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Tuesday, 25 February 2020
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Monday, 24 February 2020
Recycle Reuse
Seemed a shame to clear the table after just one game.
The original game was played with Don's 30mm Spencer Smith ACW figures but my first wargame book was his Battles With Model Soldiers and the figures were Airfix ACW so........
Hobby time has been curtailed this last week and casting & converting has taken precendence.
If all goes well I'll get to play on Wednesday.
Read More :- "Recycle Reuse"
The original game was played with Don's 30mm Spencer Smith ACW figures but my first wargame book was his Battles With Model Soldiers and the figures were Airfix ACW so........
Hobby time has been curtailed this last week and casting & converting has taken precendence.
If all goes well I'll get to play on Wednesday.
Sunday, 23 February 2020
Space Tourists
Space Park is the type of game that tends to appeal to me right away: great looking illustration and graphic design, at a low enough price point that I can afford to take a chance and buy the game on impulse. These impulse purchases can be a mixed bag, sometimes resulting in great looking games whose novelty wears off quickly (Grimslingers), or games that sounded more interesting than they actually are (Deadline), but every once in a while we end up with an entertaining game that, while simple, bears out repeated plays and earns a place in our collection.
First let's talk about the artwork. The game board is made up of a series of large tiles, each intended to look like a tourism advertisement for a location in outer space. The illustrations are gorgeous: any one of them would look great at poster size, framed on a wall somewhere. The rest of the game's printed components use snippets from these pieces of artwork along with some considered and sophisticated typography and graphic design.
Okay, so the game is pretty, but is it any fun to play? Yes it is. Space Park is an interesting marriage of familiar game mechanics with a few unusual ideas. At its core it's a resource collection game: players move around on a board made up of the aforementioned tiles, each representing a location where various different resources can be picked up, exchanged, or spent in various combinations to purchase victory points and game advantages.
What sets the game apart is the way players move around the board. Regardless of the number of players, there are three silver rocket ships, each starting at a different location. On a player's turn, they perform the action at a location where there is a ship (usually collecting a resource), then move that ship to the next empty location. This is interesting for several reasons, the most obvious being that each player doesn't have their own playing piece, they always have a choice of three pieces to move. More strategically, it means that every time a player takes their turn, they need to think about where the piece will be moving and what advantage they're giving the next player by moving it there.
It's one of those rare games with simple rules but a lot to think about that's great for when you want a lighter game with a reasonable amount of strategic depth. And it's very pretty to look at.
Rating: 4 (out of 5) Not necessarily an immersive "play all day" type game, but excellent for what it is: lightweight and fun.
- Space Park official website
- Space Park on Boardgamegeek
Friday, 21 February 2020
UCLan Alumni Selected As Part Of BAFTA Games Crew.
Super excited to announce that two of our Alumni, Steph McStea @TeaAndMonsters of Team 17
and Scott Swarbrick @Scott_Swarbrick of MilkyTea have been selected as part of the BAFTA Games Crew for 2019!
Big Congratulations Scott and Steph!
Thursday, 20 February 2020
Suzy Cube Update: March 23, 2018
#SuzyCube #gamedev #indiedev #madewithunity @NoodlecakeGames
A very late and very short update...
Read more »Missed Classic: Trinity - Is This The 50S? Or 1999?
Written by Joe Pranevich
Welcome back! Last time out, I explored the strange mushroom forest that I was dropped into after the end of the world. This "wabe", as I think it is called, is a strange place set in the shadow of a gigantic sundial and includes giant bees, an impossible flower garden, a cottage with game design notes, and a half-dozen mushrooms with little doors. But this isn't The Smurfs: each mushroom appears to have been created by a nuclear detonation. As I closed out last time, I finally worked out how to control the movement of the "sun" overhead to drop shadows on each of the doors. I opened the first door and was dropped back into reality, somewhere and somewhen.
This game remains difficult to write about. My usual style is a bit flippant and just not appropriate for the subject matter, but I also cannot help to be quippy. I'll try to keep the tone light as much as I can, but this is a difficult game with difficult themes and some of the scenes in this session are disturbing. I had to step away from the game at one point for a few days. Fair warning, but on with the show.
When I walked through the mushroom door in my previous post, I arrived in a rickety room filled with equipment that I do not understand. The white door remains open and I can use it to return to the mesa in the wabe, but then it closes immediately after. No amount of resetting the sundial opens the door again so I assume there is no way back. Will I only get one shot at each doorway? Is there a way to know what order I have to take the doors? I hope Mr. Moriarty won't be too evil about this, but I am prepared for a lot of saving and reloading.
The equipment that I stand next to is radioactive and obviously a nuclear bomb, but I'm not positive which bomb it is. Climbing down the scaffolding, I find myself in a large room with aircraft hangar-style doors. They are too heavy to open, but there's a button nearby so it's not much of a puzzle. A second button activates an intercom speaker and a voice informs anyone listening that it is six minutes to detonation. I'd better hurry! I open the doors and head out onto a tropical island. Thanks to the manual's history lesson, I guess that this is the H-Bomb explosion in 1952. The documentation just says a "remote island in the South Pacific" and I was fairly certain that was Bikini Atoll, but a quick Wikipedia search informs me that the first test was actually on nearby Enewetak Atoll.
Focusing on the present, I notice that the tide is coming in. That voice in my ear sniggers that "Gnomon can tether tide or time." Whoever he is, he's less clever than he thinks he is. We start exploring from our vantage point on the south of the island. To the west is a second island with a single coconut tree. Thanks to a mob of attacking crabs, there is no way to get to that island or its lone tree. To the north is an "extension" of wood leading off the island, described as being like a six-foot in diameter drinking straw connecting the facility to someplace offshore. It's too high up to climb and I do not see a way to access it from the hangar shed. While exploring, a shark follows me around the island, but when I reach the eastern shore he reveals himself to actually be a friendly dolphin! That's cute, but… er… he's going to die pretty soon.
