My Usual Spiel: Player Unknown's Battlegrounds, Welcome to Battle Royale

Release date: December 20, 2017
Genre: Battle Royale 
Publisher: PUBG Corporation
Developer: PUBG Corporation
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Platforms: Windows, Xbox1, Android, ioS
Modes: Multiplayer only

It’s been official for a while now, “Battle Royale” is a new PC and console game genre, just like when League of Legends was formed from the base mould of Defense of the Ancients and the term MOBA was coined, the battle royale genre has just as rich a history. Our tale beings with the 1999 novel Battle Royale by Japanese author Koushun Takami which tells the story of a large class of junior high school students who are forced to fight each other to the death in a program run by the authoritarian Japanese government. The novel was made into a film in 2000 and I must admit, is pretty damn spectacular having seen it myself and would agree that this is excellent fodder for a game. I suppose you are wondering how this fits into the gaming world, well there is a game called ARMA 2 which is a realistic military combat simulator which takes place over some very large landscapes and islands, you also may have heard that there was a mod created using the ARMA engine called DayZ, DayZ took place on a huge island inspired by the Arma landscapes and featured players trying to survive while being hunted by zombies and other players. Inspired by this mod and by the Battle Royal film Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene created DayZ: Battle Royale an offshoot of the DayZ mod where players would scavenge for weapons and supplies and would hunt each other down over a large area with a constantly shrinking safe area. To make a long story short Greene was contact by the Korean developer Bluehole/Ginno games (now PUBG Corp) who liked his idea and wanted to turn it into a standalone title, Greene accepted and moved to Korea to work with them as their creative director and eventually created Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds as we know it today.

Onward my leather-clad friends!

When I first heard of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (or ‘PUBG’ as it’s commonly referred to) and saw the screenshots, it looked like just a cheap flavour-of-the-month thing that people would play for a bit then stop just like the hundreds of other multiplayer games that died out eventually but as more and more of my friends started playing it, I soon thought that this may not be the case. So after my housemate bought the game and I had a look at it I decided to get it myself around May 2017 during the early access it indeed was different from any First Person (or technically third person) shooter I had played. To start with the whole thing looked unique, back then main menu was in a destroyed church and you could see your character model and your squadmates standing there too, in their underwear, yes everyone was in their underwear when they first started, which was probably why so many players created female characters. Firstly though I had to create my character and basically all you could pick from was a fit, attractive male or female, I thought about going female but decided not to as I wanted to play as it was me playing though that itself was unrealistic as I’m not quite in as good as shape as my character heh. So then you click on ready and you’re warped onto an island off the coast of Erangel the first and main map of PUBG, this is a spawn island where you could run and jump around amongst the other players and even test weapons that were sitting on the various tables and around the island, in the lobby the player count usually had to reach 100 before the 60 second countdown appeared before the match start but this wasn’t always the case if there weren’t enough players. And so once the timer was up you were all spawned into a moving cargo plane. Interestingly you could change from first to third person using the V key and wow seeing all us sitting shoulder-to-shoulder silently was like we were about to be air-dropped into France. The game also ahas a voice chat feature primarily used for communicating with teammates but you can switch it to be heard by everyone if you really want to listen to people mic spam.

Hey guys, what up? (I so miss being able to see this)

