the question is whether they stitched together pieces of multiple takes, which seems likely. If I were ambitious, I'd look at it again and see if the paint stains on the men change as they show up again and again. I bet they do.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, March 04 2010 02:52 PM (+rSRq)
4
You can see piles of broken TVs and at least one broken piano in the background, so I'd say they had a few runs through.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, March 04 2010 04:29 PM (PiXy!)
On the other hand, it's a development platform, not a consumer device; it has two 800x480 touchscreens, HDMI out, and a built-in DLP projector; it has two five-megapixel cameras at front and a twelve-megapixel camera at rear; a dual-core 1.2GHz Arm Cortex A9 (superscalar out-of-order SMP); accelerometer, compass, ambient light, proximity, barometric and temperature sensors; Wifi, Bluetooth, and GPS; and easy and open access to all the electronics, networking, and software.
Tech's slate (from the Accountancy story further down) isn't that much more advanced than this beastie.
EA have just earned themselves brownie points with millions of gamers by re-releasing three of the older Command and Conquer games - Red Alert, Tiberian Dawn, and Tiberian Sun - free.
Get downloading!
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Sunday, February 14
Stuff
Come to think of it, I need to redo them to insert Jy and Pi. So there may be another colour shift coming.
That list above is the mee.whatever domains I own. I missed out on mee.tv by a couple of weeks.
I need to add icons for the components of Minx - Minx itself, Meta, the templating language, Miko, the desktop client, Pita, the database wrapper, and Jsyn, the syndication and replication protocol. Oh, and Mili and Mepi, the scripting language and API respectively.
Maybe I could make those round...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, February 19 2010 05:49 PM (PiXy!)
Civilizations Wars is like a cross between Phage Wars (population and combat mechanics) and Gemcraft (main map, skill levels and unlockable game modes). In itself, that's no bad thing: Phage Wars has a neat combat system and Gemcraft is a solid tower-defence game with a great campaign and skill structure around it.
But Civilizations Wars doesn't look like Phage Wars or Gemcraft. It looks like this:
Opening credits... In a Flash game?
Awesome opening credits at that.
When three tribes go to war...
Yay turtles!
Replaying the first map, mopping up the last of the Roman-type tribe. You can see a bunch of my Golems at left, being utterly ineffectual.
My Egypt-type armies are on the move!
It smells like... victory!
It's a fun mini-4X game with some really cool artwork. Definitely worth taking a look.
* Well, that's what it sounds like they're saying.
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Monday, February 01
Little Ninja Pixy, Hopping Through The Forest
You search for ingredients, and find: The Right Stuff (2), Potion Base
(3), Power Flower (17), Nightshade (9), Apple-y Goodness (3), Glowing
Goo (4), Smokeblossom (7), Tasty Twig (17), Malted Pill (5), Twigpile
(5), Powerpack (8), Ashen Film (8), Bitter Powder (4), Dayshade (2),
Ebony Sand (2), Monochrome Flower (4), Milkshake (5), Stark Moonlight
(5)! +110 Stamina
Only two Dayshades?
To explain: This is from Billy vs. Snakeman, that silly ninja game I mentioned a while back. What you see here is the result of an unleashed Geothermal Acclimator, combined with a White Eye Sannin, a Forest Trail, a Zodiac Zoo, a Fruits Basket, a Quiet Glade, and a MegaTrail Mix. (I lucked out in the Arena and Dark Hour was active and I won 25 out of 28 battles, which put me just over the 10,000 Reputation I needed for the MegaTrail Mix.) I think that's about the best one-shot ingredient-collecting combination you can get.
1
Good lord. If things break just right, I might find seven or eight items max... and nothing like the Goo, Milkshake, Moonlight, etc etc etc... usually just Tasty Twigs and the occasional Power Flower.
How in the world did you get five Twigpiles AND four Goos???
Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, February 03 2010 04:08 PM (w5qDx)
2
Well, Turtle's Science Facility activated, so there was a chance of rare items in the forest. And I have a Fruits Basket which I got from a Kaiju just last week, so that's +3 pulls for a total of 10 per day - base of 4 for Sannin, +1 for White Eye, +1 for our Forest Trail, +1 for our Zodiac Zoo.
