Pucechan.co.uk

Issue 10 goes Open

As of today, Issue 10: Invasion has gone into Open Beta on the Test server (known as the Training Room) for everyone to test.

It looks like it has some interesting new stuff, although I don’t have a character high enough to try a lot of the new content out yet (so I won’t be heading on over to the Training Room just yet ).

The most interesting content to me is the whole Invasion setup. When I10 goes live there will be frequent (at most an hour apart it seems) attacks on 3 random city zones, these attacks consist of 3 phases: A bombardment phase where the Rikti ships attack and drop bombs, a clean-up lull to give players a chance to destroy unexploded bombs and the actual invasion phases where players have to defend the city zones from the invading Rikti.

As well as these 3 city invasions, completing the new Rikti zone Task Force triggers an invasion in a single random city zone.

Each invasion event from start to finish apparently lasts roughly 30 minutes.

This type of thing is what I consider great content, it (along with other I10 content) pushes the CoX storyline along, brings back the great Rikti and gives interesting higher-end content.

I will be interested to see what other content appears in I10 outside of the Rikti Crash Site content, we know of at least 3 new full costume sets (Stealth, Exo-Proto and the 39–month veteran reward Boxing set) and I’ll be investigating in the Training Room if Daemonstorm happens to reach level 35 before it goes live !

I thought I’d already seen “Bullet Hell”…

I’ve seen some insame SHMUPs in my time but THIS is just ridiculous. This clip is of a guy beating Mushihimasama (by Cave) on the PS2.

Absolutely crazy pixel-perfect dodging required! He is doing this on Ultra difficulty!

I have total respect for mental players with this kind of reactions!

City of Heroes Redux

After a hard day tackling The Family in Independence Port I came across a bunch of heroes taking on the giant octopus, Lusca. I decided to help them out, besides I could do with a few favours.

As you can probably tell I’m still playing an awful lot of CoH, according to HeroStats roughly 5 hours a day at the moment, Daemonstorm is currently level 27 (out of a maximum 50) so he isn’t doing too badly.

Daemonstorm is a Scrapper, which is one of the CoH melee types (the other being a Tanker, which, believe it or not, is the main Tank class), I opted for the Katana/Regeneration combo with Daemonstorm. Katana mostly just because swords are cool, especially lightweight slim ones and I chose Regeneration because it fit with the ideas I had for the character when making his outfit. Think Spawn with a trenchcoat and you are almost there.

The amount of versatility you have when it comes to design in CoH is incredible and it still outclasses many MMOs that I’ve seen to date despite originally coming out in 2004.

Issue 10 is out soon (it’s currently in closed testing, soon to enter Open Beta) and includes the now infamous Rikti invasion event (which they used at the end of the original Beta test to kill all player characters) along with a new high-end zone (where both heroes and villains will have to work together) and Task Force (a Task Force is a sequence of themed missions that have to be completed by a group over a long period, 2 – 5 hours is typical). There will also be new costume parts and presumably other new elements as well.

As it stands I’ve hardly seen much of the content already in the game with so Daemonstorm better hurry up and find some more cool PUGs to do missions with.

I’m a cross between Jamie Lee Curtis and John Goodman!

Joanne found a fun site earlier, MyHeritage.com, which as it’s name suggests is a geneology/social networking site for creating family trees and such. It has some fun little doodads though, like a celebrity face look-a-like collage generator.

Apparently I look 74% like Jamie Lee Curtis and 64% like John Goodman. Now, John Goodman I can kind of see but Jamie Lee?

See who Joanne looks like according to the gospel that is MyHeritage here…

My return to Paragon City

I just thought I’d post some thoughts on my impressions of City of Heroes now I’ve been playing for a few days. It has evolved quite a bit since I last played with some major client and gameplay changes.