The plane then flew in a straight line in a random direction across the island and you had the option at any time to jump out with a parachute and start freefalling. Of course where you decided to head for was one of the biggest decisions you had to make, the island of Erangel is a fictional island in the Black sea near the Ukraine which was once occupied by the Soviet Union (hence the military base) and home to a large populace which revolted against the Soviet forces and eventually the island was abandoned, and that’s about as far as the storyline goes, if there was one. So now the island is used as a huge arena for a ‘battle royale’ with a hundred attractive morbid thrill-seekers in their underwear. So I decided to avoid any major towns and touched down in a quiet-out of the way village where I could “loot” in peace. And yes strewn in buildings and houses all over the island were various types of weapony, ammo, attachments, medical supplies, backpacks and clothing including protective gear such as vests and helmets. So I ran from house to house finding things to both arms myself with and cover my body but all of a sudden a warning flashed up that the play area was shrinking and indeed when checking the map this blue circle was coming in, and noticing that I wasn’t in the white circle I decided to skidaddle. I found a dune buggy and headed straight to the middle of the circle, getting shot at at one point but getting away safely. Finding a safe place in the wooded hills I decided to abandon my buggy and hide in a bush in a low part of the hill. And there I lay as the circle got smaller and smaller hearing many shots and viewing the remaining player count go down until the I needed to make my way down from the hills to stay in the circle. So I crouch-ran my way to the circle feeling very exposed but managing to keep to the trees and eventually got inside the circle, though as I was making myself comfortable in another bush there a was a BANGBANGBANG and I was shot down in a second by an unknown enemy and I also jumped about half a meter off my chair.

Basic example of me running to one of the final circles, spoiler alert I don't make it but this video is interesting as I can see the whole thing play out to finish from the view after I died, which is very useful when playing in groups so you can let your teammates know where the enemies that killed you are.

And THAT was my first game of PUBG (solo that is) the screen after I died displayed a blaring “better luck next time” text and all I could do then was go back to the menu and start the whole process again. Of course there is a few more things to the game too and things have changed a bit since I started playing in 2017, wow 2017 it really hasn’t been that long has it though it seems an age ago. There has now been a vast number of changes and improvements as per the usual way of games these days, especially ones that start as ‘Early Access’ on Steam. PUBG development started in March 2017 was once thought to be one of those games stuck in ‘eternal early access’ with things slowly being added over time slightly improving the game each time, and only 9 months later your mother gave birth to you patch 1.0 was live and the game was now officially a game or something I don’t know it was out of early access anyway. That may seem like a while but there are some games who have been in early access for years so the release was applauded.

You have to have your skydiving skills down pat

Playing PUBG now basically the gameplay is the same but a lot of changes and fixes have been implemented since the early stages as one would expect. It’s a pretty simple affair, you create your character then simply jump into the game. One thing I like about PUBG is that you have so much choice as to what you want to do, play solo, play in a team of 2 or 3 or 4 etc other options include which maps you would like and the option to play locked in First-person mode. As I detailed in my story playing solo is an exciting and tense affair for me at least as I try to avoid direct combat, though the best experiences come with playing with a squad. You can of course play with random teammates which can be fun but playing with your friends on Discord (or whatever other voice chat you prefer) is the best. My friends and I usually play third person and I actually like this the best as I like seeing my player run and jump and crouch and hide in the bushes and reload and shooting using third person looks awesome, it all looks very cool and you don’t get to see it much in multiplayer shooters which are usually all First-Person. Another reason is that I’m not ashamed to admit I third-person-peek which in case you haven’t done this already which I know you have, the act of positing your player character in cover then using the camera to look around where you wouldn’t be able to in reality. Yes it’s a bit suss but everyone does it and First-person only servers weren’t introduced till almost patch 1.0 so everyone did it.

Just taking a peek around the corner with my golden shotty

There are advantages and disadvantages of third and first person, first person gives you a more immersive experience and is more difficult due to you not having much visibility especially when prone so it makes the last few circles a bit more tense as almost everyone is in prone position and they can’t see each other. Third person allows you see around you much more easily resulting in you being noticed more easily especially when you are crawling through the grass thinking you are invisible. In first person you can admire your gun and all the rest of the item models, in third person you can admire yourself and all of your cool gear which is why I am seriously considering changing to a female model at some point. Other things you can do in the menu is customize your character, get rewards (more on these in the next section) view your stats and view replays of your previous games, the replay feature is very cool as it records your previous matches (up to about 20) and you can play them back in full 3D with a large assortment of replay editing tools inc the ability swing the camera around, slow down or speed up etc basically all the things you would come to expect for making some cool videos.

