I mention the town to the south because I managed to take a portal there last weekend and nearly took down another. Had I the time and bursters I could have taken another three easily but, alas, time and resources both ran out.

Still, I now own this portal too

All in all, I’m still enjoying the game and the missus has downloaded it too, although she won’t tell me which side she is fighting for. Knowing her as I do, she’ll be Resistance just so she can mess with my portals

I’m off to London again soon and I’ll use the opportunity to grab as many resources as possible. Maybe I’ll get nearer to level 3, who knows. In the meantime I’d like the weather to get better and my stupid stomach to settle down before I go on any long Ingress-powered walks.

* In reality It’s a suburb of the town 3 miles away but it’s still called a village because my parents’ generation still remember when it was. My lovely old nan has been dead nearly 10 years now but I still remember her stories of the old village with its one doctor, stinking tanning yards and how her grandad, my great great grandad, was part of the team who built the first railway line through in the mid-1800s.

Endless landmasses in games are like that too. Sure there’s an occasional interesting lake or mountain or cave but the rest of the time it’s just a huge stretch of land that, by turns, green, brown, flat, lumpy, sandy & snowy to such an extent that it all starts to look exactly the same.

Now many folks would have you believe size matters, and they would be right but maybe not in the way you expect. Look at it this way, if it’s small enough to garner derision or big enough to cause eye-popping discomfort them it’s the wrong size and/or, possibly, shape. When it comes to games and penises, size is less important that what you do with it but as penises are for a different blog let me turn towards the size of Survivalcraft.

Survivalcraft is big. Huge really. Infinite* in fact. But that great size can also make it a little dull. Run in any direction you want and very soon the land will begin to repeat itself like the backdrop of a Tom & Jerry chase scene. Hills, grass, sand, trees, snow, hills, grass, sand, trees, hills, hills, grass, sand, trees, hills, hills, grass, sand, trees, hills, hills, grass, sand, trees, hills, hills, grass, sand, trees, hills, hills, grass, sand, trees, hills, hills, grass, sand, trees, hills, hills, grass, sand, trees, hills, hills, grass, sand, trees, hills, hills, grass, sand, trees, hills, and so on until you are no loner sure how far you have gone from your base or in which direction because it all looks the same.

Alright then smartarse, what should Kaalus do, I hear you say. Well, let me tell you what I think would be a better layout.

Islands. Lots and lots of islands. An almost infinite world of islands in fact.

These islands would be a mix of small to huge, but each one would be one vital thing. Finite. There would be an end to the resources on each, an end to the available landmass on each, and, more importantly, there would be a sense of achievement in the complete exploration of each. And when an island has been stripped bare or explored inside and out, it would be time for a brave survivor to build a boat and brave the dangerous seas (I’m thinking weather and giant quid attacks here) and move to the next island. Each island would be procedurally generated just as the landscape is now, but there would be a greater variation between islands so that terrain & climate change wouldn’t seem as jarring as it does now. I’m imagining a jungle island, an island of nothing but mountains, another of cliffs all the way round leading up to a high plateau, and yet another full of dangerous volcanoes! There could even be variations in animal types that would allow people to try and ‘collect’ all the different breeds! I’m only just scratching the surface here!

You see, for me, when the terrain is varied in a more interesting way and full of an endless number of achievable  goals I find myself far more engaged with the world than if I had the whole of creation on one flat plain to play in.

So what do you think of my Survivalcraft Archipelago idea? Do you have any landmass models you’d like to see Kaalus adopt?

* Well, almost but let’s not quibble over such a small thing.

Next comes hunger and if that one feels as useful & fun as sleep, then I’m going to be a happy bunny

On the plus side it will introduce the need to better manage your surroundings to ensure you don’t run out of breath and get munched by a bear. Things like horses and crafted steps are going to be important and that’s OK. Sort of…

On the negative side this seems like it’s going to be the type of grindy mechanic I’ve come to hate over the past few years. It has the real potential to be nothing more than a brake on my gameplay where I have to stop and start for no other reason than I happen to be out exploring.

