the lowdown on ..

ANGBAND

Angband is a MiddleEarth-inspired, combat-based RPG with (depending on what version you are playing)  graphics between very poor and nonexistent.

It is also very fun.

Angband is a small (10Meg) freeware game with a random map generator - you create your character, then head down in the dungeons beneath the city, where you find hundreds of different monsters and artifacts.

On level 99 lives Sauron, kill him, and you get to go down to level 100 to fight - perhaps prevail - Morgoth, the Ancient Enemy; kill Morgoth and you have won.

Dungeon creation is random each time you enter a level anew - irritating thought to old school dungeoneers like me who like to clean out everything, but as part of the game mechanics it works brilliantly. Limitless dungeons to explore - and although they might be very ripetitive in shape or colour, the stuff you find within them isn't.

Named mobs (from Tolkien lore - ringwraits, easterlings, uruk hai, great dragons..), artifacts, ego items, scrolls, potions, gems, wands, every item ever imagined in a classic RPG is here. Add to this the extereme complexity of the game system, that lets you do almost every immaginable action - spike doors, inscribe runes, throw items/weapons/nasty stuff, magic in every form or shape, sleeping monsters, sneaking, running madly from big monsters, and eating food - without which you die a YASD.

The Good:

Angband is fun, free, and will keep you busy for approximately one million hours. get it HERE.

http://rephial.org/

The Bad:

You have to be no less than a D&D fanatic to love it; Angband is hard and unforgiving - the really bad graphics makes you forget that every square you move is a action turn, and you tend to die often.

The Ugly:

YASD stands for Yet Another Stupid Death.

Unless you plan to really spend months on end playing it, you will make some mistakes, and generally wind up being punished for them. Mind you, there is always a reason why you died, and often that reason laughs in your face. Which is made worse by the fact that since this was designed to be a realistic game, you only get one life.. no save game reload. Once dead, you are dead.

If the one-shot game system ins't bad enough, the interface really needs a overhaul, with important ("you hear a door bust open!") messages getting lost in the keypresses, and you really need to survive this initial culture shock with Angband's ugliness and realism to get to like it.

A
nd finally, Angband wasn't made to be finished in the first place; It was a software that ran on a server at a university, with hundreds of people expected to be logged on, trying to kill Morgoth, all of them failing miserably one way or another. The fun would be in surviving a little longer, going a little deeper in the dungeons, and most of all, getting killed in the most unfair way.

In my three years in Angband, with cheats on, i have faced Morgoth but twice, and never killed him. I did though manage to kill Sauron, and Morgoth himself was brought down to half his hit points, and  i hear that - but it's just a rumor - Morgoth himself can be killed. Word around has it that Rangers work best ..

How to beat Angband

the old adage goes, Buy Lantern , Kill Morgoth.

And certainly a lantern is the most useful piece of equipment until you find an Elfstone or Glaradiel's Phial, for it makes far more light than a torch and in Angband, being able to see what is ahead is more important than a good sword. Which is also, very important. But the point is, knowing what that stuff in your inventory does is very important. Ignorance is death.

Although Angband characters tend to die very easily, all is not lost - you, as a player,(in a convenient .txt file that you can check while playing, just [r]ecall a monster) retain memories of your misadventures, and slowly get to know all the mobs in the game - expecially those whom you have killed or have been killed by, thus preparing you for what is ahead next. Many, many mobs are unfair and/or overpowered, and getting to know which ones are is the best way to stay alive. 
Even though it might seem easy to go deeper at first, you really need to do the first levels ten to twenty at least twice, as it is necessary to find a great deal of equipment before you can get to the better mobs/artefacts. Scrolls/Staves of Teleportation are essential to getting out of troublesome spots, but they both tend to be easily destroyed by fire breathing dragons and acid splashes. There are too many variables to list them here, but essentially until you know exactly what is going on, read the messages carefully and ponder on their significance(ctrl+P to see back messages). Too many times i have died stupidly having the very item that would save me in my own backpack.

