Super Mario Maker: My Levels

Hey Guys

I want to share a new game I have been getting into. For all those Mario fans out there this is the gold nugget of the series. Super Mario Maker for the Wii U.

In this game its all about creating Mario levels from scratch sharing them on the network and then playing other peoples levels. But if that was not enough to blow you away then listen to this...

After you have made a level you can switch it between four different Mario styles with the click on a button. Everything changes to that style from the game mechanics to the monsters.

Now you may be thinking that the uploaded levels will be flooded with shit levels and you are not wrong there are a few of them, but Nintendo has a trick up its sleeves to prevent too many shit levels. When you first start playing you can only upload 10 levels. If you want to upload more you need to get stars. Stars are collected from other players starring you levels. So if you only put up shit levels you will only ever get 10 to upload, limiting the shittiness of the levels.

The good thing is you can remove levels you have uploaded and upload new ones. So if you later on get the hang of things and make some new, BETTER, levels then you will take down the ones that are not doing so well and put up your new good level. This help increase the quality of levels.

I have a few levels of my own I am particularly proud of.

The first is Star Run. Its all about getting to the next star before your time runs out.
Name: Star Run - ID: 3E30-0000-008F-9860

The next is a chase game. Grab the shell, throw it and chase it. If you can't keep up you won't finish the level.
Name:Shellie Chase - ID: B94C-0000-00C4-4564

My last and favourite has to be my escape room. You are dropped into an empty room, can you find the exit.
Name: Escape Room - ID: 7394-0000-00C6-131A

Well thats it guys, if you like my levels give them a star :D

Geek it up Readers

SighFye

The Stanley Parable - Review

I've been playing The Stanley Parable over my birthday. I have played it over, and over, and over again... you may ask, why would I play the same game over and over? Well in The Stanley Parable, it's kind of the point.

You play as a everyday worker called Stanley. Stanley works in an office building at a computer terminal in room 427. He is given commands on his monitor. These commands tell him which buttons to press and for how long. One day he finds all his coworkers gone. Where did they go? Maybe Stanley missed a memo. From here, Stanley's fate is in your hands. Will you follow The Narrators instructions or will you destroy the game he spent so long making? Maybe you will help him test out a new game he is making.

When I first started playing The Stanley Parable, I thought it would be a puzzle game. From the trailer I knew it would restart again and again with slight changes so I assumed I would be finding the things that made those small changes in order to reach a final ending. I spent time and time again doing slightly different things, taking notes of numbers to access codes and paying close attention to the small things.

It took me some time but I soon realised this was not a puzzle game. This was an adventure game. Maybe an art game. I'm still unsure. The Stanley Parable has multiple endings. In fact the point of the game is to find all the endings. There is no right or wrong way to go. Follow the narrator's... well narrations... or don't. Its really up to you.

The Stanley Parable is full of comedy. The humor reminded me of Portal's humor. The narrator basically tells the story but as time goes on he can get a little annoyed or frustrated at you not doing as he says. I had a real laugh when I went into the broom closet in two games and on the second time he said "Oh not this again.". The 3rd time around the broom closet was boarded up to prevent me from going in there.

I do like this game a lot, however, I like games with a little more... I don't know... direction I guess. I wanted to actually have a true ending I was aiming for. I loved the idea of starting again and again with slight changes. I suppose I expected The Stanley Parable to be a puzzle game so I went into it, trying to "complete" the game. But there is no true ending. Its just lots of different endings.

So how do I rate this game.

Graphics: 6 / 10: I don't really know what to write about them. they were okay.

Music: N/A - There wasn't really any music. Except in the... other game part (without giving too much away)

Story: 8/10 - This was an interesting story because is was every changing. Is the narrator bad or good? The comedy in the story is what really made it.

Gameplay: 8/10 -The gameplay was fun. It is fun trying to find different ways to change the story.

Overall: 7.3 / 10

An interesting and funny game. Gets you addicted for a few hours but you don't know why?

Beyond the Veil: Demonic Invasion

Well I just finished update 1.3 of the Beyond the Veil HUD system for Second Life and everything seems to be going really smooth. With thirty seven demons already roaming the lands and twenty one Angels holding them back, the battle is on the verge of an all out war. The demons are taking over so if you know anyone that wants to be an Angel get them on board.

I want to first start by saying Thank You to all the players of Beyond the Veil. This game is my passion and to see people playing the game, competing with one another and being excited about updates really gets me fired up too. I have a lot of ideas for this game and I really want to see it become one of the biggest games in Second Life.

I want to start with a quick chat about an issue with Bloodlines players. These people are getting upset that a Beyond the Veil players have stolen a soul. This is a misunderstanding about the term soul within Second Life.

A Beyond the Veil demon was in a club cursing people and taking souls. Someone in the club had a device that allowed them to see all hidden chat and saw that a soul from a person they know was stolen. They thought that it would effect the bloodlines stats.

