Patched? But London Still Looks Just As Ruined…

There’s a new patch out for Hellgate: London, so I gave it another whirl today. The major new feature is a shared stash for all of your characters, which is much more convenient than having to mail stuff between each of them. It also added some ‘ranks’ you can earn for extra bonuses, much like the alternate advancement points in Everquest, but I can’t use those until I hit 50 anyway.

On the downside, my drone’s armour has been reduced somehow, and he was only getting 81% damage reduction instead of the 92-93% he was getting before, so he’s essentially taking twice as much damage now.

I cleared the way to Liverpool Street Station, giving me a new higher-level place to check the crafting merchants. I then went and did Moloch again, gaining two levels in the process (halfway through 44 now), and confirming that leveling is much faster if I stick around monsters the same level as me rather than higher ones. The only really notable difference in Stonehenge is that they made Moloch harder, and he didn’t drop nearly as fast as he did the first time. I was starting to think I might not be able to beat him at all, since he’d occasionally get healed by some priests faster than I could damage him. Eventually though, he kept attacking without summoning more for long enough that I could finish him off. They made it tougher to hit him with Ignite, but it still kicked in often enough to make the battle a fair bit quicker.

And I finally spent some of the nanoshards I’d been saving up to upgrade the drone’s armour pieces, putting him back at about 87% damage reduction. It’s not quite back to where he was before, but it’s better than nothing.

In Search Of Servers

I played Trackmania on and off a bit today. The ‘problem’ I’m running into now though, is that my rank is high enough that I don’t really belong on the highly-populated main servers, and the suggested servers with people closer to my rank are much less populated. I like to get lost in the crowd, I guess…

Maybe There’s Too Much Dust In The Engine

And tonight was more TrackMania, of course. I managed to find a server with a decent mix of mid-level difficulty tracks, though there were only 29 people on it instead of the 150+ I’ve seen on others. There still aren’t very many servers running with the full set of United environments, though. About the only interesting part is that I finally managed to crack the 10,000 rank mark, ending the night at something like 9982.

I also finished off a bunch of the solo mode tracks, including the new ‘white’ level ones. I was unable to get gold medals in any of the desert tracks though; the handling on that car is just really odd, and it’s hard to take tight turns without going on two wheels and slowing down a bit.

HalibutBarn Has A Posse

It was another Trackmania night, and tonight I started off on a highly-populated custom server, but gave up on it after a while. The big problem with a lot of the user-made maps is that you need to practice on them a bit since people love to throw all sorts of twists and crazy stunt jumps and blind corners and such at you, so you need a while to learn the track. You only get around five minutes per track when you’re playing online though, which often isn’t enough.

So, I switched over to one of the official Nadeo servers, running the ‘blue’ B-series tracks. I did a lot better there, but I did start to bore of them as I wrapped up for the day, so tomorrow I’ll probably have to see if there’s a C-series server.

I think the highest I placed all evening was 4th, but my overall world rank is still a little below 10,000 (out of 150,000 or so globally). And at one point, I had a few more spectators following my car than expected…

The Mania Spreads

As expected, more Trackmania servers popped up tonight, so I spent most of the evening racing around on them. They’ve apparently bumped up the server capacity a lot, as the first server I was on often had 130-140 people on it, and I’ve heard reports of others with 200+. Though there’s no collisions between players, races can still become confusing with that many people around and blocking your view. Fortunately there’s an option to shut off other players’ cars entirely, so you just see the chat and final scores at the end of the round.

With that many players around, many of whom were fairly experienced, I didn’t come anywhere close to winning, but I was usually in the upper quartile. I think the highest I ever placed was 7th.

The popular servers were just the Stadium environment though, since that’s the only one available to users of the free client. I’ll probably get sick of that before too long and then I’ll have to seek out United servers with the other settings. Hopefully there’ll be a decent number of them…

Traffic seems a bit heavy today…

…resulting in a bit of road rage.

Hopefully Forever Won’t Be Too Short

The ‘Forever’ patch for Trackmania United was released today, at a surprising size of 900 megs. It does change a fair bit though, with a new menu interface, revamped graphics in a few of the environments, new tracks, and some new track builder pieces. And perhaps best of all, it removes the CD check and Starforce, so I don’t need to keep the disc around for whenever I get the whim to play.

