Week of Random

Ever get those weeks where you have been really busy but when you look back on it, you're not sure what you were getting up to ?

Feels like last week has been one of those.

(Picture is from someone called Organbutt, made for the Drawception game. I hope you won with it !)

I have been getting chance to catch up on the recorded stuff, both in games and on the telly. The start to the latest Star Trek Discovery series was excellent and I suspect I will be a big fan of Captain Christopher Pike through this series. He stole the show on his debut episode.

The Orville has also been as fun to watch so far this series as it was last series. I'm not convinced that I'm going to stick with the DC Universe series on Sky though. Those have lost their way and I think they ran out of stories a couple of seasons ago.

I have my vouchers from the credit card loyalty thing ! Still got most of them. The only acquisitions so far have been Old Man's War by John Scalzi and Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I'm still kinda grinding my way through his Children of Time, which apparently has a sequel coming.

The cricket on the telly is showing a game with an incident that I still hold a grudge for (Eng vs NZ ODI in 2008). It's the infamous incident where an umpire intervened to attempt to get the England captain to change his decision on a run out. Lots of bad behaviour involved, pretty much all of it on the side of the New Zealand players. What happened ? A NZ batsman (Grant Elliott) who has been involved in many other incidents, including abusing his own team mates while on the field, ran straight at the bowler and knocked him out of the way. He was knocked down too, resulting in an easy run out.

The umpire intervened to attempt to get England to withdraw the run out appeal, when they really should have given the guy out "Obstructing the field" instead. The batsman ran straight down the wicket, as they should ... however there was no intention or effort to avoid the bowler who was coming for the ball. It felt pretty clear at the time. Still does.

That's in the past though. I've been playing Battletech again. And there's bad behaviour around this one too, believe it or not.

Spaceship ! That's the Argo, which (light spoiler) is the ship you play out most of the game flying around in to various places to go stompy stompy with your Battlemechs.

They did a decent job with this one in its vanilla form, although they're getting heavily criticised for a poor DLC (costing £15.49 which is too much in my opinion) that doesn't add very much. The game has to be installed on a SSD or it's frustrating to run ... but I was enjoying bouncing from battle to battle on it this morning as my force of mechs and pilots steadily build up their initial training skills and strength. More story soon.

It's a shame the lead designer has been hounded off Twitter, although that's a reflection on how poor Twitter is at controlling harassment on its site. I keep a very low profile on that site and steer clear of the potential harassment. It's not worth your time or mental energy to interact with people like that, just stick to the good ones and don't hesitate to block the bad ones.

One thing I would like to do is mod the game to expand on the basic mechanics. They're a bit dumbed down compared to the original tabletop game rules. I'd like some of that complexity back. But .... while there is a mod to do that (called Roguetech), it's a huge collection of a bunch of other mods that I don't think play well together. They also replace the original story campaign with something open ended and ... boring.

I've had a quick look at Roguetech and either it's beyond the capabilities of my PC (which is just over 7 years old to be honest) or ... it's broken and otherwise unplayable. I'm actually going with the broken and unplayable because I'm suspecting that the massive slowdowns I'm seeing in the strategic layer are due to Roguetech trying to talk to the servers that run the online campaign and just freezes while doing so. Or it's needing a bit more memory than my PC wants to give it.

Anyway, byebye Roguetech and if anyone's got a line to a mod that expands the equipment and customisation options out without crippling the game, let me know in the comments. Oh there's also a bit of he said/she said playground level behaviour in the forums over there which just looks a bit silly.

Oh and a new Battletech campaign run means more names to think up ...