Category Archives: PC

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.

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.

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.

Bye Bye Baal

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With Hellgate’s future uncertain, I turned back to Diablo 2 for my action-RPG fix and finished taking my HC necro through the rest of Act 5 normal today.

Baal himself is actually a pushover, and I just had to make sure I kept Decrepify up while the skeletons whittled away at him. The dangerous part of Act 5 for an HC player is actually the Ancients, since you have to fight all three at once, they like to move around a lot, one of them has a nasty whirlwind attack, and another can throw axes. They’re not *too* bad in normal, and I just had to run around a lot to keep throwing Decrepify on them, but I’m really not looking forward to them in NM and Hell, where they can spawn with random abilities as well.

So, I can now technically start the NM difficulty, but the usual suggestion for HC is that I farm Baal for a while until I hit level 45 or so, just to make things a bit safer.

Another Lazy Sunday Of Murdering Hobos

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I finally broke down and bought the Penny Arcade game, since it was on sale for half-price on Steam, and completed it in one shot. It’s a fairly short game and took me just over five hours, but it was still well worth the price. My impressions of the demo held up pretty well through the whole game, and it remained funny to the end.

Combat did take a bit of getting used to once past the first area, when enemies suddenly got tougher, but I got into the habit of using more items since they’re plentiful. I had to reload a few times though, after enemies got in some lucky shots, in order to go for the Immortal achievement. And the final boss also took me a few tries — the first one, Tycho got knocked out, and the second time was successful, but then I remembered I hadn’t gotten all the collectibles yet, so I got them and beat him again so that the flags get preserved in the final save (it might affect something in the next episode).

Missed It By That Much

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I play a bit more Hellgate today, but with a slightly different goal in mind. I took my brand-new Evoker character, and tried to see if I could get those timed leveling achievements.

Unfortunately, at the four hour mark, I failed to get the first one. You have to reach level 10 by that point, and I was…70% of the way through level 9. Oh well. Having had to waste time on some lockups while zoning, respawns of trash mobs, and some regenerating bosses certainly didn’t help. There’s another one for reaching level 20 by the 14 hour mark, but I doubt that one’s going to be reachable now. Patch 2.0 (if it ever comes out…) changes the achievement rewards, so I may as well wait and see if it would even be worth it to go for the bigger one.

A Cold Day In Hellgate

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I finished farming Shulgoth in Hellgate: London today, getting the achievement for him and breaking the 100,000 palladium mark in the process. Unfortunately, the very future of the game is in a bit of turmoil now…

It’s unlikely they’ll shut it down entirely, since the creditors didn’t accept the game’s IP as collateral just to do nothing with it in the case they had to foreclose. But it does make me wonder what’s going to happen to updates like the already-way-late 2.0 patch. Then again, maybe they can get someone else to do a better job. The fundamental gameplay of HG:L is pretty good, especially after all the fixes and rebalancing, but their basic weakness has always been the rather repetitive base content and the slow pace at rolling out new content. They’ve already missed their goal of releasing a major update once a quarter, and there haven’t even been any minor events recently.

London’s Ruins Make For Surprisingly Good Farming

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I’m still waiting on the 2.0 patch for Hellgate: London before I can properly repurchase my skills (and it might still be a while yet, as they just rolled out a 1.3d to tide us over), but I still did a bit of farming tonight, killing Shulgoth a bunch of times in order to get closer to the kill-him-100-times achievement and to grind out a bit of cash. He’s easy enough at this point that I can kill him by myself even without a drone.

I’ve also occasionally popped on to do some shop-hopping, bouncing back and forth between stations in order to reset the crafting merchant’s stocks, and found a handful of decent weapon mods that way. 2.0 will change a lot of things, so I might need a whole new set of equipment for my drone, if not myself.

He Can Sit Down There And Sulk For All I Care

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Having finally gotten my internet connection back, I downloaded a whole bunch of other tracks for rFactor (about, oh, 40…), but only had time to install and test a few. One of the Nordschleife variants was a bit amusing in that the cars all start out in a parking lot, but if you chose an F1 race, the cars were too fast to get out of the lot safely and would crash and bump all over the place. In fact, I had to disable the ‘Auto Pit’ option since it just wouldn’t behave properly in too many cases, often bumping the car right up against a barrier or even failing to start at all.

And I got a bit further in Diablo 2, taking my HC necromancer to the entrance of Nihlithak’s Temple. I’ll probably avoid Nihlithak himself though, as his Corpse Explosion is rather dangerous, and the reward isn’t really worth the risk.

Racing By Myself

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I fiddled around a bit with rFactor today, reinstalling some mods for it: V8Factor (the V8 Supercars series), FSOne 2006 (the 2006 F1 season), and Historic GT & TC (imports all of the classic cars from GT Legends). There are plenty of other addons at rFactorCentral, but those were the only ones I managed to get before my internet went flaky for the rest of the weekend…

Since the FSOne and Historic mods make fairly large changes to the UI, I handled these differently this time by having separate rFactor installs just for them, but with the unnecessary vehicles deleted and the config file pointing to the first install’s track directory. This lets me run the mods separately, so they don’t conflict with each other, but all of the installs will still be able to use all of the tracks I install, without having to install them multiple times.

And, of course, I did a bit of racing, though it was more like just testing since I couldn’t get back online. Racing around the ovals was the easiest way to test out some of the new cars, but it also pointed out just how much I need to get back to trying to use the wheel — with the gamepad, the input is just too jerky, when you really need smooth, gradual turns into those corners.