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Games Workshop: Gamesday 2008 27 September 2008

Posted by kaitharshayr in Gaming.
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(This is why I need to get hold of my own camera (I now have) because it takes me ages to get pictures sorted when they are on my mum’s and I need to get them to my machine but anyway here is the post i was making the DAY AFTER Gamesday. Enjoy. Also the post is a bit picture heavy.)

So I was going to make a post last night, but when I got back I was just tooo damn tired. I mean sorting photos out and coming up with coherent sentences? It wasn’t going to happen. We got back in time for me to watch the new BBC telling of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which I must confess I’ve never watched, read or listened to, so this should be interested, before I crawled into bed at 10.

So perhaps I should rewind a bit and tell you where me and C went for the day? To the Games Workshop games day at the Birmingham NEC. We opted to take the coach that our local Games Workshop had orgainsed, which meant we paid a little more, but seriously it was just easier plus as we only got our tickets a week ago I very much doubt the train would have been cheaper. Plus, while I’m not 100% sure I’d bet that Virgin trains were probably doing engineering works (again) which would have made it a b***h of a journey. So we left on the coach for Birmingham at 6.30am, arriving at the NEC just after 9. We made one stop on the way at Oxford services, where there were several other coaches, all clearly also on their way to the NEC.

We got there at a pretty good time, meaning that we weren’t too far back in the queue from the entrance, the doors opened at 10am and I think we actually got into the gamesday area at about 10.30. In fact on the way in we saw a kind of odd, but neat and something that does make sense at a convention centre, vending machine. One which wasn’t full of sweets and crisps, but with batteries, memory cards, usb sticks, dvds & cds, cables and mice.

(See we weren’t too far from the actual entrance to the place.)

Once we got in, I figured we’d try and head straight to the Forge World stuff, as the manager for our local store on the coach had mentioned that it just gets so horribly busy there, and as we’d got in reasonably early we might be able to see something. Unfortunately we didn’t quite realise were it was in relation to the entrance and so walked right past it and to the other end of the hall, where we discovered what we think may have been one of the best bits of the convention. A stall selling £5 mystery boxes and lots of old Warhammer stuff really cheap. So we both picked up a mystery box each, each box has 4 random blister packs.  We got some pretty neat models, Eldar Harliquins, 2 Tallarn Rough Riders, 4 Robed Space Marines,  4 Officers of a Russian looking imerpial guard regiment, I’m not sure which one? and a demon host. :) We went back later and got 2 more mystery boxes as well as a £2 copy of the special edition of Warhammer 40k.. £2?! Can’t argue with that! :) We weren’t so lucky with our 2nd lot of boxes, they both had Lord of the Rings stuff, a Gandolf, Boromir, Haldir and random Elf, 4 Uraki (sp??) and… 3 yes… THREE models of the same Legolas.. :| luckily some of the people on our coach DO play lotr, and so we got rid of some of the models. Although we still have 2 Legoli, and 4 Uraki.. not sure what we’re going to do with them. Anyone want one? We realised we should have got more boxes earlier, ah well. :)

After that we had a wonder rough, managed to see some of the Forge world stuff, my god the Titans are so BIG!! I mean I know they say they are big but you don’t appreciate HOW BIG till you see them. Look!

Battle scene Imperial Guard vs…? I’m not sure

A Reaver Titan

Close up shot of the fortress.

Tyranids vs Space Marines, for the Anphelion Project, Imperial Armour Vol 4 from Forge World. I may well have to get my mits on that book at some point theres some nice Tyranid stuff in there. :)

(Left to Right) Tyranid Trygon, Malanthrope , Hierophant. Just to give you an idea of how freaking BIG a Hierophant is(!)

Sorry some of these pic’s are so dark, am not used to using my mum’s camera. These pictures were actually a lot darker too, I’ve adjusted the levels to make it possible to see stuff. Couldn’t really fix the blury one!

There was also lots of random games going on, here are a couple of pictures:

Waaaaagh! Battle ship.

Isn’t it great? An actual ship. I forget who they were fighting, (Space Marines I think, or might have been  a mix of Marines and Imperial Guard), but they were based at an actual dock.

Heh Life size 40k models.I’ve no idea why I didn’t take a photo of the Space Marines the Orks were fighting… Oh well.

