Balancing/Tweaks

Crafting/Related

Graphics

Other

Anyway, as I’ve been searching for a way to revert to 1.1 without having the files myself and having finally found these files I wanted to share them, and thank the people that uploaded them, so without further ado:

• Instructions + files
• Direct link to the files
• Mirror

Installation

Installation went quite smoothly, I extracted all the files into the Skyrim folder with Phoenix  (Probably not the proper way but it worked). Running the Steam pre-load after this only took about 10-20 minutes, verifying data and downloading anything missing.

Graphics & Animation

I can’t say anything other than that the graphics simply look great, they aren’t the pinnacle of textures/graphics quality, but the style is consistent and it’s up to par with today’s standard.

The feel/style has changed quite a lot since Oblivion. Skyrim feels more like Morrowind to me, everything is a darker and more serious compared to Oblivion. This isn’t bothersome though, for me it makes Skyrim more immersive and I prefer it over the “happy happy” graphics in Oblivion.

However the animations are still behind compared to other games, Bethesda has been known to not always be up to par with other games and this game is no exception. The most bothersome thing is that the facial expressions (Well the lack thereof). Next to that there are some small clipping issues but those aren’t that bothersome.

Sound/Music

I can’t say much about this, the music is solid (produced by Jeremy Soule so no surprise there), and the sounds, well I can’t really judge them, they fit.

Combat

The combat system has been changed compared to Oblivion, you can now equip an item/spell per hand and attack with either using the left or right mouse-button. And when you dual-wield spells (needs a perk in the specified tree) the resulting cast is more powerful.

There are also satisfying finishing moves, kind of similar to some of the Deadly Reflex finishing moves in Oblivion, however without any limbs actually being separated.

Controls/UI

The controls work good, not many complaints, though not all key bindings are properly configurable.

There’s some small annoyances with the UI, if you change a keyboard shortcut the old key will still show in the UI, and if you want to hotkey things you need to add them to a favourites list first, then open that list, and use that to assign hotkeys to them.

Levelling System

The levelling system has been changed again from Oblivion, and they’ve simplified it. You don’t pick a class in the beginning, so no minor/major skills, and no birth-signs either. The total amount of skills has also been reduced to 18.

Instead of having major/minor skills help you level up, all skills will help you. And instead of the old attribute system you now choose whether you want to improve your magicka, health or fatigue, and you get a point to put into a perk for a skill (Which gives you all kinds of bonuses for that skill).

Quests

I’ve only played a handful of quests, so I can’t speak for the quests as a whole, but the ones I did complete play I enjoyed. The quests on average feel more interesting than the ones in Oblivion. There’s the “Radiant quest” system they implemented that is supposed to make quests more dynamic but as this is my first playthrough I can’t judge how that works.

Other Changes

A list of some other changes:

• Lockpicking now uses the system that was also used in Fallout 3
• No barter when trading (discounts depend on speech level/perks)
• Persuade/intimidate/bribe/brawl dialogue options like in Fallout 3 (The Oblivion disposition system is gone)

Conclusion

Even though the animations could use some improvements, and even though they simplified the levelling system I am still very much impressed by this game, and at the moment I consider it just as good as, and perhaps even better than Oblivion. So if you enjoyed Oblivion and/or Morrowind I can definitely recommend this.

Just after work I get a text “You can now pick-up your pre-order for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” so I race to the games retailer and pick it up. I arrive home and eagerly insert the disk into my computer. But not before unplugging the internet and setting the date to 11-11-11 (Risk reduction and all).

So insert the disk, fire up the installer, click “Install”…

Steam pops-up “Cannot connect to Steam servers”, FUCK! Set my date back to normal, and enabled the nets again, connect to Steam enter serial “Game activated” it says, “Click next to download”, so I press buttan…

“ERROR: Can’t install, not released yet” great, okay, unplug internet, kill ALL the steam processes, punch date forward to 11-11-11 again. Relaunch Steam, fire up the installer again, well FUCK! again, seems it isn’t fooled this easily.

So yeah I now have the physical disk, I can see the fucking files on the disk god damned, yet I can’t play.

Yes yes I know today is not the release date, but if I have a physical disk I want to fucking use it, even though the retailer shouldn’t even have started handing them out yet.

So now we wait, well we won’t wait, well be kicking Mehrunes Dagon’s ass for the coming 2 days, after that, dragons beware.

