Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

Like many others I have become dependent on Dropbox to share files between the various internet connected devices in my life. A recent update to the mobile version of Dropbox for Android made an such an enormous boo boo that I am surprised that there has been no outcry about it. To understand the gaff you must understand how Dropbox works on mobile devices. On a normal computer Dropbox keeps a full copy of every file in your Dropbox folder and constantly keeps these files updated via the internet. This approach would be far too expensive in memory and data allowance for a phone so the mobile version of dropbox does not keep a local copy of every file but instead only downloads files to a cache directory as you need them. Once you accept that you have to manually upload and download the system is a reasonable compromise and programs can still work on the copy of the file stored on the cache directory. So far so good but a recent update to Dropbox made several changes. First they moved...

I didn't blow the bank this year but nevertheless I have stocked my gaming cupboard quite well between sales, presents and impulse purchasing over the holiday period. The list of acquisitions is as follows: Orcs Must Die+DLC, Steam, €4.96: This is great fun, I spent several days playing it and I am still only half way through the campaign. Between Sanctum and his game I have come to the conclusion that I cannot enjoy tower defence unless I actually participate in the action myself alongside the towers. Dungeons of Dredmor, Steam, €1.47 : Highly regarded roguelike game but not really my cup of tea. I played just enough to get the holiday achievement. Railworks 3 +DLC , Steam, €3.49 To be honest I will probably only dabble in the game but I have had my eye on this train simulator for ages so I had to buy it when it came on sale (90% off). Batman Arkham City, Gamers Gate, £11.98  I really enjoyed Arkham Asylum and this is supposed to  be better. I am looking forwar...

Only a couple of days after launch it seems that digital download sales of SWTOR have been halted.  I am still undecided about purchasing the game but I logged into Origin to check out pricing. At first I was a little bit surprised to see that the only version listed was the digital deluxe version costing €75. I was even more surprised when I clicked the link to be told: "Product No Longer Available".  Thinking I may have missed something I searched again for any other edition but no. There was none available for sale. Then I went to the Bioware website which directed me to the Origin Web Page for Ireland: http://store.origin.com/store/eaemea/en_IE/html/pbPage.SWTOR_IE/    While the web page does list the standard edition (at a price higher than I have seen it in stores) the purchase button is greyed out and I could not purchase the game even if I wanted to. Interestingly the link to purchase additional game time works. Could it be that EA are actually restric...

Over the last few days I have surprised myself by how much fun I am having collecting Steam Christmas achievements. Ostensibly these are for Steam related prizes but the prizes themselves have so far been unexciting: a free game I am unlikely to ever play, discounts off several others I have no interest in and several lumps of coal. Collecting the achievements themselves however provides an interesting excuse to look at games I might otherwise never had played. Apart from a couple of "click this box to win" achievements most of them require you to achieve a certain goal in one of the games that is currently on sale on Steam. Many can be completed fairly quickly by an entry level character but others require hours of play to get to the correct spot in game. Happily there is help at hand in the Steam forums with guides and even save games to help achievement collectors towards their goals. Of course it is a waste money to buy games just to earn a fairly worthless prize so ...

Why do despotic governments make such a big deal about internet firewalls and trying to clamp down on "insidious foreign websites" like Facebook and Youtube. It seems to me that such loudly proclaimed efforts are as amateurish as those of the most inept Bond villain. Can these would be megalomaniacs not see that the internet is the greatest surveillance tool ever invented? No longer do we have to pay an army of informers to eavesdrop on the conversations of their friends and families. Gone is the need for midnight secret police raids on subversives meeting in abandoned warehouses. Instead of such outdated techniques monitoring the communications of your citizens over the tubes of the internet will provide vastly more information. Rather than banning Youtube, Facebook or any other seditious website invest in warehouses full of hard disks and record all of the online activities of your populace. The more seditious the website the more useful will be the information it gath...

Christmas is one of the few times of the year when a combination of loosened purse strings and available free time allows me the luxury of sampling recently released games. This year there are a few possible contenders for my Christmas holiday gaming list: Skyrim is a leading candidate while Arkham city, Shogun 2 and even Modern Warfare 3 are all possibilities and then of course there is the tantalising prospect of SWTOR. The timing of SWTOR couldn't be better for a Christmas gaming blitz and there is something magical about the early days of an mmorpg. Settings, quests and activities that will come to be regarded as tiresomely repetitive over the coming months and years are still seen as fresh and new.  The only trouble is that it is an mmorpg and I thought I had grown out of mmorpgs. My recent attempt at logging into LOTRO to sample the Isengard content lasted all of 30 minutes before I got bored and logged out. I don't think this is just burnout with one game. The whol...

