by ·Comments Off on 386 or Higher

For as long as I can remember, my computer has been on the very edge of technology.  It has always been just a few steps away from being obsolete, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

That’s a lie, I would have it another way and I intend to very soon, but it’s a convenient lie that makes me feel special, or at least that it’s on purpose.

I remember being very excited about the release of “Lemmings 2”, not really because it was an amazing game; it wasn’t, they tried to improve the original’s purity by adding in more pointless skills in what was to become my first experience with something suffering from feature creep, but it was a game that would run on the family computer.  This was a time where every (very large) game box I picked up had the words “requires a 386 or higher” that disheartened me so much to the point that I believe “386 or higher” became a running joke with my parents because it had become one of those stupid borderline meaningless phrases that I thought might have more meaning than it did.

I’ve always bought and built middle of the range PCs (because to go for the most technologically advanced is a fools errand for anyone that needs their money to eat) and always found myself very quickly having to trick it in to playing certain games, but lately I’ve found a few titles manage to run below the recommended specifications that they list.

What this boils down to is a very roundabout and drop-in-the-ocean love letter to Blizzard and Starcraft 2, which has listed on the back of the box “2.6 GHz or Higher” and yet runs perfectly well (with perfectly meaning all the graphical settings reduced to zero) on my barely-scraping-2.3GHz-if-I-had-the-guts-to-overclock-it-but-last-time-I-tried-something-like-that-there-was-fire-so-closer-to-2.2 machine.

The game itself is fantastic (the description “chess on steroids” is apt), the design is near flawless, the multiplayer is fair and challenging, and the single player storyline has accurately been described as “something a twelve year old would enjoy” which makes me feel guilty for enjoying it so much, because I suspect they’re right.  The fact that Blizzard have spent the time to ensure that it will run smoothly on a machine that is now pushing six years old is unbelievable and a testament to their professionalism.

The first thing that popped into my head when I got Starcraft 2 working however was “I wonder if Sim City 2000 WOULD have worked on the 286 after all and why didn’t I at least try?”.  Maybe the lesson here is I should stop believing everything I read.  Maybe it’s that the more things change the more they stay the same.  Maybe it’s that I ramble about things nobody is interested in when I’m hungry.  Regardless, technology is ever evolving, but it’s refreshing to see that not everyone is trying to dismiss everything that’s for the most part considered obsolete.

by ·Comments Off on Pavlov’s Keyboard

Today I added a new page to the site:  Games!

This is in fact for games that I myself have created.  My current project has been to try and get a game finished, and I have achieved this!  As with anyone attempting anything vaguely creative, getting projects finished is a big deal for me and even though this is a small project, I shall instead be celebrating ever so slightly this evening.

The game is called Pavlov’s Keyboard and is available to download for free.

The game is about memory and conditioning.  As an experiment it doesn’t completely work, but as a learning exercise it’s been fantastic.  Regardless, I now have the tinkering bug, so maybe I’ll get some more projects on the go and finished off.

I’ve really taken inspiration lately from the Indie Games movement and hope to join their lower-hobbiest-ranks with a bit more practise and dare I say it effort.

by ·Comments Off on The Script Game

This is something that a friend of mine has got us doing which is, in my humble opinion, great.

The rules are simple and the game is played over a long period of time via email. The first player writes two minutes (which is approximately two pages) of script involving two characters. The second player then starts something new with two new characters and writes two minutes of script but has to include the first two characters at some point in the background doing something in character. The third player then does the same but with the second player’s characters. This is repeated until you have run out of players.

We have  just started our game, and it’s highly manageable. Two pages isn’t that much but it is enough time to get an idea across, establish two characters, and get something to happen. More than anything else however, it is fantastic script writing practice.

I’ve had my turn, so maybe I’ll post the results if I get permission.

Additional Notes:

In fact, if you’re on task, you can establish whole films and multi-season TV shows in two minutes. Next time you watch something good on TV or see a decent film, pay careful attention to the first couple of minutes and see just how much they cross off in a short space of time. An example from the top of my head would be Serenity, which as soon as you get to the opening credits with director / producer names materializing on the screen and it starts moving through the ship, they manage to establish the seven major characters, the relationships between them and the situation they’re involved with in well under two minutes. Plus, it’s actually quite funny.

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As is occasionally the case, it can take a Flash game to  shake you out of a feeling of vague frustration when it comes to games. 

May I refer you to  a game called Time Goes By (Via Red Tower Games) which is strangely beautiful, the first stage in particular.

There are undeniably a couple of little frustrations with the game, but for the most part it has a wonderful feel to it that lifted me up ever so slightly.

There is often a question that gets bandied about various sites as to whether games can ever classify as art (Or as I have genuinely seen the question raised once “Is gamez art?”) and for the most part, we are stuffed into a general “not really” answer, but things like Time Goes By here are the sort of thing that raises the answer closer to a “sometimes they can”.

by ·Comments Off on Gaming Frustrations Part 2: Assassin’s Creed II

There are two things to note about the title of this post:

1)      Read aloud it sounds like the score from a football match.

2)      This looks like it is following on from an earlier post.

Number 1 is of course wrong, and number two is misleading.  I was originally going to talk about Assassin’s Creed II in my previous post but I got caught up discussing the binary nature of existence.  Needless to say, also on my to-finish list was the slightly more recently released Assassin’s Creed II.  This doesn’t really need you to have read part one, but maybe there’s a theme.  They’re both published by Ubisoft and I think they use the same game-engine, so that’s something I guess.

Just a quick note, “frustrations” might be the wrong word for this one, because I realise now that I’m not really frustrated with this game so much, just moderately baffled by something it managed to do, but I wanted to have a couple of blog posts with “Part 1” and “Part 2” after it to make it look coherent, despite the fact that they’re really about different things.

This post is spoiler-riddled so if you’re interested in not knowing how this one ends, look away now and come back another day.

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