Real-Time vs Turn-Based

I have had some experience with Real-Time fantasy games as well as Turn-Based fantasy games, and it is pretty surprising how much more realistic the Real-Time ones are.

One of the best examples of real-time fantasy games is Baldur's Gate 2 (which is based off of Dungeons and Dragons rules). I can compare the way that DnD works to how BG2 works, and a major difference is in whether you hit someone with a fireball spell. In DnD (and so BG2), Fireball is a very useful spell that launches a small flaming missile (which explodes). In DnD fireball is useful because you can plant it wherever you want and make sure that you only hit enemies. In BG2, fireball is more annoying because you don't know how far it's blast radius is in the game world and because as you are  casting it and as it is moving towards it's target your targets are moving.

This way, there is a chance that you will accidentally hit your friends, and there is also a chance that you will miss your enemies (so it's less useful when you cast it, but you can dodge it if you know what you're doing).

I can't tell you how many times I have cast fireball at some group of enemies or other and one or two of them got out of the blast radius just in the nick of time. Sure it's annoying, but it's far more realistic, and if your enemy is weak enough for that to make a significant difference then a few hits from one of your people's swords will get their health down to where it should be.

Another thing that can be exploited is the possibility for people's spells and attacks to be disrupted by being attacked. In DnD you have to choose not do do anything on your turn os that you can be waiting for something to happen (which may or may not actually happen), and if it doesn't you've wasted some time. In real-time, you just attack the person and if the timing is right their attack or whatever will be disrupted.

Finally, everything looks so much cooler - if you shoot a spell that targets one person, and they are moving, the spell will follow them. I remember one time I had boots of haste on (mave you move at double your normal speed) and someone cast a spell on me. I tried to run away but it slowly caught up with me. Thankfully I was wearing an amulet that gives me a chance of ignoring the effects of any spells cast on me, and this was one of those spells.

Why I hate and Love Cheating

I, unfortunately, have a habit of always wanting to cheat (and when I do I almost always go overboard). I don't really need to cheat (indeed, it keeps me from getting better at that game) but I want to.

For example, I am a big fan of the Fantasy RPG known as Morrowind. And in this game, I have a nasty habit of cheating myself godly abilities and then having to stop playing that character because things are too easy. But there is a bright side: after long years of cheating I have finally started to be able to limit myself and things are finally getting fun (without me having to spend hours fighting random monsters so I can level up).

For example, in a game of Morrowind that I recently played, I had cheated my speed up because I didn't want to spend ages walking everywhere at a realistic pace (imagine someone walking from California's western border to it's eastern border).
So, I had my speed up a bit higher than normal, and I had found some magical darts that I was hunting wolves with.

Now, I had beaten quite a few quests and I had some pretty nice equipment, so what I would do is throw a few of these darts at some wolf or bear or something and then (missile weapons in Morrowind are oddly slow) I would race ahead of them and kill the wolf or whatever with my sword, then step out of the danger zone and watch my darts hit (so I could see how accurate I was)

Other times I cheated a bit too much. A major part of Morrowind is alchemy - you can find alchemy ingredients all over the place and in many cases how many healing potions you have is what determines if you live or die. One character I made had godly high alchemical skills (the highest the game will normally let you have a skill is 100 plus the effects of magic items and spells, my alchemy skill was something like 300). I could find 2 ingredients with the 'restore life' property and turn them into a potion that, once I drank it would cause me to heal generally 55 health per second for a minute (really tough people have about 200 health). One time I drank one of these potions when I was being attacked by 2 bosses at the same time, and my health went from about 30% to 100% (and stayed there).

Other games it's not so bad. In the Command and Conquer series, for example, there are no codes or cheats for me to use, and in Red Alert 2 (which I have been playing for a long time now) I can beat the hardest computer opponents in one-on-one battles and I have a good chance at beating two of them by myself (and I am approaching that level in Command and Conquer: Generals, which I haven't had for as long).

Sometimes, though, cheating is neccesary. I was playing through the campaign of Star Wars: Battlefront 2 once, and there was this one annoying mission where you were supposed to try to prevent the rebels from stealing the Death Star Plans. The annoying part of this mission is where you are supposed to attack a heavily defended area, and your computer-controlled allies are unable to get to that area in any significant numbers (so, it ends up as you attacking 5-10 enemies at once and then having to hold that area against their reinforcements).

And, of course, in just about any game where a significant part of you being able to kill tougher enemies is your character getting better somehow, you can have most if not all of the benefits of cheating by simply 'farming' weak monsters (farming is where you kill a lot of weak monsters for their experience points, gold, etc). I remember one time when I was playing Final Fantasy 2, and I decided that I would start a new game and run around fighting random monster battles until I was epically strong and then I would run through the quests as you were supposed to do them. If that was a computer game I probably would have been able to cheat my strength and whatever up to the same levels and therefore I would have saved myself days of work fighting these monsters.

Fable

There is a game out there that you may or may not have heard of called Fable (it also has an expansion called Fable: The Lost Chapters). In this game you run around doing typical fantasy game things (like killing monsters and doing quests), and as you do things you gain experience points to increase your skills, gold to buy new stuff, and items that you can either keep, sell, or use.

Your skills are divided into 3 disciplines: Strength (Strength, Resistance to Damage, and Health), Stealth (Archery, Speed, and Sneaking and Bartering ability), and Will (Magic). One of my favorite spells is called Slow Time, and what it does is speed you (and your perception) up, so that everything looks kind of like in the Matrix when everything almost freezes and the camera does crazy maneuvers.

Slow Time is a great spell for getting experience, since whenever you deal damage your 'combat muptiplier' goes up (basically, whenever you get experience points, the amount you get is multiplied by your combat multiplier), but it also goes down when you take damage. What Slow Time allows you to do is deal damage without taking a lot of damage as you do so, so your combat multiplier goes way up.

A great addition to this little trick is another spell called Physical Shield. What this spell does is it causes damage to go to your mana rather than your health, but as a side effect you don't technically get hit by anything, so effects that knock you down don't do anything and your combat multiplier just keeps going up.

