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iRacing: All the gear and no idea!

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I love motorsport, it's about the only sport that really interests me to be honest. I follow the misfortunes of my local football club Brighton & Hove Albion, but I'm not a true fan of football. I also play a little bit of Snooker (badly). But I'm not a sporty person at all.

I love my cars though, and I love to watch a race! There's something about the control the drivers have over their machines that fascinates me. I've been a fan of Formula 1 for more years than I can remember. I make regular visits to my local-ish circuit Brands Hatch to watch various races from the now defunct A1-GP, the BTCC, the legends series and most recently truck racing! I also love going to Goodwood for the Revival and Festival of Speed.

It's fair to say I have more than a passing interest in the sport, though I would never think I could actually get in a car and survive even one lap without killing myself! That's where my other love comes in to it, video games...

I've played racing games for as long as they've been around, from arcade classics like Outrun to home console revelations such as Virtua Racing and Gran Turismo. On the whole though, I've been a PC gamer for the most part. I remember starting out with "Grand Prix Circuit" which ran in MS-DOS and moved on to other classic racing games like Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix 2. More recently I've enjoyed the new Dirt rally and F1 games from Codemasters, the Forza games and Assetto Corsa.

To enhance my enjoyment I've used various racing wheels over the years. I started with the old MS sidewinder FF wheel and when the 360 came along I picked up the official wheel for that too. I've also had the slightly less spectacular Nintendo Wii "wheel" accessory for the Wiimote, the less said about that the better!

The MS sidewinder FF wheel was great in its day, but the cheep plastic pedals and lack of a clutch and gear stick left me wanting more. So a few months ago I splashed out and treated myself to a slightly more high-end offering. I bought a Thrustmaster T500RS with pedals and the TH8RS gear stick to accompany it. This wasn't cheap, but having researched the alternatives, namely the Logitech G27 and Fanatec Clubsport range. I decided that in terms of bang for the buck, the Thrustmaster was the only option.

The G27 seems to be a good entry level option, it has the wheel, pedals and gear stick all included and can be picked up for around £250. I'm sure if I'd bought it I'd have been happy enough, but one of the things that put me off my old MS Sidewinder was the size of the wheel. It was much smaller than a real steering wheel and the G27 was similar. It is also almost entirely made from plastic and has a gear driven force feedback system. Reviews suggested it was rather weak as a result.

The Fanatec is supposedly the holy grail of wheels, I'd have one of those every day if money was no object, but the reality is that money very much is the object that stops me getting one of these. The wheel base alone (no actual wheel with that, you buy it seperatly) is £450, the wheels start from £140. Then add on the cost of the pedals (£200) and the gear stick (£150), suddenly I'm looking at spending the best part of £1,000 on a wheel! HAHAHAHAHAHA... If I win the lottery I'll have one, but until then....

So, the T500RS from Thrustmaster was the choice for me, a £350 investment plus an extra £100 for the gear shifter. Less than half the price of the Rolls Royce listed above. It's a thing of beauty too, the wheel is big, the pedals have a fantastic build quality and feel superb. The feedback through the massive motor and belt is enough to rip the wheel from your hands when you have a big crash. It transforms the experience in ways you can only imagine until you've tried it.

Being able to feather the throttle with your right foot, or apply just a small amount of brake to nose in to a corner just can't be replicated with a controller. The feedback you get from the wheel gives you so much information, you can feel the cars grip!

After using the wheel for a while I wanted to take my virtual racing to the next level. I'd heard a lot about iRacing which sort of a bit like an MMORPG for racing. It's expensive, but then what MMORPG isn't? Fortunately I signed up during a half price sale and went for the full 2 years to maximise my savings. It's a big commitment given that I'd never played the game before!

The thing with iRacing is that it's a racing simulation, there's nothing arcade about it. This is all about real tracks, real vehicles and the most accurate physics you'll find! The graphics aren't the greatest, but frame rate is king here and they are more that adequate (I think it looks very nice). The people who play it take it very seriously too, each player has their own license with points attached. Your license level is what dictates which races and vehicles you can access. At the entry level (Rookie) you only have a couple of cars and tracks to choose from.

