Well guys, today's update is a special one. You lot won't notice the difference - unless you are keeping track of how many typos I make, I guess, in which case you'll probably notice quite a few more than usual - but I'm gonna try and squeeze this one out before I have to go to Christmas lunch and eat all the food and play with my nephew's presents. Will I succeed? Let's find out!
Last update we decided to move up northeastwards, only to find suffering, pain, and the mysterious loss of 4000 creds (seriously, where the fuck did they get to?). This time we're probing southwards, hoping to run into robots or at least nick something good from whoever may live there. First we stop off at starport Solonar, which you'll be excited about since we haven't been there as of yet:
(fun fact: after you get in a fight, the white/grey tones become much brighter in general. Compare that shot with the ones at the start of the last update).
Well, that's what it looks like. I reckon it's the coolest looking station of the lot of them, personally. Anyway, we don't stick around - we refuel the BLOBFIST and then move on.
A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY:
I should probably point out that I'm using different terminology to the game when it comes to describing space. The game considers a sector to be one of these:
ie. a collection of suns and whatnot. However, I consider
this to be a sector:
ie. a collection of 'sectors', or subsectors as I have been referring to them.
Now, I know I should just use the game's terminology to avoid confusion (and I have referred to subsectors as sectors in the past in order to avoid repetition), but this game is so influenced by Traveller I just can't help myself. I've mentioned Trav before, but just to remind you guys, it's a P&P RPG, the first great sci-fi one - it came out in 1977 and is still getting new editions (the last one was Mongoose Traveller in... 2007? Sure I could pick it up off my shelf and check but meh. It was in the last few years, anyway). It also enjoys the dubious distinction of having a canon setting which has devotees who put guys like DraQ to shame, despite the fact the original edition was, like D&D, a collection of rules and tropes you were meant to apply to a world (well, galaxy) of your own creation. Computer game wise, it's most famous son is probably Elite, although the second edition (Megatraveller) got a game of its own. One of the worst RT combat systems ever sicked up by man, by the way.
Anyway, hark at me carrying on like I've played it! I hope to rectify that next year (using the classic rules, if I can convince my group to use something so antiquated), but all I really want to say is that I took my sector/subsector distinction from Traveller. If there's one on my HD I'll upload one of the setting supplements (probably The Solomani Rim) to Rapidshit or a similar service, then I'll put it here so you guys can see what I'm talking about first hand. If there's not a link then you're out of luck I guess (sorry dudes, seems I don't have any sector guides. Maybe some other time).
OK I'm finished talking about Traveller now, you can start paying attention again. Hey, coincidentally, those last two shots correspond exactly to the first subsector we visit. Here's what the system scan looks like:
The first planet we visit is that shitty little moon thing there. It has an unbreathable atmosphere but I get over myself and run a quick scientific investigation anyway. I do the same thing with the third planet, the one that is vaguely Mars-esque in the bottom right. Of more interest is the second planet, which is a high tech human world. Naturally we run an espionage mission:
Auspicious! Didn't have to fight for it or anything. Next up we decide to see if there's anything we can do for them (this game truly is XTREME! Bioware's faggy games make you do fetch quests for people
before you rip them off), which is to say we press D to bring up the Cargo Pickup/Delivery interface.
I said before about doing fetch quests for people? Yeah. Basically the 'trading' interface amounts to a planet either offering to sell you something (either some raw materials or, occasionally, fuel, which is useful for those long trips) or telling you that they're after something or other. If you have that something or other you can sell it to them for a reasonable sum. So, yeah, get the stick boy. Woof woof.
As a general rule, the questing in this game isn't exactly imaginative. Generally the missions are very much 'what they say on the tin' and then there's this little lot. Still, I can't whinge about this too much since the core of this game is combat and resource management and I think it does all that pretty well really. I also love the atmosphere - this is definitely helped by the massive playfield. So sick of space games (hi Orgasm) that feel small.
To their credit, these quests are entirely optional and there's no hand holding - if you want to complete a trading run you're going to have to fart around until you find the substance planet Tom, Dick or Harry is after all by yourself. In this case, this lot don't have anything for sale, but they do want Plutonium (this seems to be a popular choice and so you do have to wonder what sort of people are in charge of these planets). I make a note of that in case we find some later and move on to a new subsector, down and to the left:
Plenty of places to check out here.