The sad thing about that is that Physical Shield causes you to not regenerate mana while it is active, and Slow Time takes kind of a lot of mana. My solution is to find one of the weapons that increases the rate at which you regenerate mana and equip it (and to have lots of mana potions).

The final spell in this combo (for me) is enflame. You see your character punch the ground and then there is a ring of flame that damages all enemies within it's area and knocks them down. It's a great spell to use when you are surrounded and in danger since it takes almost no time to cast, it prevents your enemies from attacking you, it does a bit of damage (not a lot but more than a little), and it has a pretty low mana cost.

Using this combo and the Solus Greatsword (damagewise the most powerful weapon in the game) when I already had maxed out my speed on that quest where you are supposed to rescue 'The Archaeologist' from the Minions I got a combat multiplier of something like 100, so at the end I sat there casting and deactivating Physical Shield over and over again (and eating the various foods that give you experience, and drinking the potions that give you experience) and I got (if I remember correctly) 75,000 will experience points, 100,000 general experience points, 25,000 stealth experience points, and I had already maxed out my strength stats so I ignored strength experience.

I also took the time to make sure I did everything I could, opening every single Demon Door, all the silver chests, doing all the non-evil sidequests, and so on. By the time I got into the boss fights near the end of the game I had increased my health and magical energy to the point where I could not gain any more.

I also asked my friends, and I finally found out the best way to get Skorm's Bow (the best ranged weapon in the game). What I had been doing was going to Oakvale, using my reputation and good-ness to attract as many followers as I could, and then taking them to the Chapel of Skorm and sacrificing them to slowly accumulate 'Brownie Points' with Skorm until he would (hopefully) give me the bow.

What one of my friends told me to do was to get someone (anyone will do but mercenaries are easiest) and take them to the Chapel of Skorm and sacrifice them in the hour between midnight and 1:00 AM, and when I did I got 1,000... evil points... and the bow. Then I went and did that quest where you fight the giant bee (yes, the very first quest). As I recall, I think I one-hitted the giant bee...

It sure was a good thing that I got Skorm's Bow so quickly, since I remember in previous characters when I tried to get it the amount of time I spent in each of the areas between the Chapel of Skorm and Oakvale was ehough for the enemies there to become pretty strong. In case you didn't know, the more time you spend in an area, the tougher the monsters there become. For example, in that first area of the forest whose entrance is near the entrance to the picnic area with the giant bee (I don't remember it's name), I once spent so much time in there that the bees turned into bandits, and then the bandits turned into bandit lords (after that it was really annoying to try to do that quest where you escort the trader to Orchard Farm).

I also remember that in that game I spent so much time in the area outside those caves with the Hobbes (the one outside that dark, spooky forest) that the Hobbes there turned into an Earth Troll, which then turned into a Rock Troll (and I still had trouble getting my combat multiplier high enough to get through the demon door there).

Finally, I thought up a way that one could, theoretically, get the Sword of Aeons without... doing that evil thing you have to do in order to get it (trying to keep away from spoilers here). I noticed that there is a slight pause inbetween when you get the sword and when you have to decide if you want to keep it or not, an in that pause you could, theoretically, Hero Save so that you keep the sword and (stash it or sell it or something so that it's out of your inventory), then go and do the quest again, this time actually waiting so that you have a choice (and choosing to get rid of it). Then, you go back to wherever you stashed it, retrieve it, and you now have a sword that is tied for second-largest amount of damage dealt (tied with Avo's Tear and behind the Solus Greatsword), that increases your health and mana regeneration, and increases the amount of experience points you get by something like 25%.

Personally I just wait for Avo's Tear, though, since the only differences between them are their names and appearances...

Re-Doing Missions

Yesterday I was playing more of the Tiberian Sun campaign, and I ran across a mission that I couldn't immediately beat at my skill level, so when I failed it the first time I had to re-play the mission until I could beat it.

It got to the point where I knew what was going to happen before it happened, and therefore I could prepare for it. I knew that at the beginning of the mission some enemies on a cliff would start shootng at my buildings so I would immediately start repairing those buildings and send some troops up to the top of the cliff to shoot those enemies.

I knew that there would be enemies popping up out of nowhere just to the south and west of the thing I was supposed to be protecting, so I would have a few guys with guns nearby to shoot them.

Eventually I beat the mission, but only because of my knowledge of the mission from prior attempts. Then I realized, I don't just do this in Tiberian Sun - James Bond: Goldeneye, for example, is a game for the Nintendo 64 that I happen to have and like, and when I play I use my knowledge of what happens to be prepared. For example, I know that at this one t-shaped corridor on mission 2 there is a guy hiding behind this one corner, so I always come around the corner shooting.

I also know that on that same mission, near the end, there will be a bunch of soldiers who come in and shoot at me, so I shoot my traitorous "friend" before he betrays me, blow up the gas tanks I am supposed to blow up, and leave before a lot of guys show up.

Even in games like Halo and Halo 2 I can use this tactic. In mission 2 of Halo, I know where everyone is, when they show up, and I am ready for them. There is this one part of the mission where you and some marines and whatever are being attacked by the bad guys. Now, the bad guys have these aircraft-type things called dropships to bring in reinforcements periodically, and I know when they will do that and where the next one will land, and I am there, waiting, ready to shoot them as they come out of the dropships.

As I was thinking about all this, I realized - how much of our skill in any given game is acrual skill, and how much is just knowing what the game is going to throw at you?

I remember hearing about this video that's online somewhere, of someone playing Halo 2 (supposedly the best Halo 2 player in the world or something like that) where this guy was just running through the mission and he would do things like throw a plasma grenade as he was coming around a corner and as soon as it had left his hand he would focus on some other target and at the edge of the screen you could see that his grenade had hit some enemy or other and killed it - but he knew where everything was and could kill it efficiently without much thinking.

I was playing a game of Red Alert 2 yesterday, a skirmish so everything is random (right?), and I realized that I knew that map so well and I knew the AI in that game so well that I could prepare for all possible attacks. I knew that the computer was using allied technology, so I could expect airplane raids even if they were losing 4 planes in a raid to drop one or two missiles on a tank (which I promptly repaired), I knew that the computer was playing as America so I could expect paratrooper raids (America's special ability) and I had guns all over the place waiting for them, and I even knew that they would eventually send destroyers out to the back of my base (this was on an island) to try to shoot at my people, so I had submarines and attack helicopters ready and waiting.