Installing From DVD

As Dragoon48 pointed out in the comments, this is how you can install it from DVD

Updates

Update (10/Nov/11 22:44): the game is now pre-loaded, the waiting game begins…

Update (11/Nov/11 0:22): ”Approx. 1 hour remaining”

Update (11/Nov/11 1:03): Decrypting…

Update (11/Nov/11 1:04): Installing pre-reqs…

Update (11/Nov/11 1:08): Aaaaand we’re in!

I finally have Battlefield 3 Beta working, it turned out to be a bug with folder names containing an è, apparently characters with accents aren’t well liked.

Regardless, the fix:

1. Go to the folder where Origin installed BF3 Beta, this is usually:
   32bit: C:\Program Files\Origin Games
   64bit: C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin Games
2. Rename the Bèta Battlefield 3 folder to Beta Battlefield 3
3. Start regedit , browse to the following key:
   32bit: HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\SOFTWARE\EA Games
64bit: HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WoW6432Node\EA Games
4. Change the InstallDir path to:
   C:\Program Files\Origin Games\Beta Battlefield 3
5. Change the GDFBinary path to the following, while keeping the stuff after the last \ intact (the last bit starts with GDFBinary and ends with .dll):
   C:\Program Files\Origin Games\Beta Battlefield 3
So in my case that would be
   C:\Program Files\Origin Games\Beta Battlefield 3\GDFBinary_en_US.dll


Source: http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/battlefield-3/1432752-win7-x64-bf3-exe-crash-fix.html

NOTE: I have not been able to verify the 32bit values so they might be incorrect, a solution if you can’t find the registry key is to search for “Battlefield 3” and check if the location is similar to the above ones.

Lemme know if it works

As I’ve lately got a preference for Battlefield over Call of Duty I was quite excited when I heard that there was an open beta for Battlefield 3.

So after downloading Origin and letting it install Battlefield 3 I fired it up, and it opened a website, okay not what I prefer for finding a match but it’ll do.

So I go find a random server with room and hit the join button, okay my mouse shows the loading graphic. Ok good origin says it’s starting Battlefield 3. Okay bf3.exe in task manager… poof, gone.

It seems in my case Battlefield decided that it will just crash during start-up, doesn’t even go beyond 30MB of RAM usage so it’s crashing really early in its start-up phase.

I updated my drivers, reinstalled it and rebooted my computer, nothing, and considering this is really a minimal windows install (Only games + game related software) it seems highly unlikely my OS install is the problem.

This is a shame as I was quite excited for it after watching some gameplay footage and commentaries.

Well guess I’ll try again sometime soon when it’s fixed, hopefully this is before the beta ends.

~Xeross

Update: fixed it!

What is Schemaverse?

Schemaverse is a space-based strategy game (SPAECSHIPZ!!) that runs completely in a PostgreSQL database. So when you create an account it gets created on the PostgreSQL server and you connect to that server to play.

Currently the actual gameplay is (in my opinion) quite limited, but still interesting enough and it gives you a chance to improve your SQL skills.

Tics

Schemaverse’s universe works on tics, each tic is roughly 60 seconds long and every tick the following things happen:

• Every ship moves based on the ships direction, speed and destination coordinates.
• All fleets run their fleetscript#() function if they have it enabled and have a runtime of at least 1 minute.
• Mining happens for all ships who ran the mine() command this tic.
• Some planets randomly have their fuel increased.
• Any damage/repair that occurred during the tic is committed to the ship table.
• Any ships that have been reduced to 0 health for the same amount of tics as the EXPLODED variable (currently 60 tics or approximately 1 hour) are set to destroyed.

Scripting

What makes this game (even more) interesting is that it actually allows and encourages you to write AI for fleets using PL/pgSQL code.

This allows you to for example write a script that automatically creates new ships, upgrades their mining capability and assigns them to a planet, repeating this every tick.

Open-source

Yep, Schemaverse is open source, and the entire source code is available on GitHub.

Security

Of course when you are running an entire game in an SQL server there’s the tricky task of preventing SQL injection.

A previous exploit for example was that you could execute any SQL query as a privileged user by injecting the SQL into the ship name, and then triggering a notification to be generated for that ship. Finding new exploits is encouraged, as there’s a trophy for SQL injections that you can only get by using such an exploit to add it to your list of trophies.

Okay where do I start?