Just a quick note: yeah, sun colour seems to make a difference as to what sort of planets you're likely to find there. Red suns tend to have quite a few more uninhabitable worlds (planets with Surface: Inferno in their status screens, and stuff like that) and very few high tech, inhabited areas. Blue suns seem to have richer pickings while white ones are somewhere in the middle.
NOW, before anyone takes that as gospel (although if anyone does, it's nice you think so highly of me! I'm flattered) that would be a very unsicentific conclusion based solely on findings from this one expedition (well, that and more regurgitated 'truths' from my previous experience with the game). Not only that but I may be suffering from a bad case of confirmation bias too - I do tend to skip over the red suns since I don't expect to find much of value there.
On the other hand, the comparative rarity of each kind of sun (if you look at the sector maps I've posted, you'll probably notice that there tend to be quite a few red suns compared to the other kinds) does bear out my conclusion. Well, sort of, I figure it makes sense that you make richer, more desireable worlds rarer, right? Everyone thinks like me.
Anyway here we are again, visiting subsector (27, 22):
First we check out the blue sun.
Nice spot. Seems there's a few planets of inhabitable size/colour there - generally if a world is mostly blue and white and of a moderate size, there's a decent chance something lives there. The first one we visit is the one furthest southwards, though.
It turns out that this is a low tech 'Avain' - the devs of this game have something of a penchant for typos of the transposed letters variety - world. This is first contact with aliens of a type not mentioned in the manual, which is very exciting until you realise that who lives on any given planet makes hardly fuck all difference. Anyway we scientific investigation the place then visit the natives to see if they're after anything in particular:
That's what it looks like when they want to sell you something. 87 creds isn't much so we buy their crap and get out of there, without bothering to check whether they want anything. The next planet, coincidentally the one highlighted in the system shot above, is our next stop. We steal a mystery object from them James Bond style - they tried to fight us for it but Maggot saw them coming and they found nothing but ghosts - and they tried to sell us some fuel (20 units/150cr) but we didn't need it so we declined. The last world we bother to check out here is the one that looks exactly like the one we were just on, but it was so boring I didn't even take notes about it. Let's get the hell out of here.
Coincidentally, here's what you can do on each planet type:
- Uninhabited/No tech: scientific investigation
Low tech: scientific investigation, cargo pickup/delivery
High tech: scientific investigation, cargo pickup/delivery, espionage mission
As you can see, the higher the tech level the more potentially lucrative a visit might be.
NB The Visit Unique Location command can only be invoked, as far as I can tell anyway, when you have confirmation that something is actually there through your mad info gathering skills (since the game apparently randomly generates co-ordinates for these locations, it's pointless just guessing anyway).
Our next destination is the white sun in the same subsector.
Our blue and white standard fails us, though it transpires that little white planets have people on them too:
They have nothing for us but they do want Nobellium. Duly noted.
Anyway you are probably all bored shitless by now. I'm not sure why you'd want to read a blow by blow account of every shitty little planet we visit but I've written it now so hell if I'm going to start again, especially since my self-imposed Christmas lunch deadline is looming. Fortunately the game decides to pick a fight with us at this point so we can break the monotony:
As you can see, it's a pirate scoutship all by his lonesome. I choose to imagine that he's one of those jerks who kicked my arse in the fifth update and decide to exact some bloody revenge.
Because he's all by himself I figure it might be a good idea to try and board him, in order to claim the bonus bounty. The shot above is at the end of the first round's movement phase, and as you can see jerkhole there wouldn't let us get too close to him. Unfortunately for him he's in our 'sweet spot' where Torsten, Bee and Orgasm's firing arcs coincide. We slam him for (hits/damage) 3/90, 4/97 and 3/89 damage respectively, which is not too bad at all. I bet cockface is bitterly regretting his decision to reject our very kind offer to take all his money and let him go (plead, tribute).
That said, he doesn't wise up next round either, refusing us again. We get much closer to him this round, but Torsten obliterates him with the first barrage. Here's a shot of Orgasm wasting ammo:
It was a bit of a shame really since next round we would have been able to get aboard. Never mind, we'll be able to claim the bounty for destroying him.