Beyond that, there doesn't seem to be much to do here. After a time, I notice that the western island has sunk under the tide and only a single coconut remains floating in the water. There is no obvious way to fetch it but it screams "puzzle" and must be important for something. I eventually work out that the dolphin is actually incredibly intelligent and fetches the coconut for me when I ask. I break it open with my axe but find only coconut milk inside. What did I expect? A priceless gem? The "milk" leaks out quickly and I restore so as not to lose it. Could that be "good enough" for the potion at the cottage? The magpie said that we needed milk, honey, garlic, and a lizard. Surely, this vegan substitute for milk isn't "good enough" for a magic potion, is it? With nothing else to do and the timer ticking down, I leave my paradise to its fate and return through the white door.
I do some fast Googling to learn that the island was called Elugelab; the blast destroyed it utterly, leaving only a 15-story deep crater in the ocean bed where an island once had been. The wooden "straw" led to the nearby Teiter Island which survived the blast. There doesn't seem to be any real-world counterpart to the tiny island with the coconuts; as a tidal island it's not likely to have appeared on any maps and Moriarty may have just made it up.
When I return to the "wabe", I immediately try the coconut milk in the potion and it seems to work! I'm not sure how that counts, but I have three ingredients now. I need to find a lizard.
The Mushroom Kingdom
With my first trip out of the way and the knowledge of how to open the doors, I take stock of the rest of the portal toadstools:
My guess is that Mr. Moriarty is clever and has made each of the toadstools independent so that you can take them in any order. I therefore try the second one next and am immediately proven wrong: it leads out into Earth orbit with no spacesuit and nearly instant death. Nukes in space? There must be a way to survive there to do whatever I need to do, but I'm pretty sure I don't have the means yet.
The death scene at least offers some hints as we arrive, dead, at the ferryman's river. This time, we have a coin and use it to board the boat to the great beyond. Other than that, I don't glean any further hints how to cross without dying so I restore and try the next mushroom.
Mother Russia
I take the fifth door next and arrive in what appears to be an elevated shack on the Siberian steppe. It's cold and gray and someone is speaking in Russian on the loudspeaker. Google fails me and has no idea what "dyevianatsat minut" means, but Infocom was likely using either a nonstandard (or simply outdated now) romanization. My guess is that they meant "devyatnadtsat' minut" (девятнадцать минут) or nineteen minutes. Plenty of time, right?
I climb down from the shack and immediately step on a rodent underfoot. In fact, the ground is mobbed by hundreds or thousands of creatures all racing to the northeast. They "look something like hamsters, with long brown fur and beady eyes". Should I follow them? Or see where they came from? I try heading "upstream" against the tide of creatures, but Russian guards kill me so that's not the way. I follow them instead to discover a cliff edge where the rodents are jumping off in apparent mass-suicide. Only then does the game tell me what you already figured out: they are lemmings! Of course, lemmings don't actually jump off of cliffs, right? That's just an urban legend spread by an old (faked) Disney documentary?
At the cliff, I discover a single trapped lemming in a fissure. I rescue it but it quickly bites my hand and disappears into the mass. If I release the magpie, I can grab it and then stick it in the cage. Is that a good trade? Do I need the magpie for anything? Remembering back last week, I did not get any points for it (only for the cage) so maybe not? Also, lemmings are not lizards even if they have the same starting letter, and even if the potion took coconut milk instead of cow's milk, that would be too much of a stretch. I find nothing else of interest on the tundra. I even jump off the cliff once but just drown in the frigid Arctic water. Once there is nothing left to do and the countdown is presumably getting close, I head back through the door.
Doing some real-world research, I learn that I wasn't on the Russian steppe after all: the Soviets did their nuclear testing at a site in Kazakhstan. I was close enough though since that was part of the Soviet Union until 1991 and Moriarty would likely not have seen it as a separate country. The test site was 100 miles west of Semipalatinsk (now called Semey) and the region sees many health problems thanks to all of the tests performed there. There doesn't seem to be any real-world analogue to the cliffs as the nearest bodies of water I can find to the test site are frozen lakes around 25 miles to the northeast according to Google Earth. Am I looking too deeply at this? Absolutely. I'm procrastinating writing the next section.
Hiroshima
The sixth door is my only remaining choice, located on the moor just north of the ferryman's river. Stepping through, we find ourselves in midair and falling fast. Unlike in the space section, we have a few turns to experiment before we land with a splat and I have an idea what to do: open the umbrella! Doing so slows our descent enough that we land safely in a children's sandbox. Writing this section is choking me up, so I'm going to pause by just giving you the room description:
We know what's about to happen and it's devastating. I gather together my things and discover that I can really only move east towards the shelter without being caught. Inside is a disgusting and rough hewn bomb shelter, filthy and smelling of urine from the people that had to relieve themselves while waiting out the terror outside. It's an awful thought. There's a spade on the ground which I pick up, but otherwise there's nothing else to do.
I leave and discover that a girl is now playing in the sandpit. She spots me and nearly runs to her teacher, but then she spots my umbrella and her curiosity gets the best of her. I can tell that she wants it, so I hand it to her and she runs off into the shelter to play. Could she be the scarred woman in London? Do I even want to consider that?
There is still nowhere else that I can go safely, but seeing folded paper cranes in a nearby school window gives me a thought. I follow her into the shelter and hand the girl my unfolded origami crane from the beginning of the game, the one that gave me the message to go to the Long Water by 4 PM. She folds it back into its original crane shape and I gain three points. It glows with a strange energy. I return outside and the crane grows into a giant living paper bird. I climb on its back and it takes me up to just outside the white door, still suspended in midair, where I can leap off and through. Whew!
From a game perspective, that was an interesting segment and very much "on rails". If I had not brought the paper or umbrella with me, I could not have progressed, plus it was really only two rooms that I had to move back and forth between to advance story segments. More than any other section of the game except perhaps the first near-future in London, this paints a human face on the misery of the bomb. Honestly, this section wrecked me and I needed to take some time off from the game. I'm really not cut out for reviewing this type of emotional experience. This game hurts. I don't even care that I don't know if that was Hiroshima or Nagasaki, I'm done and need to move on.
