DayZ standalone

Well its been a while so I thought I'd do a quick write up on the DayZ standalone. For those that don't know dayz was initially a mod for arma 2. Now its a standalone game in alpha. As with all alphas it is no where near finished (unlike the mod there are no vehicles, very few guns, some serious bugs, very little hunting or survival and much lower amounts of loot) however it takes the game to whole new heights.
In terms of appearance the game is almost identical, eating and drinking still work the same way and you get shot you know about it. This game is exceptional even though its in its alpha phase however I have a couple of minor criticisms. Firstly the amount of loot is drastically reduced, in the original mod there was too much and now there is too little. Food quantity is the main draw back as you have to eat and drink very frequently, on the other hand it makes finding a gun far less frequent which can only be a good thing. The other problem is the PvP. This is an FPS and I completely understand the occasional kill but on my first life in I got shot within 5 minutes of spawning having only a torch and a teeshirt. The second time I was 6 hours in with a good amount of kit scouting around vysota looking for some food in the supermarkets when I came across an obvious newbie, he had nothing more than I had the first time I was killed and so I took him in. I found him an axe, some medical supplies and some food. The moment my back was turned he axed me in the head. I made the biggest bambi mistake and forgot the first and last rule NEVER TRUST ANYBODY.
This kill for loot trend is further exacerbated by the fact that it works. It is far easier to get a quick kill than it is to look for all the loot in the first place. Also there is no incentive to help other survivors, the risk you take talking to someone is so big that more often than not popping a quick one in their head is so much simpler.
All in all this has all the hall marks of a great game with or without the PvP. As long as you don't get too attached to your gear you will love this game.

It's been awhile

Well uni certainly picked up! With almost a full term between my last post and this one, you could say I've been neglecting the blog a wee bit. On the plus side there is just been so much to do. Whilst there have been a few 5am starts to get assignments done by the deadline, work somewhat surprisingly hasn't been too bad. One of the best things has been the large portion of free time. This brings me in a round-about sort of way to Battlefield 4.

With it having been released a month or so ago I have yet to get my grubby mitts on it. The worst thing is that it is just lying around at home unopened just tantalisingly out of reach. On the plus side I'm going home in 6 days time and it will no doubt occupy a very large chunk of any free time from now until January.

Anyhow I've got a report to write on flour beetles and so must be on my way.
Till I blog again alvederzane.

uni life

So I've just moved in to uni halls and so far all is peaceful... No stoners wandering around and no streakers jumping in to hedges. To put it bluntly its quite dull, no one knows anyone and everyone wanders around with their heads in their arses. Where is the non-stop drinking of freshers? where are the late nights and crazy stories?? I'm not even a particularly outgoing person, as any one who has read any of my other posts could probably guess, yet here i'm the most outgoing person around.
On the upside the accommodation is great no mold, no rodents and a half decent mattress.
From this point uni life can only go up, the few people who don't jump half a mile when someone says hello are very nice and so given enough time the rest will come round.
Anyho that's it for another rant
blog out

Magicka

Finally a small studio has put out a decent game. All too often small studios produce games that look cheap, have a shit plot line and are just BORING. Magicka completely changes the game. Designed by arrowhead studios magicka uses a 8 element system to produce Magicks, the main way of killing things in the game. Sounds confusing but after a while it becomes very intuitive.

With an engaging campaign with replayability (often a gaping hole in small studio games) magicka also brings a challenge mode, survive waves of enemies and a PvP mode. With the many dlc packs the challenge mode becomes almost as extensive as the campaign and 4 new pseudo-campaigns give even more. This cheap as chips game is better than almost all large studio games and definitely deserves a place on the steam best buys list.

best of british

More on battlefield 3 I'm afraid. This time I'm going to take a look over the British guns in the soon to be obsolete battlefield.

So first up is the L85A2. This bullpup rife is available for the assault class and is well worth the effort to get. The L85A2's assignment is a bi+*h to get. The first two parts are a piece of cake, 100 kills with assault rifles and 30 kills with the M320, the last part is the tricky bit. 5 Squad death match wins. If like me you play solo without a headset and don't have a set squad then being dumped with 1-3 random team mates in a game that requires you to work so closely with so few people wasn't my cup of tea. any hoo I got the blasted wins and got the gun. Now I don't know stats and can't be bothered to look them up so all I can say is that it feels right. The fire rate isn't so quick that you burn through a clip in seconds but not so slow that you can't kill anything. It sounds right and due to the slower than normal fire rate and mostly vertical recoil in 3 round bursts this gun is beastly at mid/long ranges. When playing on hardcore I use the suppressor, holo scope and no under barrel attachment.

