The Past and times of Yore: Grand Theft Auto 4‏

Also Known As: GTA 4, Grand Theft Auto 4, GTA IV
Also on: PS3, XBOX
Genre: Third-Person Action Adventure
Publisher: Rockstar Games
Developer: Rockstar North
Release Date: December 3, 2008

I’ve been wanting to express my love for Grand Theft Auto 4 for a while now, although recently it’s been kind of muted because I’ve been reading some old Official PS3 magazines and gosh darn it do they sing it’s praises or what, over several pages even. But even so I can say that this title brings out the best in games, storyline, gameplay, graphics and possibly multiplayer. It has that sort of charm that Half-Life 2 did but just nowhere near as serious. This game is about fun and I love the way I can do many things that I can’t (or shouldn’t) do in real life, I’ve played it through for about the 4^th of 5^thtime now, almost as much as I did GTA3, and believe me it’s still as good even after a few times through. GTA4 was one of the GTA series that I didn’t really pay much heed to when it was coming out. Come to think of it I guess I didn’t pay much heed to the hype for the first GTA or GTA2 either, this title was really just a case of “oh yeh GTA4 is out (for a while now) I’ll have to get it”, and wow once I did, I couldn’t put it down. There hasn’t been many games that have made me give WoW a break, namely Minecraft and partly Dragon Age Origins but this was definitely one of them. I did a previous post regarding the two new content DLC expansions earlier that was mainly about The Ballad of Gay Tony and Just brushed on The Lost and the Damned but this one I think is old enough to be under the Past and Times of Yore heading. I may do another post of the DLC packs when I replay them though.

The Lost and the Damned

The Ballad of Gay Tony

The storyline for GTA4 is pretty straightforward, you’re a Serbian immigrant named Niko Bellic with a dark and complicated past and you’re going to see your cousin in Liberty (New York) city, and the usual action and drama film shtick ensues with the story missions, side missions, friends to meet, random people, car races and believe it or not grand theft auto. I enjoy the way you’re just dumped in this new city and start off with nothing, the game doesn’t exactly have a point system but you do have money as a currency, throughout my times through the game I never bothered trying to get %100 as this is a tedious not fun task, I’d rather see how much money I could amalgamate through the entire game, and that’s really been my only goal each time I’ve played (similar to Red Dead Redemption) the game but with most games I play, my favorite part is the start, where you start off with nothing and everything is so damn simple, which is partly why I replay most of my games at least once.

Niko Bellic: Our (semi) honorable hero

Vigilante work, one of the many ways to earn some sweet dough

The first thing that struck me when I entered GTA4 for the first time, was both the graphics and physics system. The game looked almost nothing like San Andreas, the blocky and bad textures and the polygonal models were no more, of course we can obviously attribute this to the graphical upgrade over time, as the previous three GTA games were for the PS2. I bought the PC version of GTA4 because at that time I did not have a PS3, this caused both some minor problems and advantages. The former being that I could not use my trusty PC gamepad as there was only really calibration for an XBOX360 controller even on the PC version so I had to use the keyboard and mouse which had some adverse effects such a no pressure sensor buttons or joystick to use so when moving normally it actually defaulted to walking not running and the only way I could go faster was to sprint, which obviously has led to some funny ragdoll shenanigans. This got even worse when driving as it meant I can’t turn slowly it’s either full turn or I have to tap the keyboard to inch slowly which gets even worse in the fact that I always have my foot flat down on the pedal so to speak wherever I go, this leads to some erratic and dangerous driving because quite frankly I have no choice but to be a hoon, which now I think about it suits me just fine. I am a borderline car enthusiast after all and I say borderline it’s mainly because I call myself a car enthusiast but in reality I drive an automatic car and really don’t know that much about them, but when a game let’s you scream around in a car, bike, boat or even helicopter with almost no consequences whatsoever it’s hard not to let loose.

