First Impressions: Watch_Dogs

I picked up a copy of Watch Dogs yesterday on my way home from work and although I haven't spent a whole lot of time with it so far my initial feeling is that it's going to be a lot of fun. From Ubisoft Montreal, creators of the Assassins Creed series of games, Watch Dogs is the latest in a long and distinguished line of open world games set in a big city. Indeed it has the feel of GTA about it initially, running about, driving, shooting, a cell phone as your access to menus and in-game abilities & services... But it is the cell phone that makes Watch Dogs stand out from all the rest.

You play as Aiden Pearce, hacker extraordinaire and general bad-ass who is on a mission to discover the identity of the man who ordered a hit on him, which he survived, but which caused the death of Aiden's niece. The city that is your playground is Chicago, a nice change from the usual facsimiles of New York us gamers get to run around in, a city which is run on a central computer network called ctOS, a network that through your 1337 haxxor skills and your cell phone you have complete access to. You can use this ability to perform hundreds of different tasks, from hacking the network's facial recognition system to find information on the citizens you see in the streets to overloading electrical circuits to cause explosions, from changing traffic lights and raising bridges to stealing bank details and causing blackouts. The number of uses for the phone seem limitless, the city is huge and well realised and it seems like a great playground with a unique and fascinating tool to create amazing moments of gameplay. I just hope the missions are as well realised as the city and that they don't contrive to ruin what promises to be a ridiculously fun game.

Comedy moment of yesterdays play: using the phone to interact with a crane causing it to drop a huge steel crate on the two goons standing beneath it. I think I'm going to enjoy this!

Death From Above

I've been playing some more War Thunder over the past few days and I have to say I'm really quite taken with the air combat in it. I've unlocked a few tier 2 planes now, namely Spitfires - the Mk Ia, and the Mk IIa & IIb. The Mk IIb is a bit of a beast with it's four machine guns and two 20mm cannons, but pushing me up into tier 2 fights has meant my Hurricane and the Spitfire MkI are pretty underpowered against some of the other planes I'm facing. I've also unlocked a couple of bombers and while that role isn't quite as fun as the dogfighting it can be quite lucrative points wise and usually allows me to survive a bit longer, as the added altitude tends to deter enemy fighters from coming after you unless you are really tearing up their ground targets.

It's this ability to switch between dogfighting and attacking ground units that brings the game alive for me. Some of the best moments have been in a fighter plane screaming down out of the sky, all guns blazing on a strafing run against an enemy gun emplacement, seeing it pop in a burst of bright flame and then pulling out of the dive at the last possible second. The sound design is excellent; as you get close to the ground you can hear it roaring past beneath you, you can hear trees rustle as you narrowly avoid their grasping branches. More often than not as you come out of an attack run an enemy player will try to take advantage of your low altitude and you find yourself roaring back into the sky, hammering the throttle into overdrive to give you that all important extra burst of speed while frantically rolling from side to side in an effort to avoid the deadly rain of bullets cascading down from the sky. If you are lucky enough to survive your opponents initial attack run it becomes a game of cat and mouse as you both pirouette through the sky trying desperately to get on the others tail to line up a shot. It's fast, frantic and above all hugely fun, even if you lose! I've also started pottering about with the other countries starter planes and I can't help notice that those matches feel a little fairer. With my British planes I often find myself getting one-shotted out of the sky in some of the lower battle-rated ones, whereas in the starter planes the field seems much flatter difficulty wise.

I took advantage of some special offers going on over the Memorial day weekend, chief among which was a years worth of premium membership at 50% off. I bought myself 10,000 of their Golden Eagle currency for about £40 and then spent 7,600 (I think) of those coins on the reduced membership, leaving me with a couple of thousand coins to spend on converting XP in order to level up planes faster, or even just buy a premium plane or two. For the amount of fun I've had in there over the past few days I'm more than willing to give them some money. The membership really doesn't offer that much benefit over the free game, but I'm a firm believer in spending a little something in any free to play game that I actually enjoy. I'm not a whale by any means, but I'm no freeloader either, and I usually end up spending about the equivalent of a box price on most F2P games that I spend any real amount of time with.

