Day Z Diary Day 1

Day Z Diary

A group of my friends have started playing the Arma II mod, Day Z, a Zombie survival mod which is as brutal as it is buggy. Yet these bugs mean nothing once you're playing the game as you're either a) running for your life, or b) having a ridiculously fun time and these two options usually coincide.

I've decided to put together a little diary of our adventures in the barren wasteland of Chernarus as we fight to survive against starvation, zombies and dehydration. But mainly against bandits.

A little background information about our group may be necessary, so here is a list of the heroes of the story.

Badger: The protagonist and narrator of this story, aka yours truly.

Tony: My main companion in the various adventures across Chernarus. Tony and I have been playing the most and for the longest. We have taken it upon ourselves to be the unwilling leaders of the group, mainly because we're the only ones with a sense of direction.

Panda: The coward of the group, always complains that we're going to die, never wants to go to the dangerous places, likes to fill his bag with all the “phat lewtz” he wants.

Squiz aka: “Captain Geography”: Newest member to the game, has 0 sense of direction. Once tried to head east to meet up with us, ended up on the western border of the ENTIRE map, three times.

Qworn: We don't see much of Qworn, he likes to run lone wolf. Often in airfields getting shot at or at the other end of the map. Fires upon anyone he sees. Will play the music of Brokeback mountain if anyone is near a tent.

Day 1

Considering our group was recently annihilated by bandits in a field we've had to start again.

Starting locations:

Badger: Centre of Elektrozavodsk

Tony: Otmel Island

Panda: Cap Golova

Squiz: Kamenka

Right, so I'm in the middle of the most populated and dangerous city in the game. Brilliant. Oh well, best to hit the ground running. I spawn on the beach, which is the usual location for spawning and decide to head directly into town as I can't see many zombies around me and I can pick up some supplies for the group. I head past the hospital, leering in to the sweet, sweet medical supplies inside. But no, not yet, I can't risk attracting all the zombies around me, lest the bandits that are undoubtedly lurking around me. So I decide to head to the church.

Oh... it appears I've attracted a zombie.

Wait...

Oh christ...

Around 40 zombies have spawned on top of me... Brilliant. I try to run into the church to find.

Another 40 zombies.

This is a good start.

I run away from the massive horde of zombies baying for my flesh and head towards the school, it's got three floors, I can funnel them and kill them all. I have 6 clips of 7 bullets. 42 bullets... Great.

Once I'm in the school my character starts hyperventilating. Quite fitting considering I'm crying in real life. I manage to take out 8 zombies with 8 head shots. At least I'm being efficient.

Over the top of the zombies moans and the gun shots. I hear Tony complaining that he can't decide whether to choose his AK or a lovely crossbow... Wanker.

I notice the noise has died down, I should be screaming and firing round after round at the horde of zombies that was chasing me, but it appears they've all disappeared. At last. Some luck. I decide to head back to the church. What's the worst that can happen?

In the church I find a crossbow and a new larger bag! Success! This luck is continuing. I sneak out of the church and decide to try out my new silent weapon.

I line up a hopper in my sights.

I carefully aim.

I fire.

I miss.

The hopper continues as if nothing happens.

I'll just pretend that didn't happen. I go to collect my bolt which is now embedded firmly in a wall and head back to the school. A revolver and a map. Things are again looking up, who cares if I can't aim if I keep finding things!

Tony, after much deliberation decides to take both of the weapons he was painfully deciding over... Wanker.

Argh! I've aggroed another zombie! Time for this crossbow to do it's job.

I hit the cunt! I also get the bolt back from his eye ball. My first silent kill, and no one was around to hear it... Wait... Never mind.

Onwards to the nearby supermarket. Pick up some bits. I hear an update over vent about Squiz, he's managed to get lost heading East. He's also managed to lose the sea. This happens a lot. Tony is at Rog Castle, to the North-East of me. Close enough that he starts heading west so I can meet up with him.

