DreamWeb vs Metrocide: The Illicit Dreams of Adolescence

I made a recent return to Metrocide that reminded me of things that I had left half said the first time around. I originally had a bit about a game called DreamWeb in it, but I cut it out so that I could expand on it here instead of leaving something half said.

The story goes sort of like this:

There are certain key-phrases, attributes of the setting, and elements of presentation in Metrocide that reminde me of 1994's cyberpunk, top-down adventure game, DreamWeb. A game that was refused classification in Australia, which is something I wouldn't know until I read a 1996 article on Australian game censorship in PC PowerPlay. I'm fairly, but not entirely, certain about that. I remember the article, but we're reaching deep into the way back here. Regardless, it was at the time of consumption that I'd had the game for two years.

Had Australia had an R18+ rating for games at the time, I'm pretty sure that DreamWeb would've received classification, even though there are some aspects of the game that might even prevent it from getting classified under the new system.

While the violence is far less realistic than modern games, it is far more immediate. Far less removed from the world we live in. There are also some scenes of said violence, including interrupting a couple mid coitus so that you can kill one of them while the other hides under the bed, and performing a mercy killing on one of your victims that you've already fatally maimed, that might see it refused classification under the new system.

I should explain.

In DreamWeb you play as Ryan, who is either saving the world, or a serial killer who has a dysfunctional relationship with reality and/or sensory input. It's all kind of left open for interpretation.

I remember going back and forth on it throughout my two playthroughs. I remember a lot of the thought processes involved with the playing of that game. I remember the discomfort at the tasks at hand, and I remember trying to wrap my head around what was going on.

I also remember having this distinct sense of dread right up until the end of the game that I would be expected to kill Ryan's girlfriend. It seemed like the kind of thing that the game was going to ask me to do. It was already full of unreasonable justifications for some fairly appalling stuff, and I was genuinely relieved when the game ended, and it had never come up.

It is clear that the developers' intentions were to make the player uncomfortable.

In the prevention of the apocalypse, you're committing some fairly straightforward murder. You might be saving the world, but you aren't fighting most of these people. You're navigating their security systems, while they hide from you, because you're there to take their lives.

It's not the immediate kill or be killed scenarios that games normally present you with, and then there's the potential that Ryan's brain cut loose some time ago, and you're just riding his whole scene into the ground. You aren't a warrior. You're a killer.

Metrocide is similar in this regard, except your killings are less elaborate. You're stalking your 'contracts' with a much more mundane sense of purpose. You're not saving the world, and you're not going to extraordinary lengths. You're getting paid, and you're leaving them on the asphalt. It's less complicated.

This is something to which I am not desensitised. In either game. It's still a jarring experience. Well, I haven't played DreamWeb in close to two decades, but thinking about some of the scenes still makes me uncomfortable. Metrocide is a little more straight forward. It's easier to play. Right up until the game tells you that your mark is on their way home, and that they were carrying a picture of their husband and a carton of milk.

If you're anything like me, this is enough to turn you on the armed gangs in the area in order to achieve your goals, who it is much easier to hold responsible for the state of affairs in which you have found yourself.

Despite these similarities, the approaches are entirely different, and the genres reflect this. DreamWeb is a story and you're there to hit the beats. You're Ryan, doing what you're told, and you're only real choices are whether or not to keep playing. You're a witness. Metrocide gives you a goal and a set of rules, and then it leaves you to make your own mess.

In this way, Metrocide is more reminiscent of the early Syndicate and Grand Theft Auto games, which is a comparison I drew in the review. DreamWeb, on the other hand, is not like anything else that I've played.

If you're interested in playing DreamWeb, it is still illegal in Australia (it was never granted classification), but it can be downloaded for free from the ScummVM (which you'll probably need to run it) website. There are some other games available for free on the site, inclduing the incredible Beneath a Steel Sky, which is another amazing science fiction game.

Metrocide, if you're interested in that fairly excellent thing, is still available through Steam, Good Old Games, Humble, Greenman Gaming, Gamersgate, and the App Store.

An Open Letter to Capcom

Dear Capcom,

Seriously bro?! What is happening over there at your place?

Where all the games at?!



CAPCOM: What about the production costs of making these games run on PC?

I hear you. I do. I understand that you are in the financial phase that accountants refer to as the 'Where is all my money at?' phase. That's not a good phase to be in. You make some money on some games, and you turn around and spend it on other games, and then you need money for pudding, and there is no pudding money left, so you have to mix sugar with other non-pudding foods for that faux-pudding experience.

I've been there.

It's rough.

But wait, hear me out for a minute or two. You've made games for PC before. It's true. Call someone in development and ask them if you don't believe me. It's a crazy true thing.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of the games that you've already released to PC that I would gladly exchange for real money that you can keep. You keep the money, and I will keep the right to download any of these games onto my computer.

Breath of Fire IV and 6
Dino Crisis 1 and 2
Ghosts 'n' Goblins
Ghouls 'n' Ghosts
Forgotten Worlds
Mega Man X, X3, X4, X5, X6, X7, X8, Legends, and Legends 2
Monster Hunter Frontier
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Justice for All and Trials and Tribulations
Street Fighter, II, Super II, Super II Turbo, Alpha, and Alpha 2
Strider
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo
Trojan

This is not a comprehensive list of all of the PC released titles that are not available through Steam, just the ones I'm concerned about. I didn't include the missing Resident Evil/Biohazard games, because it seems like you have a plan there, and I also didn't include a bunch of games with which I am either unfamiliar or in which my interest is only passing.

I also didn't include X-Men: Children of the Atom, because I am fairly certain that Marvel have taken their toys and gone home, in so much as they've started squirrelling away their IP for more truly sub-par gaming experiences that are deep within their control, but if I thought for a moment it was within your control, I would be all over that.



CAPCOM: What about all the pirates?

There is this argument that people say that you've been saying that you don't release all these old games onto platforms like Steam, because, and I shit you not, you are worried about pirates. The number of minutes that it would take me to illegally acquire and start playing any one of these games today, while I am sitting here on my PC, would be counted in minutes, probably on a single hand.

The piracy argument doesn't fly.

Or float.

It's a terrible argument. What I have to do currently in order not to pirate these games is buy a new console or keep 3 old ones. 3! 3 Consoles that I have no interest in owning outside of the handful of retro titles that I still want to play. I could purchase a new console so that I can get access to some of these games on the corresponding console specific marketplaces on which they are no doubt available, but I'm not really keen on spending a few hundred dollars just so that I can have the opportunity to spend more money to rebuy games I already own.

I already rebuy games that I already own, and do so on a semi-regular basis. I rebuy them because of the convenience of not having to live inside multiple platforms. I don't want to own all of these different plastic boxes that are in various stages of decay so that I can play my old games.

I want to go to one place and play my games. I want to always be able to go to that place and play my games. That is what I want. That's why everyone hates Origin. We want to live in one dark little corner and throw money in there so that we don't ever have to leave. You could have some of that money, Capcom. It could be yours. I want it to be yours.