Profit and Loss

I've just finished a particularly troublesome security mission in EVE Online that involved taking out waves of enemy ships. They were mainly destroyer class with frigates supporting, and about six cruisers. Nothing too taxing, although some of the frigate class ships, Coreli Guardian Safeguards I think they are called, were really quite hardy and took a lot of killing. By the time I was done my full compliment of drones, (a haphazard mix of Hobgoblin I, Warrior I and Hammerhead I drones), had all been destroyed and I'd chewed through over a thousand rounds of ammo. I did make almost a million ISK in bounties alone though, so coupled with the mission rewards it was fairly lucrative.

The encounter deadspace just so happened to contain a load of asteroids, including the elusive Pyroxeres which is one of the only sources of Nocxium in High-Sec space. So once I'd dealt with all the hostile NPC's, I bookmarked the site and nipped back to the station to pick up my Mackinaw in order to get back out there to hoover up some of that good stuff. Shortly after I arrived a couple of belt rats showed up so I launched my shiny new Hobgoblin II drones to deal with them. I only finished training the skill to be able to use them yesterday and this was their maiden flight, needless to say I was excited to see how they would perform compared to their tech 1 counterparts. I wasn't disappointed! They tore off at break neck speed and obliterated the first ship in one volley, the second followed swiftly after. Just as they were making their way back to the ship my first mining laser reached the end of its cycle and as it started it's second cycle there was a loud explosion and I noticed my ships shields take some damage. Before I could figure out what was happening my second laser finished it's cycle and there was another loud explosion, followed this time by five smaller ones as my shiny new drones simultaneously exploded. Two million ISK they cost me not an hour ago and now they were gone. Why were they gone?! Turns out deadspace asteroids can be booby-trapped with smart bombs and nobody told me. That's what I get for flying solo I guess. Still, I snagged about 5.5 mill's worth of ore before the server shut down for maintenance, so despite my costly loss I'm still up over all.

A Quick Round Up

It's been a quiet week for me game wise, hence not much updating going on here. Saturday night saw my usual static group in ESO which was good fun, as always. More questing with my little static group, including ticking off a few more dungeons and slaying a few named beasties out in the wild. We finished up at level 14 by the end of the evening which means not far to go now until unlocking the alternate load-out granted at level 15! That'll make a nice difference to me, being able to spec for ranged or melee combat at the flick of a switch. I'm considering using the second set of powers to augment my healing abilities by slotting a Restoration Staff and some of it's attendant powers, and moving the healing powers currently in my main skill bar over there and replacing them with more melee damage abilities. That would mean that my secondary skill set is incredibly Magicka dependant though, and I think I'd have trouble with running out of juice all the time. So my other option is to keep my main skill bar as it is, (which I'm finding very versatile and useful at the moment anyway), and augmenting that with a secondary skill set made up of bow skills which will keep a similar balance of Magicka and Stamina use that I'm already used to and my character build is set up to handle. I'll have to have a chat with the rest of the group before I decide I think, get some advice as they are both a lot more experienced with the game than I am. Saying that though, I have spent a little solo time in there this week. I spent a fun hour or two running around with my Nord Dragon Knight smashing things over the head with a two-handed hammer the other morning, and then last night I rolled up a new Sorcerer and got her to level 6. I'm finding jute much harder to come buy than iron ever was in those areas. I've managed to keep both my Templar and Dragon Knight in full suits of level appropriate armour all the way up so far, but my level 6 Sorcerer is currently stuck in 2 pieces of level 1 gear appropriate for her class and a few odds and sods I've looted on my travels! I think next time I go in with that character I'll ignore the quests for a bit and concentrate on some resource gathering. It's a fun class to play though. So far I've played three of the four class types available and each is a lot of fun in its own way. Zenimax has done a good job in that regard, the combat feels quite meaty and fun no matter what type of role you choose to play.

