Month: August 2016

Deus Ex Mankind Divided

I recently finished a play through of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.  I’ve been a fan of the Deus Ex games since the first release way back in 2000,  and I was pretty excited for the new release.  Eidos Montreal promised they wouldn’t mess up the boss fights this time, and outside of that unpleasantness, I loved Human Revolution.  I’ll do my best to avoid massive spoilers but there might be a few at the end of this.

The game puts you back in JC Denton’s Adam Jensen’s shoes in the wonderful city of Prague. In the story’s universe, the city of Prague is not the nicest to its augmented citizens.  The city even has it own ghetto to corral all the augmented citizens in one area.  If you might recall, our stories protagonist has about as many human bits left as Robocop does.  This leads to some interesting interactions with the local security forces.  I highly recommend walking in the non-aug areas as much as possible to trigger the events btw.

The city’s paranoia is not entirely without good reason.  The world is still scared from a horrific event years before when the world’s augmented population went berserk causing the worst loss of human life in history.  I might be a bit scared of the guy with arms strong enough to tear through sheet metal knowing a loss of control had happened.

It is all good for the hero though.  He’s in town working for Sector 7 er Task Force 29.  He is hunting terrorists who enjoy blowing things up or something.  Too be honest, the side quests are better then the main plot line.  They bring up some really thought provoking topics, but they never delve deep enough into them.   So that’s two things so far.  Piss off the local cops, and do the side quests.

Game play is good.  You can sneak around and punch people, or sneak around and gut them.  You’ll also have lots of guns and explosives to help you on your quest.  Your character is more then capable to demolishing AI characters in a 1v1 fight.  However, they will set off the alarms quickly.  You’ll be outnumbered in no time, and probably die.  If you’re character is using a stealth build, you’ll probably die anyway.  I know I did, a lot.  🙁  At least it reloads fairly quickly.  Anyway, I’m sure an assault build would make quick work of the bad guys if one wanted to play that way.

I attempted to go non-lethal in my play through, but the first NPC I spoke with said I hadn’t been.  I must have held down ‘Q’ for too long and executed an AI.  Perhaps I dropped some unconscious guy from too high up?  I dunno what I did, but I guess I was labeled a murder at this point.     I reacted about like this..

As for the game’s performance.  Well, it did alright on my Nvidia 770.  I was running it at 1080 resolution with graphics set to high.  For 95% of the game, it ran flawlessly.  I did have a couple of massive FPS drops in two areas.  I’m not sure if my GPU disliked the rain as both drops happened during active rainstorms.  However, my GPU could have been overheating.  I think it’s becoming ill, and I had been playing for awhile before it went weird.

‘Hey I heard there were micro-transactions, and if you defend them you’re a fanboy.’  Controversy time!  Yes, it has micro-transactions in a single player game.  No, you do not need them to enjoy the game.  You can buy in game upgrade points.  However, the game is fairly generous about giving out those upgrades just by finishing missions.  I didn’t have an issue with in game credits either.  I was a bit short on the microcell batteries that recharge your augments through some of the game, but it never was that much of an issue.  I should note that I barely even noticed the micro-transactions.  I don’t recall any in game moments that said, ‘Hey go pay real $ for in game upgrades’.  I barely noticed the ‘Store’ tab in the options menu.  Yeah, it is a bit odd for micro-transactions to be in a full priced release.  However, I don’t feel they’re an issue.  If you have impulse control problems, you probably disagree with me and that’s cool.  Rock on!

Overall, I’d give Deus Ex: Mankind Divided a thumbs up.  It’s fun, the visuals are well done, and it’s a neat story while it lasts.  It should be on sale soon enough.  I’d recommend picking it up then.

 

 

 

 

Breaking Battlefield 2 Cheaters

I’m feeling rather nostalgic this week, and I was thinking about my time spent as an admin for one of the top 10% of BF2 servers.

BF2 had ups and downs during its lifespan.  It has some terrible bugs that made the Blackhawk helicopter an absolute terror for a few months, and it had that one that left almost all aircraft untouchable to missiles.  Good times.

One of the big changes in BF2 from most other games was the stat tracking.  You could review all of your previous rounds,  Check your Kill to Death ratio anytime you felt like it.  However, when you start putting everyone’s names into a competition, some people will always want to have more digital prestige then their skills will afford them.  So the cheaters arose to prove only that they are cheaters.