Once our relationship is more firmly established we can start to talk about things like Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, DarkStalkers Resurrection, Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition, Okami, Ultimate Ghouls 'n' Ghosts, and Final Fight: Double Impact.

Let's be serious. That is where the relationship is headed.

Yours if you want me,

Jacob C W Henwood

More Failure, More Launches

Failure to Launch is back!

Man, what happened there?! That first episode really took it out of us. Not really we recorded the first four in one day, and then life sort of ran us off the road.

But we're back now, and the long-awaited second episode of our Rimworld let's-play has been boldly thrust deep into public digital existence. It's deep in there. Where you can have it for free!

There are a a couple of episodes in the pipes that will follow suit in the days to come, but you can only have this one for now. Unless you're reading this after we've posted the others. Clearly, you can have all the things we've posted up until whatever time it is that you're reading this.

Failure to Launch, because the best ideas never make it past the breakfast table.

Also, there was the whole technical issue with Episode 1, so there's that too.

Metrocide: A Classic Murder Simulator!

The hum returned again, and it's clearer. It's soft now, but when it's ready it's gonna tear right through the guy.

The tracker stops, but the hum continues. She can make out his e-cig puffs at the corner. She has to move before the pop. She takes a few steps along the wall, hoping to avoid moving out into the street, but she can't make the line. She trusts the M-7 to deliver after the hum, but the shot's gotta be clear, otherwise it's eating wall and Marcel Ortiz is down the street, and her night gets longer. If she steps out now, the night can end now.

She decides it's happening.

The hum's nearly ready, and she's already got it on the guy as she clears the corner. Before her foot even hits the ground she hears the door open behind her, and catches the lady across the street, and right then, they're both up on her passive tracking.

The decision's been made. Right now, these people are going to watch, because she's standing in the open, looking down her M-7 at this guy's head. And they can see it. There's no exchange. No negotiation. They're just going to watch her M-7 eat right into this semi-electric puff-monkey, because she already made that decision.

And the guy who's on the losing end is looking right at her. She doesn't know if he can hear the hum over the din of the police drone down the block, but the lights are on. He knows whats happening. They all know what's happening. They all know what's happening, but no one's moving and no one's thinking. They're all just standing there waiting for the pop.

If you were to imagine a game that was the offspring of Syndicate and Grand Theft Auto 2, you would be understanding what Metrocide is, and as much as those games were, during the 90s, accused of being 'murder simulators', this game is actually much more of that than those games ever were.

Well, at the very least it is more focused. You play as simulated contract murderer, TJ Trench, who is either a simulated woman or a simulated man. The decision is yours.

As Trench, you are faced with a problem: people want you dead, so you need to get out of town. You also have another problem in that you have no money. I suppose that you also have this third problem of a limited skill set, but that turns out to be more of a problem for other people, because that limited skill set is murder. That is what you will be doing. For money. It's only simulated murder though.

You won't just be murdering folk in the super bland present day, though. You'll be busting caps and taking pay cheques in the near future. This mother is cyber-punk as shit, and you know how I get down on that. With a sense self-appointed of authority!

Metrocide is constructed from good ideas. That's its foundation. They're good ideas executed neatly and concisely. The behaviour of the characters, the layout of the city, and the way your tools and weapons work all serve a function that informs gameplay and your decision making.

The cyberpunk setting isn't a party trick, or an afterthought, either. It's intertwined in the gameplay and the behaviour of everything in the world. Unmanned police drones circle the city, while you make your way amongst trash collecting robots and armed gangs in the streets below.

Where a great many small budget games these days feel empty and incomplete, Metrocide feels rich and focused, like a AAA title from another era. The art style is consistent and engaging, the sense of humour is pervasive without interfering, and the game mechanics are refined to the point where risk assessment is totally informed.

Scenarios like the one at the top can and will happen, but you know the risks and possibilities before you step out into the street to release the hum on some fucker. You know, and that's your call. How you deal with it when the shit hits the fan is on you.

It's a whole and dedicated product ready for your digital consumption, which you can do at Steam, Good Old Games, Humble, Greenman Gaming, Gamersgate, and the App Store.

A List of Covers That I Like

There's been this ongoing conversation about covers I've been having with my father that started sometime last year. It's a good conversation to be ongoing instead of just had, because you find things, and remember things, and it all kind of comes back to you in bits and pieces, and you gather information from other people.

Strangely, I've not yet just googled it, opting instead for the meat mission approach.

It's an interesting conversation, because people like covers for different reasons, and I too like covers for different reason because I am a person, which is the singular version of people.

I decided to copy everyone else on the internet by making a list of people copying other people.

These aren't necessarily my favourite covers, because there are things you guys don't really need to hear.

What these covers represent are versions of songs that totally derailed my train of thought, and absolutely took over. Covers that for a split second dragged my mind through a crowd of a million phonic-faces as it struggled for recognition, before something clicked, it all made sense, and I was amazed.

This means that Lion's cover of 'The TransFormers Theme' isn't on the list, because you kind of expect something like that when you first sit down to watch a film called The TransFormers: The Movie.

I'm going to start with a song that I'm including, because I love it. It did kind of take me unawares when I first heard it, but not because I didn't immediately recognise the song. It's shortlisted, but disqualified for sounding too much like the original right out of the gate, but it's in anyway.

Deep into British new wave, as I was, Gary Numan, and in particular Tubeway Army's Replicas, was something I had listened to a lot by the time I acquired Songs in the Key of X, which had 'Down in the Park' covered by the Foo Fighters nestled deep within its X-Files themed track listing. I remember listing to the CD for the first time, and being all like, 'Gary? Is that you? No, it's someone else!'

Bertie Blackman's cover of 'In the Air Tonight' is exactly this thing that I am talking about. The song starts, and you aren't quite sure what is happening. It's familiar, but it's not the same, then recognition sets in and you're pleased. I was pleased. I like Phil Collins. Oh boy, do I like Phil Collins.

One of the most enduring bands to dwell in my musical flavour zones is Queen, and 'Don't Stop Me Now', is banana city all over my face. All over it! I love it. Similarly, Doctor Who is the business end of my love for pulp-sci-fi television. I also love Agatha Christie and classic mummy movies. That's why Foxes' cover of Queen's 'Don't Stop Me Now', from the episode of Doctor Who entitled 'The Mummy on the Orient Express', was always something that was going to make its way into my life.

Good thing, that.

I'm going to say Seu Jorge's entire contributions to The Life Aquatic with Steve Zisou. All of it! But, I'm only going to embed 'Life on Mars', because it's 'Life on Mars'.

This one is obvious and totally token. I was a massive Tears for Fears fan for great swathes of my adolescence, early adulthood, and the like, and even though the Michael Adnrews and Gary Jules cover was in Donnie Darko, I had it played to me by some friends who wanted me to 'guess' which was the cover and which was the original. Little did they know I was a British new wave enthusiast going way back.

