Banners, Scoring and Prizes

 

Banners:
In an effort to improve readability and to encourage more traffic through the blog, I've introduced banners to the top of review articles, like the examples shown above. Currently, I only have a few reviews on the site, and they are all positive reviews, but that is changing very soon!

Scoring:
Which brings me on to scoring. Since this blog started back in 2013, I've used a percentage system to convey my recommendation. I generally like to have an expectation vs reality approach to my reviews. So, for example, if I were to do a Call of Duty review, I expect that to be a mindless, simple FPS game and that's generally what I get from the experience, and so my review would generally be more favourable than some other reviews.

While I have used a similar system in my reviews up until now, I thought it time to come up with a more definite system to improve consistency in my past and upcoming reviews. So with my reviews,
 I always start at 100% and penalise for any issues I find. To standardise the penalties, I've come up with categories:
-1% - Trivial Issue - Something I don't like but doesn't effect the overall experience of the product.
-5% - Minor Issue - A minor issue that slightly detracts from the overall experience.
-10% - Major Issue - An issue that noticeably, regularly detracts from the overall experience.
Exceptional Issue - These issues are something so major it completely ruins the game play experience. I was going to standardise it at -25%, but then I decided that some issues can be so major they deserve a penalty well above that!

I am also introducing a standardised reward system that rewards products from some features. This will be used much less than the penalties as only features that impress me that are over and above my expectation of the product.
+1% - Minor feature over and above expectation.
+5% - Major feature over and above expectation.

I have backdated my reviews using the new banners and scoring scheme. In the future, I will list a products rewards and penalties in the review itself, however, I am electing not to backdate my reviews in that way. You can find our more on my scoring system here.

Award:

While coming up with my scoring system, I realised that it is possible for a product to receive several penalties, but still carry an outstanding recommendation from me. I've then created the wonderfully drawn Hibblejaybob Gem Award to give to products that have overcome my criticisms to still get a strong recommendation from myself.

For example, a product may get a good (>70%) or perhaps even an average rating because of some design flaws, but still be an absolutely must have product! Similarly, a product may have a good or gold (>90%) rating - but for one reason or another - will not receive the Gem Award. In this case, it's not to say I do not recommend the product, but in terms of games, there may be other similar games I enjoy/recommend more, and in terms of mods, it may be a fantastic mod but it doesn't contribute to the overall experience of the game for me.

This award is purely subject to my opinions of how I enjoyed the product, and unlike my scoring system, I will not specifically qualify why a product did or did not receive the Hibblejaybob Gem Award, as this award is more about my personal opinions than an objective critique. You can find out more about this award, including it's recipients, here.

Space Engineers - Torpedo Testing (First Test)

I've been playing Space Engineers a lot recently, and I've started expanding my designing. With one class completely made, and it's refit underway, as well as the construction of two more classes underway, I got to thinking about large scale offensive capabilities. This video is my first attempt at stringing all the concepts together into a functional system.

I'm not 100% sure if the warheads actually detonated or not, but they were at least destroyed in the collision. More testing will be required to get the detonation mechanism nailed down.

The torpedo itself has generally torpedo-like qualities - why fix what isn't broken! Cylindrical in shape to minimise the forward profile to prevent detection and countermeasures. The red passageway on the top of the torpedo (0:12) is the access hatch to the torpedo interior, which actually turned out to be surprising spacey (I will probably show it off once it's more finalised). The merge block visible on the right hand side is part of the launching mechanism.

This torpedo test was done against the standard Space Engineers "Red Ship".

Recap - A new venture! - Emergency 4

After seeing several discussions of Emergency 4, and various mods for it, I decided I'd give it a bash. I've not done a proper review yet, nor have a I done any of the campaign missions. There is a freeplay mode in which you have a city that will experience a wide variety of situations that you need to safely respond to. I did a fairly long freeplay mode video which you can watch below. I plan on doing more videos and reviews on Emergency 4 and its mods in the future.