Aimbots..  Aimbots EVERYWHERE!  Ugh..  How could you tell the difference between an actual cheater and one of the various ‘x-men’, mutants, or the other partial metahumans that play games online?

At first, we’d have to monitor them..  Ugh did this suck.  Going into a game to kick ass and having to sit down and keep an eye on one player because of multiple ‘He’s hacking’ reports.  Sometimes I’d see something REALLY obvious like a headshot from the other side of the map.  Other times it was obvious because you see them with an 80-0 KDR, or one might see them slaughter 10 people in a suspiciously short amount of time.  A lot of the time, it was not very obvious what was going on, and I’d spend 15-20 minutes watching a player with nothing to show for it.

This was not a very efficient way to do things.  However, I noticed something after a month or so.  I don’t think the earlier cheats would let people change their in game name (maybe they did and I didn’t notice for awhile).  At some point while looking into a cheater, I did a search on one of the BF2 stat tracking websites.  I’d usually do a search based on a unique player ID.  One time doing the search, I noticed the names were different.  The player ID matched, but the in game name was different from the person I saw in the server.  Huzzah!

This is what I needed.  A smoking gun to detect cheaters quickly, and effectively.  Now BF2 would let you create new characters, but you can’t change the in game name once chosen.  Apparently, you COULD change it if you used the cheating software.  The cheaters in their attempts to mask their actual in game name were actually revealing to admins that they were cheaters.

It makes a lot of sense why they would change their names.  I mean if you went 100-0 for several rounds, you’d probably be reported to whomever ran the stat tracking stuff at EA.  It would be hard to follow up on a report if you were looking for a name that didn’t exist.

Finding a flaw with the cheaters made things a lot more relaxing for me while admining the servers.  If there was a question about someone in game, I’d quickly do a search on the stat tracking to see if they were legit.  If the name and player ID did not match then they got a ban, and I got to go back to playing asap.

I never had one person come onto the forums and call one of those bans unwarranted.  Not one.  Although to be honest, I kinda hoped one person would have tried.  I wanted to call them out on the name thing so badly even though it would have given up my magic bullet.  *sigh*  I suppose it’s safe to mention it now since I doubt BF2 cheaters are much of an issue these days.

Stay awesome internet people.  Keep learning, and looking for those minute factual details that matter.  And don’t cheat at multiplayer games.  Go play single player and hack the fuck out of that shit.

*No, I don’t consider a person using an aimbot to be a hacker.  The hacker made the aimbot.  The cheaters buy and use them.

 

 

Waiting on many things

The crack marches onward.  I figured it would take some time to get it right, but it’s starting to go beyond what I anticipated.  I don’t think it’s a particularly complex password, but it’s long.  Since it hasn’t shown up in the password list attempts, I’m starting to believe I’m doing something wrong.  *sigh*  I’m very noobish when it comes to doing ones own cracking, and it shows..  I should probably grab one of the big password lists leaks out there, and make sure I’m actually doing this correctly to begin with.  Haha..  (shit). 8 days left on the current attempt.

On the gaming front.  DCS World has released the F-5e fighter.  I’m not really jazzed about it though.  I already have two other low end jet fighters with the F-86 and the Hawk.  I guess if I didn’t have the Hawk, I’d probably be more interested in the F-5.  It looks like a great aircraft, and it’s guns are quite deadly.  However, I’d rather fly the Mirage over the F-5 every time.  I’ve really been appreciating the updates RAZBAM has made to their Mirage 2000-C.  The constant updates since release have really caught my attention, and really made me feel much more confidant about supporting them.

I’ve been flying the Mirage a lot lately, and even scored my first Air to Air victory over another player while flying it.  He was in a Mig-21, and he came pretty close to killing me.  I lucked out when he fowled his engine and needed to restart it.  I did get some really cool footage from the fight, and I’ve been trying to edit it together.  It was going really well until DCS updated.  The update broke every DCS track file.  Eh..  At least none of the drives has crashed.  🙂  It’s coming along..

I eagerly await the new aircraft on the way.  The F-14 is still a must buy whenever it comes out.  Hopefully this year.  PLEASE!  The Viggen could be out any day or year from now.  Who knows?  The info on that is so positive yet scarce.

I’ve been sinking time into Naval Action (video soon…lol) and RimWorld.  Both very different and very good at their niche.  Sailing boats from 1750-1830s?, and a more graphical Dwarf Fortress on the other end.  I’d recommend both actually, and I’ll do so in later posts.  Probably about the same time I check this post for typos.  Haha!

Be excellent to each other folks.