No, seriously. They knew very little about it. I kind of had a secret life of music.

On the topic of Tears for Fears covers from films, Lorde's cover of 'Everybody Wants to Rule the World' first came into my life through the Dracula Untold trailer. In much the same way as the 'Mad World' cover, it harnesses something darker and bleaker that already existed in the song.

In 2003 I stayed late at cheerleading training (that isn't even a joke. It's entirely true. I was one of those) listening to Triple J. I was training with a girl who wasn't my regular partner, and I'm pretty sure everyone else had left. We were getting ready to do another lift, and we both stopped.

'Is that a cover of "Hurt"?', she said. It was.

'It sounds like Johnny Cash.' It was.

Is it better than the Nine Inch Nails version? I think so.

Lastly, I'm going to say to you that as an adolescent I loved The Prodigy, and I still have a lot of time for Music for the Jilted Generation and The Fat of the Land. They're incredible albums. I was so into them that while in London I bought WipeOut XL, which is the soundtrack to a game that I didn't even own at the time, only because it had 'Firestarter (Instrumental)' listed on the back of it. That's where I was at. That album is incredible (if you're into mid-to-late-nineties electronica, which I am). I still have it.

'Firestarter' was the kind of song (like every other song on this list) that had in its original form taken up residency in the surrounding airspace when I was a teenager, so when I heard the Torre Forlim cover something really weird gave way in me. Not in the same way that it did when I heard Mark Ronson's cover of 'Stop Me If You Think That You've Heard This One Before'. That didn't work for me. Torre Florim's 'Firestarter' works for me.

It caught me entirely off guard while I was waiting for my video to start on YouTube. Thank you, advertising.

What covers caught you off guard?

The Fridge-Women of the Land of Tomorrow

If you've not heard of Women in Refrigerators, you should probably femaliarise with it, and the concept in general.

Is it an important (pop-)cultural observation? Yes, I think it is.

The general gist of this thing is that women are often sabotaged out of the 'actual character' column into being plot points for members of the member-gender, with specific reference to page 15 (I think) of Green Lantern vol.3 #54.

The site and the term are fifteen years old at this stage (and the comic just turned twenty), but it isn't really an out of date concept. The general undermining of female protagonists is an ongoing trend in media.

Samus Aran, bad-arse cosmic-bounty-hunter of Metroid (and its related sequels), has found the time in recent games to run about in her space-underwear and go uncharacteristically wobbly-kneed due to the pressures of the dangers that surround her and the presence of boys who can talk her through it.

This is the very same character whose reputation is based on repeatedly striding (arguably under prepared) into space-pirate planets and dying worlds in order to get business done. There are few characters who are depicted as being as calm under pressure in literally world-shatteringly dangerous situations as Samus Aran.

This was a strange direction to be approved by Nintendo after the unparalleled Metroid Prime Trilogy.

I don't really know what to say about all of this.

It's a shame.

That's what I can say.

It's a shame that I find comparatively few examples where female characters are afforded the same level of story arc epicocity and complexity as is given over to male characters. Even if female characters are being better written these days, and given better stories than they were previously, how many female characters get an Emerald Twilight, Return of the Dark Knight, or a Death and Rebirth of Superman?

I'm tired of falling back on Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Willow, who is the most interesting, hardworking, brave, intelligent character on that show (and would be on many others), and has the most interesting story arcs and trials to overcome.

And, while she is 'saved' by Xander in season six (after her own Woman in a Refrigerator moment), it is through The Power of Friendship and not through promises of marriage and babies like the end of The Fifth Element.

There are just a ton of questions I want answered.

Why do fantastic games with female protagonists like The Longest Journey and Syberia dwell in obscurity?

Why can't Princess Peach rescue herself from Bowser's Castle? I think it's called escaping. Where is that game?

Why isn't there a fantasy-kingdom-management game starring Princess Peach? She can't spend all her time getting captured and rescued?

Why don't they remake The Guardian Legend? Arguably, one of the most incredibly well designed games ever made, with or without a female protagonist.

While I'm glad that Scarlet Witch is being added to the roster in The Avengers: Age of Ultron, why don't She-Hulk, Mockingbird, any of the Spider-Women, Moondragon, Crystal, Firebird, Firestar, Echo, Wasp, Captain Marvel, Hellcat, Tigra, Madame Masque, the Kate Bishop Hawkeye, Terminatrix, or any of the other female Avengers get a look in?

Why isn't there a She-Hulk TV series that is a cross between a superhero show and a courtroom procedural show? Did I mention that She-Hulk is both a superhero and a highly skilled lawyer who frequently represents superheroes in court? Imagine looking at the superhero phenomenon from a legal perspective. Where is that show? I would absolutely watch that show.

Where is the Barbara Gordon film trilogy? From Batgirl to Oracle and the Birds of Prey. Protege to team leader in three films. A character who finally escapes the obsessive, unhealthy, and violent world of both her real father and symbolically adoptive father by being paralysed from the waist down, only to decide that they're both doing it wrong.

Where is the Hawkwoman film franchise that looks at the complex history of her origins as a militaristic police officer on her fascist home-world of Thanagar, to a superhero in exile on an unfamiliar Earth? What happens when both sides call her traitor after war breaks out between the two worlds she has called home?

Why don't they promote Katma Tui, Arisia Rrab, Boodikka, or any of the other female members of the Green Lantern Corps to the title lead of at least one of the five ongoing Green Lantern comics?

Why isn't there a cinematic sequel to Willow (the film, not the character) that focusses on the adventures of Elora Danan?

Why can't they revive Magnum, P.I. with Thomas Magnum's daughter, Lily Catherine Hue (who would be in her early thirties), as the eponymous star of the new show?

Why isn't Shadowcat (Kitty Pryde) the focal character of the X-Men film franchise instead of continually being sidelined so that other characters can play her roles in stories?

Why is Cutthroat Island the last pirate movie with a female lead that I can name? Female pirates were a thing. A real thing. An awesome real thing.

Why is DC Comics' Harlequin treated as a sex object instead of as a cautionary tale about successful women (she was a criminal psychiatrist at the top of her field) who become trapped in abusive relationships?

Holding up the infrequent example is not parity, but nor do numbers create equality. 

Star Wars, A New Hope

The imminence of new Star Wars is a mixed bag. I'm glad The Mouse is in the house. I'm pretty happy Buy n' Large (did you see Wall-E?) with the way that happy-go-lucky rodent operates.

I mean, I am not down with the absence of mixed race couples among the older stable of characters. I mean, the mice stay together, and the ducks stay together, and Goofy and Pluto are both dogs, but one wears clothes.

Is that super awkward when Goofy goes over to Mickey's for dinner?

I was talking about Star Wars. There're new ones on the way. The bag is mixed. That's where we were at.

The bit that makes it less so good is that I was there in '99. A lot of us were.

In my more formative years I was a lot-a-bit unstable for Star Wars. The original trilogy. That was the only one we had. Then they broke that.