You start by creating an account on schemaverse.com and then you can either use the basic webinterface to get you started, or you can use the command line PostgreSQL client and/or your favourite PostgreSQL utility (Navicat, etc.)

For more info on how to play currently the most up-to-date and complete guide is this PDF next to that there’s also the Schemaverse Wiki on GitHub.

NOTE: One small correction with regards to above guides, the event query should use READ_EVENT(id) not READ_EVENT(event_id).

Day 1

I woke up in this strange unknown world, not sure how I got here, but the thing I did know was I was gonna be here for a while.

I started gathering some wood as I needed some tools, while walking around I saw some burning trees a bit further away. I decided to investigate and as I suspected the trees grew too closely to lava setting them ablaze

After gathering some materials I decided to find a place were to start building shelter, or at least some storage. After walking a while I encountered a cave that was very steeply going downwards, so I decided to mark it with a big pile of dirt for later investigation.

After finding a nice spot on an open plane to put down a working bench I quickly crafted some basic wooden tools, and went on to get some stone after that to get some decent tools to work with.

I spotted what looked like a small cavern not too far away and decided to get some stone there. However upon investigation it turned out to be a rather large open cave of which most was hidden under ground level. I gathered some stone, and also some coal I found and decided to head back to make new tools.

After creating some stone tools I decided to gather some more stone from my now designated mine, however as I got there night was setting in.

Night

I was stupid to decide to just make a lighted area around my workbench and that I would be fine that way, before I knew it a skeleton was attacking me, eventually knocking me out.

Strangely I woke up again at the place I woke up when I got here, devoid of all my gear, luckily I made a small wooden tower at the location of my workbench so I could easily find it back.

I managed to kill the skeleton this time and quickly decided to craft a stone sword, just in time as suddenly multiple skeletons and zombies started approaching, luckily I managed to kill most of ‘em, before being knocked out yet again.

The night continued on like this, I’ve been knocked out for 3 times now, luckily when dawn finally struck it seemed our neighbourhood skeletons, zombies and spiders left a good amount of resources, so I can now make a bow and have some arrows for it.

Now time to start building an actual shelter…

Day 2

I’ve survived the night, well sort of, now day has dawned I saw the landscape was damaged thanks to these exploding green creatures, I’ll have to restore that sometime soon.

There were still a few spiders left so I took care of them swiftly with my sword, and then went to gather resources for the house.

Spent the entire day collecting resources for the house, finished it just as darkness hit.

Night

Safely inside the house, I’ve constructed a furnace and used the little coal I had left to cook some meat and smelt some iron. Finally a good meal.

Now we wait until dawn comes…

I’m hearing plenty of zombies and skeletons outside, I hope dawn comes soon, I don’t like this. Well at least I now have a safe shelter, but I should get some glass tomorrow for windows, as this hole I look out through doesn’t protect me very well from arrows.

The sun is finally starting to rise, soon the zombies and skeletons will meet a fiery death, though it seems that these green exploding things (Or creepers as I now call them) are resistant to sunlight, so I’ll have to get rid of them the old fashioned way.

Day 3

A zombie suddenly appeared in my house, but there’s no way he could’ve gotten in here, hmm this strange land sure has its quirks.

As soon as dawn struck I decided to go gather sand for the windows, and on the way back I gathered some coal, and coincidentally found some iron. After having mined this I headed back to my house to start smelting the sand.

While the sand was smelting I headed out to gather more wood to expand the house a bit, as it was quite small and I had enough of sleeping on the floor.

When I came back I started expanding the house and placed the windows, I also smelted the iron and created some iron tools from it.

Night

I continued building the expansion in the evening but found myself out of cobblestone quickly, I figured not having a roof wouldn’t be a problem as long as the walls were up.

Fuck, I completely forgot spiders can climb walls, I have quickly lined the ceiling with dirt and will replace it with stone the following morning.

Now sleep and wait ’till dawn…

Day 4

Feeling quite hungry, so my first priority was to find myself some food, luckily some pigs had somehow formed a group so I butchered them and took the meat.

After cooking it all, eating part of it and storing the rest I headed on out to the mine to get some more stone to finish the roof.

After finishing the roof it already started to become night again, luckily due to random annoying sheep I had enough wool to make a bed, so now I finally have a bed woo, anyway, off to bed.

Night

Zzz…

Day 5

Today I decided the house needed some decent flooring instead of fucking grass, I set out to the forest to gather some wood, replanting every tree I chopped down.