Finally, I blew 10,000 Arena rep for a MegaTrail Mix, which gives you 11 more turns at collecting, at 10 pulls each, and viola!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, February 03 2010 11:44 PM (PiXy!)
Ho hum, yet another game download service. I already have Steam for the new stuff, GOG for the old stuff, and Impulse for the sprawling intergalactic battlefleet stuff.
But it's yet another download service I need to sign up on!
But it's A-Train 8!
But A-Train 9 is due out in a couple of weeks - in Japan anyway - and it looks freakin' awesome! (Bandwidth warning! Link takes you to a page full of 4-megapixel images of really cool toy cities!)
But it's A-Train... You know, that does look pretty amazing.
1
Man, those pictures from AT9 look good. But it looks like you need a super computer to run that thing if they're really trying to do that in real time.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, January 31 2010 05:54 AM (+rSRq)
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Saturday, January 02
Steaming
Today's offers on Steam: Mass Effectfor $5 (excellent game, though it suffers from the usual Bioware Empty Universe Syndrome), and all 11 games in the recent Sam and Maxseries for $15.
I don't really need another copy of Mass Effect, but I'd been thinking of picking up the Sam and Max games, so I did.
1
"Bioware Empty Universe Syndrome" -- what does that mean? I don't game anymore so I'm kind of out of the loop.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, January 02 2010 06:11 AM (+rSRq)
2
Bioware have made some of the best computer role-playing games ever released - Baldur's Gate (and its sequel), Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights (but not their respective sequels), Mass Effect, and most recently Dragon Age.
But the scales of their creations are often absurdly out of whack. The immense space station that is the center of a multi-species civilisation in Mass Effect has two shops and a few dozen people actually visible (of a theoretical population of millions). Near the beginning of Dragon Age we see an enormous battle - hundreds of troops are visible, and thousands are implied - but you are forced by the game to be off at a distance carrying out a side mission.
And then after that you never see more than a couple of dozen people in any one place. And all their games do this sort of thing.
Of course, it's not only Bioware that does this, it's just that it's very noticeable because the games are otherwise so good.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 02 2010 08:01 AM (PiXy!)
I'm spending way too much money on Steam this holiday season, but since I didn't buy myself anything else for Christmas (apart from some triple-cream King Island Brie, and that was on special... oh, and Ponyo, but that's a medical expense* and was also on special), and since the total amount is equal to maybe three new-release games at retail price, it's not a real problem.
Though I have now messed up four times and bought a game and then followed up by buying a pack that includes that game. Which has cost me, let's see, $16.50. (Actually one of those was buying a pack that was included in a larger pack...)
But then, to pick one example, for the cost of one new release game (US$75, where a new game typically costs A$80-100), I'm getting 9 games and expansion packs that I actually want, and a further 10 that could be interesting and generally received good reviews. The most expensive single game so far has cost me $13.59; the cheapest $1.99. (Well, $1.49, but that was one of the ones I ended up buying twice.)
When I will actually find time to play any of these is a different matter; I hardly have time right now for Bubble Tanks Tower Defense or Billy vs. Snakeman. But I now have tactical and/or strategic wargames covering every epoch from ancient Greece and Rome through Medieval, Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe to WWII and WWIII (had the Cold War run hot), plus a whole slew of real-time and turn-based fantasy and science-fiction wargames, for a near limitless supply of virtual baddies to virtually dissassemble.**
No Crusades or Mongol Hordes, and no Civil War or WWI, though they seem to be the only major gaps post-Bronze-Age.
Mostly RTS or tactical, but also a scattering of RPG, a couple of FPS, and a selection of indie/casual games.
Now I just need to download them all. Never mind playing them, it's going to take a week just to download them.
Update: Added them all up. 237GB.
* Ghibli films are cheap, keep me sane, and have few harmful side-effects. I really should be able to claim them on my insurance...
** What was the last major wargame I played? C&C Generals maybe? In that game you could play as America, China, or as the filthy terrorists. I played mostly as America, occasionally as China. I don't really see much appeal in playing as the terrorists, or as Nazi Germany, as at least three of my new purchases allow. I want to squish the bad guys.
Do you happen to know any contact info for BvS's higher-ups? I've gotten two doses of malware from their website since Dec 19th. I had to reinstall Windows yesterday, and I'd like to complain to someone.
