asgaard

The Godfather: Family Dynasty review: An offer I can refuse

Thu, 11 Feb 21 09:22:17 +0000

A long time ago I used to play an ancient browser game called Travian. Travian was released in around 2004 and still exists to this day, so you can go and check it out if you want, but I'd really recommend you don't because it's just not a good experience. I imagine it's dated and feels clunky now, but really my issue is that it's just not fun.

It's a persistent world where players grow and build villages by farming resources and ransacking each other. I didn't play it for long, because within a few weeks I realised that I was running my life around it. It's always there, even when you're not, so unless you're OK with losing days or weeks of progress because someone attacked you when you were offline and unprepared, you have to run your whole life around it. Was it fun? No, it really wasn't. It was addictive. Big difference.

So when the Play Store's adverts thrust The Godfather: Family Dynasty in my face, I had mixed feelings. I had some free time, I quite liked the Godfather, it said it was free... but as I got a bit further into it (you don't unlock the 'world' to begin with) - wait, doesn't this look a lot like Travian?

After playing The Godfather: Family Dynasty for a few weeks and becoming interested enough to look at other games in the Play Store, it seems that Travian was the prototype of what I'd called predatory mobile games.

The Godfather: Family Dynasty is pay to win. Well, at least, it's pay to beat other players. The core gameplay loop of TG:FD is that you gather resources (which may involve attacking other players, or being attacked), then use those resources to upgrade buildings and train troops. Every level of upgrade takes longer than before. Before long you're looking at upgrades that take several days to complete. The pay-to-win aspect comes in by allowing you to buy speed-up items.

Calling it to pay to win is slightly misleading though. You pay to speed up tasks by a constant amount. But those tasks take an ever increasing amount of time to complete. The mathematics of this doesn't make it seem appealing.

The only person winning here is the person taking the player's money. In fact, on the server I played on, there was another player complaining that he'd put thousands of pounds into another server only for it to die off as players became bored and the server emptied. He considered it wasted money as it didn't transfer to the new server. That's quite an extraordinary inflationary feedback loop: As you pay more to become stronger than other players, other players will become disheartened and leave, leaving you with no one to play with, making your money wasted.

Ignoring the monetisation aspect, the other problem with these games is that they demand your attention on their own schedule. You can't think "I have a spare half hour, I'll boot up the game" because you there might be nothing in the game for you to do. Conversely, when something is happening in the game, you need to react to it in real time, so you may have to give your attention when it's not convenient for you. Feeling that you have to always be aware of it makes the game addictive, even though it's actually quite boring because there's often nothing to do.

The Godfather branding is a very superficial layer. Occasionally the likeness of one of the characters appears on your screen, but that's about the only connection to the Godfather it has. The game itself is mostly focused on building a lot of troops and throwing them at other people, which has no obvious connection to The Godfather at all. The Godfather is a film about family and business with crime sprinkled in liberally. This is a game about building armies. The game is developed by a Chinese developer and if you told me that nobody developing the game had ever heard of the film before being involved with the game, I'd believe you. The English is also quite dubious.

I'm surprised that Paramount Studios have allowed The Godfather's brand to be associated something that comes across as a bit cheap. At the time of writing, The Godfather film is almost 50 years old. It's a classic film that has stood the test of time and is still regarded as a world class piece of art. TG:FD is not a world class piece of art. It is hard to overstate just how far TG:FD is from being a world class piece of art.

But then it seems par the course - Pirates of the Caribbean has a very similar looking app... actually, hang on, that UI looks very familiar. And what's this, Game Of War also looks remarkably familiar...

Overall I think this is just the cheap world of mobile games. There are a huge number of games that are all basically the same, but adapted in relatively minor ways to fit different franchises or art styles. The Godfather: Family Dynasty is just one among many of a set of clones of basically the same game. The only way it stands out is by attaching itself to a hugely successful movie franchise, but then fails in-game to connect to what made the movies interesting.

Pokémon GO is discontinuing support for 32 bit Android devices

Sat, 13 Jun 20 11:20:10 +0000

Update: Niantic has backed away from this and announced that they are deferring this decision after all.

Niantic, the company behind Pokémon GO, announced recently that Pokemon GO will no longer work on 32 bit Android devices from August. You'd be forgiven for having missed this, as although it's on the official blog, it doesn't show in the in-game news.