The main menu

Just like any popular game these days, PUBG has a form of the infamous loot crates. As you play matches in PUBG you acquire Battle Points (or BP) and these can be spent on two things, firstly if you are unhappy with your gender or appearance you can change it for a mere 3000 BP. I had never used this but after playing as a default guy for the entire period I decided to try out a female character, which is something I don’t usually do as I’m a bit uneasy with the whole thing but as I can change back at any time it’s okay. Though man these female models are skinny and I totally realise the irony of that statement, I mean after being the male models they look so damn small and skinny and their necks are so long and seem to turn at impossible angles and they look really frail and er well I’d better stop now before I get into trouble. Anyway, the other use for the battle points is to purchase the loot crates, there are different types of loot crates which have come out over time and contain player clothing and weapon skins. This is fine as a reward for playing though unfortunately some of the creates require you to purchase a key with real money to open and that just makes me sigh and realise that’s just how things are now.

At least I tried a female character, by the way this is the loadout screen where you can loot items, modify your weapons and view your character, as you can see I'm pretty well kitted up here

Previously the clothing was strewn around the floors of buildings as loot but now you are given a basic set of clothing to use at the start and if you want anything else you must spend your Battle points on crates which will give you a random item of clothing each time, most often things you already have. If you are like me and want to look unique, you can buy and sell your clothes and weapon skins on the Steam Marketplace, I had never used the Marketplace before as it was mostly used for games like CS:GO and Team Fortress but this I was actually interested in. What happens is your PUBG in-game items are connected to your steam account and you can view them in steam, I’d never really looked at this and found I had items from other games too which I promptly sold as I didn’t play the game and didn’t want them and then I had money to spend! Except it was Steam currency which you could only use within Steam, as I looked at the items on sale I balked at the price of some items like the Female Ivory School Uniform set which was going for upwards of $1000 I mean seriously who would pay that much and even if you sold it what could you look forward to? Never having to pay for steam games again? You’d hope they started selling pc parts or something on the marketplace. It didn’t take me long to notice a lot of the clothing came from the original Battle Royale film as you can see in one of the first promo images a girl wearing the ivory school uniform set itself and the tracksuit that Takeshi Kitano wore plus a range of other clothing items from the movie.

I have a rather large wardrobe

One thing I like about games (especially multiplayer games) is the ability to customise your character and being able to customise what you are wearing in PUB is great, it may sound silly but I like to roleplay a bit, I like to wear what would be appropriate for what I’m doing, which is parachuting out of a plane followed by a lot more physical activity like running and jumping through windows and handling weapons and explosives and crawling around and hiding in buildings and foliage. My outfit has changed obviously as more and more clothing becomes available and also specifically because of the inclusion of weather and the second map Miramar which is based in the desert, (more on that later) so had to change things up a bit. Though after much research on the PUBG Wiki and PUBG Showcase (which has an awesome outfit builder by the way) I think I got the right amount of comfort and camouflage. I went with some brown high-top sneakers, some khaki green cargo pants, a black long sleeved t-shirt, camo fingerless gloves, sunglasses and a brown leather cap, the sunglasses and cap can be removed of course depending on the weather and most of the time the cap will be removed anyway after you find any sort of helmet. Miramar being a desert map I change things up a bit with brown khaki cargo pants and a brown t-shirt and this is basically it for the maps as there is basically just forest, desert and jungle landscapes currently. Of course although I do my best to camouflage and blend in to the environment by wearing similar-coloured gear and not things like that freakin yellow tracksuit from the film that I see others wearing, it doesn’t really make much difference in A. Close quarters combat and B. basically whenever you move at all. As a friend of mine had said, your chance of being spotted is affected the most by you how much you move around, so you could be wearing a ghillie suit but if you’re running through an open field someone is going to notice you.

