And to think it hasn’t even been a few weeks since the Steam Autumn Sale, in which my credit card was royally buttfucked. And now we’re already into the Christmas Holiday Sale… I’ve barely managed to pay off my current maxed-out card (thank you very much Mr. “Can you take a cheque some other time?” Eirtakon Treasurer who owes me some games prizes and taxi trips…) and now I’m going to be loading more onto it.

Ah well, at least it makes for cheap Christmas presents for those I know who use Steam, which is pretty much Avy and… Yea.

So, the “funky” thing that Steam are doing with the sale this year is by playing around by giving everyone gifts via the Steam Inventory system. Using objectives (á la the Summer Sale with its prize tickets), you will either earn gifts or lumps of coal. There are a wide variety of gifts you can receive. One little bit of a “fuck you” though are coupons for however much of whatever, but for the most part they can’t be redeemed until AFTER the sale, and most of them are worthless considering the discount on the coupon is less than the discount offered during the sale. Oh, and they also don’t work for anything released after the sale, either.

So, the other thing is a lump of coal. However, here’s where it gets a bit interesting. You can craft seven lumps of coal into a gift (whether it’s random or chosen, who knows), or you can keep all your coal and each lump grants you an extra entry into the overall sweepstakes where the winners will win FUCKING EVERYTHING ON STEAM. There’s also some wishlist grants (50 x Top 10, 100 x Top 5) and 1k Valve Complete Packs too, but meh.

So anyway, I’ll be updating this post during the sale with my progress with the objectives and what crap gifts, or coal I earned. Yay…

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So, last night I booted up Modern Warfare 3 – having sent the order for my sister to pick it up while she was in the Centre to use up €73 worth of gift cards I keep forgetting about – with the intention of starting to stream my playthrough of the Veteran difficulty campaign. What I was not expecting was to actually finish it in the one night. It is annoyingly short, even on the hardest difficulty.

Upon finishing the campaign, scrolling the credits and returning to the main menu, the campaign time counter read 5 hours, 46 minutes. Five and a half hours for a campaign on the hardest difficulty possible is really not great at all, even more so when you consider how much time you have to use up replaying certain parts again based on how badly you do at it and how much you die.

Bearing that in mind, this would probably indicate that running through the campaign on the easiest difficulty would probably take no more than three hours. For such a high-profile game, this is woefully short. Something that a member of my stream chat mentioned about it:

It’s an interactive action movie disguised as an FPS war simulator.

In fact, the campaign is probably something that’s better made as an action movie. Not that I want to or expect to see a movie tie-in, but if it were to happen, it’d probably do well.

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So I’ve been playing around with Dxtory recently, testing it to see if it’s a good alternative for PC recording compared to what I currently use – FRAPS. Both programs do the job, but both of them also appear to have different wants and costs associated with them, as well as having a different end result.

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Sometimes I do forget that I have a blog sitting around that I can update with goings-on. Problem is usually that there goings-on aren’t really very interesting or worth blogging about.

Not much has really gone on over the past few weeks. I’m still making my YouTube videos, doing a lot of streaming over on NGame, and getting pissed and annoyed with a few people as always. The NASCAR, F1 and IndyCars have also sucked away a fair few hours.

More recently however, there has also been a couple of cases of conflict in areas.

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So, I was on the train home today from a meeting in town with some of my fellow boards.ie Pokéforum nerds, when my mind managed to stumble around to Minecraft. I had begun to think why the Flint and Steel is made using Flint and an Iron Ingot? So that led me to think: why not add Steel to the game, and make Flint and Steel require – literally – Flint and Steel?

Thus begins the rather large thought process.

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So, this morning saw Portal 2 release at sometime about 5:30am – no thanks to all the people who played along with the whole Potato Sack thing and kept pushing the launch time back from mid-afternoon… –  to which I duly booted it up, slowly waited for the damn thing to decrypt the pre-loaded game files, and then streamed my entire playthrough of the game on my NGame channel.