...and I'm not visiting the site until I hear from them. It's a shame, I really enjoy the game!
Posted by: wonderduck at Saturday, January 02 2010 05:38 AM (ffKVz)
They've had problems with their ad network serving up malware before, I know that. I run Adblock and haven't had any problems, but that's very likely what it is.
I'll see if I can find an email address. You may not want to visit the forums either.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 02 2010 05:58 AM (PiXy!)
3
I just installed Adblock Plus... didn't know about it!
Posted by: wonderduck at Saturday, January 02 2010 07:28 AM (ffKVz)
"MESSAGE FROM THE MODS: We've looked into it, and runs hundreds
of tests, and the malwre isn't coming from any of our ads. You may very
well have malware that activates when a certain number of ads have been
loaded, and it isn't 'setting off' until you hit that mark - which is
happening during BvS. I don't mean to sound insulting, but it really,
realy isn't us if it wsa, you'd hear about it in the real news, since
we use the same advertisers as major industries, not just little
nobodies. Please check the Bug Forum in the Forums for much more
information."
Maybe this is so, but it seems to be unlikely.
Posted by: wonderduck at Saturday, January 02 2010 04:08 PM (ffKVz)
Mr. Handbags, I would think you would be more interested in "nofollow", which all mee.nu and mu.nu blogs use.
What "nofollow" means is that Google ignores your spam comments. It means that all your efforts to spam here are giving you exactly zero boost. It means you are wasting your time, not just ours.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, January 10 2010 02:45 AM (+rSRq)
Bug? Check out this blog entry, at the bottom. When I load it with Firefox, it looks fine. But when I load it with IE8, the bottom half of the comment entry box is off-screen below the browser window, and I can't scroll to it. (Also the "post" button.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, December 29 2009 06:08 AM (+rSRq)
2
Yeah, I noticed the same problem just recently in Chrome 4. I need to re-test and tweak my CSS.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, December 29 2009 04:23 PM (PiXy!)
3
I've been noticing that problem on Wonderduck's site, too, though in his case when I refresh the page it gets fixed.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, December 29 2009 04:30 PM (+rSRq)
4
The bug on my site that Steven Blogged about was similar in some ways (but more extreme, centering wasnt just off the border overlapped with the posts in extended view). However, I think the current most visible issue is operator error ....I just can't figure out what error I made.
Oh and hAlp!
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tuesday, December 29 2009 08:52 PM (NkKu7)
1
If her guns are glowing, that's going to make it kind of tough to sneak around at night.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, December 05 2009 11:40 AM (+rSRq)
2
She now has the ability to fire exploding rounds (exploding vampiric rounds, so they heal her while blowing the enemy into tiny pieces). So the glowing guns have become less of an issue.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 06 2009 05:27 AM (PiXy!)
3
It's true, breast implants give you +2 dodge rating with a chance to stun (but you take a penalty to stealth and agility).
Posted by: TallDave at Sunday, December 13 2009 12:49 PM (+3aaV)
For $49 (it's currently half price; I paid $99) you get 6702 Photoshop filters.
Not all of them are useful, but there's 6702 of them. If I only find a use for 60 of them for my theme library, that's as many as Photoshop and the Alien Skin library combined.
Update: Playing some more with FilterFrog. The filters range from humdrum to how did they do that?! Many of the effects are both striking and attractive. I'm tempted to upgrade to the Pro version, even though it doesn't really give me any features that I actually need. (It does allow you to edit the filters and create your own, and work with very high resolutions, but with 6702 existing filters I don't really need the former, and for web work I don't really need the latter.)
Update: The Starter, Basic, and Standard versions support two cores; the Pro version supports as many as you have. That does make it more tempting, because some of these filters aren't terribly fast.
That game looks to be a pretty blatant ripoff of Diablo, at least conceptually. They even kept the three basic character classes -- fighter, mage, archer -- and made the archer female.
Is it any good? Certainly looks like the graphics are better, and the ability to customize your character is new.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, November 29 2009 09:25 AM (+rSRq)
2
It's actually written by the same team that did Diablo 1 and 2.
They did another game called Fate in between, which is the same sort of thing.