This is one of the special event modes in the game called 'War Mode' which allows you to respawn after you have been killed, this one gave you basically just a Ghillie suit and a Kar98 Sniper Rifle. There is a funny moment at 4:45 where soemone walks right over me and doesn't notice I am there heh

One of the things that has changed now is that clothes are no longer strewn around the buildings in the world, when you start the game for the first time now you are no longer forced to run around in your undies as you get a basic set of clothes and that’s it, anything else you must acquire from loot crates or on the steam marketplace. I am somewhat ashamed to say that I have spent about $42 US on clothing items as I have been trying to get the right look, I even purchased a brown leather coat for about $25 AU as part of the desert map outfit I was making that looked pretty cool but then I decided it was too hot so just wore a t-shirt. Of course there are still items of clothing strewn around the map that are regarded as ‘equipment’: Helmets and Vests provide protection while Backpacks and Belts provide more carrying capacity, the latter are not actually found in the world and are equipped by default. One of the most annoying things at the start of the game is finding all this loot then not having a backpack to store it all, sometimes when landing at quiet spots squad matches become a ‘looting party’ where everyone travels across a few locations looting as much as they can for about 20 mins unchallenged then we make our way to the next circle armed to the teeth only to be shot and killed in a few seconds by someone we never saw.

No we aren't doing a home renovation show this is an unofficially named 'loot drop party' where everyone drops loot they dont need then we all look through it and grab what we need.

That’s the reality of pubg, it’s sudden, it’s unforgiving, vests and helmets can protect you slightly and if you are shot but your squadmates are alive you enter a ‘downed’ state and can be revived by a squadmate but if the enemy finishes you off it’s all over red rovor. Dropping into high/risk/high loot areas is always a gamble and you get to know what areas are hot and cold from experience though generally if you want to avoid people you just avoid the cities and land far away from the flight path. One of the worst things that can happen is if you are playing in a squad and you get shot and they do the really annoying thing of finishing you off and then the rest of your squad survives and you have to sit there spectating, and give coaching or just do something else while your squadmates have fun heh. ‘Reviving’ is one of the things that make playing with others all the more enjoyable, if you get shot down you still have a chance especially if it was from miles away. Playing alone there’s this constant fear, it’s so quiet, you can hear distant gunshots and if you’re inside a buildings then hear footsteps coming from the bottom you have to stop yourself from freaking the fuck out, there is a button to sneak so you make no sound though it’s just so goddamn slow (and awkward to hold the caps button) and when you do get shot at man you jump like hell because you got the sound turned up so you can hear footsteps etc and then BANG. Playing with a squad is much less tense but still nervous and fun if you know danger could be coming around every corner and over every hill.

In the minivan with the squad hoping I don't get shot out, I like this shot heh

The Danger in PUBG isn’t just form other players of course the Playzone aka the ‘Circle’ is one of the biggest killers in the game, though there’s technically two of them. About two minutes after the plane passes over the dropzone the white circle appears, this is the “safe” area then the blue circle appears and starts shrinking the play area, but takes a leisurely 12 minutes to reach the edge of the white circle. If you happen to be caught outside the first circle you do take damage but only a small amount, it’s just a reminder for you to get going, though as the circles get smaller they do much more damage, especially if the blue circle has stopped moving and you’re still not in the play zone. The play zone shrinks at 8 different times, circles 1-4 are relatively tame with circles 5-8 have you sweating and questioning whether to cut all ties to your teammates and make a break for it. The play zone itself resembles a giant wall of blue electricity which is rather imposing though not as opposing as some other versions I’ve seen, it leaves you with a few dilemmas. Things like: “Do I keep looting or get going?” “Do I leave my buddy who has been downed to die or risk losing my life too” “Do we wait for that other squad we were trading shots with to run when the circle comes or do we make a break for it now” usually in these situations I choose to run first as I hate dying to the circle, it’s such a goddamn waste and disappointing.

Sometimes the circle can look pretty damn scary as it rapidly surges toward you

 Apart from the wall of death there are other mechanics in the game to liven things up, the Red Zone indicated by a red circle on the map appears as a warning that the area will be carpet-bombed though this rarely results in death if you are stuck outside, all you really need to do is get inside a building as apparently the bombs don’t penetrate through roofes (they built them strong XD) There are also random air drops from planes that fly past, these creates contain rare items such as the AWM Sniper Rifle, the 15x PM II Scope and the Ghillie Suit all of which can only be found in these crates. Because of this they are often dangerous to go near as they fall to the ground slowly by parachute with a blinking light then when they hit the ground a red flare comes up marking their position so basically every man and his dog would have seen it come down. I generally don’t go near drops unless it’s either right next to us or it’s in a hidden out-of-the-way place where I know theirs is not many players around, but you never know so it’s always risky.

