Release date: December 20, 2017 Genre: Kart racing Publisher:Rare Developer: Rare Platforms: Nintendo 64 Modes: Singleplayer Story, Multiplayer Racing and Battle Modes
Ahh kart racing games, with their cutesy characters and wacky cartoon
graphics, I’ve owned a few myself the first and foremost being Super Mario Kart on the
Super Nintendo which to this day I still regard as the best kart racer ever,
followed closely by Crash Team Racing,
and possibly Micro
Maniacs and Lego
Racers though they weren’t kart racers. Back in the day when I played the
good old N64 with friends we mostly played Mario Kart 64, however my
housemate Brok was a staunch fan of Diddy Kong Racing which
did look quite interesting as it included not just Cars but Hovercrafts and
Planes too which I understood you could use several different vehicles on the
one map which was pretty cool. I can’t remember playing it back then I can only
remember playing it a year or so ago at my house then playing it properly on
emulator on the perfectly functional Project64,
an excellent choice which I have used to this day. Diddy Kong Racing (DKR) was
created by the famous Rareware
who I’m sure you’ll know created the likes of Donkey Kong Country series and
many other well-known titles such as GoldenEye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, Perfect
Dark, and Conker's Bad Fur Day, they
seemed to be able to do no wrong on the Nintendo 64 as DKR is no exception.
Just a quick note before I start, I decided to use the Mario Wiki for my hotlinks as
the Donkey Kong
Wiki has an annoying custom mouse pointer, why do people do that, really?
At least I don’t see it happening on many websites anymore.
It's go time! (almost)
The opening of the game is really enjoyable with the animated Nintendo and
Rareware logo’s (A staple through Rare-made games) then it cuts to Diddy flying
in and then starts that awesome intro that shows you all of the characters with
that very catchy boppy music, I gotta say the music in Diddy Kong Racing pretty
much beats any other kart racer I have played, even Mario Kart. After the great
intro you can select your mode, DKR is fairly simple starting with Adventure
mode and tracks mode. In tracks mode you can choose to race any track you have
unlocked via Adventure mode, tracks with a Taj the
Genie symbol are completed tracks, and players can choose any vehicle that
is compatible with the track. Tracks with a Wizpig symbol have not
been cleared, and players are restricted to the default vehicles for them.
Conker in his Hovercraft in Pirate Lagoon, this was one of the few tracks where only one type of vehicle could be used
Whichever mode you pick you then get to choose your character in what is
probably the most entertaining character select screen I have ever seen (or
heard) and I loved the way the music changed its tune slightly whenever you
selected a certaincharacter with each
character having their own tune, it’s hard to explain you’ll just have to watch
the video, I swear every single time I play the game I spend 2 minutes listening
to all of the character tunes. There are 8 available characters at the start
with two that are unlockable, as with Mario Kart there are various stats and
weight differences with the smaller characters being easier to handle but
slower, the middleweight character being good all round and the heavier
characters have good top speed but can’t accelerate or turn very well. So I
decided to go as Conker as he is an all-rounder then Bumper
just for a change in the later game as I liked his yellow colour vehicles.
The intro and that awesome character select screen
Adventure mode is the main singleplayer mode and one of the features it has
over Mario Kart 64, the first time I experienced an adventure mode was in Crash
Team Racing and it made playing a kart racer alone so much better it isn’t just
menu, race, menu, race you have a whole world to drive around in, explore,
practice your skills and unlock new areas. This was an era where the story was
written in the instruction manual which they assume you read first and I think
I did used to do that but basically it’s all loosely tied in to the Rare Games.
Diddy Kong
is sitting at the tree house having a G&T then gets a letter from his
friend Timber the
tiger who says that while his parents were away holidaying with the Kong clan
in the Caribbean the evil paedophile Wizpig has come from outer space and taken over his island and
brainwashed some very large animals into serving him. So Diddy gets Squawks to send a
message that their coming then attempts to sober up his friends Banjo and Conker from their
hangover and they jack one of Funky’s
boats to reach Timber’s Island, closely followed by Krunch, who is after
them from a botched crack deal the previous night. Meanwhile on the island Bumper
is trying to hide Pipsy
and Tiptup from
Wizpig but she’d eaten magic mushrooms and was dancing around trying to summon Taj the
Genie although Tiptup says that he had been dead for 50 years due to
substance abuse.
Taj awarding me with a Balloon
When they all get together Bumper then has the great idea that
they should defeat Wizpig by racing go-karts, hovercrafts and planes for no
reason whatsoever and they should get practicing. Then T.T comes over and says he’s gonna do
some hot laps and dares them all to beat him and their all like how the fack is
that going to help us defeat Wizpig? And he’s like how the fack is us racing
against each other going to do that either? oh and Drumstick has been
turned into a frog, yeh I think that was the gist of it.
Timber Island, the main hub of the game, on the left is the entrance to Dino domain, on the right is the entrance to Snowflake Mountain inw hich you need the plane to navigate to.
So on starting the adventure you are greeted by Taj himself (guess he wasn’t
dead) who gives you an introduction to adventure mode before challenging you to
a kart race around the island rewarding you with a Golden Balloon which is the
main reward system in DKR, golden ballons are awarded for coming 1st
in races and challenges and they allow you to unlock more areas on the island.
So now I could enter Dino
Domain the first sub-world which consists of 4 races, a challenge level, a
boss race and a trophy race, earning stuff along the way. The first 4 races
weren’t too bad, you race against the other characters in the game using weapon balloons and
shortcuts to gain the upper hand. The weapon in DKR are pretty cool, they use a
powering up system exactly the same as Lego Racers, there are different colour
balloons that give different powerups, red are missiles, blue is boosts, green
is mines etc, yellow is shields and rainbow are magnets which is a new one, you
can pull yourself toward your opponents or pull them back to you which is
pretty cool.