George came in and was all like, 'These are my toys and I have decided to destroy them.'

If you really got into The Phantom Menace, and it is your favourite of The Wars, then you can take it and every copy of Batman & Robin and I can bury you alive.

BYO shovel.

It hasn't been all bad since the 1983 release of Care Bears versus Space Nazis. The first Dark Forces computer game was great, and came out during a long forgotten time when not everything in the Star Wars universe was made of light-sabres. Shadows of the Empire (only the novel) was a really good character based story set between Empire and Return.

And then there are these two videos by Belated Media.

I know that very strictly speaking this stuff isn't at all any sort of official canon. It's all just the ravings of a yet another YouTube lunatic who says things like 'salmon-box' to describe a scenario in which you are forced to work within the confines of a metaphorical box (predefined criteria) during a task that already feels like you are swimming upstream (like a salmon is prone to do).

These ravings though, are sweet.

When it comes to expanded universes, fan fiction, and other questions of canonicity I'm about as libertarian as I get. You can choose your own adventure. That's up to you.

For me, the Belated Prequel Trilogy is canon, and I am more excited about the arrival of episode III than I am about episode VII. They've restored a sort of positive feeling for the future of the franchise that is something that has only recently arrived in me. I'm sure there are words for that.

Train-Loads of Spandex

It may or may not surprise you to know that I spent a fair portion of this weekend cruising around the back end of Lego Batman 2: DC Heroes, and that my copy of the game not only has a Martian Manhunter that can turn invisible (as he should), but it also has fifteen brand new characters, and some alternate versions of existing characters.

They were just sitting back there. Completely unattended. They looked so lonely. You should've seen the looks on their little, digital, plastic faces. There are other things back there too. Other things that I am still in the process of fetching out.

There can never really be enough characters in a DC game. I mean, Scribblenauts Unmasked, with its 2000 some characters, might suggest a limit to that statement, but for the most part you can just sort of keep piling people in.

This sort of superhero clown-car approach is the scene these days. Everyone who has a roster to milk is growing extra hands to fully exploit the udder.

This exploitation is kind of at odds with the contents of these udders.

DC can see what Marvel is doing with The Avengers, and they want that too. They want you to buy all of their Justice Leagues, and they want you to buy them now. This is why they've decided on the express route, and they're not really winning hearts and minds.

The last three DC films have been terrible (Green Lantern), boring (The Dark Knight Rises), and among the most tedious cinematic experiences in recent history (Man of Steel). Even the animated DC udder to which I usually turn for sustenance at times like these has begun to sour.

This is DC's scene. This is what they do best. There has been a lot of trend whoring, and DC have gone to great lengths to reassure the public that they will do pretty much anything going. Villains become interchangeable, Green Arrow becomes Batman (Arrow), and Batman wears any dress that Warner Bros. thinks might appeal to the customer. Camp in the sixties, grit in the naughties, and nipples in the nineties.

It all just starts to become meaningless.

What I'm suggesting is a sort of franchise fatigue.

Look, I love the DC Universe, but I get more excited at the prospect of re-reading their encyclopaedia, than I do at the prospect of watching any of their new films.

The problem being that the DC Universe is a finely balanced cluster-fuck of nonsense in which awesome stories of diverse scope are told. There is a lot of room in there for a lot of different things. Imagine a giant train, but it's like that song.

It's a crazy train.

Then you start selling tickets to interplanetary holy wars, a racially diverse Atlantis, Egyptian god-kings who turn out to be alien police officers who are stranded on Earth in an endless cycle of reincarnation, other space police with magic rings that were susceptible to the colour yellow, mood based power rangers, heaps of orphans, so many orphans, like every second person, and a beret wearing gorilla who's in love with a villainous brain in a jar.

And that's just the first couple of rows. By the end of it there is an immense amount of incredibly wild shit going down in every carriage of the DC crazy train. But it's balanced. It all makes its own sort of sense.

I guess what I'm saying is that when you make a Batman movie, and you at some stage want it to be more than just a one horse show, you are going to need to make sure that the world your Batman lives in has room for everyone else on the train. Who are made of milk if we go back to what I was saying earlier.

I guess it's an udder train of sorts.

In the meantime, if you have Lego Batman 2, and you want more guys in your game, let me know.

Alien: Isolation

I am sure that I have at some stage previous to this one that is happening made clear that I far prefer Alien to anything that has been made subsequently. I would go so far as to say that it is the one that I like it the most of them, which isn't really going any further than the initial statement.

I might even go so further as to say that it is one of the most exquisite films ever made.

I do like the series as a whole, but not in the same way that I like the first one, and not on the same level.

There is something terrifying and real about the first one. Something that comes after you on the most basic levels.

There is nothing you can do. The alien is dangerous, predatory, and apparently unkillable. In the later movies they are clearly very killable, but in that first film it is apparently an entirely different beast.

The creatures in the second film appear to be so unlike the one in the first that I've often argued it should've been made as a part of a different franchise. It's an action, shooty, farce, thing with a number of plot points copy and pasted from the original, which is why they have made so many video games about it.

They haven't ever really made a game that was based on the first film. Not really. Mostly because the general wisdom in the industry is that shooty-shooty, kill, kill is the most surefire way to ensure that people spend money on your thing that you made.

Apparently running and hiding from something you can't kill is an unappealing way to spend an evening.

Until now!

People love this shit. This is actually a popular sub-genre in the contemporary interactive digital entertainment landscape, which is why The Creative Assembly got the go ahead to make Alien: Isolation.

If you have ever watched the original Alien, and thought, 'me too!', then this game might be for you.

If the idea of trying to get some series of tasks completed so that you can get the hell out of wherever you are all the while being stalked by an eyeless, indestructible, monstrosity from the depths of space (and H. R. Giger's imagination), then this might very well be your scene.

As someone who has really enjoyed hiding in storage cupboards for indefinite periods of time while playing System Shock 2, I'm looking forward to the opportunity to do some cupboard hiding in one of the great cinematic cupboard-hiders of all time.

Drunken Robot Pornography

I haven't played this game yet, and to be honest with you, I am not super sure that I ever will. There are a lot of things about this game that don't appeal to me. The title, music, and promotional material are not among those things.

If you had asked me during the nineties what I thought really popular games would be like in the future, I would have described something like Drunken Robot Pornography. I would've employed broad strokes in that description. Very broad strokes.

As a grouping of words 'Drunken Robot Pornography' does actually have something to do with the game. Not actually to do with the playing of the game, but to do with the other accumulated words that are meant to explain what is happening.

Even if I never play this game, I'm glad it's out there existing, and I hope that people play it.

Good luck to you, Drunken Robot Pornography.

Legacy of Nastiness

In my most recent post I commented negatively on the quality of the writing on Legacy of Kain community sites. These comments were unfair, disrespectful, mean, and a poor attempt at being insightful and humourous. They were neither funny nor clever. It is unfortunate how entrenched the negativity towards community resources is within certain circles, and it is an ingrained sort of meanness that made me feel that it was appropriate to take pot-shots at the work being done by others while I lazily write whatever I feel like publishing.