I seem to have spent the entire weekend fixing things. This would normally be a cause for pride of accomplishment on my part except for the fact that at least one of the breakages was completely my own fault. The first patient was a cable  remote which had stopped talking to the set top box. After several batteries were wasted by various members of the family who assumed that batteries were the problem I decided that I had better roll up my sleeves and "look into it". Looking into it consisted of  prising the plastic cover apart and peering at the circuit board inside, knowing full well that if there was anything seriously wrong I wasn't going to be able to fix it. While peering I noticed that the keypad matrix on the circuit board was covered in a syrupy gloop. The rubber keypad mat had its own fair share of this gloop. Guessing that this wasn't a design feature I carefully cleaned both and re-assembled. Hey Presto the remote works and Daddy is a hero. The seco...

I recently found myself in a position where the only practical solution for me to enjoy ebooks I had legitimately purchased (would have been) to engage in the highly illegal pursuit of using a drm removal too. The cause was a clash of software upgrades and activation limits with a healthy dose of misunderstanding from me thrown in. I am not a lawyer and the law on drm circumvention is pretty confusing at the moment. There is an EU treaty from 2001 which appears to makes it highly illegal to even think about anti drm but it hasn't been transcribed into my own countries national law yet and I believe there is still some discussion over possible exceptions (ie fair use provisions).  Well I am not going to admit to breaking the law but I will say that Google informed me that there was a very easy to use open source, community supported tool available to perform drm removal  (if I felt so inclined). I quickly realised that this tool (if I were to use it) would make the wh...

First we had digital retailers like Steam discounting AAA games from €40 down to €10 and it felt like a revolution. Then the revolution moved on to indie titles which usually cost €10 or €15 and these were discounted down to €1 or €2. Now we have the Android Sale discounting mobile  games that normally only cost a couple of euro down to €0.10. Pretty soon they are going to have to bring back halfpenny's and farthings in order to allow this discounting madness to continue.

Finished Red Faction Armageddon. I enjoyed this third person linear shooter a lot but I agree with reviews that give it a "good but not great" rating. Red Faction's unique selling proposition is an engine which allow for insane levels of property destruction and Armageddon brings a unique repair capability to the mix. Unfortunately most of the time the stuff that gets destroyed is the platform you are standing on or the box you are trying to take cover behind and this gets somewhat tiresome. Currently playing Sanctum. I don't generally like Tower defence games.Partly this is because I am bad at them but also because I find it very depressing to watch an inexorable stream of monsters march towards my inner sanctum despite my usually inept efforts at stopping them. Sanctum however spices up the mix a bit by inserting you into the fray in FPS mode and I find that is enough for me to overcome my dislike of the tower defence format.

I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC. The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone. 1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904 A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / p...

There is a Minecraft craze going on among the nerdier boys at my 10 year old daughters junior school.  Apparently most of the girls are oblivious to this but my little angel is an old hand at the game thanks to her daddy.

Really really good. A really well polished experience with plenty of humour and a good story to tag along with. I loved the ending. Puzzles are probably a bit easier than the original although I had my share of head scratching moments none the less. I have actually gotten my daughter interested in playing although I get motion sickness looking over her shoulder. I came across a how to post telling how to get split screen multi-player on one PC . It was a bit fiddly to get going but  now it works an I am looking forward to playing a few co-op levels with her. Curious that Valve should include the code for split screen multiplayer on the PC version of the game but not actually offer it to players.

Edit: My statement that you need more than 50% wall remaining to get a bonus crystal is not correct. In fact you need more than 30% of your whatever maximum wall is. You start out with wall of 100 and it increases in steps of 10. If you maximum wall is more than 150 then you need more than 50 remaining to get the bonus. A bigger wall is still better though because you always have a safety margin of 70% of your maximum wall.  My mobile distraction of choice this week is Droidhen's simply named "Defender" on my Android phone. Defender is a wall defence game where you use a combination of a bow and magic spells to fend off hordes of enemies. It is very slickly made with attractive graphics and fun gameplay. Defender is free to play in the "but you can pay if you want to progress faster" sense. Lest you doubt the efficacy of this business model I should point out that Defender is riding near the top of the Android money making chart at the moment. There are t...