Calling a Spade, a Spade
With no more toadstool doors to explore-- I haven't found the third or seventh and the second one kills me immediately-- I resolve find places in the wabe where my new items might be useful. I still have up a spade, a lemming, and an open coconut. It takes some experimentation, but I'll skip my failures and move straight to the good part: I can open the crypt in the cemetery!
Using the spade, we pry off the lid to see the corpse of the "Wabewalker" (me?). This was well-hinted since I was told earlier that I needed more "leverage" to move the lid and a spade is certainly leverage. I had hoped the grave would be empty, but instead I look down at a "great missionary or explorer" in his final rest. I hope this game does not go all Infidel on me. The corpse is wearing a burial shroud, a bandage around his head, and two strangely colored boots: one red and one green. Like any good tomb raider, I strip the corpse and take all of his stuff. His mouth hangs open once the bandage is removed and I discover a silver coin inside. Fare for the ferryman? The boots each have a strange (but empty) recess at the tip of the toes. Do I have to hide something in them? With the corpse thoroughly desecrated, I'm nearly halfway through the game: 49 points!
While exploring, I also get the brilliant idea to float the Bubble Boy's bubble out through the "space" doorway. Amazingly, it fits! The bubble immediately freezes to create a protective shell and that somehow keeps us from dying in the cold vacuum of space. Unfortunately, there is no way to control the bubble and the white door drifts rapidly away from us. After a time, a satellite comes closer and then departs again without letting us do whatever we are supposed to do. There is briefly a Star Wars-style laser destruction of a missile, but nothing to do except wait it out and die. There are still things that I am missing before I can conquer outer space.
Desert Island Decameron
I wear all of my burial clothes and the ferryman lets me on the boat! He takes the silver coin as payment (but not the London 20p one) and deposits me across the river. There is no entrance to Hades or two-headed dogs, but there is a small island with the expected toadstool on it. When I arrive with the seventh symbol set on the sundial, I emerge into another rickety shack next to a large metal ball covered with wires.
There are voices outside and if I leave prematurely, I am killed-- more on that in a minute. But if I explore the room first the voices eventually leave. I use that time to try to open the bomb via an access panel that I discover on the side, but no dice without a screwdriver. I even try using the London coin, but it doesn't fit. A book sits discarded on the floor, the Desert Island Decameron. Doing some Googling, I discover that it is an "unconventional anthology of humor"... a strange thing to find in a room with a giant bomb, but perhaps one of the guards needed a little light reading while he considered the hellscape that he was potentially helping to create. Inside is a bookmark with a poem on one side and a diagram scrawled on the other. I get four points for reading it so it must be important, but the only part we can "see" in text is the legend: "RD=DET, BL=POS, ST=INF, WH=GND". My guess is that we are looking at a wiring diagram and an explanation on how to defuse the bomb. In any event, it's useless without the panel being opened.
Once the voices are gone, I exit and climb down the ladder. At the bottom is a padlocked box… and our friend the roadrunner! He's finally back in his natural habitat and seems happy to see me. He even drops the ruby at my feet! I pick it up to gain a few more points and from this moment the roadrunner follows me around. I cannot open the padlocked panel, even when I try to smash it with the axe or spade. Letting the lemming go doesn't help either and I do not see any lizards here.
I'm going to pass on delving too deeply into my explorations of the New Mexico desert for now, except to say that we only get a few turns before we die and even with successive restores I do not find much of interest. I suspect that I am here before I am ready; maybe I find a way to slow down time? Maybe by defusing the bomb at the beginning, the test is delayed by a few minutes and I can explore further before dying?
Perhaps more importantly, this is the message that I get when I inevitably die:
The real Trinity test, which I am certain is where this gate has taken us, did not nuke the state of New Mexico. It was relatively modest as far as later bombs were concerned and so something must have happened to change history. Have I finally stumbled on the plot of the game? Did someone or something interfere with the Trinity test to make it even deadlier than before? It's a great twist if that's what happened and I am eager to see how the game continues.
For now however, I am stuck and have a few open problems to solve:
I did manage to get 70 points, but I've reloaded now to before crossing the ferry so I will have to get some of those again.
Time played: 2 hr 15 min
Total time: 7 hr 25 min
Inventory: bag of crumbs, small coin (20p), silver coin, red boot, blue boot, bandage, burial shroud, credit card, wristwatch, birdcage with lemming, broken coconut, and silver axe. (Not all being carried at once.)
Score: 70 of 100
Read More :- "Missed Classic: Trinity - Is This The 50S? Or 1999?"
This game remains difficult to write about. My usual style is a bit flippant and just not appropriate for the subject matter, but I also cannot help to be quippy. I'll try to keep the tone light as much as I can, but this is a difficult game with difficult themes and some of the scenes in this session are disturbing. I had to step away from the game at one point for a few days. Fair warning, but on with the show.
 |
| Ray Palmer seems like such a nice guy. |
The equipment that I stand next to is radioactive and obviously a nuclear bomb, but I'm not positive which bomb it is. Climbing down the scaffolding, I find myself in a large room with aircraft hangar-style doors. They are too heavy to open, but there's a button nearby so it's not much of a puzzle. A second button activates an intercom speaker and a voice informs anyone listening that it is six minutes to detonation. I'd better hurry! I open the doors and head out onto a tropical island. Thanks to the manual's history lesson, I guess that this is the H-Bomb explosion in 1952. The documentation just says a "remote island in the South Pacific" and I was fairly certain that was Bikini Atoll, but a quick Wikipedia search informs me that the first test was actually on nearby Enewetak Atoll.