Of course playing on PC does have its advantages as well, a big one being that you are able to use the mouse, and we all know using a mouse to aim is a lot easier than using a joystick, of course some can claim auto target is just as good, but the other major reason is an amazingly powerful but tiny little tool called simpletrainer which is probably the no.1 reason why I don’t play GTA4 on the PS3 even when my brother got a copy from his friend. The simpletrainer, made by sjaak327 is a immensely useful little tool for hacking the game, just press F3 and it brings up a menu where you can do almost anything you want, get invincibility, no wanted level, infinite ammo, all the usual, plus teleportation, vehicle, npc and object spawning and customizing, internet access from anywhere and a hundred other fun or useful tools to screw around with the game, I’ve played the game so much using it, I really just can’t play without it, whether it’s the incredibly useful invincibility or teleportation options or even just spawning, cleaning or fixing your favorite car makes the game experience so much better. Of course some small minds would call this cheating, and yes in ways it is cheating, but it’s cheating in singleplayer and there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s the same small minds that ridicule my way of playing some games with invincibility on but pretending it isn’t, But that’s a matter for another time.

Anyway as I was saying a couple of paragraphs ago I really enjoyed the new physics and ragdoll features available, when you ran into someone, you knocked them over and if they have a coffee cup or something in their hand they dropped it, in fact they dropped it for a lot of things, if you simply ran past them they’d drop their coffee cup as if the whole city always had some coffee cup they continued to carry around even after they had finished drinking it and kept a ever so loose grip. Apart from that you could lightly push people over with your car, barge them out of the way on foot or watch the ragdolls fly as you threw a grenade into a group of enemies or even the simple way that “Niko” (the game’s protagonist) steps over or onto things rather than just stepping through them my personal favorite was when you and a friend got drunk and you could only barely control your character from falling over everything. The whole new physics thing was a dramatic change and whether you bumped, pushed, punched, ran over, shot or blew up people it’s always a hoot to watch.

Damnit that's my craaaaaaaack! (you're actually controlling Niko during this btw)

As much as I liked all the running around and shooting, one of favorite aspect was surprise, surprise the cars. The first being as I said before the way you can drive how you want with no regard for your or other peoples safety, I can forgo the handling because this isn’t exactly the type of game where handling really matters that much. The best thing about the cars in GTA is that most of the models look really cool, and not cool in a way as they look real or graphically good and not cool as in just the Lamborghini and Aston Martin models but most of the normal looking models somehow looked cooler then the cars you saw on the road everyday, cars which looked like new or old celicas or lancers but somehow looked slightly different and there was a reason for that, the cars in GTA4 aren’t officially licensed so they have different names i.e. a Subaru WRX lookalike is called a “Sultan” so unfortunately my will to try and find these certain cars in real life is fairly futile. Though the cars are good, a lot can be said about the small number of bikes available in the game. The bikes in GTA4 are much less prominent obviously than in the Lost and the Damned DLC, but all the ones you need are there, from the super fast NRG9000 to the Vespa-like Faggio and wow has the physics and handling got better, I personally like to the chopper-like Hellfury which when riding you bounce along realistically when you hit bumps then get back to that smooooooooth cruisin’ despite the fact that I have no choice but to permanently go full throttle and I have to jerk the bike when turning because of keyboard button simplicity.

The Sultan and Merit, both close to real life cars, but not quite identical

I have to say a quick word about the multiplayer, I did try to get on and play the multiplayer a few times, and there was a few modes I did like “Team Mafiya Work” was where you were in teams or“gangs” and you each had to complete missions that were sent to you by phone, one quite hilarious one was the Mafia boss had cut the heads of his enemies and had left them in the city, you had to find them and throw them in the nearest body of water. Other than that my favorite was the races, multiplayer races in GTA are quite crazy as you’d expect and can be done in any vehicle, yes ANY vehicle I’ve raced on vespas, boats and even choppers, yes there were 4 of us zooming across treetops and ducking under bridges narrowly missing each other in passenger helicopters. Sadly I didn’t give the multiplayer as much of a go as I had liked I guess this was because I suppose the game was more popular on PS3, as the last 3 had been for the PS2 but lacking a PS3 at the time I had no choice, I would have really liked to experiment more with it especially in the Ballad of Gay Tony expansion where multiplayer skydiving and base jumping looks incredibly cool but due to me having other things to play multiplayer this kind of took a back seat and I only dabbled in the multiplayer when I was currently doing the singleplayer I also had a fairly frustrating try at LAN but I myself was not able to join in, making me quite annoyed.