In that particular game my troops got a 35.556:1 kill ratio, and most of that was just casualties from the final push and unimportant buildings that got destroyed.

What Happened to the Drivers?

In Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2, the AI that governed the vehicles and how they drove around, but in the next game in the Command and Conquer series, Generals, the AI suddenly stopped working.

In Generals, vehicles try to get into a line, and the ones in back can't go foreward because the ones in the middle are blocking their way, the ones in the middle can't go because the ones in the front are blocking the way, and the ones in the front can't go because they are stupid.

In RA2 the vehicles would sometimes trend slightly towards getting into a line, but never enough to have them all slow down. Basically, as long as you have fewer than 30 of just about anything and you check in on them occasionally they will get to their destination in one clump, so that they are not driving into an enemy base one by one so that they can get picked off and waste your money.

Even the aerial units in Generals could have better AI. The most relevant fault I have with them is that they leave their airports in twos (one airport holds 4 planes) and therefore they go to their target in twos, so that they are more spread out and, therefore, easier to shoot down.

Also, sometimes when I tell a large group of planes (say, 8) to go and blow something up, after the swarm of planes has come back from blowing the thing up, a few of them will reload their missiles and then FLY BACK into the enemy base and shoot at the ground where their target used to be (that is, if they live long enough).

I think I might know why this happens: In RA2 the terrain is divided into an invisible grid that affects buildings and vehicles. In Generals there is no such grid; you can build anywhere and your vehicles have no structure for where they can and can't go. Now I'm no programmer, but it seems to me that if not having such a grid causes the AI to fail that badly, it's a good idea to keep the dang grid!

AIs Comitting Suicide

In so many First-Person Shooter games I have, the AI allies you get have an annoying habit of stepping in front of me - but only when I am shooting at someone.

Of course they have to wait for me to be firing before they do this, and then when they get hit they complain about me shooting them. But, in the one game where I can turn off friendly fire they have no problem with that, their problem is that they like to (literally) push me around (which I can't disable).

And of course some guards even managed to do that in Morrowind. I was killing some monsters in some town somewhere, and a few guards decided to show up. I put the crosshair-things clearly on the monster and swung my sword and the guard managed to get hit, of course causing him and his friends to attack me instead of the monsters.

Sometimes it gets to the point where the only thing keeping me from just shooting them all and getting it over with is that they sometimes shoot in the general direction of my enemies, so me killing them would just make that mission harder for me.

Thankfully, most of the time the AI people in games that I play don't live very long, though...

Killer Combo in Fable

In Fable, there is this one spell called 'Physical Shield' where damage goes to your mana and you don't regenerate mana. If you activate this spell while you are holding a weapon that increases your mana regeneration (I prefar to use the Dollmaster's Mace until I can get my hands on Avo's Tear).

Then, If you combine this with a high-level Slow Time and perhaps Enflame or Berserk, you will be virtually unstoppable, especially if you have a lot of mana potions like me.

In fact, that little combo is how I beat the boss at the end of Fable, and the one at the end of The Lost Chapters - I had physical shield active before I went in and then I cast Slow time at the beginning of the battle and whenever it ran out. I was unstoppable (in fact, I have beaten the boss at the end of TLC several times now).

A great way of getting the mana potions that make this a great success is to have lots of money, and I know several ways of getting unlimited money. The first is a way that I don't reccomend: hero saving. Sure you can get more silver keys or some of those potions that permanently increase your health, but you can only use so many of each of those, and gold & experience are easy enough to get.

The second way of getting money... works... but it's a bit slow. First you buy a house, the more trophy spots the better, and you fill it with as many trophies as you can. Then you break the door, and then you sell the house. The broken door allows you to step in and take the trophies back, which reduces the value of the house, so you buy it again and put the trophies back. Keep doing that for a while.

Finally, the method that I prefer is as follows: when a shopkeeper sells you something, say 100 apples, he thinks "oh no! I have a lot of apples! I should sell my apples for 1 gold each so that they will sell!" Then, you have all his apples so he thinks "oh no! I have no apples! I should offer 3 gold per apple to anyone who wants to sell me apples so that people will sell them to me!" so he offers you 3 gold for 100 apples that you paid 1 gold for. Do that until you have the money for something else, potions and trade goods are profitable, and so are gifts. The best thing to use, though, is gems. I remember one game where I had been doing that at every opportunity and then buying just about everything I could get my hands on. By the time I got into Bowerstone North I had something like 600 emeralds, and if I sold them all to someone and then bought them all back I could make something like 100,000 gold. Needless to say, I got the Solus Greatsword pretty early.

Red Alert 2

Red Alert 2 is a game in the Command and Conquer series, it's the one right before everything goes 3D but it's still a good game.

Now, RA2 has an expansion called Yuri's Revenge, and in this expansion there is a side that you can be, one called Yuri (seems simple enough).

Each side can build it's own unique hero, and they can only have one of this hero at a time. Yuri's hero is called Yuri Prime, and he has a hoverchair that he flies around on. But, his really cool power is that he can mind control anything - including buildings. So, what you do is you pick a nice big map and start as yuri with two allies - one of the allies and one of the soviets. Then, you mind control your allies' construction yards (the things that allow them to build stuff) and you start building your own allied buildings and soviet buildings.

When you have a barracks, war factory, power plant, repair bay, and (I think) an ore refinery, you can build an MCV (mobile construction vehicle) which can turn into a construction yard. Then you have yuri prime stop mind controlling their con yarc and have him mind control the one your other ally has and do the same thing with them.

This way you can have technology from all 3 factions!

You can do a similar thing in Command and Conquer: Generals, though I never have the time to try.

First you play as the GLA, and build their hero, Jarmen Kell. He apparently has an ability where he can snipe the driver of a vehicle and then you can take some cheap infantryman or something and have him get into the vehicle, and you control it until something blows it up or mind controls it for another side.

