Loadout

Loadout is a fast-paced third-person shooter brought to you by Edge of Reality, and is currently available on the Windows OS. And it's free!

I've been looking for a fast-paced arcade shooter along the lines of Quake LIVE to play, and along came Loadout - Create, Customize , Kill! with its hefty bit of alliteration. At first I was skeptical if my low end laptop (4.1 on the Windows Experience Index) could handle such a new release, but I found that I could run the game smoothly on a lowered resolution. 

Loadout is all about its namesake: your loadout. Your character can bring two of any kind of weapon and one utility item (grenades, sentry, shields, etc.). The idea is that you can create any kind of ridiculous weapon and bring it into battle and show it off to everyone else. And the game delivers. 

redefining 'casual' gameplay

The guns are constructed off four basic chassis: rocket launcher, rifle, beam, and pulse. From there, you can customize various different parts like the scope, firing mechanism, payload, barrel, stock, etc. each with different trade offs in effects. So if you wanted to, you could totally build a lightning pulse gun that homes in on targets or a one-shot-wonder sniper rifle that lights people on fire. 

Once you customize and save your gun, you can then build them into a loadout by choosing which two guns to bring and what piece of equipment to bring to a fight. Synergy is nice, but not required. It's all about whatever you want to do.

support your team- be a medic!

Alright! Now you're ready to shoot at people, exploding them into gibs and sending their smoldering, electrified pieces back to their mothers with taunting notes attached. The game has a smooth matchmaking system which pairs you and your party up with other people of the roughly same skill level to form two teams of four. I was a little puzzled that the teams were so small, but when I went into a match I realized why: the amount of projectiles shot at you is overbearing.

Loadout is as much about mildly aiming at people (there's less of an emphasis on sniping, but it can still be done) and blowing them up as it is about learning how the fuck to get away from everything that is shot at you. You are going to have bullets, electrified spike balls, flaming laser beams, and rockets that shoot in clusters of six coming at you, all at the same time, all the time. Learning just exactly what the hell the different weapons do is key.

But really though, Loadout is easy to pick up. The movement of characters flows well. You'll be jumping, combat rolling, and shooting with ease in no time. 

stop, hammer time etc. etc.

The game modes available are pretty uninspired for the most part. 

Blitz- capture the point
Death Snatch- deathmatch with a kill confirmed mechanic
Jackhammer- capture the flag, where the flag is a hammer you can use to bludgeon people
Extraction- protect your extractor, kill the enemy extractor; comparable to VIP missions

And then there's competitive mode where it's just all of those game modes rolled into one.
Cookie cutter? Yeah, but it works. The formula is tried and true and holds up in Loadout. 

After you have gibbed (or been gibbed) enough times (or if you play the objective), the match will eventually come to an end with the winners all taunting the ostracized, grade-A losers. You will then be awarded experience points and in-game currency known as Blutes.

Blutes are then used to unlock new equipment, more weapon parts, and upgrade existing ones. Experience is used to unlock new avatars, gun design save slots, and loadout slots. And after all of that, you're ready to hop back in and blow up more people.

The game's cartoon-like visuals alongside its crude humor and comedic, over-the-top deaths sets a fitting tone to the game. The map locations and visuals are presented very well. Day and night variations of the maps look and feel unique. The game is colorful and vibrant with a great level of detail being placed into each gun part. The guns themselves have a satisfying feel to them and handle well. 

you can be just like any of these folks- and more!

Loadout is a free-to-play game, and like most free-to-play games out there today, Loadout relies on a microtransaction system. But don't worry, Loadout doesn't sell power. Instead, you can spend some money to buy SpaceBux which in turn can be used to purchase all kinds of cosmetic items for your character to make everyone know that you are, indeed, a pretty little butterfly with none other like you in the world.

What I'm mostly concerned with is the static percentage upgrades you  gain on weapon parts. Leveling up weapon parts take a long time and once you do level them up, you are rewarded with seemingly minuscule upgrades: you'll get maybe +2% reload time, a +1.5% damage, or something along those lines.

It's easy to brush those numbers off as being minute and insignificant overall, and the fact that the only way to level them up is by playing only compounds that, but I feel that static percentage upgrades is a dangerous thing. 

These numbers are small, but they do translate into direct advantages for only playing the game however many hours. In the short run it may seem insignificant, but in the long run the numbers begin to stack. Fortunately, Loadout has the matchmaking system that pairs similar leveled players with each other and the whole thing isn't a deal breaker, but the static percentage upgrades are something to keep in mind.