Thanks to Syncaine for pointing out the excellent Rooks and Kings videos of truly impressive Eve online encounters.I am no expert on EVE but it is clear that Rooks and Kings are masters of their trade employing extreme theory crafting to come up with builds and strategies that allow a small number of highly co-ordinated ships to take on defeat forces that appear to be far superior to them on paper. Clarion Call 3 is the best video because it has an epic storyline but  it makes more sense if you watch the sequence in order from Clarion Call 1 to 3. Essentially they have developed a number of precision tanking strategies that enable their small fleets to absorb all the damage that large opposing fleets can throw at them thereby allowing the Rooks and Kings fleet to pick off their enemies one by one. The thing that struck me most about these videos is how similar the Rooks and Kings approach is to that of high end PVE guilds in other games. The employ extensive theory crafting ...

I finally got around to completing the third mission which caused so much grief earlier. Despite having picked up a Nova heavy fighter in the meantime I actually used the Buster ship I started with in the end. A bit of combat experience earned fighting pirates made all the difference and I was able to deal with the fighter escorts quickly enough to follow the target as he jumped between systems.I think the key lesson I learned in combat is that strafing (using the A &D keys) does actually work and helps avoid enemy fire even though it is hard to notice the sideways movement against the background of the stars. I am sure I will need to move up from my Buster eventually but for now I am enjoying its combination of speed and firepower. It is also loaded with the software I need to control a small but expanding fleet of ships. I now have three Buster medium fighters, one Nova Heavy fighter and a Mercury hauler. Capturing pirate ships remains my most reliable means of earning money...

When I started playing X3 I tried to get a far as I could without consulting faqs or guides. After persevering for almost twenty hours I decided it was time to compromise my principles. There are too many undocumented features and the user interface is just too unhelpful to try to struggle on. Simple case in point: When you buy a new ship you are immediately presented with a menu of fittings that you can add to your purchase. Unfortunately this menu is just a list of whatever parts are available in the local system. It isn't filtered on any way. Even if your ship can only handle a single 1MW shield the game will happily sell you ten 25MW shields to fit to it.  There doesn't seem to be any way of accessing information on what fittings your new ship can take until after you exit this menu. Such frustrations with the user interface are commonplace. My current compromise is to consult the internet for help with game mechanics but I am still trying to avoid "spoilers" ...

Tim (Van Hemlock) has been playing a bit of X3 Terran Conflict which reminded me that I have an unplayed copy of X3 Reunion on my shelf since way back in 2005. This game is hard. There is no tutorial and the manual seems intended to intimidate rather than inform aspiring players. I could complain about the dreadfully unintuitive user interface except that I have a strong suspicion it is deliberately made that way to frighten off those who are not hard enough. The carrot for those who persevere, I am told, is a universe of unparalleled depth where the dedicated can carve out an empire. First hour in game: Hmmm, there doesn't seem to be a tutorial. In fact I am being asked to teach some rookie pilots the ropes. Thankfully I have played enough space games to know that you don't aim at the enemy ship you aim at the little lead indicator which tells you where they will be by the time your bullets get to them. I manage to shoot down a few bad guys and we survive. Second hour in ...

I probably won't get to play Skyrim until the Christmas Holidays but I am very pleased to see that Bethseda have something of a Mega hit on their hands. Of course I can't comment on the game until I play it but if I know Elder scrolls games I am sure it has oodles of depth and dashes of genius with quite a few flaws as well. I am also absolutely sure that this is not a casual game at least not in the Angry Birds / Farmville sense.

We keep a jug of filtered drinking water in our fridge. The water from the tap is perfectly palatable but chilled water is that bit nicer so the jug is popular. It is a matter of seconds to fill the jug but it takes several minutes to trickle through the filter and a lot longer to cool down to a nice level of chilliness. It is therefore very frustrating to reach for the jug and find it empty and I take care to top it up every time I use it. Unfortunately other members of my family do not seem to be as considerate and on many occasions I have gone to the fridge only to be disappointed by a nearly empty jug. My usual response in circumstances like this is to express my dissatisfaction loudly in what my kids term a "Father Rant". This makes me feel better for a little while but long experience has convinced me that such rants are incapable of producing any lasting change of behaviour. On this occasion therefore I decided to be a little more scientific. Analysing the proble...

