Greetings. I am Stebloke, and I am a bit strange. This website contains my blog, where you can read about the things I create, the games I play, and any other things I get involved in.

I make this blog mostly because I like to look back on the things I do and feel nostalgic, but also because it keeps me motivated to keep pushing on with my backlog of little projects and tasks.

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It's been annoying me for some time that I failed to beat Mad Max late last year. Out of curiosity, I booted back into it, just to see if there was anything I could do change this outcome.

Thankfully, after another failed attempt, I was able to abandon that awful race that was giving me all the trouble last time. This allowed me to get back out into the world and try to level up the car some more, which would need me to clear out a lot of the random little quests and points of interest on the map.

The problem, in my opinion, is that the side content and open world content of this game is an absolute drag, and some of the most repetitive, boring content I think I've ever experienced in a game.

I did read about a neat little trick involving the repeated destruction of a "Scrapulance", which gave me a fair bit of loot each time. However, having extra loot was not all that much help if I needed to do a lot of other things to even unlock the car's options in the first place.

I did what I could for a few days, trying in vain to lower the threat levels in the different zones in order to unlock the extra car parts. But there was only so much I could take. If I remember right, all I unlocked were some new tyres and the next level of suspension.

And with that, it was time to try the race once more, to see if I could finally wreck Stank Gum's stupid car and get further into this game.

I'd already attempted this race dozens of times last year. And it was looking like things were going to be much the same this time around. But then, on maybe my eighth or ninth attempt, something strange happened.

As with all of my other efforts before it, I hit the target vehicle with a few shots before it got so far away from me that I couldn't see it. However, this time, just as I came to the end of the first lap, with my car in flames and on the brink of failure, I passed Stank Gum's stationary car. It took me a moment to realise it was the quest target, as it was immobile, in flames, and on a sliver of health. I still have no idea how it ended up like that, but I gleefully pumped one last shot into it and completed the mission.

Maybe after all of my efforts, the game just felt sorry for me.

After that, with the huge difficulty spike crested and passed, the game was a cake walk. There actually wasn't all that much left to do in terms of main story, and I breezed through it in just a couple of hours.

All of the other quests, whether they involved close combat or car combat, were such a doddle in comparison. In close combat especially, if one of the goons clattered me, even with a weapon, it didn't seem to take much health off. And yes, sure, it could take a while to wear down the bosses, but it's not like those fights were hard. Why in the world that one single quest was created to be such an arse I will never know.

But it's done now, and I'll never need to do it again.

After a terribly slow first few months of the year, this has been a good June for getting some gaming done. Let's hope I can keep up this momentum...

It's been well over two years since I installed this game on my current computer, as it was supposed to be the initial test to make sure my Windows 7 installation could deal with games.

And yet it has taken me until this point, many months and several games later, that I can confirm that the test was a success.

Finally, I have been playing Middle-earth: Shadow Of Mordor.
And this is how things went...

Straight off the bat I had technical issues, as the camera just wouldn't turn very fast, even with mouse sensitivity all the way up. I learned this was somehow linked to the fps of the game. Apparently, if the game runs any higher than 60, then the mouse movement barely registers.
Learning this was strange, as I'd already turned on the 60fps limit in-game, as my monitors are only 60hz. It became apparent that the in-game limiter was shoddy. Using the in-game vsync instead did get me more mouse movement back, but came with a bucket load of mouse input lag. Great.

I had to deactivate everything in-game, and use RivaTuner to limit the fps, and Nvidia control panel to kick in the vsync. And that was about as good as I could get it.

This is a 2014 game set in a wildly inaccurate version of the Lord Of The Rings universe. Very, very much inspired by the Batman: Arkham games, it sees us control a man named Talion, who is on a mission to hunt down followers of Sauron as revenge for them killing his family.

Along for the ride is the spirit of Celebrimbor, the elf who made the Rings Of Power, who has bound himself to Talion as they have very similar motivations.

Celebrimbor assists in combat by gifting Talion his wraith-like abilities, making it possible to sense enemies through walls, teleport, and even take over the minds of the Uruks and beasts and turning them into temporary allies.

Not gonna lie, after all of the open world games rammed with side content I've played over the last few years, I certainly was not planning on doing a lot in this one outside of the main missions. After all, if I didn't fully clear the maps in the Witcher 3, Dying Light, Immortals, Horizon Zero Dawn, Nier: Automata, FF7: Rebirth, Mad Max, Stellar Blade and GTA 5, I certainly wasn't going to do it here.

