The blog of Dirk Arwood

Hello everyone, now I know that I said that there would be a edited review on here today, but with the recent news of Take-Two shutting down the OpenIV mod, I feel like I just have to do a summary of the most recent events;

1) Take-Two send a Cease-Desist letter to the devs of OpenIV on Thursday,

2) GTA V gets negative reviews on Steam due to this, (Before this started, reviews for this game were actually pretty good)

3) Rockstar release a statement saying that “Take-Two’s actions are not specifically targeting single player mods”

4) People get even more annoyed and write so many negative reviews that the percentage for recent reviews drops to a staggering 14% and the words are now “Overwhelmingly Negative” and the overall reviews are no “Mixed”.

Rating: 9/10

Oh my God. I am addicted to this game. Yes, this is the really cool and really free game on Steam called Super Crate Box, it’s an arcade style game with that classic game sound from the 1980’s and it just is a really stupidly funny game. This game was made in 2012 by a company called Vlambeer games, a two-man indie game company who are just amazing. And I only discovered it last week, and I can’t stop playing it. I really can’t stop playing it.

 Its funny, its fast paced and its just ridiculous and it’s the best arcade game ever, I only wish that this was an official arcade machine game around Britain, and one other thing that I wish for is that this is a tournament game. Because I would absolutely take part in that every single time….

 Right, I think that’s all I have to say today………. Ooh wait, yes I am making a game that’s sort of a sequel to this game and will be slightly better but yes, I am making a game.

 Hi, I haven’t done one of these talky posts in a while, today to celebrate the long awaited No Man’s Sky I decided that I would talk about how many games I have on my several PCs, not including the Asus laptop belonging to my father. I have a lot.

On my HP laptop, I have 8 games NOT on Steam.

On my baby of a powerful PC, I have a few but the ones I can remember are: Cities Skylines, GTA 5, Fallout 4, Kerbal Space Program Version 1.0.5.1028, but I won’t be counting that in the final game count as I have more than one copy of that.

The games on Steam however is a bigger number, are you ready for this, I have 153. Yes, I have bought them all, with the exception of, Star Trek Online, and thats pretty much it. Of these, games I have 12 installed, and these are Back to the Future the TellTale game episodes 1-3, COD: MW 2, COD: MW 3, Half-life 2, Half-Life 2 episode 1, Half-life episode 2, Jazzpunk, which I absolutely hate with a real passion, Portal, Red Faction: Armageddon, and Star Trek Online.

So how many games do I have in total: 164 games. And my life couldn’t be better at all.

Ok, I think that’s all I have to say to you people........

Rating: 9/10

 What can I say, GTA V is the best game besides Just Cause 3..

Yes, my dear father finally got the PC version of GTA V because my computer which is massively overpowered and is just the best thing in my life and yes, oh yes it can run GTA V at a beautiful 60fps with no lag and it is crystal clear and it is just a dream come true for me.

There really isn’t really anything to say bad about GTA V except that when you 100% the game like a few people have one in particular, Daniel Hardcastle otherwise known as OfficialNerdCubed he had a mod series for GTA V and for the first GTA V mod video he showed off a mod called native trainer, which added a bunch of abilities such as, the ability to teleport anywhere, to spawn in any vehicle, yes even including the big-ass cargo plane that is exclusive to that one Trevor mission where you have to fly a biplane into the cargo plane. And a few other abilities include, vehicle invincibility, skin changer, never wanted, you can even sync the in-game time to your computer system time which is really cool. No but what he said was which is not a bad idea actually, is that when you 100% the game, this certain mod gets unlocked.

And the fact that I got the PC version a year after it came out, really does show you something. I suck at buying video games when they come out for the first time..

I think that’s all I have to say today.......

Rating: 10/10

Before you start shouting at me saying “Why are you still playing an old version of Kerbal Space Program? The new version is better!!” I haven’t updated to Kerbal Space Program Turbo Charged yet, but I will soon….. I hope……

Kerbal Space Program maybe the most educational game I’ve played, and it may also be the most rewarding game I’ve played as well, because when you get to a different planet say Eve, and you’ve really worked hard to get there and when you eventually get there it fills you will elation and happiness and I am awful at that game, and I can’t even rendezvous or get to the Mun without crashing awesomely, until I had discovered a mod called MechJeb. This mod is basically an autopilot and the feature for getting into orbit is the ascent guidance feature and you type in the height of the orbit around Kerbin you want, and the mod will even circularize the orbit for you if you want. And this is a perfect mod for me because I really struggle with orbiting and manoeuvres and what not. But with this mod, its so much easier.

I only discovered this game in December 2015 and some people have been playing KSP right from the very start, even when the Mun was just a 2D sprite pasted onto the sky of Kerbin so that really shows how far the game has come over the years.