Community sites are maintained by contributors who create and collect content as an expression of their passion and interest in something, and it is only an inflated self importance that allows me to deride the work that they do.

I have historically avoided participating in community sites out of a false and obnoxious sense of superiority. How long I have held onto these feelings without truly acknowledging the extent of how baseless they actually are I could not tell you, but it is too long.

I will not excuse my behaviour, nor will I remove the offending comment. I have drawn attention to it in the original post, so that it will serve as a reminder to my thoughtless nastiness, and encourage me to make more serious efforts towards modifying this behaviour.

I rely heavily on community sites for much of the information on my blog, as well as for much of my own amusement.

I am sorry.

Legacy of Kain Wiki
Nosgothic Realm

Legacy of Hennig

I've played a lot of games. Huge numbers of games. Too many. Maybe. No. Never enough! It's like saying you've read too many books. It's silly. You can read in a way in which you don't take anything in, and you can do the same with games. It isn't the game's fault. You're the stupid one, stupid.

I house sat once this one time during this one summer, and the owners had this Uncharted series of games, which I am telling you now are basically a cross between Tomb Raider and one of those over the shoulder cover based shooty action things that everyone is making. I don't know. You pick one. Gears of War? Splinter Cell? Rainbow Six: Vegas? Yeah. Not exactly ground breaking stuff, but to be fair they clearly spent an absurd amount of time making sure the controls were perfect. They really nailed down to what was important about these things. But look, that is for another time. Probably not though, because that is probably all I have to say about that.

Anyway, I sat down to play the first of these games, and looked up and the sun had started a whole new game without me. Fourteen whole hours had snuck off on me. I ran off and did other things at that point, because I had agreed to, but I spent most of the day thinking about the characters and the dialogue of these games, and the super engrossing plot. I thought this was pretty weird, because they don't normally spend any time on these sort of things in games. It's usually just stuff happened so do stuff. Sometimes there is a fictitious/real war, or maybe stuff needs stealing. It's pretty meh most of the time, but it was the writing this time that kept me playing for fourteen hours straight. I got on the webs and pushed some buttons and discovered that the crafter here, was a crafter whose crafts I had obsessed over as a previous younger version of myself.

For many years I have beat people about the face with the Legacy of Kain series. A strange thing in that I think that the second, third and fifth games tell the greatest story that has ever appeared in games. Ever. Shut up! You're wrong. It's this. This thing that I am saying. I don't care what you think it is. Soul Reaver, Soul Reaver 2 and Defiance tell one of the greatest fantasy stories, vampire stories, philosophical dramas, and epic tragedies that has ever been written in any medium. And they were written by this same person. Amy Hennig. That's the picture at the top. That is who that is. It isn't just a picture of some lady. That would be weird. You know, I just started putting random pictures in my posts that didn't have anything to do with what I was talking about.

I could start explaining the story to you, but it would be stupid, because it is so well told. It would be like explaining the best brownies you have ever eaten entirely through the medium of bread. Kudos to anyone who actually takes a shot at that by the way. But you would be better off playing the games and eating the brownies. Probably at the same time. I will say that it is like watching an amazing game of chess from the point of view of one of the pawns who appears on the board after most of it is cleared only to discover that all the really interesting moves are yet to be played. A game of chess with amazing dialogue, incredible characters, and one of the most fantastically rich backstories you are ever likely to come across.

One of the things that makes Amy Hennig's writing all the more impressive, which she doesn't even need, is that Soul Reaver started life as a different game completely separate from Legacy of Kain, which was not yet a franchise. Orders were handed to her from on high, and she owned the hell out of that series from that point forward. She took the Legacy of elements that existed in the first game and turned them into something incredible.

Four of the five games are available as a collection on Steam, but you get the three important ones, which is the important bit. They are the important ones, because they are the ones with the unbelievable writing. Not unbelievable in that they contain fantasy elements that defy belief. They do, but that's not what I am saying. Unbelievable in how good it is. This woman, Amy Hennig, who wrote these things is some kind of bizarre thing from another world. She isn't human in the best possible way.

Look, if you are likely to play games, you should play these games. In terms of quality of narrative it will stand head and shoulders above the vast majority of the books, films, television series, plays, comics, and games you will ever encounter. They are Windows only, which might be a problem for some people, and there are some control pad compatibility issues which I solved by using an outdated control pad which set me back the grand total of $3. Cheaper and easier than a great many applications that are designed to resolve this particular issue.

There isn't any kissing. Maybe I should bring that up. People tend to expect that sort of thing from vampires these days, but they aren't those sort of vampires. It's all fate of the world sort of stuff. Destiny versus responsibility and the like. Also one of the characters is missing part of his face, so he isn't really a kisser. He is more into reaving souls. Also eating them. He munches down on the regular. It's a plot thing, and a game mechanic. You really can't avoid it. That isn't a spoiler. It's in the title.

You can play the two Blood Omen games too if you want, which also do not contain any kissing. The first one, which is the better of the two and not available on Steam, is available through the Playstation Network (I've been told). There are also places around the web that offer it up free of charge as abandonware, which it is not. That is up to you. Be warned: it has aged. A lot. It is seventeen years old, but it is still super playable. The second one is on Steam, as I covered upstairs.

I would also recommend the Uncharted games, which were also crafted to her words, but they are frustratingly exclusive to the PS3, which I don't own. I've played them at other people's houses though. I really hate exclusive titles. I really, really do. You have no idea. Totally for another time. And she did Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City, which I am not going to comment on as I have never played it. There was this whole basketball craze during the nineties, and stuff like this happened. Shaqueil O'Neil had Shaq Fu, which was a child of both the basketball and fighting game crazes. I did play that one. Weird plot. Rescuing kid from a mummy. I don't really remember. A mummy, not his mummy. That's important. I remember that.

Oh yeah, that's right. She lost her job recently. Sony got rid of her from Naughty Dog (a game studio), because I have no idea why. There are rumours, but they sound stupid. Use her name in conversation. Make her a known thing. Everyone should help and encourage her befaming. I follow her on Twitter, because I'm excited about whatever she will be doing next.

Also, while I am here talking about Legacy of Kain, I should offer you something in case you get completely hooked on the series. It happens. I've done it to people before. There is a website called The Lost Worlds, which is basically DVD extra features for the series. It is amazing. There are community sites and wikias that are often a hodgepodge of appalling attempts at basic communication and what have you out there (EDIT: This is an unfair statement that is both needlessly negative and not indicative of the information available on the community sites. I hope that this statement reflects more poorly on myself than it does on any of the Legacy of Kain community websites. Unfortunately, I am making this edit after the negativity of this comment was brought to my attention by somebody else. I will endeavour in future not to resort to this sort of unnecessary commentary for any reason, especially when it is inaccurate.), but this is by this one guy, Ben Lincoln, who has a style of writing of which it is very easy to read a lot. For hours. On end. And it is very well organised. He has also done a lot of the actual digital digging talked about on his site himself. He is a clever guy.

