Shades Of Twilight

Lately I’ve been running around inside Hellgate again. My gaming buddy and I have made a new character, Summoner class, and we’re both approaching level 30 now.

Along the way, we’ve had some buggy quests. One of the most pain-in-the-butt ones was the “Kill 14 Shard Skimmers” in Threadneedle (and another earlier zone, I forgot). The problem seems to happen only with Summoners and Engineers, and perhaps Guardians and Blademasters (if what they say is correct).

The thing about Shard Skimmers is that they’d run up to you, kamakaze style, and ram into you. Once they do that, and you kill them, the kills don’t count. You have to kill them before they even come near you to ram (or “plant a phase bomb” as what the guys said over the global chat) you.

With this in mind, I tried the quest again. This time I only summoned my ranged pets and left the melee ones unsummoned. That means my warper, fire elementals, toxic elemental and storm elementals were summoned. The earth elemental and the spectral ones were not.

This time around it was easier to get the Shard Skimmer kills to count, although I still did have some slight problems with it.

So it appears that if you’re a melee char, or a summoner with melee pets, you need to keep them away from the Shard Skimmers, and to kill the skimmers really quick and at range, to make the kills count

In other news, I have managed to obtain Alpha Prime, a game which I learnt about on the Xfire forums. It’s so strange that I have not seen it on Gamespot or any other game sites. It’s a sci-fi FPS game, and from first looks, it looks great. I have been warned that the gameplay and story might get a little cheesy later on, but so far, I’m only at the beginning stage, and have only gotten a shotgun and a pistol in my arsenal.

Here’s a couple of screenshots from it:

Looks pretty nice eh? Yeah even on my 4 year old rig, the game auto-detected settings at HIGH and set the resolution to 1024×768.

I’m looking forward to completing this and see if this is as scary as Doom 3 or Quake 4.

First of all, I’m actually surprised that the launch of Crysis in Singapore was such a hushed affair, what with all the hype surrounding its imminent release on 16 Nov 2007. I actually FORGOT about it until a week later, on 23rd Nov, when I happened to visit my regular game shop and saw it there.

So, I went home, loaded it up and started to go through the game. I tried setting the graphic options to MEDIUM (the game autodetected my configs as “LOW”) and yeah, it starts to lag pretty bad. I turned everything back to LOW and just bumped the resolution up from 800×600 (autodetect) to 1024×768. I mean seriously, the jaggy edges are horrible at 800×600… at least at 1024×768 I’m slightly more forgiving.

The first “level” is the same as in the demo – you freefalling onto a Korean island and then you catch a glimpse of the alien. So, I’ll skip ahead to the 2nd mission.

This is where the alien has captured another of your colleagues and killed him, and now you and Psycho have to go rescue a hostage held in a school.

This is where the bug is – After I had totally CLEANED out the school compound, the hostage and Psycho disappeared! I couldn’t find them anywhere, and my map didn’t update with a new objective.

Fine, I reloaded a savegame somewhere in the middle of the mission. I cleaned out the school compound again, but this time, Psycho and the hostage wouldn’t budge from the room they were in. I threw a few grenades into the room, Psycho ran around a little inside the room, but never left (incidentally, the hostage is invulnerable… the frag grenade didn’t even faze her).

So, giving up, I selected “RESTART LEVEL” from the main menu. This time, as I was in the process of approaching the school compound, Psycho finally said he’s coming in after me. Then, during the process of sneaking to the school building, Psycho said he’s right behind me.

I never got these 2 messages the first time!

So, now, I cleared the tanks, and right on cue, Psycho chirped – “Let’s get outta here!” and started to run.

Ok I dunno what the difference was between my first run and my 2nd run through this level, but now it’s not “stuck” anymore and I have a new quest objective in my map.

Just thought you guys would like to know if you encountered something similar….

Hmm I seem to have found a sort of incompatibility between games.

I have Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter loaded. This game uses the AGEIA physics engine, which required a separate install of the engine itself outside of the game. Now, apparently this seem to clash with the Oblivion physics engine, which is Havok engine.

I noticed that things seem to be a bit wonky when playing Oblivion with the AGEIA engine running in the background (it’s a separate thing by itself, unlike Havok which is part of the game). Spell effects either get stalled or go in slow-motion in Oblivion. Doors open in slow-motion. Fires either stop burning or burn in slow-motion.

Removing the AGEIA engine fixed this problem. So I’m guessing 2 physics engines running at the same time is not a good idea.

Edit: – OK I was mistaken. It seems that the cause of this problem is my savefile for Oblivion, which seemed to become increasingly corrupted as I play my main character. I think I might need to search on the forums for a resolution to this…