Blogs

I'm reasonably pleased with last years results...I had a good year. My plan for next year is to build on that. I'm going to be a bit more focused, as I have 2 quite time-consuming activities to work on...

There are some evenings I want to be intensely engaged in a game. Missing hours and one-more-thing. Civ V does that for me, as does City Skylines (although less so). Skyrim did too.

There are some evenings I want to build. Minecraft is good for that, although I have a pretty big rebuild of the UberStore mechanism in progress.

Then there are some evenings I like to bimble about, in the presence of others, doing stuff. Cruising. Minecraft could be good for that but more recently I've been enjoying GTA Online.

Bueller?

There have been a lot of great games popping up recently some big names others not so much and with a load more on the horizon I thought I'd do a little roundup before I forget.

Rebel Galaxy:
I think of this as Firefly the game it's basically redneck elite. You fly about a colourful space universe trading mining shooting(either good/milita or bad/pirates) etc your way along upgrading your ship with bigger and better equipment then bigger and better ships all to a cowboy rock soundtrack.

Claude is my favourite GTA character. The mute protagonist in GTA 3 made some of the dialog difficult but made him somehow loveable. I got to decide Claude's thoughts, to me his quiet resignation was a deep distrust of the people around him. Tommy Vercetti (GTA 3 VC) and Niko Bellic (GTA 4) had some personality but got progressively less interesting to play because there was less choice. You character was, well, a bit of a dick. I quite liked the gangers in GTA 3: SA but only because - as gangsters - they were shit.Everything went wrong all the time and that was enderring.

The Uberstore works well but it isn't perfect. Just recently I've had problems where one box overflows into another. It's quite annoying because resetting the system is tricky.

This chap explains the issue rather well:

He also has a solution, which means taking apart all the workings behind the scenes. I get to reuse most of the bits and I'm going to keep the layout. It's just a bit annoying.

Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel

Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel

Like a snowball down a mountain, or a carnival balloon

Like a carousel that's turning running rings around the moon

Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face

And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space

Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind!

So I have yet to have decent broadband, even when my local exchange gets upgraded I get poor connection speeds due to being one of the furthest houses from it. Because of this you really notice when something else is using your connection when you want to, something that has despite much effort over the years has started becoming noticed on my connection quite a lot recently.

Here's where we last left Under Glasslake, stretching 20 blocks North of the end of the Cathedral. You've seen this pic before in the last postcards episode.

Yesterday was my best flying day so far. I managed to get through 4 batteries without running out of propellers (although I broke a load) and I managed more close proximity flying at speed than ever before. By the end of the session, I was getting pretty smooth!

Here's the video. Beggars Canyon is right at the start.