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  • Dark Liquid 1:19 pm on September 30, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ftl, , Reviews   

    FTL 

    I’ve been on holiday the last week and so I’ve been taking the time to play some games. One game in particular I’ve been playing a lot of is FTL. FTL or Faster Than Light is a sort of space-ship simulator with elements of rogue-like gameplay.

    It’s available on Steam and GOG, but I’d recommend getting it via the FTL website as that way you get the Windows, Linux and Mac versions, as well as a Steam key too.

    What I really enjoy about FTL is the fact that it really feels like you’re managing a spacecraft and the rebels constantly on your tail add a real sense of urgency and danger to each decision you make. In FTL you get to control power distribution to various ship systems, you control the doors and can vent oxygen into space via the airlocks. You control individual crew assignments and each crew member has their own health bar as well as the ship itself having both hull damage and shield strength.

    The fact that the game employs the rogue-like of perma-death (no reloading from an old save) and randomly generated maps and events makes every game unique and even the events themselves have multiple possible outcomes which are randomly chosen meaning you can’t even keep an eye out for things you recognise, as that guy you rescued last game that joined your crew might blow himself up in a crazed rage taking out half your ship in the next game.

    The game is also brutally hard and unforgiving. I’ve yet to complete it though I’ve been close on several occasions. To show just how fickle the game can be, I played one game on ‘Normal’ difficulty and managed to destroy part of the rebel flagship at the end, but got defeated. I then played an ‘Easy’ difficulty game and died on my first jump – the game lasted all of about 2 minutes!

    It’s frustrating, but ultimately incredibly rewarding and satisfying. Every decision you make, every action you take in the game has a real effect on you chances of success which only adds to the aforementioned sense of urgency. It’s an incredibly fun game and if you’ve ever wondered what you’d do when you have aliens destroying you oxygen producers, your engines are on fire and you have a choice between firing one last shot in the hopes it’ll take out the attacking ship or diverting all power to the medbay to heal your crew so you can attempt to retake and repair the ship and retreat, well, FTL is for you.

     

  • Dark Liquid 7:11 pm on October 15, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Reviews, , unity   

    Unity 

    So, I’ve been using Unity since it’s official release in the last update. With this new release, I though it about time to talk about it.

    Now, Unity gets a lot of mud thrown at it. The main complaints I’ve seen are it ‘dumbs down’ Linux. I don’t think this is true. However, it does lack some things, things that for me define the Linux experience, and that annoys me.

    These things mainly are configurability. This isn’t to say that it isn’t configurable, but rather that a lot of this configuration is hidden behind arcane, invisible methods like the gconf system for example. Linux for me has always been about providing an environment where the user is in control, where everything can be configured and where the configuration of those programs is relatively standardised and easy to do (easy being a relative term here, I doubt anyone would argue that the sendmail config file is easy, as an example of the bad end of the scale). I found Unity to fail at providing this kind of environment. Sure it gets out of your way and lets you ‘just work’, but it does it by hiding a lot of things unnecessarily, rather than being an elegant solution.

    Now that the main negative is out of the way, it’s time to move on to the positives.

    Generally, I found the workflow in Unity not much different to my usual one. I was annoyed to find my Win key hijacked away from my usual Synapse/Gnome-Do program but I got used to it. The global menu I found fairly easy to get to grips with and it didn’t cause any problems. I quickly learnt to always look up for options. This might be due to having some experience with OSX though for a number of years, so for a new user or one experienced in non-global menu systems, it might be more disconcerting.

    Apart from it just ‘getting out of the way’ I didn’t really find it did much for my workflow at all. Since I try to avoid using the mouse, I did basically what I did before – trigger the application search to run an app and use the keyboard to switch workspaces. I didn’t really use the icon bar as I could generally type the name of the app in the search before I could remember what the icons did or what Win+Num shortcut mapped to them.

    The notification icons not showing was a massive problem as a lot of apps I used didn’t support the new system and so I had to hack around in the gconf settings, which I would have never discovered if not for others posting solutions. I found on my dual monitor system that the system tray icons would have issues – some would only work on the primary screen and not the other, the ones on the right never triggering or only flashing their menus intermittently only to whisk them away instantly.