Focusing on the present, I notice that the tide is coming in. That voice in my ear sniggers that "Gnomon can tether tide or time." Whoever he is, he's less clever than he thinks he is. We start exploring from our vantage point on the south of the island. To the west is a second island with a single coconut tree. Thanks to a mob of attacking crabs, there is no way to get to that island or its lone tree. To the north is an "extension" of wood leading off the island, described as being like a six-foot in diameter drinking straw connecting the facility to someplace offshore. It's too high up to climb and I do not see a way to access it from the hangar shed. While exploring, a shark follows me around the island, but when I reach the eastern shore he reveals himself to actually be a friendly dolphin! That's cute, but… er… he's going to die pretty soon.
 |
| R.I.P Flipper. None under sea were smarter than he. |
I do some fast Googling to learn that the island was called Elugelab; the blast destroyed it utterly, leaving only a 15-story deep crater in the ocean bed where an island once had been. The wooden "straw" led to the nearby Teiter Island which survived the blast. There doesn't seem to be any real-world counterpart to the tiny island with the coconuts; as a tidal island it's not likely to have appeared on any maps and Moriarty may have just made it up.
When I return to the "wabe", I immediately try the coconut milk in the potion and it seems to work! I'm not sure how that counts, but I have three ingredients now. I need to find a lizard.
 |
| Princess Peach has seen better. |
With my first trip out of the way and the knowledge of how to open the doors, I take stock of the rest of the portal toadstools:
- The first is in the meadow where I started. It doesn't open again now but presumably led to Kensington Gardens.
- The second is the toadstool at the waterfall.
- I cannot find the third. I suspect that it is near the boy blowing bubbles and possibly somewhere I need to fly to if I can work out how to gain altitude. Or perhaps the boy is sitting on it?
- The fourth is the one that I just explored on the mesa.
- The fifth is in the garden behind the magpie's cottage.
- The sixth door is on the moor far to the east of the map.
- I cannot find the seventh, but I expect that it is probably wherever the ferryman takes you.
My guess is that Mr. Moriarty is clever and has made each of the toadstools independent so that you can take them in any order. I therefore try the second one next and am immediately proven wrong: it leads out into Earth orbit with no spacesuit and nearly instant death. Nukes in space? There must be a way to survive there to do whatever I need to do, but I'm pretty sure I don't have the means yet.
The death scene at least offers some hints as we arrive, dead, at the ferryman's river. This time, we have a coin and use it to board the boat to the great beyond. Other than that, I don't glean any further hints how to cross without dying so I restore and try the next mushroom.
 |
| As a kid, I visited the Psygnosis offices in Cambridge. It was amazing. By coincidence, I later worked in the exact same office long after they had moved out. |
I take the fifth door next and arrive in what appears to be an elevated shack on the Siberian steppe. It's cold and gray and someone is speaking in Russian on the loudspeaker. Google fails me and has no idea what "dyevianatsat minut" means, but Infocom was likely using either a nonstandard (or simply outdated now) romanization. My guess is that they meant "devyatnadtsat' minut" (девятнадцать минут) or nineteen minutes. Plenty of time, right?
I climb down from the shack and immediately step on a rodent underfoot. In fact, the ground is mobbed by hundreds or thousands of creatures all racing to the northeast. They "look something like hamsters, with long brown fur and beady eyes". Should I follow them? Or see where they came from? I try heading "upstream" against the tide of creatures, but Russian guards kill me so that's not the way. I follow them instead to discover a cliff edge where the rodents are jumping off in apparent mass-suicide. Only then does the game tell me what you already figured out: they are lemmings! Of course, lemmings don't actually jump off of cliffs, right? That's just an urban legend spread by an old (faked) Disney documentary?
At the cliff, I discover a single trapped lemming in a fissure. I rescue it but it quickly bites my hand and disappears into the mass. If I release the magpie, I can grab it and then stick it in the cage. Is that a good trade? Do I need the magpie for anything? Remembering back last week, I did not get any points for it (only for the cage) so maybe not? Also, lemmings are not lizards even if they have the same starting letter, and even if the potion took coconut milk instead of cow's milk, that would be too much of a stretch. I find nothing else of interest on the tundra. I even jump off the cliff once but just drown in the frigid Arctic water. Once there is nothing left to do and the countdown is presumably getting close, I head back through the door.
Doing some real-world research, I learn that I wasn't on the Russian steppe after all: the Soviets did their nuclear testing at a site in Kazakhstan. I was close enough though since that was part of the Soviet Union until 1991 and Moriarty would likely not have seen it as a separate country. The test site was 100 miles west of Semipalatinsk (now called Semey) and the region sees many health problems thanks to all of the tests performed there. There doesn't seem to be any real-world analogue to the cliffs as the nearest bodies of water I can find to the test site are frozen lakes around 25 miles to the northeast according to Google Earth. Am I looking too deeply at this? Absolutely. I'm procrastinating writing the next section.
 |
| A spoonful of sugar helps the deep existential dread go down? |
The sixth door is my only remaining choice, located on the moor just north of the ferryman's river. Stepping through, we find ourselves in midair and falling fast. Unlike in the space section, we have a few turns to experiment before we land with a splat and I have an idea what to do: open the umbrella! Doing so slows our descent enough that we land safely in a children's sandbox. Writing this section is choking me up, so I'm going to pause by just giving you the room description:
Playground, in a sandpile
A set of children's swings move back and forth in the humid breeze. Behind them stands a long building, its windows hung with flowers and birds folded from colored paper.
Mounds of dirt are heaped around a dark opening to the east. It appears to be a shelter of some kind.
Several small children are happily chasing dragonflies north of the swing set. Turning south, you see a group of adults (schoolteachers, by the looks of them), wearily digging another shelter like the first.
Somewhat shaken, you rise to your feet in a child's sandpile. In the pile, you see an umbrella, an axe, and a birdcage.
We know what's about to happen and it's devastating. I gather together my things and discover that I can really only move east towards the shelter without being caught. Inside is a disgusting and rough hewn bomb shelter, filthy and smelling of urine from the people that had to relieve themselves while waiting out the terror outside. It's an awful thought. There's a spade on the ground which I pick up, but otherwise there's nothing else to do.
I leave and discover that a girl is now playing in the sandpit. She spots me and nearly runs to her teacher, but then she spots my umbrella and her curiosity gets the best of her. I can tell that she wants it, so I hand it to her and she runs off into the shelter to play. Could she be the scarred woman in London? Do I even want to consider that?