Avatars in Second Life do not have a soul. Linden Labs never gave them one. Bloodlines emulates this with a piece of information in a database. Beyond the Veil does the same thing however both "souls" are not the same. A soul can be owned in Bloodlines and owned by someone else in Beyond the Veil. They do not effect each other.

Now to prevent this confusion from happening again, when the HUD tells you you have taken a soul, it now does this in an IM to you. I was using llOwnerSay displays the message in local chat but only to the owner. My guess is his device could read Owner Say. I am not 100% sure if people can access private messages but I would think that would be a violation in privacy so wouldn't be possible.

Another frequently asked question from non players to me is the collection of information about non playing avatars and how that information is being used. I thought I would address that here.

The only information I collect about an avatar is the name. In the database I would have something like Name: Sigh Parx, Soul Condition: Blessed, SoulLocation: Raiden Faxel. If a player was to join the game then their avatar key would be stored also for in game reasons. Any and all information kept is solely for Beyond the Veil's use and will never be used for any other reason. The only time a non player will hear from us, is when a player speaks to them about the game and asks them to join. Non player's information will not even be shown anywhere except when they are scanned by an avatar and they must be within range. The information will not be visible on our website or any other location.

Okay, with that out the way lets have a quick look into what is coming. The next step for me is to build a Website to get all the stats for all to see. It will take some time to design and build so you have to be patient with me. I have a designer to do the design work. Some of you may know her as Bella Parx.

After the website comes the big update, the battle system. A lot of people have been asking me how this will work. Well to be honest, I don't know yet. We have started designing it and I'll give you an insight to the thought pattern.

First of all I do not want the battle system to be just target click dead. Although that would work I think you guys deserve a little more than that. I want to have more than just 1 button to click.
I am hoping to have multiple skill trees. These may be something like Range, Melee and Protection. You wont have to select a class and will be able to select skills from either skill tree. I want to add an experience bar which will give you skill points. These skill points will be spent on skills.

Range: Battle from a distance safe from harm of Melee attackers.
Melee: Up close and personal.
Protection: These spells will be things like heals, shields and things that can protect other players.

Now all of this is just theory. It's what I want but it's not a promise. Things may change. Also, when the battle system comes out, if it is done like this, only one of the skill trees will come out, then in a later update another skill tree and so on.

The next thought, and this as well is not a promise, just a thought; is animations. I want these battles to look awesome. Now my biggest fear with this is lag. If we get too many people doing these amazing effect it could cause bad lag. We will see what I can do.

The last thought, and my most favourite, a battle sim. I want a FULL sim where all Angels and Demons can come and kick arse. But it won't just be a place to kill angels or demons. No no. I want to add another objective to do on the SIM. This WILL be kept a secret though so until then, thats all the info you will be getting.

Okay so that's it guys. that's the plan and the idea with absolutely no promises.... except to the non players. I promise I will not use your information for any reason other than the Beyond the Veil game.

Messing around with Skyrim Mods

For the best part of the last week, I've been in mod-hunting mode for The Elder Scrolls V: Skrrim. I eventually bogged my game down to the point where it was unstable and I could barely play it, but it was fun whilst it lasted :3

Here's a few of my favorite moments.

The moment I realised that fire magic starts actual spreading fires thanks to the Ice and Fire overhaul mod. D:

The Tropical Skyrim mod makes the entire game look super cool and warm :3

Ridable Husky Mounts! "Mush!" :D

Everything looks lush and green with Tropical Skyrim on. I love it :3

I wish I'd been able to get a full playthrough out of it or at least completed a few acheivements, but after roughly 100+ mods installed, it just gets rediculously laggy and crashes quite often. I might try again and remove some of the mods to increase stability. Tropical Skyrim will probably have to go as it adds a ton of foliage and reduces performance significantly but hopefully I can kep some of the other sillier mods :3

Modded Minecraft Monday - Week 1 - Farming

Hi everybody. We're a week into the lets play, so I'd like to show you what I've been up to.

I've mostly been playing it safe and trying to set up a defensible home base with renewable food supplies before I venture out into the wilderness.

Tree-houses are super defensible! :3

Initially I collected as many different types of seeds as I could get my hands on. I quickly realised that the Moso Bamboo that grew nearby was extremely useful as building material as it can be replanted anywhere, grows quickly and can be harvested quickly as well. I used it to set up fenced fields and lit them with torches made from coal ores in a nearby mine shaft.

Quick growing crops, plentiful and useful as building materials :3

You can barely tell that's a Treehouse on the left! :D

Having established a base, I decided to explore my immediate surroundings and found a nearby village with an empty house, a Tinkers Construct Forge & Tool-house and a MystCraft vendor's house. For now I will leave this village be so it doesn't get taken over by zombies, but I might come back for that forge later. There was also a floating sky village and a floating dungeon, that could both be seen from the village on the ground, but for now they are out of my range.