Team based tactics prove a minimal existence in Loadout. There isn't really any kind of class based specialization and everyone can do anything. Being the lone ranger is difficult as damage will just stack on your from multiple sources, so sticking together is still a good idea. That is until the cluster bomb homing rockets murders everyone.

Loadout: It's fun, it's polished, it's free, and I'm sure there will be future updates that will add new and exciting content. Grab a few friends and go check it out!

Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2- What if crates were real?

Team Fortress 2 is notorious for hats and crates. A quick look at Team Fortress 2's Steam market page shows the hundreds of thousands of crates that Mann Co. and Valve have to digitally store.

Digital storage is nothing, but how much space would these crates take up if they were in the real world?

all the three cent offerings of the world are stored here

First off, we need to know the size of one such Mann Co. Supply Crate. There are special variations of the crates, but let's just take the basic crates and use some estimation. We can simplify this problem by modeling each crate as a simple cube.

Now let's find out the dimensions of the crate. A crate makes an appearance in TF2's Mac launch trailer. 

where is my soldier hatless, volvo

We can see that the crate comes up to about a little above Soldier's belt. We can use this to gauge the crate's height by using a class height chart. According to some handy reference material from Valve's developer community, Soldier has a view height of 68 Hammer units.

The Hammer unit (HU) is the unit of measurement used by the Source engine and 1 HU is equal to 1/16th of a foot. Let's model this and say that the distance from the Soldier's feet to his eyeballs is 68 HU, or 4.25 feet long.

With some rough estimates going, proportions tell us that a crate is about 2.83 ft tall and thus has a volume of 22.67 cubic feet. I could have made a better estimate if I actually took the time to pull up models of the crates from Source Filmmaker files and measured them there, but I'm too lazy.

it's rough but it'll do

We have the volume, now let's find out how many crates there are on the market.We'll include event crates too because they're not so different from the regular crates.

As of Monday, Feb. 17, 2014 CE, 12:37 PM, there are 3,087,297 TF2 crates listed on the Steam market.

If the crates were in the real world, they would take up 69,989,022.99 cubic feet, or about 70 million cubic feet. If we converted that to meters, that would be a little under 2 million cubic meters.

A quick search for the biggest buildings in the world shows that the Boeing Everett Factory has a usable space volume of 472 million cubic feet.

If you were to carefully arrange the crates, you would get something about 20 million cubic feet smaller than The O2, an entertainment district in London, England.

Instead, if we lined each crate up next to each other, they would form a conga line of crates 8.7 million feet long, or about 1,647 miles long.

ben only ever got pain trains from crates

Some more useless trivia:

-If we assume every crate on the market costs 3 cents, it would cost $92,618.90 to buy them all.

-If we assume every crate on the market is opened and each key costs $2.49, Gaben would be rolling in an extra $7.7 million.

-The most expensive crate is a Salvaged Mann Co. Supply (Series #30) which costs $84.68. There are currently 28 of them on the market.

But what about Dota 2 crates? 

It gets a little tricky: Dota 2 crates/containers come in all kinds of different shapes and sizes. Let's just count the ones that are the most crate shaped ones and assume that they are the same size as a Mann Co. crate. 

Examples:

-Containers with the prefix "Treasure of"

-Timeless Treasure of Claszureme

-Locked Gemstone Cache

You get the idea.

Steam stats shows us that Dota 2 has about 8.7x more players than TF2. Would it be safe to assume that there would be 8.7x more containers? If we just multiplied everything by 8.7, you would suddenly need 609 million cubic feet, easily greater than the usable space of the Boeing Everett Factory. But let's do an actual count just to be safe.

As of Monday, Feb. 17, 2014 CE, 1:50 PM, there are 3,215,256 Dota 2 "crates" listed on the Steam market. At least, the ones I got to. After several pages you hit cosmetic items and they were all under 2,000 in count by that point.

Dota 2 doesn't have as many series of crates as TF2 does and items only drop at the end of a match in Dota 2. Maybe that can explain why the crate count is low?

Anyway, if Dota 2 and TF2 crates were real, Valve would need 142,878,876.51 cubic feet of storage space to house all the orphaned crates using the assumptions we made.

It's doable: If Valve ever wanted to release real-world crates that drop randomly from drones in the sky onto your porch, they would have the means to store all the unwanted crates in the world. 

In the future, everything will come in crates.

