Thoughts: Metro Last Light.

demon

For one of the best-looking games ever made it is remarkable how badly Metro: Last Light screenshots. My usual method is to get Fraps to automatically take a shot every ten seconds while I’m playing, and out of around 2000 screenshots captured over seven hours of play there were maybe half a dozen which weren’t a horrible, blurry mess. Modern FPS games are very into their motion blur and depth-of-field effects, of course, so this isn’t a phenomenon that’s strictly confined to Last Light, but it has it worse that just about any other game I’ve played thanks to its unique gameplay conceits.

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Whoops.

There will be a post today. However, there will not be a post now thanks to my poor forward planning in forgetting to bring the memory stick with the half-completed post on it to work so that I could finish and upload it. It is comingthough, because while I might miss every other day of the week I’ll be damned if I miss a Monday.  It’ll just have to wait until this evening, is all.

This post will self-destruct in five seconds.

Sunday Soundtracks.

So they got Jeremy Soule in to do the music for the original Company of Heroes, and it’s his usual plinky plonky generic crap. Then they get a different guy in (one of the many, many Ian Livingstones working in the games industry) to do the music for Opposing Fronts, and the result is that the British end up with the best music in the entire game.

 

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Thoughts: Pinball FX 2 (Star Wars Pack).

EMPIRE

In which I write 2300 words about computer pinball. You have been warned.

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Sunday Soundtracks.

There’s a reason I backed the Shadowrun Returns Kickstarter effort pretty much instantaneously, and that reason is the Shadowrun game released on the SNES way back when. As a western adventure-cum-RPG it’s a bloody weird thing to find on a console at that point, but it’s very good nonetheless.

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The Hubble Bubble.

universe

Janek asks

I would be interested in a further post detailing roughly how we’ve calculated the size of the observable universe.

Okay. Actually I’m more than happy to answer this because the answer is relatively short and it’ll let me bunk off science posts for a week.

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Thoughts: Monaco.

safe

Monaco is a very purple game. I mean that both in the sense that it literally does contain large amounts of purple, and also that it’s precisely the sort of critical indie darling that induces reviewers to lose their minds and write acres and acres of godawful tortured prose about how this game had such a profound experience on them that it redefined their entire worldview and now they’ve become disciples of the church of Jonathan Blow. Or whatever. You can find examples of these frothy pieces at any one of several reputable gaming news sources, but what’s slightly unusual about Monaco is that for once they’re not overegging the larceny pudding. (Much, anyway.) It really is that good.

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