The blog of galaxyAbstractor
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Terraria
18 months ago
by galaxyAbstractor
in games
Fetching some wood from the trees
I’ve previously written about Minecraft, the 3D 8-bit like sandbox game that is quite popular nowadays.This time it’s about a similar game called Terraria.
Terraria, a 2D sidescroller/adventure/RPG/sandbox game with 16-bit-like graphics was released on Steam on the 16th May, 2011, for the same price Minecraft released at alpha stage, €9.99.
The gameplay is very similar to minecraft. You explore your world, mine blocks, craft things and fight monsters. The big difference is that Terraria already has far more content than Minecraft. There is loads of monsters that appear at both night and day, like Demon Eyes and Zombies at night and Slimes at day, and many more in dungeons and caves. There are even bosses, like the Eye of Cthulhu, the Skeletron and the Eater of Worlds. In total there is 28 different mobs, against Minecrafts 5.
There is a lot of weapons, about 47 different weapons sorted into categories like melee, explosives, magic, ranged nonmagic and flails. Tools are pretty much the same as in Minecraft, with axes, pickaxes, and hammers.
One of my caves
Another interesting feature is NPCs. There will be NPCs appearing after you met certain conditions (I haven’t been that far in the game yet), that will act as shops selling things like armor, weapons, potions and tools. They will move into houses you build after you have accomplished certain tasks, like killing a boss monster.
There are 9 different environments: Forests, Deserts, Underground, Underground Jungle,The Underworld, The Corruption, Meteorite, Dungeon and Floating Islands. I have only discovered forests and deserts yet, but I haven’t played for long yet.
The crafting system is much easier than the one in Minecraft, as you don’t have to remember recipes and look them up, you only have to press Esc to bring up your inventory and scroll to select what you want to craft. If you are standing near a workbench there will be a lot more items you can craft. Here is a list of items that can be crafted so far.
Crafting Items
There is apparently a magic system in Terraria as well. You will get mana later on which you can use on spells and attacks.
As with Minecraft, you can play multiplayer on the same world too. I haven’t yet done it but I guess it will be the same concept as on Minecraft servers.
So far I think it is a pretty good game. I like Terraria more than I like Minecraft now, as there is more content in Terraria and I like the 2D side-scrolling world more. You can build much in Terraria too and because it has two layers, a foreground layer and a background layer, you can do houses and buildings quite nicely.
The game also reminds me a bit about an old game I used to play ages ago called Jazz Jackrabbit.
There is some stuff I don’t like though and I hope they will fix it later on: it’s 4:3 only at 800×600 resolution and there is no way to change the resolution. I got a screen with 1920×1080 resolution and it looks pretty crappy in fullscreen mode, which still is 800×600 pixels and large black bars at the side.
Here is a video of some gameplay:
Here are some more screenshots I made:
A tunnel I built outside my cave
Ohayou Gozaimasu! Morning has arrived!
The guide NPC is here to help!
The surface
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Allods Online – free MMORPG
31 year ago
Allods is a free MMORPG published by the game portal gPotato. It is a whole lot like World of Warcraft except that there is no monthly subscription fee.
A part of the League city Novograd
The game starts with, after you chosen a faction, race and class, some sort of interactive cut-scene (which I think varies depending which class and faction you chose). The mage one was about some great mage that would have a speech but was killed by an enemy. Soon the place got infested with rebels and everyone had to flee through a portal which led to a small foreign “allod” (some kind of floating island in the skies of the Astral (what I understand, the Astral is some kind of space, where you can travel around with your ship)) filled with low-level mobs, and your mission is to research it and to get back to the main land, Kania.
Allod offer a great variety and number of quests, unlike FlyFF or other grindfest MMORPGs. Already at level 8 I’ve done around 50 quests, the game is more about doing quests than grinding (at least at lower levels).
A small birch forest in the Lightwood area
The people in Allods are very social and helpful. Almost instantly I got invited to a party and they helped me kill a quest enemy, although I didn’t need any help. Then we proceeded helping each other to do the last remaining quests on the foreign allod so we could travel to Kania.
Allods has quite a lot of things you can do. You can obviously fight and do quests, but you can also level up professions like mining, alchemy, blacksmithing etc which creates products that you could either use or earn some cash by selling them to other players.
Allods could be seen like a free version of WoW, as they look very similar. I haven’t spent much time on WoW, so I can’t really say what WoW has that Allods also has, but what I can say is that the interface is quite similar, it uses same money
A windmill somewhere in Kania
system (gold, silver and copper), professions (I think WoW has this too as some friend of mine was talking about it, if not, disregard this 
). I would say I like the graphics in Allods better than the WoW graphics.
As said, Allods is free to play, but as always with gPotato games, there is a cash shop, where you can buy premium items to help you level. This can be rather expensive, so unless you haven’t got a lot of cash, I would think it’s not worth buying anything (at low level at least, can’t really say if there is something worth at higher levels).
The world is quite large by the look of the maps, but I haven’t been able to explore it all yet as I am still low-level. But a quick glimpse at the map revealed around 6 territories with around 4 zones each.
Map of Lightwood
Amberwood and a wild boar
Hey, I would highly recommend this game for everyone. If you are playing WoW, save some money and come over to Allods instead as it’s free and pretty much the same thing 
If you are already playing or have questions/comments, feel free to discuss below.