This seems harsh at first, but it's actually a good thing, as it forces you to get good with the limited access you have. Master the entry level Mazda MX-5 and Summit Point Raceway, then you can improve your safety rating and open up more of the game ... sorry, SIMULATION!

Having grown up playing lots of racing games, I thought I knew a thing or two about racing. Turns out I was wrong, as most rookies, I went into my first race not really knowing what to expect and not having practised enough. I went off the track a lot and got into a couple of crashes, that was my race over and my safety rating took a hammering.

It's all about your Safety Rating in iRacing and it's a brilliant idea. It's what allows you to "level-up". Stay out of trouble and have a clean race and your rating improves, but just going off the track will lead to a penalty. As will losing control and colliding with other cars, it forces you to race properly. You can't just floor it off the line and pile up in the first corner, you won't get anywhere doing that. It still happens at the Rookie level, but beyond that the players... sorry DRIVERS, take things a lot more seriously. You can't afford to crash for fear of losing your licence.

The key to success is practise, practise, practise. You can make as many mistakes as you like in practise sessions, it's only qualifying and racing that will actually effect your rating. So you have to pump in lap, after lap, after lap learning the braking points, turn in points, improving your speed but most importantly improving your consistency! You need to be able to do around 20 laps and not spin off or lose control, keep the wheels of your car between the white lines at all times before you contemplate actually racing. I learnt that the hard way and I'm still stuck in the Rookie class :-( I'm getting better though.

The game looks amazing on my system, I've added a picture of my setup just to show off a little bit. I'd actually love to get myself a racing cockpit for it all, but I just don't have the space for that, and my PC has to do more than just play racing games. Again, if I win the lottery I'll be picking one up just as soon as I can. I've also been tempted to buy some racing shoes, it's tough to do a full race with the pedals while wearing socks. I've tried using slippers but they just don't work


Shadow of Mordor: Enraging not enjoyable!

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Middle Earth : Shadow Of Mordor is one of those rare games. It's a game that I had absolutely no idea was in development until AFTER it had been released! Not only that, but when I heard about it from a friend and looked it up I discovered it was getting rave reviews. This is something very unusual given that my on-line social networks revolve mainly around gaming. Therefore it was without hesitation that I purchased this game on Steam without a second thought. This was my first mistake!

I'd heard it was very similar in style to the Assassin's Creed and Batman games, I have played both these games and they have given me varying levels of enjoyment over the years as different versions have been released. I was happy to hear this as I'd read that Shadow Of Mordor improved on the ideas and mechanics of those games, so I was very eager to see what was in store for me.

The first hour of playing felt extremely confusing, I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing, I didn't know who I was or where I was going. I looked at the map and didn't really understand anything on it. So I started to explore... and that's where things started to go wrong! I was attacked by Orcs.. or is that Uruks... I'm still not sure I understand the difference, or if there even is one.

Inevitably I died as the 5 or 6 creatures bludgeoned me to death in a fairly swift and efficient manner. It seems the one who killed me got a promotion, but that wasn't really explained very well. I repeated the same process about 4 or 5 times, each time I'd try to explore the map and each time I'd encounter a group of enemies who would dispatch me back to the afterlife/wraith/ghost tower. Eventually I managed to survive long enough to figure out the ranking/army system used by the hordes of Uruks. I even managed to kill a captain at one point!

For the most part though, it was a case of trying to figure out where to go, ending up in a fight and dying... rinse and repeat for an hour or so. This, I'm sure you can imagine, became somewhat of a chore so I quit.

Not to be outdone, I returned to the game an hour or so later having read more reviews to try and figure out exactly what the hell I was supposed to do to survive for longer than 5 minutes. I thought I had some ideas, stay hidden was one of them. It worked to a degree, but eventually you have to emerge from hiding and as soon as I did, I'd get slaughtered again.

The thing is, Shadow Of Mordor does a good job of ticking just about all the boxes on the list of things I hate in a game. The principle one being re-spawning enemies. I will often quit a game without hesitation if a game introduces re-spawning enemies. Boderlands 2 was a classic example of this, I missed the first game but purchased the second one on the recommendation of friends. I didn't realise the game involved a lot of backtracking and retracing your steps, which the developers figured would be more fun if you had to kill the same groups of enemies over and over again. Not even randomly generated ones, they were the exact same characters in exactly the same locations every time. Needless to say that game lasted a couple of hours before it went in the trash.