There's been no PlanetSide 2 to speak of yet this week, despite a big patch that has brought quite a few changes to the medic profession, including a nice new gun that seems pretty good and has seen the introduction of implants as a way of tweaking your soldiers abilities. This is the second time the implants have been introduced, they were taken out almost immediately first time around after a massive outcry from the player-base after it was felt they were massively overpowered. I haven't heard any crying about them yet this time around, so maybe they've had a more thoughtful implementation now. My outfit is looking to have a bit of a get together in there on Friday night, so i'm looking forward to that.

As the last post makes clear there was a little War Thunder as well, which I haven't had much time to play since so I won't go over that again here, which just leaves an hour or two in EVE to round out my list. Very little done in there to be honest. I'm currently umm-ing and ahh-ing over weather to buy a Battle Cruiser or just keep saving up and training until I can properly fit a Battleship. I can probably pull off a Battle Cruiser now, but as my current standings mean I can't do Agent 3 missions yet, I'm not sure if there's much point. I would like to get a Brutix at some point though, because I love how they look, even if the Myrmidon is probably the smarter choice.

War huh? What IS it good for?

The latest game I've been taking a look at is War Thunder from Gaijin Entertainment. I'm a long time fan of Wargaming's World of Tanks and I also spent a little time with World of Warplanes while it was still in it's Alpha phase, and as such I've been very sceptical about War Thunder. Pretender to the throne or massive cynical rip-off? It started life as World of Planes, which didn't help it's claims to be it's own entity so they changed the name. Unfortunately at the same time they announced they would also be introducing a version of tank warfare and warship combat, just like Wargaming's World Of series. Needless to say, I wasn't convinced and so stayed well clear.

That was until I started reading a few pieces by wing commander Zoso over on the Killed in a Smiling Accident blog, he too was a fan of World of Tanks, but even from an early stage, War Thunder had him hooked. Another deciding factor was the fact that Wargaming came out and said that although they were going to unify accounts across the whole World Of series, there were no plans to mash the three games together and have player controlled tanks, planes and ships on the same maps, despite what many fans had hoped for. Gaijin however were planning on that from the very beginning, and it was this grand scheme that was the reason behind dropping the World of Planes moniker, War Thunder was going to be much more than just planes!

At the moment it's still mainly the planes that make up the bulk of the game, but with the recent 1.41 update the first player controlled ground vehicles were introduced. The air and ground vehicles are being kept separate for now as they fine tune the ground vehicle gameplay without the added distraction of a fairly balanced and working air game just slaughtering all those defenceless tanks right off the bat. The air vehicle game is fully fleshed out despite still being in an open beta and the planes are very fun to fly. I'm still in the first tier of planes at the moment and only playing on arcade mode with mouse and keyboard control. Upping the realism will make the game way harder and I'm already crashing a lot without being able to rip my wings off simply by diving too fast! The matches are usually fairly short, ten to fifteen minutes or so and usually require a number of ground targets to be killed in order to win the round. The matches are fun, the out of match system of upgrading and researching new planes and attachments is very unintuitive though and I feel it lets the game down a little. The add a friend system is still quite flaky and Welshtroll and I had a few problems getting our first squadron set up. We got there in the end though, and flying with a friend makes for an even more fun experience.

I won't say too much about the tank game yet as it's still very early days and I've only actually played one match with them so far, but my first impressions are World of Tanks has nothing to worry about yet. It has promise, but the tank I was in felt a little light and floaty and the way the aiming reticule works makes it quite difficult to line up a shot on anything at any sort of range. Maybe that's just something I'll have to get used to. Still, it's all looking very promising and I can't wait for them to get the tank battles fully fleshed out and to let the fly boys in the same map as them. I just hope they include some AA tanks in the roster.

The Art of Sneaking

Ragnar Grimhammer, Dragon Knight
of the Daggerfall Covenant

I had my first taste of PvP in The Elder Scrolls Online the other night. After my little static group had been adventuring around Auridon in the Aldmeri Dominion for a few hours on Saturday night we were joined in our Mumble channel by a few other folks who were going to take their Daggerfall characters to Cyrodiil to partake of some PvP. I'd recently got my own Daggerfall alt, a fierce Nord Dragon Knight called Ragnar Grimhammer, up to the required level 10 and so for the first time was able to join them.