• Graphics – These have had a bit of an overhaul, supporting complex shaders (i.e. Water Effects, Clothing and Building Bumpmaps, Reflections etc.) It almost looks like a different game.
• General “Quality of Life” Changes – Global Chat (Add people rather than characters so you can chat regardless of who they are logged in as) and LOTS of general interface improvements.
• Crafting (Invention System) – This was one thing missing from CoH at launch (due to CoH not really having “loot” in the traditional sense). Some of the enhancement sets (and costume pieces) you can make from crafting are worthwhile and from what I’ve seen so far it seems a good system.
• Auction System – Along with crafting comes the auction system, this too is new and very well done. It works on a hidden price system so the auctioning player sets a price, then bidding players bid blind (although they can see how much the item has sold for in the past). If the blind bids are above the set price the bidding player wins it. Easy, simple and fun.
• Police Band Missions – Police Band missions are missions available at any time from various zones so you always have something to do. Kind of similar to Anarchy Online’s random mission generator.
• Safeguard Missions – Safeguard missions involve preventing a bank heist (and other side events) that take place on destruct-able versions of the city zones, they generally provide a useful temporary power as a reward (for example, Zero-G Jump Pack).

As well as these there have been a constant stream of free expansions, which are known as issues in CoH, the tenth of these is currently in testing and includes a whole slew of high-end content.

The game is just as fun and entertaining as it was when I first played it 3 years ago and the amount of content that has been released and is still being created is great.

I’m really enjoying my stay in Paragon City, I can’t wait to see what content lies ahead on the Rogue Isles.

Paragon City needs YOU!

Fixed the times for the event and included UK times…

I first played City of Heroes just over 3 years ago when it was just starting out and recently I’d been thinking about reactivating my account, mostly because of all the new stuff that has been added, there have been nine free expansions since it started with a tenth on it’s way. On a similar note, last night Joanne was thinking about buying Lineage 2 so she could play on the official servers, rather than the privately ran ones that we’d played on before (with varying degrees of happiness).

We decided that we’d purchase Lineage 2 and City of Villains using the official PlayNC online store. We’d both used the store before, myself when ordering City of Heroes originally in 2004 and Joanne purchased all three Guild Wars titles earlier in the year, so we weren’t expecting to have any issues. But, as you’ve probably guessed, we did have some.

For some reason when we tried to order on Joanne’s PlayNC account using either of our cards it would just flag up an error message saying there were too many online codes bought on this account and that we couldn’t have anymore, suggesting that we purchase it from another online supplier, or a retail store. The weird thing being that only Guild Wars was on that account, and even including the expansions that only makes three codes.

So it seems NCSoft only allow you THREE Online Code purchases from their store before flagging your account. That to me just seems crazy.

So, disappointed that we couldn’t get a Lineage 2 code online we decided we’d nip into Lincoln this morning to grab it, Joanne made a post about that here.

I purchased City of Villains with no such drama and linked it with my existing City of Heroes account. Above you can see my current characters, Captain Puce and Pucechan were still there from 2004 and Daemonstorm is my new Hero.

I’ll post more thoughts on City of Heroes (and City of Villains) as I get further in, but so far the improvements made to the game in the 3 years since I last played are dramatic and include improved graphics (now using bump-mapping, shaders and BLOOM ), Auction Houses, Crafting, PvP and much more.

This weekend (June 15th 8:59am PST – 17th 8:59pm PST) is a Double XP event and I have 3 10–day trial codes to give out, so if you’ve ever wanted to be a superhero, now is as good a time as any. Leave a comment if you’d like to give it a try.

For anyone in the UK that makes the event times 15th June 14:59pm – 18th June 02:59am

Monkey Island 5… more than a rumour?

The point-and-click adventure may be a fading memory, kept alive by ScummVM and the occasional niche release but it seems that LucasArts are definitely planning a fifth adventure for everyones favourite pirate wannabe.

World of Monkey Island has received some concept art from a certain Steve Purcell (He of Sam and Max fame, with numerous LucasArts credits) that are “in no way connected to any existing or canceled piratey project..”. That piratey chap certainly looks familiar!

I personally LOVE the Monkey Island series, even if it has ventured away from it’s traditional point-and-click roots. A new game in the series would be great, fingers crossed the project gets the green light! (if it hasn’t already)

Real-Life Tetris?