Shootin a few missiles on Crescent Island
The more balloons of the same type you get the more powerful the
item is, for example 2 red balloons is a homing missile, 3 red balloons is a
group of ten (not homing though) frankly I don’t know which is better, I would
have preferred more homing missiles. Anyway you get a Golden balloon for coming
1st each time, to get the challenge level you have to find the Wish Key hidden in one of the
tracks, the challenge levels are either collection challenges like Fire Mountain where you have to fly
around and collect Dragon Eggs or a straight battle mode like Icicle
Pyramid. Diddy Kong Racing’s battle mode isn’t too bad though technically
there is only two Mario Kart style battles which were Icicle
Pyramid which was similar to Mario 64’s Double Deck
and Darkwater
Beach which was a fairly open water-filled level where hovercrafts were
used.
The Icicle pyramid and Frosty village tracks
After you finish all 4 tracks and the challenge level you
then have a chance to face the boss, which are giant animals that have been
brainwashed by Wizpig, and they are quite challenging, even the Dino Domain
boss Tricky the
Triceratops wasn’t exactly easy they cheat and run ahead at the start before
the and they often throw things at you
or leave them in their trail for you to crash into . So you beat the boss then
have to complete all the races again this time doing the Silver Coin Challenges which added the extra difficulty of finding and
collecting all 6 silver coins on a track and also finish first, then after that
you had to race the boss again and win the Wizpig Amulet then after that you did the Trophy Race
which was all the races of that world in row like a Mario Kart Cup and after
that you were finally done with the area. To access the different areas you
need to drive around Timber’s island unlocking new vehicles to use through Taj
to reach different areas. I didn’t have too much trouble with Dino Domain or Sherbet Island though the
boss of Sherbet Island Bubbler was pretty damn hard and when I got up to the Snowflake Mountain
track Silver Coin challenges I was stuck on the Snowball
Valley one for a while, it’s gets pretty fackin hard going out of your way
to get the coins then still coming first.
Bubbler the octopus boss of Sherbert Island
The main feature in Diddy Kong Racing that makes it stand
out from the rest is the multiple vehicles used, you start off with the Car and after gaining more
Gold Balloons you race Taj to gain access to the Hovercraft
then eventually the Plane. Using
the car is pretty easy, I was playing using a Playstation controller so just
used R1 as the trigger button for using powerups, apart from that there was
just accelerate, brake, sharp turn and powerslide where you went on two wheels.
Most of the time I just used the brake button to make small adjustments and to
get those boost pads, the Hovercraft was probably my favourite vehicle as I
found it easy to drive an enjoyed being able to do very sharp turns by hopping.
The Plane was probably the hardest as you had to deal with the vertical axis
was well and there were often many obstacles and sharp turns in tracks where
you flew the plane so you had to be nimble and remember to knife
edge to make the corner. Crashing was often very costly as it slowed you
down a lot and took a while to get back up to speed.
Flying on the Windmill Plains Level
So after god knows how many runs I managed to finish the Snowball
Valley Silver coin challenge then race the boss again then finish the
Trophy race then I finally got up to Dragon Forest where it was a medieval theme and a
bit more challenging but I finished it ok including the Smokey
Castle challenge level. The boss Smokey
the Dragon was pretty darn hard, you challenged him in aplane and had to dive through caverns dodging
stalactites, but it was the silver coin challenges that stopped me dead, for
the life of me I couldn’t finish the Greenwood
Village, Windmill Plains or Haunted
Woods Silver coin challenges. Unfortunately I never finished them and gave
up the game but I came back eventually thanks to my housemate Brok who had
unlocked almost everything I was able to play the bits I couldn’t reach such as
racing Wizpig and unlocking the final area Future Fun Land which was pretty fackin awesome.
It was a kind of space fun park with homages to different sci-fi movies notably
Stars Wars as one track had a section that looked like the Death Star Trench
run. Of course couldn’t defeat Smokey the second time or Wizpig in both his
initial encounter and the second encounter Wizpig Strikes Back but at least I experienced
them so I could write this review.
Dang those silver coin challenges were hard.
I love the look of
the game, there is so much colour everywhere with great looking , it was made
even better by the fact that I was playing on the emulator so although some of
the text and icon graphics weren’t the best the 3D graphics were very crisp and
looked great. The water textures were really good and the overall level design
was great I’d say on par with Crash Team Racing. One thing I really need to do
is see what the Future Fun land tracks look like on the emulator as they are so
crazy and colourful it’d look nuts. Another thing I will have to go back and do
is play all of the tracks again but with a different vehicle to the default
just to see the track from a whole different angle. Though I didn’t finish the
game fully it was still great to play both on emulator and the actual Nintendo
64, it had some really innovative features like the different vehicles and the
adventure mode and the way you could use different vehicles on the one track.
Oh and the music the soundtrack was so damn good it could give Spyro a run for
its money, one of the few things that lets it down was that it only has two
true “battle mode” levels but then again Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64
only had two good ones anyway. So I will finish with this bombshell if I had to
choose between Mario Kart 64 or Diddy Kong Racing? It’d be Diddy Kong Racing of
course.
My delving into Minecraft is minimal these days, I remember
the good old times where I would join a community of players and we would make
whole cities and communities. Of course I could still join a server and get
back into this again but I guess I’m just a bit fatigued with the game I’ve
been playing it that long. I used to work on my Brick Mansion every major patch
to add new things, but at some point I just decided that was enough and just
left it, mind you it had been finished for a long time I was just adding and
redecorating. Though one of things I always wanted to do was create more secret
fallback tunnels with powered minecart tracks that you could zoom along and
escape a potential invasion. I already had one from my bedroom to the nearby village
in case the house gets invaded, but I needed more, something that went far away
to an (also secret) fallback base. So I searched around for a bit and found an
island just a little bit away from the taiga forest across a small bit of ocean
and decided to was far enough away to be safe from would-be invaders.