Also, if you are on the server Nezeb, feel free to add me:
Name: Sollux
Faction: League
Race: Elves
Class: Archmage
Minecraft dev section
01 year ago
You guessed it, now there is a dev section for Minecraft. The first app out is mineBackup, which backs your Minecraft worlds up, which is available here. The Minecraft dev section is available here.
Minecraft
91 year ago
Minecraft is a excellent game to test your creativity. It has been made very popular lately, even though it still is in heavy development and is still in Alpha.
You start in a large, randomly generated world of different types of blocks. Your first task is to gather some resources, namely wood and coal, to make your first shelter, because when night falls, there are giant spiders, zombies, skeletons and creepers hunting for fresh, pixelated human-flesh. You should then craft different things, like pickaxes, armor, tools and more, more to come as the game is developed. With this tools you can gather several different resources, like wood, sand, earth and stone, which you could use to build whatever you have in mind. A giant fort, your house, flying islands, a primitive computer, train tracks, basically anything. The randomly generated world can reach up to 7 times the area of the irl earth before reaching technical limits, so the game could offer almost limitless exploration. There are caves, mountains, oceans, lakes, rivers, plains and other exciting sights to explore and discover. 
Daylight lasts for 10 minutes and night for 10 minutes. At night you’ll have to protect yourself and your creations from the enemies, or you could go out and fight them gathering resources you wont find elsewhere, like gunpowder and arrows.
If you feel too alone, you can join a multiplayer server to build with friends and strangers.
Don’t worry if you think the graphics is crap, I didn’t like it before I tried Minecraft, but when I did, they are actually making a part of the experience.
Also, using Linux or Mac? Don’t worry, Minecraft works for those systems as well. Finally Mac and Linux users get a great game for their systems 
I am not sort of a big gamer myself, I rather code or surf the Internet than playing games, but Minecraft is a game that I can play for several hours in a row. I have to thank Notch, the single developer of Minecraft, for giving me some fun variation besides surfing and coding 
I strongly suggest you to buy Minecraft, it’s only €9.95 during the Alfa stage, but will rise to €20 when the beta testing has been done and the game reaches gold.
Here is a fan-made trailer of Minecraft:
And here is another cool one, it’s speeded up though, the actual time of the ride would be around 40 min – 1 hour (based on how many times it turns day and night)
Feel free to share your creations in the comments
Using your PSP as controller for ePSXe
21 year ago
I wanted to play a Playstation 1 game I used to play when I was a kid but my PS1 is already broken and I switched my PS2 into a 360, so I decided to go with an PS1 emulator, ePSXe, to play it on something I already have, a computer. I don’t own any USB-controllers though and using a keyboard is just plain dull. But I do have a PSP with a custom firmware on, M33-6. Sure, I could have ran the game directly on the PSP, but it just didn’t work as the game froze when doing various things. So I decided to use a software called pspDisp. Sure, it is made for extending your screen to your PSP using your console as a secondary screen, but it also allows you to map the keyboard and mouse to the d-pad and the other buttons.
Requirements
- ePSXe – Any version will do
- pspDisp – v0.5 or later recommended
- A PSP with custom firmware – I am using 5.00 M33-6
- Either a wireless router or USB cable for the PSP
Set up pspDisp on your computer. If you are running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 you have to mark the winUSB driver, it’s marked by default. You need to accept all driver enforcement checks and reboot your computer.
Set up the controller in ePSXe like this:
Now download
ePSXe controls for pspDisp (1.7 KiB, 647 hits)
and place it in C:\Users\*Your account username here*\AppData\Roaming\PSPdisp\control. Or just right-click on the pspDisp icon in your system tray and chose About, then the Control tab and press the first button, and paste the file there.
Restart pspDisp and right-click the tray icon, and chose PSX under Control. Now it’s time to start pspDisp on your PSP. Go to the Games category, chose memory stick and then chose PSPdisp V0.5 (or whatever version you got).
If you gonna use the WLAN mode, you first need to go into the settings on the PSP version of pspDisp, go to page 2 by pressing R, and change the first IP to the IP of your computer (this is not your Internet IP, this is your local IP. It should be something in the theme of 192.168.0.*, usually found by running ipconfig /all in CMD). Also make sure to add both your computers and the PSPs local IP to the firewall on your router (these IPs can be found in the admin panel of your router). I found out that the port pspDisp uses is 17584. This is how my rules are set up:
The easier way would be to use USB mode. This is so easy I wont go into it too much, just put in the USB cord and chose “start using USB mode”.
If you are using WLAN mode, you can stream the video and sound to your PSP and play your game from anywhere in your house.
You should now be able to play using your PSP as controller. If you got any trouble, just comment below.
eRepublik
02 years ago
eRepublik is a really nice game. It’s a real life simulator (excuse me if that is not how it’s called, I’m no gamer xD), where you work, train your strength, own a company, fight in wars, own companies, join a party, run for congress or country president, and much more. And oh, it runs in your browser, no need for downloading anything.
Every real-world country has it’s counterpart in the game, often called eCountry. I, for an example, live in eSweden.
Teamwork and socializing in-game is also pretty good. I got 30 eSEK from the “center of education” when I joined, and they donate food and weapons to me from time to time. Recently, the “labor” of eSweden contacted me if I wanted to fill in a survey of my working conditions, which I did xD.
If you want to check it out, you can do it here.
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