Homeworld 2 came out to a lukewarm reception eight years ago. The latest patch doesn't even work on a modern computer so it is quite possible that I am the only person on the planet still playing it. Nevertheless that will not stop me from giving my own unasked for piece of advice to any other retro gamer out there thinking of trying it. This is not game breaking advice nor even a spoiler really but it is a hint that I have not seen mentioned elsewhere in the guides that were written many years ago. So for what it is worth my advice is to experiment with sensor distortion probes. These act like normal probes sweeping away the fog of war and illuminating enemies over a wide area but they have the added advantage of obscuring any of your units within the probes range from the enemies viewpoint until they get very close. It is like stealth mode for your entire fleet. What is not to like? I have looked over the guides on Gamefaqs and surprisingly none of them recommend this very u...

I loved the original Homeworld the beautiful beautiful atmospheric space based RTS from 1999. Homeworld Cataclysm was a worthy follow on but when Homeworld 2 came out in 2003 it didn't receive the same universal praise. Perhaps influenced by those lack-lustre reviews I never got around to playing the game until now despite the copy that has been sitting on my shelf of "to be played" games for years. Anyhow the game has kept me entertained for more than a week and I have only one more level to go before I complete the single player campaign. With the benefit of distance I can see that it is a good game but it suffers from comparison with it's predecessor. As a follow up it would have had to pull a few surprises to have the same impact as the original game and it doesn't. The first game just overflowed with brilliant levels but here the level design is competent rather than stunning. The developers also took a curious approach to difficulty setting. The levels a...

Thanks to Bill Harris over at Dubious Quality for linking to this wonderful piece: An 86 years old gamer's reflections on life .

Tom (name changed for reasons of confidentiality) is a real life friend. His kids play with our kids. Tom and his wife have come to parties in our house and we have had dinner with them. There is nothing unusual in this except that Tom is also a gamer. Those under the age of 35 may find it hard to believe that this is unusual among men of my generation. For most of my generation gaming ended decades ago ago when the pursuit of the opposite sex became a more pressing concern than pushing coins into a Space Invaders machine. Sure they may have enjoy a few games of Wii Sports with their own kids but that is the extent of their knowledge of the modern state of the game. Anyhow Tom is a gamer and I want to talk about our gaming relationship. A few years back this amounted to no more than brief conversations about the latest Call of Duty while our wives discussed other issues. The we realised we were both on Steam and we added each other to friends lists. While conflicting real life timet...

If you want to learn about usability then spend some time teaching an elderly person to use a piece of modern technology. Yesterday I got a phone call from an elderly relative who had bought a new TV and was having difficulty tuning in the channels. It quickly became apparent that I wasn't going to solve this over the phone so I hopped into my car and went around to her house. "Everything worked yesterday" she told me. "The man who installed the TV tuned in all the channels and showed me how to use it but I accidentally pressed the wrong button this morning and now I can only get channel 1" The TV was a brand new Philips LCD and a few minutes playing with it convinced me that there was nothing wrong. The installer had programmed in 15 channels including all the channels this lady wanted to watch. "It's all working now", I said. "You must have gotten stuck in a menu somewhere. This is how you get back out of any menu". "No N...

Sometimes I have to sit on my nerdy instincts. A couple of days ago a memory stick I use in work to carry files between computers failed. After buying a new memory stick my inner nerd quickly got carried away with the possibilities. - Some of the material is sensitive so it needs to be encrypted lest the memory stick gets lost or stolen. - Some of the computers I use lack the appropriate software for decryption and restrictive user rights can make it difficult to install. - For convenience and security reasons wouldn't it be better to have a bootable operating system on the memory stick that had all my software pre-installed? So it was that I set about trying to build and install a custom version of Puppy Linux on my memory stick so that I could have a portable self contained working environment. Puppy Linux is one of the coolest pieces of software on the planet. A self contained operating system that will boot from CD or memory stick and runs on just about any computer ...