My original escape tunnel had lots of more powered rails
I decided to make the entrance to the secret tunnel in the
pool hall as the idea was to make it a wall switch that activates a secret
door. But because I don’t know enough about redstone I just had to make it a
normal door on the wall, but the problem with that is you can see the door
right there and because the wood on the wall is jungle planks I had to use a jungle door which as you may
remember has holes in it. So it wasn’t really a secret entrance but nevermind
I’ll fix that later.
Ahh no one will notice that XD
Entryway from the (8-ball) pool room with chest of minecarts (yes minecarts) I like having the torches in their own little alcoves sometimes as it looks cool although doesn't give off that much light.
So then I started digging, and digging, and digging, and
digging out the tunnel, I joined up my original escape tunnel with the new one
so now you had two options of where to go and dug the rest of the tunnel
underneath the forest towards the sea. I stopped at one point as I noticed I
had dug into a cave, so I made another secret exit in the middle of the forest.
One of the tunnels with a ladder to the forest exit
The Taiga forest to the southwest of the mansion, you can see the cave entrance at the bottom of the screenshot
Once I was nearing the ocean things were going to get
tricky, I wanted to create a tunnel of glass underneath the ocean to the island
with the fallback base. So as soon as I came in contact with water I stopped
putting torches for light in the tunnel as it can’t have any light otherwise
you could easily see it from above the water. So I built the glass tunnel into
the bank and zigzagged across the ocean floor at one point dredging out a hill
to make it a bit lower. I got to the island and tunnelled into a large cave
which was accessible from the surface via a tall shaft, I was thinking of
making the fallback base on the surface built into a mountain but then I
thought that it may be safer built into the cave as we’re trying to hide from
invaders aren’t we? I could make a lookout on the surface I guess. Minecraft
really needs a way of making lifts as ladders are a bit too flimsy and stairs
take up a bit of space but that may be a bit sophisticated for the base Minecraft
as there’s redstone but no rope/pulley system in it really.
The entrance to the ocean tunnel
It's dark down here
See the dolphins!
Glass tunnel exit
The fallback base 'cave'
After doing some test runs I managed to give the Minecarts enough speed to get through the glass tunnel stretch without needing more speed which worked out well as without any lighting the tunnel was pretty hard to see.
A few shots of the underwater tunnels
As that’s as far as I got really I just wanted to make the
tunnels and they are pretty cool, especially the underwater bit as you can see
all of the undersea creatures. Speaking of which there are now lots of more
undersea creatures as of update 1.13 The Update Aquaticyes
there are now dolphins,
fish mobs
and turtles
to look at which is a welcome change from just the damn Squids. But anyway this was
just a quick update, I may keep working on the fallback base at some point or
maybe even update the mansion again but for now it’s finished.
It’s been official for a while now, “Battle Royale” is a
new PC and console game genre, just like when League of Legends was
formed from the base mould of Defense of the
Ancients and the term MOBA
was coined, the battle royale genre has just as rich a history. Our tale beings
with the 1999 novel Battle Royale by
Japanese author Koushun
Takami which tells the story of a large class of junior high school
students who are forced to fight each other to the death in a program run by
the authoritarian Japanese government. The novel was made into a film in 2000 and
I must admit, is pretty damn spectacular having seen it myself and would agree
that this is excellent fodder for a game. I suppose you are wondering how this
fits into the gaming world, well there is a game called ARMA 2 which is a
realistic military combat simulator which takes place over some very large
landscapes and islands, you also may have heard that there was a mod created
using the ARMA engine called DayZ,
DayZ took place on a huge island inspired by the Arma landscapes and featured
players trying to survive while being hunted by zombies and other players.
Inspired by this mod and by the Battle Royal film Brendan ‘PlayerUnknown’ Greene
created DayZ: Battle Royale an
offshoot of the DayZ mod where players would scavenge for weapons and supplies
and would hunt each other down over a large area with a constantly shrinking
safe area. To make a long story short Greene was contact by the Korean
developer Bluehole/Ginno games (now PUBG Corp) who liked his idea and
wanted to turn it into a standalone title, Greene accepted and moved to Korea
to work with them as their creative director and eventually created Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds as
we know it today.
Onward my leather-clad friends!
When I first heard of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (or
‘PUBG’ as it’s commonly referred to) and saw the screenshots, it looked like
just a cheap flavour-of-the-month thing that people would play for a bit then
stop just like the hundreds of other multiplayer games that died out eventually
but as more and more of my friends started playing it, I soon thought that this
may not be the case. So after my housemate bought the game and I had a look at
it I decided to get it myself around May 2017 during the early access it indeed
was different from any First Person (or technically third person) shooter I had
played. To start with the whole thing looked unique, back then main menu was in
a destroyed church and you could see your character model and your squadmates
standing there too, in their underwear, yes everyone was in their underwear
when they first started, which was probably why so many players created female
characters. Firstly though I had to create my character and basically all you
could pick from was a fit, attractive male or female, I thought about going
female but decided not to as I wanted to play as it was me playing though that
itself was unrealistic as I’m not quite in as good as shape as my character heh.
So then you click on ready and you’re warped onto an island off the coast of Erangel the first and main map of
PUBG, this is a spawn island where you could run and jump around amongst the
other players and even test weapons that were sitting on the various tables and
around the island, in the lobby the player count usually had to reach 100
before the 60 second countdown appeared before the match start but this wasn’t
always the case if there weren’t enough players. And so once the timer was up
you were all spawned into a moving cargo plane. Interestingly you could change
from first to third person using the V key and wow seeing all us sitting
shoulder-to-shoulder silently was like we were about to be air-dropped into France. The game also ahas a voice chat feature primarily used for communicating with teammates but you can switch it to be heard by everyone if you really want to listen to people mic spam.