Some Racing Clips

I recently stumbled across these wonderful incidents from my days of single player Race07 - Enjoy!

PAYDAY 2 Series: A Heist Gone Wrong

So me and my friends have been playing Payday 2 on a regular basis for some time now. We have accumulated many many hours of footage. The funniest (and least offensive) material is making its way to Youtube as time allows.

To start with, we'll be posting full games showing the painful hilarity of us getting to know the game. Once we start getting into our routine, we'll whittle it down to the funnies.

Hope you enjoy, here's what's online so far:

Test Drive Tuesday - Mazda 787

Game: Simraceway Cost: $7


So today's Test Drive Tuesday was the Mazda 787 and I have to say, I spent about 20 minutes trying it out, then quit the race to buy the Mazda. I said of the Maserati last week that it was the most fun I've had in a supercar, but the Mazda wipes away all the other cars I've tried. The straight line acceleration and braking is phenomenal and the aero package in the car means the car can sustain very hight speeds in corners as well as being able to hold very heavy braking and hard acceleration. Kitted out right, at 220mph, the Mazda is one of the fastest cars in the game that I've driven. Both me and my friend found the car a very easy drive and a very enjoyable one too. The car is both fun and easy to drive for people who are not used to rear wheel drive vehicles, or who aren't used to racing games at all, and weighing in at $7 out of promotion, its one of the cheapest supercars I've come across on Simraceway, and I'd thoroughly recommend purchasing it. Also, much like the lap board in Top Gear, I'm starting a table of personal best laps around 6 tracks in the cars I test. The reason is that trying to review a car is very subjective. Your experience of a car depends on your skills and preferences in driving, which will differ from mines and other peoples. I've chosen 6 tracks, 3 ovals and 3 circuits: Daytona is a test of the pure flat out speed of the car, whereas Martinsville and Bristol form a great test of accelerating, braking and steering stability. I've come to love the Watkins Glen long track for its fast opening section and I feel that the latter stage is a good test of the stability of the car in constant-speed corners. Similarly Laguna Seca is a good mix of fast corners testing the stability and acceleration of cars. Finally Longstone Pass is a tricky track with many medium and heavy braking sections that push the boundaries of of the car your driving. So I'm currently working my through the list of cars I already own, I'll announce how the cars stack up against others. Just now, the Mazda is first on all counts! I'll finish off the videos and get them uploaded when I can. Unfortunately because the Mazda was so easy to drive, the Test Drive Madness videos won't feature this week as there was no hilarious crashes. I will put some videos of the racing performance though. Thanks for reading!

Test Drive Madness - Maserati MC12 GT1

Another weekly I want to start. After reviewing cars during the day as part of the Test Drive Tuesday, me and my friend (Sozedge on screen) like to team up and do some races in the TDT cars. This always ends up in shambolic disasters as opposed to meaningful races, so this series is more for the yuks than it is a legitimate review of racing the TDT cars. This week, we bring you the Maserati MC12 GT1 at Watkins Glen, Laguna Seca, Silverstone and Daytona.

Again, I apologise that out microphones are quiet and hissy in places, will try to get it sorted next week.

Simraceway Review

Website: https://www.simraceway.com/‎
*Currently in Beta*
Category: Motor Racing
Cost: Free (has micro-transactions)
My Rating: 85%

Simraceway is an up and coming online racing platform that's currently in an open beta stage. It's available for free with all the tacks and 3 cars by default, with many other cars currently available for purchase and more under development. 

Cars
The development team at Simraceway have the luxury of having their own track and racing instruction school at the Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, California, complete with a team of experienced racing drivers. This allows the team to really get most realistic driving experience for the cars they develop - of which they have made some videos of the process: http://youtu.be/A2LrA_4zaaU. I have done test drives of a good dozen of the cars they offer, from VW Jettas to Maserati supercars, go-karts to IndyCar and while I don't claim to be a racing guru, my opinion of the physics is that they are very well done: Even low powered cars can catch you out if you make a complete mess of a corners (I always drive will all the driving aids turned off). High powered cars can be almost undrivable if you don't know how to deal with them, but far from that acting against the game, it really shows off the difficulties of driving and racing these cars as you would face if you tried it for real. It also means when you do eventually master driving a car and put out a great flying lap, you get a great sense of satisfaction from the challenge!