There is still nowhere else that I can go safely, but seeing folded paper cranes in a nearby school window gives me a thought. I follow her into the shelter and hand the girl my unfolded origami crane from the beginning of the game, the one that gave me the message to go to the Long Water by 4 PM. She folds it back into its original crane shape and I gain three points. It glows with a strange energy. I return outside and the crane grows into a giant living paper bird. I climb on its back and it takes me up to just outside the white door, still suspended in midair, where I can leap off and through. Whew!
From a game perspective, that was an interesting segment and very much "on rails". If I had not brought the paper or umbrella with me, I could not have progressed, plus it was really only two rooms that I had to move back and forth between to advance story segments. More than any other section of the game except perhaps the first near-future in London, this paints a human face on the misery of the bomb. Honestly, this section wrecked me and I needed to take some time off from the game. I'm really not cut out for reviewing this type of emotional experience. This game hurts. I don't even care that I don't know if that was Hiroshima or Nagasaki, I'm done and need to move on.
 |
| "You can either look at things in a brutal, truthful way that's depressing, or you can screw around and have fun." - David Spade |
With no more toadstool doors to explore-- I haven't found the third or seventh and the second one kills me immediately-- I resolve find places in the wabe where my new items might be useful. I still have up a spade, a lemming, and an open coconut. It takes some experimentation, but I'll skip my failures and move straight to the good part: I can open the crypt in the cemetery!
Using the spade, we pry off the lid to see the corpse of the "Wabewalker" (me?). This was well-hinted since I was told earlier that I needed more "leverage" to move the lid and a spade is certainly leverage. I had hoped the grave would be empty, but instead I look down at a "great missionary or explorer" in his final rest. I hope this game does not go all Infidel on me. The corpse is wearing a burial shroud, a bandage around his head, and two strangely colored boots: one red and one green. Like any good tomb raider, I strip the corpse and take all of his stuff. His mouth hangs open once the bandage is removed and I discover a silver coin inside. Fare for the ferryman? The boots each have a strange (but empty) recess at the tip of the toes. Do I have to hide something in them? With the corpse thoroughly desecrated, I'm nearly halfway through the game: 49 points!
While exploring, I also get the brilliant idea to float the Bubble Boy's bubble out through the "space" doorway. Amazingly, it fits! The bubble immediately freezes to create a protective shell and that somehow keeps us from dying in the cold vacuum of space. Unfortunately, there is no way to control the bubble and the white door drifts rapidly away from us. After a time, a satellite comes closer and then departs again without letting us do whatever we are supposed to do. There is briefly a Star Wars-style laser destruction of a missile, but nothing to do except wait it out and die. There are still things that I am missing before I can conquer outer space.
 |
| What happened to the other five stories? |
I wear all of my burial clothes and the ferryman lets me on the boat! He takes the silver coin as payment (but not the London 20p one) and deposits me across the river. There is no entrance to Hades or two-headed dogs, but there is a small island with the expected toadstool on it. When I arrive with the seventh symbol set on the sundial, I emerge into another rickety shack next to a large metal ball covered with wires.
There are voices outside and if I leave prematurely, I am killed-- more on that in a minute. But if I explore the room first the voices eventually leave. I use that time to try to open the bomb via an access panel that I discover on the side, but no dice without a screwdriver. I even try using the London coin, but it doesn't fit. A book sits discarded on the floor, the Desert Island Decameron. Doing some Googling, I discover that it is an "unconventional anthology of humor"... a strange thing to find in a room with a giant bomb, but perhaps one of the guards needed a little light reading while he considered the hellscape that he was potentially helping to create. Inside is a bookmark with a poem on one side and a diagram scrawled on the other. I get four points for reading it so it must be important, but the only part we can "see" in text is the legend: "RD=DET, BL=POS, ST=INF, WH=GND". My guess is that we are looking at a wiring diagram and an explanation on how to defuse the bomb. In any event, it's useless without the panel being opened.
Once the voices are gone, I exit and climb down the ladder. At the bottom is a padlocked box… and our friend the roadrunner! He's finally back in his natural habitat and seems happy to see me. He even drops the ruby at my feet! I pick it up to gain a few more points and from this moment the roadrunner follows me around. I cannot open the padlocked panel, even when I try to smash it with the axe or spade. Letting the lemming go doesn't help either and I do not see any lizards here.
I'm going to pass on delving too deeply into my explorations of the New Mexico desert for now, except to say that we only get a few turns before we die and even with successive restores I do not find much of interest. I suspect that I am here before I am ready; maybe I find a way to slow down time? Maybe by defusing the bomb at the beginning, the test is delayed by a few minutes and I can explore further before dying?
Perhaps more importantly, this is the message that I get when I inevitably die:
All at once, the desert around you disappears in a flash of startling brilliance! You jam your hands over your eyes in the awful glare; never see the fireball closing in at many times the speed of sound; and never feel the stellar hear that annihilates much of the state of New Mexico.
The real Trinity test, which I am certain is where this gate has taken us, did not nuke the state of New Mexico. It was relatively modest as far as later bombs were concerned and so something must have happened to change history. Have I finally stumbled on the plot of the game? Did someone or something interfere with the Trinity test to make it even deadlier than before? It's a great twist if that's what happened and I am eager to see how the game continues.
For now however, I am stuck and have a few open problems to solve:
- I have yet to find the third toadstool. I thought it was by the Bubble Boy, but since we use the bubble to go to space I was probably mistaken. I will have to search for it since there's something I missed someplace.
- I do not know what to do with the wight, either to help it or kill it. Could the crypt's skeleton key by the solution to the lock in New Mexico?
- I do not know what to do in space.
- I do not know what to do with the magnetic meteorite.
- I do not know where to find a lizard. It seems most likely to be in New Mexico, but I doubt it given that even if we find a way to reopen the doors, I don't seem to have a path back across the river to the main part of the wabe.
I did manage to get 70 points, but I've reloaded now to before crossing the ferry so I will have to get some of those again.
