Kythin rants about all kinds of things, but mainly website development

Since I quit WoW again a few months ago, I’ve been spending a lot of that now-spare time buying way too many games on Steam and playing them start to finish. At the moment I’m deep into Mass Effect 2 and loving it, but it’s making me feel nostalgic for some of my other all-time favourite and best built games. It’s too early to call ME2 a favourite, but I’m definately enjoying it and despite not having a ‘jump’ function, it’s got a really good control style both in and out of the ship.

One of the games I’m nostalgic about is an old one from 2001 called Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos. It’ll always stand out as the best space-piracy game I think I’ll ever play, with very easy and intuitive controls and a nice semi-sandbox feel to is that you really need in any open space game. You really had to size up the convoy of ships before you attacked and took their cargo pods, and with the space-police and other mercinary escorts around you had to be smart and quick with the controls. I forget most of the story now, but I remember it being pretty great.

Not many people have played it, or even heard of it, so it’s also one of those little gaming gems that never makes it onto any lists or into many reviews. I just wish I could buy it on Steam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_War_2:_Edge_of_Chaos

And now, an update! *gasp*

I just finished putting the final little touches on an idea I’ve been kicking around for years. It’s just a little ap to visually build lists (or teams, etc). It’s got no database, no login/username requirements, and a very simple way to save the state of your workspace to come back to later.

The basic idea is that you can add things to the ‘table’ and then move them around as if they were scraps of paper. So if you’re in a WoW guild with 30+ active raiders and need a way to build 10man Ulduar teams, this is here to help you out.

Check it out, I’m pretty happy with it: Kythin’s WoW Teambuilder and Generic List Builder

And ofcourse if you like it enough to want to support my random programming project habbit, you can always buy me a beer!

I recently finished the Chronicals of Riddik, Escape from Butcher Bay. I picked it up cheap at a Blockbuster near my house after hearing Penny go on about it being the best movie-game crossover she’d played. I do agree it’s good in terms of movie-game crossovers, but it doesn’t do what it sets out to do very well.

It strives to be a cross between a generic first person shooter and a stealth game like Assassins Creed or probably more accurately, Tom Clancey’s Splinter Cell. The shooting and melee battles you can get into are fun, even if they arent that challenging, but the stealth (which is how I wanted to play the game) was just plain annoying.

The idea is that you have to creep around while guards backs are turned and if you’re in a dark spot they wont see you. Most of the time though, the guards have flashlights on their guns which makes the dark spots useless so you just crounch there like an idiot and wait for certain doom in the form of an alarm going off and guards shooting you and not letting you get near enough to knife them.

The stealth does get a little better when you gain the eye-shine power, which lets you see in the dark. However, when it’s turned on it’s hard to see the dark spots in the area so you have to constantly flick between on and off. Also, by the time you get eye-shine you already have the skills to kill anything but the armoured guards in close combat or you have sufficient firepower to not need to be sneaky anyway.

The game does have a good storyline, I guess. It’s a little too quest based and there were a few times I thought I was stuck on a quest only to find that I’d already picked up the quest item and didn’t even realise it, or randomly talking to people and having them say “good job, here’s your reward”. The underlying narative isn’t bad though and I can see how it ties in with the movies, and I watched the second movie soon after finishing the game and got a tiny bit more of the references Riddik uses sometimes.

All in all it was enjoyable enough for me to want to play to the end, which is not an easy feat for most games these days with my work schedule and the speed new games come out, but it did have its flaws. I wouldn’t call it groundbreaking, and the stealth needs a lot of work to be fun, but it was a good game-from-movie adaptation. It beats all of the matrix games anyway.

I’d give it a 6/10 – Worth playing if you can get it for $10 like I did.