Sonic Rob’s Jump Troop Tactica for Space Marine Multiplayer: Part III

Finishing out my series of posts on how I like to go about playing a jump marine in Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine, let’s discuss my two least favorite maps and briefly touch on the use of Perks.

Pull!

Basilica

• My absolute least favorite map to play as ASM. There are a lot of covered passages that are can’t be jumped through, as well as long narrow hallways with tall ceilings that basically are setting ASM up to get clay pigeoned by a dev at the other end.
Continue reading Sonic Rob’s Jump Troop Tactica for Space Marine Multiplayer: Part III

Sonic Rob’s Jump Troop Tactica for Space Marine Multiplayer: Part II

Last time I held forth with no real qualifications or justification on how to fight as a jump marine in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. Carrying on with the second of three posts on the topic, I’d like to discuss particular maps in the game and how to best use the jump marine’s particular traits in each of them.

Defend. You don't say.

Continue reading Sonic Rob’s Jump Troop Tactica for Space Marine Multiplayer: Part II

Sonic Rob’s Jump Troop Tactica for Space Marine Multiplayer: Part I

I’ve been enjoying the hell out of Space Marine’s multiplayer mode, probably more than I’ve enjoyed an online game in some time. It’s pretty thin on maps and classes, but in a way that allows for some very fine tuning. It’s like a really well-cooked steak with nothing on it and no side dishes.

I’ve been looking online for some guides to playing the game, but it’s starting to look like the multiplayer community may be deserted in favor of the big games coming out in the next few weeks. Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 are both waiting in the wings to snap up fans of high-caliber online violence, and Batman: Arkham City just ate all of the nerd gamers. Still, they say that if you can’t find what you need, build it, so here are some thought on playing the easiest class in the game and thus the one I feel most confident in holding forth regarding: the Assault Marine/Chaos Raptor (ASM).

At Level 42, Chaos Raptors unlock the Khornate Firebarfer and Tzeenchian Get Stuck in Doorways Backpack

Continue reading Sonic Rob’s Jump Troop Tactica for Space Marine Multiplayer: Part I

Lifecycles

Well, it seems that the life expectancy of a PS3 is about 3.25 years. We bought you on the way back from a friend’s wedding and you gave yeoman’s service. We have streamed more NetFlix and played fewer games via that machine than I really care to address.

Now you are sitting, waiting for me to decide what to do with you while your younger, cheaper, larger, faster replacement takes the place that was once yours.

The Playstation is dead, long live the Playstation!

-fh

P.S. Thanks for lasting until after the price drop!

Good Morning

Hi everyone. I’m really sorry about the pace of posting things lately – I went from a reasonably cushy government contracting job to unemployment and now to a new job in the video gaming industry. I’m really pleased to be here and it’s a great opportunity, but the pace is just blistering my ass; I’m laying down 60+ hours a week with a really long commute on top of it. In some ways, I suppose I’m living a much more ordinary and less charmed working life than I was at the start of the year. I’m certainly beginning to see the appeal of handheld gaming in a way that wasn’t as obvious when my commute was a ten-minute drive.

I’m going to continue writing posts as I’m able, but the length and tone of them may have to change to suit the amount of time I can give to the site. Hopefully we can still have a lot of fun blathering about games and such.

-ssr

Schmannonball Schmead: Legion by Dan Abnett

Dan Abnett is arguably the best author working in the Black Library’s Warhammer 40,000 setting. He has a wonderful ear for dialogue and his characters tend to be well-drawn and to have understandable motivations, even if he introduces them only to kill them off a few sentences later. This is actually one of his favorite tricks, and it means that his novels, set in the splinter of the 40K setting known as the “Daniverse” are among the more colorful and well-populated.