Anyhow, should you survive the first impact with Angband's horrid UI, go to graphics/David Gervais Tiles and try those, they are quite nice. And if you should survive having your first few YASDs  without throwing out the folder with the game(no install required), and get deeper into the mysteries of the game, here is a few tips.

0)Tip number zero: the basics.. after learning the key commands, press shift-c and then [h], there is a list of your resistences, if you don't have one, mobs that use that attack type will mangle you in a wink.

1)Molds are the stupides, most irritating mobs in the game. They are worth almost zero XP and have horrid powers of stat drain/equipment damage/XP drain, so stay away. Also, they don't move. Another good reson to read the messages and see what is actually happening in the game.

2)Hounds are worth little XP, and extremely dangerous. Should you find a dungeon level packed with these mobs, just get out and back in again, we won't blame you for it.

3)Ignore the level feelings. The way they work is completely screwed up. You will find plenty of artefacts anyway if you manage to survive past a certain point.

4)If you are serious about beating this game, just take it easy, go slowly, and remember that the number one reason you die is because you have Recalled back into the dungeon at a level too deep for your character. When you are about to use a Recall scroll, go up about 2-5 levels through the stairs, and then select "reset recall depth?->yes".

5)To beat Angband you must kill Morgoth. In order to do so you must first kill Sauron, and him and Morgoth both have a really annoying power that you must counter in order to win: they can summon every named mob in the game. Therefore, even if you do manage to get to level 99 (it's not that hard after all), you have to spend a great deal of time just running around levels 50+ to make sure you have killed every single one of Morgoth's allies. Expecially the biggest ones, like the Queen of dragons or the Ringwraits (all nine of them). Killing Morgoth himself is just a hack&slash thing, though people have had the most success with Rangers who use Holy bolts and Runes to block him. Personally, i haven't got a good thing to say about magic, i never really had a lot of success with it, i like warriors for their simplicity.

6)Use the cheats. There is no easier way to actually learn what is going on that actually sticking your neck in it until you get your head chopped off by a mob who is ten levels out of depth. Of course, you can't win like that, and instead of WINNER you get the title of CHEATER if you do kill Morgoth, but it's the best way to go. And a bit of wisdom .. when you start the game go first to the weaponsmith. if you don't see [25000] as the maximum he pays... start again. Money isn't really important in Angband, but it can make your life easier around level 30+.

7)and last. or you could make a copy of your save game file... 

HOW I KILLED MORGOTH

well, actually morgoth turns out isn't so hard to beat, after all. here is my step-by-step, completely fool-proof method:

step one, stash at home all the potions of healing, *healing*, life that you can. killing morgy will take at least a dozen potions. actually, stashing potions will probably not be that hard at all.

stash at home as many scrolls of mass banishment as you can. simple banishment scrolls might work as well, if you are in a tight spot.

make sure you have enough speed for the beginning of the fight. a staff of haste or potion, plus a nice ring of speed (i have one that's +16) will do nicely.. looking for around +35 speed all in all.

go trough your equipment and have a setup where you have every resistance covered. obviously, chaos, nether, nexus and disenchantment are the most important.

make sure you have a weapon that has Slay Evil as a brand. ideally, a Mace of Distruption or Blade of  of Chaos of *Slay Evil* would be the best weapon, but any artefact weapon that has "slays evil creatures" will do.

plenty of potions of enlightment.

something that has teleport, like scrolls of teleportation, or staves. but scrolls are better.

that's it, you are ready. go down  to level 100, after you have killed just about every named mob in the game (atm 93 named listed, all killed), and ASAP drink a potion of enlightment. look around the dungeon, and see if there is a vault (the big rooms made of white marble, ie, made of that indestructable stone that makes up the edges of the map. if there is no vault, go back to town and try again.

