Category Archives: gaming

To The Developers Of Xenonauts.

Edit: Some rummaging in the game files revealed that not only is there a correctly-shaped lightmap in the geoscape folder, but you can actually use it to replace the current, awful lightmap through some simple file renaming. So the only remaining question now is, why isn’t it being used as default? 

First, great job on the game! The cold war setting in particular is a great idea; it looks like you should be able to produce something special if — as looks very likely — you guys make your Kickstarter target and then some. However, when you are considering your stretch goals (or what I would otherwise call “deciding what to do with our huge piles of money” if I were feeling uncharitable) I would like you to take a look at the above picture, and then have a long, hard think about what exactly this is going to do to the day/night border as it progresses across the surface of the Earth as rendered via the Mercator projection. Hopefully this will lead you to make some changes to the geoscape so that it doesn’t break basic physics, or at least put some blurb into the lore about the aliens either altering the axis of rotation of the Earth to zero degrees or else physically shifting the Sun to match, because aliens are dicks like that.

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Testicular Torsion Physics.

Longbranch Pennywhistle asks

What do you know of Newtonian Torsion physics?  Is there a reason this information isn’t more widely known or even distributed?

Here is some info I found, not all inclusive by any means but does this hold any credence?

http://intalek.com/Papers/NTP.pdf

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Thoughts: Supreme Commander 2.

My, my, my. Gas Powered Games, what have you done?

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Why I Don’t Like Super Meat Boy.

This came up in a discussion of the currently-on-sale-on-Steam Dustforce; I mentioned at the start of that review that I didn’t like Super Meat Boy very much and a certain person (who shall remain nameless) challenged me on this. So I thought I’d just write a couple of paragraphs expanding on justwhy this is, because the reason for it is intrinsically linked to the way I view game design.

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Sunday Soundtracks.

Dustforce.

The recent Steam sale reminded me of just how damn good the music in Dustforce is.

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Why You Should Buy Endless Space.

Edit: I happened to glance at my site analytics and this post has picked up a staggering 1300 views over the last week, which mostly seem to be driven by people typing “Endless Space review” into search engines and getting this as one of the first links. Firstly, to anyone finding this post subsequent to this edit, hello! Secondly, this is not a review of Endless Space because Endless Space is still in an alpha state. However, what I’ve written here should hopefully give you a good idea of what that alpha is like and inform your subsequent decision to purchase the game accordingly.

When the advert for Endless Space popped up on my Steam display yesterday evening I didn’t give it much thought. There’s dozens of awful knockoff spacesims being released on Steam every month (while Valve happily reject other, proven genres WHERE ARE MY PINBALL GAMES YOU BASTARDS) and Endless Space didn’t do a whole lot to stand out from the crowd. Generic sounding name, generic looking ships, and the ad didn’t tell me a lot about what ES was actually about. I can’t remember what it was that eventually led me to the game’s store page, but that I ended up there at all was very much against the odds. It’s a good thing I did, though, because in amongst all the obligatory babbling about the intricacies of the sci-fi world the developers have come up, I caught a glimpse of this screenshot of the research tree.

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Thoughts: Tribes Ascend.

Ever heard of a Skinner box? You must have at some point; it’s one of those behavioural experiments where an animal is taught to perform a certain action – usually very basic, like pressing a switch — in return for a simple reward such as food. I’ve drawn unflattering comparisons between Skinner boxes and the mechanics of several of the games I’ve reviewed this year, and nowhere is it more apt than in the case of Tribes Ascend. Nowhere is it more regrettable, either, because staggering beneath the weight of the enormous piles of equipment unlocks and the experience point grinds required to obtain them is an extremely competent multiplayer shooter that’s struggling to escape the shadow of its free-to-play genetics.

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