Effective 3d inside flash? Impossible you say? I thought so too, until I played around with this. Pretty damned impressive! Still a long way to go until we have the equivalent of Quake IV in our browsers, but still, this makes other examples of 3d in flash that I’ve seen look silly. There’s another example as well, and more detail over on Rock Paper Shotgun.
Headed off to Seattle for the week
I’m off on vacation this week. Susan and I are headed to Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula for a week of exploring, hiking, dining, kayaking, and more. Possibly I’ll find wifi connections I trust enough to login and post, otherwise I may not post again this week.
Friday fun link: use your imagination
Instead of a game I’ll link over to one of my favorite frivolous RSS feeds – Pulp of the Day, which shows a different cover from a pulp magazine every day. Pulp magazines had their heyday back in the 40’s and 50’s and often featured fantastic art on their covers. Their name is derived from the crummy ‘pulp’ paper they were printed on, and this site and others strives to remind us of these vanishing objets d’art. Bonus points for the chance to invent your own caption. Subjects range from the salacious to the fantastic to the sinister to the bizarre. Check it out!
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Friday fun link: Robokill
Ok ok, so you lack imagination and don’t appreciate my other friday fun link. Fine. I missed a week last week anyway, so here for your frenetic mouse clicking pleasure is Robokill, a flash-based action game built along Robotron 2084 lines. This is one of the best action games I’ve seen in flash, with great graphics and sound and tight controls. The link takes you to the demo, but it’s long enough that you’ll almost definitely get your fill, and the game is good enough that it’s worth considering a purchase.
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But …I have a good excuse!
Sorry on the lack of updates. A little vacation and a little illness have conspired to keep me away from blogging. I’m off to the doctor today for a look-see. I got bitten by a tick while I was on LI and am a little worried that I have Lymes, but my symptoms aren’t really consistent. If not for the tick, I would have said I simply have the flu or something similar.
Game finished: Shadowgrounds Survivor
I finished up Shadowgrounds Survivor this morning. It was on sale a couple of weekends ago on Valve’s Steam software distribution service for only $5. I had played the demo some time ago and liked it but hadn’t gotten around to spending the ~$20 to buy it, so when it came up for only $5 I jumped on it. By and large the game is worth $20 though there are some annoying glitches to be found playing through it.
It’s an old school action arcade game with some light RPG elements layered onto it. The plot is a riff on the old ‘aliens that look like the aliens from the movie aliens attack a space colony’ which has been riffed on any number of times, but it’s done competently enough and you can pretty much skip through it directly to the alien blasting action if you want. Controls are straightforward – mouse to rotate/aim and shoot and WASD/arrow keys to move your character around. Over the course of the game you get to use and level up three characters – a marine with a lot of firepower, a drunken russian with a flamethrower, and a lithe little assassin with some stealthy and long distance firepower. There isn’t much variety in terms of enemy types, but the game is about the blasting of the hordes and this never bothered me. The graphics themselves are pretty good:
Image via Wikipedia
There were two major technical issues with the game. The first had to do with the camera. Often as you entered a level the camera would swoop around in an in-game cinematic, and this would sometimes then get stuck in a weird location leaving you unable to see the action, or even worse, sometimes after the cinematic I’d find my character trapped in the level geometry and unable to move or stuck in a confined area. Reloading from my last save always seemed to clear this up. The second problem was worse – there is a known save game corruption bug with the game which would always happen as you transitioned into a new level and would crash the game. This one is really annoying. There’s a workaround to this problem on the forums over on steampowered.com that involves downloading known non-corrupt save game files. I suspect this one would have pissed me off more had I paid more than $5 for the game, but for what I paid…ehh, I more than got my money’s worth.
Anyway, the game’s worth a look if you like action shooter games. PC only, price between $0 and $20 (it’s on Gametap if you’re a subscriber) depending on where you pick it up.
A weekend spent in Maine
Susan and I spent the weekend in Maine. It was her brother’s birthday and her Dad’s birthday is next week while we’ll be in NY, so we headed up to Brunswick Saturday morning, had lunch with her family, played mini-golf (I came in third out of 9, not bad given I haven’t played in at least 10 years), went clothes shopping in Freeport, played boardgames till the wee hours in a borrowed unfurnished condo, wandered about Portland reliving my youth and sipping mediocre au laits, and finally took the dogs for a romp on one of my favorite places:
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(that’s Higgins Beach in Maine, looking south down the rockfaces)
All in all it was a pretty fun weekend.
Oh, forgot to post this – I’ve been using Vimeo to send my niece Isabella little greetings from the places I visit. She’s on the other side of the world in Australia and it’s one of the few ways I can connect with her. We filmed this while we were at Higgins Beach this weekend:
Susan and David at the beach from David Hamilton on Vimeo.
Nothing special I know, and here mostly for her, but enjoy it for what it is and scope out the windy higgins beach action 😉
I’m done selling things on ebay
I’ve had it. Two times in the past year, I’ve put up large batches of stuff on ebay, something I’ve been doing for literally a decade now, my own periodic virtual flea market. Each of the last two times though I’ve had serious problems with at least one of the sales. Last time, a guy from Canada managed to freeze my paypal account because he got impatient waiting on the shipping and after 6 days filed a grievance with paypal, who froze my account for weeks while I waited for the idjit to receive his package. Apparantly in his version of the world he can pay for the cheapest shipping and have the item make its way across the continent (he was in British Columbia) in under 4 days. This week, I sell a relatively high end game (The Witcher) to some numbskull who has crashing problems with the game, describes how he ‘tried cleaning the disc with a microfibre cloth,’ then demands a refund because he claims I sold him a damaged disc. This on a game still going for $50 at retail which he purchased for $10.25.
In order to protect my perfect feedback rating, I’m going to have to give this chump his money back. The whole exercise just isn’t worth it. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my constant stream of surplus stuff now, from used computer parts (I’m sitting on 2 video cards, a SFF case and a motherboard as I type this), games, and misc. electronics like my GPS which I want to upgrade. I guess it’s worth trying craigslist for some of the stuff, but the whole ‘arrange to show your stuff to perfect strangers’ seems like more of a hassle then it’s worth.
How to make windows shut the hell up
Oh, there’s so many contexts where that would be useful. Unfortunately this post is only about one context, but it’s useful and you’ll love it nonetheless. The scenario: windows prompts you to update it and you dutifully do so, after which it tells you it needs to restart, but helpfully allows you to defer this until later. Great! Except it reminds you…every…goddamn…minute…with an annoying as fuck popup window. Ever shout at that thing? Turns out a little googling reveals how to shut that thing off for good. The cheatsheet, if you don’t want to clickthrough:
Start / Run / gpedit.msc / Local Computer Policy / Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Windows Update / Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations
I can’t get ‘The Road’ out of my head
I’ve been on a bit of a Cormac McCarthy kick of late, working through Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and now The Road. It’s completely fantastic, telling the story of a boy and his father struggling their way across a post-apocalyptic landscape, questing for food and safety in a world turned barbaric. It’s also very grim. I had nightmares while I was reading it, but at the same time I couldn’t put it down. If you fancy a stroll through a post apocalyptic landscape bereft of hope, I can’t think of a better book to recommend.
How’s that for a sales pitch 😉 Seriously though, the book is fantastic so long as you know what you’re getting into and appreciate it for what it is.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 