Fate and Torchlight have randomly-generated maps, unlike Diablo, so each game is different, but the levels aren't as interesting. At least, that was true for Fate; the levels in Torchlight have been a lot more complex so far, but I think some of them are pre-made.
They've also shipped an editor for Torchlight, so there will be user-generated content.
And Torchlight is a lot of fun so far. The femal character uses guns, and has a trick where she can ricochet a bullet to hit several enemies at once. Since the game is set in a mine and you often have a swarm of monsters attacking you in a confined space, this is both effective and satisfying.
Also, you can have imaginary pets. How cool is that?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 29 2009 12:09 PM (PiXy!)
3
Diablo with a high polish on it. A lot of the annoying bits of the user interface have been removed or reworked - you don't have to play backpack Tetris, for example, and piles of gold are automatically picked up just by walking by them (removing a lot of clicking!) The pet options are interesting, and the "go sell my stuff, Rover" button is great - easily eliminated half my runs back to town.
The difficulty is several steps below Diablo, though. You've got more options, to start with, as far as skill tree building and magic, and if you're even marginally intelligent you're going to get some self-healing magic as soon as possible. The game -rains- potions. Enemy difficulty is not particularly challenging except for a couple of types of enemies (though not necessarily the ones you'd think - the little tribal guys from Diablo 2 are there, but not NEARLY as annoying as they were in that game.)
Worth the $20 they're charging for it, anyway, especially if you haven't played the Diablo games in a while.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Sunday, November 29 2009 07:56 PM (mRjOr)
4
Yep, that's the other plus - there's definitely $20 worth of value there.
Just picked up the third Fate game too, since I had some "WildCoins" sitting around. That worked out to about $10. (The worst thing about Fate is that it's sold through WildTangent, and their game launcher thing is bloody annoying. And so is their marketing and support. Wish they could bring the three Fate games across to Steam.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 29 2009 10:12 PM (PiXy!)
5
Fate does have the backpack Tetris, by the way. But it also has the send your pet to town feature, so it's not too irritating.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 29 2009 10:16 PM (PiXy!)
Also, you forgot the cardboard robot fighting tournaments.
giant robots 5%
And the .hack reality-shifting!
Yeah, I didn't have a pithy description for that one (and I haven't done it yet).
Pixy, how's your S2 checklist coming?
Wasteland is done except for the final quest. Just starting Monochrome, and need to finish The Trade.
Not sure how hard Mono will be; we'll see.
Was there any progress on that matter we discussed?
Sorry, still working on it; hope to track it down today.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, September 13 2009 01:34 PM (PiXy!)
6
Mono's not -super- hard. It's plenty hard, though, and for three reasons:
-High range requirements married with high numbers of required successes. 20d20s checks are not uncommon. Strawberry levels on a 25d25s Tai mission. On the good side, unlike Wasteland, all your +strength stuff works here. On the downside, only your Reaper allies will work here, and the ones you start with aren't that good. (And only Reaper-ally techniques will work...)
On top of that, you need to find more or less everybody (a lot of the quests require so-and-so, if not in your party, at least available to you.) A number of them only appear on rare missions. On top of that, their appearance rates -suck-. Monochrome soaks up lots of smoke bombs (not least of which because the countermeasure to the low ally drop rate, Monochrome Pheromone, is good for one mission only; use one, attempt missions, smoke bomb until the one you want turns up, and hope like heck you pass it!)
On top of that, Mono has an added stamina drain - 10 extra for each mission normally, and 5 after you get Awesome Pants. It's not a fun place to farm.
Finally, near the end, there's an item check. Getting a hollow leg is relatively easy; getting Doughman isn't hard either (or rather, by this point you better be able to get 10 arena wins in a day), but you also have to have a kaiju drop item. Not only that, you have to have -gotten it from the kaiju-. Doesn't count if you buy it or get it given to you; you have to win it straight from the monster. If your village doesn't summon monsters, you're SOL. If your village DOES, but there's 20 high-level players in it, you're probably SOL too...
Even without a kaiju drop, there's reason to go into Mono (Awesome Pants, and a lot of the niftier one-use items in the game come from ingredients that drop here). But it's tougher than the Wasteland, not just because it plays by different rules, but because it's -just freakin' tough-.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Sunday, September 13 2009 01:54 PM (vGfoR)
7
Ah, forgot about the kaiju drop. I do have one, but I was awarded it (for most attacks) rather than winning it directly.