I also really like Kerbal Space Program because it allows you to mod it and that’s really awesome because one mod I discovered was a sci-fi spaceships mod which adds the following ships: U.S.S. Enterprise, U.S.S. Voyager, Shuttlecraft Goddard, The TARIDS, a Borg cube section, the Doomsday machine from the original series of Star Trek and The Phoneix which I don’t know what that is but it looks really cool. The mod also adds flags as well, with the inclusion of the Borg flag, the old and the new Starfleet flags, the ferengi flag, the Klingon flag, the Romulan flag, the Bajoran flag.

If you own a copy of KSP and you want to add mods to make the game even more awesome than it already is, then just head over to this website: https://mods.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal and to find the sci-fi spaceships mod, just type in to the search box: Sci-fi Shipyards and just follow the instructions, and to find the MechJeb mod, its pretty simple, just type MechJeb into the search box and find the mod for the version of KSP that you own.

Oh and to see Kerbal Space Program being played awesomely good, visit Scott Manley’s YouTube channel which is called Scott Manley where he did a KSP tutorial playlist.

Right, I’m going now, to play KSP and suck horribly…..oh and to launch TheBurntPancake SpaceStation.

Rating: 8/10

This is TheBurntPancake’s game of the year 2016, considering that a mere 2 hours after installing it, I had got to the Galactic Centre, found Sol, found another save game that I had made, and just expanded the TzaBoohaBoo empire. Yeah, there is no actual end to this game, it just continues and you can just continue overthrowing empires and colonising star systems and praying that you can just take one planet from the Grox which are literally the Terminators of the SPORE world and you will never defeat.

There are a few things I don’t like about the game though, I don’t like the Tribal Stage and the Civilisation Stage, because those are RTS stages and that’s not what SPORE is about. SPORE is about exploring the planet your species is on, and the Tribal and Civilisation stages don’t represent that and that really disappoints me.

And the Space Stage is actually really good, I just wish that Maxis hadn’t overwhelmed the centre of the galaxy with Grox, this made it so that it took me 10 attempts to get to the Galactic Core and be presented with the Staff of Life. And what also annoys me about the Space Stage is that colonies you establish on other systems don’t make their own spaceships so what your pretty much doing in the Space Stage of SPORE is going back and forth defending your colonies from invaders, which is pretty frustrating.

But the coolest feature is the history screen, because it shows you the history of your species right from the very beginning and in the Space Stage when you’ve reached the Galactic Core, it really feels good to look at the history screen and see how far the species has come and it fills you with happiness and a sense of pride.

As far as the horrible concept of DRM goes, I don’t know if Maxis has patched that out or not, or whether Steam has or not, but I got it on Origin in a sale so regardless of DRM it’s a really good game and its totally worth giving it a go.

Right, I think that’s all I have to say about my game of the year 2016….

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgnUfdYCugU)

Why did i not find this YouTube feature earlier?

Rating: 5/10

Hey everyone, whose reading this, if anyone is actually reading this blog. Sorry I’ve not written anything on here for the past week. So anyway back to weekly reviews.

Oh no, Oh no indeed. What a mistake I have made…

Jazzpunk maybe one of the worst games I have ever played in my life…

I mean come on here, the camera movement is just so shaky and tank-like, the movement controls are also tank-like and there is no field of view adjustment option, or a third-person option so there is really no way that I can play the game for more than 10 minutes before coming motion-sick and being sorry to myself.

The story is good, but I just don’t see myself completing the game and I’m sure that the developers will eventually patch the FOV problems and the camera movements but in the current state that its in, I don’t think I want to play the game anymore, and I feel really bad saying that because it’s a funny game and I think that it has a lot of potential as a game, but until the developers patch the FOV and the camera movements and also the character movement, I mean its just so tank-like, and it doesn’t feel realistic and I know that GTA V has tank-like controls as well but this game, well let’s not even go there.

Sorry this was such a short review, but I just can’t find anything good to say about it.

Rating: 10/10

I have only 3 words with which to describe Just Cause 3; “Best Game Ever!”(Quoting Nerd³ there..) Why? Because Rico now has a massive new map to play in, and now some new toys, including a parachute and a wingsuit. What’s absolutely brilliant about Just Cause 3 is that the developers took Just Cause 2 and they made it better, they improved on every single feature from the parachuting to the grappling.

The parachute is now not just a way of traversing the map, it’s also a stable platform from which you can get your guns out and kill enemies. Traversing with the parachute just feels good, it feels realistic. And I’m going to follow that with quite possibly the best videogame mechanic for quite a while; the wingsuit, because it does give you flight, but it’s not unlimited flight, it is flight with limitations, and that’s what I really like about it, is that you have to grapple off of objects to get around and that also adds a sense of danger as well as you have to be quite close to the ground to grapple off of stuff.

