Tag: game
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Roomscale VR Still Rocks
I'd promised the kids I'd dig up my (ten-year-old!) original HTC Vive VR gear and hook it up in the living room over Christmas. Roomscale VR, even running on decade-old kit, still rocks and is as immersive as ever!
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Egg and Dispatch
I don't get much time for videogames, so when I find the opportunity to complete not one but two games within a single month, you know my recommendation of them holds some weight! Let me tell you about 'Egg', and 'Dispatch'.
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Tom Forsyth recollects a bug that made Half-Life 2 unwinnable when built using a compiler to that supported SSE. A reminder of how weird the edge-cases in tech can be!
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DOCTYPE
I received my copy of DOCTYPE magazine, a genuine 'type this program in and run it'-style programming magazine but for a modern world, and enjoyed writing, debugging, playing, and then considering refining Stuart Langridge's puzzle The Nine Pyramids.
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Dogspinner
Dogspinner - by Lu Wilson and Flora Caulton - is the Monday morning distraction you didn't know you needed.
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Impossible Countdown
Are there any tilesets that can be legitimately drawn during Countdown's Letters Game for which there exist no English words? I began writing a program to try to find the worst possible deals, but then found a series of heuristic shortcuts that meant I could find one with just a few minutes thought... because it turns out computers aren't always the right answer!
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DOGWALK
DOGWALK is a free, open-source Godot game for Windows, MacOS and Linux, produced and given to the world by Blender Studio as a way of showcasing some of their video lessons. And it's adorable.
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Playing hide and seek in Kennilworth Castle. You'll never find me!
(geotagged for your convenience)
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Dan, looking shifty, against a red stone castle wall.
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ChatGPT beats GeoGuessr
Given nothing more than a screenshot or two of my game screen, from the starting position only, ChatGPT plays GeoGuessr better than I ever could. Apart from cheating at GeoGuessr, what else could this mean? Is this going to be a scary new weapon in the toolkit of Internet stalkers?
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White's move. Mate in three. A giant chessboard is the perfect environment to teach a child some basic chess strategy, right?
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A girl studies a chessboard on a lawn, watched over by two men: Dan and JTA.
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Voice of America
In light of Trump's attempts to axe Voice of America, because it is, he claims, "anti-Trump" (and because he's so insecure that he can't stand the thought that taxpayer dollars might go to anybody who disagrees with him in any way, for any reason), I've produced a suggested update to the rules of Twilight Struggle for the inevitable 9th printing.
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It is as if you were on your phone
When you use your phone to play this game, it really does look indistinguishable from being on your phone. Weird!
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I've been playing Sean O'Connor's Slay for around 30 years (!), but somehow it took until today, on the Android version, before I tried my hand at "rewilding" the game world.
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Hex-based videogame board, entirely owned by the yellow player, but with only a single solitary soldier standing alone. The rest of the island is heavily forested in pine and, along one coast, palm trees, with the exception of the far North beyond a line of castles.
The rules of the game make trees... a bad thing: you earn no income from hexes with them. But by the time I was winning this map anyway, I figured that encouraging growback would be a pleasant way to finish the round.
Play your videogames any damn way you want. Don't let anybody tell you there's a right or wrong way to enjoy a single-player game. Today I took a strategy wargame and grew a forest. How will you play?
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Except to children, I don't really give Christmas presents to (or expect to receive them from) others any more.
But that didn't stop my buying myself a gift of a particularly fun Lego set to build over the festive period (with a little help from the eldest child!).
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Lego model of a Tallneck from videogame Horizon: Zero Dawn/Forbidden West, with minifigure of protagonist Aloy standing atop its head.
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This child is eating sausages with one hand while playing a video game about eating sausages with the other.
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A child slouches in an airport lounge chair. Her right hand is being used to eat a plate of sausages. Her left hand is playing 'Fork N Sausage' on a tablet.
Is this life-imitating-art or the other way around? Who can possibly say?