Book 20 - a Story of Battletech (plus more from the weekend)

Is it cheeky claiming the story of a game as a book ?

Perhaps. Some games are blurring the line there though. Either it's a game that's more about the story or it's a visual novel with gameplay elements within. And then there are the old Fighting Fantasy style books that were a game in a book.

But Battletech ... a common element of strategy games like this will be to use a story to tie together the missions perhaps with a good few randomly generated missions thrown in too for either padding the game length out or to give your people something to do between story missions to make them stronger.

I'm going to start off with a : The story isn't awful.

That's a really bad thing to say about it isn't it .... The story in Battletech starts off brightly with you having to flee the planet where you are employed, escaping just ahead of a coup. It is a classic set up where the bad guys take over at the start and your role is to gather strength so you can counter usurp them later. Oh and the bad guys are really really bad. Our people are plucky mercenaries pretty much on the neutral side of neutral. But we're getting paid the big bucks to help out the former leader of the Aurigan Reach.

I definitely enjoyed the game ... but there is some real boneheaded stuff in the backstory leading through. Sometimes it feels like characters are doing stupid things just to kick off elements of the story.

Mind you, the movie Interstellar was just like that as well and that's a film I'll watch repeatedly. Sure, the set up is nasty but what they do with that is fantastic.

There's good voice acting here, I actually thought it was Maggie Q playing the leader for a while.

So Battletech - a great game, story could have been better as it reached its end but then the aim of the story in these games is to set up great missions and I think it does that. It may actually prompt me to look at some Battletech books. A while ago, I read the Mechwarrior Dark Age - Ghost War book by Michael Stackpole and highly enjoyed it.

But I'm not likely to go straight back in to replay the campaign. I'm actually more likely to replay MechCommander 2 from a good few years ago.

To the weekend ?

I needed the recovery time from Lords. My legs were definitely feeling that. And then I go straight into an all nighter watching Le Mans. Not as good a race this year as the racing has been. Let's see :

Toyota were unchallenged and their only reliability issue this year was an error in the head of one of the drivers when he missed his "You need to pit now" and almost ran out of fuel.
Jenson Button's car decided to throw a bad sensor, which put them 50 laps behind. They were racing hard when they got back in the race but the car expired about 90 minutes before the end. A shame. Hope he's back next year.
Aston Martin's car just didn't work for them this year. They said it was very good with speed and handling up to a certain point ... where it felt like it was hitting a brick wall. So the Aston Martins came nowhere. Hope they figure that one out.

Gaming - finished Battletech ! See above.
Finished Motorsport Manager too, with the last few races of the season. The other teams were keeping me honest by making sure I couldn't get away without thinking through strategy for the last few races but my team still reigned supreme. This is a snowballing type of game, where if you set things up right, the team will continue to march ahead of the competition. That gets boring ...

All nighter ? I managed to stay awake for the whole of the race ! I wouldn't recommend that. I think the hallucinations were starting to come in at about 9pm last night and I was definitely feeling it even by around 4pm yesterday.

I may have ordered more Lego too.

The laptop replacement is being pushed right again. The place I'd get it from have pushed the price up by £50 and that definitely tips it over into "ain't worth it". Oh and one of the issues with the last one where I thought the screen was burning out has been fixed by ....... turning the brightness up.

Back to work tomorrow ! More chill out tonight.