Racing. :)

Tanks! This was just a giant tank battle, Imeprial Guard vs Orks. :)

Annoyingly I am POSTITIVE I took some more photos of other games going on, some Eldar Vs Tyranids, and a big fight between the Tomb Kings and the Undead, which had a giant sphynix and such. However they seem to have vanished. :(

Now for some other random pics:

Ork Battle wagon.

Thats one big gun, I would suspect there aren’t rules for this in 40k, because otherwise that’d be pretty nasty!

The people who make warhammer originally started off which historical battles, their new supplimant is the the Great War and this is a scene from Galliple.

Thats pretty much all the pictures, overall it was a good if rather tiring day. It got to abot 2pm and both of us just ran out of energy, luckily the power of coca-cola did revive us. Hurrah for sugar. I wasn’t too impressed with the awards ceremony for the Golden Demon has the way they set their big screen up made it almost impossible to see the actual figures. The screen had a bright white background, with the large logo for the Gamesday at the top and the name of the award at the bottom, meaning the pictures were squashed in between with no way to help contrast them. The best we could make out was ‘I think thats an.. Ork?’ :/ So will have to wait till I can find a report and pictures either online or in White Dwarf.

Finally the guys from our Games Workshop had set up a quiz, we were supposed to be in teams of 6, but the other 4 people in our team contributed NOTHING. Still with just me and C, and C somehow dredging up 10 year old memories of what certain things were we managed to come joint 3rd with 39 poitns (I think) the winners got a rather large 59, so we had no real hope of winning there. Some of the questions in the quiz were pretty tricksey, such as how many elves turn up at Helms Deep in the book.

I’d definitley consider going again, those mystery boxes were fab! :)

So Excited!! 24 August 2008

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Hehehe!! So a few weeks ago I saw the Eldar E3 trailer for Dawn of War II, and I must say its a fantastic trailer, the graphics are amazing and it really shows off Eldar and Space Marines really well!! The trailer ends with the Space Marine Captain slashing at the Eldar Farseer with his chain sword and saying “This world is ours, Witch!” with the dying Farseer answering “Wrong, this world is theirs.” And she points up to the sky, and all we see is a rather reddish looking night sky. The trailer then cuts out to say Dawn of War II, coming soon (or something like that). Leaving you going “Whose?! Whose world is it?!”

What was my reaction then? “Tyranids! Its got to be Tyranids! Oh I hope its Tyranids!”

What did C find today? A slightly extended Eldar Trailer, showing who turns up

and also This

(Sorry the Embedded video just didn’t want to work :( )

I was right!! Tyranids!! SQUEEEEE!!! I am sooooo very excited! Look at the awesomeness!!! The utter utter awesomeness of them!

Survey Request 14 August 2008

Posted by kaitharshayr in Gaming, University.
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So I’m going to post this link here in the hopes that the some of the few people who read this blog may be inclined to answer this survey.

The survey is about gaming, there are only 4 questions and its for my MSc project, so the more responses the better. I’ll be very greatful for any and all responses. :)

Survey here

Geeky ramblings 9 June 2008

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I went to Leicester with C this weekend to meet up with a friend to celebrate her birthday, much geeky talk and fun was had. :) My friend is doing a Phd at Leicester uni, and was doing a shared bday meal on the Saturday with a friend from Leicester uni’s role-play society, and then the RP soc had their geek ball on the Sunday. And I’m really too tired to write anything really coherent about what we got up to, we ate food, met up with fun people, went to a ball, that about sums it up. The rest of this post is on rather geeky stuff, I didn’t intend to write a long post, but I do seem to have generated one all the same. :)

D&D 4th ed came out, and on the Sat, my friend’s bf bought a copy of the players guide, over the weekend we all had a look through, and we all decided that it was rather sterile and not very interesting. They’ve changed the races, half-orcs are out and dragon kind (kin?) are in, ok so I find that kind of cool, I do like dragons after all. But then flicking through to some of the other races, there are Eldaren (sp?) AND Elves, and to be honest there isn’t really that much different about then, hmm ok the eyes for both races might have been ever so slightly different but not much. Now I’m not an elf hater like a few people I know, but still Eldaren, Elves and half elves? It’s just getting silly.

And the classes? they’ve thrown out many of the interesting ones, no more druid, or bard and just introduced more combat type classes, and a slightly new type of arcane magic user class. In fact everything is MUCH more combat based, theres no more summoning, illusion, enchantment or necromancy. In fact speaking of necromancy, there is nothing that allows players to be even a little evil, everything is aimed at players having to be good people.