The cars are visually well modelled both internally and externally. Damage (with the exception of major individual components such as wheels and wings) is not modelled visually, which is a bit disappointing but the game is still in beta. The physics modelling of damage is also very well done, and while fairly simple low powered cars can take a few bashes before any noticeable impact, but gently glance a wall in a supercar and expect to suffer for your crime!

Overall, the cars look great and handle realistically ("well" is a very subjective term).

Tracks
Simraceway has decent lineup of tracks, which they release for free when they are developed. Being an American-based company, most of the tracks available are based there and features a mix of road courses such a Sonoma and the Circuit of the Americas and oval tracks such as Daytona and Indianapolis. There are a few famous tracks outside America, including Silverstone and Zandvoort, with more surely to be added. One feature I did like was that all the variations of circuits are neatly grouped in one menu per track, unlike other racing sims. The tracks themselves all seem well modelled with tracks, kerbs, gravel traps and features all appear to be correctly placed, though I haven't visited any of them in person!

While I do have a strong computer setup, I'm still very very impressed with optimisation of the game as a whole. With full graphics settings, 59-AI cars racing on a track AND fraps recording the screen, the game remained at a comfortable 50-60 FPS. Things only got a bit hairy when large crashes involving many cars brought the FPS down to about 15 FPS, but those are exceptional circumstances. This allows the tracks and backgrounds to be modelled in great detail, and they are!

Single-player
As a multi-player platform, single-player comes in the form of "practice", where you can either take a car around your track by yourself, or race against the AI. The AI races are all very mechanical: all the cars look identical and all follow near-perfect vector lines, which takes alot of the fun out of single player racing, albeit, single player isn't a full feature of Simraceway.

Multi-player
Multi-player is the main staple of gameplay in Simraceway and comes in two forms: Quick Races and Events. In quick-races, its a straight up race against other people on a track. Sometimes its all in the same car and recently, users can select from a set of cars. So, the experience boils down to the people you play with, which is usually bad - "rammers" are very infuriating and can put to waste what is usually 90% of a great race. Of course, in racing, accidents happen all the time, but rammers intentionally hit into your car hard and there is no punishment for regular offenders. This can sometimes reduce your time on the game to waiting until the people you know are rammers to leave or go into a race so that you can form another one of your own, which is very detrimental to the experience. 

In these races, qualifying is done away with and instead, users starting positions are determined by their Skillquant. The Skillquant is a well balanced score and is worked out by several factors including how many places you've gained/lost during races, how often you followed the racing line and how often you lost control of the car. I think its a very good idea as it means having a minor bump or a bad start doesn't mean the end of your race-winning career, and gives a good reflection on users actual racing ability.

Events are races against the clock, where you go to a track by yourself and try to get the best time. What I really like about events is the ghosts, if you enable them. When you start, you get the ghost of the slowest recorded time and when you set a time, the ghost then becomes that of the person above you in the timing sheets, and so on until you are at the top. It can be very comical to be worried about having the ghost in front of you, only to see it spin off into a wall and you know you're getting a better time! That feature makes the Event experience quite pleasurable in my experience.   

Other Features
Other than the default cars, you are required to buy to other cars which can be done with real money, or "credits". Credits are worth 0.1 cents per credit, but as you race online in either events or quick races, you gain 5 credits for every lap you complete, which is nice as regular users can then "win" the cars they want, rather than having to spend money.

There is another major feature, which I will discuss in my next post.
 

Issues
One of the major problems I have with this game as it is, as I've already discussed, is rammers, and I hope that Simraceway can come up with some way of dealing with them that prevents them from racing in that manner and discourages others from doing the same.