    I didn’t find it all bad though and I think for the mass market, the new user that only wants to use what’s provided through the ubuntu software centre and has one monitor, it does it’s job. However, I found it to be quite hostile towards customisation, something I’ve never associated with Linux before. It seems to me to be trying too hard to be OSX, providing a single end-to-end software eco-system and user experience. This isn’t a bad thing, after all, OSX is very popular for a reason and it does provide a very tight, well balanced system if you want to do things in the way it provides.

    I think there is a place for Unity, but it’s not really for me. I’ve found Ubuntu have developed this OSX style philosophy further in 11.10 and I found myself not liking it at all. On my main desktop machine I’m now trying out GNOME Shell, in the hope that it provides a nice balance between what a Linux system means to me and a productive, uncluttered desktop that gets out of my way and just lets me work. After using it for a while, I’ll write up how I feel about it.

     

  • Dark Liquid 4:07 pm on October 17, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: 2d, disappointment, , ps3, Reviews, sega, sonic   

    Sonic 4 – Be Disappointed, fast! 

    I am incredibly disappointed right now. It all seemed so perfect, a return to the original recipe, that perfect mix of features but with a new, modern twist but it was all for nothing.

    Sonic 4 is terrible. Utterly, utterly terrible.

    It’s like they’ve missed the point of the game entirely. The original 2D Sonic the Hedgehog games were a mix of two things; Speed and Jumping. Sonic 4 has some speed but the jumping is absolutely awful. Jumping in the original Sonic games was beautiful, it curled you into a ball, protecting you; you could manoeuvre in the air almost effortlessly; you bounced of things, imparting more momentum and giving you the opportunity to chain attacks together by repeatedly bouncing from one bad guy to the next.

    In Sonic 4, all of that has gone. Most of the jump when you jump, you aren’t a ball – you fall uncurled and vulnerable. You can’t bounce on anything with any kind of momentum, the bouncing mechanism having been replaced by a horrible, horrible homing system that sends you crashing into a target. It completely changes the game, slowing the pace considerably, which for a game all about speed is extremely disappointing. Air control is awful, horizontal control in mid-air is nearly non-existent which makes something as simple as jumping from one platform to the next a pain. Worse, it feels completely unnatural, like you are being buffeted on both sides by wind when in mid air.

    Speedwise, the game seems slower and worse, the spin dash is awful, most of the time it’s actually faster to run rather than dash, curling into a ball actually slows you down half the time. It’s ridiculous and I can’t fathom why such a decision was allowed – in the old games you were a fool to ever be uncurled, you’d spend 90% of the game in a ball, bouncing or rolling along at speed, not running around vulnerable. Instead, it doesn’t feel like a Sonic game at all but a bad knock up, a poor facsimile that is more insulting to the memory of the original games than a homage.

    The worst though is that I had such high hopes for it. A return to Sonic’s roots after the awful 3D games, a focus and speed and skill and nothing else. The physics of the original games were pure genius and Sonic 3 & Knuckles will remain one of my favourite games for all time. This monstrosity though seems like a bad fusion of Sonic 1 & 2, taking the worst from both and combining that with everything that was wrong with the 3D games, but in a 2D environment. I am crushed and I feel like a fool for hoping that there could be another Sonic game to rival, or at least live up to Sonic 3 & Knuckles. That I was mistaken after investing so much hope is soul-shattering.

    I don’t like the new graphics either. The old 16-bit graphics had a gritty, fun quality to them that seemed more real somehow. The textures and patterns they’ve used for the HD version make it look like everything is made of plastic stickers stuck on acetate, the worlds feel fake, the movement through them feels uninspired and dull. I was hoping for more crisp visuals in a 16-bit style but instead got shiny plastic with no character or soul. There is no substance to any of the graphics, they just feel like images moving on a screen rather than part of a rich interactive environment.

    Worse than the graphics though is the music. It is absolutely abysmal. I’d go so far as to say it’s insulting, the music having a horribly patronising childish quality to it like what I’d expect from a cartoon for toddlers. It’s just poor and I don’t like listening to it. The Boss stage music is particularly offensive.