Also there is no more negatives, everything gives bonuses with bigger numbers, so no more ‘lows’ for players. Generally speaking we realised that it is basically an MMO but for a pen’n'paper game. C and my friend’s bf finally decided that the only thing 4th ed would be good for would be a tactical squad based war game, where each player would command their own squad exploring dungeons. Cause otherwise for a role playing game, it does feel rather sterile.

So I guess if I do play d&d, and lets be honest I’m not a big fan of d&d, although I was looking forward to 4th ed, it did sound like it had some good stuff, but as you can probably tell I’m not very impressed with it, but yes if I do play d&d I think I will stick to 3.5. :)

Also got discussing with my friend and another friend who came for the geek ball too about whether I should try and re-ignite my Stargate Sg-13 game. Then I moved on to say maybe I could run a Buffy related game instead, and the idea of BuffyGate came up. I’m really not sure who came up with the idea first, but anyway my two friends and C all seem to think that some crazy Buffy and Stargate crossover would be a good idea(?!) I’m really not sure how it would work, have an SG team with a slayer(s) in it? Make hellmouths into some strange type of stargate? Um.. hmm no, I really don’t think I want to try and make that work. C thinks I lack imagination because of that :P .

Although it reminds me that after reading the Fray comic it did make me wonder a few things. And to warn you up coming is a bit/rather spoilerish for season 7 of Buffy but anyway. Assuming the end of Buffy doesn’t happen, and there is still only just 1 slayer… or.. two? Because in s7 they do go on about how Buffy dying will trigger the next slayer, but isn’t Faith supposed to be the ‘current’ slayer.. so maybe there are two lines of slayers now, but anyway I digress from the point I wanted to discuss. Assume there is only 1 slayer, what happens when humanity gets to that point where they have space travel, and colonies on other worlds etc. What happens then? Do other worlds have hellmouths to spawn demons etc? Or are there only such things on worlds where life has spawned (and not worlds which have been terraformed?). What would the slayer do if there were? Or would it only be Earth? And if so would that mean that the Slayer would never be allowed to leave Earth?

And obviously this got me to wondering what aliens do, I mean do aliens have their own type of vampires & demons (or because demons tend to come from another plane of existence, could not the same demonic race inhabit other alien worlds?) and if aliens do have such things, how do they combat them? Their own slayer types? Or some kind of Initiative type? What? It does make me wonder.

My Prince Returns 4 June 2008

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*drool*

(I think his hair looks silly thou… )

Done! 30 May 2008

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So yesterday I had my last exam!! (Maybe my last exam ever? Although I thought that when I finished my undergrad degree, and it turned out to not be the case.) I’m glad thats all over now, now I just have to do my project and I’m done. Quite relieve that the majority of the stuff is over though, although I’m not quite sure just how much the project counts towards my final grade. :/

So as my last exam finished at 12pm, yes its an odd time considering that all my lectures and other exams were at 6pm, but that’s because a partner college in Sri Lanka was doing the same exam. After that was done I met up with C and we hit Oxford street. I did have reasonably grand plans of getting some new shoes, a dress, a bag, a book and a game, alas the trip was not so successful. I couldn’t find the Agile Web Development book for Ruby on Rails in Borders, so looks like I may have to get it off Play.com. And alas the dress and bag I had liked didn’t look as good in real life, ah well no biggy, saved me a bit of money its not like I needed them. I did however invest in some sandals, (2 pairs in fact), and it seems like my feet have shrunk, I know that you can go slightly smaller with sandals but usually I’d get a 6, not a 5 1/2.

And then I did a silly thing, I bought Portal, now don’t get me wrong I really want to play this game, but I sort of thought I didn’t want to bother getting the Orange Box, because well I’m not too interested in playing Team Fortress 2, and someone already gave me their Half Life 2 and Half Life Ep1 from the Orange Box so I wasn’t sure if it would be worth it. But then I do want to play Half Life ep 2 and I remembered (after I’d purchased Portal) that the Orange Box also has Peggle Extreme in it, and currently its only £24 on Amazon, soo when you consider I’d get 3 games, and would probably have tried Team Fortress 2, then I really should have gotten it. Well no problem, I thought to myself, I haven’t opened the packaging on Portal I can just return it to HMV.

