I picked up Divinity II: Dragon Knight Saga with some slight trepidation; while I had been first attracted to the game prior to its initial release in the form of Divinity II: Ego Draconis, poor reviews for the first release dissuaded me from taking the plunge. With the release of the expansion pack, Flames of Vengeance, Larian Studios remastered the first game, incorporating an improved graphics engine and a number of other improvements. The Dragon Knight Saga release includes this remastered version of the first game, and the Flames of Vengeance expansion, which extends and concludes the story. With reports that these improvements had addressed some of the main issues that had marred the original release, I picked up Dragon Knight Saga in the Steam sale, and was pleasantly surprised. In many ways it is a B-list game, lacking spit and polish of your AAA games, while at the same time avoiding the true levels of innovation which would help it truly step above the competition. However, if your looking for an enjoyable RPG romp, with a few neat ideas, then it manages to deliver solidly.

The most obvious of these neat ideas is the central conceit, the ability to turn into a dragon, something which ensured that the game jumped on to my radar. However, while the idea isn’t exactly squandered, it certainly isn’t used to its full potential, barely making an appearance until halfway through the game, and remaining almost entirely unused in the “Flames of Vengence” expansion. For the most part, dragon sections feel like a separate mini-game, albeit one which is remarkably useful for making a rapid escape from danger. They are competent enough, but for the most part lack the depth and variety of the human portions of the game. Instead, the draconic nature of the main character plays a far more interesting role in the development of the plot, although again, this scenario is not explored to its full potential. In practice, neither of these decisions should be seen as a major failing on the part of the game; instead the reflect on clear design decision, in terms of gameplay and exposition respectively. However, if your primary reasons for looking at the game were to take part in epic in air combat, or to experience a detailed consideration of the nature of the self and the nature of humanity (or draconity) then you’d best look elsewhere.

While the central conceit may fail to deliver anything more than a distraction, the rest of the game provides more than enough satisfaction. The mind-reading skill provides a neat mechanic, providing a few rewards or alternative quest solutions along the way. In many ways it acts in a similar manner to speech checks in other RPGs, but the experience cost for mind reading means that its use becomes considered, rather than the ‘speech check option’ magic button seen in games like Mass Effect.

The game is classless, allowing you to easily develop your character as you wish. I was easily able to create a battle mage, giving myself a nice selection of DPS spells, summons, healing and crowd control, while still ensuring I was durable in melee combat and could deal out considerable damage with my dual wield weapons. The ability to upgrade skills ensures that spells do not become underpowered as the game progresses, and it is easy to respec your skill tree later should you have a change of heart.

Other nice mechanics are the weapon and armour enchantment, which can make significant differences to the performance of your kit. However, one criticism is that the weapon damaged modifications are ridiculously overpowered at the higher levels, making them no-brainer choices when compared to the other possibilities. The problem is further compounded for dual wield characters, as damage modifiers on your main hand, also effect your off hand, and vice versa. By the end of the game I was dealing more damage due to my enchantments than due to the base damage of the weapons themselves.

Necromancy provides a ‘creature,’ which acts as a summon for all character builds. The choice of different limb sets allows the creature to be customised to perform different roles, loosely falling into mage, ranger and tank. While in the early game your creature can be a valuable ally, by the end game a maxed out creature will be only a minor distraction for your enemies. It would have been nice to see a bit more tactical depth introduced at this point, allowing the player to issue basic commands to the creature, although it is possible that the developers wished to avoid the feeling that you need to micromanage your summons.

While combat provides enough depth to allow the player to customise their approach, and to ensure they aren’t reduced to continually spamming the same skill, it is slightly lacking in variety. While enemies show slight differences in damage sensitivities, it isn’t sufficient to discourage a one size fits all approach, especially in the later stages. Additionally, power games are likely to find themselves becoming overpowered towards the end of the expansion, although I can be partly blamed here as I entirely forgot I could turn up the difficulty.

The game isn’t going to win any awards for writing, and the plot, while entertaining, is lacking in depth, or any striking originality. However, it is entirely serviceable, and has enough twists and variations to prevent it from becoming overly predictable. ‘Dark’ fantasy this is not, and the game never takes itself too seriously; it is perfectly willing to mock itself when it needs to, voice acting is often served with a large side order of ham, and most conversations have a few witty retorts.

