"No Bugger plays 'em!" Part One. Neocron.

Long long ago in a galaxy far far away... well no, it was in Germany and it was the late 90s. A bunch of lunatics called Reakktor Media got together to create a post apocalyptic cyberpunk MMO with a difference. This one would be First Person, in fact a First Person Shooter. They called it Neocron


As the official description puts it "By the end of the third millennium, Earth has changed...

Global pollution, excessive wars and a perforated atmosphere have turned the planet into an almost lifeless sphere of toxic mud. Radiation is everywhere and most animals have either gone extinct or have mutated into bizarre monstrous creatures.

The remnants of mankind seek protection from the desolate, scorched world and gathered behind the protective walls of giant cities. These few mega cities became the last lights of hope, in the darkness of Earth's final dusk..."


This dystopian future of the great and the good having buggered off to another planet and left you behind is where you are dropped after going through a tutorial that gives you the basic grounding in the controls of the game.

After you choose your class and how your character will look off you toddle through a section of the city called "MC5" levelling up and questing you

Like many people , the FPS angle was what attracted me to the game and after poking around the forums a bit I signed up for the closed beta not expecting anything. A couple of months later, there I was in beta stage 3 loving it.

r little newbie heart out until you are big enough and tough enough to go up to a GenRep (Gene Replicator. Think "bind point" from other games) and port yourself to your apartment.


Yes, I said Apartment. Despite its age , this game has player property. You reading this Blizzard? A dozen Germans could do what you couldn't! Each player gets their own little hidey hole in a different location depending on where they start and which city faction they choose at the start. Each apartment has storage, a GenRep, and a computer you can use to access in game fora, mail, bug reporting tools and a stock market. You can also buy items to increase the storage , fluff items like plants, and even keys to other apartments. Once you decide to take the plunge, yank that Law Enforcer and join a clan you can also access a larger clan apartment. Basically, you have features in a decade+ old game that current generation games are only adding in expansion content.









Basic Player Apartment.

Alongside all this there is the fact Neocron is an odd fish, it's an MMO/FPS hybrid where your character class is just as important as your twitch gaming skills. No point trying to be a melee char and all in peoples faces if you're a Spy... they'll leave your twitching corpse on the floor and go grab a beer in the Pepper Park red light district. Also don't go thinking that your Private Eye can go waving about a Plasma Cannon the size of a car with any real efficiency, you'll not be able to hit a cows arse with a banjo. What you can do however, is build a character around your chosen skills that will be able to hold its own and complement your chosen play style.



The Neocron UI in all it's glory!

Ah yes, did I mention that this game release as an 18? It has drugs, sex, violence, and an emote system that includes humping people in the face. Add that to fact that to cap out your char you need to pull out an implant called a "law enforcer chip" that is all that prevents you from breaking out a flame thrower and hosing down your fellow players (and them returning the favour) and you can see that this game is not for the shiny happy people. It's for the ones who understand that cyberpunk is all about "Do unto others, just do it first!" / Style over substance attitude.


Neocron has had a troubled past, bankruptcy , 2 publishers, 5 years without an update and now... rescue! The support team picked up the remains of the old girl, kicked her into life, and took her Free to Play based on the Neocron Evolution 2.2. codebase.


Since then, the guys and girls have set up a Facebook page, IRC room, various twitter feeds and the like.


So If you're into the old Cyberpunk and not too bothered about a mildly aged engine, check out the game!


Oh yes, and if you get shot in the back by "Ithaqua" or are lucky enough to get a ride across the wasteland in the Magic Bus say hi. If you're polite I might not leave your corpse halfway up a mountain...

No Bugger Plays 'em. A Semi regular series of blog posts

Evening Ladies and gentlemen, please pull up a pew, grab your favourite beverage and make yourselves comfortable while I introduce you to my new project.

"No Bugger plays 'em!" 