At this point I decide to stop taking planet by planet notes, which was a very sensible move on my part since I am now unable to artificially lengthen my updates by writing about every little thing we did. I surprise myself sometimes. Anyway I note that the next 'few' planets are fit only for scientific investigations - from what I remember, these were mostly worlds around red suns. Soon enough, though, we meet a couple of freighters.
Now, just like in personal scale combat, in space you get a chance to avoid combat if you can successfully 'scan' your new pals. Unlike in personal combat, it is not at all clear what skill is used to do this, if any. I don't even care to guess at this point, either - it'd be nice to believe it is determined by the Pilot's Code Breaking skill just so the Pilot needs another skill other than Pilot, but that's just wishful thinking.
Anyway, this time we are not thrown straight into combat but we are asked if we want to engage with the 'friendly' craft. Remember da plan?
If you don't, yes, is we do want to get stuck in this time so we can try and extort money. Oscar opens dialogue with the freighters and we inform them (politely - ask, tribute) that they should hand over their valuables or they'll regret it. They decide they'd rather regret it, a fact which may have a lot to do with the fact we never did bother to fix that hole in our hull. After a little thought I decide a fucking good kicking will change their minds:
That's Bee popping the first one in the first firing phase. The other one is off screen, out of range so he can't bother us while we deal with his mate. The next couple rounds involve us jockeying for position - to avoid return fire - and demanding tribute from dimwit there. He decides that he'd rather die, though:
So Bee obliges. I would rather have had the money but if you have to grab some collars in order to make a point, then you grab those fucking collars, you know?
With that we check out a new subsector, and at this point I really need to go get ready for lunch so I guess I failed my challenge - I might have made it if my stupid dad hadn't rung me. Sorry dudes, I guess you'll get to read this later tonight or tomorrow depending on what we're doing after luncheon. So close to the end as well!
BROS I AM BACK! On the 29th. I do apologise for the delay. I would like to pretend that it was related to a fulsome social life over Christmas and the ongoing emigration saga but I can't. I am a ronery individual and the whole moving thing has been going surprisingly smoothly. The real reason for my tardiness is, and I am being dead fucken serious here, is that I spent the past few days on a massive sugar high, because I was given a lot of chocolate for Christams. So naturally I ate roughly one and a bit boxes of the stuff each day since then, until yesterday when I finally ran out. So if I wasn't all twitchy and in no fit state or mood to write anything I was all headache-y and nauseous and in no fit state or mood to write anything. And yes, I know precisely how pathetic that is.
However, I wasn't entirely unproductive! I beat my personal best scores for ESP Ra.De. AND DoDonPachi when I was all wired (2000000-something and 599060 respectively which isn't great in the scheme of things but under normal circumstances I have all the reflexes of a rotten sloth so I am proud of myself nevertheless) and I played three new games, which I will review for you now:
Eden's Aegis: Doujin bullet hell shoot 'em up. Kawaii neko witches as protagonists (I don't know what neko means). I discovered X.X a few months ago when I downloaded Blue Wish Resurrection Plus off some shitty French site while trying to find a decent PC shooter and I just about wet myself. It had an elegant scoring mechanic, a metric fuckton of bullets and a level of challenge that's about right for someone of my abilitiies so naturally I loved it. Later I discovered Eden's Edge which was vaguely similar but had a witch as heroine instead of a spaceship. Aegis is X.X's latest game and I think it may be their best, too. The level of challenge is a fair bit higher than in BWR+ and EE, for one thing (I can't 1cc this in Heaven mode... yet) and I absolutely love the fact that responsibility for clearing the screen of bullets is now placed in the player's hands. Did I mention it's freeware?
Here's the website.
Ace Combat X: Arcade flight 'sim' on the PSP. Fucking fantastic game. Shame it's not on the PC since I've been crying out to play something like this with my joystick. Anyway this is quite reminiscent of the action-y flight sims you can't get anymore (as an aside it's interesting how some genres have the opposite problem to RPGs, which is that a prospective player has nothing to cut his teeth on. If you're interested in flight sims but don't want to deal with engine lag or whatever realistic bullshit those games have which I didn't just make up then sorry, you're fucked. Since I'm avoiding actually talking about Star Command now I might as well mention the security guard at my former workplace, who seriously thought that having a $700 joystick and getting out books on XML so you could correct a couple of minor distance related errors in some MS Flight Simulator 2008 definition file - or some such thing - doesn't make one a nerd at all. Not even a little bit. HOWEVER, owning some 1e AD&D books is like having a bloody pocket protector and sellotape round the nose bit on your glasses). Anyway, in this game you blow a lot of shit up using various planes which you can unlock and buy, and the missions change depending on what order you do them in (OMG RPGOTY!), which is neat. Shame the whole thing only lasts about six hours. Still, it has a multiplayer mode - not that I know anyone else with a PSP - and replayable missions so that's not a huge issue.
