Playing games the way they're meant not to be played

So it's been a few days since I last posted.

This is solely the fault of T-Mobile, who believe that blogspot is a harmful site full of adult content, violence and sex. I'm yet to see any of it.

Nonetheless, I have still been gaming (I know, I can't believe it either) and still been taking the (slightly more occasional) screenshot.

I recently purchased Mount & Blade: Warband off of the Steam Store. It's the first expansion in the series, and really what I consider Mount & Blade version 1.0, with the original kinda being a half-baked game full of mistakes and errors.

The basic precept of the game is that you're a person dumped into the middle of a bit of dirt, with 6 or 7 factions warring over the space. You become a mercenary commander, gain an army, and take over the land for one of the various factions, get rich through trading and killing armies, raid, plunder and generally be nasty until you win.

That's great.

I got bored of doing that within a few hours.

I don't play fantasy games (even those without magic) to have hundreds of soldiers dying at my command. I play fantasy games because secretly, deep inside, I want to be that hero, who stalks across the world killing monsters and bad guys. It's secretly what every geek wants to do. No, really, trust me.

So, screw the idea of having an army. I'm going to take over the world by myself and take pictures of me doing it.

This is the world map. It's not much to look at. I try not to. It's only purpose is to serve to carry my one man party around the world.

The benefit of playing a one man party is that everyone automatically presumes you suck. This means that guys attack you.

As these looters found out... one man does not equal a sucky fight easily won and lots of loot. They all died. It was a test of the idea. My next step was to find a slightly bigger group of outlaws to take on. Here you can see the grand total of about 20 bandits that I'd been employed to hunt down. There's about half that again elsewhere in the battlefield (there were 27 of them in total). They too, died.

In the nature of curiousity, I decided that my one man party would extort some goods from one of the villages. Heading over there, I ordered my hero to burn the village to the ground and take everything. Understandably, the villagers didn't take too nicely to my doing this, and promptly attacked. 60 villagers later, they were still burnt to the ground.

I should probably point out here, my character isn't cheating in what I'm doing. He is in fact alone, he's not got any friends. He's levelling up quite quickly.

Something about having to hack his way through hundreds of enemies inbetween stops helps with that.


Next time? Karabis takes on everyone within the walls of a castle and single-handedly captures a major town! If the game mechanics allow it....

Some more Soulstorm pictures

Soulstorm Picture 2

You have to feel sorry for this computer, who doesn't know that dark reapers are lethal.

It's a common mistake. I see it from real players too.. reaper rushing, as I call it, is so massively overpowered.

There was a second game after that one that was 3v4 Insane Comp Stomp versus orcs. Me and the guy who I play with far too much and some random Tau idiot.

Tau player turns out to be a noob, and his base gets destroyed within the first 10 minutes. Being Eldar, I just jump into my friend's base. We not only hold out for 40 minutes or so whilst we tech up, with hordes of orks sweeping towards us, but then go on to win the match.

Being me, I forgot to screenshot any of it however. I shall find a screencam that I can run constantly in future, so that condensed parts of it can be shown.

And yes, it was another Reaper rush... but with Wraithlord support so that I could take out bases. Ork bases are suspectible to giant 10 foot tall metal structures driving giant hammers through them. I think it's the fact that the orks haven't really learnt how to build bases, and just get a pile of guns and call it home.

The aftermath?

I kill 3500 orks. My friend kills 4500 orks. We both have over 15000 military score thanks to kills.

The Tau player who was knocked out in under 10 minutes? -55 points overall.

We lose less than a 1000 troups between us. 7-1 isn't particularly bad I don't think. I'm still amazed that 2v4, we took them on and won. If only players were as stupid as computers.

Team Fortress 2 Medic Skillz

Trying to get the 1000000 heal points as medic achievement on Team Fortress 2 at the moment.

A few pictures from my stint this evening

My mediocre start out.

It soon improved however.

And I maintained the top 3 slot for sometime

Neat huh?

Mass Effect Paragon Playthrough Part 1

And we're back in space, with the ambient music that stereotypically is assosciated with this kind of thing

I am a geek. I wear glasses, don't care too much about personal hygiene. I'm skinny, I have gadgets filling up my bedroom (which is where I live, and which is a mess). Oh, and I like sci-fi books, films, games, models and have a lifetime ambition to set foot on Mars.