Whilst the announcement makes it sound like only older devices will be affected, this is not the case. Many newer Android phones ship with 64 bit hardware, but a 32 bit operating system, in which case they are, for all practical purposes, 32 bit devices and are restricted to running 32 bit apps.

Unless a device has more than 4GB of RAM, there's not any great advantage to using a 64 bit OS, so a lot of budget phones come with a 32 bit operating system. For example, a large number of devices in the Motorola G range and the Samsung A and J ranges have only a 32 bit OS, even some of those released in the last 12 months. The Silph Road community on Reddit has started to assemble a list of modern devices that will be affected by this change.

Unfortunately, it's not clear that Niantic has understood the distinction between the architecture of the CPU and the architecture of the operating system. The devices in their list of examples all have 32 bit CPUs. It is very possible that they have made this decision based on data collected on hardware, and have not looked at operating system architecture data. I suspect the fact they've given this quite a low-profile announcement means they have estimated that this will not affect many people, and I also suspect that it will actually affect a large number of people. This seems like the kind of announcement that should be made 12 months in advance, not 6 weeks.

For those who will be affected by this, I recommend waiting until closer to August before replacing your device. Niantic may have made a mistake and may yet back down.

It's also worth noting that it's actually quite difficult to determine if you're buying a 32 bit or 64 bit device, as a lot of manufacturers don't publish this information. If you do need to replace your device, choose carefully.

Epic Games Store - Unable to download any more free games

Sun, 24 May 20 11:12:39 +0000

When trying to redeem an offer on the Epic Games store, I came across this surprising error message:

Your account is unable to download any more free games at this time, please wait 24 hours before trying to redeem a free game again.

In my case, the message was triggered by my VPN. When I switched off my VPN, I was able to redeem the free game immediately (without waiting 24 hours). So it seems to be linked to IP as well as (or instead of?) user account, as the message suggests.[...]

Giovanni's Persian

Mon, 03 Feb 20 20:28:38 +0000

Contents:

So, what's wrong with Machamp?
So, what should we use instead?

Just how do you take down Giovanni's Persian in Pokémon Go?

Persian is a normal type Pokémon, so, obviously, you want a fighting type Pokémon, and everyone knows the king of fighting types is Machamp, right?

Well that's what I thought until I spent Saturday afternoon trying to defeat him and his Persian with (one of) my prize Machamp. The other Pokémon weren't too difficult, but the Persian was wrecking me and Machamp wasn't pulling his (substantial) weight.

So, what's wrong with Machamp?

The problem is that Machamp goes down too quickly to get off a charged attack. My CP 2900 Counter + Dynamic Punch Champ was VERY close to getting off his first charged attack, but he was consistently fainting right before he got chance. That's a big problem, because it means you're bringing out your second Pokémon and Giovanni hasn't even used one of his shields yet, and he's about to make you use one of yours.

That's the important thing for the first Pokémon - you need to be breaking down the shields. Machamp has a reasonably fast charging charged move (Dynamic Punch), but he faints too quickly to use it.

So, what should we use instead?

I did it with a Tyranitar. Even though Tyranitar's dark or rock moves have only standard effectiveness against Persian, Tyranitar takes less damage because Persian is less effective against rock types. Tyranitar is a bulky boy on top of that so he stays alive much longer than Machamp and manages to get off charged attacks. So even though his attacks are less effective than Machamp's, he ends up doing a lot more damage.

However, even better is if you can field a Pokémon that has resistance versus Persian and simultaneously has super effective moves. An example is Lucario, which has steel type resistance versus normal, but has fighting moves, which are super-effective against normal. A high level Lucario with a three-bar charge move (Power Up Punch) should go straight through the Persian without breaking a sweat.

Wasteland 2 Director's Cut review

Sat, 08 Oct 16 16:00:58 +0000

I started playing Wasteland 2 last year and got about half way through the story when they announced the Director's Cut edition, at which point I lost some free time and decided to leave it until the DC was out and stable. So here we are.