I find an m1911, another pistol, I'm throwing away pistols to pick up pistols, the world is my... pistol store. Squiz screams as he's been shot and killed by a bandit. I would be sad, distraught even, if this wasn't a common occurrence. He exclaims “Lucky bastard, he just got himself two maps” I laugh a lot, and envision map man taking over the world.

I decide to crawl to the hospital so I can pick up some supplies before leaving the city. My cowardice is too high and I can't stay in the city much longer. I make it round the back of the hospital and 'liberate' some blood bags, morphine, painkillers and epi-pens. It's not looting in the apocalypse. Whilst I'm sifting around the debris like a junky I hear gunshots and enter panic mode. I run out of the city as fast as I can. I catch the attention of three hoppers as I run out, luckily they're pretty slow and just trundle behind me as I flee.

As I reach the border of the city I notice something moving differently out of the corner of my eye. I look back to see the zombies miles behind me so take out my binoculars. In a field about a kilometre away I see him... A bandit. What's worse, he sees me. I drop my binoculars and run, at a full sprint this time, into the under brush. Squiz yells at me to kill him. Tony shouts over ventrillo “If your heart is pure, the arrow will fly true.” He's a 1000 metres away, and all I have is a crossbow, with an effective range of 40 metres. Fuck that. I keep running. I turn around after about 5 minutes of running to find two zombies (who I named Wingus and Dingus) still chasing after my sweet, sweet flesh. I shoot them both in the face and hide in a bush, calming my shot nerves.

I hear my companions updating me on their current location. Tony, who was heading north, aka away from the sea has ended back at the sea, just east of Elektro. Squiz has arrived at the west of Elektro.

I sigh and turn around.

I decide the best thing to do is to wait at a little pond just north of the city. It's away from the zombies and I'm hidden from the bandits amongst the frond. The others shouldn't be long.

They both are approaching a fire station which could mean they're approaching the same one, unfortunately there are two fire stations in Elektro and seeing as bandits are around neither of them want to make too much noise. Well I say neither of them. I mean Tony. Squiz is sprinting upright (a big no no in this game) and has a horde of zombies behind him. Tony doesn't head towards him just in case the bandits are watching Squiz in the same way that Emperors watch slaves fight lions and hides in the fire station.

Unfortunately there's a fresh corpse in here. An unlooted fresh corpse. Which still has it's items. Which could mean that his killer is very close by. Fortunately for Tony, Squiz has arrived at a different fire station. You can hear the relief in his voice as I chuckle to myself. Squiz climbs above the fire station, but the sound of smug satisfaction in his voice is short lived when we rectify his ignorance about zombie's ability to climb ladders. He's now stuck on the roof of a fire station with angry zombies climbing up a ladder towards him.

I lie by the pond peacefully.

Tony hears shots and decides Squiz isn't worth it and runs towards the pond.

Squiz is no longer scared of the zombies bearing down on him.

Mainly because he's been shot.

Again.

Squiz blames this death on Tony, he should have helped him. Tony blames the death on Squiz. He was on a big red building surrounded by zombies in the middle of a field. I feel I side with Tony on this one. Squiz has a new theory that the bandit was just trying to help him, and he accidentally ran in front of the bullets. Poor, naïve Squiz.

Tony is soiling himself whilst hidden in a bush and decides that although Squiz Mk. 3 has resurrected in Otmel, he's a lost cause and confers with me privately that we should head north together. He can always catch up. We decide to head north to a nearby dam. There's bound to be something there! Otters maybe?

I'm still hiding in the pond waiting for Tony when I hear the distant shot of a sniper rifle or an Enfield. Basically a weapon that could kill me quite easily from very far away, and decide, as Tony can hear it too. I'd best head off north on my own. Tony can catch up!  

Space Marine Review

I'm am entirely sick of games petering out. Why oh why, in this modern age of gaming do developers concentrate on the first half of a game then give up for the end.

