Carmageddon Release Day

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Carmageddon

I notice that Carmageddon : Reincarnation is released today yesterday officially.    As a Kickstarter backer I’ve been playing various alphas and betas for months now, but here’s finally the point where the rest of yall can play the game.

It’s totally worth it.    Did you ever see the movie Death Race 2000 ?    Yeah, that’s what this is; the game producers aren’t allowed to say it.    Did you ever play the original Carmageddon, which had the world horrified with its violence ?     You should play this game.    (Today, I’m sure the game will provoke less than a yawn next to Grant Theft Auto).   Well this is a big graphical update with new game modes.

Here, I’ve selected the mode Death Race, which is simply a race. Except every opponent you wreck, you can steal their laps !

But it’s cracking good fun.    Your car will behave in a way that feels very correct on the physics side, even as all the unreality of gaming sets in.   Fall off a cliff and into the water ?   Recover for a few thousand credits.     Get your car mangled horribly so it doesn’t move ?   Hold down the repair button and it magically puts itself together.   And always, there are peds to kill.

The loading screens are full of the “Giggle – Blood and death and sex” kind of silliness.

The object of the game varies, but each race/game features tracks filled with people wandering to and fro, which you can take out and waste.   One game even asks you to take out every last one of the 600+ people on the race course – never managed to do that, myself.    Destroy your opponents cars, beat them in races, and stay as “The Fox” longer than anyone else and you’re winning the contests.

Falling off the top of a bridge. Rats !

I put up money to back this on May 30, 2012.     It was slated for a February 2013 release.   It finally got around to being finished on May 21, 2015.    The result is worth it, but certainly cooled any ardor I had towards Kickstarter as a funding method.

I win most of these, since I selected the easiest difficulty mode. Time to kick it up a notch.

For sale today at $30 this is pretty darn good value.

Dipping my toe in everything

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Banished, Carmageddon, Marvel Heroes

Over the past week it’s been all about Steam games, with some World of Tanks thrown in.    After installing about two dozen games I’ve managed to enter and play a few of them.

• Banished is an interesting game.   It’s very slow paced – you want to carefully balance town services, foresting, food production, and population growth.     So slow paced I’m not sure I want to wait that long to see if I succeed, which is unexpected since I’m a slow paced kind of guy.   I find myself still playing up Stebbingdon, but at 10x speed.   Currently sitting at 130 population with a stable base for additional population.
• Carmageddon has been updated with a career mode and engine optimization.   The game is a lot of fun to play at this point.
• Flatout 3 is the last of the excellent value Flatout games that I’ve yet to play very far through.   I might not play much though – the career mode seems lacking, and the Steam achievements don’t make up for it.
• Spore is getting playtime again, with my first world entering civilization stage.     However, my old login did not work and it’s apparently a known issue.    In Gamespeak, this means it’s a bug that’s never getting fixed.   So all the crazy creatures my kids created over the years are gone (well, sitting on the old PC in the other room) as I build up yet another login for the game.
• I went ahead and bought Xenonauts on a 50% off sale day.    After playing through one alien landing and ground action, I think it’s an awesome successor to X-Com.    I’ll have to keep going and see if that holds up.
• I am not impressed with Age of Wonders III, but neither have I really tried to play it.   I got in, and back out.

Now Marvel Heroes is an interesting MMO concept.     While I recall the odd post about it in the blogosphere (nothing specific), I come in knowing almost nothing about the game.

First point – it’s pretty free, it seems.    There is an in game currency (credits), an in-game premium currency (Forgot the name), and RMT currency (G, as in “Gees”).     You can play one of the starting heroes for free, but after one, it will cost you to unlock more heroes.   Then again, you can use the ??? to unlock heroes.

What I’m unsure of is if I need to both unlock heroes, and un-level-cap them.    If it costs $5 – $10 to add a hero to your account, I can see myself doing that – I want to play as the Hulk.   For the moment, I’ve decided to play Captain America through.

Your team window, and being inside of the Avenger’s Tower.

They have an interesting concept with the heroes though.   You can play a large selection of them up to level 10, and I’ve done just that.      Once they hit level 10, you can only keep one leveling up, so I’m told.

The fights are fun. Captain America is an ass-kicker.