The second British gun is the L86A2. The L86A2 is a LMG that is SO easy to unlock (20 squad resupplies and 20 kills with LMGs) and is SO good. In my opinion it is the best LMG in the game. Whilst not having the huge magazines of the PKP and the M249 etc. the L86A2 is a LMG for people who don't use LMGs. While that may sound completely contradictory its not. The L86A2 has a tiny amount of bullet spread over long distances and with the PK-A (3.4x), bipod and either extended mag or suppressor depending on the map this gun easily bests the other LMGS.








Now the Final gun the L96. Just to put it out there I think there are better guns out there most notably the JNG-90 and the SV98. That said the L96 is a perfectly good gun. In hardcore a shot to the chest can kill in 1 shot but for normal modes then the increased bullet speed (less bullet drop) of the JNG-90 and the faster bolt cycle of the SV98 means that the L96 is a halfway house that isn't as good as the start and finishing posts.
So that concludes the British segment of my BF3 stuff.

-Al out 

Diving in sharm - Red sea fish

I just got back from a week diving in Egypt. Excluding the Egyptian men who are creepy and sleazy, the huge amount of mess everywhere and the constant reminder of how wrong a property boom can be by the half built buildings all around you Egypt is beautiful in a barren desolate kind of way.
Under the water however the story couldn't be more different. I did my training with a company called elite diving who I couldn't recommend any more highly. They are simply fantastic. We managed to do 3 dives a day for 5 days completing both our open water and our advanced. Ras Mohammed national park is up in the top 5 dive sites in the world, going to a place like this does however have one downfall. Now I will be totally underwhelmed when I go to places that are not so exquisite.

As I want to zoology at uni this post is going to go into more detail about some of fish I saw, not everybody's cup of tea I know but who cares.

Red toothed trigger fish

Some of the most common fish we saw were red toothed trigger fish, so named because of the distinctive fins and a red canine tooth. The trigger fish family can be incredibly aggressive especially when guarding their eggs. We also saw a small number of titan triggerfish whose territory extends in a cone shape above their nest. These are hugely territorial and if a diver swims over them they will attack you.

Titan trigger fish



Another very common fish, especially around during the boat dives, is the fusilier fish. When see in the day time these fish look very plain an quite mundane. This is due to the water removing much of the red light. The fusilier fish really come in to their own during the night. They are relatively sluggish letting you get closer to the shoal and when you shine a torch on them the reds and orange on their stomach show up. They also have a reflective blue strip on their flank which at night becomes almost a blue neon colour.

Blue striped fusilier fish

Another common fish is the parrot fish. These some of the most interesting fish around the red sea. It is more than likely that the sand you run your hand through whist at the bottom of the sea has been trough a parrot fish. These fish eat corral and as it moves through their system the indigestible matter is excreted as sand. These many parrot fish, a sub-set of the wrasse family, secrete a mucus layer around them in order to keep their sent from escaping as they sleep. This mucus layer is then re-ingested in the morning and used again in the night. Sadly due to parrot fish being disturbed as they sleep by divers many parrot fish have lost their mucus layer and are more vulnerable to predation.

parrot fish showing mucus layer

Parrot fish

And finally what diving trip would be complete with out the little nemo fish or anemone fish. These tiny fish about the size of a large middle finger rival the titan trigger fish for aggressiveness. They will quite happily take a nip of any part of your body. the humble Clown fish has a very interesting love life. All clown fish are born male and the most dominant fish becomes a female. Most clown fish pairs have 1 or 2 smaller males to ensure that should the dominant female die the new female will still have a mating pair.

Clown fish (note the larger female)

considering there are 1,100 species of fish in the red sea the above are just a few that especially caught my eye. We saw many others including a comb jelly. Any hoo i'm done rambling 'bout fish. Alex out.

 

Comb jelly (note the bioluminescence down the sides)

End of exams and GOW3 and Bulletstorm

Righty ho here goes my second post. Exams are finally over and I'm back home for the extended holidays. So just got round to getting Gears of war 3 and Bulletstorm, 2 games both made by epic games.
Both have sufficiently long campaigns to keep you occupied for 18+ hours and with all the extras they both a lot of re-playability.  Bulletstorm is a tongue in cheek FPS which really deserves its 18 rating. This game is so much fun if you don't take it to seriously, keep an open mind about using the surrounding scenery to kill everything in your path this game is truly fantastic. Whilst the story isn't the greatest the skillshot aspect adds a unique spin on the occasionally tiresome fps franchise. The game also looks beautiful especially during the set pieces.

Gears of war  has a well written, well thought out campaign with so many extras as to make your mouth water. This game is designed to be played as a coop game from the addition of horde and beast mode, game types that pitch you as the COG against 50 waves of gibbering beasts and as the gibbering beasts against 12 waves of COG soldiers, and an offline verses mode that allows the addition of bots something that is sorely missing from almost all games these days.

All in all both games are great fun to play with Gears of war being better with someone else and bulletstorm being a game for some light relief.

Any hows that concludes my second post hopefully more to come.