Mostly Harmless

Spent an enjoyable evening yesterday playing the Viking Game with Jen and family (yes yours truly really knows how to live it up of an evening). It’s a Tafl game or basically one where the teams are not equal. The King (who has a small guard of pieces) has to escape and the attacking team have to prevent the king escaping and ideally surround him with four pieces in order to run him through.

Thinking ahead is actually harder than something like draughts, because the pieces are not constrained to only move once square at a time, they can move any distance as long as their path is not blocked.

I haven’t found a computer equivalent that reproduces the board game we played exactly - only one that runs in a DOS box where the king can win by reaching the edge of the board, which makes it fairly easy for him compared to the version we had where he has to escape to one of the four corners (which are more easily blocked). I suspect this is balancing on the part of the producers of the boxed version because it does seem a bit easier to be the king at least going from the first couple of plays. Also that old DOS game seems a wee bit hard…

If anyone knows of a more recent Linux variant of this game, do please let me know.

Rowan :: May.29.2007 :: Games, Personal Entries :: No Comments »

Managed to pick up X3 Reunion Game of the Year Edition at Woolies for £6 which given it has the latest patch from February and a whole host of other bits and bobs was a pretty good deal.

However to play one of these games you really want a Force Feedback Joystick (a space sim with a keyboard and mouse? ugh) which meant I found myself dusting off my SideWinder ForceFeedback Pro. Small problem, my latest gaming PC doesn’t have a midi / gameport.

Some quick thievery of an ancient Turtle Beach Montego 2 sound card from an ancient Dell tower later and I was trapped in the hell of old devices. This is a quick run down of what I had to do to get it working. The games machine is based on the Asus P5W DH Deluxe Motherboard.

• Plug and Play OS Support enabled in PCI section of BIOS (without this enabled machine would not POST with joystick connected!)

• Windows would not start without hopping into safe mode first after the above - go figure. All fine after a quick visit to Safemode and a reboot.

• The midi / sound features of the soundcard should be enabled as apparently these are used for the ForceFeedback (I’d originally intended to have the gameport only enabled)

• No Sidewinder drivers are available for XP. Use the Sidewinder option under add game device in the control panel. Force Feedback strength and other options is now game specific rather than configured within control panel.

The game takes up a shocking 4GB of disk space and takes a fair amount of time to install. Review coming as soon as I’ve played it

Rowan :: Apr.25.2007 :: Game Hardware, Games :: No Comments »

I honestly couldn’t help but laugh when I came across this. The basic gist of the article appears to be that rather than continue to play Video Games and buy “childish” material we should all be getting loans for suits we can’t afford and praying for promotion. Apparently not doing so also means you won’t be able to relate to your children…

Sigh.

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Rowan :: Mar.15.2007 :: Blog Responses, Games, Personal Entries :: 1 Comment »

The destruction derby style racer gets a makeover. Is it enough of an improvement to be worth playing?

The original Flatout managed to provide a good sensation of speed and destruction, however it just wasn’t finished. Things like a decent menu system and car upgrades were glaring omissions and the whole thing felt too short.

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Rowan :: Feb.28.2007 :: Games, Reviews :: 1 Comment »