Casually like.

Hence, when Mass Effect came out, I squealed like a little girl and went and got it. Not quite literally, but you get my point.

My getting it coincided with one of my then friends getting it for his 360. I am forever grateful I got it on the PC, where things kinda make more sense.

This is my guy

He's one of the presets, I never really care what my male characters look like. I wanted him to look a lil bit righteous, he's called Gawain. Yes, that's one of the Arthurian names; yes, I'm aware of it; yes, it's deliberate. He's a PARAGON. The guy who we assosciate with the stereotypical heroes. Maiden in distress? He's your man. Hostage situation? He'll negotiate his way through it.

I hate him already.

This is, however, a necessary evil. I accidentally deleted all my Mass Effect saved games. Mass Effect 2 saved games only have the primary story triggers set if you start them afresh, and everything I've read about Mass Effect 3 says that all those secondary triggers from Mass Effect 1 are going to have omgwtfthisisgonnabehuge effects on things that happen then.

Hence, I have to get the completionist achievement.... 3 times.. with 3 characters.

A soldier, a biotic and a vanguard. That's someone who blows things up with weapons, someone who does it with psi powers and someone who has a lil bit of both.

It will take me about 50-60 hours to do it 3 times, maybe a little more. By the end of it, I'm going to be sick of all of it. I know I am.

The cutscene that starts this game off (congratulations Bioware on making kickass cutscenes by the way, some of the ones in Mass Effect are amazing, and only get better throughout the series so far) continues with a shot of our pilot, Joker

And a named character with a very short lifespan, Nihlus the Turian Spectre

The two really don't get on that well, and after a merry bit of slagging him off, we finally get to see a bit of the ship we're flying. We walk from the cockpit into the comms room, for a meeting with our captain (and we get to control this bit. Mass Effect is more like an interactive DVD than a game at times)

Here's a bit of the ship.

And our meeting with Nihlus and Captain Anderson (surprisingly, he's the captain of the ship. Never guessed that one from his name)

Mission isn't routine, it's all just a sham so that we can pick up some ancient alien artefact. Blah blah blah. Oh look. Aliens trying to kill the people guarding the ancient artefact.

Oh wow, atsmospheric shots of the of the planet as our stealthed ship heads towards the dropzone. Never saw that coming.

Yeah. It's stereotypical. I love it all really though.

We come under attack

We lose a squadmate, only for his replacement to turn up practically instantly in the form of Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams. Who is running away from the enemy. Stupid bitch, guns don't fire over your shoulder do they?

We see the aliens, which we now discover are robots (called Geth, incidentally, which gets explained straight away. Or at least, we're told that's what they're called. Not really an explanation is it?). And look! Torture of innocent civilians! Could we have guessed that such a catastrophe would happen?

We fight off the rest of the Geth with Ashley, recruit her, then continue our path along the road.

We find out just what those Geth were doing - turns out the spike turns them into zombies, which have a nasty EMP attack that eats shields. Not brains, shields. Bioware game designers decided that instead of brains, their players would have shields. Or something.

Blue zombies. Smurf zombies maybe?

Kill those, find a doctor, hiding in a room with her (paranoid, very shaky, deserving to die - if only I wasn't a pargaon eh?) assisstant.

Nihlus gets shot, by one of his 'close friends'

Big scary alien spaceship takes off

We fight our way through, get to the beacon - which we were supposed to be fetching off of the planet - which has miraculously been activated. Gawain ends up flying through the air, but it's all fine, cus the beacon explodes.

Ashley goes to tend to him as he flies across the plateu they're on. Note how Kaiden (my other squadmate) mysteriously disappears here. It's a known glitch, but I personally thing that it's just a case of Ashley dispatching him to have a bit of one-to-one time with the captain, who she reckons is cute.

We find this out later, but hey? Who cares? We get to have sex with her, and in a game rated 12, that's not bad!

Er, I mean... video game sex is overrated, and in no way should contribute to what games are top sellers, nor is video game sex the reason why 'The Witcher' enjoys such rabid enjoyment from it's hardcore fans who complained that pressing a mere 4 keys simultaneously was dumbing down the game.

Not forgetting the thousands of submenus, none of which actually seem to mean anything.

I should really get around to learning how to play the Witcher... properly that is, rather than just keyboard mashing and hoping I hit the wtfpwn set of keys that I presume exists somewhere.