Time to burn it up in times square (I was the king of boat racing)

I haven’t quite covered all of GTA4 here but I think it’s a sufficient display of my thoughts and appreciations of the game, in my opinion it’s definitely worth playing through at least once, just to appreciate the gameplay, the graphics and the storyline. it doesn’t have quite the crazy off-road and airborne antics of San Andreas or the make-it-to-the-top storyline that Vice City had, but it’s a hell of an improvement over them in most regards, not to mention GTA3 which was set in the same city as well as having a similar story. GTA4 is one of those games that deserves a place on my shelf of greatness but unfortunately I’m not really sure what to expect next, whether the next GTA is going to flabbergast me even more than this one.

JD

This close too hoonerfication

Minecraft Creations: Submarine, Zeppelin, The Temple of Water Love and a brief contemplation of creation‏

Salutations all,

I’ve been thinking about what I create in Minecraft lately, and it’s strange but I feel that I’m not quite building to my full potential sometimes, or maybe the project I‘m doing I’m not quite happy with. Don’t get me wrong, I loved making and rebuilding such structures as my plane and grey tower that’s probably due to the fact that I was able to make these things bigger and better in singleplayer in fact that’s probably the main reason. Most of my creations are made first in multiplayer and then again in singleplayer, because of this a lot of them are fairly smaller scale and more rushed the first point being that whichever server you happen to be on, one map is almost never there forever, and pretty soon when a new Minecraft release comes around, the old map goes out the window, I mean it may be available for download afterwards but you’d really rather have something that others are going to be able to see (which is partly why I made this blog).

The second point being I am sometimes in a rush to finish things cause I want to make sure they are there long enough for people to see them because of the ever present factor that your creation may not be there in one piece or at all when you log back in. It is of this reason that I find myself planning concepts which are small but unique and imaginative then something huge and complex, and especially with me heading back to the dangerous, crowded and merciless gang warfare rampant cesspool that is Mikeland Factions, and you can bet your golden apple that anything I’ll be bothering to create will be very temporary indeed. But more on that at another time.

 I recently downloaded the 1.7 and 1.8 Tribalfield maps and realized now that my usual theory of taking screenshots in multiplayer of my creations in order to document them for reference and creation in singleplayer was sort of redundant if I actually already had a singleplayer map to showcase them in. I’d always been proud of having all my previous multiplayer (and other purely singleplayer creations) all in the same area kind of like an outdoor showcase. This map that I’m using however is from Minecraft 1.4 if I remember correctly or perhaps even earlier, so although most of the features are carried over or change themselves, but this is not true with the actual geographical features of the map. As most probably all of you now know the Minecraft 1.8 release brought major geographical changes to the landmass including large deep oceans, swamps and ravines, and if I happen to use any of these new geographical features as a direct part of my building I will have no way of doing them on my current singleplayer “showcase map”.

The irony with this is these three creations is that the ones which were mad in the multiplayer 1.8 map weren’t built in or around the new geographical features and the one that as created in the singleplayer map was made with one exact feature in mind. I think that if I am going to build in multiplayer with the new features in mind I’m going to have to trust the owners of whatever server I’m playing on to always have the old map up to download every time there’s a total wipe, but of course I may not have the same close interaction on other servers as we did with NorC. I would like to keep my outdated showcase map because I think it’s great to have all your treasured creations been built sometimes bigger and better in the much easier conditions that singleplayer provides and be able to fly around and how all of your friends.

So without further ado, my latest creations

Submarine

I’d always wanted to make a submarine but was always kind of hindered by the level of the water etc it was either too shallow or the really deep parts just weren’t wide enough. As I could see from the Tribalfield 1.8 map the oceans did seem to be a lot bigger, you could paddle along in your boat for quite a long time even losing sight of land altogether, I had heard that the oceans in 1.8 were very big, though I wasn’t sure If they had been like this from earlier versions, but unfortunately due to me making this at a LAN strangely enough it was on my singleplayer map where I could only find a small bit of water deep enough and also close enough to the rest of the creations. I did have to do a bit of dredging the bottom but I still ended up making the actual sub sit just 1 block under the water, due to it becoming so damn dark in the water itself which I hope is rectified in a future update, and maybe add some fish, y’know? Squids really are a strange addition, I won’t go on a tangent with this but frankly if I was going to be designing a new sea creature wouldn’t it technically be one of the most basic and numerous of all of them? But I suppose what I see (or can’t really see) under the water doesn’t really matter in the long run. 