I did a bunch of the new tracks, but they were mainly easier ones, meant as tutorials for new players. Looking ahead to the tougher tracks though, the unlocking requirements get pretty steep, requiring things like getting all golds on all previous tracks. I’m not sure I’ll ever reach that point…

Not many servers are up yet, but it was just released, so it’ll take time for people to get it and start up more servers. Hopefully…

Restoring Hell To Its Rightful Infernalness

I was stuck where I last left off in Sam & Max, but got unstuck today when I tried shooting Jurgen’s Monster and got things rolling again. That led to freeing Grampa Stinky, and then I was able to free Bosco and the Desoto, though I had to look up the nitrous puzzle solution (it wasn’t exactly intuitive). And finally I got the right combination on the toy, freeing Santa and his elf, and finishing off all of the dioramas.

Unfortunately, this got Sam sent to his own personal hell, with Peepers from the Soda Poppers replacing Max as his sidekick, causing much anguish. Getting out was fairly simple though, and after confronting Satan again, the big secret behind who really runs hell was revealed, and Satan gets fired.

We had to stop *them* now, as they tried to carry out their strange-but-nefarious plan in three different locations, involving a fiddling contest, seducing Sybil, and tempting Girl Stinky. Stopping them required breaking up a rather disturbing bachelor party for Lincoln’s Head, but was mostly just a matter of finding the right object for each spot.

Now that they were really mad, they banished both Sam and Max to a flaming lake, but here it crossed over with a previous episode again and they immediately escaped, since technically we already performed that escape in the other episode. That led to the final confrontation in a now-rather-frosty office of Hell, but this ending bit was fairly easy.

The wedding takes place, Satan gets his job back as head of Hell, and all is uh, well, I guess. OR IS IT? Well, probably not, whenever Sam & Max are involved.

This Isn’t What I Expected When They Said The Game Was About Dilemmas

There’s a new patch out for The Witcher. It’s not the huge one they promised that will rework the English dialogue and improve the engine though, this one just adds one new quest module, the editor, and some other minor fixes. But, according to the patch notes, they recommend that you restart the game due to expected glitches and other incompatibilities with current save games. Whoops.

I didn’t intend to apply this patch anyway since I’m waiting for the big one, but unfortunately the same thing will probably also apply to it. So, at this point, I have to decide whether to go on and finish the game as it is right now anyway, or to wait and get all the improvements but have to restart and redo the first three chapters all over again. Argh.

Hell Really Is Other People

The final Season 2 episode of Sam & Max was released today, continuing on from the cliffhanger at the end of the last one. I have to get Bosco’s soul back, and it’s going to take a little trip to Hell to do so…

Hell is apparently a rather placid-but-dull office building, where I encountered some of the villains I’d defeated so far, like Hugh Bliss and Jurgen the vampire (now working reception). In the back I found a room honouring Sam & Max, who unsurprisingly apparently contribute more than their fair share to the soul collection process. There, I found some dioramas containing the personal hells of a few other people I’d met, including Santa, Grampa Stinky, the old Desoto (apparently cars have souls, who knew), and Bosco, and could enter each of them.

I obviously have to help them out somehow, and I’ve collected a few items, but I’m a bit stumped at the moment as to what to do next. Being the last episode for a while, I’d prefer not to have to resort to a walkthrough for this one. The humour is pretty good so far though, with plenty of chuckle-worthy quips.

(I also couldn’t resist ordering some more S&M merchandise, including the new DVD collection of the animated episodes, and the reprint of Surfin’ The Highway, since it has some new material. Yeah, I’m a fanboy…)

You Have To Be Dedicated To Figure It Out

After some more experimenting, I still can’t get the GTR2 dedicated server to work properly, and there aren’t even any useful logs or error messages. I’ve opened up the necessary ports, I’ve tried with the firewall off, with and without admin rights, installed to a separate directory, using a different profile name… Argh!

Oddly enough though, RACE 07’s dedicated server works just fine, and it’s pretty much the same engine behind it. It’s the one less likely to be preferred by other sim racers I might be talking to, though. I still have to try rFactor, though…