if there is a vault (smaller is better), go in, and if morgoth hasn't spotted you yet, clear it/banish. if you can't, start again from town(vaults are plentyful at these levels).

when you have your small vault cleared, put your speed equipment on, and sloooowly go around the dungeon looking for Morgoth. When he spots you and proceeds to tunnel through granite to get to you, run to the vault. (once in, get your "fighting" equipment on)

lead Morgoth into the vault. essentially, what you want is a situation like so :

XXXXXXX

XXuM

XXXXXXX

where "u" is You, and M is obviously, Morgoth. X's are the white vault walls, that Morgy cannot destroy. 
This leaves you with a simple (hrmm..) one-on-one melee with Morgoth. If, or rather, when, Morgoth summons his many friends, just read a scroll of mass banishment. i had 9 at the beginning of the fight, used 6 to beat him. besides this, it's just attack morgoth .. press space bar several times...else you might attack him one time too many, and go too low on HP. if your HP are less than say, 600, then you need to drink a potion. my Dunedain warrior had 1144 HP, Anduril as main sword, 30+ potions of *healing*, AC 237 and all resists covered, plus a lucky Nenya and Vilya combo.. but these are not necessary, as a nice ring of damage will do.

o
h btw, you *do* tend to miss Morgoth quite a lot, so rings of slaying will do just as nicely, as a simple potion of heroism also. when meleeing him, simply never push your luck. if your HP are low, drink a potion. do not try "one more attack" as he can manastorm for 600dmg or so.   on a good round, i would use two moves to attack and the third to heal. didnt take me more than 15 potion of *healing* to kill him, so around 30-40 turns.. 


thinking about it, that must have been a solid two minutes of gameplay, not longer. but they sure were a tight two minutes. 

Better Bring A Bucket

Stuff's better, still no 'net but more moneys coming in. Coming soon:
The Ulysses - not such a good book
Blood Bowl, UnLegendary Edition
Angband! - it's the 90's all over again
Pipe Smoking - great or awesome ?
and of course, lots of Python

plus the usual spewings of satire and hate.

Still job-hunting :/

Halleluya

Finally, Windows 7 has a proper application audio mixer - allowing me to turn down the output of individual applications (more useful than you'd think); kudos to Microsoft for implementing this - long overdue - change.

Audio on Microsoft computers is still many years behind what i expect from a home machine.. but never mind that. Windows 7 is a really great OS, just as good as XP was many, many years ago. The main strength of W7 lies in the fact that as of now, every piece of XP software i had to run runs fine - even if my system is 64bit.

Well, Duh you might say, but the fact that i can function just as well as i did on my ultra-tweaked XP, and i can do so by just popping in the W7 install disk (i didnt need to install *any* driver this time around) is  agreat advantage. Also, i'm not just having the same experience, as W7 fixes some long-standing kernel bugs that XP had, making this "2010 XP" version of windows a no-brainer choice. The loss of performance for using a more modern OS (more stuff running on it) is .. negligible. seriously.  When i installed W7 i just *knew* it was going to suck, but it didn't ! What a surprise..

So, W7 is good, but is it great (yeah, i know i said it was great, but the question stands)?

Well, only time will tell. I can already see a couple things about it i don't like, but all together i say it's promising.
Sure beats working with OSX.

Christmas? What christmas?

Just watched the christmas special of Doctor Who. Matt Smith has to be the worse screen presence in all of England - god i miss David Tennant. Or even Ecclestone, would have been better. Writing on the series is pretty bad as well, but it was never really brilliant, except maybe in Midnight, Forest of the Dead, Army of Ghosts, Impossible Planet,  and ...thinking about it, more or less the whole Tennant series was awesome. Ecclestone, was ok. Loved Rose Tyler's big juicy ass. Matt Smith's choice of personality for the Doctor is easily comparable to The Phantom Menace's choice of script. Just unbelievable that nobody yet has gone to him and told him "look here mate, its just not funny. or serious, either".

