Oh boy, I've been playing ARK: Survival Evolved for a couple of weeks now and having a ton of fun! This is a game about survival in a world filled with pre-historical creatures, mostly dinosaurs, where you can tame almost all of them and ride them around! The guys behind the game are constantly updating it with new creatures almost every week, tons of bug fixes and new stuff to build and explore.
I've been recording my adventures in ARK (in Portuguese) and uploading them to YouTube. Check that out:
In addition to that, I also took the time to learn some Android development and wrote a fairly simple app called Anacruse where you have to tell the note name from a staff. Go download it!
Hey guys, I've been very busy recently with Natural Selection 2. Some of you may have heard of the free weekend and 50% discount on the game that went live last weekend. This brought lots of new people into the game, hopefully to stay. It's been really fun going back to the basics and teaching those new people how to play the game and win. The game is still on discount sale as of this writing, but only for 6 hours, so hurry up and buy it if you like it!
After a three week hiatus (due to some issues with my ISP), my stream came back with a couple of very good, very fun NS2 matches. The first one is a couple of ENSL Gather matches, one of which lasted over an hour and had its fair share of higher alien lifeforms and all sorts of marine tech destroying said aliens.
The second is a set of matches for the NSL Season 2 tourney, for CiB Highwind. We played against AtroX on the official map Veil and the custom map Jambi. Watch below my point of view for all four rounds, and also the official casts by RedDog and Neatchee: rounds 1, 2, 3, 4.
Hey there people, happy new year! It's been a while since my last gaming-related post. As you may know, I am now playing Natural Selection 2 a whole lot. This means I must have been streaming a lot lately, right?
Well, due to what amounts to extreme laziness, I haven't been streaming too much. :( But this is going to change, as I just found out this new streaming program called OBS (Open Broadcaster Software), which is, simply put, a "free, open source XSplit", except it is much faster and lighter.
For starters, it loads and closes as fast as Notepad. I can easily stream with the screen capture feature without as much as a dent on the frame rate, which I found very impressive. I can play NS2 at over 60 fps most of the time with the aforementioned software screen capture, just as if I wasn't streaming at all.
It has pretty much the same features as XSplit, lacking only a few I never used anyways. Even if it doesn't come with them out of the box, there is a plug-in framework so that people can add the features to OBS. I wouldn't be surprised to see plugins that replicate or perform certain features better than XSplit.
I have one complaint though: the video quality doesn't look as good as XSplit. Maybe I'm trying to push too hard with just 2000 kbps of video bandwidth? Who knows. I'll be tweaking it a bit more...
Back to Natural Selection 2! I did stream some matches, and they're available on my YouTube channel. Here's one of my recent ones - a ridiculous pubstomp (70 kills, 7 deaths!) with those newbies that bought the game on the recent Steam Sale:
This is going to be my first gaming-related post (yay!). I had a blast playing the first Borderlands game a while ago. Picked Mordecai, grabbed sniper rifles and pistols and chose a set of skills with emphasis on sniping. Cleared the whole game, including all DLCs. Leveled to 61 (before the cap was raised to 69). Then I got bored and hacked my character to make the most insanely powerful equipment out there -- 1.2k x4 damage pistols with near-perfect accuracy and very fast firing rates (and the ability to crash the game once in a while), "god mode" shields (which displayed as negative 2 billion and never drained), insanely fast sniper rifles and even some overpowered Eridian guns, and maxed out all skills in all trees just because. I remember doing a critical hit for the maximum possible damage of 99999 with a melee attack once. Needless to say, the poor victim exploded in a shower of gibs.
Back then I didn't have a computer powerful enough to record my gaming, nor did I have an YouTube channel or a stream, so unfortunately I got (almost) nothing to show you. :(
When the sequel was announced I was pumped. I watched every trailer and every bit of gameplay and just had to play it now (er... then). Borderlands 2 was released three days ago (September 18th), but I had to wait two more days as the game would only release on September 20th here in Brazil.
The wait was over, and I had to stream it. Unfortunately, my microphone is really bad, so I couldn't comment on the stream itself.
Here goes my personal opinions on the game:
Borderlands 2 has an amazing sense of humor. Claptrap's lines are among the funniest, as are Handsome Jack's and pretty much every other non-srs-bsns characters'. If my microphone was working, you'd hear me laughing about every 10 seconds or so.
The guns are much better polished, and each brand feels unique -- an addition I liked a lot. I quite enjoy Jakobs pistols - they let me fire as fast as I can pull the trigger, which is to say, really fast. Tediore weapons are fun; you throw these cheap pieces of garbage away when reloading and a new gun materializes in your hands while the discarded gun proceeds to explode. I also like how Bandits can't spell their weapons properly.
Enemies are much smarter now too, and they also feel more "natural", more "realistic". Bandits will actually look for cover or just put their faces straight into your gun, and they also seem to work as a team now. They also have better environmental awareness and try to avoid/use explosives to their advantage (at least that's how it feels to me).
The world is HUGE. I've partially explored three major areas and this makes about 5% of the in-game world map. Each individual area is much larger than the previous iteration's areas. You also get a bunch of side-quests right at the beginning (OK, not too early) and there's always something to do or explore everywhere. Not to mention the vistas are amazing!
The new UI has a bunch of improvements, but the inventory feels a little clunky and not much of an improvement from the first game. Comparing items was made easier, but equipping items isn't as simple as before. To switch a weapon, you have to go to the backpack column, click on a weapon, then click on the weapon slot you want to switch. Switching shields, mods and stuff for some reason requires the same steps as above, even though there is only one slot for each. Buying and selling items, however, is much better than before.
And now, a bit of gameplay! The video quality should improve after YouTube decides to process the videos. Oh, and sorry about some videos being cut before the actual end. You're better off watching the videos from my stream channel anyway.