Using this method, you can get construction dozers for China and USA, and therefore build all the technologies. Best of all, this gives you the exact technology of the person you took it from - so you can have King Raptors instead of regular Raptors if you steal a dozer from the Air Force General.

This brings up the possibility of somehow mind controlling a worker or peon or whatever in WarCraft III, so that you can build stuff from multiple factions. Think about it! Night elf, Human, Horde, AND Undead units all working together. Probably take up a lot of space for all those buildings, though...

Good Equals Gold

I play a lot of fantasy games, many of which have ways of you being good, evil, or somewhere in the middle. It has been my experience that it gives you far more in the long run as well as the short run if you are good in such games (except perhaps Fable).

I was playing Baldur's Gate 2 one time and there was some guy giving out some quest reward or something that was like 10,000gp and you also had a shot at some sort of item (I don't remember what exactly). For whatever reason I decided to do the evil thing and kill him so that I could take his stuff.

To start, I walked up to him and saved the game (in case something went wrong). Then I had my characters attack him, and we killed him easily. Then, when I went to look his corpse, not only was the 10,000gp and the item not there, all he had was a generic random item that you get for pickpocketing random people on the street.

And not to mention the fact that in so many games you have the opportunity whenever you get a reward to complain about how small it is and hope you get more. Thing is, if you do that too much (or at all in some situations), you get less or people don't like you as much (thereby giving you less chance of convinving them to do something in the future).

And of course there are the classes and items that can only be used by good characters. While some games have a balanced system (evil only classes and items), those rarely have abilities as useful as the good only ones.

Even in Fable, where you get items for service to a temple, you can take anybody to the evil temple and sacrifice them at the right time of night to get Skorm's Bow, and then you will suffer no serious complications if you run around as slightly neutral for a while (or you can give lots of money to the good temple and get a magical club as you become good again.

And, Fable's spells where you have to be good or evil to master them, you can quickly become good or evil, buy the spells, and then go back to your old alignment and all will be fine. If you don't do that, though, the good spells are so much better than the evil ones - evil gets berserk (useful), drain life (somewhat useful), and some mind control spell (eh), while good gets summon (eh), heal life (useful), and physical shield (the most powerful defensive spell in the game).

Finally, if you play an evil character you can't sell your stuff and you can't even go into town. Baldur's Gate 2 has it set up so that if you come into town with a reputation of some number or lower, guards and whatever will appear and attack you, and shopkeepers will run away from you (rather than buying the junk you picked up on your adventures). Also, one time I was starting an evil character in Fable, and I wasn't very evil since I was killing monsters to gain XP. So I decided to attack some villagers or something to get a few evil points. Unfortunately, a guard saw me and I had to fight him. Since I was a beginning character, I kept dying and I burned through all of my resurrection phials before I finally beat him.

Old Games

I am a bit of a fan of old games. Hey, if you know where to look online you can usually find any given game for free (perfectly legally). For example, I was poking around the official site of the people who made Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind and Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, and I saw that they had a downloads section.

I clicked on the link, and when the page loaded I saw that they were offering the first 2 games in the Elder Scrolls Series for free. All you have to do is download these games ( I think they were something like 8 MB each) and a DOS emulator (they had a link to one, it was something like 5 MB. Even with my dial-up, it only took like 30 minutes (or maybe an hour...).

Also, old games take up so little space yet they manage to be entertaining. I have this one game, called Goblin's Quest 3. It is a great game with good enough graphics, but it comes on 5 floppy discs (not the old floppies, the relatively new ones), so it can't be more than 5 or 6 MB.

Thing is, some companies still think that they can somehow make money off of their really old games, and they make it illegal to download them (I, of course, refuse to knowingly download something I am not supposed to), so I have to wait for several companies to come to their senses and stop charging for their old games that came out before CDs. The only ones like that that I have actually paid for were the first two Command and Conquer games, which I paid for because there was this DVD with all the CnC games ever made on it.

After a while, I decided to play those two games, just for the heck of it, and they are pretty fun (once you get past the graphics). Seriously, though, each guy is drawn with maybe 20 pixels each. The main things I like about them are the challenge, the grenadiers (very useful units reminiscent of the disk throwers from Tiberian Sun), and these wierd little biplane-looking things that can strafe targets for you (the only reason I like them so much is that there is practically nothing that can shoot at aerial units).

Some newer games that were simply made for low-end systems are pretty good and pretty similar to those old games, though. Back when my school was lending out Palm Pilots to the students, I had a game on mine called Warfare Incorporated. Don't know if it's old or just designed for palm pilots, but it was pretty fun, and almost as high-end as Command and Conquer.

One of the most addicting games ever, though, was another that I had on my palm pilot but I have ween internet versions in a couple of places. The version I had was called SF Cave, and you were a dot that could go up and was always going foreward, and you had to make sure that you didn't fall and blow up on the floor and you also had to watch out for floating rocks or something. Apparently I wasn't very good at it since I never got much past 2000 points, but people I knew said that the game ended at 3000 points (the cave or whatever you are in dead-ends and you blow up)

And, of course, there are those old games that come with Windows now. Solitaire and Spider Solitaire are not bad, but my personal favorites are Tetris and Minesweeper (then again, that pinball thing isn't half bad...)

Finally, one that I still play a version of is called Druglord. In Druglord, you are a guy and you buy and sell drugs as the prices fluctuate. If it wasn't drug-based I would suggest it to my economics teacher as a way of teaching us 'buy low, sell high' but that's probably never going to happen. The game I play has a few extra features, most notably there is a little graph that tells you what the price of that drug has done over the time you have been playing, the guns and things are more accessible (instead of Vinny coming to you at random times and offering you guns you just go shopping), and finalyl you only get a certain number of days before your character decides to stop being a druglord.

Pretty annoying, but it allows people to swap high scores so I ignore it.

Hard Drives

So, I am planning on buying a new hard drive soon, since I am fairly certain That my computer has multiple hard drive ... plug thingys...

Also, if I get the 500 GB one that I am looking at now it would increase my total hard drive space on my computer to 570 GB and my avalable space to 500.8 GB.