Amy Pond in policewoman outfit and red hair is really sexy. (attack of the obvious statements). Maybe even *too* sexy, i'd say that any companion that goes above Tegan-level sexyness is too sexy for the show. Hey, call me a prude, thats just how i feel. Would love to see her in the buff, sure. Even privately. But she's not really the type you expect as a companion.. in a bad way. not revolutionary a choice, more of .. awkward. and mister fish face (whatshisname, Amy's husband) is the second most pointless companion since that guy with the Kilt from 30 years ago. Look, Doctor Who *is* a children's show. It's all true, *that show with the puppets* sums it up perfectly. Without good - grim, captivating - writing, better acting, and good pace of direction the show just falls apart. This last series is just bleeaurgh, not even worth watching. And FFS, the continuity, writers *really* should know that scifi serials are very strict on continuity, you just can't have a room filled with every enemy the Doctor has ever had and not expect some raised eyebrows.

And the story ?

Honestly i can't even say what the story from S5 is. Did he spot a crack in time, that he then closes? Well? Where are the twists ? The intwined plots? Well?
And how can you fuck up a character so deep as Professor River Song?

She is the ONLY person alive to know the Doctor's true name (something quite big for the show.. i would say .. the biggest revelation that the show has had since day one ????).
She can fly the TARDIS, better than the Doctor can. She is also a person of courage and someone who the Doctor loved - she sacrifices herself to save him in Forest of The Dead.
This person was the one who changed Doctor Who, a real catalyst of years of the show.. and then they went and gave her the manga treatment, where she is a ... what, intergalactical thief who travels trough time? She was supposed to be just a human that he would fall in love with, like Rose almost tipped him over. Good character stories do have to come to a closure, it's an unavoidable fact.

And - everything else apart - how can the Doctor now be such an idiot? Remember that personality may change but capabilities remain unaltered. Meh. Another example of the voice of reason going lost to the wind.

Anyway, show is crap. Even the new tune they have is worse than the one from last series. And Christmas always seems to the a good excuse to not have to write anything, just do a toss-off of Scrooge McWritersux
and be done with it.. What has the world of television come to ...

*sad*

a final edit. In Waters of Mars the Doctor goes to a base on Mars; he then discovers that the people who he is trying to help will die regardless, because it's a event fixed in time, a key Doctor Who continuity element that has helped the series develop with some interesting hardships along the way, rather that a one-button-solves-all solutions you would imagine associated with owning a time-traveling machine. The key element of the - rather bad - episode is that the character is faced with a dilemma spurring from his own nature - he is a Timelord, and therefore he cannot "afford" to love those who he knows cannot be saved.. That is what is happening in the episode. Not "he wiggles the screwdriver"; he does that, but those are just filler actions, not plot or story elements. Series 5 HAS NOT GOT a story. that, is the problem. or teh problem, as they say.

My BTEC part 1 of many.

When my BTEC course began, we were presented with a series of questions to be answered in writing - some essays - explaining the nature of sound and simile. I had trouble with them not because of the nature of the material, as i told my teacher, but because i did not know who i was answering to; Did this person who wants to know what phase is(or reverb, or vibrations, or kinetic energy, or amplitude, or frequency, pick one), knows *anything* at all about sound, physics and the like, was he a learned person, or a complete ignorant? To an acoustician who asks me the same question i could answer with three words, to a schoolboy i would have to explain lots more, in a long and extensive manner which explains terminology, basic physics, and so on.

Explain it to an idiot, the teacher said.

As the course went on the questions got more complex, more in depth, and also reflected on what we wrote before.
On one side you must assume that anyone who asks a question so specific must have a knowledge of at least certain particular elements, so the answer you give is appropriate to that person - too short for the BTEC course to be good. But if you assume that you must explain a very advanced acoustics concept to someone who doesnt know anything at all, a simple "what is the Doppler effect" becomes a 30 page essay, instead of the simple answer "compression of soundwaves".