This is going to be an occasional series of blog posts (and possibly once I get a working microphone that's not built into my laptop, some audio) that have one big theme... games at the smaller end of the player numbers.

It feels wrong to me that so many games out there struggle away with hard pressed developer teams beating themselves senseless and as it says in the title "No bugger plays 'em!"

Originally this was going to be just MMO games since I play them a lot but then I thought about it and expanded the scope.

I'll be starting this series with Neocron, a game very very close to my heart as it was the first subscription MMO I ever played and I have the great honour of being a former Game Master trying to keep thousands of lunatics vaguely stable.

Part two will be about the game formerly known as Horizons : Empires of Istaria and now called Istaria : Trials of the Gifted. From there who knows? We'll have a look at what is out there and give 'em a go.

If you're up for it, subscribe to this blog and join me on a journey through the more sparsely populated end of the genre. If you're a rabid fan of some game out there and want me to have a look... you know what to do... let me know about your favourite!

More to come boys and girls! Like the Steppenwolf song says ...



"Well, you don't know what
We can find
Why don't you come with me little girl
On a magic carpet ride"



Until next time...

Gamers are an odd bunch.

We are you know, we're all mental. I reckon to be a gamer you need a serious masochistic streak. Here's my reasoning... we spend hours and hours beating our metaphoric heads against a wall trying to achieve things in a virtual world that a lot of people would assume mean nothing. We do this freely and of our own volition, and in a lot of cases we pay people for the privaledge! Stark Staring Box Of Frogs MENTAL I tell you!

And yet, despite all this malarkey we continue on, doing the same thing over and over. We also are willing to take a shedload of abuse from games companies in the hope that they continue to take our money. Over the past few months I have on occasion had the misfortune to encounter the community manager and customer support staffer (same person by the way, just different on-line identities in a lame attempt to disguise their self serving inanity) for an MMO with a less than stellar player-base. It's never been one of the big hitters as far as subscription goes , but the core player-base are deeply invested in the game, lore, and mechanics and have even stayed with it through multiple ownership changes over the past 9 years. It has some unique features and this is what keeps people paying to play even in these free to play days. This person has no customer service skills at all. None. Not a One. The few communications I have had with them have been obsequious, mealy mouthed drivel ignoring the points made to them and trotting out the same useless party line ad nauseam. Now this often is not a problem for the person on the player side of the conversation, you accept it, shrug and move on, but when you're trying to point out serious problems with some elements of the community of a game that only continues to survive because of that same community, there's something wrong here.

Let me ask you this, if you had just logged in to a game after creating a character and in the starting area saw a group of obviously quite advanced player avatars sat around talking what would you expect from those players? Some hints? A little help along the road? Some advice on levelling strategies and the like? At the very least some accurate information correct?

How about a wall of multicoloured spam in "txt sp33k" , obscenities and blatantly false information? Would that make you continue on in the hope of finding someone who didn't have their head up their arse or just log out and go back to one of the bigger games. Now don't get me wrong, there are players in this game that continue to attempt to rise above the scum and help new players on their road to success, but they are few and getting fewer. I can see a day not too long from now when the server side chat logs will be full of nothing but ERP (nothing wrong with that really whatever floats your boat, but for pity's sake keep it out of public chat... some of us are eating). I'm an obstinate old git so I'll still be there logging in and playing the damned thing until the lights go out, the office closes, and someone dismantle the servers but it's got to the point that until a new player has proven by their actions that they are not a complete waste of DNA I am no longer willing to even tell them where the button to open their character info is.

Oh and yes, a lot of them don't even know that because they can't be arsed to read the tutorial text.

Reminiscences of youthful folly.

I, like many others am part of one or two Facebook discussion groups. They range from trying to organise a reunion for my old school to one reminiscing the Heavy Metal scene of the 80s and 90s in Sheffield that revolved around clubs with names like "Wappentake" and "Rebels". There was a recent post on one asking if people looked back at the music from those days with fondness or horror.