    The sprites all suffer from the same crappy plasticity as the levels and Sonic looks terrible, the developers deciding to try and use the newer-style Sonic form the 3D games rather than the classic one. The boss battles and the animations of Robotnik (I’m not calling him Eggman) are shit, they look terrible and the animators haven’t seemed to have taken into account physics when doing some of the animations, so they look weird and unnatural.

    I don’t know how they could have gone so wrong with this, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Sega have been shitting on the Sonic brand since they made the jump to 3D, it was foolish of me to hope that it could be revived. If you are new to 2D Sonic and are between the ages of 6-8, you might like it with it’s shiny looks and childish music. If you’re at all like me, you’ll be bitterly, bitterly disappointed. I feel so completely cheated. There are no words.

    Stats

     

    • Chris 10:23 pm on October 17, 2010 Permalink

      Wow, that was overwhelmingly negative! I’m used to seeing some pros in a review even of a sucky game; they must have really screwed up O_o

      -will stay away from the game-

    • Kit Brown-Watts 11:41 pm on October 17, 2010 Permalink

      Exactly… you hit the nails on the head.. Why does sonic spent so much time exposed??

      This is clearly not the same team of people who made the original trilogy.. Didn’t accurately capture the *feel* of that at all..

    • Gardy 1:44 pm on October 18, 2010 Permalink

      As a lifelong Sonic fan (Original 2d games, not the shitty 3d games) i agree with most of what you’ve said. The spin dash is particually annoyingly bad and the vunirable in mid air move is dreadful. Sega has destroyed the franchise, they put no new ideas into this game (just rehashed enemies and levels) and put together piss poor music.

      Thanks SEGA you pricks

    • Dave 4:19 am on October 26, 2010 Permalink

      I was extremely disappointed in Sonic 4 as well… and it discourages you the second you load the game up with that terrible music in the main menu. I finished the first zone and turned it off immediately without hesitation. Nothing about that game is any good.. and I am especially turned off by the way Sonic looks when he is running. His legs just turn into some shiny graphic that spins.. it isn’t even animated like it was in the old game. At the very least they could have drawn some separate frames and cycle them. For all of the fuss they stirred up advertising the game you’d expect a little more work had gone into it.

      Check out Sonic Fan Remix.. it is only the first 3 zones of the original game but they should hire those guys to do their work from now on.

    • Dessimat0r 8:28 pm on October 30, 2010 Permalink

      I played the demo and didn’t like it either. It seemed really slowed down, and the graphics are also ‘showed down’. Whoever made it seems really adverse to any ‘fast graphics’ even though the FPS is high enough! Absolutely bizarre. You only need to look at something like Warioland Shake It! on the Wii to see a game that does 2D properly, with style, and without stupid pre-rendered, soft graphics that keeps the user feeling like they have proper control over their character.

    • SL Ruiz 2:32 pm on November 3, 2010 Permalink

      Very good review man, if you want a good platformer go check Super Meat Boy, that’s bananas.
      As for Sega and Sonic… forget it, Sega is not Sega anymore and the best we can do with Sonic is ignore it for now on… Just move on!

      Fuck the new Sega

    • TheGuy 10:52 pm on November 12, 2010 Permalink

      This game is an abomination, a disgrace to the Genesis Games. Sonic 4 does not exist, this is not Sonic 4.

    • jeremy 3:10 am on February 8, 2011 Permalink

      I actually didnt have a problem with this game, im suprised it got so much hate…

    • Dark Liquid 8:13 am on February 8, 2011 Permalink

      Its because it was billed as a return to Sonics roots but instead ended up more a 2D rehashing of the more modern Sonic mechanics. If taken as a game in its own right, rather than as a Sonic game, its doll not great as the jumping mechanic is still awkward but its playable. To anyone wishing for a proper old-school Sonic experience its a bitter disappointment made more insulting by putting all the “features” of modern sonic games in place of the expected old-school mechanics fans were hoping for.

