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Fun games from Kongregate
As much as I enjoy games like Ka-50 Black Shark for their depth and challenge, there are times when I want something that doesn’t take quite so long to load.
It probably take 5 to 10 minutes to get going in Black Shark and similar games when you account for loading the game and then the mission or save. Frankly I don’t have the patience at the end of the day when I can only allow 30 minutes for a quick blast.
A faster and cheaper alternative that can be just as much fun, is to enter the world of online flash games. There is an important warning though, it is possible to spend (should that be waste?) huge amounts of time on these sites.
I’ve found more than enough good quality flash games to keep me happy at Kongregate.
Protector has kept me interested for ages. It’s a strategy game where you have to place units on a map to stop monsters from getting past. It sounds simple but there are right and wrong ways of doing it, as I’ve found out the hard way.
Warfare 1917 was good but didn’t last long enough for me. It is a good alternative to the fantasy setting that is use for so many of these games.
Gemcraft is similar to Protector but I’ve found it a lot more challenging.
Another way I’ve dealt with this is to restrict myself to really old games and rely on the relative speed of my newer computer. Deus Ex served quite well for a while. At nine years old it was really quick, even on the highest quality settings. The same goes for Morrowind.
You could go even further back in time and play some old DOS games with D-Fend Reloaded. A large collection of games can be found at Abandonia.com
Ka-50 Black Shark screen grabs
What did I do at lunch? Fly a Russian attack helicopter.
First I went for the instant action button and got the arcade version of the game.
A nice touch but I’m really after the proper action. So back to the training video. I selected the one of starting the helicopter. This is because I can’t be bothered to keep switching between the Flight Guide and the keyboard shortcut list. Much easier to let the instructor take care of the complicated stuff. Even on the third time through, I’m still not keeping up with the instructions. Though at least this time I remembered to turn on the power to the ejector seat system (more on that later)
Here you can see the cockpit. The centre display is the TV based targeting system and the one to the right is the advanced moving map. So far I’ve been able to turn them on. There are more controls to the left, right, above, and in fact behind the pilot too.
The Ka-50 is very responsive, much more so that the Huey that I flew in Med-Evac or Sea King in Search and Rescue 4. The manual recommends using the trim control, which I shall find in the shortcut guide soon. However, as long as you’re careful it’s not a hard helicopter to control.
And here’s the Black Shark in flight. I did manage to land a couple of times but thought I would end up with the ejector seat.
If you thought that ejection might be a little risky from a helicopter with the blades over the pilot, you would be right. Luckily the designers spotted this and came up with quite a novel solution.
There are explosive bolts fitted to the blades designed to fling them out of harms way. As the picture to the right shows it all seems to have worked ok.
Hopefully I should start to learn how to fire some weapons soon.
Ka-50 Black Shark very first impressions
A reputation for being able to land helicopters and aircraft in (mostly) one piece rewarded me with a copy of Ka-50 Black Shark earlier this week.
The Black Shark is the Russian alternative to the Apache attack helicopter. An added challenge for the simulation is that it is only a single seat, so you have to fly and fight at the same time.
Installation was nice and simple and I have been impressed with the graphics and performance. I set the resolution to match my gaming notebook (affectionately called ‘The Beast’ thanks to 22in monitor) at 1680x1050. Black Shark exceeded my expectations by playing fine at this rather extreme setting without having to turn anything else down.
I decided to give the training missions a go and it quickly became clear that this is a proper simulation. There is a start button for each of the two engines, but pressing this is just one step of 35! Thankfully there is a quick start-up button if you don’t have a checklist to hand.
Speaking of checklists, there is an impressive amount of documentation available to help play the game. PDFs for my downloaded version of course.
| Quick Start | 56 |
| GUI manual | 162 |
| Flight Manual | 383 |
| Keyboard shortcuts - simulation | 9 |
| Keyboard shortcuts – game | 5 |
| Total | 615 |
The keyboard shortcuts in both the PDFs and in game have one problem, modifiers such as Shift or Ctrl are listed after the key rather than before as we are normally used to. Given that there is a distinction between the left and right Shift, Ctrl and Alt, this may take some adjustment.
I’ll be back in flight at lunch so there’ll be more detail soon, and hopefully some screengrabs.
New games for Windows 7….
Well, Windows XP games that got cut out of Vista that are returning. They are Internet Backgammon, Internet Checkers and Internet Spades.
As the names suggest they are online multiplayer. A very cool feature is that the computer will take over if a human opponent drops out. There’s no mention of how it will decide on the skill level. That could present a problem with the statistics tracker in the Games Explorer if the replacement is too good.