First impressions are good. In principle it has a lot in common with the old Warhammer Online RvR gameplay; a huge open map with keeps and outposts for the teams to capture. In this instance though there are three teams instead of Warhammer's two, meaning there are usually multiple fights to choose from rather than just steamrollering or being steamrollered in one huge zerg. Cyrodiil, the map in which the PvP takes place, is gigantic. So much so that I felt totally out of my depth without a horse and I feel I really need to get one before I go back again. Fortunately I have the Imperial edition of the game meaning I can pick up a basic horse for the princely sum of 1 gold piece, so that's not a problem. The fights themselves tend to be of two types; large zergs attacking and defending keeps, and smaller skirmishes out in the open countryside between small bands of players. I prefer the latter, although the former is far more productive as far as XP and loot is concerned.There are also several PvE missions available whilst in the PvP zone, and this adds a sense of purpose to the proceedings, giving you something else to do other than tagging onto the back of your Empire's main zerg and hanging on for dear life. We spent a good deal of time doing these missions and so didn't really see too much of the huge pitched battles, though we did take part in a few keep defences. We spent a lot of time out in the wilds creeping about either trying to get to our quest destination without being spotted, or trying to get close enough to a group of enemies that we had a chance of taking down ourselves.

Sneaking outside an enemy Keep.

The sneaking mechanic is what makes the game so fun for me. As long as you stay crouched and far enough from an enemy player you won't show up on their screen. This makes for some fantastic moments of gameplay. Such as crouching behind a tree as dozens of enemy players stream past on horseback, just praying one of them doesn't stray too close. Or the time we spotted a couple of enemies lurking around some rocks on the brow of a hill, we fanned out to surround them, crept up as close as we could without being spotted and then all charged in for the kill with arrows whistling, spells crackling and swords and hammers swinging. It felt really epic!

The respawn map. I see a lot of this.

It's very fun, although with only limited ranged attacks available to me at the moment some of the fights, (mainly the big Keep defences/assaults), can get a little frustrating. I'm going to get a little more time sunk into that character I think to get him up to level 15, meaning I can have a bow and a melee weapon equipped at the same time and maybe even spend a couple of skill points on some bow attacks. All in all though, the PvP game in ESO gets a big thumbs up and Im looking forward to our next outing!

Shouting at the TV like a crazy person

News broke yesterday of Microsoft's new plans for their rubbishly named Xbox One console. Right up until launch they were insistent that the Kinect was an absolutely integral part of the console and that it had to be plugged in and switched on for the console to even work. Shortly before the release they backtracked on that idea under the sheer weight of protest from press and fans alike, outraged at the thought of Microsoft's all-seeing eye sat staring at them 24 hours a day. Now it seems that the pressure from being consistently outsold by its much cheaper rival, the Playstation 4, has forced Microsoft to back-peddle yet again with their  plans for Kinect. Yesterday, amid a series of announcements, they unveiled the unbundled, Kinect-less Xbox One console. Weighing in at £350 the budget Xbox is about £80 cheaper than at launch, but less than £50 cheaper than the console is currently available for, putting it at the same price point as the PS4.

Is this a sign that Microsoft are desperate to claw some sales back from Sony? Well, yes, obviously. They badly underestimated how hard that extra $100 they were charging over their rival was going to hit them in the sales department, a lesson that should have been well learned from the last round of the Console Wars when it was the Playstation 3 that was prohibitively expensive, allowing the Xbox 360 to pull out a commanding lead in the sales figures, a lead it was never to lose. It's not all doom and gloom though. I think this move adds another layer of choice for the consumer, which is always a good thing. I just think that the loss of the Kinect from the package is worth more than a saving of forty or fifty quid. Hell, I'd gladly pay twice that for the ability to shout at my TV like a crazy person and actual have it listen!