So that’s what I went to do today. Or tried to. Apparently HMV only do exchanges on unopened PC games. Joy. And unsurprisingly my local (rather small) HMV did NOT have the Orange Box available. Thus I am now presented with 2 options.

  1. I trek to Oxford Street (30 min journey) and attempt to exchange my copy of Portal for a copy of the Orange Box (price £30).
  2. I give/sell Portal to someone else, and buy the Orange Box of Amazon.

Hmmm. :/ Really not sure. 1 is cheaper but its a little bit of a hassle JUST to exchange a game. :(

Ugh so anyway back to yesterday, I decided that going shopping after you’ve had an exam really isn’t a good idea, its really exhausting! I was wiped out by the time I got home, couple that with the fact that I haven’t been sleeping too good for the last few days. Oh well maybe now exams are done I can sort that out.

In other news I did get a hair cut today. Yays! It is now jaw length, and layered (I have thick, curly hair, I have to have it layered otherwise it just goes all poofy. So now it is funky and short, although the hair dresser did decide to do weird things when finishing up, it was going curly and he decided to straighten the very front bits but to leave the back curly. Very strange. Ah well I do intend to dye it purple over the weekend (hopefully).

And finally my new keyboard did arrive.  Although the size of the box it arrived in did amuse me, especially when compared with the size of the box for the keyboard.  It was all taken up with those fancy bag’s of air. :) I took a pic of it against my old keyboard too,  the size difference doesn’t look too bad (its barely noticeable in some ways). And hopefully you can’t see how dirty my old keyboard is either! :) Keyboard & Packaging

Random update 14 April 2008

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Well the first week of my ‘Easter’ Holidays has been and gone, and I feel much more relaxed now, I guess its about time I get started on my coursework that I have? Especially as one is my big project proposal write up thingy.. urgh. Lets forget that for now, and I’ll make this an update on the fun things I’ve been up to recently.

Ahhh I’m going to cut this because this post is getting long!! Anyway to give it a mini contents page I talk about Wedding, Natural History Museum, Roleplaying, and random other things. :)

(more…)

Game levels 30 January 2008

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So as part of my reading for my MSc project I have been told to read Game Level Design by Ed Bryne, its actually quite an interesting read, and has prompted me to think a bit differently about game levels. And particular about some game levels that I have played.

Vampire:the Masquerade – Bloodlines

Well, most people know that this is a buggy game anyway, *cough* crashing out to desktop at a certain bit of the game *cough*, it was rushed at release, and clearly poorly beta tested. But that’s not what I was going to discuss. There is one level in the game were you end up in the sewers, having to face these strange monsters, that are made up of bits of people and creatures and reanimated by some evil Vampire. (If you’ve played this then I’m talking about the area with the strange women’s bodies on spider like bodies. Horrid things!) And as I was playing through the game as a Ventrue I found this level EXTREMELY difficult, I am now better able to identify why that is the case.

The book talks about needing to make levels challenging, and yet not so challenging that players get pissed off. That you need to offer options to different types of players, one example the book gives is allowing players either to take a lift shaft or to take the stairs, where perhaps the stairs have more enemies for the more combat inclined.

Now in Bloodlines you can in theory, specialise your character, make them more combat orientated, stealthy, talkative etc etc etc. However if you are anything but seriously gun combat orientated or stealthy then this level is a nightmare! Now with my Ventrue I’d gone towards swords, a bit of stealth and I think decent persuasion type abilities.

So you can imagine my terror when I first get to the level and fight one of these women-spider things with my sword and get slaughtered. I had to get my guns out and run around backwards shooting it, I think this is the only way I defeated it. This was only a sign of things to come, the level is horribly populated with those things, and it is also a bad level to navigate, I kept getting lost, and dead. And as a Ventrue I cannot get blood from rats, and thus using my powers was a PITA.

I finally reloaded the level and uped my stealth quite high. It was the only way. And thus heart in mouth, I snuck past these monsters, until i finally came to one that completely blocked the pathway to the ONLY WAY OUT. Somehow, I crept past it, only mere inches away! And then bolted for the exit. But I was lucky, I only had to boost my stealth by one, to do this level, what do people do who are less combat/stealth orientated? It was indeed a very frustrating level, and a reasonable example of poor level design.

Prince of Persia: Two Thrones

Now don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the PoP games, (well less number 2 but..) its fun to run around as the Prince (monkey boy that he is) the mix of puzzles and combat is generally pretty good.