Aveyond: The Darkthrop Prophecy: What I wanted was a cutesy J-style RPG with a girl protagonist and some of that old King's Quest IV fairy tale charm. What I got was a J-style RPG with a bunch of random bullshit strewn about the place and insufferably stupid characters. Oh and the most retarded fake difficulty ever. Basically what this boils down to is wandering around trying to grind for cash in order to acquire better weapons and armour so you don't get wrecked by the new enemies in the area you're going to next. Well, sometimes you need to find the weapons in the dungeons rather than just buying them.
Grinding for XP, by the way, is useless, as any personal growth you may experience is worthless compared to the boosts you get from equipping a new weapon, as are tactics (unless the tactic in question is 'spam spell scrolls'). And fuck me, the quests could have been SO GOOD. But they weren't. Check this out: you have to do this quest in which you do the following:
- You get tasked by the king of some stinkhole to find out which noble in his court is consorting with the thieves in the forest.
After wandering aimlessly for a while, you'll walk into someone's house and read a letter that says 'bring blackmail payment to forest at 9pm tomorrow or we will narc on you to the king. Best regards, the thieves.'
You return to the king in order to tell on the person who's house it was but no, that's not the end of the quest.
After more aimless wandering you meet some chick who had her wedding ring stolen. You go to the jeweller's and find it there. Not that you can bash the jewller and take it back before demanding to know who sold the ring to him, of course.
Grind for cash. Buy the ring. Return to rightful owner. THEN you ask the jeweller who he bought it from. Was it the homeowner in question? Yes, obviously it was. Who could have guessed?
King doesn't want to know.
Alright, go to the forest. Find the thief's cave. Party member tells you you can't go in there yet, because obviously we have nothing to confront them with yet. FUCK OFF
Go to the homeowner's house. Oh hey guys who I've never met before, I'll pay you to take this package (which you'll never think of opening, natuirally) to the thieves in the forest. OK sure.
King: still not interested.
Forest. Dungeon crawl (actually the dungeons aren't too bad I suppose, sometimes there are some simple little puzzles and things that demonstrate some thought has been put into them). Meet thieves.
Hope you ground for cash since you need to pay them off in order to get the necessary information out of them. Can't just smash up the place, oh no.
The secret is that what's her face sold the king's daughter into slavery so the right of succession would be passed on to her son, the king's nephew. Pretty grimdark, right?
Your party members decide tracking down the king's daughter might be a good idea.
I decide just telling the king is better because seriously I'm sick of this shit. But hey guess what?
Alright fuck you then.
Gosh do you think that the king's daughter might be the slave girl on smellpit island who prince fucknuts is totally in love with?
In short (ie skipping the two or three trips across the world map the game thinks you should have to make): yes it is. The woman who bought the slave is arrested, homeowner gets busted for her thieving and treachery and you get a big reward for being nice people. Soon slavery will be banned too so yay.
I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that this quest would have been awesome if you could rat out homeowner much earlier on, but the quality of your reward would be proportionate to the amount of effort you put in. I think that's sort of the whole problem with this game really, the content has some decent ideas but the execution is middling at best and utterly mind numbing most of the time so ultimately the game sucks shit.
OK and back to Star Command now. Checking back before I went on my little tangent (it's my LP and I'll do what I like) I see we were up to the bit where we collar grabbed a couple of fools who wouldn't give us any money. Sucks to be them.
After that of course we go looking for more inhabited planets to ruthlessly exploit, because in the future no-one is affected at all by committing massive, unprovoked acts of violence (well, maybe a few small pangs of regret over the ammunition we wasted). If we weren't before - sure, I could check but meh - we are now in subsector (25, 21):
I didn't take many notes about this subsector, probably because the only thing of interest was this dingy little world here:
as per usual, we check out the local stock exchange to see if there's anything they want before running an espionage mission. I like this planet since, unlike the others, they want nice, wholesome Oats and not Plutonium or some other unstable isotope for bombs or pollution or whatever other nonsense all these other worlds are into. The other thing about these guys is that they are willing to fiercely defend their granaries:
Note the relatively high fatigue factor this time around. I'll admit I didn't.