The tutorial over, we head back to 'The Citadel' which is this pretty amazing spacestation

With a huge fucking spaceship parked outside

Joker isn't impressed, reckons that size isn't everything. I suspect that this is probably compensation for something, but as I'm straight, I'm not overly curious as to how true that is.

We get a couple of nice views of the Citadel after we dock

Nice fake clouds. Nice city too. Pity that it's full of people trying to kill me, or who hate soldiers, or who just hate humans. It's funny how that works in video games. Everyone hates you, then you do some meaningless, entirely pointless task for them (like killing their sister) and suddenly they're your best friend.

Seriously though... who does favours for people who hate them? What kind of naive twat is my character? I don't like to ask too much. It makes me want to jump him off of a cliff. Repeaetedly.


We meet with the council, who refuse to believe that Saren - the guy who murdered Nihlus - commited the crime. Saren implicates Gawain in the murder of Saren (seriously? Gawain wouldn't hurt anyone unless he had a good reason, like.. say.. they had guns and were shooting at him!). We have to prove Saren's guilt.

All so stereotypical, but that's what I love about these games. No surprises at the beginning, so you can skip the dialogue. Mostly.


We then get to the one bit of Mass Effect that was knocked in every review. The goddamn lifts. These things take up more time than the running about, than the missions in the citadel. They take up more time than conventional loading screens. I have no bloody idea why they were included, and think that they're a piece of shit.

Whatever happened to continuous gameplay with stairs? Or something slightly better than a lift... Although at least we get the banter between squadmates to distract us, and the promise of a Shakespeare play on at a local theatre, run by the slow-talking emotionless aliens. It says that it's only a 40 hour performance.

That's longer than most BBC TV dramas feel. I feel sorry for alien races with attention spans that long.

Maybe the 40 hours include naptime though? That would be acceptable. Ish.

Here's a picture of one of the lifts. I'll try not to fill up this blog with them. They would dominate it.

We head down to the stripclub in this part of town, brush off an assassination attempt and meet with our contact. Who, honestly, had nowhere better to be than a stripclub. Honest. He tells us about Garrus, who we met briefly before. Garrus was the Turian in charge of investigating Sarren.

The contact, whilst being generallly unpleasant, tells us to head off to find him at such and such a place. Sure enough, we find Garrus about to interupt an extortion racket run by Fist. He tells us that Fist has the evidence we need to prove that Saren was responsible, so we go and shoot our way to Fist - through his armed guards, and the nightclub our contact was at shortly before. Fist tells us that the evidence is in the hands of a Quarian named Tali, who he had ordered killed, and who was meeting someone in the back alley of such and such a place.

We go there, shoot a few more aliens in the head, rescue Tali who immediately produces the evidence she was trying to sell to someone about thirty seconds ago. Blodoy stupid Quarian. I would have paid her for that.

The ambassador isn't too happy about all of this and says so

It appears that the ambassador of the humans to the aliens is a xenophobe. Typical or what?

We head up to the council anyway with the evidence where Ambassador Udina gives a very compelling speech

All of this kerfuffle out of the way, the council declare Saren a rogue and immediately discuss who to replace him with. Sure enough, Gawain is the number one candidate for becoming a Spectre.

Cue awe-inspiring speech.

"It is the decision of the Council that you be granted all the powers and privileges of the Special Tactics and Reconnaissance branch of the Citadel."

"Spectres are not trained, but chosen. Individuals forged in the fire of service and battle; those whose actions elevate them above the rank and file."

"Spectres are an ideal, a symbol. The embodiment of courage, determination, and self-reliance. They are the right-hand of the Council, instruments of our will."

"Spectres bear a great burden. They are protectors of galactic peace, both our first and last line of defense. The safety of the galaxy is theirs to uphold."

"You are the first human Spectre, Commander. This is a great accomplishment for you and your entire species."


My first act? Recruit Garrus, a non-human into my team.
Second act? Pick up an assassin-for-hire who wants some work. Also a non-human. So far, so good. Really plumbing the role for proving human supremacy here.

I head back to the Normandy, where I discover the ship is now mine to do with what I want, so I prepare for more journeys into the unknown to track down Saren.

Next time? Follow Gawain as he seeks the perfect girl to make Ashley jealous, as to further his and her relationship together!