But there is one level in the game that strikes me as rather poor design. You start in a chariot and it ends at the the 3rd (out of 4) boss fight in the game. However this fight is, I feel the hardest boss fight of the whole game! And when you die you have to repeat the chariot section ALL OVER AGAIN! Once I’d done the chariot part of the level several hundred times (a bit of an exagguration but it was a lot) this was less of an issue, but it is a long chariot section, and is hard to master. Especially when you end up using all your sand in that section and thus have none left for the horrid boss fight. It was not fun. :( It took me so long to get past that boss fight too. Was so very hard. I feel that quite possibly they game should have separated these section. Possibly if you loaded from your save, start from the chariot race, but if your in the same game and haven’t just turned on the machine, then when you die in the boss fight, you should re-spawn at the start of the boss fight. It would have made life easier. Although possibly annoying if you have no sand left? Hmmm. Perhaps that was a factor in making the level the way it was.

Um anyway I think I have waffled enough, I should get back to reading!

FPS 17 October 2007

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People that know me know that that while there are many first person games I’d love to play I tend to steer clear of them. Why? Because very often I find they make me queasy. For a long time I have attributed this to motion sickness, due to some sort of head bobbing thing. So there have been very few FP games that I’ve been able to play.

As such it does mean that I’m careful about getting any FP game, I tend to try and play a demo of it before I get it. Otherwise it’s just a waste of money for something that will make me ill.

Halo (on xbox), I can play this generally without a problem, very rarely does it make me feel quesy. Oblivion and Splinter Cell (both on PC) I’ve generally been ok with too, just as long as I don’t play for hours on end.

However since yesterday I think I now have a better idea as to what it is that makes me queasy. A friend gave me a subscription to Half-Life 2, (thank you!) which I’ve been meaning to play for a while but been a bit hmmm about too because it’s FP. So I started playing it, and within about 20 mins or less I felt more queasy then I have ever felt from a FP game, I was dizzy, felt mild urge to throw up, and so I went to lie down. It was horrible.

About an hour later I decided to try again, first I looked at the settings, to see if perhaps I could lower the mouse sensitivity as I thought maybe it was due to that. However the mouse sensitive was already set pretty low and then I noticed that I can play the game in windowed mode. So I try this and presto! I got in almost a good hours playing time before i felt tired and a little queasy.

And so it’s made me think, I have a 19″ wide screen monitor, and now that I think about it when I briefly played oblivion on it and splinter cell i felt queasier quicker than I had when i played the games on my old CRT monitor. And when I’ve played Halo its mostly been on small tv’s in co-op or multi-player mode, thus giving me even less screen space. So I wonder if its perhaps something more to do with the immersion into the visual environment than actual motion sickness.

Perhaps if I play games in windowed mode more often I might be able to play more FP games :) (Although I wouldn’t say everything.. I’ve seen someone play Prey, I’m pretty damn sure all that suddenly walking on ceilings would make me ill)

Sony getting a bit desperate….? 6 October 2007

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So the PS3 isn’t selling that well? Not a huge surprise to me to be honest. It’s overpriced, has not much choice in games, and was pretty late to the market. Combine that with there still being PS2 games being produced and well who wants a PS3?

Also add to this the USA get two options of PS3, the expensive one and the really expensive one. Europe? Well obviously being the back water gaming place we are we only get the really expensive option (and you wonder why it isn’t’ selling?) The USA got a cut in the price of the PS3, and as far as I know Europe.. got it offered with a spare controller and 2 games instead. You know if I had wanted a PS3 I would have preferred a cheaper console to having it lumped with two games I might not want to play. And now? Well..

Cheaper PS3

I quote: “The new PS3 will be unable to play PlayStation 1 and 2 games, has a reduced number of USB ports, from four to two connections, and no slots for memory cards.

The system will also only be 40gig. Ok fair enough smaller HD, less USB ports but to NOT make it backwards compatible?!?! What is the point? There’s like nothing to play on the system as is! to not be able to play old games? Ok so taking that feature out makes it cheaper for them to produce and means they can sell it for less, but man, I swear I think someone forgot to take their sane pills!

Also as pointed out in the article, this Cheaper PS3 is the same price as the Xbox ELITE! Ok so the PS3 as the fancy blue ray dvd player in it.. but you know that’s all you seem to get for your money a really expensive DVD system at the moment. What is the point?