It's a village.. but in the sky... :O

 There were two minor changes to the mod-pack during this first week. 

First, I found it extremely easy to locate loot bags, which seemed to drop from every second or third enemy and often contained quite powerful gear, including enchanted diamond armour and tools. This obviously unbalances the game severely, especially since the Lycanite's mobs mod was removed last week, which made surviving aggressive mobs much easier at night time. I tweaked the config file for this mod so that the chance of a loot bag being dropped by any mob is 10 times less likely.

The second change was to add the mod called Natura, which simply adds some grow-able food crops and bushes and spawns great, huge, Redwood trees into the game, which make great tree-houses.

Now that I've established a nice home base, I'll be highlighting a particular mod for a week at a time so that anyone playing along can explore all the nuances of the individual mods, that they might have missed otherwise.

If you are playing along at home, I have updated the download link below to include the extra mod changes and the map that I'm playing on, as it is now. You can use it to see what I've been up to yourself and explore all the stuff that I've been toying with. I always loved seeing how other people built their worlds in Minecraft servers online and I figure you guys would like it too :3

A word of warning though. My computer may be 5 years old now, but it has a decent graphics card, 8GB of ram and an i7 cpu. My computer plays it ok given plenty of ram and patience, however it's extremely slow and laggy when new areas are loading for the first time and it can take several minutes to start up every single time. One of the main reasons for settling in and setting up a home base was to give the rest of the game time to generate and settle so it could be played smoothly. If you have the patience (or a super-computer?) go for it! Otherwise, you might want to pass on it.

Updated Download Link: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/76107282/GettinMyMinecraftOn.zip

No Love For PC In Black Ops 3

Since I heard that Black Ops 3 was being released I have been on the search for a server browser within the game. Day after day I Google it. I want to play CoD but what's the point in buying a game that will lack players in less than a year.

The PCdev recently made a tweet which gave a lot of the PC community hope.

However as I mentioned in a previous post, the term dedicated servers is misunderstood. Black Ops 1 and 2 had dedicated servers in all ranked matches. As does Ghost & Advanced Warfare. However the only one that had a server browser was Black Ops 1. Dedicated servers means there is an actual server that the game is played in rather then the game being hosted on one of the players PCs.

You may notice that when playing zombies in Black Ops 1, when the host left, the game ended. This is because there was not a dedicated server but the game was hosted on the host's computer. However with the ranked multiplayer matches the server would remain there even if all players left. This is dedicated servers.

Now I recently watched the video below on YouTube. This explains a different use of a matchmaking system to not put you back in the same server if you leave that server. Matchmaking equals no server browser.

So once again, this year's Call of Duty (or as Vanellope Von Schweetz would say Call of Doody, which I think is quite fitting for the PC gamers) is another Call of Duty I will not be getting and I think is my last Call of Duty I will look at.

Save More on Steam Sales

The steam sales are tomorrow people and we are all in to getting some great games at a great price. But I am here to teach you how to make the most of the steam sales and save the most money. Save more on steam sale he says? That's right, the price you are paying may not be the best price you will pay during this sale. It may say 25% off but if you wait you may find that same game for 70% off. You have to be patient.

So lets look how to get the best deals.

1) Is the game a daily deal? When you first log into steam you are presented with a list of games that are on sale. If your game is in there, GRAB it now because these deals only last 24hours and always list the lowest price.

2) The next place you should go is the flash sales. Flash sales are also on the lowest prices. Games that were in Daily Deals often can be found in flash sales the next day. These sales only last 8 hours so you will want to log in a few times a day to find the games you want.

3) After flash sales we have Community Choice. These are the games selected by the community. The winner of the votes gets the largest discount. So vote and buy.

4) The last of course is last day. On the last day all the best sellers of the sale gets posted once again at its lowest price. If you missed a deal, it may be here.

So get out your wallets and prepare yourselves to spend a months rent in one fantastic place and buy a crap load of game you probably will never play Well that my usual story anyway.

Modded Minecraft Monday - Failure & Renewal

Hello everybody. It's time to check in on our modpack lets play.

Unfortunately there have been a few small issues with the modpack, so whilst I have been playing it for the last week, I eventually found some issues that forced me to make some changes before starting the official let's Play. 

First of all was the difficulty curve. I had intended to make the game a bit more challenging to survive in, but I may have gotten a bit carried away.

I lost count of the number of times I died when the sun went down...

