Sunday 16 November 2008

Spore tips

Okay, been playing Spore since release, and wound down a bit, primarally because I'm trying to wipe out the Grox. I thought I'd give a few tips for anyone who tries such an endeavour, and to clear up some of the lies surrounding them.

1) The Grox are easy to defeat.
This is what is technically known as "not true" - they are not easy. It will take a long time. By which I mean "weeks if not months of playing for hours a day"

2) The Grox only have around 600/700/1000 systems.
LIES! Well, okay, maybe... per arm and not including the middle. I'd estimate them to have closer to 7000 systems.

3) Each system will only have 1 Grox planet
I've encountered more systems with 4 or 5 planets than those with 1 or 2. I've even encountered one with 6 inhabited planets!

4) The cities can be destroyed with a single mega-bomb.
Once again, no. This is only true of the planets which are on the outskirts of their territory - I've fought cities in the centre of areas they own that took 7-8 or maybe even 10 bombs to destroy. That's because they're fully defended - filled with turrets and buildings.

5) There is only 1 city per planet.
Filthy filthy lies. Why do people who have never seen anything close to the extent of the Grox try to give advice on it? 1 city on some planets, 2 cities on most. 3 cities on one, and when that is destroyed then another planet gets 3 cities.

6) You can reach every Grox system.
Also lies - no amount of slingshotting yourself will get you to some systems, so you need to use either a mod or a trainer to get rid of your movement restriction when near the centre of the galaxy.

7) The Grox do not conquer other systems.
Oh yes they do, and that is why this has taken me so long. I was playing by the original rules at first - I worked my way out from the centre and completely eradicated one of the arms. I then moved off a bit, and came back. They once again inhabit every system at the centre, and most of the arm I had removed them from. They expand, and they do it at a rate so as to make them really annoying.

As such, here is my advice:
Get a mod to remove the range restriction at the centre of the galaxy.
Also, get the 42 mod to remove the recharge time and use limit on the Staff of Life.
The Mayflower mod is also useful.
Be a trader.
Get a good trainer - one which can alter the relations with species, and the use of weapons.
Now, work your way through one arm, to the Grox. Force them to be loyal, and ally with them.
Now they are your friends they won't attack you - won't conquer your systems (they can do that, and they can also reduce a T3 planet to be T0, hence why these mods and devices focus on increasing speed)
Buy systems, and use the Staffs to wipe them out in order to place colonies. Essentially fence them in, and then create more of a fence to cut their property apart. Cut it into small mangable chunks so you can easily set yourself targets of how much to destroy, and see if they try to expand at all.

This is how I'm doing it. It will take a long time, but it's better than taking forever, which it will have done otherwise.

Thursday 11 September 2008

Zen Koans

I've been thinking. You know that Zen Koan, "If a tree falls in a forest and no-one is around, does it make a sound?"

Previously I've always said yes, since the sound is caused by the energy being transferred through the particles in the air, which is caused by the tree falling.
But really, what is the sound? Is the sound the energy, the transferal of said energy, or is it the interpretation of the vibrations of the air particles?

If the latter is the case then the question should not just be whether it makes a sound when no-one is around, but whether it ever makes a sound.

Thursday 4 September 2008

EA sucks

This is hillarious.

Spore has already been cracked, making EA's security measures only hurt their legitimate customers. I'm still buying the game, because I've wanted it for the past 5 years, but it is still nice to see EA get punished.

Tuesday 8 July 2008

CT:DS

It's a shame it's a port with some extra dungeons rather than a full-on remake (a la FF3 and 4) but still, it's awesome. If you own a DS, buy this game. You owe it to yourself. Seriously

Monday 16 June 2008

The continuing adventures of a webmaster

I master teh webz, lol.

Been messing around with the css, html and js again. "What have you done?" I hear you wail.
Get out of my head right now.

Anywho, I have now added an external links section to the sidebar, and made each section of the sidebar have a header (h2, to be precise.) Why? So now the "Blog archive" h2 looks like the others. Hurray for conformity within my code!

I was also getting a lot of "font" css errors from firefox: though the pages would always validate, the web developer toolbar didnae like it (what, a firefox extension being stricter than the W3C?! Preposterous!)
So, that's all fixed. I am now xhtml strict and css 2.1 uber-valid and have an external linky thing.

THIS page, however, still doesn't validate, but none of the errors are mine - they're all blogger's annoying widgets (though, they may not realistically be any way to have a centralised blogging service without them.) The errors are quite interesting. Do you want to see them?
Well, tough. I was going to post them, but it now appears that I have fixed the only problem which really was that interesting.

PS. Okami was beautiful on the PS2. It is beyond beautiful on the Wii. If there was a god of looking awesome, then it'd be that game.

Tuesday 10 June 2008

Papercraft

So, yesterday I got into papercraft a bit, I can't remember how, precisely. I think I was looking for homemade Half-Life plushies, and found headcrabs made of paper.
Whatever happened, it developed from there, and I spend about 4 hours downloading almost 800 megs of patterns. Most of which are awesome.
For example, I found one of Okami Ameratasu (which looks mighty difficult)
I also, however, found the second best thing ever: MACROSS papercraft!

The best thing ever is, of course, Macross papercraft of all the VFs (particularly the 19 and 21) in P, D and B modes, rather than just P.

[edit] It's interesting to note how many referrals I'm getting from torrent sites and gothic forums (though, only to the timeline, but it's not like there's much else here)
I no longer need (did I ever need...) to plug my site. Hurray?

Wednesday 2 April 2008

Moe CSS

Done a bit more now, however - now everything (except this blog, as it uses blogger-specific code which won't validate [and the applet page, but that's not meant to be permament anyway]) is both CSS and xhtml valid!

Woohoo!

Friday 14 March 2008

CSS

If you've been watching these pages for the past few days (I can barely stop laughing at that concept) you may have noticed some changes.
I've been messing about with the CSS, and making things as XHTML and CSS valid as I possibly can.

The font sizes still need some dealing with.
Also, for the opacity to work properly I've had to mess with the compatability a bit - most browsers today are bloat-ware, made compatible with older code.
To make my pages compatible with older browsers I had to use particular tags (-moz-opacity: .65 and alpha:opacity(=65)) so my pages are neither CSS2 nor 3 valid.

Oh wells.