Rant No. 11 RPG Text Choices Not Actually Saying The Choice

I'm playing The Witcher 2 at the moment. It's a great game, with superior visuals and combat to The Witcher 1 along with a great story and lore. Like the first game, it also has plenty of choices you can make, both in terms of who you side with and how you talk to people. The problem is, however, unlike The Witcher 1 where you see the entire text response you will give before making the decision on how best to sarcastically berate those lesser than you, The Witcher 2 only gives you approximations on the responses Geralt will pick. While the developer is usually pretty good at guessing your most likely responses and making text choices to do with them, sometimes they can think that a different emotion is being used when responding with this answer - honesty instead of keeping your options open, begging instead of sarcasm or accusation instead of questioning. It's this last one which prompted me to write this rant, and if you don't want any spoilers for The Witcher 2 then I give you three options: 'Remark: How Dare You Write Spoilers!', 'Remark: OK, if you say so', 'Remark: OK (actually meaning you're going to anyway).

Rant No. 10 Oscar Nominations

Ah, the Oscars. The pinnacle of the film awards season, and the ceremony which makes the public ask ‘what are these films?’. Your favourite superhero and action films, while good in their own right, are banished to the technical categories unless particularly groundbreaking (The Lord of the Rings is a prime example), destined to be big audience pleasers, but not take home the gold at the end of the day.

Rant No. 9 Certain Popular Indie Games

Today, Steam brought me to the attention that Robocraft had had a fairly large update, and having not played the game in about half a year, I decided to load it up, just to see what had changed since what I remembered the game being like, and to see what new (and hopefully exciting) features had been added. What I found was not what I wanted, but, I suppose, I should have seen it coming.

Rant No. 8 PS+/Xbox Live Gold and Autosave

Now, I was going to do this a while ago when I realised how limited some games became *cough Star Wars Battlefront cough* when you didn't have PS+ or how unplayable some other games such as Titanfall became when you didn't have Xbox Live Gold. I believe that for the prices of games nowadays and their DLC, you shouldn't have to pay another subscription just for online, especially if the game is online only. Now, I was okay to let this slide as I personally play more single player than multiplayer games. However, things were about to go from bad to worse.

Rant No. 7: ESL's Hosting - a Big CS:NO!

So CS:GO eSports are now becoming very big things. Tournaments are getting funded by Valve. Millions of views watch on Twitch and in game. But what is actually set by Valve? And what is set by other companies such as ESL, MLG, Cevo, Faceit and Dreamhack to name a few?

Rant No. 6 amiibo Shortages

Right then, I think it's my turn to rant, don't you? And I think I'll start it with something that's rather close to my heart... and my wallet. As many of you are probably aware, Nintendo's new IP, Splatoon, came out on Friday. I, like many others in the UK (and around the world), preordered the game in order to get the limited edition Squid Inkling amiibo (and the Boy and Girl Inkling amiibo, thanks to GAME's bundle). I was then rather disheartened to find that my Squid Inkling amiibo had been... misplaced... along with the lorry that was carrying it.

Rant No. 5 PC 'Master Race'

With the recent release of GTA V for PC, the internet has exploded once again, with cries of gamers shouting one term. 'PC MASTER RACE!!!!'. I've personally never understood the term and being a gamer who can enjoy games on a computer AND a console, never really appreciated it. For anyone who doesn't know, the term and the phrases associated with it (dirty console peasants etc.) are meant to tell people that PC, as a gaming platform, is better than consoles. But rather than debating it civilly using actual facts, some people on the internet think that just screaming that they are right means that they actually are. Disclaimer: I'm not here to say that consoles are better than PC or vice versa. The idea of this post is to highlight the stupidity of the phrase PC Master Race. Now let's actually look at some facts:

Rant No. 4 Fraps Error Messages (or lack thereof)

Fraps is a good recording software, and the one that I use for making my videos. Some of you may notice that there will be a gap in the recordings of the Prison Architect videos going out on the YouTube channel. This is due to Fraps.

Rant No. 3 Steam Gems

Hello Banters and Bantresses,

I'll start with a question that I often ask myself - Valve: why?


I have 100 gems, okay? I thought that, hey, I might get a game. But no, I just got slapped in the face. I am not a casual gamer but I don't spend all my time on the computer. It seems that gems are worthless, over a thousand are needed to get the worst games put up for auction - tens of thousands for good ones.

Are you trying to make a uniform Steam currency? If you did, you failed because you need at least two years of owning Steam to come close to getting a game. This DOES NOT make new players welcome. I could have got about 15p for the cards a swapped for gems. They are a null concept and pointless. I want that 15p in my Steam wallet! I was completely f****** off when I realised how poor a decision converting to gems is. What were you thinking?!?!?
There is, of course, the argument that you can convert items rather than trading cards which, in actuality, can be quite an easy way to get gems. In addition you can get a cheap badge (convert one item to gems) which was a nice incentive (but could have been developed by making it harder to achieve/being able to level it up - get 250 gems for example).

Overall, the main problems are the conversion rate between gems and money and cards/items and gems as well as the, already present, problem of actually getting these items and cards without spending money (which would be more than the gem price due to the low conversion rate). If these problems were addressed, and the required security was added, then Steam Gems could become a proper currency with a thriving marketplace (if the Steam Marketplace wasn't already broken, that is - but that's another rant for another day).

You've been reading an Olimg rant (with some help from Harry). Thanks and come again! (If something else annoys me enough).

Rant No. 2 Team Fortress 2 Weapons

So the recent update for Team Fortress 2 came out and was one of the most anticipated updates: End of the Line. This was a community update that Valve agreed to back and introduce actual items and maps into the game. While I don't want to bring hate on the devs of End of the Line but it is a mix of Valve and them that managed to ruin the update.

The update was meant to add a new map cp_snowplow and some new weapons as well as cosmetics. The only problem was the fact that Valve took one look at cp_snowplow and stated that it was "too complex for new players"! That is too complex?! What on Earth about cp_steel, that is complex to players who are used to Team Fortresses map style. Also when it came to the items, one was added in the Love and War update and the others "were not to a high enough standard". This means that in the entire year we have only received 8 weapons. 8! That is utter rubbish. The leaked Spy vs Engineer update may be the only weapons we get the whole of next year. Oh and speaking about that update, after what we saw with EoL the new weapons could be a new pistol that is shared between them as well as a reskin of the wrench. Also, do Valve love demoman or just hate the other classes? 4 new weapons, for the demoman, in a year while only 8 weapons were added to TF2 this year. That is half of all the weapons made! Spy and Medic haven't received a weapon and Pyro, Engineer and Heavy have only received a single weapon that is shared between them. Why? Why not include the other weapons made specifically for this update? It would have worked and all this "were not to a high enough standard" s***. (Rage Mode activate) HAVE YOU F***ING SEEN THE CLASSIC OR EVEN THE DIRECT HIT THAT HAS A SCOPE ON IT THAT ISN'T EVEN USED. WHAT ABOUT THE EUREKA EFFECT THAT HAS THE TEXTURE OF A SKINNED WHALE WITH ADDED RED RINGS OF B*******?

I do see that Valve had some reasons to not release the maps and weapons, and at least we received some other new weapons for Christmas, but the most of the reasons were c***.

See Ya,

Martin

Rant No. 1 - 'Elder Scrolls' 'Online'

On paper, the Elder Scrolls Online was an amazing concept. Skyrim with friends. What more could you want? Well, how about an actual Elder Scrolls game, like we were promised?