Firstly, I should give a big shout-out to ThoughtsOfGlought and IrradiatedGamer for hooking me up with the game after winning a contest they were holding for a pre-order copy of Portal 2. And also I get to hopefully enjoy Glought dying a lot in VVVVVV soon

The game itself is brilliant, very well made, great story, and actually lasts for quite a while when you compare it to the original Portal. Overall, you get three distinct environments in which the puzzles take place, and I’d have to say that each one is about the length of the original Portal testchambers – and only the testchambers.

To put a time on the length of the game, I’d say six hours is a good figure for the story length, based on my stream video containing pretty much the entire game bar the first while lasting five and a half hours, and also the timespan between me getting the first story achievement, and the last one was 5h32m. Although that timeframe did include a couple of puzzles that well and truly had be stumped for a while, I must say.

Co-op I haven’t had much of a chance to dive into yet. Both myself and MegaGWolf played the single player from launch and were pretty damn tired afterwards, but we completed the first “intro” part of co-op, and the first set of testchambers proper – before G had to get ready for work, and I had to go to bed (after having had three hours of sleep and running on a bottle of Mountain Dew).

One thing that some people may say about it – seeing as it is released to retail on 360 and PS3 as well – is that the PC version is pretty much a console port. I would normally disagree with that, but seeing as they did screw up in where you’re manually saving the game and it advises you to “not turn off your console“, I’m on the fence about that.

Overall, it is a great game, but I do have one major bone to pick about it: the price. Full retail price of €50 for something as short and kinda unreplayable as Portal 2 is a bit of a rip-off. As with Portal 1, once you’ve gone through the game and have an idea of how to do the puzzles, future playthroughs aren’t exactly the same. This may seem a little biased considering I got Portal 1 on PC for free (special Steam offer to all); and Portal: Still Alive on Xbox Live Arcade for 1200 MS Points (€15) which had even more content that the regular Portal – but I think maybe something like €30-€35 would have been the most fair price for the game. I pre-ordered Left 4 Dead 2 back in the day and that too was €50, and I do kinda regret it considering how much I haven’t really played it, how similar it was to L4D1, and also the fact it dropped in price to €30 within a few months of launch…

Anyway, I’m not going to spoil any of the game for you, go play it for yourself if you haven’t already.

Link to my NGame recording: http://www.ngame.tv/thechrisd/thechrisdsrandomgamingstream24787

PS: If you bought it on 360 or PS3, SHAME ON YOU!!! VALVE GAMES ARE SACRED THINGS THAT SHOULD ONLY BE PLAYED ON A PC WITH A KEYBOARD AND MOUSE!!!
(I know it seems rich seeing as I bought Portal 1 on 360, but I hadn’t otherwise paid for Portal before. And the extra content…)

So, I’ve been playing F1 2010 recently, and I thought it might be an idea to maybe try write up a “racing report” style of article once I eventually finish up the first season. Now the results themselves may seem a little askew given the current difficulty settings I’m playing under (Amateur difficulty; full ABS, TCS; manual gearbox; sim fuel/tyres/damage; max flashbacks; auto pit), but I’m blaming that on the fact I’m doing an achievement run in the first year for at least:

• Rocking the boat (15)
  Finish ahead of your senior team-mate in your first season with a new team
• Crushing victory (20)
  Outclass your team mate at each race, over one season
• Consistency is the key (25)
  Score a point in every round of a season

Maybe after I finish it completely – and I finish up doing my Let’s Play of Pokémon Black – I might do a Let’s Play of one of my future seasons in the game on a harder difficulty, which should ideally offset the fact I’ll be in a much faster car, particularly as I have both Force India and BMW Sauber interested in my services for next year

First, I shall give a brief lesson as to what an Emolga actually is:

FUCKING EMOLGA

Emolga (Japanese: エモンガ Emonga) is a dual-type Electric/Flying Pokémon introduced in Generation V.

Emolga is a rodent-like Pokémon, primarily white in coloration, that most resembles a flying squirrel. It possesses facial features similar to Pachirisu’s, such as its eyes, tiny nose, and yellow cheek patches. Its ears, positioned at the top of its head, are rounded in shape and black in coloration, with yellow and white sections of coloration in the inside of its ears. Emolga sports a vaguely hood-like patterning of black around its head, with a spiky extension of the pattern above its face. Emolga possesses winglike, yellow-colored flaps connected to its three-fingered arms. Its feet are white-colored and fairly small and its black-colored tail is in a jagged shape.