An longish journey across Erangel where we loot up then keep travelling, clear out a shed and find a drop crate then make a final stand in the forest.

So now we get to the maps, the sprawling landmasses of both spoilt and unspoiled natural beauty with eerily abandoned and decayed villages, towns, industrial centres, military bases, farms, quarries, ruins, prisons, basically anything a small regional island (or area) would have. The alpha map Erangel was the first map set in the and possibly my favourite, I don’t know why, it’s an island in the black sea in an eastern european setting and is based off the Chernarus map from DayZ which itself was taken from Arma II, maybe it’s the beautiful scenery with forests and farmlands and mountains, it all just looks nice, the man-made structures though not so much. There’s really no indication why the island is uninhabited, there wasn’t in the film really either, there’s some story in the wiki page about the island was used for military testing then there was a rebellion by the island’s population then an electric field was used to keep rebellious towns contained but I guess it’s just a filler, there’s no single player campaign and we don’t really need to know why this is happening. A story I could believe though is that prisons are overpopulated so they decided to kill some off by dropping us all on an abandoned island that is abandoned maybe due to previous nuclear radiation danger and letting us hunt each other down in a picturesque wasteland.

And a nice sunset cruise to finish off a day's killin

The Erangel map is technically 8x8 miles though a large part is taken up by the ocean, getting around the island quickly means making use of the various vehicles lying around the same as everything else, yes in Erangel there are 4WDs, motorcycles (some with sidecars) dune buggies, boats and oddly a Dacia 1300. You know I love vehicles and using them is a lot of fun especially with friends though as you could imagine vehicles are loud and can be heard coming not to mention obvious to others as you zoom along the landscape though for the most part you’re safe, you’re going fast so you are hard to hit. Vehicles are necessary at times especially if you like to drop into the far edges of the map or find the circle is nowhere near where you landed, they are useful to travel to and from groups of houses looting as you go with all your buddies travelling together, convoys are also fun too. I am fond of the motorcycles though they are quite dangerous and prone to flipping where you could either knock yourself down or kill yourself easily in solo mode, usually when two vehicles with squads in meet it turns into a drive by shooting match with people often being shot out of the vehicle and left behind which happened all too often to me or everyone decided to bail out and take them on, bridges are often a haven for ambushes especially when the circle is across a bridge.

One of my favourite PUBG videos I have made, this was quite a roadtrip.

Erangel was ‘the’ map for the majority of PUBG’s life, it was only in December 2017 that Miramar came along. We were all very excited for a new map, out in the desert, a completely different landscape and it worked out well I think. There were concerns that Miramar was too much of a city-centric map, the desert was hilly in parts with some mountains and mesas if was a sniper heaven with little trees and lots of exposed land, fighting mainly took place in towns and villages of a South American country, though it seems more Mexican desert to me. One things for sure, there are quite a lot of open roads and highways with a sort of Biker/Mad Max feel to it and indeed the new clothing creates the Biker Crate and Desperado Crate did have that exact style of clothing which was pretty cool. And along with this there were a host of new vehicles including an off-road friendly Ford-esque pickup truck, a slow but roomy Volkwagon-esque van which can seat 6 though unless it was a special event wouldn’t really be needed, a Chevy-esque open topped muscle car and the weirdest looking jet-ski/dinghy hybrid I have ever seen called the “Aquarail” though it’s fun to use to zoom between the small amount of islands. Miramar is currently the only map that is not an island as the western edge is blocked by a high mountain range and the northern edge is blocked by a large steel wall which I think may be a reference to Donald Trump’s comments. After Miramar there was the introduction of weapon skins which was met with mixed feelings as now with weapon skin and clothing crates there were multiple versions and again some you actually had to pay to purchase a key to open even after you spent your battle points, this game was becoming like CS:GO and Team Fortress all the time.