After laying the floors for the house I decided to start working on the roof a bit, I managed to finish the outlines of the sloped roof before running out of wood.

After this I filled up some of the holes the explosions of the creepers left with the sand I had now gathered, and then night fell.

Night

Zzz…

Day 6

Started working on a pathway to the mine, so I can get there in the night too, even though the pathway won’t be safe for spiders everything else can’t get on it, though I’m gonna need a lot of stone/wood for this project.

Well more work tomorrow…

Night

Zzz…

Uwu, for some reason I keep getting woken up by skeletons and zombies somehow being inside my house, this doesn’t make sense at all.

Day 7

More work on the walkway to the mine, so far the actual path is done, now for the fencing and lighting posts tomorrow.

Night

Somehow the zombies/skeletons are still able to get into my house, this is seriously impacting my night’s rest.

Day 8

Spent the entire day working on the walkway to the mine again

Night

Waited too long before heading home, had to fend off quite a lot of monsters in result, anyway back home now, time for sleep.

Day 9

Pretty uneventful, finished the lighting next to the walkway, and started working on sealing off the entire mine.

Due to sealing off the mine it became somewhat darker so I had to add some lighting, and a zombie managed to scare me shitless, better look more carefully next time.

Night

Seems moving my bed has solved the problem with the monsters finding their way in, odd.

Zzz…

Day 10

Worked on the mine the entire day again, sealed off most of it now, still need to add windows.

Night

Part of the fence is now finished, need some more wood, spent the entire night mining, sealing off the mine and working on the pathway

To my surprise though we had now arrived at world 5 (Aka the 5th reset), and not only that, but some quite drastic changes have been made to the experience (LP) system.

Instead of the more generic “Do action, get XP” approach they’ve now taken a more EVE Online like approach. There are now apparently these curiosities (Some kind of item) that you need to study, this basically means putting them in a special inventory and waiting, and it even continues when offline. When done studying these curiosities you will gain LP which you can use as always.

Now I kind of liked the XP per action approach with H&H because you got rewarded for building a house, creating a wall, etc. so I guess a change of mentality is needed (As was needed with EVE Online for me) to be able to keep enjoying this game.

Another thing that has changed is that you now need to have both the skill for a certain crafting recipe, and you have to have seen all the items needed in the recipe to be able to craft it. Seen in this case means gathered from their original source, not traded, picked up from the ground, etc.

They do seem to however have increased player counts now, last time I checked 400 people were online, now 1000 are playing, so at least it’s still gaining momentum.

Only time will tell if these changes will prevent me from playing again, now I just need to find some people to play with.

~Xeross

Now almost all MMO’s implement the sharding in a way that certain characters are tied to a certain server, so those characters can only be played on that server.

This results in all kinds of annoyances for the players, friends that find themselves on different servers than each other, etc.

However there was 1 company (Well I only know of one) that had a better plan for the shards, why not make the characters usable across shards.

So now, instead of having your characters tied to a specific server both you and your friends can just log onto the same server and play together. While still having the performance and scalability benefits of sharding.

I don’t expect any of the current MMO’s to actually implement this, but for something like for example WoW this would’ve kept me playing a lot longer.

There’s probably some performance issues tied to using such a system, but those shouldn’t be too hard to overcome for a developer with a decent budget.

Well that’s it, leave a comment with your thoughts, ideas, etc. if you want.

~Xeross

So far I’ve spent quite a few hours in CoD4, though unfortunately I don’t know a lot of people still playing it. But it’s good fun anyway.

And today (Well technically yesterday) I’ve purchased Team Fortress 2, I didn’t really like it at first but I’m starting to like it.

Especially the lack of an assault rifle wielding general soldier class annoys me a bit, but I’m starting to be able to work with the classes that do exist.

So yeah that was it for a little gaming update, meh, I’m out.

~Xeross

So I recently stumbled upon this open beta of Final Fantasy XIV, another attempt to create a Final Fantasy MMO, I haven’t really followed the happenings around the first one so I can’t really compare it to that, well let’s get started.

Registration & Installation

So the first thing to do is register an account and apply for the beta (Even have to do that while it’s an open beta), this process goes smoothly, but after that we need to download and install the game.

After you register you download a small installer of about 110MB, however this is just the tip of the iceberg (And way too big for just the launcher in my opinion), so after downloading and installing this, you need to run this to install all the content. Well that’s the idea.