Similar to Pikachu, Emolga can store electricity on its electric sacs located on its cheeks. When threatened, it releases this electricity to fend off other Pokémon. Emolga lives in the treetops and glides from tree to tree using its cape-like patagium, sometimes discharging its electricity.

This fucking thing. Oh my god, THIS FUCKING THING.

Emolga is the worst possible thing to come out of Pokémon in Generation V. It’s Electric/Flying dual typing gives it immunity to it’s primary weakness: Ground; and instead replaces it with a weakness to Rock and Ice. Normally this is fine, as the only other Pokémon with this typing are either legendary (Zapdos, Thundurus), or only acquired the typing in Gen V and aren’t available in Unova anyway (Fan Rotom).

However the primary problem with this thing is the fact that it appears so early in the game, and when it does start to appear, it appears in force. Through a combination of it’s 103 base Speed, Static ability, and early access to Double Team; this is the most annoying Pokémon you will come up against, especially if you lack the necessary tools to be able to dispatch it.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that Emolga appears prominently in the Electric-type Gym of Unova, in Nimbasa City. It is the 4th Gym of the region, which differs to the other Electric Gyms in Vermilion (3rd), Mauville (3rd), and Sunyshore (8th).

Another part is the lack of availability of Electric-types in general in Unova. At that point in the game only Blitzle/Zebstrika and Emolga are available, and as such the Gym also features only those two evolutionary lines. The other Electric-types of the region: Tynamo/Eelektrik/Eelektross, Joltik/Galvantula and Stunfisk all appear after the 5th Gym.

And finally, the lack of viable counters. The Ice-type does not come into play until the next town, which you cannot access before the 4th Gym battle. As for the Rock-type, there are a few more options, but unless you already have them, it may be too “out of the way” to bother with. Pokémon-wise, there are Roggenrola/Boldore/Gigalith or Dwebble/Crustle. Both have a high physical Attack and Defense, but suffer with a lack of Special Defense, opening them up to Volt Switch. Also, their lower Speed means getting an attack off before a Double Team is nigh impossible.

As well as that, the available moves aren’t great either. Smack Down is the best as it renders them vulnerable to Ground, but requires that it actually hits, which may be a pain given Double Team. Rock Slide requires a higher level, and has less accuracy, as does Rock Tomb from TM39 found in the desert.

In general, these fucking things were designed to make you tear your hair out, swear profusely at your DS, and to rage-eject the game cartridge before running it over with your car. Add to this the annoying strategy they employ with the Gym Leader (Double Team, then Aerial Ace in case you try the same, and Volt Change to GTFO to Zebstrika when the going gets too tough).

FUCKING EMOLGAS.

PS: On my Facebook page, you can find an album of images with other people’s expressions of anger, with regards to these little rodents. Also, feel free to express your anger at these things in the comments, or rant on Twitter with the hashtag #fuckingemolgas.

I should be able to still utilise the excuse that I’m paying too much attention to other stuff to realise that I have a blog that I really should keep updated…?

Been spending most of my time working on more videos for my YouTube channel. Hopefully all this effort will pay off soon, as right now I feel like I’m putting a ton more work in that several high-profile YouTubers who dapple in the same subject areas as I do, who are still more popular and gaining even more views and subs every day, whereas I’m sitting here just hoping that even a few hundred people will watch it.

I suppose that as a gamer, I ought to write some more gaming and game-related posts; so, here’s something that I feel just a little bit vocal about – the upcoming large patch for Civ V in the next couple of days.

Judging by the entire patch notes (which include a few changes already made in previous patches), the core gameplay itself looks to be changed quite drastically, hence why I have held off starting a new game after winning my last game as America – somehow via Diplomacy when I had just spent the last third of the game wiping my equal rival off of the map after he was stupid enough to declare war on me – so that things won’t radically change during my game.

So, a few things I’ve noticed in these notes that I’m more than a little interested in:

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