The entourage in the Chevy on Miramar

Anyway so after that a new map Sanhok was announced, this new map would be different from the last two as it is much smaller 4x4 miles instead of 8x8 which would make for some much more action-packed and fast paced gameplay and immediately I wasn’t impressed. I liked pubg being big cause I liked landing in the middle of nowhere, travelling large distances across a huge landscape and hiding in houses with your squad scanning the fields and hills with the thrill of when you eventually seeing someone. I didn’t want the game to become a closed-in cityscape gun battle like I’ve seen happen with the Battlefield series and also games like Counterstrike that take it to the extreme with maps that are overly simplified, like a bunch of 4 pillars in a room and that’s the whole map, but anyway the map was going to be half the size not like a quarter so I guess that was ok. The landscape itself was this time going to be a mixture of Thailand and the Philipines which was pretty cool as the name ‘Sanhok’ is a mixture of the Thai word for fun: ‘sahnook’ and the Philipino word for chicken ‘manok’ so it basically means chicken-fun.

The current three maps in PUBG (Sanhok not to scale though you can tell it's smaller)

Sanhok is a typical tropical south-east-asian environment feature rolling green hills, lush jungle vegetation, rice fields, temples, beach resorts and traditional rural housing. It also has a heavy military presence with many military camps dotted around which reminds me more of Vietnam then Thailand or the Philipines as they have names like “Camp Alpha” and “Camp Charlie” and even some of the rural villages are called things like ‘Ha Tinh’ and ‘Ban Tai’ which to me sound kind of Vietnamese so there seems to be a very Vietnam War things going on with the naming but most of the scenery is reminiscent of the two countries as there is a large cave that you can parachute into from the plane similar to the Pham Lot cave in Thailand. Sanhok now has some new vehicles including the iconic Scooter and the Tukshai which you may also know as the Tuk-Tuk.

Ahh sunny Sanhok, one of my friends who is Thai says that some of the trees on the island aren't quite correct though

After Sanhok the Training Mode featuring a smallish island where there are facilities to practice practice pretty much anything you do in the game, shooting, driving on land or water, parkour, parachuting, throwing grenades etc It's pretty fun to mess around with friends driving around the test tracks and jumping around the parkour course. A new survival reward system has also been created allowing you to gain more clothing items for doing specific task for example getting kills with an SMG or surviving at least 20 mins.

I have a snipe at my friends at the Trainign island boatyard, you can the boating course further out and the 800m sniping range on the top right

In case you didn’t know PUBG is developed using the Unreal Engine 4, which made development faster than games such as ARMA and H1Z1, which were built with proprietary game engines. Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Green said himself that development was difficult when creating such huge maps as the engine was never built for that sort of thing. To be honest I think it looks great, it looks pretty damn realistic and despite the fact that I may hinder myself by playing with decent graphics I like to because the game looks so good and I don’t think it really affects me, I’ve played things like 7 Days to Die and to be honest they almost seem to have been made with the same engine, though 7 days to die seems so freakin depressing. Anyway the graphics look realistic, nuff said, there’s a bit of glitching but it’s fine, the game has had some major graphical updates since its inception and now looks much better, only after watching the Zero Punctuation review where Yahtzee mentioned that most of the models look like they were taken from the stock military/survival/fps and it’s kind of correct, as your character doesn’t really have any kind of personality their just a base multiplayer model that yells in pain on occasion but no change in facial features though who needs that really it’s a multiplayer game.

We are all very serious with our apples

I for one like the beautifully rendered, grass trees and bushes and hide in them quite a lot in fact a running joke about me is that I like to hide in a bush for most of the game but with graphics like this, why not? I’m also a big fan of the weather effects as at one point ‘evening’ ‘rain’ and ‘fog’ matches were introduced and man did I like the rain and fog ones. The noise of the rain muffled footsteps and even some gunshots and slightly limited visibility, fog was the best as it severely limited your visibility making sniping virtually impossible, but this was the same for everyone so it was fine. Bluehole actually removed the fog and rain weather after players started intentionally leaving the match which had this feature, which really sucks to be honest couldn’t they just leave it in? To combat this, the maps now have dynamic weather so they usually start off with clear weather then fog or a storm will roll in which is ok but I really like to dress for the occasion.