This time I'm talking about Space Marine, the new hack-n-slashing-shooting-squishing game from THQ. As I have stated before, I am a massive Warhammer 40k fanboy. So I was more than excited when I heard that they were going to be making a game letting me be a proper Space Marine in all it's stompy glory. Especially so because it was THQ who was making it (let's forget about Dawn of War 2). I pre-ordered the collector's edition, I don't care if it was overpriced, I now have a pure fridge, with it's very own purity seal.

I played the Space Marine demo when it was released about a week and a half prior to this review. I absolutely loved it. It captured every boyhood fantasy I had about being a Space Marine. It was delightfully visceral. The Space Marines moved as if they were in several hundred kilos worth of armour. The close combat weapons were nice and meat inducing, and it was the first game I've encountered that properly represented what a bolter should shoot like. The demo was great.

Cue this morning (yes I know I got the game and completed it in a day, I'm a sad individual, I went to the pub before I completed it so at least that kind of evens it out right... please?) I was awoken by the sounds of my house mate doing his morning ritual of brushing his tongue and making noises like a fish trying to swallow a brillo pad... I wish I was joking. I opened my door to see a nice big parcel for me on the window sill. I chucked it in my computer and after a long install time (2 disks! In this day and age) I was in the game, all giddy eyed and happy mouthed (I'm not very good at metaphor).

The first few hours, amazing. Exact experience as I had in the demo. I was cutting up Orks left, right and centre. It felt good, it was fun. I was playing the game on hard and it was the perfect difficulty, I died a few times but it felt challenging yet enjoyable. That all changed when the Chaos Space Marines were introduced. The entire pace of the game changed. This was mainly due to the fact that meleé was made almost entirely redundant by them. Their aim, along with the cultists, which I'll get to in a moment, those bastards, was so perfect, and the range of their weapons was so huge that if you tried to charge in and kill them, you died almost instantaneously. The majority of levels from the point that the Chaos Marines joined in were designed in a way that either put you at the end of a very long corridor, or in the middle of some low ground in which your enemies encircle you entirely. Now, Space Marines are known for their tactical prowess, but I'm starting to doubt it, the amount of times I was forced to walk directly into what was clearly an ambush astonished me.

I was forced to stand as far away from my enemies and pump rounds and rounds of bullets into my enemies in order to thin their ranks. The game went from a beautifully fast and exciting combat game into essentially a point and click adventure. “But Badger”, perhaps you're saying, unlikely unless you're prone to talking at your internet browser, “maybe your aim was just poor?” Well fuck you random reader! My aim was fine, depressingly so, seeing as I got the 250 headshot achievement about an hour into the game. The Chaos space marines merely take around 2 clips from your go-to bolter to go down, I spent the majority of the second half of the game with my hand off the keyboard, just holding down the shoot button and thinking about something else.

Maybe I am slightly to blame, I do have a confession. There is a section in the game where you get a Thunder Hammer for the first time, for those of you who don't know, a Thunder Hammer is a massive two handed mace, that looks like a block of metal on the end of a lamp-post that some GENIUS decided to pump electricity through. I have to say, this point of the game was possibly the most fun I've ever had. My house mates could hear me cackling throughout the house, to the point where one of them decided to come sit on my bed and watch me whilst playing Pokémon (one at a time ladies this is the Casanova house I know). It was due to this extreme amount of enjoyment that I developed a kind of neuroses, a separation anxiety disorder with my hammer if you will. Nothing could make me put the thing down. Even when the Chaos Marines showed up and I couldn't even get close to them I still held it aloft in my hands and persevered through, but why should I be forced to, why is it that the second half of the game has been decided as being ranged only? There were also sections of the game where I couldn't get rid of the bastard thing when I'd actually had enough. Seeing as you need to replace the hammer with either an axe or a chainsword, you can't just drop the fucker, apparently Captain Titus has separation anxiety too.

