New Rusmil

Update your bookmarks – Rusmil is being combined with my other blogs into a single entitiy.

New site is drezha.wordpress.com – you can still use www.rusmil.co.uk to get to me – it’ll direct you to the new site.

Updated Rusmil

Firstly, I apologise to all regular readers for yet another change – this is hopefully the last change for the coming year and a bit!

I’ve decided that wordpress free hosting does not allow for the flexibility of hosting that I would like. Not only that but I run a few free websites and decided to consolidate them into one. Therefore Rusmil has moved (again!) to my hosting account with the (currently) excellent, Just Host. The price is cheap and offer Unlimited Bandwidth and Unlimited space – however there are some clauses on what files can be uploaded. This has been in the works for a while now (and I would have been using Web Host Giant however whilst they are very good, cheaper than Just Host and support replied within minutes to emails, they don’t allow hotlinking and this prevents me from using my pictures on other sites (good when I want to prevent bandwidth thefts but bad for linking pictures on forums etc which is a reason I’m using it.))

Due to the move, I’ve also updated the layout and look of the site and I’m very much liking the new layout – I hope you do to and I welcome all feedback.

Rusmil can be accessed (currently – I’m unsure whether to renew my Rusmil domain) via the following links-

http://www.drezha.me.uk/rusmil/

http://rusmil.drezha.me.uk

http://www.rusmil.co.uk

If you use a feed reader, please resubscribe by clicking the RSS button below and/or update your reader as appropriate.

Hopefully I’ll see you all on the new look website soon!

Shattered Horizon – Review

Well the new PC has performed admirably and whilst it copes very nicely with Dawn of War 2, I wanted a fairly modern game to try and tax my graphics card. Now when I saw that what Steam was running for free this past weekend, I jumped at the chance to try it for free.

Shattered Horizon

Shattered Horizon is an interesting idea for an FPS – rather than the age old “fight in a space station” somewhere, this shooter puts you outside in space. In zero gravity. This obviously gives you a whole 360 degrees of action and movement rather than the rather linear gravity based shooters where everything is essentially on the floor with you.

Not only the gameplay sounds good, but the graphics look fantastic.

However this comes at a cost – it’s a Direct X 11 game only so requires either Windows Vista or Windows 7 to run. No issues here as I’m running Windows 7 Professional (thanks to University discounts) , however readers might not have this.

First Impressions

Loading the game up and starting playing and the game lives up to my expectations. Considering I hadn’t heard of it before, I assumed it was a fairly simple affair and I wasn’t wrong.

There is only one weapon – an assault rifle that has fully auto fire and also a sniper capability. It also has an attached grenade launcher with 3 different grenade types (EMP, Explosive and ICE).  Controls are fairly basic and just like in space, when you stop pushing forwards, you wont really stop moving forwards so the controls may take people a slight getting used to.

Gameplay is quite fast and frantic and there are a few different game modes, such as assault (attacking fixed points) and the standard death match. The levels are quite large and open with lots of differing routes around the levels.

After a While…

The space and zero gravity aspect works very nicely – whilst your assault rifle doesn’t have any kick back as such, firing it in sniper mode will send you spinning wildly. Therefore you can land on any scenery an secure yourself to it so you can fire as a sniper quite safely without spinning into a meteor field. With no health or ammo pickups, flying off into spaces isn’t really a great idea!

Ammo seems to be unlimited for the assault rifle but you need to reload after every 60 rounds. You have 3 grenades per life and the different grenades come in handy – you can time them to explode when you want and they can bounce off scenery. The ICE grenades are essentially smoke grenades, they make a large area unnavigable for a while. EMP disables a spacesuits control systems making the player move very slowly and the explosive do as they say!

All the technology you are wearing comes at a a price – the suits radar can detect your team mates and enemy alike. That is until you switch to silent running, where all suit systems are turned off so it’s harder to move, however you don’t appear on enemy radars. Check this video for an example:

However this comes at a cost – it’s a Direct X 11 game only so requires either Windows Vista or Windows 7 to run. No issues here as I’m running Windows 7 Professional (thanks to University discounts) , however readers might not have this.

Conclusions

Shattered Horizons is a simple FPS – for £15 on Steam, you don’t expect massive, genre changing, gaming. Yet Shattered Horizons manages to set itself apart from other FPS games with the addition of the zero gravity element. It all combines everything for a simple to pick up shooter.