Anyway, Amy Hennig. Amazing! Incredibly talented writer who is kind of unsung. She should be sung about more. Start singing!

Here is another picture to muse you. Get mused. Do it!

If you do actually write a song about Amy Hennig, absolutely let me know. Even if it is just new lyrics over a song that is not yours. We have no problem with that here.

La-Mulana is a better way to wear the hat

Indiana Jones has a problem. Not one that you can really fix. It isn't like we need to have an intervention or anything else that requires any kind of organisation. People need to calm down. As a guy, he is okay. He isn't unwell or anything, it's just it has been a long time since Fate of Atlantis.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is not only the single best Indiana Jones game that has been made thus far, but it is also a standout title when compared to a great number of other games. It's highly regarded. I regard it highly. As do others. The problem is that it washed up on IBM compatibles in 1992. It's been twenty years. Well, twenty two, but, you know, we do this in decades. It's a rounding thing.

The franchise has offered up other fairly okay games in the intervening period, but it's a torch holding thing that they're not doing. It's not about not having hands either. It's metaphorical. The torch and its holding. Someone else has decided that it is their responsibility to amend this situation. And the product of that responsibility is La-Mulana! This is what Indiana Jones games should be like. It's exquisite. It's not an actual Indiana Jones title, because that would get them in trouble, and in a lot of ways it is the better off for it.

It isn't really like any other Indiana Jones games I've seen either. It is an entirely different genre to Fate of Atlantis. In fact the only things they share are the hat, the whip and the undeniable quality. The closest you might come within the bounds of officially licensed materials might be Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures, but even then that would only be because they are both platform games. La-Mulana is a metroidvania kind of thing, whereas the SNES game was a more traditional platformer with levels and passwords in lieu of a save function.

Anyway, La-Mulana is different to those things, but still rocks out in a way that is pretty retro. Beyond the art, which is clearly a product of a pixel passion, they have really nailed a classic style of game design that I feel fell by the wayside somewhere down the track. It walks a very fine line between between challenging and deeply frustrating, and will often have you running madly around the temple figuring out what you need to do next, but there is a pleasure in mastering all the jumping and whipping.

It is hard. I should say that. It is hard in a similar sort of way that System Shock 2 is hard. This puts it in the realms of punishing. You aren't going to cruise through this game. I've had to start over once already. Something happened, and I thought, 'I'm never going back! I'm done! You screwed up La-Mulana!', but I was wrong. I went back to crawl the halls of the temple once again. I started from the beginning, and I am having as much fun playing the game as I did the first time. Probably more. Yes. More.

There is a Kickstarter campaign that is in the process of winding up for the sequel, so there is going to be a second one, which is good if you like the first one. In the meantime the first one is currently available over on Steam. Actually, while I am on the subject, Fate of Atlantis is also there. On Steam.

How the geek stole Christmas!

This is me. I'm Batman. I am the night. I'm not sure that I am doing it right though. I'll have to look into it. Actually, I'm not sure what I'm doing, but it doesn't look like a very Batman thing to be doing. I'm not often Batman. One might even suggest that I'm pretty much never Batman. I used to be Batman a lot when I was a child. I was the kind of Batman that climbed on the furniture. I loved Batman, and then that Batman movie came out. You know the one. Batman. That was what it was called. Just Batman. When that happened I think my life became suddenly better. It was also around that time that I started reading the comics. I think that the first Batman comic that I read might have been the the one that was based on the movie. I'm not certain about that though. Before that it was all Super Friends and Adam West.

Batman is a DC comics guy, which means that he hangs in a club with Wonder Woman and The Flash. DC comics do this thing where they do crossovers all the time so that you will read their other titles. It's not particularly sly, it's just something they do. Currently, of the fifty two ongoing titles being published by DC, thirteen are under the Batman umbrella, or Batbrella, which means that venturing into this territory is hazardous. You can suddenly find yourself reading thirteen titles a month without even thinking about it. Some years ago I freed myself from this situation, and managed to cut back my regular DC comic consumption to Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps, in no small part due to the cancellation of many of my favourite characters.

I'm not really big on Christmas, which is nearly entirely to do with the time of year. I'm the kind of person who spends most of Summer tired and sweaty, and I haven't usually done anything fun to get that way. Historically, I seem to spend the Christmas period ricocheting through a variety of outdoor themed activities and geographical locations, all the while harassed with promises of fun and mirth. Then I get burnt, and bitten, and stung, and prematurely aged, and scratched, and tired, and grazed, sometimes injured, and usually end up adding unnecessary quantities of seawater and/or chlorine to my diet. Sand! There is also lots of sand.

This Christmas I managed to escape much of these sort of sun related things. It rained, which helped, but there was also a little bit of putting my foot down. Sometimes feet. More often than not though it was my bum. That is the final word really. My bum is down, and I am staying right here.

With my bum firmly placed, I suddenly found myself surrounded. I am completely misrepresenting this situation for dramatic effect. There were numerous bum placings, in each of which it would be fair to say that I knew what I was doing, but let me tell it the other way. I was surrounded by Batmans. Batmen. No. Wait. Let's try this another way.

Retreating from the greater part of humanity, pretty much all of it apart from myself, I sat in the living room of the beach house glad that the grey skies and scattered rain had excused me from a variety of external obligations. I pulled open my laptop, and launched my Steam account. Games had started arriving there as part of the festive season, but I had been deep in the Batman: Arkham games, and launched one. I had been spending my time with them lately, and an understanding was growing, but something had changed. As I steered my Batman through his digital Gotham, my mind lingered on the current role of Robin and Nightwing.

I didn't think much of it at first. A lingering thought about the characters that populated Batman's world. Who are we if we aren't thinking about Batman from time to time?

Early January rolled around, and I found myself looking up from Sribblenauts Unmasked: A DC Comics Adventure. I had just spent six hours in the in-game character encyclopaedia. Six hours in the blink of an eye. How had this happened? How did I reach this point? The last ten days came reeling back in. Lego Batman 2: DC Heroes, Batman: The Dar Knight Returns parts one and two, and all the Young Justice I could find. I had touched everything it had offered me. I had taken it all in. I could see the sickness. I had delved too deep, and I had become infected. I could see then where it would lead me. I knew what awaited me if I failed to regain control. I had been there before.

Frantic, I moved against the tide that would consume. I created as much space as I could between myself and the darkness, fighting for myself and my time on this Earth. I could feel its thousand hungry eyes watching me as I locked it away.

A week passed, and I was beginning to feel free from the lure of the sequential art. My cousin called late one night asking if I would like to catch up. It was late. It was after nine. Well, I was up, but I was surprised that I got a call at that time. That is late for a call. I thought that it would be good to catch up then and there. Sooner the better.