After executing the launcher the wait began, it seems that this game uses torrents to spread the updates, and the included torrenting library/program does a horrible job, I never even managed to get any kind of download going with it.

Fortunately the torrents can be found in “My Documents/My Games/FINAL FANTASY XIV Beta Version/downloads/ffxiv-beta/d96437e6/metainfo”. So after downloading them through uTorrent I placed them on the correct location and the game started to apply them.

So after another hour I could finally play this bringing the total install time to about 3 hours (On average after 2 installs).

Graphics

The graphics are simply astounding, they look great and the game has a good feel to it. However due to the graphics even my rig couldn’t run it, and it was last upgraded with almost top of the shelf equipment about 9 months ago.

So with all settings on low I was able to get around 25FPS on my rig, so though it looks good I hope this gets some improvement on the official release as I prefer playability over eye candy.

Sound

I haven’t paid too much attention to the sound, but the voices sound good, the sounds fit and the music does too, so not much to note here.

Gameplay

Now on to the actual gameplay. After creating your character you land in a forest, apparently you have jumped out of a plane. After walking around a bit you get attacked by a few wolfs or whatever they are to represent.

They are just there to get you to know the combat a bit and while I only tried one class the combat system works nice, not something astounding but nice.

Next to this 1 character can also be all classes, you can switch between them on the fly. Basically every class uses a specific weapon type, depending on the type you are wearing you will train that class.

You have both a physical level which can increase your attributes and a class level that can level the current class, granting new skills and other nifty things.

Character Customization

Your character is customizable however to a certain degree, no hundreds of sliders to adjust, just a few dropdowns with things to choose from.

Multiplayer

Haven’t explored this a lot either, so I can’t comment on it.

System Requirements

Conclusion

Even my rig couldn’t decently run this game, not even on its lowest settings. So I’m afraid that for most of the mainstream gamers this game will be out of reach.

I won’t update this any more until they improve the FPS or when I get a new gfx card as this is unplayable at the FPS I am getting.

• Graphics 5/5
• System Requirements 0/5
• Sounds 3/5
• Gameplay 4/5

So this morning I woke up and decided to fill up the tanning tubs again, however upon arriving outside it seemed wildlife somehow managed to get past our palisade, 2 foxes and 1 boar managed to get in.

Good thing I have trained marksmanship, preparing to take them down now, might take a while but the rewards are nice so I guess there’s a positive side to this infestation.

I also had my first encounter with a deer, as I’m only skilled in ranged combat I decided to lock myself in so he couldn’t attack me.

However after hitting it for the first time it ran off and healed, this repeated itself the second time I shot at it coming to the conclusion I wouldn’t be able to kill it.

Well time to start working on the palisade.

~Xeross

Haven and Hearth is a 2D indie MMORPG created by 2 friends, it is set in the past with the structures and tools you can make ranging from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages.

You start with a character that has almost no skills and can only build fires, and perhaps cook some meat, and you get LP (Learning Points) for almost every action you do in the game.

With this LP you can purchase additional skills (Ranging from combat to farming) and increase incremental skills to improve quality of made products and some other stuff.

The idea behind it is pretty much the same as with EVE, you live in a giant persistent sandbox, you can build towns, stay hunting, or just build an isolated farm, you can live together with people, but people can also betray you, steal from you, and kill you.

There’s a few differences compared to EVE so let me list them

• If you die you lose almost everything – All your LP, skills, etc. will be lost when you die, however any buildings/items you made that you weren’t carrying around will still be in the game and usable.
• There is no market, there are trading towns made by players but there’s no trading system implemented (May change as it’s still in alpha)
• Most major difference is that it’s not in space and you’re not in a spaceship, the game is on a huge 45000×45000 tile grid.
• Combat isn’t as straightforward in EVE, expect to not be able to fight anything significant for a while
• There are no NPCs, except for the wildlife (Bears, Boars, Aurochs, Etc.)

So far I’ve been thoroughly enjoying it, the website can be found here to register click login and then you can click sign-up.

Resources to get you started

• Starting Guide (Recommended)
• How-to on the website
• Azkanan’s Extremely Overwinded Quickstart Guide (Recommended)
• The H&H Wiki (Recommended)

After having my trusty server running for 4 years (+5 years before that as a desktop) it became clear that it would probably die soon (Well some part of it). the graphics card was making noises (it doesn’t have an on-board graphics card) which turned out to be the fan that was vibrating heavily, and I didn’t like the idea of running it without a fan.

