Table of contents

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• Nerd Cubed - Nerd Cubed Plays...

Games

Age of Fable

• http://www.ageoffable.net/
• I like the pictures that accompany the text.
  
• At first I found it boring, but I gradually got more and more involved in the universe that it was discussing; it was kind of like being hypnotized into forgetting about my life and instead being sucked into a dream.
  
• It seems like in order to get sucked into the dream you need to have it be different enough that you won't be reminded of things that you're encountering in your real life, but similar enough that people can understand the images you're trying to convey.
  

AI War

General thoughts

• First impression from reading the developer's prose in the tutorials is that this guy sounds competent.

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• Q: If you can hear the sonar pings from escorts, does that mean they know where you are?
• Is it realistic to be able to use the periscope underwater to see nearby ships while you're below periscope depth? I feel like the visibility underwater should not be more than a few feet.
• Q: Can escorts detect you with their hydrophones if you're moving at the slowest speed, or stopped?
• Q: Is it better to just keep hammering a ship with the deck gun in the same spot?
• It would be more immersive if the game showed sailors abandoning ship.
  • A: I think the GWX3 mod does show this. SH4-5 may also show this, I'm not sure.

Soldier of Fortune 2

Thoughts

• This is a pretty good game.  I can see how it would be frustrating if you were trying to play it like Call of Duty.  It's definitely more fun once you learn how the AI behaves, because then you get killed less.
• I can't lie, the realistic gore is what made me want to play the game, but it actually doesn't seem over-the-top, it seems generally pretty realistic.

Advice

• The way to do well in this game is to crouch-walk through the levels, 'slicing the pie' of each room / area to take on the enemy one at a time.
• The pistol and the M4 are always perfectly accurate, so (unfortunately) there doesn't seem to be much of a reason to ever use something else, like the shotgun or M60.  They should've required you to press some key to hold your breath to get better accuracy for the pistol and M4 and have a wide spread otherwise, that would make the shotgun actually useful for CQB.
• The AI are less accurate when they're further away and so you should prefer to engage them when they're further away.
• If you're playing carefully, one of your biggest remaining dangers is grenades, and your best defense against them is keeping distance from the enemy (I'd estimate you want to be at least 40-60 feet away from them if possible, and further away is better).  so what you want to do is get to the point where the enemy is shooting at you and then fall back to a position where you're far enough away that they won't be able to throw a grenade at food.
• The enemy seems to be much better at hitting you when you're standing up so you want to stay crouched pretty much the entire time, only standing briefly to look / shoot over objects that are preventing you from seeing further.
• When you're using the M4, use single-shot.
• Rebind your keys!  Off the top of my head, these are the changes I made:
  • 1 - My main weapon (M4)
    • I did this so I could quickly switch back to it from my binoculars on the jungle mission.
  • Shift - Hold to run
  • Ctrl - Hold to crouch
  • G - select grenade
  • B - select binocs
  • Tab - Zoom binocs / scope
  • F - Use door / pick lock / disarm trap
  • Space - Jump
  • Right-click - Secondary fire / zoom scope
  • R - reload (I don't remember if this was the default or not)
• The linear design of the levels gives you an advantage when fighting the AI, because you can always(?) safely retreat while facing forwards towards new threats; you never(?) need to worry about enemies behind you.  You can use this to your advantage by using your gun to get the attention of enemy AI that are in a good defensive position and thereby drawing them towards you, and then falling back to a position where you can eliminate them more easily.
• You can usually hear the enemy soldiers' footsteps when they're pretty close to you, and that can be a good time to use grenades if you can be sure that they won't have time to get to you before you can pull out your gun after throwing the grenade.
• If you use your binoculars to zoom in on an enemy, that seems to actually make them more likely to spot you–even if you're difficult to spot–so don't zoom in too much on enemy soldiers with binoculars.
• You'll pick up health and body armor if you're even the slightest bit below maximum health/armor, and so on the harder difficulty setting you may want to wait to pick them up if you're already close to full health/armor.  But you should remember where they are so you can go back to them later in the mission if you get shot.
• This game on its hardest difficulty is actually more forgiving than Operation Flashpoint.
• Penetration doesn't seem to be modeled; a tent will protect you from an M60.

Spelunky

• The main cause of death I'm seeing is combinations: an enemy will not only do damage to you but also result in you being thrown in the opposite direction, which often ends up with you falling off a ledge, or being pushed into a trap or another enemy.

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