1. DXHR really feels like true successor to the 2000 classic. All of the freedom of choice is in there. You really are presented with big open world levels and left to figure things out for yourself. The augments feel powerful and for the most part offer useful alternative ways of completing objectives. 2. This freedom of choice is not as surprising in 2011 as it was in the year 2000 but it is nevertheless refreshing. 3. I like the story. I found it sucked me in sufficiently to encourage me to "role play" my character. Not as good perhaps as the Mafia games but nevertheless still far better than most. 4. Getting into my character's role was absolutely the right way to play the game for me. On a normal difficulty I found the game play quite easy for the most part so if I had fallen into the trap of min maxing my character I am sure it would quickly have become trivial to the point of tedium. 5. Although I was role playing a basically moral character I found that h...

The last game from the Indie Bundle I got around to playing was Trine. This is a platformer with a twist in that you can swicth between three different characters each with different abilities in order to overcome the various challenges that the games levels throw up. This is a style of game play made famous by 1992 game called the "Lost Vikings" from a little known company called Silicon and Synapse who soon after changed their name to Blizzard entertainment. I have very fond memories of the lost Vikings and it is generally acknowledged as a classic so it is surprising that the format has rarely been copied. "Project Eden" was one such attempt set in a 3-D world but that game failed to grab me. Trine is more faithful to Viking's platformer heritage and proved good enough to keep my interest to the end. The good bits: 1. The graphics are drop dead gorgeous. The loving attention to detail really makes the game a joy to behold. 2. Controls are tight and re...

"Did you know" my wife asked out of the blue "that the average gamer is a 43 year old woman?" Somewhat surprised at my lovely lady's new found knowledge I mumbled "Um... are you sure they aren't talking about Facebook games" "Perhaps. I read it in the newspaper. Also did you know that there are four kinds of gamers: achievers, socialisers, killers and something else.  I am an achiever". She is too. My wife holds every achievement possible in Plants versus Zombies and now she is in the process of repeating the feat with Bejewelled 3. I am delighted that the mainstream media has not forgotten Richard Bartle's seminal piece of gaming research although I am somewhat surprised to see it being used in relation to Facebook games. Modern them park mmorpgs have diverged very far from the open world MUDs that spawned Bartle's research and sometimes it feels like his work has been forgotten. By the way I would watch out for that ...

Despite the name of this blog I am not really a puzzle aficionado but I do enjoy the occasional intellectual challenge. I have been playing SpaceChem on my PC for a couple of weeks now and I would certainly classify it as a challenging puzzle. On my phone I have a tile shifting game called Red Stone which looks simple but is also in fact extremely challenging. Although both these games have a high level of difficulty the consequence of that difficulty is very different. On the more challenging levels of Red Stone I quickly run out of moves and I have spent literally hours shuffling tiles around in circles without making any progress towards a solution. SpaceChem however is a building game at heart and regardless of how unreachable a solution appears at first it is always possible to make incremental progress towards the final goal. Every failed attempt teaches you something that brings you closer to a solution. In Red Stone I am well and truly stuck on the ninth level and I have...

Logging in to check my Lotro account (in response to yet another security breach warning) I was dismayed to see a big red "Pending Cancellation" notice bannered across my subscription details. Squinting down through the fine print I saw that yes indeed my LIFETIME membership  was due to expire on June 1 2061. Think about it. I will be 97. Not a bad age but with medical advances and such I was hoping to hit the hundred. Ah well. 

I noticed a subtle change when I logged in to Memoir 44 last night. The first two scenarios are now completely free. This brings the game more into line with other free to play games where you can play a cut down version of the game for free forever but have to pay to get the full flavour. The first two scenarios are going to hold anyone's attention for very long but at least they are there.

Look what happened on my very first attempt at Challenge Going Green: This is the first time I have ever gotten to the left hand edge of the of the cycles chart so I am pleased with myself. Mind you it was a pretty straightforward challenge - no fancy insights involved just applied lessons learned from previous levels.

Logging into Steam yesterday I spied an advertisement for a free to play game called Memoir:44. I hadn't heard about this one before so I decided to check it out. To be honest I haven't got beyond the tutorial yet but I have already discovered quite few things that are different from other free to play games. The first point is that the game itself is a faithful online implementation of a successful and well reviewed board game that has an enthusiastic community of both online and offline players. The second point is that rather than the usual f2p model of letting you play a version of the game for free and then charging for an enhanced experience Days of Wonder have settled on the far more straightforward approach of simply charging you in "gold coins" for every match you play. You can buy batches of gold coins for between €0.03 to €0.04 each depending on quantity and battles cost 2 or three gold coins depending on the scenario you pick. Battles seem to last a...