It was extremely difficult to survive at night due to the large quantity of powerful hostile mobs that would spawn in darkness. Lava was also nearly impossible to get close to, as several highly powerful mobs would spawn in the lava, both underground and on the surface in lava pools. I was also notified by a user that starting a new map was impossible since the modpack would crash immediately upon the world loading. After a bit of error tracing, I found the culprit was the Lycanite's Mobs Mod, which would crash the game when trying to spawn the player for the first time. Noticing an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, I simply removed Lycanite's Mobs which solved both issues. I also changed the starting health amount to the default of 10 hearts instead of 3 since most mobs were one-hit killing the player, which is no fun. It is no longer immediately suicidal to venture outside when it's dark and players can successfully start new worlds.

Next was the limitations of wooden chests and default vanilla bookshelves not actually storing books...

No house is complete without an attic library :3

I added two new mods in order to make chests that could be upgraded with iron, gold, diamond and obsidian to increase their inventory size and to make bookshelves which actually store books for visual appeal and easy retreival :3

Additionally, there was a bug where it was impossible to craft a stone button. Ordinarily this wouldn't be an issue since the underground biomes mod adds buttons for each stone type, however the pokeball mod won't use those buttons. Only the default vanilla stone buttons.

I had two options. Either I could just make buttons something you had to find in dungeon loot only, making pokeballs extremely rare, or I could add another mod that allows me to fix the recipe that is broken. I opted for #2 so you can now craft buttons the way you're supposed to be able to.

Now I did get a full week of gameplay out of this modpack, however when I went to open minecraft a few minutes ago, my map's level data was corrupted. (probably as a result of me pressing the shutdown button without realising Minecraft was still running... Save worlds before shutting down kids) so this might be a good time to start a new map for the new modpack configuration.

I chose to simply provide you guys with a seed this time instead of the entire map files. That way the file size of the modpack will be reduced and you can regenerate the map if you have issues.

I allowed cheats for screenshot purposes only.

I visited a site that converts text into binary and typed in "Gettin My Geek On" but that was way too long in binary, so I simplified to "GMGO" which turned out to be "010001110100110101000111" in binary, so I used that for the new lets play map. I'll be starting that next week, but here's what I've been up to for the last week.

I spawned near the ocean and decided to create my base on top of the water to make it more difficult for enemy mobs to enter my safe areas.

Cobblestone appears to float surprisingly well!

Nearby I found several fruit trees. These are perfect for a renewable food supply, so I cut down an apple tree to get some apples and saplings. In order to make a sapling that will grow into a fruit tree, you need to combine a sapling and a peice of fruit in a crafting area.

Nope. Not ripe yet.

After setting up a base and a farm with some apple trees nearby, I decided to set out to find adventure. I headed west by boat and a short distance away from my spawn area I spotted this giant brick structure underneath the water that seemed to be made up of a lot of square rooms.

The thing under the water... I know there's a floating island there lol

I decided to investigate and discovered a massive sprawling underground Treasure dungeon from the Dungeon Pack mod. On another nearby island I also found my first lucky block. When I destroyed it, two more lucky blocks spawned with a sign in between them. The sign simply stated "one is lucky, the other is not" however one spawned a bunch of cool vanilla items like hoppers, chests, buttons, redstone torches and other useful tidbits and the other spawned a lucky villager. I got lucky. One of those blocks could have killed me instantly.

Jokes on them. Both were lucky :3

I also found some Chocobos and brought them back to base with pokeballs :D

I ventured into the dungeon a few times and got some interesting loot, but not long afterwards I shut down my pc whilst the game was running and my world corrupted.

I updated the modpack and it can be downloaded at the bottom of this post if you want to try it out.

I have done my best to make the game fun and more diverse, but as with all modpacks you should expect bugs and crashes ocasionally. Most of the time you can just relaunch Minecraft and continue where you left off though.

Ok, well that's about it for this week. I'm writing this week off as bug-testing time and going to start fresh for the next post. See you then! :D

Modpack Download Link: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/76107282/GettinMyMinecraftOn.zip

Oddworld: New & Tasty - First Impressions

Hey Guys

One of my favourite games on PlayStation was Abe's Oddysee from the Oddworld series. It's a platform puzzle game where you're a Mudokon, called Abe, working at a meat processing plant. Meat supplies are running low and the CEO is forced to find a new product to increase revenue. Abe discovers the new meat is MUDOKON!! It's your task to escape Rupture Farms while saving as many of your kind as possible.

Recently I discovered they have remade the game and released it as Oddworld: New & Tasty which is a great play on the poster Abe sees in the beginning scenes of the original.

When I first heard about this game I was excited and really wanted to try it. I looked on Steam and found it was on sale at 40% off. So I jumped at the chance. Then the fear set in. What if it was just a remake in the way of graphics and not really a New & Tasty game. I settled on the thought that I could still replay the game with the new graphics. I would still enjoy it.

This morning it finally finished downloading and I jumped straight in, even before breakfast... shh don't tell Bel I skipped breakfast to play it....

So my first impression on the title screen was good. Really clean graphics and beautiful sounds. Abe even spoke a little more in the menu then before.

