow and all of this is fine, I’m just glad stealth games are still being made. And what's more I hear there's a prequel expansion in the works..

JD

8/10

Things I liked:

Genuine Stealth game

Excellent Cel-shaded visuals

Smooth Liquidy animation

Cool abilities

Things I didn’t like:

Very fragile protagonist

Lack of objective variety in levels

Too much reliance on shadow abilities

Aragami release trailer

Oh, I'm bein' followed by a moonshadow, leapin and hoppin' on a moonshadow…