Time played: 2 hr 15 min
Total time: 7 hr 25 min
Inventory: bag of crumbs, small coin (20p), silver coin, red boot, blue boot, bandage, burial shroud, credit card, wristwatch, birdcage with lemming, broken coconut, and silver axe. (Not all being carried at once.)
Score: 70 of 100
Wednesday, 19 February 2020
Amiga Para Siempre: FS-UAE Amiga Emulator Hits Version 3.0
FS-UAE is one of the newest Commodore Amiga emulators on the scene, and perhaps the only true multiplatform emulation project for the system still in development. It has had astounding progress since it was originally released in 2011, and last week it announced the release of version 3.0.
The changes in the newest release are many and varied, so feel free to check the full changelog available here. FS-UAE has garnered a very good reputation for being a quality emulator focusing on ease of use and multiplatform support. The developer also maintains the OpenRetro Database, where users can submit information and configuration files to help running the games easier.
 |
| The FS-UAE launcher tool |
The Amiga is one of the home computers originally developed by Commodore back in the 1980s. During its heyday it was considered to be a revolutionary platform, notorious for its user friendliness and the quality of its sound chipset. Its game library, although found to be meager by some nowadays, has maintained a solid fanbase over the years. Games like The Secret of Monkey Island, Sensible Soccer, and Lemmings, were all originally developed on the Amiga, and many other titles for the platform have ever since attained cult status among gaming communities.
All the code for FS-UAE is, of course, Free Software, and its main repository can be found on Github here.
Code license: GPLv2
Post your comments on this thread.
Recent Playtesting - Sails And Sorcery: Some Details
The last few weeks, my Saturday playtest sessions have been spent playing Michael's game, Sails and Sorcery. It's kind of a mashup of my game Eminent Domain and the area control classic El Grande.
In Sails and Sorcery you are a pirate captain, sailing your ship from island to island, recruiting and deploying pirates, building structures, and summoning monsters in an attempt to make off with the lion's share of treasure when it's found in those areas.
Michael had been working on it for a while, he talked about it on the TMG podcast last year. In October, Mike figured it was time to get my input, so he brought the prototype to town with him for Rincon, we played a few times, and he left it with me to work on.
Because it was based on Eminent Domain, the game had a role selection mechanism (where opponents can follow your role). Michael had noticed an issue with that however, and he had disallowed following in the last round of the game. The issue was that if I make a play -- putting pieces on the board, or moving them around -- it's really easy for other players to undo my play by simply following. Disallowing the follow in the last round didn't fix the issue in the other scoring rounds earlier in the game though.
So one thing I suggested as we played was that maybe it should not be a role selection game at all. In other words, maybe there doesn't need to be following in the game. Role selection (the lead-follow dynamic) is the entirety of the player interaction in Eminent Domain, but in this game there is interaction on the board as players vie for control of different areas by having the most pieces there. With that interaction, the role selection isn't as necessary, so we tried it without.
However, without being able to act on other players turns, we wouldn't be able to get as much accomplished. So in place of following, we just did an additional role each turn (I'm going to continue using the term "role" here to mean "thing you get to boost with other cards," even though the terminology isn't as accurate any more. "Action" simply means playing 1 card for it's effect, no boosting). This seemed to work fine, and so the first few tests I did recently continued to use 1 action and 2 roles per turn, in that order.
One of my playtesters really wanted a more flexible turn order, because frequently you want to do your 2 roles in different locations (you act in the location where your ship is located), and so he wanted to do role/action/role, using the action to move his ship. I was hesitant to try this because Michael and I had said the same thing back in October, and we tried it, and I immediately did not like the results. This was partly because the "action" part of your turn was really resolving your whole ship, which had multiple things you could do.
However, I acquiesced to try it again, but with a simplified ship such that your abilities from your ship we're more static (like role icons), so it was just the card action you would be doing "out of order." We tried it, and it wasn't too bad, but I still didn't like it, maybe because I prefer the organized turn structure.
Then that player had an additional suggestion, to replace the action with another role. Most of the actions are miniature (1-icon) versions of the role anyway, so if we didn't have actions and just did 3 roles, then a bunch of rules overhead drops out, and the turn flexibility increases without feeling too weird or out of order. In addition, we said that taking a card for the role from the stacks (another aspect based on Eminent Domain) was optional. If you did it, then you'd have an additional icon for the turn, and another card in your deck. If you didn't, then you would miss out on that icon, but you could avoid bloating your deck with the card if you wanted. You only have so many cards in your hand, so often times one of your roles will only be for 1-2 icons. In that respect, the role/role/role format isn't really all that different from action/role/role after all.
We tried this new format once, and I was skeptical. I thought it would produce too much AP, or have other issues. However the first play with that format didn't take any longer on the clock than the game we had just finished using the old format. So I'll try it again next time.
Another aspect I've been tinkering with is the monsters in the game. Originally, you could use a build role to build a building, which gave you permanent influence in an area, and unlocked some ability (like the buildings in Crusaders), or summon a monster, which had some cool effect, but was otherwise similar to a building. Michael had envisioned pieces like in Blood Rage - large miniatures with player colored bases that you could snap on to show who had summoned the monster. You needed to know that, because often times the monster counted as influence toward scoring (just like your buildings did).
My opinion was that the monsters and buildings were too similar, so I suggested making them more different from each other. Buildings give you influence and power ups, so I thought monsters should give you some awesome immediate effect, and then stay in play with some global effect for everyone, like it or not. I liked the image of summoning a force of nature and then being unable to control it.
My first draft of the monsters was to make them the high end of the build role. For 2 or 3, you build a building. I tried the monsters costing 5 (and if you were really interested in summoning them, there's a way to get a build icon from one if your buildings). This was too high a cost, by the time we were ready to summon the monsters, the game was over. Michael wants them to see play every game, not just some of them, and not just maybe, and not just at the end. And I agree with him.