"Oh no and it was so nice and sunny when we first started too, oh well I guess they won't hear us coming over the thunder"

In case you didn’t know already my preferred playstyle is sneaking around and hiding and letting everyone else kill each other, though this does not get me any wins, or “Chicken Dinners” as they are called. I have heard of the saying before but it’s become like a sort of cliché of the game as when you or your squad defeats the last remaining enemy or team you are congratulated with a “Winner Winner Chicken Dinner” message though this doesn’t have any relation to anything really it’s just a quirk. So anyway my way of hiding in the bushes doesn’t work to well in the long run as when I get to the point where I need to actually spot and kill someone I am woefully inexperienced so much so that I found it a good idea to do some ‘hot runs’ by dropping into popular areas like the school on Erangel or Hacienda on Miramar where there is bound to be many others. When doing this you need to plan your landing area carefully and make sure you spot any guns or ammo very quickly as you’re often competing with others for loot so much so that you could run into a room and find nothing and your enemy runs into another room stacked with gear and weapons and it’s just your bad luck. But these kind of runs are great for practicing your player-vs-player combat.

There are hot drops in the middle of every map, and in Sanhok it was definately Paradise Resort, with the school for Erangel and Hacienda Del Patron for Miramar

Another good way to practice this is events, yes PUBG has had a fair few official events from simple changes like 8-man squads and weapon spawn changes i.e Crossbows and Ghillie suits, Shotguns only, 45.acp ammo weapons only to more complicated things like flare guns scattered around the map that can be used to summon armoured 4x4’s. And then there’s the game-changing War Mode, yes War mode is basically a static circle, (about the size of circle 4) at a random point in a map and there are planes constantly flying over the area so if you die you can respawn, it’s based in teams and the highest kill count wins. War mode is fun and good practice but it still makes me nervous as I don’t want the entire game to be like this. And then there’s the custom modes, yes you can customise the game to be almost anything you want, one of the weirdest modes I have played was vehicles only, no weapons, so it was basically just everyone driving around and trying to squeeze each other out of the final circle before it disappeared.  

Have you ever seen this many cars at the same place?

PUBG has grown into one of the most popular games in the world, as of 10/8/2018 it was Steam’s top game by player count  and has officially cracked the top 10 best selling video games ever and has seen a lot of publicity though not nearly as much as publicity as you know what but I’m kind of glad it isn’t as when the game you play is being featured on A Current Affair it’s not often a good thing. PUBG is definitely my favourite of the Battle Royale genre as it is now, I have never played Fortnite but I’m not a fan of the graphics and the generally more fast-paced gameplay though the building mechanic looks like a fun thing to mess around with.Totally Accurate Battlegrounds  was released from the same creators of Totally Accurate Battle Simulator as a Battle Royale clone with a very comical style complete with silly, locations, flailing dummy player characters and a large and ridiculous weapon arsenal, I played with my housemate and it was a lot of fun and I gotta say the TABG version of the ‘wall’ is the best I’ve ever seen. I haven’t tried out Ring of Elysium yet but I it looks ok. Lastly I’d never thought I’d say this as I am not a fan of Call of Duty but their upcoming ‘Blackout’ battle royale mode for Black Ops 4 looks pretty good. PUBG is also available on Xbox1 and interestingly Android and IoS too, I did install it on my tablet and have a play but frankly you know how I feel about using the tablet screen to play a game and it currently has no controller support, probably to stop others having an unfair advantage. Of course people have managed to use a controller through rooting their device, something I will never do. And even managed to get a keyboard and mouse working on their phone which leads to a massive advantage to someone who decides to do this and obviously the general playerbase is not happy as this tips the scales a lot when you're fumbling around with the touchscreen controls.