Hey guys, what up? (I so miss being able to see this)
The plane then flew in a straight line in a random direction
across the island and you had the option at any time to jump out with a
parachute and start freefalling. Of course where you decided to head for was
one of the biggest decisions you had to make, the island of Erangel is a
fictional island in the Black sea near the Ukraine which was once occupied by
the Soviet Union (hence the military base) and home to a large populace which
revolted against the Soviet forces and eventually the island was abandoned, and
that’s about as far as the storyline goes, if there was one. So now the island
is used as a huge arena for a ‘battle royale’ with a hundred attractive morbid
thrill-seekers in their underwear. So I decided to avoid any major towns and
touched down in a quiet-out of the way village where I could “loot” in peace.
And yes strewn in buildings and houses all over the island were various types
of weapony, ammo, attachments, medical supplies, backpacks and clothing
including protective gear such as vests and helmets. So I ran from house to
house finding things to both arms myself with and cover my body but all of a
sudden a warning flashed up that the play area was shrinking and indeed when
checking the map this blue circle was coming in, and noticing that I wasn’t in
the white circle I decided to skidaddle. I found a dune buggy and headed
straight to the middle of the circle, getting shot at at one point but getting
away safely. Finding a safe place in the wooded hills I decided to abandon my
buggy and hide in a bush in a low part of the hill. And there I lay as the
circle got smaller and smaller hearing many shots and viewing the remaining
player count go down until the I needed to make my way down from the hills to
stay in the circle. So I crouch-ran my way to the circle feeling very exposed
but managing to keep to the trees and eventually got inside the circle, though
as I was making myself comfortable in another bush there a was a BANGBANGBANG
and I was shot down in a second by an unknown enemy and I also jumped about
half a meter off my chair.
Basic example of me running to one of the final circles, spoiler alert I don't make it but this video is interesting as I can see the whole thing play out to finish from the view after I died, which is very useful when playing in groups so you can let your teammates know where the enemies that killed you are.
And THAT was my first game of PUBG (solo that is) the screen
after I died displayed a blaring “better luck next time” text and all I could
do then was go back to the menu and start the whole process again. Of course
there is a few more things to the game too and things have changed a bit since
I started playing in 2017, wow 2017 it really hasn’t been that long has it
though it seems an age ago. There has now been a vast number of changes and
improvements as per the usual way of games these days, especially ones that
start as ‘Early
Access’ on Steam. PUBG development started in March 2017 was once thought
to be one of those games stuck in ‘eternal early access’ with things slowly
being added over time slightly improving the game each time, and only 9 months
later your mother gave birth to youpatch
1.0 was live and the game was now officially a game or something I don’t
know it was out of early access anyway. That may seem like a while but there
are some games who have been in early access for years so the release was applauded.
You have to have your skydiving skills down pat
Playing PUBG now basically the gameplay is the same but a
lot of changes and fixes have been implemented since the early stages as one
would expect. It’s a pretty simple affair, you create your character then
simply jump into the game. One thing I like about PUBG is that you have so much
choice as to what you want to do, play solo, play in a team of 2 or 3 or 4 etc
other options include which maps you would like and the option to play locked
in First-person mode. As I detailed in my story playing solo is an exciting and
tense affair for me at least as I try to avoid direct combat, though the best
experiences come with playing with a squad. You can of course play with random
teammates which can be fun but playing with your friends on Discord (or whatever other voice chat you
prefer) is the best. My friends and I usually play third person and I actually
like this the best as I like seeing my player run and jump and crouch and hide
in the bushes and reload and shooting using third person looks awesome, it all
looks very cool and you don’t get to see it much in multiplayer shooters which
are usually all First-Person. Another reason is that I’m not ashamed to admit I
third-person-peek
which in case you haven’t done this already which I know you have, the act of
positing your player character in cover then using the camera to look around
where you wouldn’t be able to in reality. Yes it’s a bit suss but everyone does
it and First-person only servers weren’t introduced till almost patch 1.0 so
everyone did it.
Just taking a peek around the corner with my golden shotty
There are advantages and disadvantages of third and first
person, first person gives you a more immersive experience and is more
difficult due to you not having much visibility especially when prone so it
makes the last few circles a bit more tense as almost everyone is in prone
position and they can’t see each other. Third person allows you see around you
much more easily resulting in you being noticed more easily especially when you
are crawling through the grass thinking you are invisible. In first person you
can admire your gun and all the rest of the item models, in third person you
can admire yourself and all of your cool gear which is why I am seriously
considering changing to a female model at some point. Other things you can do
in the menu is customize your character, get rewards (more on these in the next
section) view your stats and view replays of your previous games, the replay
feature is very cool as it records your previous matches (up to about 20) and
you can play them back in full 3D with a large assortment of replay editing
tools inc the ability swing the camera around, slow down or speed up etc
basically all the things you would come to expect for making some cool videos.
The main menu
Just like any popular game these days, PUBG has a form of
the infamous loot crates. As
you play matches in PUBG you acquire Battle
Points (or BP) and these can be spent on two things, firstly if you are
unhappy with your gender or appearance you can change it for a mere 3000 BP. I
had never used this but after playing as a default guy for the entire period I
decided to try out a female character, which is something I don’t usually do as
I’m a bit uneasy with the whole thing but as I can change back at any time it’s
okay. Though man these female models are skinny and I totally realise the irony
of that statement, I mean after being the male models they look so damn small
and skinny and their necks are so long and seem to turn at impossible angles
and they look really frail and er well I’d better stop now before I get into
trouble. Anyway, the other use for the battle points is to purchase the loot
crates, there are different types of loot crates which have come out over time
and contain player clothing and weapon skins. This is fine as a reward for
playing though unfortunately some of the creates require you to purchase a key
with real money to open and that just makes me sigh and realise that’s just how
things are now.