The majority of the ship was made out of steel blocks including my ridiculous looking propeller, a resource which would be almost impossible to obtain such a substantial amount in multiplayer. It was a fairly long process of underwater building then filling and removing the entire interior with dirt blocks in order to get rid of the water, a process of which could have been time consuming with only about 20 seconds breath available fortunately on singleplayer I could remove this limit, I was never in a water tribe on the Tribalfield server, but if I was, this was the kind of thing I would build. My friend who happens to be very knowledgeable of the world war vehicles said to me that it must be a Russian sub because I had for some reason made the bridge (the part that sticks out at the top) at the rear instead of nearer to the front, I never knew this before, но я думаю, теперь я.

The redstone torch farm powering the engine, they don't really do anything though, apart from move the piston.

These two structures were built on the Tribalfield 1.8 map which was the last one before the fall. The interesting thing this time is I have downloaded the map from the now defunct Tribalfield website so I have a kind of dilemma whether I actually remake the things in my main ‘showcase’map or just leave them saved in the 1.7 and 1.8 maps an option which I’ve sort of always had but never worried about because I half knew a new map was coming. Anyway these screenshots are from the multiplayer maps, so whether I decided to remake them again is a decision I’ll just have to ponder

Zeppelin and Tower

Ahhh the Led Zeppelin, another of the things I’d always wanted to create in Minecraft, this one isn’t as big as others that are out there, I was just going for relative simplicity and also proper size ratio, although even as big as the balloon is it may have still not been big enough by today’s standards to be able to fly, you’ve seen the Goodyear blimp, there’s really not that much of a cockpit on those things compared with the gargantuan balloon that’s keeping it suspended, but we could blah blah physics, aviation mumbo jumbo all we want. Most of the bottom‘gondola’ part of the Zeppelin is made out of wood, though I did add some nice new iron bars for the railings. The balloon itself you could imagine I was meaning to make all out of wool, which is the best alternative for whatever the hell zeppelin balloons are made out of, but after exhausting x_xJDx_x and googleboy’s entire supply of wool I calculated that I’d have to shear an entire island of New Zealand, in order to have enough wool for the whole thing, so understandably I had to switch to cobble, mainly because I had used wood for the majority of the bottom gondola.

On a rather amusing note I logged back into the server a few times and found monsters inside the balloon as expected, but I also found that sometimes there were random single blocks missing, it took me awhile to realise that it wasn't griefers it was actually Endermen.

The ‘Zeppelin Tower’ and “Hoegarden”was pretty much made just to fill up my space in my friend Joro’s claim and plus we always have that annoying 1.8 aspect of hunger which has led to a lot more farms then usual sprouting up over the map. The tower was relatively simple, made of bricks with a spiral staircase and a standing platform that the zeppelin pulled up next to I also decided to use more iron bars for railings. The tower itself was built on top of the hole I had dug out of the ground in order to dismiss the large amount of cobble needed for the balloon.

Templo del amor, del agua (The Temple of Water Love)

This creation came from when I was on Kiwi island with mib44 and Lupidoo, I had finally decided to make my own residence and really wanted to use stone bricks  as a main building material, I decided to write the name in Spanish as "The Temple of Water Love" sounded kind of weird. I'm not actually sure where this idea came from I think its was just another creation which I would do if I were in a water tribe, (similar to the submarine) I'd never been in a water tribe (whose main ability was underwater breathing) I spent most of my time in Spirit tribe with no falling damage which was quite useful and is why I ended up making so many things in the sky. It took me awhile to realise this temple could actually be the opposite of the 'Lava Temple' I had previously created. I especially like the hole in the roof and the way the rain comes through it into the well below.

As you can see from the pictures, I had intended to make my dwelling below with glass on the roof in order to be able to lookup through the ocean and let some light in, unfortunately though this went horribly wrong, as instead of making the rooms behind the temple under the sea bed, I had accidentally made the rooms in front of the temple so they were under the actual island.. This ended up with me having to greatly extend the moat and practically dig out a part of the island and let the ocean in resulting in a bridge style entrance. I also had to dig out the dirt surrounding the temple so it looked even. You could say this was my first project that went horribly wrong but turned out ok in the end.