Quest design is pleasantly varied, and often enough allows for a couple of different solutions; although in many cases the repercussions of these decisions are decidedly limited. A few quests even involve jumping puzzles, unusual for an RPG; for the most part the third person perspective, and decent platform placement, ensures that these are pleasant change of pace, rather than a source of hair pulling frustration. Especially nice are the unmarked quests, such as small puzzles in dungeons that may lead to a chest of loot. These latter puzzles couple well with the games rewarding of exploration. With the tutorial out the way, it is theoretically possible to run through the world that will host most of the original campaign. In practice you’ll soon be killed by enemies outside your level; the game features no level scaling, and until the expansion pack, pretty much no respawning.

One of the nicest features of the game is the great art design, and there are some fantastic areas and enemies. While it would have been nice had the designers gone completely overboard with some of these designs, there are still obvious efforts to ensure that some of the more cookie cutter sections, such as the flying fortresses, are still given their own flavour.

I realise that this review might sound a bit 70%, however the game holds together remarkably well; it is better than this. It is, for the large part enjoyably competent, but with a few touches of something much better. Like a cheap summer blockbuster, that somehow manages to get all the elements in the right place, and shines through because the people who made it were genuinely enjoying what they were doing. Divinity II knows that it is not AAA material, and it gloriously recognises this fact and revels in it. It reminds me of games from the 90s, before they were ‘serious business,’ and never worries about being a bit silly if that means things will be more fun. Finally, although you shouldn’t buy it solely because of this fact, you can play a bloody dragon.

In the UK, Divinity II: Dragon Knight Saga is currently available on PC by digital distrubution only.

• Steam
• Direct from the developers
• Gamers Gate

I’ve gone ahead and pushed out the blog redesign. I expect there will be a few teething issues, especially with elements which it wasn’t easy to test in either the mock-ups, or using WordPress’ preview function. It is just these kind of situations when running a local server would be useful.

I also intend to try and improve some of the shortcomings of the theme over the next few weeks, and add a few functions. For example, as it stands the site looks somewhat less exciting in Internet Explorer than in most other browsers. I haven’t even dared test it in IE6 yet, partly because I don’t even have access to a copy. With WordPress 3.0 launching soon I imagine I will also try and adapt the theme to take advantage of any improvements made.

I first saw the Google Wave videos a few months ago, shortly after Google first announced the product.

It looked quite exciting, although admittedly it wasn’t something I was entirely sure exactly how I’d end up using. The simple benefit of a communication system which fused E-mail and chat was obvious, especially when it was also media rich, something that is becoming increasingly important in modern communication. However, at the same time I realised that Google were providing a toolset, which would quickly offer up novel uses, discovered by those who used it. Just as my twitter account has morphed over time, and is now used for far more than just simple “I am eating a sandwich” tweets, so I could picture Google Wave expanding rapidly beyond some of the uses concieved of at its exception.

Of course, the only real way to find all these uses is by using the thing, but at the moment Wave is still in its closed stages. Google have started giving out invites, although I imagine my somewhat late discovery of the application form, not to mention my admittedly limited skills in web development, have lead me to being somewhat low down on their list. Fortunately however, I managed to get hold of an “invite nomination” from Andrew Badera, whose blog I happened to stumble across by accident. Andrew was very kind to drop one my way, especially as I admitted to not being a regular on his blog, so I thought it only fair that I drop him a link in return.

I’ll keep you posted on the progress of the invite nomination, and should I get some invites of my own, I’ll make them available here, and via my twitter feed.

Update: I recieved my invite this morning. Unfortunately I don’t have anyone to talk to. If you have a Google Wave account, then feel free to wave at me.

Oh dear.

It was obvious from the start that Derren Brown wouldn’t predict the lottery, and the failure to reveal the balls before the draw just made the whole situation blindingly obvious. As soon as he did that, the whole situation boiled down to little more than a glorified card trick.

Now, I’ll be first to admit I don’t know how he did it. That’s not any indication that the trick was difficult, but rather the fact it was so sodding easy. While Paul Daniels claims that he knew 99 ways of achieving it was probably a slight exaggeration,  several possible solutions occurred to me both during and following the show. Personally I favour the ‘split screen’ argument, having used a similar technique myself I know how trivially easy such things are. (Even if I was thwarted by an ill-placed mirror)

The split screen idea is also supported by movements seen within the balls as the results are read out, although a similar effect could also have been seen with other suggestions, such as those of a mechanical ball printer. Other possibilities include an augmented reality approach, digitally projecting the numbers onto the balls, although if such an effect had been achieved, it was remarkably effective.

The general point being however that there are a number of ways the trick could have been achieved, not even taking into consideration sleight of hand, which admittedly would have been difficult if we are to assume that the camera feed was genuine. No prediction, or fixing, was required.