Don’t expect deep character development or anything – this is a pure shooter which is pure and simple and addictive. It does feature a stats feed (mine are here), however due to the simple nature of the game, there’s not much to track (unlike Battlefield 2′s award and medal system).

Overall, well worth the money (I paid £7.50 as it was half price this weekend) if you want a shooter that is different to the current offerings.

Lego Weapons

Alright, I’m a big fan of lego, even now as an adult! So when I stumbled across the extremely interesting BrickArms website, I knew I had to share it with readers!

ASCUK is Dead, Long Live UK Airsoft Zone!

As you may know, ASCUK died last year – the admin pulled the plug and that was it, gone.

However it appears that the moderating team have decided to open a new forum and it’s running as UK Airsoft Zone now. It’s nice to see the familiar faces (well names!) from the old ASCUK and it’s by far a better community than it’s competitor in the UK!

New Gaming Rig

Rusmil may see a resurgence of PC gaming soon – I treated myself to a new PC as my Atom based desktop was just lacking behind what I needed for it. It’s primarily been built for my work as I use LaTeX for my writing and while this can easily be edited on any PC with a text editor, when you come to compile the code, it requires CPU and the Atom just wasn’t coping. it’ll also mean I can go back to a dual screen setup, making it easier to work as I can view a PDF on one screen and Word or Texmaker on the other.

Therefore I purchased the following:-

• Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H
• ATI HD3850 Radeon GFX
• Intel  E5300 @ 2.60GHz
• 320Gb Samsung HD
• Kingston 2Gb
• OCZ StealthXStream 400W SilentPSU
• Cooler Master Elite 335
• Coolermaster Hyper TX3 Cooler
• Windows 7 Professional

The aim is to over clock this when the TX3 arrives (it’s currently running on the stock Intel cooler) and apparently it should easily reach 3.9GHz but we’ll see what happens. This all came from Aria (except the TX3, which is coming from Play).

Of course, with the power, it can play some games which I intend to use it for at times. I’m eagerly awaiting the new Dawn of War 2 addon, Chaos Rising, that arrives in March. I’m currently going back and playing through the campaign and the new downloadable content, Last Stand, where you have to face multiple waves of enemies until you die.

I also bought Titanquest and it’s add on from Steam a while ago but was unable to play it so I’ll be having a go at that as well – it’s the closest game I’ve seen to Diablo 2 which is a personal favourite so that’ll be played. I also have Blazing Angels but this doesn’t appear to work on Windows 7 with Steam which is a royal pain and I cant get a refund on this without getting Titanquest refunded as well so I’ll stick with it and hope it gets updated.

Anyhow, it’s nice to be back!

Fearful Silence

Well it turned out into one of those days. Unfortunately, the game didn’t go ahead due to my mate ordering the wrong size batteries for the M4 he recently bought. I told him to order a crane stock battery which he did and then it turns out the battery was to wide to fit as it was using large battery cells and should have used stick battery cells!
As my AK74S is still in the shop being repaired, it meant that we had one AEG between us and therefore we had to call the whole thing off. We did try and construct a crane battery  out of his old small battery but very quickly realised we’d be spending more than £15 on making it and thus we might as well call off the weekend and he’ll order a new battery.

Well from this, it pays to find out what batteries your AEG takes before ordering!

Next Game – Fearful Silence 23rd January

This will be my first game of the new year and will be a chance to try out a new site.

It so happens I am doing an interview in Leeds the day before this and so a short stay over with a friend and then on the Saturday I’ll be trying Fearful Silence. The game site looks to be good and there seems to be a reasonable number of players so it’ll be nice to try somewhere new.

Due to some upgrades on my main AK, I’m reduced to using my AK74S but this shouldn’t be an issue as recently it has been outranging the longer AK74. I’ll mention more on the upgrades when I get it back from the gunsmith.

Just a note

I am still about, I’ve just not had anything to update this site about!

If you want to read more of my stuff though, check out drezhainsilico.wordpress.com for computer related comments…

James May’s Toys – Airfix

James May has a new series of toys starting. This weeks one was about Airfix. Having been an avid airfix fan (and even now I still make models but in the form of the futuristic Sci-fi Warhammer 40,000), this was of interest to me, especially as the model in question they were building was a 1:1 scale Spitefire!

Very good bit of TV I must admit

If you missed it, catch up with it on iPlayer.