There are other things that these Chaos Marines ruined as well. Whilst fighting the Orks I was entirely engaged. The combat was so intense and as realistic as I presume it could be without genetically engineering some humans, putting them in concrete/steel armour and finding some Orks. When the Chaos Marines appear this feeling was completely removed. I know they're supposed to be tough gits, and plated in some futuristic armour, but if you get shot in the face, you're bound to react slightly, I know my character did whenever it happened. They just stood there, firing at you as if nothing was happening. Even when they got dazed and you kept firing at them, they just looked down, then as they died, stood up, then disappear into the warp. (Which by the way, they shouldn't fucking do, I know this is nit-picking but Chaos Space Marines are not demons, when they're killed they don't get banished to the warp, they die, they're flesh and bone.) The entire process of fighting with them feels so disjointed that I just didn't care about the game at all. Usually when I get sucked into the game I can't tear myself away from it, but with Space Marine, on the last level I went downstairs and decided to go the pub instead.

Enough about the Chaos Marines for now, let's talk about the worst enemy I've ever faced in recent times, the Cultist. In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, cultists are the bitches of the Chaos massive. They do all the bitch work. They make things, they get used as sacrifices, it seems in this game however, they are the hardest things in the universe. They would randomly teleport in and instantly I would groan and hide behind something. Cultists, float in the air, they have a seemingly massive amount of health. They also have what appears to be an infinite range attack, that is completely accurate and does the most damage of anything else in the game. If one appears and you're out in the open, have fun looking at the loading screen, because there is no way to defend against it. The amount of times, where I would die after a large fight just because a cultist destined for the next area would appear and shoot me through some railings was infuriating.

Now, I appreciate I've been ranting quite excessively in this one, but bear with me, I'm nearly done, just one last angry outburst. Oh and a mild warning for anyone who is planning to play the game, there will be spoilers in this upcoming section. Why, oh why, do developers seemingly have this train of thought:
“Getting a bit bored of this game now, nearly finished, started well... dum de dum, how should I end it? Epic boss fight? Massive encounter with the villain you've been chasing since the... 'twist' (OOC: And if you play this game and don't work out the twist you're a moron). Seems like a lot of work... Quick Time Event? Yeah Quick Time Event will do.”

ANOTHER game that ends with a mediocre QTE. After your enemy becomes amazingly powerful, after spending the game literally disabling you using just his mind, you... push him off the cliff and have an aerial fight with him like Gandalf and the Balrog. It's not even a particularly epic one, it's about three animations looped over and over again, until you eventually crush his head. It looked amazing, I'll give it that, and I know I haven't talked much about how the game looks thus far, but it does look fantastic, the graphics are phenomenal, the animations brilliant, but that wasn't enough, it was a glorified cut scene of a final boss and was the shit covered cherry on top of the mediocre icing on top of an amazingly promising cake.

Hiatus!

Hey all!

Sorry about the extreme lack of posts in the past month or so, I'm going through a period of development. I'm having a new site being built and I'm writing a few articles/blogs that should make visiting here (or the new site should I say) far more interesting! Watch this space in the next month or so, I promise there will be a tonne of reviews/articles/other bits of joy being uploaded in the not too distant future.

Badger

Review: Terraria

Terraria, a Minecraft-a-like that's not much like Minecraft. Confused? Because I am.

Terraria is a strange phenomenon to me. No matter how much I tell myself I dislike it, I keep playing it. Terraria is a game in which you have a small pixellated character who starts of simply with a pick axe and an axe. You start mining, you start cutting down trees, you make yourself a house, NPCs start moving in, you go exploring.

That's the gist of the entire game, wondering about mining, finding things, building houses and killing things that give you stuff. It's so simple it just works. The game doesn't have an ending, it has very little point. It's slightly more engaging than Minecraft but doesn't have the same epic feeling of architecture that the 3D brings.

I call it a Minecraft-a-like because you mine and it's an open world, it's also got a crafting system, but that's actually better than Minecraft's. The entire play style is very different. It's a 2D side-scrolling game, which is an interesting new way of playing a RPG/Exploring game, something that hasn't been done in my memory at least. This is a pretty good idea to some degree as it's very difficult to get lost, there's nothing more depressing in Minecraft than making yourself an epic settlement/bastion/citadel/farm then going off for a while and getting lost and losing your home forever (or at least until you stumble upon it again in a Planet of the Apes style). In Terraria you can go left, and you can go right, it's hard not to find your way home unless you occasionally turn your monitor upside down and are easily confused. It also makes it harder for enemies to sneak up on you.

