Sunday, May 19, 2024

Spam

Some of the various "I know a secret that you don't want revealed" spam is actually quite well done, in terms of preying on people's concerns and misconceptions.


Although I feel the effect is rather lost when it's sent to an 'abuse@....'  email address,

Thursday, December 23, 2021

Warframe

 As anyone who can see my steam stats can tell, 2021 is the year I played warframe.

Like many people, I started playing because a friend of mine suggested it - they stopped, but I continued, so I though it would be interesting to reflect on why warframe grabbed me the way it did.

Firstly, there's the movement, which is just amazing. Even now, after having gotten decent at it, it's still incredibly satisfying to chain a bullet jump into an aim glide into a roll to cross a large gap, or bullet jump to the next level up rather than finding the steps, or roll out of a heavy landing from a long drop. It's fluid, it's fast, it's fun and there's really not much else out there with the same range of options.

Second, the game makes a lot of concessions to solo play, which is rare in multiplayer games in my experience. Everything can be done solo, and solo play allows pausing in most situations.

Third, the mission design. There's a good range of different options, and you can choose to play them differently depending on mood. Do a stealth spy run where you kill no-one, or bull ones way through killing everything and tripping all the alarms.  Do a quick capture run where you only tough the target, or kill everything because you're looking to find every nook and cranny in the map. The different reactor sabotage choices and their trade-offs. And so on and so forth. Of course, so of this flexibility goes away if you're playing multi-player, since most people are focusing on speed of completion, but it's still a good feature.

Then there's the endless missions. I find the "play as long as you want", with the increasing enemy levels a  really interesting option. It can be a quick mission, just to get the first reward pool and some resources/credits, or you can choose to go long because you want to get something from the high tiers and/or test a build and/or level something up.

Of course, there's also the variety of weapons, warframes and so on. Different frames feel different. have different strengths and abilities and can be more or less fun in different situations. Different weapons can be very different in behaviour, and the range of options is quite fun.

Then there's the modding system, with it's multiple different layers of multipliers and the various damage types and combinations. It's a great space for someone who enjoys theorycrafting , although it does suffer from how weak some of the elemental options are (blast, for example), which ends up reducing the viable solution space one has to play with significantly.

Lastly, there are the open world areas. There's a certain enjoyable silliness in chaining a bounty mission into some "quiet" fishing into a Tony Hawk series of K-drive tricks into some mining into another bounty.

Ultimately, it comes done to really fun movement and enough variety in what is quite a simple loot collection game loop to keep me from becoming bored. I haven't mentioned the lore, which is an enjoyable convoluted mess with some fun (and some admittedly not so fun) quests, because, while entertaining, it's not central to the basic game play and so isn't a key part of what hooked me and has kept me hooked.

Sunday, November 15, 2020

 More cat photos, because why not:



Tom finds a grasshopper to play with

Pigeon watching

Sauntering cat

Why are you not petting me already?

Scritchable cat




Playing with Tom

Tom, combining sleeping on me with sleeping in the sun

I'm not sure how this is comfy

Aaaw



Wednesday, May 20, 2020

In case you'd forgetten

I have a cat.

The lockdown has given me more chances to take photographs of said cat, of which I will now show a selection.

Tom is very helpful when trying to build a puzzle

Watching Cat


A perfect cat cave



Nature provides the best toys


Overly artistic pictures of cats

Ditto


Be sure when planting cats that they will get plenty of sun


What are you doing down there?

Friday, May 1, 2020

What we do in the lockdown

So, it's long been a personal annoyance that various games distribute figurines that aren't particularly visually distinct. The lockdown has finally driven me to the point of trying to do something about it

Pandemic: Reign of Cthulu

The Pandemic figurines

The pandemic figurines are reasonably distinguishable, but a bit dull, and it requires some effort to associate the figurine with the right character sheet at the start


Painted cultists

The cultists don't strictly need to be painted, but it seemed a chance to add more colour and variety to the game.

Shoggoths on the march

Shoggoths should look ugly and menancing, and the pale blue just wasn't working for me

Painted heroes

Far from the best paint job ever, but it achieves the goal of making the figures resemble the card artwork and makes them more distinguishable on the map

Gears of War

Gears of War is arguably one of the worst offenders, with it's basically indistinguishable CoG figures.

However, the colour scheme of the cogs in the artwork doesn't help distinguish the figures, so I opted for the simple approach of solid colours to make them distinct



Not terribly artistic, but much more usable.

Fortune and Glory


That the FanG manual includes this handy reference sheet shows the issues with their figurines. The heroes are somewhat distinguishable, but not particularly so at long distance, and the Nazi and Mob mooks are too similar with the default colouring


The different value tokens are somewhat too similar in size for that to be a good measure, and the different symbols are too hard to see at a distant. Painting the 1-value tokens makes things a lot clearer



Mob villians

Mob mooks

Nazi soldiers

Nazi villians

The different groups are now much more visually distinct, and it's much easier to recognise which figures are on  the board



Painting the zepplin is not required, but seemed a fun idea

Visually distinct heroes are nice



Again, painting the pyramids isn't required, but I wanted the option to talk about different ones easily, so I added the option to refer to them by colour rather than just position on the board. The paintwork is a bit light, since I like the effect of the underlying colour bleeding through - it feels a better look for ancient ruins.

Sunday, March 8, 2020

Catblog

Continuing the stream of cat photographs

Tom deals with a competitor for attention


Inspecting the garage door


Tom helps file VtES cards


Tom makes an excellent wrist support



Also an excellent mouse hand warmer


 
Lap cat


The dedicated bird watcher


Tom ambitiously stalking a hadeda

That face

Thursday, December 12, 2019

Surprised?

Boxes must be carefully inspected

Box inspection, take 2

Tom Storage

Everything must be investigated, including the camera bag

Bird watching

Tom on the lawn

A perfectly sized planter