At least I tried a female character, by the way this is the loadout screen where you can loot items, modify your weapons and view your character, as you can see I'm pretty well kitted up here
Previously the clothing was strewn around the floors of
buildings as loot but now you are given a basic set of clothing to use at the
start and if you want anything else you must spend your Battle points on crates
which will give you a random item of clothing each time, most often things you
already have. If you are like me and want to look unique, you can buy and sell
your clothes and weapon skins on the Steam Marketplace,
I had never used the Marketplace before as it was mostly used for games like CS:GO
and Team
Fortress but this I was actually interested in. What happens is your PUBG
in-game items are connected to your steam account and you can view them in
steam, I’d never really looked at this and found I had items from other games
too which I promptly sold as I didn’t play the game and didn’t want them and
then I had money to spend! Except it was Steam currency which you could only
use within Steam, as I looked at the items on sale I balked at the price of
some items like the Female
Ivory School Uniform set which was going for upwards of $1000 I mean
seriously who would pay that much and even if you sold it what could you look
forward to? Never having to pay for steam games again? You’d hope they started
selling pc parts or something on the marketplace. It didn’t take me long to
notice a lot of the clothing came from the original Battle Royale film as you
can see in one of the first promo images a girl wearing the ivory school uniform
set itself and the tracksuit
that Takeshi Kitano
wore plus a range of other clothing items from the movie.
I have a rather large wardrobe
One thing I like about games (especially multiplayer games)
is the ability to customise your character and being able to customise what you
are wearing in PUB is great, it may sound silly but I like to roleplay a bit, I
like to wear what would be appropriate for what I’m doing, which is parachuting
out of a plane followed by a lot more physical activity like running and
jumping through windows and handling weapons and explosives and crawling around
and hiding in buildings and foliage. My outfit has changed obviously as more
and more clothing becomes available and also specifically because of the
inclusion of weather and the
second map Miramar which is
based in the desert, (more on that later) so had to change things up a bit.
Though after much research on the PUBG Wiki
and PUBG Showcase (which has an awesome
outfit builder by the way) I think I got the right amount of comfort and
camouflage. I went with some brown high-top sneakers, some khaki green cargo
pants, a black long sleeved t-shirt, camo fingerless gloves, sunglasses and a
brown leather cap, the sunglasses and cap can be removed of course depending on
the weather and most of the time the cap will be removed anyway after you find
any sort of helmet. Miramar
being a desert map I change things up a bit with brown khaki cargo pants and a
brown t-shirt and this is basically it for the maps as there is basically just
forest, desert and jungle landscapes currently. Of course although I do my best
to camouflage and blend in to the environment by wearing similar-coloured gear
and not things like that freakin yellow tracksuit from the film that I see
others wearing, it doesn’t really make much difference in A. Close quarters
combat and B. basically whenever you move at all. As a friend of mine had said,
your chance of being spotted is affected the most by you how much you move
around, so you could be wearing a ghillie suit but if you’re
running through an open field someone is going to notice you.
This is one of the special event modes in the game called 'War Mode' which allows you to respawn after you have been killed, this one gave you basically just a Ghillie suit and a Kar98 Sniper Rifle. There is a funny moment at 4:45 where soemone walks right over me and doesn't notice I am there heh
One of the things that has changed now is that clothes are
no longer strewn around the buildings in the world, when you start the game for
the first time now you are no longer forced to run around in your undies as you
get a basic set of clothes and that’s it, anything else you must acquire from
loot crates or on the steam marketplace. I am somewhat ashamed to say that I
have spent about $42 US on clothing items as I have been trying to get the
right look, I even purchased a brown leather coat for about $25 AU as part of
the desert map outfit I was making that looked pretty cool but then I decided
it was too hot so just wore a t-shirt. Of course there are still items of
clothing strewn around the map that are regarded as ‘equipment’: Helmets and Vests provide
protection while Backpacks and Belts provide more carrying capacity, the latter are not
actually found in the world and are equipped by default. One of the most
annoying things at the start of the game is finding all this loot then not
having a backpack to store it all, sometimes when landing at quiet spots squad
matches become a ‘looting party’ where everyone travels across a few locations
looting as much as they can for about 20 mins unchallenged then we make our way
to the next circle armed to the teeth only to be shot and killed in a few
seconds by someone we never saw.
No we aren't doing a home renovation show this is an unofficially named 'loot drop party' where everyone drops loot they dont need then we all look through it and grab what we need.
That’s the reality of pubg, it’s sudden, it’s
unforgiving, vests and helmets can protect you slightly and if you are shot but
your squadmates are alive you enter a ‘downed’ state and can be revived by a
squadmate but if the enemy finishes you off it’s all over red rovor. Dropping
into high/risk/high loot areas is always a gamble and you get to know what
areas are hot and cold from experience though generally if you want to avoid
people you just avoid the cities and land far away from the flight path. One of
the worst things that can happen is if you are playing in a squad and you get
shot and they do the really annoying thing of finishing you off and then the rest
of your squad survives and you have to sit there spectating, and give coaching
or just do something else while your squadmates have fun heh. ‘Reviving’ is one
of the things that make playing with others all the more enjoyable, if you get
shot down you still have a chance especially if it was from miles away. Playing
alone there’s this constant fear, it’s so quiet, you can hear distant gunshots
and if you’re inside a buildings then hear footsteps coming from the bottom you
have to stop yourself from freaking the fuck out, there is a button to sneak so
you make no sound though it’s just so goddamn slow (and awkward to hold the
caps button) and when you do get shot at man you jump like hell because you got
the sound turned up so you can hear footsteps etc and then BANG. Playing with a
squad is much less tense but still nervous and fun if you know danger could be
coming around every corner and over every hill.