Still going strong – Moraff’s games
I got a press release this morning about some new tilesets for a MahJongg game made by Software Diversions, home of the Moraff games.
I don’t know how many people know this but Moraff was very big in the good old days of DOS. Moraff’s Revenge was one of the very first 3D role playing games and I remember spending many happy hours playing Moraff’s Blast, an Arkonoid like game (although Popcorn was my favourite). Time to dig out DOSBox.
Enjoying game music
Without really meaning to, I found some good music to listen to while working, music from games. It makes quite a lot of sense really when you think about it. Game music is written to help the gamer enjoy the game without distracting them, so it’s perfect background music.
Myself, I’m listening to the tracks from some of the Might and Magic series of games, 6-9 to be precise. As they were created some time ago, the music was supplied on a combined audio and data CD. Extracting the music couldn’t have been easier with the ripping tab in Windows Media Player, although I had to put the track information myself.
It seems that these games were at something of a sweet spot for general listening. Earlier games often used MIDI, which was very atmospheric in games like Dark Forces but loses something for day to day use. Some games have a decent collection of mp3s, X2 The Threat was one, but I’ve found that many use a system to change the music to react to events. The resulting files are too small to be of any use in this way.
Having said that, there may be a small renaissance of game music. Some idle web searching produced DirectSong, a website offering albums for Elder Scrolls III and IV, Guild Wars and Dungeon Siege II among others. Annoyingly there is no mention of price before signing up, which is enough for me to go elsewhere, but it’s a good idea none the less.
As a slight aside, one of my favourite games of all times, No One Lives Forever, came with a small album’s worth of music on the second install CD. In fact you can even download the source code for the game now from the official site. In fact, I’ve just discovered that you can download the music, and quite a few more extra tracks too, from indiespace.com. I think I shall do so now.
Does anyone else have any favourite music from games?
Maybe Guitar Hero won’t kill proper music after all
We took a look at Guitar Hero World Tour before Christmas and decided it was a lot of fun – if I look like I’m scowling it’s because I’m concentrating, I do it with ordinary instruments too.
I had one big reservation though. I’m worried that children will see Guitar Hero and Rock Band as the main way of making music. There’s not actually any real relation between what you play and hear, and there’s no scope for improvising your own tunes. Granted I’m unlikely to be popular breaking out a real drum kit when returning from the pub!
Well it seems that it might not be such a problem as a study by the charity Youth Music has found that Guitar Hero and Rock Band have actually encouraged youngsters to start learning musical instruments. And that many instruments are actually cheaper than buying the virtual kind and a console.
Thanks to Musicians Tools for the link,
Vista chess frustrations
I would have to admit that I'm no great chess player, but it seems that Vista makes up for any deficiencies in a different way, forcing a draw.
This was discovered by our editor. Thinking he had managed to checkmate the computer, the message above appeared saying the game was a draw.
The board appeared as below. There are two queens because he managed to get a pawn to the other side of the board. All the more convincing a win you would think.
Someone else in the office pointed out that this is not actually checkmate because the King is not actually in check, it just cannot move without going into check. I would call that a winning situation but perhaps the computer is willing to wait for the human player to leave game and default (in the manner of Rimmer in Red Dwarf when playing draughts with the ship robots - Series 2 episode 5).
Game of the week: Dino Run
The aim of Dino Run is to run. Fast.
You play the dinosaur, and you're being chased by all sorts of things that want to make you extinct. From fireballs to dust storms and plain old big rocks, there's plenty that will kill you.
But build up enough momentum and eat enough small furry mammals to gain points, and you'll make it through to the next level.
Performance - it's not just about CPUs and GPUs
It's easy to be seduced by the every larger, and more complicated, speeds and model numbers of processors and graphics cards, but they don't tell the whole story about performance, especially when it comes to notebooks.
The hard disk also has a very important role to play, even more so these days, given the constant indexing and virus checking that goes on.
This was brought home rather firmly when moving from a high end gaming desktop computer to a notebook. The notebook is still very powerful with dual SLI Geforce 7000 series graphics card and a very big screen. The official name is the Emperor, but it's been dubbed the Beast instead in the office, and I would have thought it was ideal for gaming.
Which it is, so long as games don't require lots of disk access. Playing F.E.A.R has become an exercise in patience as there are slight pauses when the disk is accessed. And this is on Windows XP rather than Vista.
This does highlight one of the biggest handicaps notebooks face against desktops, the relative performance of their smaller hard disks. Just to make the comparison worse, the desktop computer I had been using had two hard disks working together with RAID, improving the performance even further.
Worth considering when buying a new computer if gaming is important .