I needed to escape the temptation that had been reaching into every part of my life. He came to get me, and we exchanged those regular greetings that we exchange with family, and he tossed something into my lap. Late Christmas presents. I knew them for what they were straight away. Trade paperbacks. Collected editions.

I looked down at the one on top. Star Wars Legacy. There was no problem here. Dark Horse, who published it, aren't known for their universe sprawling crossovers. This was containable. This was something I could read in isolation Perhaps it would be followed by a handful of sequels, but I would not be consumed.

I was suddenly afraid of what lay underneath. The other title. I had glimpsed the spine, and I knew what it could be, but I wasn't certain. There was the possibility that it was a standalone story. They do those from time to time. More often than you might think. I slowly slid the Star Wars book aside to reveal Batman Volume 1 The Court of the Owls. I knew what I was looking at. I knew full well what this wretched thing was. Full continuity. Ongoing. Part of a DC comics crossover event. It was a gateway book. This is it started.

My cousin pulled out of the drive way, asking me where I wanted to get dinner, but all I could think about was the door that had been opened. I hadn't read it yet, but I would. I knew that. I thought back to the previous week. It hadn't been hunger I had seen. It was patience.

The car picked up, and the night made way for us. It had begun. It knew me now. I was the night.

An updated sense of Unity

In early August I was talking about learning Unity in your own time. The original post mentioned that there were some issues completing the tutorial as described in more recent versions of Unity, and went on to say that there was 'nothing major'. This is wrong. I had originally completed the tutorial using OSX Unity 3.x, and have recently completed the tutorial on Windows 8 Unity 4.2.

Where you are really going to hit issues is with the sound. It turns out that the way in which Unity handles sound has changed over the years, and the Lerpz tutorial was never updated to accommodate these changes. This is something that the author of the tutorial freely acknowledges. His suggestions for getting your sound to work properly in the more recent versions of Unity didn't work for me. I scrounged around, and managed to learn a lot about the new Unity sound system in the progress. A few of the methods have changed, and some of the tags and components work slightly differently. It's a more complicated system, but not so complicated that you should be worried.

If you reach the audio section of the Lerpz tutorial ask a question in the comments, and I'll help where I can.

Cooking with Steam

There are a couple of things that re important to me. Actually, 'a couple' implies that there are actually a couple of things. There are more. There are lots of things that are important to me that I am fairly certain that most people don't actually care about. The two (of the) really big ones are education, specifically educational gaming, and digital rights management.

I've got a hard on for Steam at the best of times, and that is something I say proudly. When Gabe Newell speaks, I take a knee and brace myself for the knowledge. Apart from his recent comment on the future of gaming on Linux, there have been two other recentish announcements from the saunaed halls.

Steam has announced 'Family Sharing', which is a thing that makes an awesome amount of sense, and is distinctly different from putting your game library on every machine you come across. What it lets you do is authorise other accounts to use your library when you aren't using it. I've had a little dream about something like this for the very simple purpose of having a second 'living room account'. The living room account would open straight into Big Picture Mode (Steam Interface designed for use with TVs) and it would only have full controller support games installed on it. Everyone who lives in a house can then list the 'living room' account as their family. It essentially allows you to have a communal console for when that's whats going to happen that night.

By far the most exciting something that Steam is doing though is Steam for Schools, and its 'Teaching with Portals'. There is also a product available through the service called Universe Sandbox, which I haven't had a good look at yet, but I am super excited about. I can't actually have a look at it on my own, because I am not a teacher at a school. I know a couple of teachers, and I plan on co-opting them into assisting me in my endeavours.



EDIT: Universe Sandbox is available on the regular flavour of Steam. Even though I was referring to not have access to Steam for Schools, I assumed that there was a package deal thing going on. One can obtain Universe Sandbox through the Steam store for $9.99USD. 

"The best co-op, 3rd-person, fantasy, puzzle-strategy-defense-shooter of 2012"

The quote is mine. I wrote that. I wrote it is a jab at the way 'genres' and 'categories' are listed on Steam. I like Steam, but their publisher assigned genres and categories are basically nonsense now. Some people seem to just tick every box on the back of "Yeah, it's got some of that".

As I have previously mentioned, I do understand the need to make these distinctions, but there are times when it gets a bit out of control. My rule of thumb: if your 'genre' reads like the response to "give a description in twenty-five words or less", then you need an editor. When it comes down to it, do you need all of those words? Are they all required to get players into what your pimping? Historically, I have played a lot of fighting games, and when a new fighter comes out I give it a look-see. The term 'fighter' is enough in that regard. I have a look and I read some reviews and I then start to think about the expanded terminology. Is it a technical fighter? Is it a team-based fighter? Is it a true 3D fighter, or is it 2.5D? While these terms are useful for fighter community discussions, I don't want to see the next King of Fighters referred to as a 2D, team-based, technical-franchise-fighter every time anyone talks about it. Apart from the fact the entire King of Fighters series can be described in this way (except the first where you would switch out 'franchise' for 'cross-over'), it isn't really a super useful genre, because it is a very small party.

As it happens the English language, out of habit more than anything else, will usually find a term for something when the party gets large enough. It is a linguistic blob, amorphously digesting anything it comes into contact with, press-ganging the required vocabularic DNA into sometimes bold and unexplored usage. When it's stretched it will even mutate new words from what ever it can find. It'll take a noun and make it an adjective, or a noun and verb it. Sometimes stick words together (compound words), and sometimes jam them together so hard that some of the letters pop out (portmanteau, which is itself a metalanguage term that is a loan word from French that originally referred to luggage, and was itself a portmanteau before we had a good word for it).

Video games are a relatively recent thing (when compared to art and literature), and we are filling out our glossary nicely. We have terms like metroidvania (portmanteau), tower defense, roguelike (compound word) and mmorpg (acronym) which my friends pronounce as 'more-pigger'. When the time comes that we absolutely need a term for games like Morrow Wind or Skyrim that aren't acctually part of the Elder Scrolls series, we will more than likely use a term like 'scrolls' (plural), and not first-person-hacktion-adventure-fantasy-RPGs. As a species, we're too lazy for that kind of tongue-twisting tomfoolery.

The title was in reference to Orcs Must Die! 2, which is hands-down the best co-op, 3rd-person, fantasy, puzzle-strategy-defense-shooter of 2012. No competition. It is also a fantastic game.

Unity in three easy steps

I mentioned Unity a little while ago, and said that I would get back to it at some stage, well that stage is NOW! I'm not going to go into too much detail about everything to do with Unity, and cover all of it's good and bad points. That time is not now, and honestly may never be. I will drop three tutorials on you that I fell everyone should be able to complete with minimal difficulty. I will talk briefly about those tutorials, but I think you should hook into the free downloads and let them speak for themselves.