In the minivan with the squad hoping I don't get shot out, I like this shot heh
The Danger in PUBG isn’t just form other players of course
the Playzone aka the
‘Circle’ is one of the biggest killers in the game, though there’s technically
two of them. About two minutes after the plane passes over the dropzone the
white circle appears, this is the “safe” area then the blue circle appears and
starts shrinking the play area, but takes a leisurely 12 minutes to reach the
edge of the white circle. If you happen to be caught outside the first circle
you do take damage but only a small amount, it’s just a reminder for you to get
going, though as the circles get smaller they do much more damage, especially
if the blue circle has stopped moving and you’re still not in the play zone.
The play zone shrinks at 8 different times, circles 1-4 are relatively tame
with circles 5-8 have you sweating and questioning whether to cut all ties to
your teammates and make a break for it. The play zone itself resembles a giant
wall of blue electricity which is rather imposing though not as opposing as
some other versions
I’ve seen, it leaves you with a few dilemmas. Things like: “Do I keep looting
or get going?” “Do I leave my buddy who has been downed to die or risk losing
my life too” “Do we wait for that other squad we were trading shots with to run
when the circle comes or do we make a break for it now” usually in these
situations I choose to run first as I hate dying to the circle, it’s such a
goddamn waste and disappointing.
Sometimes the circle can look pretty damn scary as it rapidly surges toward you
Apart from the wall of death there are other
mechanics in the game to liven things up, the Red Zone indicated by a red
circle on the map appears as a warning that the area will be carpet-bombed
though this rarely results in death if you are stuck outside, all you really need
to do is get inside a building as apparently the bombs don’t penetrate through
roofes (they built them strong XD) There are also random air drops from planes that fly
past, these creates contain rare items such as the AWM Sniper Rifle, the 15x
PM II Scope and the Ghillie Suit all of which can only be found in these
crates. Because of this they are often dangerous to go near as they fall to the
ground slowly by parachute with a blinking light then when they hit the ground
a red flare comes up marking their position so basically every man and his dog
would have seen it come down. I generally don’t go near drops unless it’s
either right next to us or it’s in a hidden out-of-the-way place where I know
theirs is not many players around, but you never know so it’s always risky.
An longish journey across Erangel where we loot up then keep travelling, clear out a shed and find a drop crate then make a final stand in the forest.
So now we get to the maps, the sprawling landmasses of
both spoilt and unspoiled natural beauty with eerily abandoned and decayed
villages, towns, industrial centres, military bases, farms, quarries, ruins,
prisons, basically anything a small regional island (or area) would have. The
alpha map Erangel
was the first map set in the and possibly my favourite, I don’t know why, it’s
an island in the black sea in an eastern european setting and is based off the Chernarus map from DayZ which
itself was taken from Arma II,
maybe it’s the beautiful scenery with forests and farmlands and mountains, it
all just looks nice, the man-made structures though not so much. There’s really
no indication why the island is uninhabited, there wasn’t in the film really
either, there’s some story in the wiki page about the island was used for
military testing then there was a rebellion by the island’s population then an
electric field was used to keep rebellious towns contained but I guess it’s
just a filler, there’s no single player campaign and we don’t really need to
know why this is happening. A story I could believe though is that prisons are
overpopulated so they decided to kill some off by dropping us all on an
abandoned island that is abandoned maybe due to previous nuclear radiation danger
and letting us hunt each other down in a picturesque wasteland.
And a nice sunset cruise to finish off a day's killin
The Erangel map
is technically 8x8 miles though a large part is taken up by the ocean, getting
around the island quickly means making use of the various vehicles lying around the same
as everything else, yes in Erangel there are 4WDs, motorcycles (some with
sidecars) dune buggies, boats and oddly a Dacia 1300.
You know I love vehicles and using them is a lot of fun especially with friends
though as you could imagine vehicles are loud and can be heard coming not to
mention obvious to others as you zoom along the landscape though for the most
part you’re safe, you’re going fast so you are hard to hit. Vehicles are
necessary at times especially if you like to drop into the far edges of the map
or find the circle is nowhere near where you landed, they are useful to travel
to and from groups of houses looting as you go with all your buddies travelling
together, convoys are also fun too. I am fond of the motorcycles though they
are quite dangerous and prone to flipping where you could either knock yourself
down or kill yourself easily in solo mode, usually when two vehicles with
squads in meet it turns into a drive by shooting match with people often being
shot out of the vehicle and left behind which happened all too often to me or
everyone decided to bail out and take them on, bridges are often a haven for
ambushes especially when the circle is across a bridge.
One of my favourite PUBG videos I have made, this was quite a roadtrip.
Erangel was ‘the’ map for the majority of PUBG’s life, it
was only in December 2017 that Miramar
came along. We were all very excited for a new map, out in the desert, a
completely different landscape and it worked out well I think. There were
concerns that Miramar was too much of a city-centric map, the desert was hilly
in parts with some mountains and mesas if was a sniper heaven with little trees
and lots of exposed land, fighting mainly took place in towns and villages of a
South American country, though it seems more Mexican desert to me. One things
for sure, there are quite a lot of open roads and highways with a sort of
Biker/Mad Max feel to it and indeed the new clothing creates the Biker Crate
and Desperado
Crate did have that exact style of clothing which was pretty cool. And
along with this there were a host of new vehicles including an off-road
friendly Ford-esque pickup truck, a slow but roomy Volkwagon-esque van which
can seat 6 though unless it was a special event wouldn’t really be needed, a
Chevy-esque open topped muscle car and the weirdest looking jet-ski/dinghy
hybrid I have ever seen called the “Aquarail” though it’s fun to use to zoom
between the small amount of islands. Miramar is currently the only map that is
not an island as the western edge is blocked by a high mountain range and the
northern edge is blocked by a large steel wall which I think may be a reference
to Donald Trump’s comments.