Normally, if I know about it in advance I won't bother to buy the game, but I didn't in the case of Shadow Of Mordor. The argument goes that giving you endless enemies to fight enables you to level up your character by grinding away. My argument is that it's a lazy game mechanic that enables the developers to add several hours to the game play without having to make any additional game! If I clear out an area, I expect that area to be clear when I return, unless there is a valid reason for re-enforcements in the story as a one off. But in Shadow Of Mordor, you can be fighting a group of 5 or 6 Uruks, and as you're fighting them, 5 or 6 more will just appear from nowhere, and then another 5, and another 5 until you are totally overwhelmed and dead!

On the occasions that I found a Captain (or one just randomly appeared in the middle of a fight), I would already be in a weakened state with no way of regaining any health. So inevitably the captain would kill me, and he would level up. That's one of the "clever" things in this game and what it's being given huge credit for. As enemies kill you, they level up, become more powerful etc.. they also remember their past encounters with you. The problem with this, as I've found out, is that it sort of breaks the whole difficulty progression.

You see, every time a Captain kills me, he levels up, but I don't. This means the next time I encounter him, he's harder to kill, but I'm still just as weak as the last time I fought him and lost. Do you spot the flaw in this design? It means the game gets harder the worse you are! That's some screwed up logic right there isn't it?

I guess you could just spend even more time grinding the endlessly re-spawning grunts, but even they kill me after a while, and frankly it's just boring.

You start the game seriously under-powered to face the enemies around you and trying to escape that at the start is very difficult. The game at the beginning is punishingly hard and I rage quit countless times. I kept coming back though because the reviews were all so glowing, I couldn't find a bad one! I thought I must be missing something and it would all come together, I can tell you now that it didn't.

I now have 8 hours of play time registered on Steam and I don't think I've actually managed to get anywhere! I think I've completed maybe two missions so far, and that was only through endless repetition and eventually getting lucky. Certainly not because I was able to accomplish it through any skills I'd developed.

I like a game that presents a challenge, but that challenge has to be enjoyable. I don't think I can honestly say I've enjoyed any of the time I've spent playing Shadow Of Mordor, it's just got me stressed and frustrated. I understand that you are supposed to die in this game, that's how the whole Uruk army/nemesis thing works, but I just didn't appreciate being overrun every time I got into a conflict. Essentially, if I started a fight, I'd end up dead!

I felt helpless and powerless to make any progress within the game, you can level up and improve your abilities, but you have to be able to survive some fights to gain the XP in order to do that. I can't!

Now normally a game offers difficulty levels, easy, normal, hardcore etc... and when it does, I invariably chose the easy option. Because I know I'm not that great at games, but I like to experience them and absorb myself in the story and world. If a game doesn't do that, it will usually have some sort of adaptive AI where the fights get easier and it will set itself to be just enough of a challenge to keep you on your toes. Not so in Shadow Of Mordor, it will happily just kill you again and again and again and again. In fact it goes further by punishing you for being bad by making the captains more powerful!

One of the missions I failed numerous times was a stealth mission where if the alarm was raised, you failed the mission (another of my pet-peeves). Well I must have attempted that 30 or more times, eventually getting through to the target, and when I did, I locked on to the wrong enemy by mistake and failed it AGAIN!!!!

The encounters with the Captains are totally random too, I knew the location of one of them as I had him marked. He was the opposite side of the map, but right in the middle of a fight in a camp, suddenly he shows up! That's just stupid and unnecessary.

I can't see any way to escape the misery of grinding hours and hours of grunts to try and match the Captains now. That's my idea of gaming hell and I really wanted to like the game, that is evident by the 8 hours I spent trying to get on top of it. But the repetitive nature of the game play, the endless deaths and retries have finally taken their toll.

The saddest part of all is that I bought the game on Steam so I can't trade it in for something else!


