LA County Fun, Gamer Nerd Fun

[thorfinn]

LA County Fun

Some people have probably heard that LA County banned the use of 'Master/Slave' in vendor documents. The obvious replacement choice, as I suggested in gayathri's post (sometimes, where I work makes me laugh my ass off) is "dominant" and "submissive".

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NWN: HotU

Well, I'm behind the times on republishing this news, but NeverWinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark has gone gold (ie, the master CD is burned, and it's off to the publishing house). Bioware are holding a Contest for a SoU to HotU bridging module. Now I have to find time to play these, somehow... and ditto for HotU itself once it comes out.

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Medieval Total War

I posted previously that I was going to purchase Medieval Total War... and I have. And it's damn fine. I've sort of given up on the strategic campaigns, since I was finding the tactical battles more exciting, so I've gone over and started playing the "Historical Campaigns" instead... Oodles of fun. I'll go back to the strategic campaign once life gets a little less busy.

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Homeworld 2

nigelw and I played the multiplayer AI on a few maps... the AI on "standard" isn't really up to scratch. Eventually we played one 6 player map, with 3 teams of 2 (2 x 2 AIs, and 1 of me and nigelw), and despite taking a bit of a early pounding, we cleaned up the AIs quite handily nevertheless. entrippy tells me that the AI on expert is much better though, as the random-factors in the AI algorithm get tuned down to zero... So I want to play with that at some point.

Comments

[halloranelder.livejournal.com]

Good choice in music. I wonder how many people will actually have any idea what it is?

And to make things worse, I own the Soundtrack.

I am geek...

[thorfinn]

*chuckle* Dunno. Still, I figured it was an appropriate track for all the wargames...

[nutzboy.livejournal.com]

Been playing Max Payne 2 myself, if you like action games (Hard to tell, you seem more like the strategy type), this is a must... really damned good. However I'm getting sick of my mouse 'sticking' and not allowing me to aim, I've done a few too many quickloads because of that. >:\

[kowari.livejournal.com]

You are not the only one who got the sticking thing. My partner finished it in a night but was annoyed with his optical mouse not tracking right in the game, made it jerky

[nutzboy.livejournal.com]

No, it's actually my mouse. MP2 may contribute with it's own, but it's indisdinguishable from the usual sticking.

[thorfinn]

Definitely a strategy type. I gave up on Myth 3 when it became apparent that you had to do stupid levels of tactical trickery just to make it through the single player campaign, and did the same with WarCraft III multiplayer, when it became apparent that you could never balance the attention-span stuff well enough, unless you were in the top one percent of players. And FPS stuff makes me ill very fast - my brain really doesn't like it when it gets visuals mismatched with kinesthetics. Except for Descent, which I haven't played for a very long time.

[nutzboy.livejournal.com]

Oddly, Descent was the only FPS game that did that to me. :D

[thorfinn]

Yeah, I get that response a lot when I tell people that Descent doesn't make me ill. I think my brain has no problems with Descent because it's *not* a standard human-sized environment, and you don't "move" through it anything like the way a human does. FPS games just don't get human motion and vision correct (it's either too smooth, or too bumpy, and they don't really take into account proper body kinesthetics anyway, and they can't until they give you goggles and track your head motion)... and the closer they get, the quicker I get sick, because the subtler the mismatch is. If it's really *obviously* wrong (eg, Descent), then I'm completely fine, and driving games are fine too for the same reasons.

M:TW

[belegdel.livejournal.com]

So, how do you find the tactical battles run, speed wise?
(and the obvious adjunct to that is what are you running it on?).

I found it painfully slow (though my kit is, well, cheap :)

Re: M:TW

[thorfinn]

They're fine on my kit, even with the odd full scale 3 way battle I've run into, but it's a Pentium 4 1.7GHz, 512Mb RAM, GeForce 420... It's a laptop, but the important bits are as listed. If it's painfully slow, drop the number of men per unit. TW keeps track of every single individual and statistics thereof... if you drop the number of people per unit, you can drop the amount of memory and CPU needed by a fair bit. If it's your video card that's at fault, doing that probably won't help that much, though.

[tomble.livejournal.com]

Ooo, I just read this. Care for a homeworld 2 battle over the net? I've been looking for someone to play against.

[thorfinn]

No (don't have good net connection at Peel St, only dialup), but I really should make some time to come out and visit... Have been meaning to do that since forever...