I wanted to play the game using a controller like I did on the PSX so I went into settings and tried to set that up. Now this was my first disappointment. My controller, even though the image on the screen was identical to mine, it would not work correctly. Now I didn't look too far into this so it could be another fault but to begin with, I can not use my controller. Keyboard will have to do.

I started the game. The cut scene didn't seem to have much improvement but once the game started I could clearly see the difference.

First scene

A few improvements I noticed is how the game played. For example in the original, the screen did not scroll. When you got to the edge of the screen the next screen would load. In New & Tasty the stages scroll into each other. The game feels a lot more fluid. I also noticed when you give commands to your friends, they respond instantly, unlike the older version. This was beginning to feel as though it was not just a graphic update, but a full recode of the game.

Bird portal in the original

Bird portal in New & Tasty

As I played further into the game I realised the game was not the same at all. There are set areas which are the same as the original, but only enough to link your memory to the original game. I now had in my hands a whole new Oddworld adventure.

Here is a comparison of a part of the game which stayed the same. It also shows the stage flowing into the next part.

I have always said it's the little things in games that make or break the game and this game is packed full of the little things. From the Mudokon workers grumbling about the lack of pay to the giggles they do when something happens.

If you are a fan of the Oddworld series and especially Abes Oddysee then my first impressions say to get this game. Seriously you will not be disappointed.

Thanks for reading guys. Don't forget to share, comment and 1+. You can also find us on facebook and find me on twitter.

SighFye

Get The Most From Steam

Recently I have found a few things that Steam can do that is really cool and I wanted to share them with you.

1) Game Sharing: I was playing on my account on Bel's computer when I noticed at the bottom of my library: "Bellistik's Games" and a list of her games. I decided to click on one I knew was installed and see what happened. A request was sent to Bel's account asking her permission for me to share her games on her computer. I logged into her account and accepted the request. I was then able to play her games, on my account. Now this was cool enough but what made it better, the game was treated as though it was my game. I didn't have to play her game. So now, I have in my library, ALL of her games and ALL of mine.

2) Game Streaming: Today I saw Bel's games again but this time on my computer. Once again I decided to try and play it but this time, play was replaced with stream, so I clicked stream. Her game then loaded on my PC. And I was able to play it. Now I want to point out that my lappy is not good enough to play some of the games but this time I was able to play. I looked at Bel's computer and steam had given me control with my keyboard and mouse.

3) Download without using bandwidth: As previous mentioned by Lloyd, you can set up steam to download your games from freezone servers only. I won't go into this as Lloyd already wrote a post about it. If interested in this you can read the original post here.

4) Remote Downloading: Damn I forgot to set that game to download and I'm out on the town. Well you can log into your account via the webpage and start a download from there. Then when you get home your game will be ready and waiting for you.

And these are the things I have found which I didn't know myself. Now you can get more out of Steam :D

Modded Minecraft Monday - The Modpack Contents

Hello again. I have been fairly quiet for a bit and this post explains most of the reason why. I have been assembling a collection of mods for a modded Minecraft playthrough and, as anyone who has explored minecraft mods can attest, it's pretty addicting to keep adding new mods when you come across them. I have finally settled on a list of mods that I'm happy with so it's time to start a Let's Play series of blogs.

To begin with, I'd like to state that I'm not particularly a fan of modpacks like Technic or FTB. I have enjoyed playing them in the past, but I feel like the extra machinery and pipes and wires overcomplicate and distract from the core minecraft experience. Thus I have tried to stick to mods that, whilst adding new content, accentuate or expand on the core minecraft experience without overcomplicating it.

There are a lot of new hostile mobs added which does make the game rather difficult at night time, but hopefully I've balanced it out with enough extra ore and loot mods to make your arsenal much easier to upgrade quickly. The Extra Health Enchanted mod also starts you off with only three hearts and allows you to expand your maximum health by leveling or adventuring in dungeons, thereby allowing for a much better difficulty curve. It should be really hard at first, but as you level and progress through the game it should get significantly easier to survive.

Modpack Contents:

• ExtrabiomesXL - Adds 28 new biome types to the game for added landscape variety.
• Pam's Mods - Adds tons of new  plants and a few minor tweaks. 
• Harvestcraft - New farmable crops, fruit trees, bushes and food.
• Desertcraft - New desert flora
• Random Plants - New Venus Fly-Trap plants.
• Mob Drop Crops - New rare plants that drop hostile mob items like bones and ender pearls.
• Wheee Flowers! - More flowers!
• Bonecraft - Adds fossils to terrain generation which drop bones when mined.
• Clay Spawn - Clay will now also spawn underground with the same rarity as iron ore.
• Get All The Seeds - Adds all of the available seed types to the list of drops when breaking tall grass. New seed types will drop extremely rarely. 
• Plant Megapack - Adds tons of new plants!
• Underground Biomes - Adds different types of rock that have their own biome types underground. Lots of new stone types to play with!
• Dungeon Pack - New randomly generated structures, including large underground dungeons and ships on the water!
• Mystcraft - Based on the game and book series. Allows the crafting of books that contain entire worlds based on the runes you use to define that world.
• ChickenShed - Chickens will now randomly drop feathers like they do with eggs.
• WAILA - "What Am I Looking At?" is a mod that provides a HUD at the top of the screen that describes what what you are looking at and what mod it comes from. (Needed this to keep track of all the ores and underground biomes rock types)
• Mr Crayfish's Construction Mod - Adds a block that will build a building for you. You still need to gather all the materials required and spend time punching the block to build it, so this is more a way of creating templates to rebuild a certain building than a cheat. It balances out with the recipe requirements anyway.
• Easy Crafting - Adds a new crafting table with a more expensive recipe that shows you everything you can make with the items in your inventory. You click the object you want to make and it creates it for you using the items in your inventory. Works much like the console crafting menu does.
• Fast Leaf Decay - Because I hate floating leaf blocks when I cut down a tree...
• Minecraft Graves - Instead of dropping everything, the game will spawn a gravestone containing all of your items where you died. Saves your items, but you do have to get back to where you died to retrieve them.
• Harder Peaceful - Removes the automatic player health regeneration feature from Peaceful mode and enables hunger in Peaceful mode. Food now has a purpose in Peaceful mode! :D
• Infernal Mobs - Adds rare variants of regular mobs with randomised Diablo-stlye buffs. Kind of like mini-bosses.
• Item Physics - Items will drop to the ground properly without sitting there and spinning in place.
• More health Enchanted - Start with only 3 hearts of health maximum. Leveling will add more hearts. Hearts can also be added using items crafted from heart containers, found in dungeon chests. There is no maximum quantity for hearts so it makes you more resilient as you get further into the game.
• Dual Hotbars - Adds another 8 slot hotbar that uses the top row of your inventory. I often find myself short on slots, so having 16 instead of 8 really helps :3
• Lucky Blocks - Mining this block is like pulling a slot machine. You might get killed by an unlucky Lucky Block and you might get some awesome loot from a really lucky Lucky Block.
• Roxa's Tall Doors - Adds doors that are much larger than the default doors. (2x3 and 3x4 etc)
• Carpenter's Blocks - Adds slopes to minecraft! :D
• ComputerCraft - Adds programmable computers and robotic blocks called turtles that can build, mine and farm for you if programmed correctly.
• DecoCraft - Decorative blocks and furniture.
• Greg's Lighting - Redstone floodlights that can project light down a hole or corridor.
• Horizontal glass - Glass panes that can be placed horizontally as a floor or roof.
• Luppi's Ladders - rope ladders that can hang from a ledge, strong ladders that can stand unsupported and blocks that will retract both when powered with redstone. (good for treehouses)
• Deconstruction Table - Found some loot but have no use for it? Break it down to its core components and recycle! :D
• Mr Crayfish's Furniture Mod - More decorative furniture :3
• Malisis's doors - Adds a smooth swinging animation for doors, makes double doors act together and adds new customisable door types.
• Mowzies Mobs - Currently only adds a larger, animated and far more nasty version of a Venus Fly Trap to the jungle biomes.
• Butterfly Mania - Having 202 new types of butterflies fluttering around just gives the game an extra feeling of life.
• Choco Craft - Adds tamable, breedable and ridable Chocobos!
• Mo'Creatures - Adds a large number of Animals and Peaceful mobs as well as some enemies.
• Backpacks - Adds backpacks in two sizes and multiple colors. They take up one inventory slot and when right clicked, open a chest-like inventory to store things in.
• Loot bags - Enemies have a chance to drop a bag full of loot on death. The common bags could have some seeds and a scrap of leather and legendary loot bags might have enchanted diamond armour and a rare weapon. Its all random. Added this one to balance out the difficulty of all the new hostile mobs.
• Lost books - Mostly just adds any books the player dropped and lost to a list and enemies have a chance of dropping them. Can also customise with your own unique book sets.
• Pokeball Mod - Adds a ball that a single entity can be stored in. Store enemies or friendlies by right clicking to throw it at them. Good for relocating animals and villagers.
• Xeno's Reliquary - Adds a bunch of craftable relics that have special effects.
• Tinker's Construct - A smelting and tool crafting mod.
• Balkon's Weapons - Adds a bunch of new weapon types, including a firearm.
• More Bows - Adds new craftable bow types.
• Not Enough Items - A searchable list of all items in the game. It shows the recipes and uses for each item and can be narrowed by item type or mod. Very useful.
• Bibliocraft - Usable bookcases, shelves that display their contents and more.
• Iron Chests - Upgradeable chests.
• Better Foliage - Leaves blocks now have additional leaves to break up the blockiness and grass blocks now have short grass sticking out the top.