DIary of a Witcher : Part 2

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Well as I suspected, Vensna only wanted me for my body! She was the hot waitress I was talking about in the last entry. At least I got to know her name before anything happened, I did have to get her drunk first though (what's new).

So anyway, I've realised this series of posts is going to be a bit spoilerific. But I'm okay with that, after all the game was released 6 years ago and frankly if you haven't played it before you're unlikely to now (but you should). Also, nobody is forcing you to read any of this, you could stop right now and click this link to be taken to happy place. Assuming you've not done that you've only got yourself to blame if this ruins anything for you!

So anyway, I've completed the Prologue and Chapter 1 of the game now, I'm not sure how many hours that is, but it feels like a lot. That's not to say much has happened, this game is quite the slow burner. I've had encounters with more Barghests and Drowners than I could care to remember and I've slaughtered my fair share of Ghouls too.

I met a Dwarf outside of Vizima who I think was a blacksmith, I had a chat with him and I was in stitches as he was swearing like a trooper! There was another Dwarf called Zoltan who taught me how to play a game of dice that's based on Poker. You can play several people in the game and it's a quick way to make money. The trouble is, whether you actually make money or not is all down to the luck of the dice. Sadly I haven't had much luck and I've lost far more money than I've made so far... damn gambling!

I also met a guy called Odo (not the one from Star Trek), a rich gentleman who partakes in the game of poker dice. He seemed a nice guy until I discovered he had killed his brother for his money, hence why he is so rich. Before I found that out though I had another interesting experience in the game, that of alcohol. He got me drunk! It's actually quite funny, you get double vision and struggle to walk straight. You can sleep it off easily enough and I'm not sure it has any benefit other than being a bit of fun.

Abigail doesn't look like a Witch
I had my first big decision to make too, there's a Witch called Abigail (she's also hot), and you have to decide if she was responsible for the beast that has been plaguing the village. The villagers have got their pitchforks out and are ready to burn her at the steak, they have lots of tales about her wicked deeds. The problem is there's a lot of evidence that supports her innocence too and if you talk to her there are two sides to the stories. Essentially it's left for you to make up your mind who you believe.

So, having had sex with her (well it would be rude not to) I went out to face the villagers and pass judgement. I decided she was innocent and that although she is a Witch, she was not doing evil. This lead to a fight with half the village and I ended up having to kill numerous people.

Did I let her manipulate me to save her life? Possibly, maybe I'll find out as the game progresses. But regardless of her good looks and charm I think I made the right choice.

Having completed the first Chapter I'm starting to see some of the issues with the game. The first is the amount of backtracking, it's seemingly endless. Every character you speak to seems to want you to walk to the opposite side of the area to fetch something or kill something. When you've done that you walk all the way back to collect your reward or information. This generally leads you to having to walk back to the other side of the map to get to your next objective. This process goes on and on and on. It's a bit repetitive, but I've managed to stick with it so far and the story is starting to draw me in to the point where I want to see where it is heading. So even though I despair at constantly trekking backwards and forwards, I'm having to go with it.

I'm also having trouble with some of the missions, the map marker isn't always very accurate. So while it will point an arrow in the direction you need to go, often you will follow it to a dead-end. Some places are only accessible from one direction and the tracking doesn't account for that! Also, when you reach your destination the person you need to see isn't always there. The NPCs have a fair amount of freedom in the game, but will be in certain locations at certain times. If you don't arrive at the right time you can get totally lost as to where you have to go. It's okay if you're meeting a character you've seen before as you can usually find them. But when it's someone new it's tough! I spent ages trying to find a merchant selling a certain herb who was never where the map said he should be. Turns out he was only about 15ft away but I was a long time figuring that out.

My Eyefinity setup is also giving me a few small problems, the game wasn't really designed with such a resolution in mind. So although the cut scenes play out, I'm missing a huge amount of the action, the way they've fudged it is to zoom in on the original view, so I'm only getting a tiny part of the vertical picture. In general gameplay it's fine, although the menu stuff is stuck to the far edges of the monitors which leads to a lot of mouse movement. I can live with these issues though, none of them are ruining the game. You can see it in the screenshot below:

Click to enlarge, OSD stuff is at the extreme edges :-(
In the Witcher 2 they fixed this and put all the On Screen Display stuff in the middle monitor, but there's no option to do that here.