I coincidentally had acquired enough spare parts to create a new computer with so I decided to use those to build a new server. After disassembling and assembling I reinstalled Debian Linux 5.0 and started restoring my back-ups, this time I’m trying to keep it as organized as possible.

So this is basically what I’ll be finishing the coming days besides playing EVE. Oh yes and E-ON magazine arrived today, read about 1/3rd of it so far (Great job on the article Mynxee), my new USB stick also arrived, a 16GB Sony Microvault Excellence, it’s 2 times faster then my current 2GB Titanium Cruzer (Will still use them both) and I’ll primarily run Linux and EVE from it (Not EVE inside Wine, just EVE when inside a windows environment).

Well that wraps it about up I think, thanks for reading my huge wall of text and see you at the next post. or leave a comment and we can discuss or talk about something related or unrelated.

~Xeross

Note to self: Don’t write posts when sleepy, they turn into huge walls of  text.

Shortly hereafter he left the encampment and headed towards the Wrathgate with the Kor’Kron and I could see the Alliance had already started the battle. After a while of fighting hordes of scourge Bolvar Fordragon yells “Arthas, the blood of your father of your people demands justice. Come forth coward, and answer for your crimes !”,

After this the gate opened and Arthas appeared, after Arthas apperently said something (I couldn’t hear it from where I was standing) Saurfang charged towards him yelling “Let it be finished.”. As soon as he tries to attack Arthas his attack gets countered shattering his weapon and killing him.

After this suddenly a group or forsaken appear under the command of Grand Apothecary Putress, with them they have some sort of catapults that seem to shoot green poison gas bombs. These are fired at the battlefield killing everyone including Bolvar, only Arthas seems to retread back into Icecrown mostly unharmed.

After this the Red Dragon Flight appears in the distance and burns the entire area to rid it of the poison. I make my way down to Alexstrasza and get the order to retrieve Saurfangs armor and take it to High Overlord Saurfang at Warsong Hold to tell him the unfortunate news.

After arriving at Warsong Hold and reporting to Saurfang what had happened he told me not to mourn because death in battle is the most honourable way to die, and that there are more pressing mattes at hand.

OOC: I’m not really satisfied with how this post turned out, it’s more of a diary looking back then an in character story. And please leave a comment if you have any tips or other relevant stuff.

General Info

Background Info

Borderlands is set on the planet of Pandora. Lured by its apparent vast deposits of minerals, several colonization ships journey to the planet and create a society there. However, they soon discover that there is little else of value on the planet except for the presence of alien ruins. Those who are rich enough to do so left the planet, leaving the rest of the population to scavenge for themselves. While some isolated settlements were formed, much of the rest of the colonists became bandits, living out in the barren wastelands or trashheaps across the planet. Further investigation of the alien artifacts leads to the discovery of “The Vault” – a supposed treasure trove of alien artifacts, technology, and of unimaginable wealth – but those that had discovered it were wiped out by a protective force, leaving few clues as to its location or purpose but creating a myth of its marvellous treasures, you’ll be trying to find this vault and acquire the riches that lie within.

Characters

The game starts out in a bus where you have to pick 1 out of 4 available characters: Brick, a Berserker strong with his fists and capable of entering berserker mode  which makes him almost invincible and able to kill almost anything that moves with his fists. Mordecai, a hunter who can summon his pet Bloodwing, a bird of prey that attacks his enemies from above, and he’s also skilled with either a sniper or handguns. Lilith, a siren that can Phasewalk, with which she can enter another dimension and then reappearing in a group of enemies causing a shockwave blast. And Roland, a soldier that can deploy an auto-firing turret with a shield around it.

Gameplay

After you chose your character you’ll exit the bus near the town of Fyrestone where you’ll be greeted by a little robot known as a Claptrap. after this some bandits attack the town and you’ll have to get rid of em. You’ll start out with a weapon relevant to your class of choice, and you’ll be able to pick-up a handgun shortly after.

So I entered the town and was attacked by a few bandits, being the first enemies in the game they die pretty quickly with a few headshots from my Sniper Rifle, the controls are intuitive and are slowly introduced at the beginning of the game.