  • Dark Liquid 8:48 am on May 23, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Reviews,   

    Windows 7 So Far 

    Been using Windows 7 a little bit and hit a few snags. It didn’t detect the Macbook hardware very well but sticking in the OSX Leopard Install Disc and installing the drivers sorted that out. The two-finger scrolling isn’t very smooth and to right click you need to hold two fingers on the touchpad then press the mouse button. Weird. I’ve installed a bunch of security updates and done everything it recommends (install anti-virus, run a Windows Defender scan, etc) and I’m just waiting for the anti-virus scan to finish. So far it’s not been too annoying though and most of the dialogues have actually been useful and helpful. The only thing that I’ve been annoyed by so far is the autorun functionality. The Windows Explorer program displays your devices (when clicking on the Computer link) as a bunch of icon button things and clicking them only does autorun it seems, to actually look inside the disk I had to open the tree view of the computer tab link thingy and browse into the disk. Didn’t seem very intuitive. Also, the autorun popped up asking whether I wanted to run the autorun programs but when the autorun programs actually run, it asked again about whether or not I would like to allow them to modify my computer which was kind of annoying since I’d already agreed to run them. I get that running the program and allowing it full system access are two different things but it would be nice if perhaps they could detect it was an installer or something and ask me this all at once rather than have two similar questions asked separately in quick succession.

    Aero seems to run a little slowly which is quite disappointing considering compiz under Linux seems to run very well now I’ve applied the changes I mentioned in my last post. Perhaps the drivers or graphics card needs driving in some better way similar to the changes I made under Linux but no idea how I’d make them, sounds like I need to do some searching on that one if it’s even possible.

    IE8 is still as horrible as IE7. I hate it’s interface, I hate the way it does things and it renders stuff weird in some cases, such as the TinyMCE controls on WordPress’ Post Entry box. I just find it a chore to use and it UI just seems to get in the way of what I want to do. I haven’t used it for doing anything complicated like debugging a javascript app or anything like that but I don’t imagine I’d be in for a fun time if I did given my previous experience with older versions of IE.

    I found the font rendering looked pretty shitty by default, but playing around with the ClearType tool made it all render much better and I can’t really complain now, though I think the rendering under Linux looks better.

    Conclusions

    So far though, no major complaints, most things seems fairly easy to find and fairly well explained by the help text. I think generally the actual system maintenance and customisation tools are much easier to use and far more friendly to new users than they used to be in older versions. Not a bad operating system as far as they go so far, but not tried to do much stuff yet, still only really had some basic usage out of it, not tried developing anything or messing with multimedia of any kind yet so the jury is still out on that one.

     

  • Dark Liquid 4:07 pm on January 25, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Reviews   

    Dead-Headed Zombie 

    I thought I’d do some quick mini-reviews of things I’ve consumed recently. First of all is a little mini-series called Dead Set.

    Dead Set is basically bring brother in the aftermath of a zombie outbreak. It’s fantastic in many of the ways Peep Show is awesome: the terrible cringe-inducing stupidity and awkwardness. Plus anything where you get to see the vacous residents of that stupid show ripped apart and eaten gets an automatic thumbs up. As zombie stuff goes, it’s quite good with the right balance of cheese and seriousness and so me over the top effects thrown in for good measure without trying too hard to be taken seriously. It’s a black comedy really and it does it quite well if you can get over the initial shudder of watching Big Brother, even if only by proxy. Also, zombie Davina McCall automatically adds makes this a must see.

    I did enjoy this, not only for the above qualities but als for the apparent sense of disdain the creators have for Big Brother portrayed not only in the characters personalities but in lots of little things throughout the mini-series. Of course, that might be my own biases instead.

    Next up, Two-Headed Monster, Collide’s latest album. On first listen, I didn’t like it at all. It’s a departure with kaRIN’s usual almost ethereal style and I don’t like it at all. After a few more listens, about two songs came through as quite enjoyable but otherwise, no, I still don’t like it. I was quite disappointed. After hearing Collide’s work in The Secret Meeting, I was hoping for something more like that, but no, it wasn’t anything like it at all. Of all of Collide’s albums, Some Kind of Strange has to be my favourite and this new one had none of the qualities that made that album work for me. While technically, the album is of a good quality, stylistically it’s terrible and seems to be trying to be something it’s not. A disappointing release indeed. I really hope I get to see another album as strong as Some Kind of Strange released by Collide some time in the future and that this one is just a hiccup and not the start of a new trend.