In fact, outside of the main quest, I only really went around hunting for intel by beating up Uruks and questioning them, as well as having a few rumbles where I would tame several Carigors and set them loose among the enemy soldiers.

I liked the Carigors. The Carigors were good boys.

Overall the game was quite playable, at least once I'd got used to it and unlocked some more skills. My main bugbear, outside of the ludicrous controls and bonkers key bindings, was when you're asked to hunt down a specific Captain, only to have more and more Captains pile into the combat along with their followers. In early parts of the game, where you don't really have the tools to handle this, it was a pain.

In fact, in one fight against multiple leaders, a Captain named Olgoth The Drunk came back into the combat twice, getting more powerful each time, so I had to kill him three times before the fight was done. It was a slog.

One of the Warchiefs was immune to pretty much everything except ranged attacks, but I didn't have enough arrows to wear him down fast enough before his health would regenerate, and the Shadow Strike skill didn't even seem to do any damage at all. Once I'd separated this dude from his minions, I ended up brawling with him all across the map, trying to figure out how to take him out, before finally setting him on fire which terrified him. Even then, it took me a little while to finish him off, as I didn't realise at first that when an enemy becomes terrified they lose all of their invulnerabilities. Sheesh.

There was a funny little Uruk character in the first of the two main zones called Ratbag, who helps us (kind-of) by setting up other Uruks for us to take out, so that he can climb the ranks and get us closer to the Warchiefs. After getting to the second zone, and learning we would be making an army of Uruks and basically waging a civil war, I thought it was quite the shame that Ratbag couldn't join us.

At the end of the game, I had to march my mind-controlled Uruks to the Black Gate, and there I fought Malmug The Dumb, who was apparently my Nemesis. I think he could have been someone who killed me early in the game before I knew what I was doing. But this time, I was the one with the numerical advantage. So after ploughing through his followers, I sat back for a while and allowed my followers to have some fun.

But then the end fights were so bad it was laughable. The fight against the final Black Captain just sees you sneaking around, and the final fight against Sauron is just a shitty QTE. What the hell were they thinking? I hate it when games do that.

Kinda spoiled the entire thing, to be honest.

But, whatever. It's done, and I can move on.

I'm closing in on being done with all my Amiga games, and the latest one that I've attempted is Speedball 2.

Similar to the Blood Bowl game I played years ago, I'm not even sure if you could say this game could ever be "completed". But in my head, winning the league should be enough to accomplish this, so that's what I intended to do.

It took quite a while to get back into it. I really couldn't remember what all of the extra things did, like stars, and bounce domes, and pickups. And I had no idea how to actually manage the team.

So I had to do what nobody likes doing these days, and read the manual.

Even then, things felt weird at first, like there was some kind of input delay.
I do not know if this was my controller, or I'd got the emulator set up wrong, or it's just the way the game is, but I was able to reduce this effect somewhat by slightly slowing the emulation speed.
This resulted in the game itself running a tiny bit slower, but at least my little dudes then seemed to do things exactly when I pressed the buttons.

Not that it helped all that much.

When I played this combat sports game as a kid, I remember getting to the top league a couple of times, but would then promptly get smashed to pieces.

I figured with save states, I could completely mitigate my poor skill level, by just being able to replay every game until I won, and then move on to the next.

In reality, while this was enough to again get me out of league 2 and into league 1, those top teams were just way too fast and good for me to handle.

I read online afterwards that I'd probably made a huge mistake by trying to train and upgrade my starting players, instead of just getting rid of them and buying new ones. In order to do that I'd have to start all over again, but I really don't want to do that right now.

Maybe in the future. Who knows?

As I was reading about this game, I saw that a new PC game is currently in early access, and I was quite intrigued. But then I realised it's got Denuvo, and as such it will never get my money.

It's been a very long time coming, but at last, nearly half way through the year, I've finally finished my first game of 2025.

To be fair, it was probably well past due that I played this, as GTA5 is a very popular game from 2013, that I imagine the majority of gamers have played by now.

I'd just never really been that interested in playing it before, as the PC version is packed to the gills with different forms of DRM, and to play it on console would require me to use the dreaded controller in a shooter game. Urgh.

But when I saw the PS5 version for just £15, I thought I may as well give it a try. After all, it costs nearly that much whenever I go to KFC these days.

As an added bonus, it would actually give the console something else to do.