Leisure suit Larry is being re-released . I owe a lot to that game. Nearly a quarter of a century ago it was the first "real" PC game that I ever finished and I was blown away by how much more sophisticated this was that  the blocky Space Invaders and Pong games I remembered from arcades. (Of course no one could ever accuse Larry's humour of being sophisticated but the gameplay was head and shoulders above anything I had ever seen). That one game led me to Lucas Arts Adventures and from then to Doom and from then to the enduring gaming hobby that remains with me today. Thats not the confession. The thing is I didn't own a PC at that stage (late 1980's) few people did. Instead I pulled an all nighter in work to play a bootlegged copy someone had smuggled in to the office. I finished it in the small hours of the morning and I can still remember the feeling of euphoria. I knew this was the start of something big and important. That isn't the confession thou...

At the end of every level in SpaceChem the game taunts you with histograms showing how well your design fares against the rest of the community. Having just arrived at an inspired solution to a tricky problem it is always somewhat sobering to realise that your  "brilliant" solution is solidly stuck in the Average section of the graphs. Some herculean corner cutting efforts later later and you can maybe shift your design to the lower slopes of the main sequence but there are always better solutions to the left of yours and indeed there is often a whole new peak far to the left (left being fewer cycles or fewer components). No amount of tweaking will shift your creation to this new lower peak so clearly an entirely new and better concept is required. Anyway having endured this process multiple times I am firmly convinced that a given solution can be fast or it can be thrifty but it is very difficult to be fast and thrifty at the same time. Speed seems a more laudable goal to ...

My excursion into the world of "pay what you want" is turning out to be far more rewarding that I expected. The lynchpin game of the bundle is the very popular Frozen Synapse and although I was keen to see it for myself I didn't expect it to hold my attention for long. It's too early for me to give a definitive verdict but after playing a few levels of the single player campaign it hasn't grabbed me yet. I do see the quality of the game and I suspect that if I was more into multi-player I would get more out of it. What I didn't expect was how much entertainment I would get out of the "extras". I really enjoyed Shadowgrounds and its sequel Shadowgrounds Survivor, two old school top down shooters. I should warn you that the original Shadowgrounds has extremely long levels (up to two hours) with no checkpoints. A respawn system gives you some relief if you die half way through a level but if you quit it is back to the start of the level so forget abo...

I have never owned an Apple product and yet Steve Jobs has changed the world I live in at least four times. Jobs and Wozniak's Apple II made the computer personal and in doing so it made the information technology revolution something that everyone of us could share in. Prior to the Apple II only geeks and hobbyists with their own soldering irons need apply. Later the original Macintosh transformed our expectations of how humans should interact with these strange new thinking machines. It matters little that the the Mac never competed with the more generic PC in terms of sales. It also matters little that few of the ideas in the mac were entirely new. It was Jobs and the Macintosh that showed all of us what was possible. In more recent times the Ipod and Itunes revolutionised the business of not just music but creative content generally. Again it matter little that the ideas were not particularly new. This time Apple's vision of a product with superior design that was si...

This story of a rural pensioner (apparently) running an unlicensed pub in the remote mountains of Donegal  made me chuckle. It is like a tale from a bygone age. The garda (policeman) who visited the premises consumed approximately FIVE alcoholic drinks before deciding the venue needed to be shut down. Definitely going above and beyond the call of duty there. The pensioner is appealing the case proclaiming that: "I have sold no beer to nobody"

A couple of posts back I mentioned that I was hugely impressed by the design of the Humble Bundle website . Well it turns out I didn't know half the story. Azuriel decided to test the system by making an offer of $0.01 and was good enough to post the results on his blog "In an Age". You should go and read it . Hats of to the Bundler's for a really really great piece of website design.