The Banner Saga

The Banner Saga is a role-playing game with tactical combat elements taking place in a universe inspired by Nordic myths. The game was developed by Stoic, a small indie team comprised of former BioWare members, and is available for the Windows and Mac OS X via Steam, GoG, and other digital distributors.

the banner is a motif, representing perseverance

It's been a long time since I've played a game backed by a strong narrative filled with heavy choices to make. 

The experience to me felt more of like reading a profoundly written choose-your-own-adventure game with bits of combat added in, so I'm going to be spending more time discussing the presentation and various themes and messages the game communicates rather than waddling too deep into the game play.

godstones- an old offering to the gods

The Banner Saga takes place in a fictional, richly cultured land. Inspirations from Nordic and Viking mythology combined with an art style derived from Walt Disney's 1959 film Sleeping Beauty create this universe that feels as if it had always existed. 

The player is plopped into the the middle of everything, and instead of painstakingly explaining everything that has ever happened leading up to your beginning, the game takes an effective pace at revealing little at a time, filling you in on the important bits as the situation calls for them. As you read about the different landmarks, mountain ranges, rivers, forests, and cities that dot the map and talk to people from small villages all the way up to bustling trade centers, you get the feeling that there are generations of culture and history behind the places and people you see and meet.

that's bambi's mom

Players experience the near-end-of-the-world taking on the role of different characters. The story alternates between the characters, often contrasting the situations they are in. The Banner Saga's prominent theme to me was rising to the occasion. One character, Rook, is a father trying to protect his daughter, Alette, after failing to protect her mother from harm. As a seemingly genocidal invasion from the dredge nears, Rook is suddenly placed into a position of control. 

Escaping with a caravan of men, women, and children from his village, Rook is faced with many conflicts which explores what kind of man Rook becomes, wishes to be, what it means to be a leader, and what kind of sacrifices one is willing to make to ensure security of the community.

That's the meat of the game. The choices are hard- and not everyone is going to make it. Through my experiences as Rook, I found that his whole world was his daughter. I found myself becoming very protective of Alette in the shoes of Rook. I was willing to leave behind some fighters if it meant drawing dredge away to protect the rest of the caravan. But eventually, you come to ask yourself: where do I draw the line? Alette needs to become strong and self-sufficient (after all, Rook isn't going to be around forever), but at the same time she needs guidance and protection, as she is still a young girl.

and the band keeps playing- also: very nice minimalist UI 

And that's just one of the many myriads of complex situations you'll find yourself in, as one character, with many more in the game. In The Banner's Saga's story, it is explained that many believe the gods to be dead. Do you look up to them for protection of your caravan, or do you really believe that they have left the world? Do we really always  have a choice in what seems to be impossible situations? And what about the dredge? Are they invading, or are they running from something too? 

Rook is just a man looking out for his daughter and community. Is it his job to help save the world? Rook can just take Alette far away, get away from it all, and yet, there is this sense of unseen responsibility to the world.

I've never had a game tug at my heartstrings so much before. During the downtime while the caravan is traveling, I often think to myself "What would've happened if I had done things differently? Maybe things could have been different." You'll contemplate about your decisions a lot. The choices you make throughout the game affect how characters act toward you and how the universe takes shape.

before and after: final fantasy football

Game play wise, it's very simple. You control your traditional RPG party of heroes and you beat up stuff when the situation calls for it. The combat can be a bit difficult at first as you fumble around with the armor/strength mechanics, but after awhile it does become a bit stale. Don't get me wrong: the dredge look and feel formidable, and they're not the only enemies you'll face. It's just that after awhile, it feels like there isn't much variety in the combat system. It's fine, but you're not playing the game for the combat. The narrative and setting of the game is what you're there for.

If I have to gripe about the game at all, it's probably going to be the lack of graphical options you can tweak with. I do own a lower end gaming laptop and there are occasional frame rate hiccups, but nothing that takes away from the experience. The lack of a quick-save function annoyed me at first, but I came to enjoy it- it encouraged me to stick with the consequences of choices I made.

The soundtrack creates an unforgettable mood. The music complements the artistic style, providing moments of solace as your caravan trudges through the snow and ice, moments of despair as you realize you've royally fucked over your entire group with decisions you've made, and moments of glory as you manage to just barely hack yourself a victory with the last hero standing. 

The writing is natural, the characters various and complex. The Banner Saga is an experience I will never forget. This game reminds me how much fun reading is, if only I could.

you can click on images to enlarge them

As a side note, this game is available on Good Old Games, a digital distribution service similar to Steam. GoG sells games DRM free and often with soundtracks, avatars, concept arts, etc. I'm starting to use GoG more than Steam. Links are available in the intro paragraph. I recommend you check it out!