And furthermore if we advance in a course we cannot be expected to not reference earlier work on the same subject; the idea that your "examiner" has forgotten everything you did yesterday and you must explain it again is ridiculous.

Look : an unrelated link : explaining why the new Skype is bad and how can a group of programmers screw up so badly. But my course is exactly the same, how can professionals do so badly something they are specialized in, when a student knows more about the art of teaching than the national board of BTEC examiners does.

That link speaks the truth and, if you read it, you will notice that it does so RIGHT ON  THE MAKERS' OWN FORUM. Do you think they fixed it? They went "oh no, we screwed up, we must fix this embarassing thing double-time!".

They didnt. (nerd rage follows).

QL

I play Quake because there is nothing better to do - lots of times - on the internet.

QuakeLive is a in-browser version of a game i used to own in 1998 (Quake3Arena) as i was a Doom fan, but could never get my head around. Q3A was extremely hard, and my first game on a instagib server while on 56k was my last. But as it turns out, Quake is brilliant. The engine is ultralight, very fast and quite complex. Learning how to play can be a frustrating experience, since there are so many "hidden" rules concerning the physics, and mastering these is key to playing the game decently. To get any better, since Quake is quite possibly the second most popular - and first in difficulty - eSport in the world, with the crown going dubiously to Starcraft, you need more than patience, you need superhuman reflexes and extreme precision. Surgeons will have nothing on you.

Anyway, i sometimes get frustrated at QL even though i have gotten pretty good at it, because of some faults (or at least i think they are faults) within the game engine.

Unfortunately, the QuakeLive community is the biggest bunch of douchebags ever assembled on the internet, so trying to get help - or even a shoulder to cry on - from them is impossible. So i vent on this here blog.

I apologise to anyone who reads this and understands nothing of it. I especially apologise for what is coming next. It will make no sense whatsoever.


The LG (and everything else, really) is screwed up.


I have recently found out what mouse acceleration is, and turned it off, to the expense of everything else on my desktop. Turned down the sensitivity, which has helped but fucked my rockets.
Already i wonder why the fuck the QL website doesnt have a big "THIS IS HOW YOU TURN YOU MOUSE ACCELERATION OFF ON XP" sign on the login page. Since having it on stops you from possibly playing this game decently.

Yet still i cant get results with the LG.

This is because.. bear with me .. the client-server packets lose some informations about the hitscan location on some cells.

I have ran right behind newly spawned players (not glowing) and wasted 60 cells on them.. that 420 damage, and they didnt die.
I wasted a whole clip of MG on a player, hitting with every shot, and he didnt die. newly spawned, no armor or health pickup.
I have hit people 4 times with the shotgun while with Quad, and they didnt die.

On the other hand, i have been killed by gauntlets when hit twice. I have been hit for 70 damage from the other fucking side of the room with a shotgun, while i hit the same guy from the same distance 4 times with no avail.

I HAVE SEEN WITH MY OWN EYES the beam of the LG hit a model, the white spot of the crosshair in the middle of their hitbox, and no hit is recorded. for a cool quarter second, then the bells begin.

Since over a second your opponent might get in and out of the beam maybe 5-6 times, a quarter second bug makes the LG pretty much useless.
And since this is arguably the second most powerful gun in the game, of three, playing without it means i'm bound to lose no matter what.


Different reactions from playing against different clients.

Some players in the same arena, same server, have a hitbox as big as a house. i have hit people who were well gone behind a corner, while some other people have a hitbox that disappears from time to time.

hey sure, its a fun game, but when the community agrees that a ping above 60ms is too high for professional gaming, didnt you think something was wrong ? That maybe you should change the physics model to accomodate the reality of technology? And remember, this is a 1998 game, was even worse back then.

As it stands now, Quake is only playable properly in LAN. And i know it cannot be fixed, and i am sad. But it is still the best FPS out there, and its free.