 

Interrupting our regular deep introspection with a brief note about playing many games at once

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Carmageddon, Civ5, Fallen Earth, Mafia II, Steam, war-worlds

And for the past week I have spent my energy on many different games.      Many.    Different.   Games.

War Worlds expansion continues.    The north corner of my “square” is getting better defined, and as I continue to move it southwards I get closer to having a large area being worked north-to-south.     I still have my ships moving in that direction all along the loose line from Inkdium to what is left of Curufin, and have passed 6.5 million population.

Mafia II turns out to be quite a bit of fun.    The game is advertised as a shooter, which it is in a certain sense, but I have a much stronger feeling of being inside a Mafia movie instead.    Taking care of the family, and business, and crushing those you don’t know under your bootheel.    So far I’ve gone from rags to riches, to rags, twice.     I assume I’ll end up with riches again but it’s a scripted movie game so who knows for sure.

One thing driving me crazy about Steam is the screenshot method.    When I take a screenshot, it gets saved in some crazy numerically-named folder deep in the folder tree.   This has more or less sapped my desire to get screenshots during the games, which is silly, but I have to be honest with myself.   I want to find it two or three deep in a clearly marked folder, and anything else just doesn’t work for me.     Now, what it works well for is publishing screenshots on your Steam feed, but otherwise, meh.    This is why there’s no images in this post.

I now have the “Pre-Alpha” version of Carmageddon, which is a lot of fun in a limited sense.    I can take out pedestrians and race the other crazy personalilties, just like 20 years ago when the game first came out.    It needs work, no doubt, and I’m waiting for additional updates.    I was misinformed thinking that the game was finished and ready to play.     And so the excruciatingly long lead time for my initial Kickstarter investment continues to tick off.

I have reached Level 23 in Fallen Earth and moved on to S2 – The second map, where there be many factions and the large city of New Flagstaff.   I’ve done some adventuring, but I decided to catch up on my tradeskills.    I now have an ATV as well as my horse, and I’m currently working on making my last Ballistics book before I hit 90 skill, which is the next point at which I can unlock more recipes.    I’m running low on materials (finally) and at some point will need to go out and do some more harvesting.    With 7 red chips (7 million total, I believe) and nothing auction-wise to spend them on, I am buying plenty of Scrap Paper, Pens, Scrap Lead, and Weak Botanics to continue the tradeskilling spree.

I have only three tradeskill slots given that my premium has expired.    This is encouraging me to log in for a few minutes at a time, whenever I know I should be done making whatever was last in the batches.     Then I set up an additional 3 recipes and quit the game.     Play some more War Worlds, etc, then when the time is right head back into the game.  Planning to rinse and repeat until I’ve done everything I can with tradeskills.     So far, the only limiting factor is collecting salvaged wood – I know where to collect tons of the level 1 materials, but I need a bunch of salvaged wood as well.     I’m sure I’ll figure it out later.

Having bought the latest expansion whose name escapes me, I went ahead and fired up Civilization 5 again.     This time I am Ramkhameneanang or whatever the Siamese leaders name is, on Warlord level with Terra map and no goody huts.    I am doing OK and trying to get the hang of the new artistic winning method.    Without the goody huts the game is significantly harder, but more fun, and we’ll see where I end up when it’s all said and done.    A win will tick off another achievement, and Civ5 always has the advantage in that it’s easy to interrupt.   Now looking forward to Civilization : Beyond Earth.

I’ve pretty much finished the good parts of Flatout 2, and plan to start the next game in the series which is Ultimate Carnage.     Quick races when you can squeeze them in are pretty good, and easily shareable with kids.

What happens when you die IRL ?   Good question.    But I now have my failsafe plan in the event that I should pass away suddenly – IRL friends (2 of them) now have the keys to this blog and are supposed to post to it.    I think about Jeff Freeman every so often, and his amazingly fun blog which has disappeared after his passing.  I do want all my regular readers to know if I disappear suddenly, why.    Not that it’s expected, but you never know.

And with that, back to Real Life outside gaming.

Carmageddon launch date

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Carmageddon

The press release popped into my email this morning.  It’s been a long time coming, but apparently it’s here :

Carmageddon: Reincarnation to launch as an
Early Access release on Steam! Blood, Laughs,
Amazing Pile-ups and more Cows than ever!

