I've been a gamer since a young age, my first experiences were with my old Atari 2600. Nowadays I'm mostly a PC guy but I also play board games when I have the group for it. And I love wrenching on cars besides.
Alright, so if you read my little quick look blurb on Xcom2 you already know it's a pretty tough game that puts itself a step above 2013's already challenging XCom: Enemy Unknown / Enemy Within. I'm here to put my thoughts down and I hope you'll stay with me for the read. Read more
With the end of #4if approaching quickly I was curious about what to do next. So I was looking at some article suggestions on our boards and one of those was the question of: Are there any games you're looking forward to in the near future? And I thought to myself, "Self, there are games you're looking forward to, you should write about that." Read more
Those of you that have been playing it already know that XCom 2 is a step up from Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within. I was expecting a bit more of the same great game play that those previous titles handed us, but what XCom 2 doles out is nothing short of punishing. And it's excellent!
I'm only playing on normal difficulty and I'm having to reload saves several times per mission so that I'm not losing my veteran soldiers. I think by the third mission I played, my basic, barely promoted soldiers were already coming up against mechanical units and mind controlling Sectoids. No unit in this game is easy to go toe to toe with.
Each project that's researched, each improvement made is met with furious resistance. Just get your best soldiers healed up? Ready to take on that black site finally? Awesome, let's go... Well, now there's an urgent mission available, if it's skipped the enemy gets guaranteed reinforcements for a month... shit guess we gotta do that. At least we've got experimental armor for our soldiers... well they have heavy units with plasma weapons that can bypass armor... what now? Grenades, perfect, take that!... wait, Shield Bearers... They cast an energy shield on all of their allies in a radius that soaks up damage before allowing units to be vulnerable... Get up there with your power sword Rangers and slash that guy up!... Great but now we're out of cover... and oh good a Viper has come to bind our ranger and take them out of combat until they're either dead or the Viper takes damage... Now we have wounded soldiers and it'll take days or maybe weeks before we can assault that black site that we were so prepared for. Who knows what will happen between now and then?
It's like that every step of the way and it's wonderfully stressful. 
If you were into XCom: Enemy Unknown, you're gonna be into XCom 2. Just be prepared to lose, a lot. If you're already playing XCom 2, good luck and godpseed Commander.
And I have to say it was a fun little side-scroller platformer. But I do mean little, it only took about three hours to complete from start to finish. Some quick thoughts follow. Read more
In keeping Greywolfe's theme of games played in childhood that surprise us now, I decided to revisit Namco's 1992 Super Nintendo title, Wings 2: Aces High. By the way this was sold in Europe as Blazing Skies, in case it looks familiar but the name doesn't quite fit for you.
I was twelve years old when I got to play this game for the first time and I fell in love with it because I got to fly a World War One biplane around and participate in dogfights and bomb buildings etc. However I never really payed attention to its historical significance. I only ever thought it was cool to be flying around in what was then a very highly detailed faux 3d environment battling with other planes.
The story behind Wings 2 is that the player takes part as the leader of a British war plane squadron that's been tasked to hinder Kaiser Wilhelm the second's war efforts. The squadron consists of five pilots, though you'll only ever see one at a time, and if any of them fail a mission and manage to survive they're dishonorably discharged from the air corp. If the player dies during a mission the pilot is given a memorial scene and his medals are displayed if he's procured any from his trials. The whole thing takes place during 1917 in France, of course during World War one. Ultimately the player is confronted by the Red Baron himself, Manfred von Richthofen.
While fighting other planes the player has to search for enemies and perform acrobatic moves to keep them in their sights. Firing your planes machine guns shows a trail of glowing hot ammunition streaming from the front of the aircraft. When those shots connected with the enemy you'd see small bursts to indicate that you'd hit and after a few shots you'd see smoke frothing from the engine and eventually the enemy craft would spin and fall from the sky landing in a great fiery explosion below. Pretty great detail for a 20 plus year old cartridge title.
So when I was playing this at a young age I never took into consideration the fact that these were among some of the first planes to be used as tools of war. And as such carried some of the first pilots to fly in a war. Looking at it now it's amazing that these guys survived any mission they were sent on.
These guys were flying around in planes made of wood and covered in canvas. They were the covered wagons of the skies. There was little in the way of warmth for the pilot, perhaps a wool and leather jacket, gloves, a silk scarf and a cap and goggles, so flying in cold weather was as miserable as it was dangerous. The scarves themselves were very important, they were used to keep the pilots goggles clean of oil and exhaust soot and also helped keep chafing away while they had to constantly swivel their necks to keep sight of the enemy.