I wonder if this means the Xbone's operating system will be updated to provide an automatic sign-in option? It's annoying to be able to shout at my console to turn on from two rooms away but then have to sit in front of it and wait for it to recognise my stupid face before it'll let me do anything.

Another announcement that was made was that using apps will no longer require an Xbox Live Gold membership. This leaves the way open for a BBC iplayer app to finally come to the Xbox One. The BBC's charter says something about it's customers not having to pay twice for their content, so anything on the iplayer, which has already been paid for with the TV license, cannot be included as part of a paid for service. This is great as it means I won't have to switch between devices if I want to go from watching something on Netflix to something on the iPlayer.

Full details of the upcoming changes can be found HERE on Major Nelson's blog

The Sisters of EVE

Just a quickie this morning because I've got last nights Game of Thrones to catch up on before bed, but I did want to just quickly mention that four and a half years after starting it, I finally finished the Sisters of EVE epic mission arc "The Blood Stained Stars" in EVE Online!

That's quite a trek

In my first encounter with EVE Online back in September of 2009 I did what all good newbies do and followed the initial set of missions that are offered up to you. They do a reasonable job at introducing you to some of the things you can do to while away the hours in the game, but to be honest they barely scratch the surface. Probably the most useful set of missions for the new player is The Blood Stained Stars mission arc offered up by The Sisters of EVE corporation. Some forty nine missions spanning seven chapters will take you from your first combat frigate up through your first destroyer and into, (as long as you save up the mission rewards in order to buy and fit the damn thing), your first cruiser class ship, which you'll probably need for the last mission. I don't really remember much about the early chapters, but I think you get a few implants and skill books as rewards, possibly even a ship or two? I really don't remember. What I do remember is that somewhere along the line I ended up with a mission that required me to leave Gallente space and head over to Hek, the main trading hub in Minmatar space. This was a trek of 10 or so jumps and when I got there one of the first few missions was something like a further 23 jumps. I could have got it down to about 18 by going through low-sec space, but as a newbie that was too scary and really not worth the risk for such a small saving. It was at that point I gave up and headed back to my home station to start a life as a small time industrialist and regular mission runner.

I've burned out, gone away and come back to EVE two or three times in the intervening years and each time I come back I see that mission listed as "offered" in my mission log and think, "One day", but until this weekend I've never thought to actually try and finish it. So I loaded up in my Thorax and went for a long, long ride. It took two fairly long play sessions to actually finish the whole arc, and at this stage in my career the one million ISK reward for completing the final mission was pretty anti-climactic. I can make that in about 3 minutes mining Blue Ice, so it was a dreadfully unproductive couple of days as far as wealth accumulation is concerned. It did give me a good sense of completion though, having finally got through it all. I just wish I'd stuck at it back at the start when a million ISK in one payout would have been a big deal! I also wish I hadn't left some loot all the way over in Lisudeh, some 19 jumps away from were I currently am!

Adventure Time

The lighting effects in ESO are superb

My Saturday night this week was spent gadding about in the new shiny on my list of currently played games, The Elder Scrolls Online. I've got a small static group on the go in there with my RL friends and neighbours Welshtroll and his good lady wife. We get together on one of my nights off and spend a pleasant few hours questing through Tamriel with our Aldmeri Dominion characters, helping the needy, fighting monsters, exploring dungeons and generally fulfilling our destinies as great heroes of the age.

It's a very nice game. The quests are well put together and unlike most MMOs it doesn't feel like you are traipsing from one quest-hub to the next. The quests are nicely spread out through the world and there are plenty that are just out in the wild, waiting to be stumbled upon by adventurous explorer types. Best of all I've yet to come across a typical "Kill 10 rats" type quest. It's all fully voiced and the quest objectives are nicely varied, meaning we can spend several hours just chaining quests together without getting bored.