I also thought it was weird that the same resource both built you buildings and summoned monsters. So I made 2 changes... First, I separated the roles. You use build roles to place buildings for influence and abilities, and you use summon roles to summon monsters. I set the summon cost of the monsters to be 2 summon icons, plus 1 more for each time that monster has been summoned in the past. This is easily tracked by dropping a token on the monster card after you summon it.
I have iterated through a few versions of each monster, but I am now super happy with this format and the current effects of the monsters. Splitting up the resources was great, and this cost structure is perfect. The monsters all start out cheap, so they get used. Then they get more expensive over time so that in the late game it's hard to afford them if you haven't been summoning all game long.
The monster cost structure worked so well, I wanted to try it with the buildings too. The buildings on your player board (your ship) are in 4 rows of 2 columns, and for each row you must build left to right, just like Crusaders. Originally, the buildings in the left column cost 2 build icons, and the buildings in the right column cost 3. Additionally, each area had a certain number of build spaces (usually 2 or 3), and no more than that number of buildings could be built there.
Thinking about the escalating monster cost, I tried eliminating the build limit and old cost structure, and instead tried "buildings cost 2 icons, plus 1 more for each building already in that area. This way, you can build cheaply if you spend time sailing around or get to an area first, but once there are 2 buildings in an area, you will have a hard time building there again if you haven't specialized in it a bit, either by investing in the building that gives you a build icon, or by obtaining a number of build cards into your deck.
This works well because each building also increases the value of the area for the 1st place player during scoring.
The effects you unlock from moving these buildings off of your player board have also changed a bit. Originally, some of them were static effects, such as a role icon, or a hand size increase, and some were additional actions you could do at the beginning of your turn. While it was fun to do an extra action at the beginning of your turn, it often wasn't as useful as you wanted it to be. A free deploy doesn't help if you need to recruit pirates. A free plunder doesn't help if there aren't any opponents where your ship is. This is the kind of frustration that prompted the desire for a more flexible turn structure, but it's also the reason the more flexible turn structure was problematic. The game action happens with the card play, so it made sense to me that the buildings could all be static effects rather than additional free actions. Removing the game action from there made the flexible turn structure a lot more acceptable feeling. I've been tweaking and trying different combinations of unlock abilities, but most of them are the same as they were back in October. I'm trying to make sure there are a variety of strategic paths available in the abilities, but also make sure that you aren't forced to build a certain way (or at all) in order to succeed. Like the technology in EmDo, I expect players will build at least a little each game, and if they concentrate on it, maybe they'll build a lot. I expect most players to end the game having built anywhere between 2 and 6 of the 8 buildings and still be able to be competitive.
There are a bunch of other details I've been working on, but these were some of the biggest (and most recent) changes I've tried. Perhaps I'll post again later about other aspects, such as the scoring round format :)
Read More :- "Recent Playtesting - Sails And Sorcery: Some Details"
In Sails and Sorcery you are a pirate captain, sailing your ship from island to island, recruiting and deploying pirates, building structures, and summoning monsters in an attempt to make off with the lion's share of treasure when it's found in those areas.
Michael had been working on it for a while, he talked about it on the TMG podcast last year. In October, Mike figured it was time to get my input, so he brought the prototype to town with him for Rincon, we played a few times, and he left it with me to work on.
Role Selection
Because it was based on Eminent Domain, the game had a role selection mechanism (where opponents can follow your role). Michael had noticed an issue with that however, and he had disallowed following in the last round of the game. The issue was that if I make a play -- putting pieces on the board, or moving them around -- it's really easy for other players to undo my play by simply following. Disallowing the follow in the last round didn't fix the issue in the other scoring rounds earlier in the game though.
So one thing I suggested as we played was that maybe it should not be a role selection game at all. In other words, maybe there doesn't need to be following in the game. Role selection (the lead-follow dynamic) is the entirety of the player interaction in Eminent Domain, but in this game there is interaction on the board as players vie for control of different areas by having the most pieces there. With that interaction, the role selection isn't as necessary, so we tried it without.
However, without being able to act on other players turns, we wouldn't be able to get as much accomplished. So in place of following, we just did an additional role each turn (I'm going to continue using the term "role" here to mean "thing you get to boost with other cards," even though the terminology isn't as accurate any more. "Action" simply means playing 1 card for it's effect, no boosting). This seemed to work fine, and so the first few tests I did recently continued to use 1 action and 2 roles per turn, in that order.
One of my playtesters really wanted a more flexible turn order, because frequently you want to do your 2 roles in different locations (you act in the location where your ship is located), and so he wanted to do role/action/role, using the action to move his ship. I was hesitant to try this because Michael and I had said the same thing back in October, and we tried it, and I immediately did not like the results. This was partly because the "action" part of your turn was really resolving your whole ship, which had multiple things you could do.
However, I acquiesced to try it again, but with a simplified ship such that your abilities from your ship we're more static (like role icons), so it was just the card action you would be doing "out of order." We tried it, and it wasn't too bad, but I still didn't like it, maybe because I prefer the organized turn structure.
Then that player had an additional suggestion, to replace the action with another role. Most of the actions are miniature (1-icon) versions of the role anyway, so if we didn't have actions and just did 3 roles, then a bunch of rules overhead drops out, and the turn flexibility increases without feeling too weird or out of order. In addition, we said that taking a card for the role from the stacks (another aspect based on Eminent Domain) was optional. If you did it, then you'd have an additional icon for the turn, and another card in your deck. If you didn't, then you would miss out on that icon, but you could avoid bloating your deck with the card if you wanted. You only have so many cards in your hand, so often times one of your roles will only be for 1-2 icons. In that respect, the role/role/role format isn't really all that different from action/role/role after all.
We tried this new format once, and I was skeptical. I thought it would produce too much AP, or have other issues. However the first play with that format didn't take any longer on the clock than the game we had just finished using the old format. So I'll try it again next time.
Monsters and their cost
Another aspect I've been tinkering with is the monsters in the game. Originally, you could use a build role to build a building, which gave you permanent influence in an area, and unlocked some ability (like the buildings in Crusaders), or summon a monster, which had some cool effect, but was otherwise similar to a building. Michael had envisioned pieces like in Blood Rage - large miniatures with player colored bases that you could snap on to show who had summoned the monster. You needed to know that, because often times the monster counted as influence toward scoring (just like your buildings did).
