Garry’s Mod 13

Hurray it’s the first of September! Oh no, I have work tomorrow!

Now, aside from the boringness of work, I’ve decided to type my second blog entry on Garry’s Mod 13. I’m no Garry’s Mod pro (My limit is spawning in 100 rebels and seeing how long they last versus infinitely spawning zombies), but I have racked up a nice 126 hours on the game.  Garry’s Mod (Or GMod) is a sandbox game built using the popular Source engine (Possibly my favourite engine) and it allows you to create… Pretty much anything you want. Want to build an airborne fort to survive the zombie apocalypse? Do it.

What an interesting sight!

GMod is possibly my favourite sandbox game that has literally no point. It is true to the meaning of ‘Sandbox’. Minecraft, you must survive and destroy an Ender Dragon, GTA you must complete levels (I know NEITHER of these objectives are FORCED on you, but they are the main point of the games). GMod however literally has no end to it. Yes,  you could say that creating everything possible would pass as ‘ending the game’, but I’d like to see someone do it.

Looking over the GMod 13 changes, whilst I didn’t understand a lot of them (Mostly super-1337 hax0r language that I cannot understand), some of it I did. And so…

Change One: Menu

The menu now looks different. It definitely feels a lot cleaner, and the random menu background is cool, not to mention the occasional slow-zoom in feature is a nice little touch. However, overall I don’t really like it. Probably because I’m used to the old one, and this just seems too different for me to get my small brain around. I think it LOOKS better, by far, it’s strayed away from the very Valve-y styled menus and created it’s own style.

Personally, I think it’s too white. Valve had a nice colour base, grey. White is too bright and in-your-face, whilst black is too dark and reclusive, grey hits the middle almost perfectly. Garry swapping over to white may have no reason at all, or it may have lots of reasons. I just prefer being able to open up a menu at 3am and not lose my eye site.

Change Two: Spawning

This is more menu-based stuff I suppose, but I also have some problems with the spawning. First of all, the location of everything has been changed. It’s neater, sure, but I can’t find my  large metal crate that I often used as a wrecking ball.

Onward from that, spawning NPC’s is now ridiculously annoying. I’ve yet to find out how to make them spawn with different weapons (Pistol wars ftl!), but making them enabled/disable, join your squad, notarget on you etc is a pain in the backside. Previously, it’d be a nice little tickbox menu on the bottom left to change options, and a weapon selector just to the right of it. It was good and I preferred it. It feels like it’s downgraded or gone back in time.

Change Three: Engine Changes

Garry mentioned somewhere that he’s extensively changing the engine around. Not sure why, but I’m sure he has very good reason to. People rarely change engine stuff around for no apparent reason. My first STRONG annoyance with this, is it means that almost all of the maps created in the old engine are now completely void. They won’t work, or at the very best, will have strong issues with them. That’s great, Garry, let us spend days and days creating our badass mansion guarded by Antlion Guards and Striders, then nuke it with an engine. Seems legit!

On a more positive note though, I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that said the engine change will allow a lot more advanced capabilities to the game, which sounds positively excellent! Provided it works, of course.

RUN FOR YOUR LIFE.

Change Four: Phys Gun

In GMod13, Garry is updated the phys gun so that you can choose how fast your mouse wheel will push and pull objects away/to you. This is a pretty good update as I fairly often use my phys gun to pull in objects that are ages away, and they take an age to get back to me. Now, I’ll be pulling bathtubs from one side of gm_flatgrass to the other in seconds. Well done to Garry!

Change Five: Binding Actions to Keys, not just numpad

FINALLY. This further enhances Mac compatibility (I once played GMod with a friend who used a mac, he was having some serious troubles making doors that opened with numpad touches. The problem being he couldn’t open them. Because he didn’t have a numpad. Forgetting that, we can now use ANY key on our entire keyboard to do an action. Whilst we could already semi-do this (bind suicide k), this allows us to do even more with it. Yay for mass genicide by touching the / button!

Change Six: Console-Based Saving/Loading

I have a feeling this is just for the Beta, because if not Garry is smoking some SERIOUS shit, and I’d like to know his dealer. A change in GMod13 is how you save/load. You no longer do the traditional menu > save/load game option that is the exact same across hundreds, if not thousands of games. No, you now bring up your console (Yes, this means you now need to have developer console enabled) and type ‘save [mapname]’ ‘load [mapname]’. For example, ‘save map1’ to save my map, ‘load map1’ to load the map. There’s a slight problem. The saving/loading system STILL sucks. Get advanced duplicator. It doesn’t save maps, but it’ll save the location of props PERFECTLY. It’s the same thing… Basically.