Take this example: I want to set up a new emergency shelter and right now all I’d need to do is set off in the morning and head in one direction until nightfall and then build. After the next update I’ll have to stop every few hundred steps and rest for a few seconds and that, above anything else, is going to piss me off. I mean, its not as if I can choose to walk instead of run as this game only has one speed! So simply getting from A to B will now mean I either have to get a horse or accept a stop-start experience.

Then get a horse you may say, but that’s a mechanic I’ve never really liked. I’m happy to have a corral and ride a few horses but I don’t want to be dependant on them and I feel the use of stamina is going to force me to be just that.

And this is the crux of my unhappiness with the game, which, by the way, I have hardly played since 1.21 came out. I feel that there are more mechanics coming into the game that I’m being forced into using rather than being given the option. Horses are pretty & fun to toy with but I don’t want the hassle of riding them full time. Being tired after running a lot is interesting, but not when all I can do is run. Drowning is cool, but I’d rather see it happen when diving rather than just swimming across a lake.

To me, these changes are not really about survival but rather more about padding the game out, which is a damn shame. I’d rather see true survival mechanics such as the need to farm & manage resources, the need to explore to gather certain materials and make certain accouterments, and, ultimately, escape the sodding island. What we are getting are ways of grinding out more time in the game.

For me right now, SC has dropped off my play list. MCPE might well take its place when it next updates but until then I’m heading back to the PC I think.

For SC I’d really like to see more emphasis on surviving, goals to achieve and strive for, dangers to overcome. Kaalus says he’s working on just these so I’m really looking forward to 1.22

For MCPE the fact they are adding realms, online servers for collaborative play, excites me a lot if for no other reason than I’ll be able to play with The Boy when I’m away from home. It also means I can invite friends to my place and we can work together on… I don’t know, stuff. MCPE doesn’t have as much to offer as SC but the ability to play online with other players is going to be huge!

So roll on the end of May when I think both will be out and I maybe I’ll be enthused enough to start playing and blogging about them again. Maybe.

This would not do.

So I grabbed my phone and The Boy and we headed into the village to take our enemy down. Now I didn’t expect much, the portal was level 3 and I a mere 1 so what could I realistically do against it? Well as it turns out, quite a bit. You see I’d picked up quite a few XM bursters in London and as I started firing them off, the resistance resonators holding to portal open for the enemy began to take a beating. A big one.

Launching my XM Bursters against a Resistance portal!

The portal fights back!

As I fired of one after another the resonators began to fail and then collapse until, to both of our excitement, the portal was down to one resonator which teetered at what looked like 33% efficiency. The Boy prepped the portal for a final attack and… nothing! We had used up our stock of weapons with only the smallest amount of energy left in the last active resonator! The portal would not fall until we could take down that last resonator and until it fell we could not claim it for the Enlightenment.

Almost... Almost...

What followed was madness driven by an overwhelming desire to capture our first portal. We returned home, got into the car and spent an hour driving around the next town just to hack their portals in the hope of getting enough L1 bursters to take the last resonator down, all the while watching out for an email alert that Cyberfox had returned to repair all our damage! Madness I tells ye!

Luckily for us, he never returned to shore up his defenses and by the time we got back we had enough tools to finish the job we had started hours earlier. We set about attacking…

Taking down the final resonator.

Until, with a satisfying animation, the last resonator imploded and the portal reverted from its blue, Resistance-owned status to grey & unclaimed.

The portal collapses in on itself!

And now to claim it for The Enlightened!

We had done it! The portal was ours! Well, it would be as soon as we could deploy 8 L1 resonators around it (and for good measure we bolstered it with 3 shields I had hacked from London sites). Let’s see Cyberfox take this back now!

Build it big and build it strong...