I have been poking around Best Buy ads (since I have a gift card for Best Buy that I figure I might as well use), and I have found a 500 GB internal hard drive on sale for $160, which seems like  a good deal. Of course the day that I finally get around to going to Best Buy to get this thing is Easter Sunday and they are (of course) closed on Easter Sunday.

On the upside, this gives me more time to see how much similar hard drives cost at other places, and Best Buy is right next to the biggest bus stop in San Rafael, so getting there again shouldn't be a problem.

Actually, though, I find it surprising how much companies are trying to use up our hard drive space. I have old hard drives lying around my house, I know that people made do with pretty small hard drives - a computer that I actually used had a hard drive that fits only 2888.8MB of space (I know this because there is a sticker on the hard drive that says so).

These days, though, Windows and the basic programs that people use (such as Word) would probably take up all that space by themselves. The new iLife, for example, supposedly takes up something like 20 GB of space. A game I have from 2003 or so takes up 1 GB by itself and it's 2 expansions take up another 1.5 GB between them, but it's sequel (came out in the fall of '07) uses up 6.5 GB.

And it's not just companies that do this, and it's not just hard drive space. That 6.5 GB game won't work on my computer because I don't have a fancy graphics card, and I can't download pretty much anything because I have dial-up. Even when I go to my father's house to use his much better computer with much faster internet things aren't nearly perfect. The 6.5 GB game will run over there, but it is rather laggy, and I can watch episodes of my favorite TV shows, but they take forever to download. One show is compressed down to 40 MB for the 25 minute episodes and 80 MB for the 50 minute episodes. This other show that I watch isa apparently not compressed at all (in the place I download it from) and so each episode is 230 MB (and takes me over 30 minutes to download).

These days, if you have a hard drive smaller than 20 GB, you need more space, and if you have internet slower than basic DSL you are pitied. And hard drive space in any large quantity isn't cheap.

Morrowind

Many of you have probably heard of Oblivion, the fourth installment in the Elder Scrolls series of games. You have probably not heard of it's prequel, Morrowind.

While I won't be comparing to two, or even talking about Oblivion very much (since I don't have it), the various people I know who have played both say that Morrowind is better in every aspect except graphics.

Morrowind is a fantasy game played from first-person view (although a 3rd-person camera is avalable) featuring a main quest, many small side quests, and numerous guilds that you can join (and that offer quests). In fact, the best aspect of Morrowind is the vast overload of things that you can do. You can do the main quest, you can join the fighters guild, you can run around killing monsters and performing side quests, you can even go online to one of probably a thousand sites and download easily installable mods to give yourself more to do, or different ways of doing it. Heck, you can even become a vampire and do quests revolving around that.

The second best thing is how much 3rd party stuff there is for Morrowind. The computer version comes with a simple, easy to use, and (most of all) powerful editor that can be used to create and edit plugins. Think your sword is too heavy? Make it lighter. Think there should be a town run by vampires? Make it (or change an existing one). This editor can do anything if you know how.

Of course, you almost never have to do anything yourself, since there is a small army of geeks addicted to Morrowind who constantly turn out every concievable mod and plugin and post them on sites so that other people can play them.

And, of course, you can make your own spells. The magic in Morrowind is simply 20 or 30 spell effects and each spell is one or more of them at a certain magnitude, duration, radius, etc. You can have a spell that allows you to fly for 10 seconds, another that lasts 20 seconds, one that lasts 30 seconds, and another that lasts 31 seconds if you felt like it. You can even have a 'getaway' spell - a powerful burst of healing, a boost of speed, and how about a summoned creature to hold off your enemies while you leave.

Finally, everything is skill-driven. If you want to hit someone with a sword, how high your level is has nothing to do with the equation - you could have a level 100 character, but maybe he prefers axes over swords. So when he tries to use a sword (maybe his axe broke), he will have a bit of trouble hitting people. In fact, your level is only used as a device for HP and stat increases and as a way of comparing the relative strength of characters.

And, of course, when you have modded the heck out of Morrowind like I have you can find some fun little things that you can do. For example, I have one that makes it so that whenever you cast a spell with this one effect that creates a magical bow for you to use for the duration of the effect, you also get a supply of arrows to go with it. And another one modifies this little pair of effects called Mark and Recall. Mark marks a location so that the next time you cast recall you are magically teleported to where you were when you cast mark. What happens for ME, though, is I assign a mark to one of 12 slots that I now have, and recall allows me to choose which mark I want to go to. That little mod has saved me a fortune in ship fees.

Tiberian Sun

I recently started playing Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun, a game that I have heard good things about but never really got around to playing since it came on a disk with 5 other great games (including more recent games).

I remember the first time I tried Tiberian sun; I started it up, and when it stopped playing opening stuff it was at a menu with 2 main choices: Tiberian Sun and Tiberian Sun: Firestorm. I chose Firestorm since it would be the expansion and (thus) newer and better (makes sense, right?). Since I didn't feel like playing through the campaign at that moment, I decided to play a skirmish game. I set up the game to be me (as GDI) versus an 'easy opponent' computer (also as GDI).

I started the game, and I saw that I had several buildings and a couple groups of units. I figured I would have time to get started, since all the other CnC games did that and this was an easy opponent. I started poking around, I build a few buildings, and then about 30 seconds to a minute into the game some enemy tanks or something showed up and started shooting at my tanks. I had all my units swarm these things, and they eventually killed them. But then, more enemy units showed up (I think these were infantry), and they wiped out all of my guys and I quit the mission.

I stopped playing Tiberian Sun for a while after that, but last weekend I decided that I would give the campaign a try. I went into the menu and set the game to it's easiest, slowest possible settings. IT WAS FREAKING SLOW!!! I finally got it set at about the middle for speed and the same for difficulty, and I am slowly moving through the campaign.

The reason I like campaigns so much is that they are a great way of learning what each of the units does and how they interact. The first few missions especially - they almost always start off with an easy little mission where you can build generic infantry and (maybe) a few buildings, and then slowly add different types of units and make the missions harder, and in this manner you get the hang of the game.