We seem to have accidentally put together a fairly synergistic group of classes. We've got a Khajiit Dragon Knight who is quite tanky whilst still being able to deal a good amount of damage; a Wood Elf Nightblade who does lots of stealthy sneaking about and has high point damage DPS; and I'm playing an Imperial Templar with a nice mix of damage and healing. So far we are able to pretty much burn through any foes we come up against before they have time to do any serious damage to us, but for the trickier ones our individual abilities often mean the difference between succeeding and the group wiping. We've had a few deaths along the way, but way less than I would have expected by now. In keeping with the differentness of the quests in ESO, similarly the characters feel different to most other MMOs. The limited hot bar and the directional FPS style attacks make for much more involved combat than in something like LOTRO or WoW. The combat feels solid, and while individually characters can sometimes feel a little underpowered, as part of our little group I do feel like something of a badass, which is always good!

The main thing the game has going for it though is it's graphics engine and world design. It is quite simply the best looking MMO ever released. We often find ourselves stopping mid quest to take in the scenery and the level of detail in the world is simply mind-boggling. Combined with a really good score and subtle but atmospheric ambient sounds the Tamriel of Elder Scrolls Online feels like a fully realised and lived in world. I can think of far worse places to spend a Saturday night.

I love the smell of Veldspar in the morning

Pew-Pew lAz0rs!!!11!

Working the night shift can make finding time for gaming difficult. My post work relaxation time, or evening as normal people would call it, is usually a couple of hours either side of eight o'clock in the morning. That means that all of my gaming friends are in bed or in work, neither of which is ideal for grouping up in an MMO. As such I have to make an effort to get online for an hour or two in the evenings, before I go to work, to catch up with my outfit mates in PlanetSide 2. But what about that post work period? I don't really want to come in after a hard shift and go straight to bed! I need to relax a little first.

It's in these early morning hours that I tend to get most of my single-player gaming done. Typically, this has been on a console, but in recent months it's seen me more and more turning to solo play in an MMO. For a while I was spending my time sauntering around Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings Online, but since returning to EVE, I've not spent a single second staring at the arse-end of a Bree Pony. The way I play EVE means it is fantastically suited to my early morning needs. The semi-AFK nature of asteroid mining in EVE means that I can catch up on the nights Twitters, check my clan's forums or even watch some telly on the second monitor while I'm doing it, but also keep an eye on what's going on in case some belt rats or gankers decide to show up. As I'm typing this, EVE is on the main monitor and my Mackinaw is sat in space, strip mining the hell out of some Rich Plagioclase asteroids. When the ore hold is full I'll scoot off back to the station where I'm based and refine it into the Pyerite I so desperately need to feed my production line. But while that is going on it gives me time to make blog entries! The main reason this blog is so patchy update-wise is that generally I'd much rather be playing games than writing about them, and if I've got the time to write then that is time I should be spending playing! Only with EVE, I can do both at the same time and as such I'm hoping that for a little while at least, I can keep to some sort of regular update schedule.

Now I just need some topics to write about I suppose...

Farming the Farmers

An NC Sunderer

I joined up with my outfit mates in PlanetSide 2 for a couple of hours last night. We were fighting on Indar as usual and hopping around from fight to fight, winning a few, losing a few. Nothing out of the ordinary. Eventually the fight lead us, as it usually does given enough time, to The Crown. As we were getting closer to our target we could see that the Vanu Sovereignty had a fairly formidable air presence around the base, groups of Scythe fighters whizzing about the place and a couple of Liberator gunships looking for easy targets. Our merry little band, trundling along in an almost defenceless Sunderer, was one such easy target.