Despite my lack of interest in playing it, I was not a complete novice when it came to the game and the city it is set in. This is because, back during the winter period in late 2021, I got hooked for a couple of solid months on watching GTA5 roleplayers on Twitch.

There were a bunch of streamers I watched, like uhSnow, Timmac, Silent, and Kyle. I remember I was watching live during the Mary Mushkin rocket launcher incident, and also viewed events from Wolfabelle's perspective during the huge conflict in Sandy Shores when most of the cop players got massacred.

Two of my favourite characters were Crystal and Ka Chao, who were a comedy double act. But the player who has had the longest effect on me is Pinkchyu, who had a character called Selena. This is because she recorded a song for her character to perform in the game called Delirium, which I like so much it's still in my playlist.

However, I only watched it for a couple of months, and looking into the scene now reveals that most of these players and characters are not around any more.

Shame.

In this game, you play as three different characters from in and around the city of Los Santos, as they deal with all manner of crooked cops, drug dealers, gangsters, and rich assholes.

It can be played from either a 3rd or 1st person persepctive, which is a choice I always appreciate in games like this.

The game I'd played in the past which was most like this was Saints Row The Third. Which makes sense, as that series is (or was) considered to be a bit of a rip-off of GTA when it first came out.

However, while that other game was pretty much just set in a city, here, the location of Los Santos and the surrounding island is large and impressive, especially for a game that came out so long ago. I really do need to go back and have a look at how it ran on the consoles of the time.

Unlike Saints Row, this thing takes itself quite a bit more seriously, apart from a few ludicrous moments, that is.

I really did miss the wild zaniness of that other game, especially as the setting and characters here are so dark and depressing.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, in this game is a complete arsehole. Thieves, murderers, even torturers at times, I really didn't like any of them. There was no real love for the dialogue, either, as the characters were constantly at each others throats, arguing, calling each other all kinds of racial slurs, and basically just being dicks to one another. I have no idea why they ended up being friends at all.

This is all in stark contrast to the characters in Saints Row, who despite being equally psychotic, were mostly happy in their own ways and were all good friends who actually got along. There was an element of fun to them, you know?

At the end of this game you can make a choice about whether to let one of several different characters die, or have them all band together to take out their collective enemies. And while I knew the game and story were designed to have them all team up, I really did struggle over whether or not to take out the character of Trevor instead. That dude was a vile, disgusting psychopath, and I wish I could have gone and killed him in addition to the other ending.

Of course, as expected, my main issue was with having to use a controller to play a shooter game with. I seriously just don't get why devs don't put mouse and keyboard into console games, when the consoles themselves have support for these peripherals, and the exact same game on PC always has mouse and keyboard support.

For most of the game, I was aiming manually, and was able to just about struggle through. But for the last few missions I'd had enough and slapped on aim assist just to get through it as fast as possible.

I definitely had other issues with the controls though. The main problem was that I kept forgetting that melee and reload were on the same button, but which one triggered depended on whether you were unarmed or had a gun equipped. So in the middle of a firefight, if an enemy got too close, I'd press the melee button and just end up reloading instead, inevitably leading to my death. I just couldn't get my head around it, and kept messing it up. I know it was mostly my problem, but who the fuck put those 2 controls on the same button?

Outside of the controls, and me arguing with my spaghetti thumbs as usual, by far the main problem was how this game handled the vehicles.

Compared to Saints Row The Third, which was so elegant and easy, here things were a right mess. Cars constantly vanished or despawned, or came back after I'd got rid of them. It was a nightmare.

For one example, there was a mugging. I chased after the guy (in my car), managed to get him out of his car, then chased him down the street about 50 feet. I decked him, got the wallet back, then turned around to see his car still there but mine had despawned.

Another example was a mission where I'd got to kill someone in a hotel. I looked around to where my car had been just seconds ago, and it had despawned again. The map said it was back at the safe house, so I tried to take a cab back there but the quest failed, saying I abandoned the mission. I thought maybe it was because I fast travelled, so instead I tried again without the quick travel but it still said I abandoned it. Grrr.

These examples were only the tip of the iceberg when it came to how shit this game is when handling the storage of your vehicles. And it's such a shame, because in Saints Row The Third this was one of the best parts of the game for me. I loved stealing and doing cars up, then stashing them in the garage, and I enjoyed that here too, except for the fact that the damn things kept going missing.

You can click the following button to read about the crazy shit that went on during my playthrough:

Show / hide storage woes