So I know enough about Tiberian Sun and the other games in it's storyline to know that whenever an infantryman dies from the damage that infantry takes from being on Tiberium ore they turn into this annoying blob called a visceroid. Unfortunately, one of my light infantry apparently turned into one during the course of mission 2, so I have some ifantry nearby shooting at it. Thing is, apparently the explosive ... things... that some of my people shoot literally bounce off of these things, so right after I give this order I see some of these projectiles flying into a civillian building and I hear the narrator-ish person ("construction complete" or "our base is under attack" and similar things) say that I failed the mission, and I see a low-resolution video of some aircraft or something being shot down by some thingys that I blew up a few minutes earlier. Apparently, I had killed some civillians with my stray missiles.

After that I decided to read a book for a while (It's a surprisingly good book, too), and now I am contemplating playing the campaign of Tiberian Sun: Firestorm.

Halo 2

One of the great new features of Halo 2 is the ability to hold 2 weapons at once, provided that they are small enough.

I rather like having the opportunity to do so, since it allows me to have 2 weak guns that work well together, rather than simply having a heirarchy of guns in which bigger is always better. In fact, the possibility of dual-wielding is probably the only reason I ever use SMGs or plasma rifles, since neither of them packs the firepower on their own to make them truly interesting.

The only downsides to dual-wielding are that you can't throw grenades (your hand is busy holding your other gun) and that reloading ammo-based weapons takes more time. But, you can compensate by finding a good pair of weapons. I have heard good things about using a plasma pistol and an SMG, where you charge the pistol and use it to take down your opponent's shields and then use the SMG to actually shoot at them.

Personally, though, I prefer to have 2 plasma rifles. They have the speed and power to handle just about anything close-range, and enough accuracy to allow you to get close to targets that are further away. Plus, they never need to be reloaded, and they are common enough that you can easily find a replacement for one that runs out of ammo.

Another fun aspect of Halo 2 is the sniper rifles. There is your generic sniper rifle that fires bullets out of a 4-shot clip, and there is your energy-based sniper rifle that fires purple beams of energy. I prefer the ammo-based one since as long as you make sure the clip is full whenever you have a minute it rarely runs out of ammo in the middle of a fight. Plus, when you are in the scarab in mission 3, the bullets from that rifle bounce around the walls.

I remember the time I discovered this; I was a little to the side of the bottom of the stairs, and I had already shot all the enemies except one of the pilots. I pulled out the sniper rifle and aimed at the pilot, who couldn't see me, except when I fired I accidentally jerked the rifle to the right, so I shot the wall. But then I saw the smoke trail from the bullet hit the pilot in the back of his head.

Finally, another addition I like is the fact that the AI for the marines was expanded to be able to drive the warthogs, which comes in especially handy on mission 2 when you are driving around the tunnel. See, in the original Halo you would have had to either go it alone in one of the ghosts or drive a warthog and let the marines handle the shooting. But in Halo 2, you have marines following you even if you take a ghost, and you can also fire the gun on a warthog while a marine drives. And when you get to the part where you have to shoot at those transports you better hope you have some way of shooting at them yourself, because the marines fire in small bursts and it takes for ever for them to blow up a transport.

Then again, Halo 2's pistol isn't nearly as good as the one from Halo 1...

Why I hate the Beam Rifle

These days, I recently got back into playing two old favorites of mine (one of which is older than the other), Baldur's Gate 2 and Star Wars: Battlefront 2.

Battlefront 2 is a 1st- or 3rd-person shooter game (I have it for the Xbox) with tank and starfighters also avalable. I rather like it because it can be pretty challenging, and skill is a definite factor. I know this more than ever because I stopped playing for a while and when I started again it was a lot harder than I remembered. I distinctly remember checking my kill-death ratio shortly after I started playing again and it was 12.94:1, and then I checked again a bit later after I was starting to get the hang of it and it was 12.44:1.

Sniping seems to be pretty hard in Battlefront 2, I know this because my sniper-crazy friend says that he never snipes in it because it's too hard. So I was playing this one mission practicing my sniping skills on Kamino (the rainy planet with the aliens who clone people). I was an assassin droid sitting up on this one little ledge-type thing that gave me clear shots at most of the map (they were technically out of range, but the rifle could hit them just fine, and I must have gotten 40 or 50 kills.

Then, I guess I got my 4th (or maybe 5th...) headshot and I got a little message saying that I just earned the Beam Rifle, a "better" sniper rifle with no delay between when you fired and when your target got hit. Sounds great, right? Then I found that the zoom was only 8x (As opposed to a choice between 8x and 4x), so it would be harder to hit people who were fairly close to me.

Then, I decided to shoot some guy in a turret, since my aim wasn't used to this rifle (or so I thought). I take the little dot at the center of the crosshairs and put it right on this guy's head, and I pull the trigger. Nothing happens. I fire two whole clips into this guy and still nothing happens. Then I realize: this guy is out of range. The regular sniper rifle could hit him, but this one can't becsue it actually has a maximum range.

I finally use my video game wisdom to defeat him by using a trick I picked up in Halo 2. I used the scope on the beam rifle to aim exactly at his head and, without moving the joysticks at all, I switched out the pistol and emptied a clip into him.

A Glitch in MechWarrior 4

When I was playing this mission in the campaign of MechWarrior 4: Vengeance the other day, I think it's the last desert one but I have yet to beat it so I don't know (there doesn't seem to be any more space on their map of the desert), and I fould a glitch it the AI.

I, my 3 lancemates, and 2 other allies were fighting the defenders of this one prison camp, at least one of which was an Uziel. I accidentally shot the building behind the Uziel one too many times and it blew up, and a little while later the Uziel walked into it (apparently you can walk through destroyed buildings, even if they look solid). Then it just sat there, and I figured that I would take that opportunity to blow it up without getting shot myself, so I fire a salvo of lasers at it. Nothing happens. I try walking into the factory (one of the other sides, of course) and try shooting at it again. Nothing happens. I try walking right up to it and shooting it again. Still nothing happens.