The planes guns had to be engineered to fire through the beats of the propeller or the pilot would shoot himself down. Bombs were carried on the floor of cockpit and the pilot dropped them by hand while leaning over the side of the aircraft. All while dodging incoming fire from other planes or ground troops depending on how close they had to be to the target, and doing so without a parachute. These guys were arguably the ballsiest, craziest people there were during those times. Each one of them willingly put themselves in control of a slow, under-powered, basically armorless flying target and expected to die during every mission they undertook. And these incredibly brave men were also -inventing- flight maneuvers that are still used today. Unbelievable.
Looking back on what I saw at the time as just a fun flight combat game made me realize that it was so much more. While it isn't a highly realistic simulator like we have today, Wings 2: Aces High did and still does salute the bravery of the pioneers of air warfare from all sides of the conflict.
If you haven't already, You can check out Grewolfe's article here.
[image credit for the 1917 Nieuport fighter here] [That beautiful feature image is by Gary Meyer] [In game screenshot credit here] [This site has a lot of information on WWI aircraft]
By now we're probably all familiar with the up-coming DC film "Suicide Squad". Based on Detective Comics graphic novels of the same name, the Suicide Squad is comprised of a band of degenerate weirdos and misfit villains that are drafted into service as anti hero types meant to take on impossible tasks that they are not likely to survive.
I'm pretty excited for the movie myself, especially after the last trailer I saw. We'll be expecting to see this in theaters August 5th of this year.
This article however, is about the true and real Suicide Squad comprised of some equally degenerate weirdos and just so happened to form the basis for what is now NASA's, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
In the interest of time I'm going to summarize some things until we get to the interesting bits after this paragraph. A talented self taught chemist at Caltech named John Whiteside Parsons (folks called him Jack) along with colleagues, Frank Malina and Edward Forman wanted to make a liquid fuel rocket motor. However they lacked the funding so they decided to approach Caltech with the idea. The head of GALCIT (Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory-Caltech), Theodore von Karman gave permission for the group to work together on the subject.
With some effort the men came up with the basic funding needed and secured a test site behind the Devil's Gate Dam in Pasadena CA. As it happens this site is pretty close to the JPL test site still used today. Soon the team was re-enforced by two more scientists from GALCIT: Weld Arnold and Hsue Shen Tsien. The Suicide Squad was now complete.
Why the name Suicide Squad? Well, as it turns out a lot of the small scale tests were done indoors and one of these tests went awry in 1937 that caused a cloud of nitrogen dioxide/alcohol to be released forming a thin rust layer on much of the team's lab equipment. This of course could have also been very unhealthy for the team members themselves, and afterward all tests were performed outside. Crazy huh?
Word got to the team in '38 of the National Academy of Science (NAS) interest in seeking a way to assist in the take off of heavily loaded planes and Caltech was awarded a $10,000 contract. The Suicide Squad got to work on development of rocket propulsion that would provide a large increase in performance for propeller aircraft to get up to speed quicker and thus take off quicker. The team referred to it as jet propulsion so as not to sound like a pulp sci-fi story that would never be taken seriously.
Theodor von Karman was set as the lead with Parsons, Forman and Malina being the major staff members. Arnold and Tsien had left the project several months earlier. Parsons quickly proved himself invaluable to the operation in 1940 by using knowledge from the failed experiment in 1937 to show that red-fuming nitric acid was better than liquid oxygen to be used as an oxidizer.
Jack Parsons had a second life, a very strange one in fact. In Los Angeles in 1939 he and his wife Helen had found an organization called the Ordo Templi Orientis international magical fraternity, or O.T.O. The order was lead and founded by a British man named Wilfred Talbot Smith who quickly formed a friendship with Parsons' wife. They formed the O.T.O. Gnostic Mass Temple in the attic of their house. This temple contained a book, the Egyptian 'Stele of Revealing' which was known widely by the followers of a famous magician by the name of Aleister Crowley. He was known for the mantra "Do what thou wilt shall be whole of the law". Information on Crowley can be found here.
Crowley eventually wrote an astrological research paper titled "Is Smith a god?" that convinced Wilfed Talbot Smith that he wasn't a human, but actually an incarnation of a deity. This event lead to Smith going into private practice, and that somehow brought Parsons up to be the new Head of the O.T.O. Lodge. Parsons' wife Helen eventually left him for Smith, but they managed to stay friends. Besides, Parsons was busy collecting money for the upkeep of the O.T.O. much of that coming from his own pockets.
Crowley was an accomplished fellow, a writer, mountain climber, and chess master, but his main focus was the practice of sexual magic "Magick" as he called it. Soon he was known as "the wickedest man in the world" and even compared to the "Great Beast 666". He of course felt that this was a misconstrued reference and countered with a quote "Within the memory of man we have had the Pagan period, the worship of Nature, of Isis, of the Mother, of the Past; the Christian period, the worship of Man, of Osiris, of the Present. The first period is simple, quiet, easy, and pleasant; the material ignores the spiritual; the second is of suffering and death: the spiritual strives to ignore the material.... The new Aeon is the worship of the spiritual made one with the material, of Horus, of the Child, of the Future." His books are still stocked in new age book stores.