I feel I've been quite negative in this post, and I don't mean to be. I'm really enjoying it, but not everything is perfect. None of these problems have caused me to give up yet, and normally I give up on things fairly quickly so it's definitely doing something right.

I've made it into Vizima now so that's a whole new area for me to explore, that's if I ever escape from this dungeon I've been put in....

EDIT: Just had a though, is it a coincidence that the three characters I've had sex with in the game so far (Triss, Vensna & Abigail) have all been redheads? Hmm, I do have a thing for redheads...

Diary of a Witcher : Part 1

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During the Steam summer sale, I purchased a copy of "The Witcher 2". I started playing it in Eyefinity on my PC but the frame rate was a bit poor and it really needs a gfx card upgrade to run sensibly. If I was on just one monitor I've no doubt my 7870 would laugh in the face of it, but a resolution of 5,760x1200 is just too much.

I want to hold off on upgrading until the new range of cards is released later in the year. As I've never played the original game I figured I'd play that first while I wait.

It runs on my three screens really well, although there is a bug which means the cut scenes only work if you turn the lighting down to basic. This isn't a disaster as it all still looks lovely. Being an older game I can get good frame rates too so everything is nice and smooth.

The hot waitress
You play the game as Geralt, a Witcher. I'm still not 100% clear on what a Witcher is, though it seems to be something to do with slaying monsters. So far I've only played a couple of hours into the story, I've defended against a castle siege though the Salamandra (the bad guys) managed to escape with some mutagens. I've saved the life of Triss Merigold by creating a magic potion and then I slept with her. The next day we all split up to try and track down the Salamandra, I headed South and seem to be in a village called Vizima.

I visited an Inn and got chatting to one of the waitresses, she seemed hot. The next thing I know, she's outside being hassled by some bandits, so I killed them and walked her home. She told me to meet her in a barn the next night with some wine. That's as far as I've got up to now, I'm guessing if I do as she asks then I'll be getting lucky again! I'll let you know how that pans out next time.

Tex Murphy: Under A Killing Moon

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Before I got my new shiny triple screen setup which you can read about over in this post: Triple monitors, calibration & Eyefinity. I decided to do some old school gaming. I'd recently learnt thanks to Niaz (@gospvg on Twitter) that a new Tex Murphy game was coming out. This had me tremendously excited as I had fond memories of the series.

I still had the games on the numerous CDs they came on, but as they were designed for a time before Windows these games ran in MS-DOS. This meant it wouldn’t be a trivial matter to get them running on modern PCs. Fortunately while searching the web for a method to do just that, I stumbled across the GOG website at http://www.gog.com. This made it possible to purchase the games at a very cheap price ($9.99) download them and run them in Windows! I decided for the stress free life and to get playing the games sooner rather than spend my weekend trouble shooting, I'd just pay up.

I'm glad I did, the whole process was very simple and I'm sure I'll be using GOG.com again in the future!

Once back in the game, the memories came flooding back, it was very nostalgic! The one thing that struck me more than anything else though, were the clunky controls. This was a first person point & click adventure game. But, this was in the day before "mouse-look" had been discovered. So instead of moving with the traditional WSAD keys, you moved with the mouse. Looking up and down was done with keys! It was most bizarre and I never truly got used to that. I was able to get by, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't hamper me somewhat.

The graphics engine was very dated too, but really after the first few minutes I wasn't bothered by that. The story line was interesting enough to keep me playing to the end, even in the tricky "stealth" section towards the end which was made far worse by the control scheme.

I played the game over a weekend, the voice acting is dodgy in places, but overall the writing is excellent and the video sections are both funny and move the story along nicely.

If you have missed out on this series of games I suggest you give them a shot. Just be patient with the controls and allow yourself to get to the bottom of the mystery. I'll be attempting the follow up "Tex Murphy: The Pandora Directive" and the sequel to that "Tex Murphy: Overseer" soon before the new game comes out later this year. Hopefully they will have fixed the controls in the new game!