The questing mechanism is easy to use and thought out well, you’ll have a diamond in your HUD that shows where to go for the quest and you can also find it back on your map.

Shops are done in the form of vending machines: one for weapons, one for ammo, and one for healing related items. You can also sell items to them and there’s a buyback tab if you ever sell something by accident. These vending machines are plenty throughout the game and can be found at the entrance of almost all zones.

When you die you’ll be returned to the last checkpoint you’ve been at these are poles that will either be colored green or red depending on if it’s the last checkpoint you’ve been to.

You’ll also get a quest to fix the catch-a-ride station, this will give you access to a vehicle (Car) with either a Rocket Launcher or Machine Gun. The colours can be customized and you have a boost button.

Loot

In Borderlands there’s a huge amount of different weapons and mods, just like Diablo it has a random loot generation system that makes sure you almost never get the same weapon, some even have Elemental damage, and for everyone there’ll be a gun to your liking.

Multiplayer

I started out with the single player but as soon as my brother got home I installed borderlands on his PC and we started co-op. The game is intended to be played with multiple people. The enemy’s strength and loot quality will be adjusted to the amount of players (Max. 4) and the level of these players. Money found will be shared between the players and other items are kept by the one that picks em up.

Now there’s a few things in the multiplayer that are missing: There’s no way to trade items (Except dropping them), You can’t trade money or ammo, and there’s no loot distribution system. Now the last thing will only be a problem when playing online with some ninja looter, but it would’ve been nice if it was implemented

Graphics

A while before the release the developers of borderlands decided to switch from a realistic to a cell-shaded style. Many found this a bad decision it actually looks pretty good, and I doubt that I would’ve played borderlands this long if it weren’t shell shaded.

The graphics fit, even though it’s a bloody shooter the shell-shaded style looks good. The world is shapen nicely (Well for a desert) and the graphics just work. I’m just not a fan of barren lands (Deserts) and alike, but that’s just a matter of taste.

Conclusion

Borderlands is a great and addictive game, the scenery just looks good even though it’s shell-shaded and even with the shortcomings of the multiplayer it’s still a great game. I’ve stopped playing after a good 8-10 hours because it started feeling repetitive, however most people say the game is just starting after playing for 8 hours so I might play some more in the near future.

System Requirements

Update (August 2010)

I had picked up Borderlands again a while ago to play with a friend, we finally completed the main storyline and the Zombie Island expansion, I can highly recommend zombie island I really enjoyed playing it.

We have now lost interest again because the other DLCs are quite hard to do and we don’t feel like playing the storyline again, still the game enjoyed us for over 40 hours so it’s an awesome game.

All you need to do is add the following html code to the section of your wordpress template.

<script src="http://static.wowhead.com/widgets/power.js"></script>

And after that any links to Items, Quests, Etc. on WoWHead will automatically have a tooltip when you hover over them.

Example: ‘Tis the Season

If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask them.

~Xeross

Edit: This is currently not enabled, will be re-enabled in the future.

Since I’ve played Borderlands I somehow pay more attention to detail in both Graphics and Sound, maybe just because I’m also planning on reviewing games and also because well I like pretty graphics. If you’d look at WoW you’d say that the graphics are dated and ugly, but when soaring through the skies of azeroth (with my UI hidden) it just looks incredibly good, next to that is the music that I’ve finally enabled just sounds great. Wings flapping, hooves running just wonderful.

Now back to The Feast of Winter Veil. I’ve begun completing the quests around this event and so far I’ve rescued Metzen the Reindeer and I’ve read the story of “The Feast of Winterveil“, I tried delivering it Cairne Bloodhoof but he was nowhere to be found. I’ll be continuing my journey through Azeroth and the current festivities and might report back at a later time.

~Xeross

I’ll be primarily focusing on getting the corp website online when doing anything EVE related, my CMS is as good as finished so I just need to implement the design and EVE specific modules.

Other than that I can get back into blogging and following everyone’s blog again so that’s good too, and ofcourse continue helping out my clients.

Well that’s it for this update, I’ll be writing a detailed post on the Windows 7 issue soon.

Regards, Xeross

First of all I’ve been in bed for a week with a fever (Ranging from 39-41 degrees centigrade) thus I haven’t done anything worth noting in the last week, I’m still recovering, the fever is gone but now my ears, throat and stuff start going a little downhill.