Wasteland 2 is a modern incarnation of the classic RPG formula. There's a lot of text, a lot of detail and it can be pretty heavy going. It can also be rewarding and the details ooze personality. This might make you think "Fallout", and, obviously it's a similar sort of setting, but Wasteland's world is a bit more superficially grounded by virtue of not having the 1950s wackiness strewn around. The overarching story itself is, in RPG tradition, largely uninteresting and lacking any sense of urgency, but there's plenty of settlements in the wastes full of people and plots to keep you interested, and despite Wasteland's outwardly serious demeanour, some of them are completely off the wall.

The player takes control of a military-ish squad (of the Desert Rangers) and has full control over them, rather than playing as a lone warrior who picks up independently minded NPCs who run in front of your crosshairs at integral times. This is possibly a barrier to getting interested in the game early on, as although you can have up to three NPCs in your party who will add their own comments occasionally, the four core members of the squad you start off with are entirely player made (or chosen from a preset) and don't have any dialog or interactions associated with them. Ok, never mind, it picks up soon.

Character creation and progression follows a familiar format consisting of attributes, skill points and perks. The skills system generally works very well by being thoughtfully coupled with the gameplay. There are often more ways to solve a problem than simply shooting everyone causing it. Sometimes you don't have the skills or foresight you need to resolve a situation to your satisfaction, but the game handles the branching well. If you end up with a sub-optimal outcome, and you will occasionally because your actions do not always have predictable outcomes, then that's just life - maybe you'll do better next play through. The game really demands a second play through just to see the alternative possibilities. The breadth of this hits you very early on: the first decision you make is to respond to one of two distress calls. Each represents a large chunk of content and gives access to a different NPC companion, but you can't do both.

The only obvious criticism of the skills system is that they are a bit diluted by there being too many of them. For example there are essentially four different door opening skills: lockpick, safe cracking, computer science (electronic locks) and brute force, which seems a bit excessive.

The combat itself is OK, but could be better. It's deeper than Fallout 2, but shallower than Fallout Tactics. Tactics is a dirty word with fans who wanted an RPG, but people unfairly overlook that it was a really good tactical turn based combat game. W2's combat is not bad, but it can be a bit algorithmic in that environments and enemy behaviour are not varied all that much. Once combat starts there aren't any surprises - everyone in the engagement is immediately visible to everyone else regardless of where they are and the AI knows exactly where your squad is regardless of whether anyone has line of sight on them, so you rarely need to change tactics away from getting everyone spread out and behind some cover for an evasion and chance to hit bonus, and have your sniper take a pot shot to initiate the fight. Later on in the game enemies do start packing so many hit points that you do sometimes need to think about using targeted shots to hurt their arms to cripple their aim, or slow them down by hitting their legs, but for the first half, tactics can be pretty simple. Weapon jams, intimidation effects and minimum effect ranges on some classes of weapons make things a bit more interesting, but overall some of Fallout Tactics' combat features could have been used to much stronger effect here.

Weapons are diverse and offer a satisfying progression of stopping power as the game goes on, but they are somewhat unbalanced, i.e. assault rifles and sniper rifles are the main work-horses, and shotguns are virtually useless. Handguns don't become competitive until you get the 9mm variants. SMGs and heavy weapons exist in the hands of enemies but eat too much ammunition to make them particularly tempting to the player (although you might occasionally use burst mode of your assault rifle in a tricky fight). The game advises you to vary your weapon skills so your squad isn't fighting over ammunition, but ammunition isn't that sparse, and given another play through I'd just give everyone points in assault rifles or sniper rifles. Fallouters will be pleased to know, however, that rushing up to someone and hitting them over the head with something heavy is a mostly viable strategy, but is neutered somewhat by the fact that heavy armour has serious drawbacks.

Overall: Wasteland 2 has a pretty long list of minor flaws, but none of them are serious enough to take away from the fact that the game is engaging and continually tempts the player to poke around, meet people, and learn more about the world. The bottom line is that if you're a CRPG fan you'll probably like Wasteland 2. If you're not, you'll probably find it long winded and lose interest.

4/5

War Thunder

Wed, 10 Feb 16 22:25:01 +0000

I kind of like War Thunder, but it's spoilt by frustrating gameplay caused by the apparent fact that the developer, Gaijin, couldn't balance a tricycle.

