You know you’re getting old when … You get your copy of Empire: Total War (11 days after it was posted from play.com; bad form guys & have really burnt bridges with me there) & it comes on two DVDs. Two! Can you imagine it? Why the gods themselves couldn’t conceive such a number.
I can’t remember when I got my hands on my first game to come on DVD, but certainly around that era a lot of games could still come on anything up to 4 install CDs. I suppose it’s only a matter of time as game assets get progressively weightier, while ironically the actual longevity of the games themselves steadily shortens.
Damnit, in my day you could fit a hundred games on a single floppy. Possibly.
In spite of my previous rant about the … deficiencies that came with the old-school “Point & Click” genre, I am also a sucker for two things; clever Indy developers & pretty visuals. Oh and you can possibly add “adorable robots” to the mix too. So as the trailer for “Machinarium” shows, it has all these elements in abundance.
The following is a screengrab I took from Beneath a Steel Sky, an old-school RPG “Point & Click”, courtesy of Good Old Games. There are 3 objects on the screen our character can pick up, can you spot them?
Hmmm. Nothing a good walkthrough can't fix.
Now I remember why this genre died a death a long time ago and I wish those still weeping with a sense of Nostalgia download & play this game. It might change their tune somewhat. I had blissfully forgotten that back in the prehistoric days of adventure games, playing them necessitated a migraine trying to find that errant clump of 4 pixels that formed your next vital clue or object (I’m sure everyone can spot the two conspicuous & useless items on the shelf to the left. The third, game-centric item is somewhere else entirely).
Beyond that, once you have these bloody items you then had to figure out what to do with them; that is to say, peer into the tea leaves and decipher what narcotic the developers were consuming when they devised the inane combination the items & the environment demanded to achieve your goal. Logic, reason & the flow of an idea don’t apply here; it’s very much a case of trial and error. That’s not fun, that’s laborious.
Don’t get me wrong, Beneath a Steel Sky is fun & well written (if incredibly short and badly acted) story, but whatever you say about the state of modern gaming, basic logic & gameplay is at least now a vague default, rather than an option. Point & Click games swapped “gameplay” for “tedium”.
Mind you, I was always crap at this genre anyway; hell, I remember that damn goat in Broken Sword leaving me stumped.
PS: For the record, the item was a lump of putty. Or rather, it wasn’t. I was expected to have the wherewithal to suspect it might not have been what the game said it was, ask my companion what he made of it (a process that is never before or again repeated, so I was expected to know to do this) & then discover it was actually plastic explosive. Naturally! All good storerooms in pipe factories should have an ample stock. After that, I had to combine it with a lightbulb socket or somesuch; at that point I had given up playing the game & fled to gamefaqs.com.
I got bored with the previous Wordpress theme, so I quickly made one myself, mostly to see how easy the process was to translate a HTML cutup intoWordpress. The answer? Pretty damned simple it seems.
The “thunk” is definitely the highlight. I’m not sure whether this can be classified as an AI bug or just a very stupid Gnu (Yes, that’s its name, though “wildebeest” would be more well-known). Somewhere in the middle methinks as the rest of Far Cry 2’s AI can be slightly ropey in places.
Buggered if I know why I’d want to advertise it, but for shits, giggles or a combination of both I re-uploaded the previous pixelburp.com homepage I had created during a boredom-induced brainfart. The result was something I left relatively unfinished & “live” for a good while. I get to play about with Flash so little that my own site seemed a good playpen, though I didn’t get to finish the idea I had knocking about (mostly involving wavy vector hair) to the end.
Below is an awesome piece of TF2 machinima; not only is this little cartoon quite the TF2 based giggle, it’s also of French origin, proving that the nation may finally be blinking in the dawnlight of a comedy world beyond Jerry Lewis (The world can hope). Having said that, the shine was taken off somewhat upon learning that the makers used 3D Studio Max (having imported all the assets), rather than the native “Gary’s Mod” tools. Given though that 90% of Gary’s Mod ‘toons look like a drunken puppet show on elastic bands, that’s possibly not a bad thing & should be applauded none the less.
Even though I don’t play the game much myself, I thought I would plug the Unreal Tournament 3 “HOLP (Hardcore Old-School Low Poly) map pack 2” that was released the other day. The simple reason for this is that a good mate of mine Barry, who goes by the name of “barballs” is one of the mappers who contributed to the pack. He made the map “DM_Precision” and was also part of the team for the original map-pack (DM_Flustered was his map). Barry has always been big into his Unreal Tournament & enjoyed mapping for the previous iterations, so it’s nice to see his work getting exposure and being part of the widespread modding community.
