Poor Driving and Change

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Last night I largely spent the night playing Rage 2 and doing a really poor job of driving around the wasteland.  In theory I should use this as an opportunity to test out the little 3D Printed controller wheel that I have…  but instead I am just suffering through the mouse and keyboard controls.  It is funny how even when they do not feel amazing… I will still gravitate towards mouse and keyboard in part just to keep from having to switch between controller and keyboard all the time.  I will always be of the firm opinion that shooters are just better with a mouse…  and then many of those shooters also want you to control vehicles which work best with a controller.  So either I suffer with the shooter gameplay or I suffer with the often side content that is driving.  The problem with Rage 2 however is you spend a lot of time in your vehicle as you cross wide swaths of territory between missions.

So while I did not get a screenshot of this because I was enthralled by the combat…  one of the random events that happened in the world is that I encountered an enemy vehicle convoy…  which I followed around trying to take out.  There were roughly 3 car type vehicles, 3 or 4 motorcycle type vehicles and one giant Semi sort of hauler vehicle that was the primary objective.  I managed to whittle down the convoy to just being this big massive vehicle…  and chased it around through the landscape for a good fifteen minutes slowly plinking down its health.  Often times I would drive poorly and get way off track forcing me to jet booster thrust my way back into gun range.  Unfortunately I only managed to know it down by about half health before I got a verbal warning that I was almost out of ammunition.  I am guessing I need some of the vehicle upgrades to realistically fare well in vehicle to vehicle combat…  but I gotta say… I was completely hooked by the experience.

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Every town seems to have a major problem that you need to deal with for them… before they can turn around and help you.  Last night I made it through one of those missions…  which unlocked another sequence of events that I am going to need to do before they can actually help me.  That is fine… like I said yesterday there isn’t a lot of back and forth in the dialog so I more than expected to keep going on fetch and assistance quests until the storyline culminates in a battle with the big bad of the world.  It is the moment to moment game play and the exploration of new areas that make the game interesting to me personally.  I like checking enemy camps off of my list, especially when they happen to be hiding an ark full of goodies.   As I move forward into the game I keep encountering newer and tougher groups of enemies…  and I have to say…  Authority soldiers are already a pain in the butt because I don’t have an amazing answer to their energy armor yet.

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Last night during the quest I was speaking of in the previous paragraph, I picked up my first new weapon…  which is a really amazing shotgun.  Shotguns are a weapon that I always find deep kinship with, because they are sort of the no-nonsense killing machine option that have been pretty much something I gravitated towards since Doom.  The most recent Doom game had an awesome design as far as shotguns go with some interesting mode switching, and Rage 2 does something very similar.  If you are firing the weapon blindly you end up with a fairly rapid fire short ranged blast option.  However if you hold down the right mouse button and aim the weapon, according to the in game dialog, the weapon melts together all of the shells into one large high powered slug that knocks targets back and has a satisfying thump when it fires.  When it says it knocks things back…  you can get some interesting situations where you hit a single target and it ends up knocking a whole line of enemies down if they are approaching single file through a choke point.  So far this weapon really is my only answer to the Authority troops, and you end up getting it in a mission where things are constantly leaping out of the walls so it also does a great job of twitch reflex killing.

I’m still very much enjoying the game and look forward to playing more of it as the week goes on.  However there is one more topic that I want to bring up.  I will be over the next few weeks moving all of my sites from my current host over to a different host.  I’ve been with my current host for the entire decade during which Tales of the Aggronaut has existed.  Initially I used them because a good friend of mine was one of the system admins, and I could always poke him if I needed something weird done.  However after he left the service has not exactly been that stellar.  Additionally there has been a pretty constantly series of blips in server up time and I am getting tired of it.  I needed to find a good host to use for another purpose… and instead of doing a single one off… I bought a big enough hosting account to hold everything of mine and even do MP3 hosting if I choose to do so and move away from Libsyn.  I will go into more details later as I move everything over depending on how positive or negative the experience is.  I’ve moved a single non-gaming site over and it went pretty smoothly.  This weekend I plan on moving AggroChat and depending on how well that goes might move Aggronaut as well.

Mostly I just wanted to give my readers a heads up that some changes will be coming in my infrastructure and it might wind up with me being down more than I intend to.

2 thoughts on “Poor Driving and Change”

  1. ” wind up with me being down more than I intend to”

    Meaning you’ll be bummed because moving sites can be a hassle (at least with consumer hosting sites)

    -or-

    Meaning your sites will be unavailable here and there as you move them.

    (I’m just being silly today)

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