 The first game from the latest humble bundle that I tried out is Shadowgrounds Survivor. There are a lot of similarities between Survivor and Torchlight, a game I finished just a couple of weeks ago . Both games are essentially linear crawls through dungeons infested with assorted creepy crawlies. Both games use third person perspective and have very simple click to interact controls. Both games have level up mechanics and rpg elements.  Of course Torchlight has a fantasy setting while Shadowgrounds has a Sci Fi setting but that isn't the real difference between the games. The first real difference is that Torchlight has "strong" level up mechanics where your character's strength and abilities get increased many fold as they gain levels while Survivor has weak leveling up with characters getting a few new weapons  and some useful skills but never doubling in power or strength. Bizarrely it is Torchlight that feels to me like the more repetitive game. Torchligh...

I have previously been very dismissive of "pay what you like" offers . My limited understanding of economic theory convinced me that there was no rational justification for customers to pay more than the bare minimum. I couldn't accept that this was a viable business model and I was sure that these offers were no more than a passing fad. Well, maybe I was wrong. The humble indie bundles continue to thrive generating substantial revenue for indie developers and a chunk of money for worthy charities to boot. I got an opportunity to experience a bundle first hand last night when I bought the latest humble offering the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle . I was most impressed with how slick the process is. A single web page quickly lets you know what is on offer and lets you place an order. Choosing the price you pay is trivial and you can even choose how your money is allocated using sliders. This sounds like it could be complicated but it is absolutely not. This is the slicke...

I have noticed that bloggers reluctance to write posts over the weekend tends to spill over to Monday morning. Therefore this is probably as good a time as any for me to break my blog silence of over two weeks. I haven't got much say but hopefully I can get away with it given the lack of blogosphere competition this morning. Busy life at the moment has sapped much of my time and enthusiasm for gaming. I did spend quite a few hours finishing the main Torchlight campaign as an alchemist. Torchlight is a superb example of its type but games of that type normally quickly drive me to utter boredom with their progress quest like repetition. It is a measure of just how busy I have been in the real world that I stuck with it long enough to finish the campaign. I have been making very slow progress through Deus Ex Human revolution. I feel it is a game that deserves full attention in order to get the most out of it. The game world is full of detail and the variety of augmentation offers ...

I am cheating a bit here because the bulk of this post is a copy of a comment I left on Andrew Anderson's blog Systematic Babble . Andrew's post reflects a growing trend in gaming which suggests that the days of the $60+ game could be numbered. Like Andrew I am generally not willing to spend $60 on a game and nowadays there is so much gaming entertainment to be had for so much less that that price point has become almost silly. However I must admit to a certain hypocrisy here. Even though  am miserly in my spending I still really enjoy AAA games with Hollywood level budgets.  I would hate to see a future in which the demise of the $60 game meant that only free to play and Iphone games survived.  Anyway here are my thoughts as expressed in that comment: I agree that the $60 price point is rapidly becoming unsustainable but I don’t think my gaming hunger can ever be fully sated by $1 Iphone games.I still want to play AAA games with cinematic production values. As ...

Thank you to a recent tweet from Syp for reminding me of one of the most ridiculous things on the internet that seems to hit gamers more often than others. I am talking about the ludicrous age verification checks that ask you to tick the year you were born in order to "prove" you are old enough to view content. The whole concept is ludicrous because it is trivially easy for a minor to lie about their age in  order to see the prohibited content. In fact given that these almost universally employ roll down lists it is far easier just to scroll wildly towards 1900 than it is to pick out your exact date of birth. I suspect that most people do just that which is why I imagine a survey of the average age of gamers picked up from such tools would indicate that we are all well into our dotage. Of course randomly scrolling down the dates has its own hazards too. On a couple of occasions I have inadvertently hit  the wrong date and was told: "Sorry you are too young to view t...

Having played and enjoyed the single player campaign of Modern Warfare 2 over the weekend I am finally ready to share my thoughts of how it compares to it's predecessor only twenty two months too late! I realise that these games are most famous for multiplayer but single player is still important both because many players never get beyond a brief flirtation with multi and because the single player game will live on long after Activision turn off the online servers. Storyline: I was very surprised to find that MW2 has a strong storyline that is both ambitious and audacious. It is certainly more coherent than the thread which ties together MW1's series of missions. Pacing: The action has cranked up a bit from MW1 to MW2 and the game moves along at a faster pace. Indeed the pacing of the game is pretty much flawless. This is a game that is hard to put down. There are no boring filler patches and there are no unfair difficulty traps. The checkpoint timings are so good as t...