I'm pasting my reply here verbatim because I'm willing to bet that minus the specifics (I doubt many other places were up flights of stairs) the intent behind the reply will strike a chord. There's bound to be those places we went to in our youth that when remembered give us a sort of warm glow. Rebels is definitely one for me and like I say below, it only takes those opening guitar notes and I'm back inside those purple walls, swigging cheap Newcastle brown ale and watching nicotine dissolved in sweat drip off the light rig onto the bodies below while some fool runs into one of the pillars and brains themself yet again.

Ah, good times, good times. \m/

There's stuff from the 80s and 90s I still listen to, mainly the usual, the cult, the mission, the sisters, ac-dc, motorhead, the occasional foray into Lawnmower Deth and Acid Reign if i'm feeling silly. A lot of the old stuff I look back at with equal parts fondness and bewilderment thinking "did I really listen to that shite?" but then that's the... shall we say... less talented end of the scale. Anyone else remember a band called Sarcofago? Oh god I hope not!

The likes of Rebels and the music played in there are relics of our youth, like my mother and her photos of herself in the Haight / Carnaby Street and her Bob Dylan and early ("out of our heads" era) Stones and Beach Boys records.

We'll remember the good bits and blank out the bad... it's what people do. At least, until we hear that opening riff from "She sells sanctuary" and then we're back in skin tight jeans, bottle of newky brown in hand, playing frogger around the vomit as we run down those stairs to get to the manky burger van and stagger off into the night.

A lot of people are IDIOTS! Social Media and understanding search fields.

OK, so it may or may not come as a surprise that my name is Christian. Yup, same as the religion. You can only GUESS how many shit jokes that spawned right?

So here's the thing. I have Google +, Facebook and twitter accounts. In fact my G+ and my twitter both fire hose onto FB because I'm a lazy sod. Now what kind of moron does a search for ... ooh... say "christian" on those social media platforms and doesn't spot that it's the name and NOT the religion?

You want to know? About 80 people and bots so far.

Yup, 80.

So I waste my time blocking them because I really do not care that I am unlucky enough to share the same name as followers of the invisible bastard in the sky and his zombie son (if you want to know why I dislike Christianity so much do a Google search for Tomas de Torquemada and tell me that you don't have a problem with what he did). I hate all organised religion equally by the way, so please don't feel left out if you don't happen to be a follower of the Nazarene Carpenter. I think you're all mad.

So please, for the sanity of me and anyone else with this misbegotten name...

Learn to SEARCH!

Windows 8 in "Not Shit" Shocker!

Ok, now here's a confession. When I tried out the developer preview of windows 8 I HATED it. It was such a change from the previous UI that I just did not want to know.


Now after having used the release preview for a couple of weeks, I take it all back. there are now aspects of this OS that I have come to realise have me sitting here thinking "what took so long?". 


A long running joke for me was the dire dire state of the progress bars in windows. Now in 8, you get a graphical display of how fast (or not) data is moving from source to destination and you can get a real sense of whether windows is lying to you or not when it says it will take 2000 years to copy that ISO to your backup drive.


The lack of a start menu? No big deal really. the functionality has just changed. Hit the windows key (or hover your mouse pointer on the bottom left and click the start icon) and you get the new Metro Interface start screen. from here or even just on the desktop you can type, for example, "command" and there you have it, a search listing everything with that word in its name. You also get to filter the results by clicking Apps, Music etc. (A colossal thanks to TWiT.tv 's "Windows Weekly" and Paul Thurrott for mentioning that little trick.


I am not saying that Enterprise will like 8, it will hate it with a fiery passion and curse the Redmond bunch for years to come. Some journalists will lambaste it, most tech heads will also point to metro and say it's part of the iOS-ification  of Windows. "Normals" however , once they have got their heads around it after being shown the new UI and all the cool shiny bits and had a play you average person on the street will love it.