    Well, thats it for now.

     

  • Dark Liquid 6:29 am on October 9, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Reviews   

    LittleBigPlanet 

    I’ve been playing the beta few a few days and so far it’s pretty fun. There are some cool levels out there, some crap ones and many in-between. The controls for creating things is a bit of an arse sometimes. The specific problem I keep having is that when I create something in front of something else, it’s very hard to get at the object at the back layer. Another annoying thing is that the capture object and object selection tools sometimes get confused and decide that nearly the entire level is a single object, which even crashed the game for me once.

    It is beta though.

    Issues aside the game really is quite fun, though I can’t really say why. It’s essentially a stylised 2D physics sandbox. They style of it is part of it’s charm. Because of it’s soft, natural, playful style as a creator you don’t feel compelled to make everything perfect, you can just create things and not worry about having perfectly straight edges or aligned textures. The rough, tacked-together feel of the whole visual style of the game frees you up to actually focus on doing fun things rather than struggling to make the perfectly shaped and textured object.

    Multi-player is fun too, and it’s quite easy to construct levels in such a way that you need multiple players to complete it. Running around solving puzzles together and/or battling each other to collect the most points works surprisingly well, especially in well crafted levels.

    Currently, I’m crafting a single level. Despite what I said above, I’m still trying to get everything perfect. However, it’s more to do with game-play elements now than fiddling with brushes and textures. Hopefully I’ll finish it before the beta ends. I’m also stuck on the story levels. I’ve completed them all but I’ll be damned if I can complete them all to 100% – I have no idea where the other collectables could be and there seems to be no indication at all in the levels as to where they may be hidden. So I’m stuck creating with the few objects I have managed to collect, both online from other people and in single player.

    All in all, I’m looking forwards to playing the full game. I’m not much of a hardcore gamer per se, so something nice and casually fun like this appeals to me.

     

  • Dark Liquid 8:49 am on June 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , gore, , Reviews   

    The Machine Girl 

    I just watched the most awesome movie ever last night. That is, the most awesome film ever if you find extremely over-the-top, clichéd Japanese slasher flicks awesome.

    Completely ridiculous plots, character interactions and reactions and events are rife in this film, but they all make the film that much more fun. The gore and violence is extremely funny, as is the dialogue. I’ve only heard the English dubbed dialogue, so I can’t say if it’s an accurate translation or not, but damn, its funny.

    Some choice moments include

    • finding out about the main characters parents
    • the main character getting her arm battered and fried
    • someone being sliced into chunks by shurikans
    • someone having their skin blasted off by machine gun fire
    • chainsaw feet
    • the drill bra

    The entire film is hilarious and the are so many things in it I’ve seen in various animes. Sort of staple scenes and scenery that seems mandatory in anything from Japan, such as ‘school kids walking over bridge’ which is in at least half a dozen animes I’ve seen.

    This film actually surpasses Brain Dead as my all-time favourite humour/gore-fest film. Well done Japan, well done.

     

  • Dark Liquid 11:21 am on May 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Reviews   

    Iron Man 

    Dow, dow, dow-dow-dow, dowdowdowdow-dowdowdow, dow-dow-dow.

    Last night Dru and I went to see Iron Man at the cinema. Normally, I’m not often impressed by Marvel film-adaptations, but I really enjoyed the Iron Man film, the only downside being the slightly anti-climatic final battle, which seemed somewhat short compared against the action in the rest of the film.

    The cinema was basically empty, which was nice and foolishly everyone left as soon as the credits came up and so missed not only the cool ending credits animations but also the secret extra scene at the end of the credits.

    I thought Robert Downey Jr. made an excellent Tony Stark and Gwyneth Paltrow’s character was very good too. The film had an excellent balance of comedic and action sequences and generally ended up being an enjoyable film.

    Highly recommended.

     

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