It's pretty obvious at battle ranks (BR) 3.7 to 4.7 that the German planes are insanely overpowered. People complain about the UFO-like flight models of the Russian Yaks but in overall effectiveness they have very little on the average German team. I struggle to get a 1:1 kill:death ratio in British or American planes, but give me a FW 190 A4 or a Bf 109F-4 and suddenly I'm king of the skies. My 190 A4 has a 4:1 kill:death ratio and my F4 2:1. I'm even at 2:1 on my near stock A5 despite the fact it has all the aerodynamic properties of a flying anvil - my performance in this is mostly attributable to the fact my team has usually shifted the odds from 10vs10 to 10vs2 by the time I actually get to the fight. I don't even need to play well to get great rewards because most of the rest of my team will.

The reason that Germany dominates so well is that its planes climb so quickly. Whichever team has the altitude advantage when combat starts will win nine times out of ten, and that team is Germany. Oh yes, the Spitfires in general climb nicely too (or at least, the IX does, the Vc which is also at that tier does not), but they get lumped in with American teams so you don't get a swarm of Spitfires at 5k, you get a swarm of P-47s and B-25s at 0k and one or two Spitfires at 5k, which have to face a swarm of 109s.

Gaijin, and some of the playerbase, will defend this by saying the planes are historically modelled and that's genuinely how they performed. And fair enough, maybe that's broadly correct. But I'm pretty sure that enemy airfields weren't usually 30km apart, and I'm equally sure that the German and allied forces didn't agree a set time in advance at which for all their planes to take off so they could all climb towards the centre of the map and have a big fight until all of one team was dead.

In reality there are numerous obvious historical inaccuracies which makes me doubt that the modelling is really that great. For example, the 109 had problems with its wings ripping when pulling up from dives, which Spitfire pilots used to their advantage. You wouldn't know that from playing War Thunder, from which you would conclude exactly the opposite! At the moment, the Spitfire IX at 4.0 regularly loses flat scissors to 109 F4s and even 190 A4s, which is utterly perplexing.

Some of this would be fixed if they finally implemented Enduring Conflict for realistic mode. EC is basically the only mode of War Thunder that works well (apart, possibly, from simulator, which I haven't dared to try as I don't have a joystick). Unfortunately, EC comes along for a day or two once every few months, is locked to only a few aircraft, and then disappears again. I don't know why. When EC does come along it highlights just how broken the standard realistic mode is. EC gives more dynamic and emergent gameplay and reduces the frustration and penalty for making a small mistake by allowing you to respawn in a new plane. It could be greatly improved, but even in its current state turns the game into an objective based one rather than a team deathmatch.

There are other frustrations too:

1. Hit registration is the worst I've ever seen in an online game, and, bizarrely, seems to be dependent on which guns you use. It's a bit embarrassing when you're sat on a 109's tail who is sat on your team mate's tail and you're visibly knocking chunks out of him with your hispanos to no effect while he rips up your team mate who presumably thinks you're a total idiot. My ping to the EU server is 20-30 so there's really no excuse for my shells desyncing noticeably.

2. As you get higher in the tree, the planes get more painful to fly initially because they are so far outperformed by fully upgraded planes. You earn research points to unlock things like engine upgrades. Until you do so, you are at an artificial disadvantage. It's not quite pay-to-win, but it's certainly pay-to-remove-the-artificial-disadvantage-sooner. For me this just means I am reluctant to fly the planes I've just unlocked.

There's a similar issue with crew points - you can upgrade things like your g-tolerance which makes you a lot more competitive. This gives an unfair and undeserved (and unnecessary!) advantage to more experienced players.

3. Bombers, ground attackers, etc, basically anything that isn't a high performance fighter, is completely useless in realistic battles because Gaijin doesn't seem to have designed their game. Although there are mission objectives, the real mission is "kill the other team" because the alternative is to hope they ignore you while you go about completing the objectives (hint: they won't). The British bombers in particular are painful. They were designed for night raids, so lacked strong defensive armament, which Gaijin models faithfully ... but then puts them in games set during the day and lights them up with a big red marker when you get close to them. Selective realism! The big problem is that the likes of the B-17 and Lancaster are iconic and people want to fly them. This makes allied teams even worse. Again, some form of EC with sensible ground target objectives would largely fix this.

4. Gaijin seems to model a lot of their game around trying to keep game queue times short, but average and below average players will have to run a resource deficit to repair their planes or wait 24+ hours for the free repair. This is just daft.