Parsons would regularly perform prayers to the O.T.O. before testing new rockets and began to believe that it had a major effect of the Suicide Squad's success. Unfortunately he wasn't very successful very quickly and the many failures began to raise questions by the government financiers. Eventually however he was allowed to continue and the Suicide Squad built the first successful "Jet Assisted Take Off" (JATO) rockets just a few months later. And on August 12th 1941 [a date that coincides with new Suicide Squad movie release almost to the day] Parsons' team was involved in the very first American jet assisted takeoff. Magic or science? (For the record I say science coupled with a lot of trial and error)
The new JATO rocket utilized a fuel called GALCIT-27, it provided 28 pounds of thrust for 12 seconds. There were still problems however. This was a solid rocket fuel in powder form and during storage could settle and crack causing abnormalities that would produce inconsistent burns and even catastrophic failures. This was solved initially by only loading the rockets just prior to use, but they needed a more permanent solution.
So Parsons and two others credited for their help in development, Fred Miller, and Mark Mills, created a more stable version of the fuel called GALCIT-53 in June of '42. Around the same time others were working on Parsons liquid fuel idea from much earlier using red-fuming nitric acid and gasoline, this also turned out to be successful. Soon Parsons, Malina and Forman had their own company called, Aerojet Engineering Corporation, to produce and sell these rockets. Later this company came to be known as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
...Malina came under scrutiny for being an ex-Nazi (actually a few years earlier) and had moved to Paris, France where he joined UNESCO. Eventually in 1952 he returned to U.S. and with his shares of Aerojet managed a comfortable life. He became a sculptor and artist, even founded a magazine called Leonardo, it's still in publication today.
Also in 1952, Parsons was working on an experiment in his garage mixing "magick" and science. Supposedly he was trying to create a Homunculous, a magical artificial human. The experiment went wrong and he was killed in the resulting explosion.
I could find little information about Edward Forman, other than to say he left the team. Perhaps more research at a later time will yield more.
[Source info here] [and here]
Well the title says it all, the Overwatch closed beta is coming back on the 9th. Balance changes have been made to characters and AI bots, there are a couple of new maps and even a new game mode.
I have to say that as guy who's not really a fan of games like this any more, this one looks fun. And if you also think it it looks fun you can click this link that will take you to a Battle.net post containing more information and a sign up link at the bottom.
[feature image and info sourced from Blizzard]
Well, it's happening. Microsoft has added Windows 10 to the list of recommended updates for Windows 7 and 8.1 users. That means if you've got a Windows PC and you're perfectly happy with the operating system you chose, bought and payed for a few years back then you may wake up to an unwelcome surprise soon. That is if you've got Windows Update set up to automatically install updates.
Thankfully you can get around this by entering your control panel, choosing System and Security, then clicking on Windows Update. From there you can change settings to let you decide what's installed on your PC. I'd personally recommend "let me choose when to download and install updates" as the automatic download isn't exactly small and will suck up your bandwidth if set to anything else besides "never check for updates".
For the record here, it's still advised to install security updates and the like to keep things flowing normally, but if you don't want to walk in to a room after refilling your coffee cup and see that you have a new OS installing, I'd recommend unchecking the one that says Windows 10 before confirming any installations. If you -do- get caught in the auto upgrade, you'll have 31 days to choose to reverse the action.
Also here's how to stop that annoying little nagware popup telling you your free copy of Windows 10 awaits.
Furthermore, if your reason for not updating to Windows 10 is the fact that it spies on basically everything you do... Well Windows 7 and 8.1 have been doing that for quite a while now, so they're just as bad. Bigger reasons to avoid the upgrade are things like these:
What's up everyone? Scrooloose here to tell you all about my #4if. This is in fact my first venture in to the #4if and I hope it'll be a fun one. I've chosen some potentially cool titles so here we go... Read more
Guys, seriously.... Microsoft has begun the backwards compatibility list for Xbox, I'll link the list at the end. More importantly, as of now they have given access to Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings for free on Xbox One and 360 from January 21st until February 5th. Even better, it's not like one of those deals where: [My best speed talker impression] This offer only applies to people born outside on a Wednesday under a 200 year old oak tree with no more than three witnesses during a thunderstorm and along side a stampede of Zebra running East.
If you're one of those who didn't play Witcher 2, then I would I advise that you resolve that issue and get yourself a copy. It's an excellent title and it will help some things in Witcher 3 make a little more sense. It's FREE, people!
You can see the titles added to the Backward Compatibility List here. And keep an eye out there for more to come.