A quick word on monitor sizes before we get too far into this. I having been playing around with Unity on a couple of systems and a couple of different monitor sizes, and while some other system resources don't seem to have made a lot of difference, the difference between 13", 15" and 22" monitors is definitely worth mentioning. I found working on the smaller monitors frustrating, and often found that it negatively affected my workflow (as well as my mood). You can still use Unity on smaller monitors, but in this instance bigger is better. If you are thinking about getting into this seriously and are working with a laptop or smaller monitor, you can pick up reasonably priced monitors from MSY, and other places of that ilk. I'd love to quote my friend Adrian on monitor sizes during his experience with modelling software, but his exact words escape me. Maybe he'll comment.

Getting Started

The current version of Unity is 4.2, and you can retrieve (download) it from unity3d.com. When you install it, you will be asked which version you would like to use. I recommend the free version for now. You will also be asked to register a Unity account. Do this. This isn't one of those pointless things that is about getting your e-mail address, and flinging spam, this lets you access the asset store, so pick your favourite e-mail and get started.

Beginner Tutorial Modules

The tutorial modules cover a surprising amount of stuff. They are incomplete for the time being (2013-08-09), but would hardly be classified as useless. Far from it. While only beginner level tutorial modules are provided on the site, they introduce you to the editor, graphics, physics, audio and scripting. This is about all you need to know to get started.

To get into these tutorial modules you will need the Unity Labs 01: Robot Lab, which will have all of the assets and things that you will need for the tutorials. The other thing you will probably need is a link.

3D Platformer Tutorial

This was the first one that I completed, and you could probably jump in here. The game is very basic, but you still feel productive. I also really like the way that this tutorial is written. It was made by the Unity guys a few years ago for a previous version of Unity, but it is still pretty straight forward. There are only a few minor differences between what is in the tutorial and what you will need to do.

Whenever colours come up the with RGB and opacity values the opacity value needs to be multiplied by 2.5ish. In the old version of Unity the opacity scale was out of 100, but most programs use a 0-255 scale now.

There are going to be a few extra things, as well as things moved around when they show you screen shots of the user interface. Nothing major, just be careful.

The other thing worth keeping in mind is that some of the values for things, like particle systems, tend to err on the cautious side. The tutorial was written a few years ago, so you can jack up some of the values fairly substantially for bigger effects. Just play around with it. You can get it through the asset store built into Unity or you can grab it from the site.

UPDATE: There are more problems with this tutorial in more recent versions of Unity, which include the sound.

Project #01: Stealth

I've read through this one, but haven't had time to start it. There isn't really anything in it that should throw you if you have done the other tutorials, but the final product is definitely more impressive, and is playable online. Unlike the 3D Platformer Tutorial, this one was actually written for the current version of Unity, but like the modules, the instructions for the tutorial are online, at the projects page, and the assets are in the asset store, under Unity Projects 01: Stealth.

Let me know how you go.



(All of the images including the Unity logo are the property of the people over at Unity, and are nabbed from their website. I'm not really across the rules for this stuff, but I thought that seeing as I am promoting them they probably wouldn't mind so much. I'll drop them an e-mail and see how they feel. Either way I will be talking about Unity again.)

Double Dragon Style Java

I haven't had much time lately, which I'm using as my excuse for not posting recently. I've been busy with some different things, a lot of which is related to university. I am actually still very busy, so I will keep this short.

There are a great many debates surrounding the best way to learn programming, and many a heated discussion has centred on the value of learning 'real programming' versus learning logic and theory in programming courses. Everyone seems to have their own opinion, and it is crazy factional. Yay, factions! Anyway, I am a proponent of the Double Dragon Style of programming education. I believe that in order to be a true master you will need to master both of the Dragons, and understand how they work together. You must move between the dragons, benefitting from the strengths of each as you progress. In this instance Greenfoot represents the logic oriented dragon, while Eclipse is the 'real programming' dragon. Both of these tools have tutorials that cover a variety of different skills and skill levels, and both of these tools are so straight forward that I would even go so far as to suggest that even early high school (maybe even primary) students shouldn't have any difficulty with the projects included in the early tutorials. Additionally both of these tools are available for OSX, Windows and the major Linux distributions. They also both use Java, which I think is a good thing. Java is a good place to start learning to program. There are a number of reasons why and why not, but the short versions tend to sound a lot like, "Java is universal", "It's object-oriented", "It's easy" and "The more recent versions handle their own garbage collection (or so I have heard)". It may not end up being the most useful language you ever learn, but it is a fantastic language to get started on.

Our first Dragon will be Greenfoot is a good place to start, as the early tutorials will cover programming logic in a simple way while still making you feel like you are actually making things, and those things that you will be making will be games. There are a lot of fun things you can make very quickly with Greenfoot. You won't be doing a lot of 'real programming', but you will be. Programming isn't that difficult, it just seems overwhelming, and Greenfoot does a good job of circumventing some of the early boogeymen. Look, the term 'real programming' is one that I have heard a few people throw around when hating on and around Greenfoot, but in my experience it is mostly thrown around by people with a more traditional programming educational experience. It is easy to be negative about logic oriented learning, because it is often overlooked, well at least it seems to be. Either way, logic is incredibly important to programming, and figuring out a way to learn it is just as important. There is a lot of surprising stupid code out there in the bowls of the interwebs (and the all of the app stores), and it is probably best if you don't contribute to the rubbish heap.

Where Greenfoot turns the process around and focuses on logic first and 'real programming' later, Eclipse uses the more traditional approach of replicating specific tasks that is common in university courses and DIY books like Sams Teach Yourself Java 6 5th Ed. This is the way that most people learn to 'program', which is to say that it will teach you how to write code and will show the solutions to specific problems. The problem with this method is that it produces a lot of terrible coders. It is great for learning good form, but it isn't good for learning to write clever code. While clever code is important, good form is also important, and for many of the projects on which you might find yourself working closing off scanners and memory management could well be far more important to you, and the people who use your apps on their phones and tablets. The other major benefit of learning programming like this is that you will learn some of the best ways of coding common functions and solving common problems, so that you don't spend the majority of your time reinventing the wheel.

I have checked through (read as 'completed') quite a few of the tutorials, and tried to check that there aren't any major oversights. That said I can't swear that learning this way is truly effective, or that none of the important fundamentals are overlooked, because I didn't learn this way. I started with other programming languages and tools, and learned logic mostly through games, but this back and forth between the two styles makes the most sense to me. In the end these are two of probably thousands of tools out there that could be used in the Double Dragon Style, and they may not be the best, but I will vouch for these two, because I am certain that they are two of the best. That and if you come to me for help, I will probably know what you are talking about and where you are stuck.

You will need to make sure that you have the latest version of Java (7u25 at the time of writing, though I read somewhere that 8 is on the horizon) and install the JDK (Java Development Kit) to use either of these tools. If you have any questions, comments or difficulties, please comment below or e-mail me at jacob dot c dot w dot henwood at gmail dot com. I'd rather you commented though, just in case I end up fielding the same questions.

Next time on United by Glue: Three Unity tutorials that anyone could finish.