In addition to trying to find a 64 pixel texture pack for the majority of these mods, there are also a few core mods installed, that these mods rely on, that I didn't name as well, for brevity's sake.

Example of folder structure

If you want to play along, I have packaged up the lot and stuck it on my dropbox so you guys can grab it HERE if you like. It's ready to go with all the mods already set up and a copy of the same map I'll be playing in. You will need your own Minecraft account in order to play it though, if you so choose.

Please keep in mind that the custom minecraft launcher I made, to run it in the downloaded folder instead of in the user folder, is sensitive to spaces in folder names and long file paths. 

Best to put the lot in "C:/Minecraft/" to avoid issues. You will need the two files "Minecraft.exe" and "PortableMinecraftLauncher.hta" in there as well as the "GettinMyGeekOn" folder (which contains the game + mods + the map).

Once it's set up like this, it won't affect any other modpacks you have installed. It will just run isolated in that one folder. You will have to launch "PortableMinecraftLauncher.hta" (by double clicking) instead of "Minecraft.exe" though, in order to make it run locally.

Ok, well that's about it for the contents of the modpack so I should probably go start playing now. Since the spawn area for this map is relatively close to the ocean on the beach, I might build my base on the water :3

I really hope there are no sharks around here...

See you next time! :D

*Edited Monday 1/6/15 - Added two new mods (Iron Chests & Bibliocraft) & included another mod that was not mentioned in the list (Better Foliage). Modpack on dropbox has also been updated to include the two new mods.

*Edited 5:55pm Tuesday 2/6/15 - Bugfix - Player spawn crippled, so new worlds would crash immediately. - Removed Lycanites Mobs Mod and it works just fine now. If you don't want to redownload, just go to C:/Minecraft/GettinMyGeekOn/.minecraft/mods/ and delete "LycanitesMobsComplete 1.10.13.2 [1.7.10].jar". That should fix the problem. Otherwise, the dropbox link should update within about an hour and then you can download that instead.

*Edited 6/6/15 - I have been made aware that this modpack breaks your ability to create buttons from stone and thus some specific mods (pokeball for example) will not work with the underground biomes buttons. I have added a new mod that adds in a new recipe that does the same thing. I will update the downloadable copy when I make my first Let's Play post on monday.

Tech Tip - Free Steam Downloads Bandwidth

If you're like me, you've often run over your monthly allowance of data because you bought a few too many games through steam that week and been restricted down to dial-up speeds until the month rolls over. (That's if you live in the stone age, like most of us Australians do)

Now most internet providers have certain content that they call the "freezone" or something similar, where anything you download is not counted towards your monthly limit. Some companies, like iiNet, have Steam servers set up that run inside this Freezone network. You can make use of these servers using the steam settings, but ultimately that just sets a preferred server. Steam can still download through a metered server if the unmetered server is busy or doesn't have the content you're after.

I have found a piece of software that allows me to download most things off steam without them touching my monthly allowance of data whatsoever. It's called Steam Limiter and it blocks steam from connecting to any download servers that are not within the Freezone for your ISP. This effectively forces Steam to run only through servers that are not counted towards your monthly allowance of data.

Now there are a few small drawbacks. I have noticed that some content is not available from these freezone servers, so occasionally I have to disable it to install a game, but it happens very infrequently. The software's benefits also depend on your Internet Service Provider having a Freezone Steam server. So if you are with an ISP that doesn't provide one, you're out of luck :/

All in all, it's a very useful piece of software and it has stopped the majority of complaints from my housemates about the data always running out each month, so it has served it's purpose for me. Your mileage will vary, but I highly recommend trying it and seeing if there's a noticeable decrease in your monthly data usage :3

Tales from the Bargain Bin - Retro Games Haul

Now, anybody who already knows why I'm here may suspect that I just have a lot of games because I have too much money, but unless it's a big game like GTA5, that's not the case.
I love finding bargains and bundles that let me get tons of games for pennies on the dollar. You might even say I'm addicted to videogame bundles.

Today the Humble Store is having some sales and the content was too good to resist, so I thought I'd share my haul.