Just when you thought Japanese game shows just couldn’t get any weirder!

The many faces of Pucechan (or what the heck do I talk about…)

The last few days I’ve been thinking a lot about my blog, in particular what exactly I should talk about. I love the concept of blogging and feel I have interesting and thoughtful opinions that are worth sharing (even if that hasn’t been shown in posts so far) but the problem I have is that I am interested in so many facets of computing that I don’t really know what, if anything, I should focus on.

Should I focus on gaming, Linux, technology, programming or more personal stuff?

My writing tends to have a more serious tone which doesn’t exactly match my personality. I have a slightly quirky sense of humour (I.E. Family Guy, Bill Bailey, Peter Kay = funny, Lenny Henry, Paul Merton = not funny) and I really don’t take myself seriously. I don’t feel I’ve managed to convey “myself” very well so far.

Rather than a focused stream of say technology-oriented posts can I mix and match all these things into this blog and actually convince people to come back regularly (or subscribe to my feed) when only 1 in 8 blog posts is interesting to them?

Writing a post can take a long time, when you consider the research you put in and the thought involved in the actual writing process. I find it hard to choose a subject a lot of the time simply because I have so many things fighting for my attention. Sometimes I’ll see something, say the iPhone and want to comment but there is also Forza 2, a new Roguelike and a couple of new pieces of Interactive Fiction I want to mention. Because of all the “cool” stuff I want to talk about I end up not writing anything because I can’t decide.

This is something I’m trying to come up with a solution to, I’m not sure what that could be at the moment.

Along with this comes the design and branding, as cool as the themes I keep changing to are, they aren’t mine and they don’t really say much about me or the site.

I’ve had quite a few aborted attempts at creating a new design, often aborted because I end up not liking the design as much as I did when I started. Another reason is that the content of the site has to match the design and branding, which is why the previous issues are so important to me.

As far as branding is concerned, I’ve come up with a logo design, I just need a site design and content to match it!

RSS Feeds, Ubuntu and Google Reader

I’ve spent a few hours tonight setting up Google Reader with feeds for all the sites I visit on a regular basis.

A large bulk of my time during the day is visiting a whole bunch of sites and scouring them for stuff that interests me, I used to have a few site’s feeds as Firefox Live Bookmarks but I outgrew the toolbar space available which made using them a bit of a chore.

I finally decided to take a look at using a dedicated feed reader to try to speed up my “geeky news assimilation time” (or GNAT ).

As I use Ubuntu exclusively now I started looking at feed readers in the Ubuntu repositories. I’d heard of Liferea and as it’s a GTK+ application it fits into the Gnome desktop nicely. I also tried Straw (which is also a Gnome application) and Akregator which is a KDE application.

All three of these were good although both Akregator and Liferea easily beat out Straw for features. If all you want is a simple feed reader though Straw is the way to go.

To try these on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) do the following:

sudo apt-get install straw liferea akregator

To remove them use:

sudo apt-get remove straw liferea akregator

Obviously omit ones you want to keep! To remove dependencies that removing packages might leave behind simply do:

sudo apt-get autoremove

None of these really satisfied me though, so I took a look at Google Reader. I’d already looked at it briefly when it originally appeared but at that point I was still coping with Live Bookmarks. The main reason I decided to look again was after seeing this video where Robert Scoble talks about how he uses Google Reader to browse 622 feeds!!!

I didn’t realise that Google Reader has keyboard shortcuts, they make skim-reading feeds so much quicker than any of the desktop feed readers I tried. Google Reader is also MUCH quicker for me than any of the desktop feed readers which is also a huge bonus.

I only have 50 feeds that I browse (which compared to 622 is miniscule) but so far Google Reader is definitely helping to speed up my GNAT which leaves more time for me to procrastinate over my procrastination of projects I kind of semi-start.

So if you visit a lot of sites and have never thought about using a feed reader, give Google Reader a try, it’s really simple to use and fast.