Now originally I dismissed simple camera trickery, it seemed too much of a cheat, and seemed unlikely to take up a whole hour show. Then again, I couldn’t see how any plausible explanation could take a few minutes; therefore Brown was going to bullshit us. The trick and misdirection would continue into the explanation, as Derren led us on a merry goose chase. Unfortunately it appears that I only bothered to tweet this at the beginning of today’s show, which is still a darnsight better than Brown’s after the fact ‘prediction.’

It was obvious from the start that Derren was aiming to misdirect, firstly by implying that there was any psychology involved, and then by progressively misleading bouts of mathematics.  While I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that the lottery is truly random (such as some quantum events appear to be) any biases are going to be so minor, and external factors far more significant that any attempt at prediction will be impossible. To imply that crowd-sourcing would be ow any use in determining a random set of numbers is entirely misleading.

Which brings us from the impossible, to the improbable. The fixing. I don’t know if Derren hoped to convince his sceptic audience with this spiel, but we are fed a series of unlikely events which would be both illegal and unethical. While people indeed commit illegal and unethical deeds, they rarely do so publicly on national television.  Furthermore, to suspect that Camelot’s security is lack enough that a breach made in August could subvert a draw made in September is laughable.  Furthermore, there are 14 sets of balls, so I find it hard to imagine that this was the first time one of the alleged six was used since the claimed breach. Not to mention, I’m far from convinced that a 20g difference would be sufficient to entirely bias the draw.

While I’ve happily excluded the impossible maths explanation, leaving the improbable fix explanation, I’m sadly still left with a considerable set of downright more probable explanations. Had Derren’s numbers been revealed before the draw, then things would be different, and I’d probably be checking into exactly how long the broadcast delay is from lottery HQ. However just because Derren has given an answer, doesn’t mean I’m going to believe it.

Unfortunately Brown’s attempts at an explanation did little to endear me to him during the show, despite the fact I’m usually a fan. The fact he was spouting nonsense was obvious, which made me hope more and more for a strong pay-off. Derren Brown likes to market himself as a sceptic, and thus I hoped he’d build up to a clear crescendo, which illustrated his audience had been duped.  Parallels between the earlier practice ‘draws’ and the final draw (mainly that the result was revealed after the draw) made me hope that these factors would tie themselves into the great reveal, that we’d get a clear mention of why two camera-men were present when only one was necessary. Instead though we got yet another, albeit a marginally more plausible, shaggy dog story. Not only do I feel that Derren Brown did not reveal his trick, but he ultimately failed to demonstrate anything in the hour long show. Only in his last words, “I’ll tell them it was just a trick” did he bother to give any nod to the truth, a matter which probably passed by anyone who wasn’t already sceptical.

Ultimately I was disappointed with not only the trick itself, but with the explanation, which demonstrated little more than Derren’s ability to string people along.

Its looking likely! Earlier today, newspaper columnist, television presenter and all-round misanthropist Charlie Brooker gave hints that we mad soon be seeing a series of ‘Gameswipe.’ In a tweet on his @charltonbrooker Twitter account, Brooker asked for the following:

Worst videogame bosses ever? Email yr suggestions to gameswipe at zeppotron dot com. Make what you will of that email address.
10 minutes ago from TweetDeck

Brooker is no stranger to games journalism, as his career began back on the pages of PC Zone. He has also regularly mentioned various computer and video games in his column in the Guardian. The E-mail address also appears to be associated with Zeppotron, the production company behind both Newswipe and Screenwipe.
Brooker’s recent satirical and biting look at news coverage in the form of Newswipe was absolutely fantastic, both hugely entertaining, and damning in its criticism, proving to be one of the only television programs for which I will bother setting an alarm.
Exactly how the *wipe format will be adapted to gaming is unclear, as both Newswipe and Screenwipe focused heavily on the past week or so in television/news, an approach which is unlikely be be so suitable for the slightly slower moving world of gaming. Thus its possible that we shall be looking at a one off special episode, or a short series taking a more general look at gaming; certainly the E-mail request somewhat suggests the latter.

Edit: Wow! I should post breaking news more often, this post is only twenty minutes old, and its already brought in a load of visitors.

I first played around with the political compass a few years ago, and was vaguely worried that I may have betrayed my old self, and have darted to the far right without quite realising it. As it happens I haven’t, and indeed I think the score is somewhat more extreme in the other direction than it had been previously.

Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: -7.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.62

Now in practice of course I realise that asking everyone to march to my drum would be ineffective, impractical, and immoral. While I’m not prepared to indulge every contradictory philosophy, finding some abhorrent, and still others mutually exclusive, I realise that expecting everyone to become raging liberal-lefty is not going to work in political terms, or even practical terms. As a result were I ever to become a mainstream politician, I’d probably have to take a bit more moderate a position. This is probably why I’d never be a mainstream politician.

