Does there need to be 15 kinds of Danish, Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian death metal while all Grunge from the pansy Screaming Trees and Eddie Vedder’s bro-rape quintet to Mudhoney is lumped together? Anyway, it’s fun for a good 15 minutes.
Cthulhu for the People
The THING 2(!?)
Norwegians. Remember them? They flew in over the station in a helicopter chasing a dog. One got shot inside the eye and the other got blown up real good. Their lines were not subtitled so it sounded like gibberish. There were other Norwegians–lots of them died at their own base–but what really happened?
Thing 2, coming out next year, details the events that happened before the fateful helicopter chase. Notable: the main protagonist is a chick, and it’s a Norwegian film. More here.
I expected Hollywood to puke a sequel out in the last few years along the lines of Highlander 2, but shockingly, this doesn’t look like some rehashed Hollywood schlock from the imagination-devoid hack writer’s guild to cash in on the street cred of one of the finest horror films ever made.
Oh and if you haven’t read this fanfic of the original film from the Thing’s point of view– get on it.
Damn the Minecraft
I ‘played’ Dwarf Fortress an hour or so a day for about two weeks awhile back so when Minecraft started getting the buzz on, it was quite easy to say: “fool me once” and not try it. I bit the bullet over the weekend and picked up the Alpha version and now, predictably, it’s an obsession (at least for the next two weeks or so).
That said last night, I learned how to make stone picks, wandered away from my spawn point, got lost and had to dig into a mountain when night fell to avoid the rapening. I underestimated the speed with which digging can be accomplished with a pick and dug down down DOWN until I ran out of picks and couldn’t see anything and got lost. Of course I hadn’t found any coal at this point so no light, no pick, lost inside a mountain. I started digging up and it took me half an hour to get to the surface, only to find that it was night again. Waiting for daylight, I chopped down some trees and then wandered back down into the mountain hole I made to build it out a bit (I had no idea where my respawn area was). ten steps down and BAM blown to pieces by three giant green penises. How did they get in there? At least I found my spawn point again.
More scrumfail in the gaming industry?
It’s not explicitly stated by the interveiwees, but some of the statements by both the lead on Elemental War of Magic and now APB’s Josh Howard lead me to believe that they tried to adopt scrum or some form of Agile to their development process and,it added up to fail. I just happened upon this interview and noted the line: “‘we don’t need specs’ and ‘we don’t need this, we’re just going to move” which is a classic scrumn00b statement. The only game company I know 100% uses scrum is Blizzard, but I suspect Torchlight followed an agile model. However, just like any method of project management, it takes training, practice and diligence. Jumping on the ‘no specs!’ bandwagon is easy when sitting in meetings at the beginning of projects, and you get a lot of head nods from people who hate it, but even with the most document-lean methods of Agile, you still needs something to capture and report what the hell the software is supposed to do.
GSB: Galactic Conquest Beta- Initial Ruminations
This is not a review and I’m playing just the beta (though it’s quite polished). I haven’t finished the game yet because it’s thankfully a challenge! Hence, this is just a list of five good things and five bad things. My benchmarks for any space 4x are: Master of Orion and Ultracorps. For general 4X it’s Dominions 3 and Empire Total War. That said, I think this little indy game from an English dude is the most important game in 4X space strategy that we have seen since Master of Orion 3 marred the genre.
Things I like:
- Beautiful and extremely easy to use interface: it is just flat out awesomeness incarnate. Dragging stuff, sliders, the works.
- Turn button works very fast and is almost always always accessible: when I get sick of mucking around with stuff, I can just click and it’s next turn from almost anywhere
- Sliders all over the place: this is what 4X space games are all about. If you don’t have sliders just go home and let the space piss cascade on you.
- Combine fleets interface: manual drag and drop and an auto combine to bring units up to full strength from smaller units
- Retreating: now you have an option in battle. Though this hoses any possibility of playable multiplayer for Gratuitous Space Battles, it’s growing on me for single player.
Things I don’t like
- Random fleet attacks from random races: the user-created enemy fleets idea is cool and all, but it’s really not a replacement for having enemy empires
- No random map
- Unlocks from the battle game only: there’s no way to get unlocks from playing the campaign. With the campaign, I no longer care to ever play the battle game again, as the battle game is wholly complete within the campaign version
- No campaign enemy races, empires, technology, no diplomacy: fleets just show up at your door and can be any race
- Movement is one planet to the next: each move takes one turn, this isn’t the worst, I just don’t like it being this simple
- You can’t auto-resolve battles until you’ve set up your fleet and started the battle.
It’s 7$ to buy the beta and if you already have GSB– this is a no brainer. Full review once I win.
Doom 3 – Hexenmod!
Yay! We're in another interactive bubble
Back in 1999 there was the DACK bullshit generator– a harbinger of the collapse of the dot.com bubble that we could look at and use every day in our presentations to clients, and now there’s a new one: http://www.whatthefuckismytransmediastrategy.com/. Along with the dry up of available developers, if this isn’t an indication of a mountain of social media horseapples swaying back and forth looking for a place to fall, I don’t know what is. Luckily this shouldn’t take the economy down with it– that a give we’ll get from the Gov’t/bank-sustained housing bubble 2.0 fail.
MauriceBastard and Higherheels take the zyel (normal level) diablo down quite boringly but with much cursing
Gratuitous Space Battles campaign now out in "purchasable" beta
Purchasable in quotes is because when you try to play, you get a required space to put a registration number– a number that’s not provided to you when you buy the game. I’m sure this will get fixed eventually, but I would wait until release to pick it up if you’re planning on it.
NOTE; steam users– you have to dig down into your steam folder to install the beta files. It should currently reside in VALVE/STEAM/STEAMAPPS/Gratuitous Space Battles/ Remember to CUT the last part of the path string the default setting gives you as it will try to create a new /Gratuitous Space Battles/ folder within your current Gratuitous Space Battles/ folder if you don’t.