Usually, we would just try and run the Sunderer in as close as we dared, deploy it, and head into the base on foot, but with the amount of VS air in the area we wouldn't have got very far. So, instead of hiding our little bus in an inconspicuous corner, we first suited up with Anti-Air MAX suits and AA lock-on rocket launchers and then drove our tempting easy kill right into the open valley below the enemy aircraft. A liberator spotted us first. As it angled in for an attack run on us, our defenceless little bus suddenly sprouted seven tooled up and ready AA monsters. The Liberator's heavy guns and thick armour were no match for us and within seconds it was little more than a burning husk falling from the sky. Flush with success, we all piled back into the Sunderer and trundled off again. It wasn't long before we attracted the attention of a keen eyed Scythe pilot, eager to stick a few rockets into our lonely and defenceless Sunderer and gorge on all the lovely XP within. "Scythe incoming, lets get him!" came the cry from our driver over TeamSpeak, again, our defenceless slow moving brick suddenly became a pilots worst nightmare. This one used the speed and manoeuvrability of his craft to try to escape, but he'd taken too much damage before he realised what was happening. Just as he afterburnered away for the safety of the hills a lone lock-on missile streaked through the sky after him. Boom! Goodnight Scythe! Before we could get back in the bus a Lightning tank sprang up over a sand dune next to us, spotted our Sunderer and started firing, fortunately the Sunderer was deployed so I switched out my MAX's flack cannons for a pair of Falcon Anti-Vehicle launchers. Combined with the power of half a dozen dumb-fired AA rockets, he didn't last long. The driver bailed out, but was quickly chased down.

A VS Liberator Gunship

This went on for the next half an hour or so before I had to go to work and I have to say, it is the most fun I've had in that game for quite a while. Our group may be small, but when we can stick together and have a common cause, it's surprising how much of a difference we can make. We managed to keep the whole area clear of enemy air for a while, and even had time to fall back and scupper an assault on the base behind us. It was a really fun evening, and a reminder that despite it's flaws, PlanetSide 2 is THE best game on the market at the moment for having a laugh with a bunch of mates. I think I might even pop back in this evening for another go!

Return to New Eden

My Miasmos ore hauler leaving a station

Where was I?... Oh yes, video games! Jon over at How to Murder Time has recently re-posted all of the old Van Hemlock podcasts and I've been slowly working my way through them. The early ones are quite heavily EVE based, and being of a highly suggestible nature I am of course now playing EVE again.

Eve Online is a strange beast. It can be utterly impenetrable to the newbie, yet has the scope and scale to allow it's player driven content to make its way onto international mainstream news. Massive battles with hundreds of thousands of real-world dollars worth of ships being destroyed; intrigue and espionage allowing a single player to destroy a massive player alliance from within. EVE is the epitome of multiplayer. The vast bulk of its content is derived from players interactions with each other and yet here I am, soloing it and soloing it hard. I've only been back a few weeks but I've easily put in 100 hours in that time and all of it has been solo.

My Thorax, bristling with rail-guns

I'm kind of intrigued by the prospect of joining up with a big corp or alliance and heading off into the wilds of 0.0 security space, but it feels to me like I'd need to make a commitment to the game I just don't think I want. I think the added pressure of that would make me burn out on the game altogether more quickly than I would do otherwise. So here I am, treating one of the most hardcore PvP MMO's as a kind of relaxation aid. I load up into my Mackinaw mining ship, head out to a nice quiet asteroid belt in high sec and start mining some big juicy space rocks. Since getting a nice new 27" monitor my old 20" Samsung has been given a new lease of life as a second monitor. Most EVE players in this situation would have a second account running to provide assistance to their main account, a hauler maybe, so the mining vessel never need leave the asteroid belts. However, as is fairly obvious, I'm not most EVE players. I'm using my second monitor to browse the web, read and write blogs, catch up on missed TV or power watch a series of something on Netflix. EVE is my perfect companion to a few hours of idle surfing, happy to get on with something by itself and only requiring occasional input from me. And all the while the ISK, (in game currency), keeps trickling in, be it from the sale of unrefined Blue Ice or from my little Catalyst, (a Destroyer class spaceship), production line that most of my asteroid grazing goes towards supplying. If I fancy a change of pace I can hop in my Rifter or my Thorax and run a few Agent combat missions, pew-pewing against AI controlled drones and pirates. I'm in the process of training up to be able to fly and kit out a Battleship in order to do some higher level agent missions and really start making some money off them, but for now they are a fun way of mixing up my more sedate industrial activity.

I'm 100% sure that if any real EVE player was to read this they'd sadly shake their head before calling me a n00b and telling me I'm playing the game about as wrong as it is possible to play it. I'm well aware of that, but you know what? I'm really enjoying it the way I'm doing it for now, so sod off!