I'm planning on farming some ally drops before I loop, but I might give Mono a miss for now.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, September 13 2009 06:04 PM (PiXy!)
8
Created an alt. I'll park him in Turtle and he can help out. ^^
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Wednesday, September 16 2009 11:41 AM (pWQz4)
9
So I patrolled, donated various things to the storehouse, collected herbs, took D level missions and fought zombies,
Why am I still a lazy ninja?
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thursday, September 17 2009 11:33 PM (AXiRx)
10
Did you actually patrol (as in, the patrol option in the village)? That should take you off the lazy list. If you have the "You are helping a village out today" message showing in the village, you're good.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, September 18 2009 01:31 AM (PiXy!)
The latest episode of The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe:
This week's topics are: Live Recording from TAM 7 News Items: Microbot Plummers, Archeological Dig, Sunspots Return, Blogs vs Journalists, Genie Sued Science or Fiction Live Questions Rebecca's Wedding
Yep, live.
(Rebecca's site, skepchick.org, used to be hosted here at munu.)
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Friday, July 17
SemiAutumnatic
Our latest project is nearly finished. Possibly one more track, and some minor tweaking. Then I'll be taking a break for a couple of weeks (from composing, anyway), before returning with Summer Theologica.
1
Pixy, Ace has been getting hammered by spam the last few days.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, July 13 2009 03:42 AM (+rSRq)
2
Yeah, the spammers have gone nuts. I need to clean up and ban IPs again.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 13 2009 11:33 AM (PiXy!)
3
Banned a stack of IPs and deleted 180,000 comments. Bleh.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 13 2009 12:28 PM (PiXy!)
4
Bad news; Ace is still getting hammered. Take a look at his "recent comments" sidebar. Lots of "replica watches" and "royalmewigs" and "powerleveling".
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, July 13 2009 01:58 PM (+rSRq)
5
I'll be doing some more cleanup, but the sidebar on Ace's current blog doesn't rebuild dynamically, so that's a snapshot as at the last post.
Really need to get him over to Minx. If the damn servers would just stop exploding for a week or two..
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 13 2009 02:47 PM (PiXy!)
I've been working with The Electric Ant Orchestra* (in between my fighting hackers, spammers, hardware failures, bosses who want every cool new feature in place today**, and random germs*** and their live shows at The Scythe) on a new album, a sort-of prequel to our recent Winter Collection.
Because we came up with a name that was too cool**** not to put something together and get it out there.
It's called SemiAutumnatic.
With any luck, the first section, Cities, should show up here this weekend. I'm still tinkering with the mixes on two of the tracks, so we'll see how that goes.
* My friends Liz, Harri (never Harriet!) and Su. ** Yes, it's most often actually a cool feature, but today is not always practical. *** Have come down with some coldy-fluey thing. Entering the third day, and it's not too horrible so far, so probably just a nasty cold. **** For... certain values of cool.
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Monday, June 22
Oopsie
I'm tidying up all the files for Winter Collection, and I discovered that I hadn't saved the final version of the source file for the first track. I had saved it, but then I'd done some more changes, and not saved those, and then produced the .mp3 I uploaded from that unsaved version.
Spent about 30 minutes fiddling with it trying to get it back the way it was, then realised that what I'd done was put an intensity hold on it, which is why that track sounds so mellow. That done, I was able to reproduce it exactly.
I think.
I don't have a .wav output of the original either, so the best I can do is compare the original .mp3's waveforms with the new one. Or do a blind test to see if I can tell the difference.
Update: Eyeballing the waveforms, it's very close up to the 1:57 mark, then it diverges. Looks like some more tweaking is in order.
Update: Eurgh. Well, the sequence of notes is exactly right. Now I just have to place - at most - 17 intensity markers at half-section intervals until each sub-section matches exactly. Sigh.
Update: Aha! Had it almost right except for the ending. I couldn't persuade it to do an automatic fade and switch sections on cue; I could do one or the other, or I could switch sections and do a manual fade, but I knew I hadn't done a manual fade before, so it meant I was missing something. And so I was. Even when you manually place all your intensity cues, the composition parameter still affects the ending. When I set it back from 1 to 4, I was able to match the original mix.