My opinion was that the monsters and buildings were too similar, so I suggested making them more different from each other. Buildings give you influence and power ups, so I thought monsters should give you some awesome immediate effect, and then stay in play with some global effect for everyone, like it or not. I liked the image of summoning a force of nature and then being unable to control it.
My first draft of the monsters was to make them the high end of the build role. For 2 or 3, you build a building. I tried the monsters costing 5 (and if you were really interested in summoning them, there's a way to get a build icon from one if your buildings). This was too high a cost, by the time we were ready to summon the monsters, the game was over. Michael wants them to see play every game, not just some of them, and not just maybe, and not just at the end. And I agree with him.
I also thought it was weird that the same resource both built you buildings and summoned monsters. So I made 2 changes... First, I separated the roles. You use build roles to place buildings for influence and abilities, and you use summon roles to summon monsters. I set the summon cost of the monsters to be 2 summon icons, plus 1 more for each time that monster has been summoned in the past. This is easily tracked by dropping a token on the monster card after you summon it.
I have iterated through a few versions of each monster, but I am now super happy with this format and the current effects of the monsters. Splitting up the resources was great, and this cost structure is perfect. The monsters all start out cheap, so they get used. Then they get more expensive over time so that in the late game it's hard to afford them if you haven't been summoning all game long.
Buildings
The monster cost structure worked so well, I wanted to try it with the buildings too. The buildings on your player board (your ship) are in 4 rows of 2 columns, and for each row you must build left to right, just like Crusaders. Originally, the buildings in the left column cost 2 build icons, and the buildings in the right column cost 3. Additionally, each area had a certain number of build spaces (usually 2 or 3), and no more than that number of buildings could be built there.
Thinking about the escalating monster cost, I tried eliminating the build limit and old cost structure, and instead tried "buildings cost 2 icons, plus 1 more for each building already in that area. This way, you can build cheaply if you spend time sailing around or get to an area first, but once there are 2 buildings in an area, you will have a hard time building there again if you haven't specialized in it a bit, either by investing in the building that gives you a build icon, or by obtaining a number of build cards into your deck.
This works well because each building also increases the value of the area for the 1st place player during scoring.
The effects you unlock from moving these buildings off of your player board have also changed a bit. Originally, some of them were static effects, such as a role icon, or a hand size increase, and some were additional actions you could do at the beginning of your turn. While it was fun to do an extra action at the beginning of your turn, it often wasn't as useful as you wanted it to be. A free deploy doesn't help if you need to recruit pirates. A free plunder doesn't help if there aren't any opponents where your ship is. This is the kind of frustration that prompted the desire for a more flexible turn structure, but it's also the reason the more flexible turn structure was problematic. The game action happens with the card play, so it made sense to me that the buildings could all be static effects rather than additional free actions. Removing the game action from there made the flexible turn structure a lot more acceptable feeling. I've been tweaking and trying different combinations of unlock abilities, but most of them are the same as they were back in October. I'm trying to make sure there are a variety of strategic paths available in the abilities, but also make sure that you aren't forced to build a certain way (or at all) in order to succeed. Like the technology in EmDo, I expect players will build at least a little each game, and if they concentrate on it, maybe they'll build a lot. I expect most players to end the game having built anywhere between 2 and 6 of the 8 buildings and still be able to be competitive.
There are a bunch of other details I've been working on, but these were some of the biggest (and most recent) changes I've tried. Perhaps I'll post again later about other aspects, such as the scoring round format :)
Thursday, 13 February 2020
Brave Browser voted the best privacy-focused product of 2020
Out of all the privacy-focused products and apps available on the market, Brave has been voted the best. Other winners of Product Hunt's Golden Kitty awards showed that there was a huge interest in privacy-enhancing products and apps such as chats, maps, and other collaboration tools.
An extremely productive year for Brave
Last year has been a pivotal one for the crypto industry, but few companies managed to see the kind of success Brave did. Almost every day of the year has been packed witch action, as the company managed to officially launch its browser, get its Basic Attention Token out, and onboard hundreds of thousands of verified publishers on its rewards platform.
Luckily, the effort Brave has been putting into its product hasn't gone unnoticed.
The company's revolutionary browser has been voted the best privacy-focused product of 2019, for which it received a Golden Kitty award. The awards, hosted by Product Hunt, were given to the most popular products across 23 different product categories.
Ryan Hoover, the founder of Product Hunt said:
"Our annual Golden Kitty awards celebrate all the great products that makers have launched throughout the year"
Brave's win is important for the company—with this year seeing the most user votes ever, it's a clear indicator of the browser's rapidly rising popularity.
Privacy and blockchain are the strongest forces in tech right now
If reaching 10 million monthly active users in December was Brave's crown achievement, then the Product Hunt award was the cherry on top.
The recognition Brave got from Product Hunt users shows that a market for privacy-focused apps is thriving. All of the apps and products that got a Golden Kitty award from Product Hunt users focused heavily on data protection. Everything from automatic investment apps and remote collaboration tools to smart home products emphasized their privacy.
AI and machine learning rose as another note-worthy trend, but blockchain seemed to be the most dominating force in app development. Blockchain-based messaging apps and maps were hugely popular with Product Hunt users, who seem to value innovation and security.
For those users, Brave is a perfect platform. The company's research and development team has recently debuted its privacy-preserving distributed VPN, which could potentially bring even more security to the user than its already existing Tor extension.
Brave's effort to revolutionize the advertising industry has also been recognized by some of the biggest names in publishing—major publications such as The Washington Post, The Guardian, NDTV, NPR, and Qz have all joined the platform. Some of the highest-ranking websites in the world, including Wikipedia, WikiHow, Vimeo, Internet Archive, and DuckDuckGo, are also among Brave's 390,000 verified publishers.
Earn Basic Attention Token (BAT) with Brave Web Browser
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