Eventually (after I and my friends had killed everything else we were supposed to, I looked at the mission objectives, and the only one we hadn't done was to kill all the enemies on the map. So I walked back to the Uziel (still trapped and still doing nothing). Only, this time when I walk right up to it I take longer to stop than I expected and I accidentally nudge it aside a bit. I finally realize that I can move it out of the building by pushing it, and then we should be able to shoot it normally. I push it out and, sure enough, the fight between it and my friends resumes. I debate staying inside the building since my central torso health indicator is flashing red (a very bad sign), but I decide that, with all the firepower my friends and I have, we should be able to kille it before it does anything. So I step outside the factory and start shooting at it. It shoots me in the central torso with both PPCs and I die.

Sniping in CnC: Generals

I think that many people who play Command and Conquer: Generals and Zero Hour underestimate the effectiveness of USA's pathfinders. They are 1-hit kill (vs infantry) invisible snipers, and are particularly effective when put into humvees or (my favorite) Overlord tanks. You can put some pathfinders into humvees (I usually go with 3 pathfinders and 2 guys with rocket launchers) and then drive around in the vicinity of some GLA stinger sites, so that they can snipe the guys in the stinger site and shoot rockets at the site itself.

Against USA or China you have to use your pathfinders in more of a defensive manner, or at least take out their turrets before you send in the pathfinders, but they are still useful. China in particular has a habit of sending in troop transports filled with infantry, so all you have to do is have your partiot missile turrets shoot the transports then your pathfinders will take care of the infantry that is left behind almost instantly.

GLA, also, has that annoying ability where they can spawn some rebels anywhere on the map, so what I usually do against them is have small groups of pathifinders spread throughout my base in such a way as to have overlapping fields of fire, then when my opponent sends rebels into my base the pathfinders take them out before they can cause trouble.

Sure pathfinders are a tad expensive, but what do you expect for something so useful? Combine some pathfinders with some sort of missile source, such as patriot missile turrets, and you have a pretty much unbeatable combo there -- the pathfinders shoot infantry before it can shoot your stuff, and the missile things shoot tanks and aircaft before they can do much.

WarCraft 3

I have been making a custom map recently in WarCraft 3, the predecessor to the now-infamous World of Warcraft. If you have never played it, it is a strategy game with little armies and a few heroes versus another force of the same, and it is divided into the Alliance (humans, high elves, dwarves, and gnomes), the Horde (orcs, tauren, and trolls), the Undead, and the Night Elves.

I have always liked it, but never been very good at just playing a normal game, it just isn't my style. So recently I found a map online where the player has a hero and fights their way through large numbers of bad guys, eventually becoming epically strong. To get started, I took a copy of that map and completely wiped it clean, leaving the custom units. Since then I have been fiddling and changing, and my goal is to eventually make a map where the player and their allies fight against large numbers of extremely strong foes and perhaps somehow survive. I am making a custom race for the player to be, it is primarily Night Elf, though there are a few Alliance and Horde units and even an undead or two.

It took me a while to figure out how to adjust some of the settings, primarily increasing the maximum amount of food (houses supply food on a constant basis, and units have a food cost that you need to pay on a constant basis). I finally figured out where it is, and I also found various other little things I can do, such as changing the highest level that heroes can go to from 10 to 100, and changing it so that the most experience a hero could get from battling monsters was the highest the game would let me set it -- 10,000.1.

I guess all I am talking about in this article is my map, so I might as well talk about the concept a little more. What I envisioned at the start of this process was a map where the heroes start out normal and then as they level up they get stronger and stronger, preferably at the default rate just expanded over 100 levels (so, if some spell that whatever hero gets deals 100 damage at first level, 200 damage at second level, and 300 damage at third level, I will have it increase by 100 damage every level afterwards). At least I try to do that. One hero that I rather like, the Demon Hunter, has an ability called evasion. If you get it to level 1 it gives you (I think) a 25% chance to evade each attack directed at you. then, if you get it to level 2 that changes to 35%, and it continues at that rate. Stretch that out to 20 levels, which is what I am doing, and you will automatically dodge every attack against you (which is somewhat overpowered). So I slowed it down a bit.

I am looking for new appearances to use for my heroes. I started with the default heroes, but they look a little too ordinary so I am searching through the various units for the cool-looking ones. Right now I have 5 Heroes and I will try to keep it at that number, since each hero can be selected by pressing the F key corresponding with that hero (F1 for the first hero, F2 for the second, and so on), but only F1 through F5 are set up to do that, so it is harder to select the 6th hero (if you have one -- the game normally only lets you have 3). But right now I have Jaina the Archmage (from the human campaign), Sylvanas Windrunner (from the undead campaign), Cairne (from the orc campaign), a dreadlord whose name I can't remember right now (from the undead campaign), and Evil Ilidan from the Night Elf and Blood Elf campaigns, though I have found a few interesting creeps (monsters) that I might use.

Mech Warrior 4: Vengeance

I feel I should warn you ahead of time, but if you have never played anything of the Mech Warrior, Mech Assault, or Mech commander games or read any Mech Warrior or Battletech books you will probably have no idea of what I am talking about.

I recently got back into playing Mech Warrior 4: Vengeance,  which I have had for years but never really played since I have (and preferred) Mech Warrior 2, which is more streamlined. But a friend of mine gave me an old joystick he wasn't using, and now it is one of the most addicting things I have ever played. Before I got the joystick I had to use literally half of my keyboard with all the buttons I use, plus the mouse, but now I can tie all of the commands I use most into this joystick and only have to reach for the keyboard when I want to fiddle with the minimap.

I have been doing the campaign and, I think it is one of the best ideas for a campaign ever in such a game -- when you finish a mission, your people salvage what they can from the remains of your defeated enemies so that you can use them on your next mission. It's a great idea and it totally fits my style (high-powered weapons striking at critical areas to quickly kill one's enemies -- with a minimum of damage overall).

This makes it much more balanced than simply letting people use whatever they want or have the game's creators decide what you can and can't use on any given mission. My only complaint about it is that the game's designers have yet to let me fight any of the 'mechs that I really like - I particularly want a Mad Cat Mark 2, one that I have had some luck with -- cut the max speed to 52 kph, get rid of the jump jets, and put in 2 Clan Ultra AC 20s with double ammo, 2 Clan SRM 6s, and 2 Bombast Lasers (or Clan ER large lasers) and then pump up the heat sinks and you will have a very short range but very powerful killing machine (in a fight against 3 waves of 2 atlases each, I got a 3 to  kill ratio, and only because I started running out of ammo every now and then).

