Category: Gaming

Playing “The Ascent”

RyanGaming

I work in the gaming industry, but normally don’t talk about games much because a) I work on the technical side and b) there are so many other blogs, outlets, news and review sites that do this every day that I don’t feel I can add a perspective that is unique (and there is no sense in writing redundant blog posts).

That being said, I really enjoyed one of the games I recently played, so I decided to write about it anyway. The game is called The Ascent and it’s an isometric top-down shooter in a cyberpunk setting.

There is a wide variety of weapons that you can level-up throughout the game (although the resources required to level up weapons are scarce at higher levels, so you can only bring a few of the weapons to max level). A few different weapon damage types are available, that work better or worse against different enemies. And to further customize your character, there are a few abilities and skills available.

The story was engaging, kept me busy with both main missions and side missions. Missions always have a suggested level with is useful because if you head into an area you aren’t ready for you will be killed swiftly 😉 Aside from the story, I also enjoyed the graphical level of detail. No obvious repeating of elements, each area/level had a very distinct feeling to it, even backgrounds or parts of the map where players can’t navigate to were very detailed. Music was also very well picked for the different game areas.

Difficulty scales fairly moderate. The beginning can be tough at times, but as long as you keep leveling up your weapons, and making sure you have the right gear equipped, it’s pretty smooth sailing. Also, remember to match up weapon type with enemy type.

A recent update introduced a “Game+” mode with tougher enemies that allows you to re-play the game with you character from the normal playthrough (i.e. keep your stats/skills/inventory, but the enemies also start out at around level 30). Game+ mode is nice if you really want to max out all the skills or level up a few more weapons.

There were a few cons too, in coop multiplayer mode we had a few crashes and quests getting stuck (requiring us to restart the game). But all in all it was playable and we mad it through the whole game. Multiplayer had a very “added in later” feel to it, not something designed to be a integral feature of the game (e.g. “guests” don’t see any of the useful mini-map markers).
Also, there is little to no replay value in the game. I did a second playthrough in Game+ mode, and it felt more like a speedrun focusing on the main mission and picking up side missions in the same area for extra EXP.

All in all I really enjoyed the game, it wasn’t too difficult or grindy, and travel times not too bad as long as you kept an eye on your missions and made liberal use of the taxi and subway system. I got all the achievements in the game, and the one that took the longest was “Die 100 times”.

Organizing your Steam library

Ryancategories, library, steam

I’ve had a steam account since 2003, so unsurprisingly I’ve accumulated a bunch of games over time thanks to summer sales, winter sales, humble bundles, …
As a way to give users a means to sort and categorize games, Steam introduced categories a while back. You can add arbitrary categories, and have a game in multiple categories, and categories are synced to your account so they appear on multiple devices. The downside is that you have to set categories for each game manually.

Here is where a nifty tools come in hand: Depressurizer (download)

It provides a user friendly interface for organizing your categories, making it easy to mass categories games. But it’s most useful feature is the ability to auto-categorize games. It can do so via various criteria like genres, Steam flags (e.g. “Single-Player” or “Steam Cloud”), Steam tags, Developer & Publisher info, How Long to Beat times, release year, and/or Steam review user scores.

Once automatically categorized it is easy to find games on your library that are Local co-op, or maybe you are feeling like playing a Dungeon Crawler game today, or just want to browse games you have with an Overwhelmingly Positive rating.

I use a unique prefix for the different auto-categories so it is easy to tell them apart in steam. It also doesn’t mess with existing categories, so it’s easy to manage both categories from depressurizer and your own manual ones.

