Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

Santa brought me a lovely new Andoid phone - a Samsung Galaxy S and I am learning to love  and hate the world of mobile phone apps. An app is nothing more than a software application for a phone but Apple has managed to turn a simple concept into a phenomenon their Iphone App store and Google is doing its best to imitate this with the Android Market. The rise of the app store has meant an explosion of free and low priced software for smart phones. As long as your exercise a little common sense with regard to security and privacy this is a good thing but there is one particular type of app that really annoys me: The apps that are designed to replace internet browsers. I am talking about facebook apps, Youtube apps, Google and Gmail apps and so on. There are apps for just about every major web service and now even minor players are jumping on the app bandwagon. My local library has an app, so does my local traffic authority (for telling you about speed cameras). Why oh why do ...

I haven't disappeared but what with Christmas and family activities it has been pretty quiet on the gaming front. Minecraft proved a big hit with my daughters. I even set up a home server to allow them play together in multi-player. I made this harder fro myself than it should have been by starting out on patch day so I had to fight with version incompatibility as well as new patch bugs. Once I got everything sorted out however it worked a treat. As an unexpected bonus I managed to set things up so you can log in single player or multiplayer and still edit the same world. The trick to doing this is to store the multiplayer server in the Saves directory of the single player game and to change the level-name in the "server.properties" file. to be the name of your single player world.  This sounds bizarre but it does work. It means that when I am not around to set up a server the girls can still log in with single player and work on their world. The only game I have been p...

Minecraft's world building has proven such a hit with my kids that I bought a second license with the intention of setting up our own private server for a bit of multi-player world building. Both my licenses are alpha licenses which cost €10 each. Sometime today the beta starts and the price goes up to €15. If you have any interest in Minecraft but  haven't gotten around to buying it yet I strongly recommend buying before the price goes up. It isn't just a matter of the extra €5. Alpha purchasers also get "all future versions of the game for free" while beta purchases will only up to the first release free. Given the success of the game this makes the alpha purchase an incredible bargain for the few hours that remain at that price.

I'm not really into building / crafting games so I had given Minecraft a miss until yesterday when I realised that the price goes up by €5 with the release of the Beta version on the 20th December. A game that sells over 800,000 (and rising ) copies at a tenner a piece despite being laughably ugly and still in alpha must have something going for it, mustn't it? I reckoned it was worth a punt for a tenner and anyway it might be something to amuse the kids who are a bit more craft minded than I am. I logged in and paid my money before launching the browse version of the game.  I sat down with my daughter to play it for a bit. Gosh it is ugly isn't it? Single player "peaceful" mode seemed like a good place to start getting familiar with the game and thanks to paulsoaresjr's helpful video's we were soon chopping down trees and crafting basic items like torches and picks. My daughter was intrigued by the crafting interface so we started experimenting to see ...

I have been playing Empire Total War for about 2 weeks now at a very intermittent pace. I an still working through the "Road to Independence" tutorial campaign but now that I have finally reached Chapter 3 most of the restrictions seen to be removed and it feels like a full game. Chapter 3 opened with my American rebel forces being overrun by the British redcoats at Bunker Hill which was a bit disheartening until I read that this is historically accurate. I am enjoying Empire more than I expected having read reports of bugs and poor AI. I was initially concerned that the advent of powerful firearms would remove a lot of variety from the game because one soldier with a musket is much the same as any other. Having played a bit however I haven't had problems with bugs or AI and I find the changes to combat intriguing. There is something very satisfying about stopping an enemy charge dead in its tracks with a hail of crossfire from overlapping volleys. Increased accuracy...

Much excitement about the confirmation that a new Elder Scrolls game has been confirmed for next November and that it is a direct sequel to Oblivion . Oblivion didn't impress me quite as much as it's iconic predecessor "Morrowind" but nevertheless it was  hugely impressive game and I have learned to eagerly anticipate any new release from Bethseda Softworks. The news even inspired me to re-install Oblivion and I am currently playing a very impressive full conversion mod called  "Nehrim: At Fates Edge" . Not many mods offer 50+ hours of hand crafted single player campaign so this is quite special and I will probably discuss it at more length later. The real justification for this post however was the following page from the Elder Scrolls Wiki that I stumbled upon while googling for the mod. It reminded me that Oblivion, one of the most successful single player games of the last decade widely recognised as a monumental achievement in gaming, was fundamenta...

Thanks to a heavy snowfall I had the perfect excuse to spend the weekend indoors playing Metro 2033 bought in last weeks Steam Sale. It is a very Russian game. The post apocalyptic setting and the art style remind me a lot of Stalker but the gameplay is more linear. Indeed it owes a lot to half life. I actually enjoyed the game very much. Sometimes a good old fashioned on rails shooter is exactly what you need. The game does have a few tricks up its sleeve most notably the use of ammunition as currency leaving you with a constant dilemma about whether to shoot your bullets or spend them. Restricting the availability of ammunition is a tried and trusted way of increasing the tension in a horror game and for the most part this achieves the same effect but there are a few places where I found it annoying. In the early part of the game there are shops offering cool weapons and upgrades but I never knew whether I could afford to spend the ammo on them or not and by the time I got a handle...