The first night I played it after I quit I thought "Well it's all right I guess, I've not really been sucked in", it was at this point I realised that I had been playing for 8 hours straight. The next day I promised myself I wouldn't play it any more, then a friend of mine started playing and we played together, adding a whole new layer of fun. I've recently started playing with another friend who is... let's say chaotic, which has added even more fun, as I feel I have to goad around this wound of ball of crazy and try and prevent him from dying. (More on that later!). I keep thinking I'm going to get bored of the game but for some reason I don't. I don't feel elated whilst playing it, but it passes the time and if you've got some mates to play with it can be huge amounts of fun.

I realise this has been something of a short review, but it's a short game (in a pathetically crude metaphor kind-of-way!), there's stuff to do, but not much depth, it's fun, but not hugely. This also means I can talk about some other news!

I know a few days ago I posted that a friend of mine and I would be putting together a little video play through of Final Fantasy 14, with various HILARIOUS (debatable) banter. Well that's still going to happen, it's just my friend is in the West Country and their internet is atrocious so it's taken him 2 days of downloading just to patch the thing, so that's in the works. In the mean time we've been playing Terraria and had a little recording session of us just mucking about. I've got about an hours worth of recorded material that needs to be edited down to about 15 minutes of anything usable, so that's happening as we speak. I thought that I would put up a little teaser so you can see what we're like.

For those of you who have never met me, quiet shout out to my 5 American fans (five!), I'm the one with the excellent enunciation and Oxford accent, he's (Colrum/Joe) the one who sounds like a farmer.

Fucking cat...

I've been plagued by a cat recently, it comes into our house and just sleeps everywhere, we can't get rid of it, it doesn't want food (apart from our cream) and is generally just pretty neutral... But it's getting irritating. This thing is like a ninja, doesn't matter if we weld the windows close, this fucker will get in.

This inspired me to adapt a song for it (with help from Merlin)


Here's the lyrics:

Well here we are again
You keep on invading our home
Remember when you tried to eat our cream?
Oh how we laughed and laughed
Except I wasn't laughing
Under the circumstances
I've been calm as a stream

You want your freedom? Take it
That's what I'm counting on
I used to want you dead
But now I only want you gone

He was a lot like you
Maybe not quite as Purry
Now little Chairman Meow is gone as well
One day you woke me up
And ruined all my bedding
It's such a shame the same
Will never happen to you

You've got your short sad life left
That's what I'm counting on
I'll let you get right to it
Now I only want you gone

Goodbye my furry friend
Oh, did you think I meant you?
That would be funny
if it weren't so sad
Well you've not been replaced
A cat is not required
When I eat the cream maybe
I'll stop feeling so bad

Go make some new family
That's what I'm counting on
You're someone else's problem
Now I only want you gone
Now I only want you gone
Now I only want you gone

Tune: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVVZaZ8yO6o

(written by Badger and Merlin)

Coming soon: Badger is dragging himself into the 21st century!

A friend and I have been, in past months, trying to find a way to break ourselves into the youtube market of jovial/satirical game reviewing. We were going to do a weekly Rift sort of podcast/videocast but we got bored of that.

So we came up with an idea. I found Final Fantasy 14, the latest MMO from Square-enix and noted god awful game, for £5 on Amazon, I bought a copy, as did my friend Colrum. We're going to try and play a week of it, without killing ourselves, and record our progress, hopefully engaging  in various chuckle-worthy antics and banter. It's also vaguely free as well! As Square enix can't bring themselves to actually charge for it yet, joy!

Colrum is patching at the moment but I imagine we're going to begin recording today, add in some time for editing and our first episode should be out within the next few days to a week, watch this space!

Working title: Badger and Colrum Play the Worst Game Ever.

Final Fantasy 14 BONUS REVIEW!

Don't get it.