And so, just like that and in a three hour flurry of walking, driving & hacking we had our first portal under our belt. Now we have to defend it…

My first ever portal... *sniff* I'm so proud...

FOR THE ENLIGHTENED!

And then I heard nothing and forgot all about it.

Until November when my activation code came through and I finally got the app working on my phone, at which point I realised I didn’t actually know much about the game. Frantic googling ensured and I found the slick Niantic Project website where the board of clues had been largely filled up. I flicked to the start of the timeline and read/watched every item pinned to the board in order. by the end I was totally drawn in to what seemed to be an exciting game layered on the world I actually inhabited.

Once I had devoured the marketing, the reality of the game’s beta status hit me when I found nary a portal anywhere near me! I live in suburbs of a small town and not only was the area around me empty, but the town itself was devoid of any Ingress action at all! By Xmas I was deep in Minecraft Pocket Edition and Ingress slipped from my mind.

Until last week when I found myself working in London in glorious weather (inclement weather is a bit of a ball ache for playing this game – waterproof phones and contact gloves are a must in wet, old Britain) and I set to trying to get my head around how exactly to play. Its not that it’s difficult, more that without actually doing it it can seem confusing. Well it did to me but once I found some portals near the hotel and began hacking them like a man possessed to get at their goodies hidden within

This was my first portal hack, a statue in Russell Square Park. It gave up a resonator (needed for opening portals), some XM bursters (weapons to destroy resonators and allow portals to be taken from the enemy), and a media file which turned out to be a rather entertaining weekly need update produced to Google’s usual high standards.

Ingress – First Portal Hack (London, 23 April 2013)

I spent the next few days as I travelled between meetings hacking every portal I came across, friend or foe. I didn’t bother attacking much as every bugger in London seems to be a Level 8 and I hadn’t really got passed the start of 1.

Anyhoo, I can report I really enjoyed the spy-lite-like fun of Ingress and I’ll be playing it more over the summer, assuming/hoping we have more than two weeks of sunshine this year of course!

Have you tried it? If so what did you think? If not, let me know why as I’d be interested to know what you guys think of it.

By the by, I’m on the side of the Enlightened…

Why not head over to The Gaming Blog Nexus and add yours (for free!) so more folks can read your excellent stuff. Go! Go now!

Kaalus is already working on the next update and despite the first news being the ability to paint more blocks, about which I couldn’t care less, he has teased there is a new survival mechanic on the way. Hallelujah. Hopefully the next update will re-spark my interest in playing because if it doesn’t, the upcoming MCPE Realms just might and I’m not one for playing more than one thing at once.

Oh, as I was in London rather than the backwater I live in near Manchester, I decided to give Ingress another go, but more of that in my next post…

I am a plonker.

It started badly when I couldn’t find any bears, only coyotes and they only give one leather patch off so I had to range further and further away from my house until, with a shock, I realised I was near my first shelter south of my base. Here, for some reason I can’t pretend to understand, the sandy beach gives way snow & ice and the only critters other than seagulls are vicious polar bears. It was with one of these furry bastards I found myself in battle when my killing blow knocked the toothy snowball into the sea and I was forced to watch in horror as three prime pieces of saddle leather sank to the bottom of the freezing cold ocean.

I had no choice. Well, actually, I did but let’s pretend I didn’t, eh? It’ll make this narrative go much quicker if we pull together.

I dove in and swam down to where I could see the leather waiting for me, calling to me, beckoning me. If only the fecking stuff had shouted a bloody warning instead of whispering sweet nothings about saddles & horses! If only it had had the decency to shout “JESUS H CORBETT! SHAAAAAAARRRRRRRK!” but no, it kept regrettably quiet on the matter and just as I was about to reach the surface I found myself reenacting the opening scenes of Lake Placid…

Bastard sharks. Now I have a new enemy to punch in the nuts. If they actually have nuts. Still, you catch my drift. Shark. Nuts. PUNCH! Grrrrrrr!