After Miramar there was the introduction of weapon skins which was met with
mixed feelings as now with weapon
skin and clothing crates there were multiple versions and again some you
actually had to pay to purchase a key to open even after you spent your battle
points, this game was becoming like CS:GO
and Team Fortress all the time.
The entourage in the Chevy on Miramar
Anyway so after that a new map Sanhok was announced, this new map
would be different from the last two as it is much smaller 4x4 miles instead of
8x8 which would make for some much more action-packed and fast paced gameplay
and immediately I wasn’t impressed. I liked pubg being big cause I liked
landing in the middle of nowhere, travelling large distances across a huge
landscape and hiding in houses with your squad scanning the fields and hills
with the thrill of when you eventually seeing someone. I didn’t want the game
to become a closed-in cityscape gun battle like I’ve seen happen with the
Battlefield series and also games like Counterstrike that take it to the
extreme with maps that are overly simplified, like a bunch of 4 pillars in a
room and that’s the whole map, but anyway the map was going to be half the size
not like a quarter so I guess that was ok. The landscape itself was this time
going to be a mixture of Thailand and the Philipines which was pretty cool as
the name ‘Sanhok’ is a mixture of the Thai word for fun: ‘sahnook’ and the
Philipino word for chicken ‘manok’ so it basically means chicken-fun.
The current three maps in PUBG (Sanhok not to scale though you can tell it's smaller)
Sanhok is
a typical tropical south-east-asian environment feature rolling green hills,
lush jungle vegetation, rice fields, temples, beach resorts and traditional
rural housing. It also has a heavy military presence with many military camps
dotted around which reminds me more of Vietnam then Thailand or the Philipines
as they have names like “Camp Alpha” and “Camp Charlie” and even some of the
rural villages are called things like ‘Ha Tinh’ and ‘Ban Tai’ which to me sound
kind of Vietnamese so there seems to be a very Vietnam War things going on with
the naming but most of the scenery is reminiscent of the two countries as there
is a large cave that you can parachute into from the plane similar to the Pham Lot cave in
Thailand. Sanhok now has some new vehicles including the iconic Scooter and the Tukshai which you
may also know as the Tuk-Tuk.
Ahh sunny Sanhok, one of my friends who is Thai says that some of the trees on the island aren't quite correct though
After Sanhok the Training Mode featuring a smallish island where there are facilities to practice practice pretty much anything you do in the game, shooting, driving on land or water, parkour, parachuting, throwing grenades etc It's pretty fun to mess around with friends driving around the test tracks and jumping around the parkour course. A new survival reward system has also been created allowing you to gain more clothing items for doing specific task for example getting kills with an SMG or surviving at least 20 mins.
I have a snipe at my friends at the Trainign island boatyard, you can the boating course further out and the 800m sniping range on the top right
In case you didn’t know PUBG is developed using the Unreal
Engine 4, which made development faster than games such as ARMA and H1Z1,
which were built with proprietary game engines. Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Green
said himself that development was difficult when creating such huge maps as the
engine was never built for that sort of thing. To be honest I think it looks
great, it looks pretty damn realistic and despite the fact that I may hinder
myself by playing with decent graphics I like to because the game looks so good
and I don’t think it really affects me, I’ve played things like 7 Days to Die
and to be honest they almost seem to have been made with the same engine,
though 7 days to die seems so freakin depressing. Anyway the graphics look
realistic, nuff said, there’s a bit of glitching but it’s fine, the game has
had some major graphical updates since its inception and now looks much better,
only after watching the Zero
Punctuation review where Yahtzee mentioned that most of the models look
like they were taken from the stock military/survival/fps and it’s kind of
correct, as your character doesn’t really have any kind of personality their
just a base multiplayer model that yells in pain on occasion but no change in
facial features though who needs that really it’s a multiplayer game.
We are all very serious with our apples
I for one
like the beautifully rendered, grass trees and bushes and hide in them quite a
lot in fact a running joke about me is that I like to hide in a bush for most
of the game but with graphics like this, why not? I’m also a big fan of the
weather effects as at one point ‘evening’ ‘rain’ and ‘fog’ matches were
introduced and man did I like the rain and fog ones. The noise of the rain
muffled footsteps and even some gunshots and slightly limited visibility, fog
was the best as it severely limited your visibility making sniping virtually impossible,
but this was the same for everyone so it was fine. Bluehole actually removed
the fog and rain weather after players started intentionally leaving the match
which had this feature, which really sucks to be honest couldn’t they just
leave it in? To combat this, the maps now have dynamic weather so they usually
start off with clear weather then fog or a storm will roll in which is ok but I
really like to dress for the occasion.
"Oh no and it was so nice and sunny when we first started too, oh well I guess they won't hear us coming over the thunder"
There are hot drops in the middle of every map, and in Sanhok it was definately Paradise Resort, with the school for Erangel and Hacienda Del Patron for Miramar
Another good way to practice this is
events, yes PUBG has had a fair few official
events from simple changes like 8-man squads and weapon spawn changes i.e
Crossbows and Ghillie suits, Shotguns only, 45.acp ammo weapons only to more
complicated things like flare guns scattered around the map that can be used to
summon armoured 4x4’s. And then there’s the game-changing War Mode, yes War
mode is basically a static circle, (about the size of circle 4) at a random
point in a map and there are planes constantly flying over the area so if you
die you can respawn, it’s based in teams and the highest kill count wins. War
mode is fun and good practice but it still makes me nervous as I don’t want the
entire game to be like this. And then there’s the custom modes, yes you can customise
the game to be almost anything you want, one of the weirdest modes I have
played was vehicles only, no weapons, so it was basically just everyone driving
around and tryingto squeeze each other
out of the final circle before it disappeared.
Have you ever seen this many cars at the same place?