I like the angle on this shot

So if PUBG is that popular the developers must be doing something right, but you wouldn’t think that when hearing from the community, yes that’s right much like any kind of product or service, you often only hear bad feedback and complaints if anything at all and with a game as popular as PUBG this is a true as ever with one of the most toxic communities around, on Steam the reviews are “Mostly negative” if you trust that sort of thing. Yes PUBG has had its fair share of complaints including things I’ve never heard of such as claiming the game has bad ‘optimization’ which can be described in this way "Good optimization means that the game works at the same framerate across a wide range of hardware specs, including low-end configurations." So this explains why I see complaints from players super god-like high end system not displaying the constant 60fps framerates or whatever they are after but tbh the only time my framerate seems slow is when I’m locked in a gun battle with another player and that’s no time to check your fps counter. I admit that PUB from the start isn’t the most stable of games but you would expect something like this from a game in BETA. Though even when PUBG reached patch 1.0 and was officially released a lot of the issues were still there, things like not being able to see friends in the menu, invisible walls, rendering issues, graphical issues, framerate issues and a large one being server and connection issues as you often get random ‘server busy’ and ‘cannot connect’ etc screens but you seem to be able to overcome them by just trying again.

Fog, hard to see whats in the distance, but much better frames per second!

And then there’s the inevitable hackers the mostly Chinese hackers are well known within the community. While I’m sure there are people who hack from other countries it’s evident that a large number of the playerbase hail from China as many a time in the lobby you hear Chinese language-speakers, even in the Oceanic lobbies there were many. We didn’t really know the reason that they were here though we guessed that there were too many players (and hackers) in their own server so they decided to infect us. Thankfully there is a deathcam feature in PUBG so you can see exactly how you were killed however embarrassingly or illegally it was done and yes we saw each other being spotted through buildings and landscapes and the suspect’s aim snapping onto us then being shot at long range with no recoil and we can then choose to report them for all these abuses but it’s just sad that a game needs to implement this level of tools to combat hacking. More recently the oceanic servers seem to be dead as queuing in that region leading to wait times of almost half an hour if the game ever happens, I’m not sure whether it’s due to failing interest or a server problem as we have to resort to playing on the South East Asia servers which although we will have a ping disadvantage we are able to get a game quickly. PUBG Corp interestingly released a new ‘Fix PUBG’ campaign aiming to make the game better, something that has come a little too late for many players.

Eeeyowch, you can see the death cam and report options on the lower right, this guy was thankfully legit

Despite all of these issues PUBG is one of my favourite games still, it’s a great game to play with friends and I have had the good fortune of the game to be adopted at my (sortof) local large-scale Lan Lan-slide with not one but three comps, Squad, Solo and War Mode Duos. I don’t play it as much anymore as it seems everyone just wants to play Sanhok and not the old maps and I’m a bit sick of it though I will get back into it once the new Snow map is released. I will still always regard Battlefield 2 as my favourite Multiplayer FPS and Vietcong as my favourite combination of both story and multliplayer ever but this comes a close third though they are all different in gametypes, in Battlefield there was only conquest mode, in Vietcong we always played capture the flag  and PUBG is battle royale (most of the time anyway) If you’re looking to get in on the battle royale action then I can only recommend PUBG as the original of these games, I can’t recommend Fortnite or any of the others (with the possible exception of TABG) as I have not given them a go. Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds is all I need and I will continue to support it, well until the usual two reasons I leave multiplayer games, the playerbase dies or something better comes along, that’s just the world we live in.

JD

10/10

Things I liked:

Battle Royale is awesome!

I like hiding

The ever present sense of danger

Great game to play with friends

Choice to play alone or with one, two or 3 friends, no set number

Realistic graphics and environment

Character model and clothing customization

Very large play area, slow paced gameplay

Ability to rejoin game when game crashes.

Great death cam and replay feature

Leave and start a new game whenever you like, very minimal waiting times

Things I didn’t like:

Many many bugs and issues

Many hackers

Mostly unpleasant community

Oceanic servers no longer playable

Having to purchase keys with real money to open some loot boxes.

Getting killed early on then having to wait for your squadmates to finish.

Can’t we all just be friends?

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