5. The kill credit system is broken. In RB, where the stakes are high, it's very frustrating to damage someone's controls such that you leave them to crash, then a few minutes later when they do perform an unplanned lithosphere brake, the game says they "crashed" rather than crediting (and rewarding) you for the kill. When someone is going down, it is often not safe to take another pass on them, or to burn you energy/altitude/ammunition, to ensure you get the credit.

Overall: This game can be fun, but I would not recommend it.

Fallout, Bethesda, and Vsync

Tue, 10 Nov 15 20:27:03 +0000

With Fallout 4 making an impact...

I tried to play New Vegas again recently but I only got a few hours in before ending up feeling that putting up with the mouse controls was more effort than it was worth. The problem is Vsync. Vsync delays rendering frames until they sync with your monitor's refresh rate, which causes the perception of lag on your input. I don't know why this is a problem when a simple frame limiter (e.g. fps_max in Source engine games) works fine, but I would guess that a frame limiter puts the game to sleep so it discards your input and therefore only responds to up to date mouse/keyboard events, whereas vsync lets the game run as normal but it delays rendering frames, so the display on your screen is slightly out of date.

Anyway, the point is that it feels awful enough that I don't play games which force vsync. Skyrim was exactly the same, but with the added bonus that if you hacked vsync to be off, the frame rate increased and the physics engine couldn't deal with it. Tying game speed to frame rate is extraordinary in 2015 in that it's so obviously wrong and not very difficult to implement correctly.

According to this thread on Reddit, Fallout 4 has the same problem, which is a shame but not really a surprise.

CS:GO competitive mode experiences

Sat, 03 Oct 15 15:14:43 +0000

I have played a lot of CS lately and recently decided to try competitive mode.

The first game was easy (we won 16-2), the second game bumped me up into playing with higher ranks and we comfortably won (16-9), and the third game bumped me up into playing with four double AK ranks on my team and we narrowly lost (16-14) with me being on about 1:1 K:D and middle of the scoreboard.

The first and second games were fine, but unlike the first two games, in the last we weren't winning comfortably and that brings out problems in less mature team-mates. Our top player was the very definition of 'toxic', and ironically we probably lost at least one round (and therefore the whole game) because he was distracting everyone ranting about how it wasn't his fault that he just got killed.

Overall it wasn't an enjoyable way to spend an hour.

I think the main problem is that games can last upwards of an hour and you get penalised if you leave early, so without knowing in advance who you are going to be playing with, there's a risk of locking yourself into an unenjoyable game for the next hour. If you only have time to play one competitive game every couple of days, this is far too much risk to make it a good use of time. You could alleviate this risk somewhat by having a shorter competitive mode which is first to 8 instead of first to 16 (which I think would be a lot better for older people anyway...).

So at the moment... no real desire to play more competitive.

CSGO Lounge has a 'No Winnings' problem

Sat, 05 Sep 15 20:34:21 +0000

CSGO Lounge is a website on which you can bet virtual items on the results of CS:GO games.

It has a major flaw in that you can win, but end up with no winnings. This has happened to me a few times and the forums are full of people complaining their (relatively large) bets won but returned no winnings.

CSGOL justifies this by saying the entire bet is zero sum, and as items can't be broken down into smaller units, they have to fit items to winnings as best as possible to the odds so there will be some 'rounding error' and some people will lose out by their winnings being undervalued according to the odds CSGOL gave when they made the bet.

I strongly suspect that this is a bit misleading and the main cause of the error is not the inability to break down the items, but the difficulty in solving the distribution problem accurately.

The problem of distributing winnings can be stated something like: Given that you have a set of items with individual value, and a set of people who each demand a total value, organise the item set into subsets such that every item belongs to exactly one subset, and each subset can be uniquely allocated to exactly one person.

This sounds like a harder version of the subset sum problem, which is already NP-complete. In layman's terms, this means that it's really hard to solve because it requires infeasible amounts of CPU power to do it. With few items you can use brute force algorithms to try all combinations and choose the best one, but as the number of items grows larger it will take thousands of years to run the fastest correct algorithm.

Therefore to get a solution reasonably quickly you use probabilistic algorithms that hopefully give you a decent solution in x% of cases.