Change Seven: Toybox Removal

OH MY GOD NO GARRY WHY WHY WHY?

Yes. Garry is completely removing Toybox from GMod. I didn’t use it THAT much, so I’m not going to get too in-depth, but I liked it as it allowed me to playtest maps/mods instantly without reloading the game or moving files. Click > Installs automatically > Automatically loads map/mod. It was brilliant.

Now though, Garry has decided it’d be far better to use the Steam Workshop instead of Toybox. Not really sure if this is good or not, I don’t really see there being much difference. Instead of a user submitting it to toybox, they just submit it to Steam workshop. No problem, right? Right???

Overall I can’t wait to knock out an extra 100+ hours on GMod 13. Provided that it doesn’t lose all my saves like it did yesterday when I made a nice looking fort. Nearly cried…

Counter Strike: Global Offensive

First of all, welcome to my blog and therefore first blog post. I hope you enjoy posts that I include on this site.  If not, feel free to tell me why.

So, part one – GRAPHICS

I think the graphics for CS:GO are good enough. The game itself has nothing to do with graphics. More so than other games that may require good graphics to keep you immersed in the ‘game world’. CS has, in general, always been a competitive FPS. I don’t think the graphics update was needed other than to attract more players. All in all though, I enjoy them. Whilst I rarely see graphics as a defining point of a game, I still prefer playing a game with good graphics than the same game with bad graphics. Gameplay > all, though.

Counter Strike: Global Offensive. Can you guess what map this is?

Part two – GAMEPLAY

Overall, it is the standard CS gameplay a lot of people have come to enjoy. Now, it’s no 1.6, but it sure as hell isn’t as different to it as CSS was. Overall it feels like the guns require a tad more skill, and there’s just generally a lot more tension in CS:GO than there was in CSS. Again though, still not quite on the same level as 1.6. Do I prefer GO to 1.6? Maybe. 1.6 may have less AWP’ers, but it just doesn’t feel as ‘fun’ to me anymore. It’s still the competitive badass game that it was when it released, I just find GO more fun. Sue me.

Part three – COMMUNITY

Nope. Nope. Nope. Sorry, but so far from what I’ve experienced, the community on this game is bad. I’m not hating on it, but it’s such a different playstyle to 1.6 or CSS that it almost feels ruined. Why is that under community? Well, I’m bringing it up far too often, but yet again, AWP’ers. On 1.6 I rarely run into an AWP’er, and if I do, they are usually camping back watching the bomb sites. On CS:GO however, on certain deathmatch servers (my preferred gamestyle) I run into an AWP’er every other corner. I don’t see what the attraction to using the AWP is, you know, other than the fact you could aim 45 miles away from him and still manage to one-hit-kill him. Through a wall.

Part four – NEW GAME STYLES

For anyone unknowing of these, the new game styles are demolition and arms race. Arms race is effectively GunGame from CoD (Although CoD did indeed take it off another game). You start with a predefined gun and each kill unlocks you a new gun immediately. You keep killing till you get to 25 kills, where you are rewarded with the prized GOLDEN KNIFE. To win the game all you have to do is stab someone :-). The other new game style, is Demolition. I’ve not played too much demolition, but it’s basically (from my layman’s perspective) Arms Race and Classic mixed together. Whenever you get a kill, you’re rewarded with a new gun (on the next round), but you still have the primary objective of defending/planting at a bomb site. I find it’s a good way to get into the classic game styles of CS whilst still being ‘nooby’ to the game, as it’ll teach you all the different guns. One problem with them both is I find the maps to be far too small. It’s too fast paced for me.

Yes, this is indeed the graphics for Counter Strike: Global Offensive.

Overall? I like CS:GO. I really do. It’s a fun game with some competitive side to it.  If you haven’t got it, I would recommend buying it. It’s a fun game, and with the inclusion of the new game modes (Arms Race being my favourite out of the new ones) it’s definitely more appealing to less ‘pro’ CS’ers. My only main problem with it, and this is more an ‘ethical’ problem than an actual problem is the way Valve are trying to force competitive CS 1.6 players to play CS:GO (by paying competition company’s to use CS:GO instead of 1.6).