On the other hand, having to use lighter 'Mechs than I normally would has given me an appreciation for them that I normally wouldn't have. For example, until I ran through the campaign I never would have tried using a Cougar since they are only, what, 35 tons? But after I have used them on a few missions, I realize that they are tough little buggers that have a good balance of speed, armor, and firepower (once modified, of course).

Thing is, I am still stuck in the desert missions and I hate the heat there. I tried doing this one mission there in a NovaCat once. That was a disaster -- I am supposed to raid this base, and the first things I am supposed to do are shoot the communications thingy and the turret control tower. I stand at the edge of my weapons' range and hit the zoom button. I fire my 3 ER large lasers at the communications building and quickly move the crosshairs over to the turret control tower and fire my 2 ER PPCs at it, and then I see that my heat is critical. I believe that was the mission that I eventually finished in my Vulture, with my computer-controlled ally losing my Argus in the process. On the upside, I won a 6-or-so to 2 fight when we were already damaged and all I had left was an ER PPC (Uziels are much less annoying after you have blown their arms off -- especially if they have used up all their SRMs).

Turtling

Turtling, basically, is where you quickly set up impenetrable defenses around your base in a real-time strategy game. I particularly like this strategy because it allows me to kick back in a more-or-less completely safe environment and build up an overwhelming force with which to crush my opponents.

In some games I get so good at turtling that I need to find a way to make the game harder. I still play Red Alert 2 every now and then even though I have mostly moved on to the next game in the series, Generals, and it gets to the point where I look at my opponent's base and just say "if they attacked now with everything they had, they might be able to beat me..." and then I send 30 or 40 prism tanks through their base and turn it into a field of smoking craters. And of course it doesn't help that each game has some sort of unit that is completely overpowered yet expensive (so I can sit back and collect money for a while and then send a couple dozen of these things at them. In Red Alert 2, for example, the soviets can build this thing called a 'Kirov Airship'. Kirovs are blimps that are, somehow, heavily armored and can drop bombs that destroy anything on a direct hit (of course, nothing ever lives long enough to get a direct hit on it) and that cost $2000 (which is a lot of money in RA2). I remember one time that I sent 10 of these things at an enemy's base and completely crippled them while losing 2 or 3 Kirovs in the process.

A similar unit that the allies can build is the prism tank. It isn't very powerful by istelf, but it is cheap enough that you can build 30 or so of them and then their massive range and damage will protect them from just about anything as long as they are clumped up.

But, I digress. Turtling in RA2 is at the same time harder and easier than in other games. Buildings get built faster than most other games, but there are more easy ways of destroying them, too. There is nothing I hate more than seeing my row of pill boxes and prism towers get blown up by some apocalypse tanks or prism tanks. But, when that does happen, a harrier strike should get rid of those pesky tanks with a minimum of damage to the harriers (apocalypse tanks have anti-air missiles)

In Generals, on the other hand, it is harder to turtle (unless you're the laser general) than to do pretty much anything else. Thing is, if you do, you can pwn SO hard. I remember one time in the campaign when I had USA and Chinese technology. Overlord Tanks. With snipers in them. Versus GLA. "Oh, look, it's one of those GLA rocket sites. <snipe>, <snipe>, <snipe>, Yay! no more guys with rocket launchers!"

Or, of course, you could simply build 10 or so superweapons and cripple them that way. After all, 2 or 3 nukes detonating in pretty much the same place in rapid succession will get rid of just about anything.

The Importance of Video Cards

So, for my first article I guess I will talk about how important it is to have a good video card. My mother has a computer with 2.3 GHZ of processing power, 512 MB of RAM, and an integrated (not very good) video card. I was playing Age of Empires 3, which has a minimum of a 1.3 GHZ processor, 256MB of RAM, and a pretty good video card. It works fairly well... until I have my ships start shooting at stuff when I am looking at them. The frame rate drops from about 50-something per second to less than 1. I click on the minimap to move the screen onto something less graphics intensive (like the middle of nowhere) and it still takes something like 30 seconds to move the screen there.

Later, I was at my father's house (he has a much better computer, but I don't know how good exactly) and I was trying out AOE3 on that computer for the first time. I told 3 frigates (if you don't play AOE3, they are the big ships with lots of guns to kill your frame rate) and I told them to broadside some random other ship. When I did this I fully expected it to lag, but I didn't know how badly (since it was a different computer). It didn't slow at all and that other ship sank in about one and a half seconds of real-time.

Then I got Neverwinter Nights 2, a game that I heard some great things about and the sequel to another great game. I cleared off the 6.5 GB of space on my hard drive and installed it. Then, when I tried to run it I got an error message saying that my graphics card (this is the bad one) did not have something called direct3D. I went to my father's house and tried it there - on that computer it's the processor that is (slightly) too slow.

Another time, I was testing a map I made in WarCraft 3. This map was designed to have the player be overpowered but against tough enemies so it balances out. I was testing the player by fighting 5 enemies at the same time. I was doing fine in holding them off, partially because this was a fantasy setting but my base was being guarded by machine guns and rocket launchers as well as magic. Then I decides to go on the offensive, to knock out one of them and make my day a little easier. I took 24 people through the portal and I got ambushed by 36 or so enemies. Ordinarily, I could have had my heroes blast away with spells and probably win. Thing is, with so many people on-screen all fighing, it started lagging SO hard. I looked at the icons for my heroes that show their health and whatever, and saw that one of them was in danger. So I quickly pressed F2 to select my paladin and then T to tell him to cast his healing spell. Then I tried to move the cursor onto the icon of the injured person to heal them. The game was lagging so much the cursor started disappearing. That person died and I was about to cancel the healing spell, but another person started losing health so I tried to target them (they died before my cursor got there), and the battle went on like that. I got wiped out in about a minute.

So, kids, take this lesson to heart and always make sure you have a good video card when you're gaming.