Now, we don't know what algorithm CSGO Lounge uses, but we do know that the overall website is pretty amateurish. Making the website work well is pretty simple and any semi-professional software developer could do it. Solving the distribution problem is hard and requires much more specialised computer science/maths skills. It would be very surprising if they were bad at the easy part and good at the hard part.

More likely, their redistribution algorithm is bad and it can't give sensible results for the amount of volume the site gets. It's also worth noting that there appears to be no public audit trail for how the items are distributed, so we don't actually know that the bet really is zero-sum and that CSGOLounge really is allocating every item it receives.

Either way, the site is currently not fit for purpose and I strongly recommend against using it.

Mount and Blade: Warband review

Sun, 11 Jan 15 16:43:12 +0000

I have been meaning to write a review for Mount and Blade: Warband for some time now, but I haven't had the time. Because I've been too busy playing Mount and Blade: Warband. Warband is a pretty big game so this is going to be pretty long, and it still won't cover nearly everything.

Warband is a fairly unique game which puts you on a horse as you ride around a fictional continent, Calradia. It's not dissimilar to a horse based version of Sid Meier's Pirates!, but somehow turns out to be much more replayable. The experience is very raw; the graphics are very dated for the most part, the user interface often bad, and the gameplay sometimes tedious (especially before you understand the game and know where the shortcuts are). In a more modern/polished game a lot of these things would have been streamlined out (sometimes to the detriment of the overall game). Therefore it is a testament to how enjoyable the rest of the gameplay is that you soon overlook all these annoyances.

Warband is a sandbox game and there is no real point or game specified goals. Some people will find this lack of guidance off putting, and it is a bit overwhelming as a beginner. Certainly, there are times when the random number gods are not on your side and there isn't a lot to do. What you will probably end up doing is riding around the country-side building up an army, performing favours for local lords, and competing in tournaments. Armies need to be fed and paid so you'll need to make sure you're using your men to generate money, which usually involves capturing enemy troops and ransoming them.

The combat gameplay is both brilliant and unique. Mounted combat is hard and rewarding; you need to time your sword swings, and you'll need to take into account your own velocity when trying to use bows and crossbows. Your character stats will determine which sort of load-outs you are most effective with, and there are a lot of possibilities. The weapons themselves have splendid detail - e.g. a double handed great sword might look fearsome but you can be left vulnerable without a shield and it might be slow to swing. Alternatively, a fast short sword is not much use on horseback because it's not long enough to reach infantry.

As the game progresses and you've built up a reasonable army you'll find yourself allying yourself with one of the factions of Calradia and taking part in bigger battles and sieges. Your army and tactics will be affected by which territory you spend most of your time in, e.g. a Nord army will be mainly heavy infantry, leading to slow crushing attacks, whereas a Khergit army will be comprised of horse archers, who charge around the plains and riddle foes full of arrows, but tend to be a bit useless in a castle siege.

Eventually, by impressing enough of your allies, you'll be granted towns and castles of your own which you can use to supplement your income, but in reality the AI tends to make a beeline straight for your assets and unless you are very vigilant (which isn't possible if your assets are spread out), your towns will be frequently looted (which is a bit annoying).
There is an in-game economy which you can take advantage of. Goods prices follow supply and demand, and if you're desperate for cash you can always start shipping merchandise across the land.

This all sounds very broad, and it is, but it's not always as deep as it could be. This is to be excused, because the work required to implement all of Warband's features convincingly would be huge. Nevertheless, it would be nice if the political side of things seemed a bit less algorithmic and if each lord had a bit more personal character.

One of Warband's greatest strengths is its moddability. This has led to some excellent third party mods being released by the community. The quality is inconsistent, but then so is Warband's. After fully acquainting yourself with the base game it's worth moving on to the Floris mod pack, which liberally sprinkles improvements and additions over the whole game and adds a new 'career path' enlisting in a lord's army.

Due to various things, the game is reasonably hostile to beginners. I fully recommend familiarising yourself with this helpful guide as you play. If you push through the initial confusion you'll find a game that draws you in just as much as the likes Civilization (I didn't previously realise that "one more turn" also applied to real time games).

Overall Warband is extremely enjoyable, and even though it's a bit raw, it's far more rewarding than most games and with the caveats outlined previously, I thoroughly recommend it.