video game

I'm a big fan of the Fallout franchise, so when I discovered Fallout Shelter, I was happy to see a new member of the family. It's actually a pretty engaging little game, but it has some ugly flaws that I find frustrating, so I'm going to complain about them.

Fail? Okay, that's a bit hyperbolic. If my failures were like Rockstar's, I'd be sipping umbrella drinks right now. Or recovering from same. But GTA Online is frustrating by any measure right from the get-go. Here's why.

I thought about actually titling this piece RIP, Ouya but thought hey, let's save the hyperbole for the body. What's actually happening is that I'm taking my Ouya back to Gamestop and washing my hands of this whole experience. Maybe I'll buy one used later, when the Mad Catz console comes out and they all end up on eBay for a song; by then perhaps there will be a CM port. Unfortunately, the Ouya console is deficient in basically every area.

My Ouya decided it didn't want to pair the original controller any more, so I performed a factory reset after backing up all my apps with TitaniumBackup. Then I performed a factory reset, which doesn't. It left a couple of apps behind, including ES task explorer. Upon entering the adb shell, I found I could no longer su. The fix in my case was to reinstall superuser.

I finally broke down and got Minecraft, even though I think Minetest is fairly excellent and getting better. Even though you pay Mojang for the game, making it polished takes at least a couple of mods and making it really slick takes a few more. I wrassled around with minecraft on Linux and found a decent set of bits which make the game pretty fancy. This guide assumes you've got minecraft successfully installed, but not too much else.

Fable III is a cute little game that tries over and over again to sell you stuff. At the same time it tries to train aspies to interact with their fellow humans by vibrating their genitals (the controller is in your lap, right?) when they say nice things to people. It's filled with bugs and glitches and the camera is retarded. At the end, it tries to sell you some more stuff. Two of five stars. Fable II was better in most ways.

The internets are full of people just crying about how the end of Fable 3 is hard and/or takes time to get a satisfactory ending. Didn't they play Fable 2? If you need money you just stop going on story-advancing quests and go make money. Don't be such whiners. I guess this is what happens when you make a game more realistic — a lot of twisted knickers.

I decided to revisit Startopia, a nifty Windows XP game. I had trouble because they don't use Direct3D correctly; they make assumptions about your card. I had to teach it about mine to prevent a bluescreen every time I ran the game.

After a couple hours of searching I finally found a tool capable of unpacking umod files on Linux today. I can't get umodpack to build so I gave up and downloaded a Windows tool written in Delphi and ran it in Wine, which works great. Looks like someone boned something somewhere and broke backwards compatibility that affects my ability to build umodpack, it happens while Perl tries to generate documentation and a quick search suggests that it's an endemic problem. Thanks, whoever you are! Download Unreal Tournament UMOD Extractor to successfully unpack umod files on Windows or Linux+Wine.

It would be excellent to remake Star Co- er, excuse me, The Ur-Quan Masters in the Vega Strike engine. It wouldn't currently permit the resource-gathering portion of the game, but that was my least favorite part anyway. The most hoped-for features in Vega Strike are first-person combat and continual flight down to planets' surfaces, so one day that too may be possible. All the really good parts of the game could be implemented in the existing engine.