PUBG has grown into one of the most popular games in the
world, as of 10/8/2018 it was Steam’s top
game by player countand has
officially cracked the top 10 best
selling video games ever and has seen a lot of publicity though not nearly
as much as publicity as you know what
but I’m kind of glad it isn’t as when the game you play is being featured on A
Current Affair it’s not often a good thing. PUBG is definitely my favourite
of the Battle Royale genre as it is now, I have never played Fortnite but I’m
not a fan of the graphics and the generally more fast-paced gameplay though the
building mechanic looks like a fun thing to mess around with.Totally
Accurate Battlegrounds was released
from the same creators of Totally Accurate Battle Simulator as a Battle Royale
clone with a very comical style complete with silly, locations, flailing dummy
player characters and a large and ridiculous weapon arsenal, I played with my
housemate and it was a lot of fun and I gotta say the TABG version of the
‘wall’ is the best I’ve ever seen. I haven’t tried out Ring of
Elysium yet but I it looks ok. Lastly I’d never thought I’d say this as I
am not a fan of Call of Duty but their upcoming ‘Blackout’
battle royale mode for Black Ops 4 looks pretty good. PUBG is also available on Xbox1 and interestingly Android and IoS too, I did install it on my tablet and have a play but frankly you know how I feel about using the tablet screen to play a game and it currently has no controller support, probably to stop others having an unfair advantage. Of course people have managed to use a controller through rooting their device, something I will never do. And even managed to get a keyboard and mouse working on their phone which leads to a massive advantage to someone who decides to do this and obviously the general playerbase is not happy as this tips the scales a lot when you're fumbling around with the touchscreen controls.
I like the angle on this shot
So if PUBG is that popular the developers must be doing
something right, but you wouldn’t think that when hearing from the community,
yes that’s right much like any kind of product or service, you often only hear
bad feedback and complaints if anything at all and with a game as popular as
PUBG this is a true as ever with one of the most toxic
communities around, on Steam the reviews are “Mostly negative” if you trust
that sort of thing. Yes PUBG has had its fair share of complaints including
things I’ve never heard of such as claiming the game has bad ‘optimization’
which can be described in this way "Good optimization means that the game
works at the same framerate across a wide range of hardware specs, including
low-end configurations." So this explains why I see complaints from
players super god-like high end system not displaying the constant 60fps framerates
or whatever they are after but tbh the only time my framerate seems slow is
when I’m locked in a gun battle with another player and that’s no time to check
your fps counter. I admit that PUB from the start isn’t the most stable of
games but you would expect something like this from a game in BETA. Though even
when PUBG reached patch 1.0 and was officially released a lot of the issues
were still there, things like not being able to see friends in the menu,
invisible walls, rendering issues, graphical issues, framerate issues and a
large one being server and connection issues as you often get random ‘server
busy’ and ‘cannot connect’ etc screens but you seem to be able to overcome them
by just trying again.
Fog, hard to see whats in the distance, but much better frames per second!
And then there’s the inevitable hackers the mostly Chinese
hackers are well known within the community. While I’m sure there are
people who hack from other countries it’s evident that a large number of the
playerbase hail from China as many a time in the lobby you hear Chinese
language-speakers, even in the Oceanic lobbies there were many. We didn’t
really know the reason that they were here though we guessed that there were
too many players (and hackers) in their own server so they decided to infect
us. Thankfully there is a deathcam feature in PUBG so you can see exactly how
you were killed however embarrassingly or illegally it was done and yes we saw
each other being spotted through buildings and landscapes and the suspect’s aim
snapping onto us then being shot at long range with no recoil and we can then
choose to report them for all these abuses but it’s just sad that a game needs
to implement this level of tools to combat hacking. More recently the oceanic
servers seem to be dead as queuing in that region leading to wait times of
almost half an hour if the game ever happens, I’m not sure whether it’s due to
failing interest or a server problem as we have to resort to playing on the
South East Asia servers which although we will have a ping disadvantage we are
able to get a game quickly. PUBG Corp interestingly released a new ‘Fix PUBG’ campaign aiming to make the game
better, something that has come a little too late for many players.
Eeeyowch, you can see the death cam and report options on the lower right, this guy was thankfully legit
Despite all of these issues PUBG is one of my favourite
games still, it’s a great game to play with friends and I have had the good
fortune of the game to be adopted at my (sortof) local large-scale Lan Lan-slide with not one but three comps,
Squad, Solo and War Mode Duos. I don’t play it as much anymore as it seems
everyone just wants to play Sanhok and not the old maps and I’m a bit sick of
it though I will get back into it once the new Snow map is released. I will still
always regard Battlefield
2 as my favourite Multiplayer FPS and Vietcong as my
favourite combination of both story and multliplayer ever but this comes a
close third though they are all different in gametypes, in Battlefield there
was only conquest mode, in Vietcong we always played capture the flag and PUBG is battle royale (most of the time
anyway) If you’re looking to get in on the battle royale action then I can only
recommend PUBG as the original of these games, I can’t recommend Fortnite or
any of the others (with the possible exception of TABG) as I have not given
them a go. Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds is all I need and I will continue to
support it, well until the usual two reasons I leave multiplayer games, the
playerbase dies or something better comes along, that’s just the world we live in.
JD
10/10
Things I liked:
Battle Royale is awesome!
I like hiding
The ever present sense of danger
Great game to play with friends
Choice to play alone or with one, two or 3 friends, no set
number
Realistic graphics and environment
Character model and clothing customization
Very large play area, slow paced gameplay
Ability to rejoin game when game crashes.
Great death cam and replay feature
Leave and start a new game whenever you like, very minimal
waiting times
Things I didn’t like:
Many many bugs and issues
Many hackers
Mostly unpleasant community
Oceanic servers no longer playable
Having to purchase keys with real money to open some loot
boxes.
Getting killed early on then having to wait for your
squadmates to finish.