Friday, 28th February 2014. Isle of Wight, UK. Stainless Games announces that on the 27th of March 2014, fans who have been waiting for what has seemed an eternity (but is actually a mere 17 years) will finally be able to play the sequel to the original “points for pedestrians” car smash carnage-fest Carmageddon, as the Early Access release of Carmageddon: Reincarnation launches on Steam.

 

I was wondering if I had wasted my Kickstarter money ($15), but seems I was wrong.    When I had pledged, back in May 2012, it was when I was still anti-Steam.   Seems I will also get a Steam version of the game.

Your Rewards Breakdown

Reward	Description
Credit on Carmageddon.com	Get your name on the credits for Carmageddon:Reincarnation on Carmageddon.com
Credit in-game	Get your name on the credits for Carmageddon:Reincarnation in the game
DRM-free Download	A DRM-free non-Steam version of the PC Game to download
1 x Digital Steam Download	1 x Digital download of the game via Steam
Exclusive Wallpaper	Exclusive Wallpaper

 

So just about two weeks to go and presumably I’ll have a new pedestrian-smashing game to show yall.

Carmageddon : 1st qtr 2014

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Carmageddon

At this point, I’m glad I participated in only a single Kickstarter campaign, which was the new version of Carmageddon for the PC.     They continue the public relations campaign however, with an AMA going on right now on Reddit.

Not only are they doing question and answer, but they’re also giving away the Carmageddon Max Pack through GOG.com, which presumably means the original games from the late ’90s.

A useful tidbit from the Q&A :    It should be Steam Early Access in first quarter of 2014.    Which would mean the release of the game slipped around 15 months from the promises/expectations/hopes expressed in the original Kickstarter campaign.     That’s not the worst slippage I’ve ever seen, so I’ll remain hopeful there’s a happy ending to this little story.

 

Of Tanks and Peds

Tags

Carmageddon, World of Tanks

Posting is light, because interesting milestones in World of Tanks are light.

Thanks to the 5X weekend I ultimately have unlocked a Tier 6 American TD.

Ready to buy the T25 AT

Which removes the Jackson from my primary list, hopefully making grinding a bit faster for the rest of the tanks.   Am I buying the TD ?   Heck no !

And the VK4502P grind from hell continues, but now with 3/4 of the way completed (150k of 196k).    The double weekend crew XP was certainly welcome, but not really noticed among the frantic rush to grab quintuples.    And the Stuart has 37k of the 56k needed to unlock the Chaffee.      The VK 30.02 now has 61k of the 81k it needs as well.    So there was progress made.

One thing I did also do over the weekend – was bolster my stable of premium, training tanks.

Now with four tanks for training an MS-1 crew

I bought my Valentine II which gives the immediate impression of “Haha !    You shall bounce every shot sent my way!”, and while I got a mere 3 matches in it, I think I like it.

The T-127 I was looking forward to.    It’s supposed to be the tank everything pings off of, but vulnerable to flanking.    And then, in my first battle, I find myself on the road in Prohorovka, driving north as a high tier tank.     And I get one shotted from the front.    First hit – no pings off the armor.   Ammo rack explosion.   Ugh.

The bad taste from that lingers, but thanks to the 50% off equipment special (again) I bought the wet ammo rack for it, hoping that is a good idea and not just the RNG being especially cruel to me.

My MS-1 crew moves up a bit and takes 57% on their third skill, which might get to 100% someday if I stop playing anything other than Russian lights.   Well, one can hope.    What I notice most about grinding those two guys, is watching their compatriots needed to fill out the crew on other tanks – still trying to get all of their Brothers in Arms up to 100%.

For the French TD’s I also picked up the FCM36Pak40.    (Did I get that name right from memory ?    Yes, I did)

Ungainly little beast

Big, slow, and awkward to handle, but it does seem to pack a wallop and added several quintuples to my two French crews.

What is really standing out is just how hard it is to grind crew skills.    I think Wargaming ought to lighten that up some.     Getting a good tank takes much less time than it does to move a crew up to multiple 100%’s, unless you move them between tanks.    I never do that – well, unless the tank is awful (Looking at the 4502P) and I think that was a design decision they made.    Collecting is discouraged; keep a few slots and tanks only, and move your crew forward for gold.

If I could manage to grind my way through the T32, I could get an M103 at a 30% discount, but for the moment I’m not going to concern myself with that.    I am nowhere near high enough to reach for the IS-3, which ends tomorrow anyway.