Second of all because of this sickness the week flew by because of sleeping almost the entire week, so now my training for my Hulk is finished I purchased one today and have fully fitted her, she’s bringing in a nice volume of about 4000m3 of ore a cycle so I’m happy.

And third of all I’m trying to get some of my programming projects into motion again, an application I’m developing and am intending to sell a subscription on is still in debugging phase, I’m debugging it with someone I met that needed such an app so that’s going nicely and I have some websites I need to finish (Like the Corp website) so I’ll need to start working on that again too.

Regards, Xeross

Content of the Box

After I got home I opened the box, it’s made of quality cardboard and the box is sealed by a circular patch of sticky tape like stuff. After cutting through this and opening you have the mouse in plastic.

And on the backside of this plastic thing there’s a cardboard thing attached, containing the manual and some other things.

This cardboard thing can be opened and it contains a few things: the manual, a certificate of authenticity and the driver CD.

After this I opened the plastic thing and took my brand new mouse out.

Installation

So after unpacking everything I plugged in the mouse and started the driver installation. Clicked next a few times, set the installation directory and let it run. The first 2 times I ran it it tended to disappear and didn’t finish installing. The third time however if popped up properly instead of minimizing without coming back. It seemed it was asking to install Raptr (More on that in a separate paragraph) so I installed it and just let the installation run.

After that I had to reboot, and once everything booted up again I could check out the driver menu. I have to say it looks pretty cool, and the features are also pretty neat. Ofcourse the first thing I did was set the polling speed to 1000hz (1ms), and after this I had to reboot again.

So after rebooting again I started up the configuration again and set my side buttons to increase DPI and decrease DPI, after that I decided to start up Call of Duty 2.

Performance & Comfort

So time to try this baby out in a game. After launching COD2 and joining a server I immediately noticed that it’s a lot more precise then my old mouse (a Logitech EX110) and that it’s a lot easier to rapidly move it. My scores on COD2 were substantially better compared to when I played with the EX110.

It has some special foot thingies so that it glides a lot easier, and it also does compared to my old EX110. the mouse also fits perfectly to my hand, it’s comfortable and it has an anti-slip layer on the top that makes sure you’ll never loose grip.

Durability

The mouse is build from high quality plastic and it has a solid feel to it. Even the mouse buttons feel like they’re high quality and will last a lifetime. The only thing that might wear out is the anti-slip coating, but time will tell.

Conclusion

The Razer Deathadder is a great mouse and that for a good price, at the time of writing this article it costs 60$ on the Razer website and I paid 50 euros for it in a store in Breda. It’s comfortable, precise and fast, and feels very durable. So I’m very positive about it and till now I love it, if I encounter any problems with it I’ll write about it but I doubt it. So I say if you’re looking for a good gaming mouse go for the Razer Deathadder.

Update (14-Aug-2010)

After almost a year of use the anti-slip finish still doesn’t show any wear, and the mouse is still performing as good as a year ago, I liked it so much I even bought a second one.

Specifications

• Frequency response:
• Headset: 20 Hz–20 kHz
• Microphone: 100 Hz–16 kHz
• Input sensitivity: -58 dBV/µbar, -38 dBV/Pa +/- 4 dB
• Speaker size: 40mm
• Cable length: 10 feet
• Connections: USB and dual gold-plated, analog 3.5mm

Comfort

After opening the box the first thing I did was try it on. The first thing I noticed is that headset is worn with the head thingie in your neck instead of the usual on top of your head. so I tried it on and well it wasn’t very comfortable, tried rotating it a bit, etc. but it just didn’t feel right (and it’s also kind of heavy), I asked my mom to try it on too, she did and was also trying to make it fit comfortably, but to no avail. it just isn’t comfortable. She said it might just need some “Getting used to”, after this I was already dissapointed so I decided to google a few reviews on it.

So I read to a few reviews to find out 90% of the reviews say: it’s uncomfortable, sounds like shit, and is heavy. as I’ve concluded myself.

Sound

Haven’t even tried this after reading  the reviews, but according to most it’s crap.

Conclusion

This headset is nothing but a waste of money. It’s uncomfortable, has bad sound quality, and the price is high for such a crap product. I didn’t even test the sound. if you want a cheap headset get a cheap Trust Headset and if you want a good gaming headset go for a Sennheiser (Thinking about getting the PC 151).

Please give me some feedback on how I did in writing a review, or if you want to say something about the headset feel free to do that to.