Monthly Archives: July 2008

Doesn’t Race Well With Others

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I didn’t really get much gaming done last night, opting instead to try and clean up my rFactor install a bit.

Most rFactor mods live peacefully side-by-side, but a few have been a bit of a pain. Aside from the previously-mentioned issue of having to restart to get them to initialize properly, a handful of them have vehicles that don’t behave properly when you’re in the “all vehicles and tracks available” mode, popping up error messages and displaying a placeholder model on the track. So far, it looks like the Historic Rally Cars, GP2 2006, and Renault Super Clio mods are the ones that cause trouble for me.

Fortunately I can deal with them by setting up a separate rFactor install just for them. It wastes a bit of disk space, but I’ve still got a bunch free on one drive, and some stuff like the track data can be deleted and pointed back at the main install so that I don’t have to duplicate those. The main problems it causes are that the user profiles can’t really be shared between the installs, so any setting changes have to be redone in each one, and each install will have to be patched separately whenever a new update comes out.

Oh, the things we do for our pretty cars…

Edmonton Makes You Dumb

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I fiddled with rFactor a bit today, first racing tractor-trailers around Jacksonville Superspeedway. That wasn’t really as much fun as it might sound, so I figured that with the Edmonton Grand Prix coming up, I’d fool around a bit on there.

I selected the Toyota Atlantic series and loaded up the Edmonton track, but as soon as I started the practice session, it was obvious something was wrong. All of the AI drivers were behaving like complete morons, constantly spinning out, colliding with each other, and hitting the barriers. After putting in a handful of laps, I checked the timing and not a single AI driver had managed to complete a single lap yet.

But it turns out I’d just forgotten the cardinal rule of dealing with mods, and hadn’t restarted the game after switching series. After restarting it, everyone behaved properly, and I tried another practice session with a mixed set of vehicles. I came in second-last, my BMW M3 only a few seconds faster than the lawnmower.

Lost? Seems Like Plenty Of It Around

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I was going to play a bit more of Paper Mario today, but instead I got distracted by something I’d been curious about for a while now: Lost Winds, one of the launch WiiWare titles.

It turned out to be, as expected, a rather short little game that only took a little over three hours to finish. I think that’s a fair length for it though, as any longer and the more annoying aspects of the controls would have become far more frustrating. You move the protagonist with the nunchuk, but use gestures with the remote for any other actions, including jumping, lighting torches, blowing objects around, attacking enemies, and so on. It works pretty well most of the time, though sometimes it’s a bit hard to push that rock just where you really want it.

It’s fairly easy, since it’s generous with the revives and most of the enemies aren’t much of a threat to begin with, and I didn’t even get hit once during the final boss battle. The only real challenge was figuring out where to go next, since you have to backtrack to some areas and it’s not immediately obvious were the new part you can go is. It’s definitely not the game you want if you’re looking for a challenge, but it was decent enough for a relaxing weekend time-killer.

Damn You Madagascar

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I killed a bit of time this afternoon playing Pandemic II, a nifty little Flash game where your goal is to wipe out the world by developing a virus/bacterium/parasite and infecting as many countries as possible. Morbid, but fun.

The best strategy seems to be to lie low as long as possible, getting rid of the more visible symptoms and letting harmless infections spread widely, and then piling on the more lethal attributes once most of the world is infected. I haven’t successfully gotten the entire world, though; Madagascar seems to escape most of the time since the only infection vector is a single port, and they shut their borders too early.

And I tried to play a full championship season in rFactor, with the 1979 GP cars, and the first track that came up was one of the built-in oval speedways. A bit odd, since that wasn’t part of the actual 1979 season, but whatever… And then the second race came up…on that same oval again. Turns out that I hadn’t yet downloaded the specific map pack that this mod wants, so it was just dumping me on a default track. Oh well, the more tracks, the merrier.

Mario Retires From The Ring

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Fiddling around with all these other games is all well and good, but sometimes I have to remind myself that I’ve still got six zillion other games left to finish off first. So, today I finally got back to Paper Mario: TTYD.

I finished off Chapter 3, which was a fairly uneventful climb through the rest of the wrestling rankings, with the obligatory twist about who was really behind all the recent disappearances, and after beating the real enemy I got the star for that chapter.

Since I had recently picked up Yoshi in my party, I could explore a few new areas in the sewers and found some more star pieces and shines there, and finally remembered to go use the shines to upgrade party members (Yoshi and Goombella, for now). And I went and did a few more jobs from the Trouble Centre that had opened up, though in the end I think I pretty much broke even on the costs and rewards.

Next up, the Twilight Woods.

It Helps To Have Something To Drive On Them

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Having installed a whole pile of tracks into rFactor, I spent a bit of time over the last couple days installing a bunch of car packs and racing series as well. These were a bit more annoying since they tend to use executable installers or have more complicated install instructions, have more patches and versions to chase down, take up a lot more space, etc.

But it was worth it in the end, as I can now live out my dream of racing lawnmowers at Monaco.

Hey, This One’s Marked “Participation”…

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All of this E3 stuff reminded me that I still hadn’t updated my PS3’s firmware, so I did that and redownloaded Super Stardust HD as well, since the new version of it adds trophy support.

Trophies are the new PS3 equivalent of the 360’s achievements and, well, they act pretty much the same way. The main differences are that there’s no point value to them (which doesn’t really matter to me, and Steam’s achievements are the same way), but they are divided into bronze, silver, and gold categories, to reflect how hard they’re supposed to be to get.

So I played SSHD for a while and got two trophies, one for clearing a planet and another for not using boost (I’d just forgotten that there was a boost ability). When Home is released we’re supposed to be able to show off our trophies in a virtual environment, but I’ve never really understood that aspect of it. Are people really going to hang around in Home rather than actually play games, and drag their friends into it just to show off their trophy collection, or go visit a friend just to stare at theirs?

What’s Another Dozen Songs?

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I couldn’t resist getting the Who pack for Rock Band today (I’m going to need a bigger hard drive at this rate), and the songs are pretty good overall. The two most notable bits were the start of Baba O’Riley, which is completely silent for a good minute or two on the guitar track, and Eminence Front, which has a hell of a lot of notes even on medium difficulty.

And Then There Was Sony

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Sony’s show was mostly dominated by sequels that were already well-known or expected (Resistance 2, GoW 3, Ratchet & Clank). Otherwise:

Riddick: Also a sequel, but a bit of an unexpected one since the original was an older PC/Xbox game. It was a good one though, so there’s promise here.

Little Big Planet: Yeah, it looks cute and fun. It did at last year’s E3, too…

Flower: Another abstract flOw-ish pseudo-game that’s going to be hard to predict.

GTTV: Eh, I already watch enough racing on regular TV.

MAG: Now this is a bit more intriguing, as a Battlefield-style game hasn’t really been done on this scale (256 players) yet, just in MMOs like Planetside and WW2OL. It’s still really, really early and there’s little other information, though.

Overall, there wasn’t really enough new and exciting things though; it was mainly just confirmation of things people were already suspecting. All three presentations turned out to be rather underwhelming, in their own ways.