That's it for now folks, stay tuned for some adventures in Mikeland a some musings on the 1.8 update and possibly the ever-looming 1.9.

JD

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No sé qué zepelín globos están hechos de, pero es evidente que no sería de piedra

Minecraft Adventures: Tribalfield Minecraft Server, the community, the grief and the accomplishments‏

I have always felt that I had made this previous post prematurely, as I was sure there was more Tribalfield to come after then as much as I wanted to go back to WoW, but this message came so suddenly. I had only got home from work and look oddly at the various posts on facebook before my suspicions were realized, there were suspicions about the server closing down in the past but they were shrugged off with the revamping to 1.8 but not long at all after that we were confronted with this message

I have to admit I wasn’t really sure how to react. I had nothing against NORC for this, he ran the server at his own expense, trying to make the experience better for us all, with a small amount of donations and help from a few of us over the time and I respect the decision his decision to shut down the server. Tribalfield had always been a great place from the good and the bad times there was always a very diverse bunch of people on there which each of us got to know sometimes quite well. But we all know that the number one factor that made tribalfield so great was the community (which we have facebook to thank for that since the loss of the forums) we all played on the server and we all discussed, shared and argued about both Tribalfield and Minecraft as well as anything else we wanted to bring up this kind of community wouldn't be possible without a medium to properly communicate or a player base that was overwhelmingly large, everyone knew everyone else, (well mostly) and it didn't take long for them to be added to the facebook group family.

As many of us have I have saved some screenshots of the 1.7 and 1.8 maps as a last testament to the Tribalfield server feel free to comment if some of these creations are yours. Also I apologize if I didn't get everything I couldn't really find much on the 1.7 map that wasn't griefed

1.7 Map 

I didn't get much from here as I couldn't find that much and most of it had been severely griefed.

What remained of Zocrowe Island

Wretchedgiraffe's Castle

Arena

Frewer's Plateau

Cool castle

Awesomley large castle good job to whoever made this

1.8 Map

Cfelths & Themasses claim

Joro's Claim 1 (with my Zeppelin :D)

Joro's Claim2

Joro's Claim 3

Acal's house: Well done on this I really like the design, best house I'd seen on 1.8

Joro's Claim 4

Joro's Claim5

Random Plateau

Random square plateau

BattleArena near spawn

Cliff near Spawn

The area that was to be Melbourne...

Me, Bailey and Lupidoo's Kiwi Island

Gravelicious! XD

Not even NPC's are safe...

Random villiage

I swear this is WretchedGiraffe's dirt house

BIG Pyramid, good job whoever made this

Inside of pyramid

When you look at some of the things that were done, I wonder how one person could do it, but then I remember that It wasn't always just one person, it was sometimes lots of people co-operating and building, and that's how (pardon my french) shit gets done, that's how friendships are formed and to half quote Meatloaf: that's how Minecraft dreams come true.

Now for a bit of deja vu ...

So without further ado I'd like to again thank everyone I've met in my time on the tribalfield server or just on facebook, you've all helped to make mine and everyone Minecraft experience richer and I hope to see you all in the future from one server to the next.

With Thanks again to: (in order of appearance and apologies if I miss anyone)

mystic_duck, Mickle, wagapm, chaote, angrathar, Carceous, harro, Kieran_Cahill, Andreasonline, Dr_Uhhhh, Da_Seano, jabbcore, FletcherHD, PresidentFreeman, danielstiglec, elboomer, Jorobinson, captain_pugwash, Frewer, TheFiendish, JeniusJJ, Ventelation, rawrbleh, WretchedGiraffe, codzombie, Arycama, cashman, cfelths, themasses and my mysterious other: x_xJDx_x

And of course: kakashi, BaileydeBortoli (mib44), lupidoo, laver, WarpageHD, Atomic_Sandwich, Dickdatson and last but not least: NORC whose hard work and dedication made this server so great.

And to think that we did it all in a game that hasn't been fully released yet, needles to say there will be plenty more Minecraft to come.

Keep in touch....

JD

From one world to the next my friends....