The one thing I don’t like about the game is the new rebel drop mechanic; and I will explain why now. Because the way you get a rebel drop is by getting beacons, you can get these from liberated camps or by dying. And also if you request a vehicle, you have to wait a certain amount of real-world time to be able to request that vehicle again, and I understand why that limitation is in place, its so that you can’t just spam infinite planes.

Now, the level up system is actually useful for this game because if you want to upgrade vehicles or tethers or parachuting, then you have to have these gears, these gears come from completing challenges specific to a category, for example, if I just wanted to upgrade the parachute, then I would have to complete the parachute specific challenges to be able to upgrade it, if I wanted to upgrade explosives or tethers, then I would have to do challenges specific to those criteria, and that means that you don’t have to do, any other challenges, and that is just perfect for this game. Just Cause 3 is designed to be a toybox game, and you only have to do the challenges that you want to do. For example I only really want to upgrade the parachute, the wingsuit, the tethers, the explosives and the rebel drop waiting time. So I would only have to do challenges specific to those criteria.

Now, other people maybe completing the story or driving cars, but that’s not what I want to do, I want to mess around in Just Cause 3 and see what I can do for fun, for example I tried to recreate the term ‘Helicarrier’ by getting a helicopter and tethering a car to it, let’s just say that, didn’t go too well. And you don’t even have to complete the story, you can just mess around and see what you can do. And I will also mention that when planes explode, or fences or a train, all the debris are individual physics objects that can be manipulated.

I’m going to go and have more fun in Just Cause 3 now…..see you later….

Rating: 9/10

Yes, I have made a science joke.

The notion of having a game where you have to create a pathogen to eradicate humans and destroy all of humanity is perfect.

Plague Inc Evolved is the port of the free-to-play mobile game, Plague Inc, which in my opinion is a terrible game. You have to pay for everything, which I think is daylight extortion on the Al Capone level.

But both of these games are literally improving on that flash browser game, Pandemic 2. This is a hell of a lot simpler than both Plague Inc or Plague Inc Evolved. And it looks worse graphically, but that’s not the point. The point is Ndemic Creations led and founded by a Mr James Vaughan, wanted to create a game that is hyper-realistic and has all the necessary details.

Both Plague Inc and Plague Inc Evolved have caught the attention of the CDC, they commented on how hyper-realistic the game is and how it can educate people on how to mange disease spread.

And I’m not lying here;Plague Inc Evolved is really hyper-realistic, WHO, the World Health Organisation for those of you who don’t know what that means. They make an appearance in the game.

Another cool thing about this game, is that you can name your disease what ever you want, I for example have named a disease, EU Referendum, another I have called Donald Trump and to really stir up some controversy, I called one disease Kim-Jong-Un… Ndemic Creations also commented on how they have seen the name Brexit for a disease a lot over the past few weeks.

Another cool feature is the scenarios… See, the scenarios create events in the world, such as no traveling, or xenophobia, and you have to adapt your disease around that particular scenario, and that’s what I like about Plague Inc Evolved; that it gives you a extra challenge..

But one thing that really annoys me about this game is how players with little experience might not be able to progress in the game because of the strategies that need to be adopted to beat a certain level. Which is why this game is getting a 9/10.

I would like to take a moment to talk about something that is happening tomorrow that is actually quite serious… The EU Referendum.. I don’t know whether to remain in the EU like we are or, we leave the EU and we don’t know what’s coming in the future.

I’ll put it in two analogies:

The EU is like YouTube, its good for somethings and its completely rubbish for others. And there are somethings that just hinder you and get in your way all the time. But its important, no its essential to us all, if we don’t have the EU, then what are we going to do in the future, Nigel Farage said, that he has absolutely no idea what’s going to happen if we leave the EU. And i totally agree with him on that one. The last prime minister who actually did something good for Britain was Harold Wilson, when the US President asked him to assist in the Vietnam War Harold Wilson replied with: “Bugger off” and has Mr “Dodgy” David Cameron our current majority voted prime minister for the second time running done anything to help Britain; I don’t think he’s done a single thing except benefit himself with tax evasion revealed in the Panama Papers a few months back.

Or the EU is like Jeremy Clarkson and Britain is Top Gear, or should I say “Flop Gear”. If Britain does leave the EU, then Jezza's fine and no one will hinder him; but Britain is stuck with Chris Evans, the crappy psychopathic bully control freak who does the Radio 2, not Chris Evans the cool actor who plays Captain America and Human Torch in the Fantastic Four film. The good one, not the remake one. But anyway, we(Britain) are stuck with Chris Evans and if people vote Leave then they’re basically saying that Chris Evans is better at doing Top Gear than Jeremy Clarkson was and in that case; How dare you??