28 May 06 - 17:03
Catchup
It's exam season now, and with both shoddy English ones out of the way, the QCA has only legions of Maths, Chemistry and Physics left to throw at me. Alas, revision (which has been ludicrously and shamefully slow of late) needs to be extenuated, and I really have to get down to it - there're some relatives coming over from America on Tuesday which will no doubt minimize revision time. As such, I'm avoiding gaming temptation by booting to Gentoo and making sure that important stuff like XGL is up to date, though I did suffer a temporary hickup after updating to expat 2.0 caused everything from Apache to KDE to die completely pending recompile. Not being patient, I instead downgraded to 1.95. It's only *now* that I read there was a note when it was installed - though at least I wasn't the
only one caught out.
I've decided that my post exam treat to myself will be a pretty black DS Lite (black one's only appear in Europe, so ha to all you inter-continental types), which should be released on June 23, just in time. Not that expensive, but I have to decide which games are best to accompany it too.
Nathan - Gaming, Personal -
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05 May 06 - 10:06
Pivot updated
The kind wizards have released a signifcant update to this blogging software, primarily aimed at stopping the tirade of spam that has been affecting all users of it for several months now. My backend looks a lot nicer (heheh) too.
I've basically now got a section for spam control, and a few options on how to control it. I have an option to use HashCash, but this needs Javascript and I'm therefore reluctant to use it. As it is, there's now a deeply challenging and involving question asked to everyone who tries to comment on an article older than 7 days (they never seem to spam the front page). There's also a global blocked phrases list, which will hopefully stop everything else.
Nathan - Development -
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01 May 06 - 17:53
DEFCON 5
Mwahaha! I've just got my way into the alpha/beta test for a game of the year: Introversion's DEFCON.
Not heard of it? DEFCON is a game of Global Thermonuclear War (as seen in the movie
Wargames) which involves nothing more or less than blowing the hell out of everyone else. The winner is the player with the fewest casualties.
Because they've been very vague, I'm not sure what restrictions have been placed on beta testers, so rather than risk my beta testing status, I'll only include promotional screenshots and publically available information on this blog - sorry.
The premise? A very simple, but exceptionally engrossing, game consisting of a 2D world map and a number of very simple sprites shooting dots or missiles at each other. The effect? Tactics, intrigue, deception, anger and suspicion all mingling together in one big heap.
The preceding sentence is marketing, because the Alpha builds that we currently have our hands on are all AI controlled, and we can't actually issue any of the orders that are issued to the carriers, fighters, bombers, silos and airbases. Instead, testers are setting up games, defining their execution parameters, waiting for others to join before loosing the AI off (whilst chatting through the built-in IRC chat interface). Defy the point of being a game, you may ask? Perhaps - but the current phase of testing involves testing the netcode and getting the engine itself working.
One of the intriguing modes is "Office Mode". This, designed with 9-5 workers in mind, plays the game in Real-Time, takes about 8 hours from start to finish, takes an entire day to complete, with missiles taking 30-45 minutes to cross oceans and impact (allowing plenty of time for players to respond to threats). The game also features a "panic" button, where the game will minimize to the system tray; the icon flashing when a nuclear launch is detected. I wish I could play this in college.
I was happy to see Bristol on the world map, though in the one game for whos entirety I have watched, I was too busy being spellbound to watch when/if it got nuked. Next time...
Nathan - Gaming -
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