Abnett also understands a key problem with 40K, which is that it’s actually sort of a shitty setting. Space Marines are dull, Imperial Guardsmen are idiots, and even Orks can get monotonous after a while. Sure, in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war, but you have to write about more than war or risk your novel turning into a Risk War Diary. Abnett’s solutions, at least in the novels I’ve read, are to avoid writing about Marines whenever possible, and to populate his stories with more-or-less normal humans who exist in cultures distinct from the usual kinda-like-Nazis-kinda-like-Victorians Imperium of Man. Legion, the 7th novel in the very long-running Horus Heresy series, set in the 30th Millennium, long before the “present” of the 40K universe. The novel purports to tell the tale of the Alpha Legion, youngest of the Space Marine Legions and one that we know in 40K as a dreaded Traitor Legion. In fact, like a lot of the Heresy novels Legion takes place mostly from the perspective of a series of bystanders, normal humans serving alongside the Alpha Legion in the vast non-Marine human armies.

John Grammaticus, an immortal psychic, works for a Cabal of aliens who have seen the future. They would like to meet Alpharius, leader and genetic template for the Alpha Legion, so they can warn him about a coming danger to the galaxy that the Legion might be able to help avert. The aliens don’t trust the humans, who are a young and violent species, and the humans don’t trust the aliens because various aliens have perpetrated mass slaughter against humans at times when the Imperium was weak. Wacky misunderstandings and hijinks ensue.

Continue reading Schmannonball Schmead: Legion by Dan Abnett

Chat Box

Sonic Rob: new Space Marine movie has a tarty IG girl
Sonic Rob: her uniform bares her midriff
FyreHaar: what????
FyreHaar: send this so I may be scathing
Sonic Rob: I am so confuse
Sonic Rob: I may be wrong
Sonic Rob: that could be some tan underarmor
FyreHaar: That was tan underarmour
FyreHaar: there was no tart
FyreHaar: she looked hard
FyreHaar: but there is a dude with my haircut
Sonic Rob: LOL
Sonic Rob: emo chaos marine
FyreHaar: oh totally

Cannonball Read #5 & 6 – The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls

The Curse of Chalion & Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold.

The Curse of Chalion and its follow up novel, Paladin of Souls, are explorations of the human relationship with the divine wrapped in a pair of eminently readable fantasy novels. Continue reading Cannonball Read #5 & 6 – The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls

Subspace – The Lost Bladesman

Should you have on your computer, through whatever means, a copy of the 2011 martial-arts film The Lost Bladesman, and should you perchance have attempted to view this Chinese-language film accompanied by the most common English-language subtitles available on the internet, you may have noticed that those subtitles suck. They are just not very comprehensible. From what I understand, this is probably because they were produced by running a Vietnamese-language script of the film through Babelfish, so that probably gives you an idea of what I’m talking about; there’s a lot of “Do not want!”-style dialog.

Having somewhat enjoyed the film in spite of its issues, I decided to take a few hours and copy-edit the subtitles into something a little more put-together. Admittedly, there were a lot of rough spots; some of the idioms I think just don’t translate well into compact English. I’m not sure if it’s how Chinese works or if the film is badly-written (or, again, if the translation is lousy), but some of the conversations veer wildly through numerous topics with no real transition between sentences. I did what I could to make things clear, readable, and fun. In maybe one or two lines, this entailed a total rewrite, which I find sort of tacky and embarrassing, but I think the effect is worthwhile.

Also, there are several instances of written Chinese that had no subtitle translation; as I can’t read Chinese (nor, in the interest of full disclosure, do I speak Mandarin or Cantonese), these written segments remain untranslated.

So, going back to your hypothetical non-pirated copy of The Lost Bladesman, I here present a set of modified subtitles that might be a bit more esthetically pleasing to English-language viewers, in .txt format. To use them, download the file and edit its extenstion from .txt to .srt; wordpress won’t let me upload .srt files for security reasons.

If you have a roughly-translated set of English-language subtitles, and you’re looking for someone to punch them up and clean up their spelling/grammar/coherence, feel free to get in touch with me. I offer reasonably fast turnaround and competitive rates.

Actually, I have no idea what would constitute either. Watch the film; Guan Yu kicks like 400 guys’ asses with a halberd, punches a guy right in the helmet, and takes on an entire army with a single rock in his hand.

-ssr