Sonic Hits Collection ($112.99 $16.94)

This collection includes copies of:

• Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine
• Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed + Metal Sonic & Outrun DLC
• Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing
• Sonic 3 & Knuckles
• Sonic 3D Blast
• Sonic Adventure (Director's Cut)
• Sonic Adventure 2
• Sonic Adventure 2: Battle
• Sonic CD
• Sonic Generations + Casino Nights DLC
• Sonic Spinball
• Sonic The Hedgehog
• Sonic The Hedgehog 4 (Episodes 1 & 2)

Sega Genesis Classics Collection ($29.96 $7.49)

This collection includes copies of:

• Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
• Alien Soldier
• Alien Storm
• Altered Beast
• Beyond Oasis
• Bio-Hazard Battle
• Bonanza Bros
• Columns
• Columns III
• Comix Zone
• Crack Down
• Decap Attack
• Dynamite Headdy
• Ecco the Dolphin
• Ecco Jr.
• Ecco: The Tides of Time
• ESWAT: City Under Siege
• Eternal Champions
• Fatal Labyrinth
• Flicky
• Gain Ground
• Galaxy Force II
• Golden Axe
• Golden Axe II
• Golden Axe III
• Gunstar Heroes
• Kid Chameleon
• Landstalker: The Treasures of King Nole
• Light Crusader
• Phantasy Star 2
• Phantasy Star 3
• Phantasy Star 4
• Ristar
• Shadow Dancer
• Shining Force
• Shining Force II
• Shining in the Darkness
• Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master
• Space Harrier II
• Streets of Rage
• Streets of Rage 2
• Streets of Rage 3
• Super Thunder Blade
• Sword of Vermilion
• Vectorman
• Vectorman 2
• Virtua Fighter 2
• Wonder Boy in Monster World
• Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair

Grand Theft Auto III + Vice City ($19.98 $3.98)

Max Payne ($9.99 $1.99)

Drunken Robot Pornography ($14.99 $3.74)

Now pretty much all of these are older games that I played as a kid (with the exception of Drunken robot pornography) so I thought I'd grab em whilst they were on special for Way Back When's Day.

Drunken Robot Pornography is a bullet hell game about giant robots so I thought I'd grab that one as well, just for funzies.

All in all, this was a good haul. I ended up with $407 worth of games (original individual game prices, not the collection prices) for just $34.14 USD or $42.71 AUD.

That's a saving of just over 372 dollars for a grand total of 67 individual games!

Granted I already own about 3 or 4 of these games, but even some of those got new DLC from this haul, so I'm happy.

Feel free to head over to the Humble Store and check out some of the bargains yourselves. They do amazing videogame bundles too and a large sum of the money goes straight to charity. Well worth the price they usually offer.

Kill The Beast: Ep2: Attack of the Cave Spiders

Last week I left you on the edge of a deep chasm, wondering what would be down there.

Well I decided to walk away from the chasm and take my iron ore home. After all a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. I had 33 iron ore which was more than enough to make myself a full set of iron armor. I threw the iron ore in my furnace and decided to make haste on building some walls. After all I hadn't seen any monsters yet so they were sure to be coming soon enough.

A full cobblestone wall with a trench around the sides will prevent any monsters from coming in. I suddenly hear the groans of a zombie and decided it was time to collect first blood. The zombie was in a small hole in the ground which lead no where but it was the beginning of many battles.

 Back at base i made myself a full iron suit and all the iron tools I needed. With an iron axe I collected wood to build my roof and secure my base with heavy doors.

With my base secure and my armor complete it was time to return to the chasm. Heading into the cave I stumbled across another zombie and prepared to attack.

I was getting lost in the cave and couldn't find my way back to the chasm. Without warning I fell. The fall must have been about ten to twenty block high but I survived with minimal damage.

I looked down to realise I had fallen into the chasm I was looking for. A stroke of luck had me land on a small ledge. This could have been the end of my quest so early into the game. I had to be more careful.

 

I decided to head down, after all this is why I wanted to come back. Digging a stair well  into the edge of the wall I found myself at a cave. The chasm went deeper but I wanted to explore this level first.

 

 Things were starting to get confusing within my cave and I was afraid I would not find my way home. A torch on the ground would be a perfect sign to follow. 

Following the cave I emerged at the surface. A quick look around I noticed I was right near my wheat field. Mental note: this may be a quicker way home from here.

I headed back into the cave and made another mistake. I accidentally cut the stone underneath me while descending the chasm and once again I fell. This time much further and I landed much harder.

I think if I had done this without my armor I would surely be dead. Luck favoured me on this episode and in more ways than saving my life. I looked around and found I had fallen right onto a mineshaft.

I could hear the sounds of spiders running close by. Lots of spiders. I climbed onto the platform and was attacked by a poison cave spider. I managed to kill it but I was poisoned. My health dropped quickly.

It stopped within a few hearts from death. I quickly ate a chicken to bring up my health and went forward on my journey. Around the next corner I stumbled upon a cave spider spawner. Cave spiders came at me from every corner. Each one of them delivered a poisonous bite. But once again luck shined on me. I had just enough food to keep my health up and just enough time to fight each spider separately. In the flurry of spiders I didn't get a chance to get a screenshot but I did manage to destoroy the spawner.

After being so close to death, so many times, it was time to call it a day. I headed back to base and made my mind up to explode the mine system next week.

If you like this series please +1 the post and share it with your friends. You can also add me on twitter.

Until next time, Happy Mining.

SighFye