Given the diversity and optimisation of the game as a whole, even in the beta stage it is now, I feel it would not take a significant amount of work to add a full featured single player mode, be it customisable careers or just individual races with imperfect-AI driven cars. While at the moment, the safety car is not functioning on all tracks, when it was working, it provided a very good racing experience with full flags and I really enjoyed the fact you could opt in to formation laps for standing or rolling starts. Realistically, if they just fixed the safety car and made some AI profiles with different liverys then they could turn the game from a good online racing platform to the one of the most diverse modern racing gamings on the market today, and (perhaps as someone with a fairly slow internet), I do feel the game is lacking for it.

Nevertheless, given the platform is completely free, if you're into racing its very much worth a look. Despite my few criticisms it has now become my racing sim of choice, and I have recently introduced my friend to it too: he's now hooked!

Want to see more? Check out my Simraceway videos on my Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/hibblejaybob

Thanks for reading!

New Blog

So, as a person with more games on their Steam list than most Valve employees, I found myself a tad bored when my £50 gaming mouse went all Mac-style on me and couldn't right click. In these dark and lonely time, I decided to myself 2 things: that first, I was going to get back into game building and secondly, I was going to start a blog about gaming. And as with all ambitious projects of mines, I've picked the perfect time to begin: my final, and most important year at university starts next week, all the while I'm at working, learning two languages, doing a competitive year as a target shooter and qualifying to become a real life racing driver. There is no way at all that I might be overstretched!

Anyway, gaming takes up alot of my time so I want this to become a regular fixture of mine and hopefully, readers enjoy it enough that it becomes a regular fixture of theirs too. Now, I can't keep up with constant new releases (as an independent here, I anything I spend on games comes out of my budget for food), and my computer setup is already rather precarious, so I can't really do the crowbarring necessary to get alot of vintage games running on my setup. So rather than a constant stream of reviews on new games or retrospect of old ones, both of which are already well covered on the internet, I'd think I'd dedicate my blog to the overall topic of gaming. Mainly, I'd like to focus on discussing the development of, and the concepts behind the games we see today and how they've evolved the games of yesteryear. One thing I would like to do fairly regularly is discuss the hard-working modding community, reviewing some good mods and talking about how their work changes the games we play. And once I violently crowbar gently absorb the necessary knowledge to begin my games creations in earnest, I'll talk about what its like and and the work behind developing a game of your very own.

Of course, I will also do some reviews on the games I'm playing now and some of my favourites from the past. Generally, I hold quite positive opinions of games that others might be quick to criticise and complain about, so I wouldn't say the reviews would be highly critical, so I reckon my reviews would be the case of documenting the reasons why you should buy or play a game. As for what I play, I'm very open and have everything from Call of Duty to Rail Simulator, Indie to Triple-A developers, and ages and genres across the board. I'm happy to play anything, although I very much enjoy simulation. In particular, I spend alot of my time on Microsofts Flight Simulator. Indeed, my very idea for starting this blog came from my friend who regularly does videos for the benefit of those interested in flying. His site can be found here: http://merryfaceaviation.com/ and is well worth checking out, if you're interested.

So, this has been a fairly long post, thanks for reading. I don't have all that great sound gear on my setup, so while I put a far few videos on my Youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/hibblejaybob) I narrate fairly few. Now that I've started this, I will try to do more, time allowing. I will put videos online fairly regularly and like relevant ones here. I also have a long-abandoned project doing content creation for RailWorks which can be found here: http://giffordlightrailway.blogspot.co.uk/. For the moment, most of my discussions will be done by text on this blog. So before I go, I'd like to give a shout out to a couple of great places to go for insights into games and funny things that happen in them: first is Zero Punctuation (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation) and second is Random Encounter (http://uk.gamespot.com/shows/random-encounter/).

So thanks again for reading, throughout this blog, feel free to give any comments, questions or suggestions on any topics or games I've mentioned, or that you want me to cover. See you all soon!

Hibblejaybob