In other news, the Carmageddon Kickstarter campaign that I contributed to has borne some fruit, with my getting a free download of the original Carmageddon, ported to the Android platform.    It’s certainly not a casual phone game, but I enjoyed playing around with it once over the weekend.   No screenshots, as I am waiting for my new phone to be purchased and figure out that whole “rooting it so you can take screenshots” thing.

Still looking forward, someday, to the new Carmageddon version available for the PC.    They clearly blew the Feb 2013 promised deadline.    So much for delivering what you promise.    I think my decision to wait on ever funding another kickstarter, until seeing how this one played out, was very wise.

One of those emails that Stainless sent out (and I which I deleted) apparently spelled out that the game is now expected to take until 2014 to complete.     Let’s hope that they do just that.

On funding of PC games, with a smidge of progress updates

Tags

38 studios, Carmageddon, Civ5, Kickstarter, Minecraft, World of Tanks

All continues well in the World of Tanks – matches are played and tanks are ground up.   I have an extra 2.5m ready to buy a VK4502A but will hold off until I elite some of my vast holdings of tanks.    And I finally had enough, burned free XP, and I don’t have to drive the flaming WOLVERINE any more

Minecraft continues to entertain, in a shared experience with my boy, who can talk about it for an hour in his stream-of-consciousness way.   He actually exhausted me with it last night, and I had to go sit on my bed and relax for 15 mins after being treated to his analyses & questions for half an hour.    My game is most about collecting resources and hoarding food.   His game is trying not to lose his house (again!) and figuring out if zombies can break through windows set into the side of a hill.

I brushed the dust off of my Civilization games as well.   At release I only played half-a-dozen Civilization 5 games before quitting with the vague complaint of “It’s not fun”.    Will be finishing this game I started last night, and after taking out Ramses I hope I’m successful.      There are a ton of achievements on Steam I haven’t yet earned !

Read more about the 38 studios implosion and got to thinking about the many problems inherent with PC games.    I don’t own a console, not since the ’80s at least, and apparently the bigger companies who make games get their money from them.     That’s fine to a certain degree.   I remember PC games bringing in the big money, and I didn’t like what it did to the industry.    Now it’s a more specialized/boutique industry and that suits me just fine.

In a vague sense I’ve heard about Kickstarter for several months, but I read about a project last week that made me think a bit more about the service.     If you – like me – aren’t exactly aware of it, Kickstarter is a methodology for coming up with a project idea, and getting crowd funding.    Your project has to hit on the entertainment/art end of the spectrum, which game software is a natural fit for.   You state the amount that needs to be pledged (Like, $1,000) for your project to be accomplished.    If you hit that level, the donors are charged and you are expected to do your project.    If not enough is pledged (Like, $800 only) then no money changes hands.

It took me awhile to figure out Kickstarter the company’s angle – it’s not prominently displayed on their website.     If your project is successful they get a 5% cut.     Your project also pays credit card processing fees of between 3-5%.   So they take a 10% max cut of funded projects, and it seems reasonable to me, not ideal but not exorbitant.

Look at this project ! Haven’t thought about Carmageddon in years.

I read the project description and everything placed onto their page by the Stainless studios guy (Nobby).   What a hysterical and twisted guy.   Probably part of the 80’s generation like me.   I love the whole idea of an updated Carmageddon, and the money going to the development team instead of a publisher.       At this point, I feel good about giving Stainless $15 and hoping for a good game.

For a contrary view I googled “how much does kickstarter charge” and this nicely written post was about tenth from the top.  I do think they’re probably a bit of a pricey service, but with any overpriced service a competitor usually comes along.

With PC gaming being a bit more niche, less so aimed at you damn kids out there, and more at the grumpy young adults/ middle aged, how can you expect to get the games developed that YOU want to see ?   Well – I mean – that *I* want to see ?   This strikes me as a pretty good way to go about it.    Why wait for angel investors and play a big money funding game, ala 38 studios ?    Maybe start with the right core team and see what you can get via previous work or by having a famous developer or such.

Carmageddon Reincarnation is slated for a Feb 2013 release.    This is the game I hid from small children and only played in the dead of night, with a maniacal grin on my face and understanding the whole comedic angle of the game.    But the pixelated mess you see when running it on modern computers just didn’t work for me.    Now, an updated version with 3d support ?     Let’s see what they can put together.