And this is an example of how the end result looks like
in Steam

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Floor plans for PAYDAY Map “Diamond Heist”

Ryan1 Comment on Floor plans for PAYDAY Map “Diamond Heist”Gaming, gfx

I’ve played PAYDAY the last few weeks, it is a 4 player CO-OP FPS (think of Left 4 Dead in a different setting). One of the maps has caused me a bit of difficulty (Diamond Heist). There is an achievement called “Are Those The Blue Ones?” where you have to collect all the sapphires before the alarm goes off, and I kept forgetting where they were. Also keeping track of the cameras was a bit of a pain, so today I threw them all together on a map for easier reference (right-click “Save link as …” to download):

Graphics sources:
http://www.overkillsoftware.com/payday/
http://openclipart.org/detail/125695/diamant–diamond-by-lmproulx
http://openclipart.org/detail/31891/surveillance-camera-by-maxim2

How to increase Fraps performance with a ramdisk

Ryan2 Comments on How to increase Fraps performance with a ramdiskbattlefield 3, fraps, IO, powershell, ramdisk, Windows

I recently started playing Battlefield 3 and remembered that I have a Fraps license so I installed it and started recording some stuff. Unsurprisingly the performance made a big dip when I recorded. A glance at my PC told me the harddrive was at fault, probably bringing the whole system down due to IO.

Since my PC has more than enough RAM I decided to set up a 5Gb Ramdisk to see if that helped. It did, when writing the video files to the ramdisk I hardly had any performance hit. Unfortunately 5GB isn’t going to last long while recording 1920×1080 @ 40FPS (a few minutes footage at most).

Here is my little cmd file to create a 5GB ramdisk as drive J: and format it for usage:

So my next thought was to see if I could write a script to move files off the ramdisk when they were done being written to by Fraps. This obviously was going to cause IO load … the reason we were having performance issues in the first place, so I was skeptical about if this was going to help any. Especially since I also had to move the files away quick enough so that the drive wouldn’t fill up completely with the next file Fraps was writing. I wrote a little powershell script for this (yeah, a *nix Sysadmin writing scripts in powershell …)

Here is my little powershell script to copy the finished files from my ramdisk to a normal HDD (please excuse  possible ugliness, I’m a powershell noob):

The last little problem I noticed is that the 5GB ramdrive wasn’t big enough (Fraps seems to create some dummy files and fills them up). Forcing Fraps to make smaller files by toggeling the recording fixed that though -> pressing F9 twice fast will drop a few frames though. I used my Logitech G13 for that, just had a key mapped to press F9 quickly every 60 seconds. The shortest gap I could get working reliably is 50ms.

This all probably sounds awfully complicated, but it works and solves my problem. Fraps is great software, but it would be immensly helpful if you could set the file size in the settings (instead of it defaulting to 4GB). Or, even better, if Fraps could rework their IO system to work more efficiently.

So to sum everything up:
– create ramdrive
– start script that copies files from the ramdrive to a normal HDD
– set fraps to store videos on the ramdrive
– start game, press F9 to start recording and then press the G13 key to toggle the F9 periodically

Thanks for the free games @Valve

Ryanarg, free games, portal2, potatoe, reward, valve

For the release of their latest game Portal 2, Valve went to great lengths marketing wise. They set up an “Alternate reality game” (ARG) with tips and puzzles hidden in 13 independent games (to promote indie games). Some of the games even added extra levels just for the ARG.  Solving puzzles, finding passwords, and triggering special events led to the possibility to gain “potatoes” as a sign of progress. If all 36 potatoes were found in the 13 games involved players got a golden potato.

After the ARG was solved by the community, Valve added a countdown a few days before the release of Portal 2, allowing the community to get Portal2 to release early by collecting potatoes and (in the end phase) playing the 13 indie games.

Last Friday Valve announced in the official blog “There’s also still time to collect all 36 potatoes. Anyone accomplishing this feat by the time Portal 2 launches will receive a very special, non-hat-based reward.” An extra incentive for people to play the games involved and collect the potatoes. I spent most of the last days collecting all 36 potatoes, got the last one just hours before the deadline.

Today everyone with a golden potato  got the reward, a valve complete pack and a copy of portal2. I’m honestly impressed. I never would have expected them to not only give out all their previous games ($100), but also a free copy of their latest game they just released yesterday ($50).

Impressive move Valve, even if I was irritated at buying the game on steam on pre-order and then seeing Amazon and Best Buy drop the price shortly before release by 10$, the ARG and the potatoes blew everything out of the water. So now I have a few copies of games I already owned to give out 🙂