Alright, combat begins on a slightly average note:
This is us failing to establish a comms link. Must try harder, people!
I thought the pirate's loadout was also cause for concern, given the preponderance of group-targetting weaponry, but I really needn't have worried. Round one goes swimmingly, with one pirate dropped, largely thanks to the efforts of our Devastator units Destroid and Orgasm (Yeesh helped too). Here's a picture of Destroid being given orders in round two:
In addition to killing that one buccaneer you can see we also broke B5's rocket launcher, which he replaced with a flamethrower (not much of an improvement really). Round two goes much the same as before - one pirate down and no significnt injury taken on our side. Since we were doing so well and the pirates were being so useless we moved to an offensive area in order to make our fire that much more effective as well.
Round three is sort of a mixed bag. Yeesh ends up with a broken gunsight and we lose some HP but on the other hand Orgasm splatters what's left of group B so it's not all bad.
Next round does not go quite so well. I hinted darkly at the start of this battle report that the fatigue factor becomes important in this particular fight, and indeed it does - right now, as a point of fact. I mentioned in a previous update that when you run out of fatigue points your guys need to chillax for a round in order to regain them. Well hey guess who needs to relax this round? Yeah, that's right, everyone. We lay about while the sole remaining pirate starts making his way to the edge of the map.
He nearly made it and all. However, the next round we ruthlessly cut him down just as he was about to escape (actually to be fair if we hadn't, he would have fired on us and possibly wrecked some more of our equipment, or maybe even done someone an injury) thanks to Destroid and his flamethrower.
Now that the fight's over I madly hammer away at the CTRL and F5 keys in order to get a decent shot of the battle report screen (I normally forget to do this) since the text still flashes up awfully fast. Here it is:
600 creds! Nice. Well not really given we have equipment and ammo to replacve but it will do I suppose.
Fortunately for us I'm paying enough attention this time to see that we're a little low on fuel and so I figure it's time to head back to Solonar now. So we do.
Close call but we made it. Just as well I decided it was time to head on back.
Alright this is what a reward screen looks like when you're actually being rewarded for something. It's pretty much just like the reward screen I showed you guys before, except with a bigger number than 0. Now, once again I have provided you guys with dodgy information. I said in an earlier update that kill rewards were 10 creds/tonne and capture rewards are 20 creds/tonne but actually, it is 20 creds for a kill and 30 creds for capture. The manual phrases it peculiarly and I got the numbers around the wrong way, so soz about that.
Now if you'll recall we also managed to pinch a couple things from some of the more advanced planets we discovered. They are:
So not a bad haul really. Although why you'd store data in RAM is beyond me - I found out that this was a stupid practice at the age of ten when I tried to RAM save a game of Elite I'd been playing for a few hours (this was the Amiga version, by the way) - you can imagine how I felt when I tried to go back to the game the next day. You think they'd know better in 25000000000000AD but I suppose Cleve was right about man not being a learning animal.
We sell our items gathered from less advanced worlds for hardly fuck all as well:
Everyone gets fixed up in the medbay after that.
Now, interesting aside: gun sights, or 'sighting hardware' as the game slightly awkwardly refers to them, can't be repaired if damaged. This means that they can turn into quite the money sink if you insist on getting the good ones, and more importantly, that they aren't an entirely reliable replacement for a high weapons skill. I declare this an incline.
Anyway we end up getting Yeesh a new one, and I discover by chance that Bee's is missing as well so I replace that too. I could make a joke about how women always make you guess what it is they want/need out of you but I'm too much of a gentlemen so I won't. Although I'm too much of a passive-aggressive jerk to let it go entirely but hey I didn't
say it, right?
Anyway that is the end of this update. I think this trip went quite well - we made back our losses and even made a small profit (just over 1K if I recall correctly), even after replacing all our gear.
Next time: MY TERRIBLE SECRET. Or maybe I'll just talk about Aveyond some more instead. Who knows?