There are also many points raised on which my opinions are far more nuanced than a four point scale will allow. I don’t think this changes my idealism in my approach to them, but believing something is a good idea is still fundamentally separated from knowing how to implement it. I also realise that any ideas I may have will almost invariably need to work in our current social climate, and complete political upheaval required to achieve some ideals will cause more problems than it solves. While I may be less than enamoured by the pandering to popularism democracy results in, I’m far less keen on many of the alternatives which have been seen. I may very well love everyone to live governed by rules of sunshine and happiness, but unfortunately I fear that the rules of Kalashnikovs and power would find a way to take hold.

One question intrigue me, and I’m not sure I see it as a left-right argument.

There is now a worrying fusion of information and entertainment.

The question itself could be interpreted to apply to many facets of the modern entertainment and information industries. I’m currently a big fan of Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe, but should that push me more to agree or disagree? The program is entertainment undoubtedly, but also informative, but paradoxically one of its prime thesis is to attack the way in which the news has allowed the need to deliver facts to be hijacked by the need to entertain. Is there hypocrisy in this situation? Secondly, infotainment has been one of the primary driving forces of the web and internet, with sites like Wikipedia being both methods of entertainment and sources of information. While I think letting entertainment get in the way of your facts is a Bad Thing™ I don’t think I could say the same for the reverse, although perhaps the end result is inevitable.

One of the benefits of using an extremely popular blogging platform, such as WordPress is the diverse range of plugins available. This allows for the easy addition of new features to a blog, and the latest versions of WordPress provide excellent tools to make it easy to install plugins and keep them updated. In this post I will mention some of my favourite WordPress plugins, and describe what they do and why I like them.

Akismet

Akismet is one of the most popular anti-spam plugins, and has replaced spam karma 2 as my plugin of choice after the latter was discontinued. Akismet is incredibly simple to use and configure, requiring just a WordPress API code. It then sits quietly by, monitoring all comments and trackbacks and filtering out the spam. At the moment it is working overdrive, thanks to an overzealous spambot operating form a small set of IP addresses.

Unlike some anti-spam solutions, akismet uses a centralised server which serves as a filter for thousands of different blogs. This allows the service to take advantage of the repetitive nature of a lot of comments spam, and to rapidly isolate dodgy IP addresses. Of course, it also adds a central point of failure, but I haven’t noticed any issues in this respect.

Obviously the most important stats with respect to a spam filter is accuracy, and while Akismet has a low rate of misses, I haven’t been able to assess false positives as this blog doesn’t get enough traffic.

Spam: 257
Not Spam: 13
Missed Spam: 2
False Positives: 0

BackType Connect

A recent addition to my blog, Backtype Connect is the offspring of the excellent Backtype website. Backtype initially began as a comments aggregator, bringing together a users comments across the entire blogosphere, all under one page. This move helped to solve one of my major problems with the blogosphere, a dispersed identity which can lack cohesion. A user visiting my blog would be completely isolated from comments I’ve made elsewhere, despite these comments being as important as those made on home turf.
From this beginning Backtype went on to consider another issue of the social web, namely that a lot of conversation remained divorced from the article being discussed. If someone were to tweet a comment about this blog post, I’d have little idea, and systems such as bit.ly and tinyurl.com obfuscate the connection even further. Backtype worked to index these references, extending pingback to places such as twitter and comments threads.
It is this latter service that the Backtype Connect plugin integrates directly into the blog. For example, a look at the comments of this entry will show the tweet I made to advertise this post, as well as any other conversations about it that may arise on other places, such as Digg or Reddit. (God forbid this blog should ever get dugg, it would be dead before it hit the front page.)

iBegin Share

Given my fear of getting dugg, it was possibly a mistake to add this plugin. There are many plugins which add share-this links to the bottom of blog entries, making it easier for users to share the content over different websites. I was already familiar with the author of iBegin Share after having used the fantastic lifestream plugin, discussed below.
iBegin share is particularly appealing, as it adds a compact link which opens up an in-stream list of possible options. The plugin is free and open-source, and thus is easily extensible with further options. It also offers the option of sharing the article via E-mail, and provides statistics regarding exactly which articles are being shared, and via what services.
You can see it in operation at the bottom of this post.

Lifestream

Lifestream is absolutely amazing. Just as backtype unifies comments made across different blogs, lifestream unifies activities across the social web. It does this my making use of RSS feeds and API’s for a diverse range of services, and combines this into a timeline for your activity across the web. Developer David Cramer is still adding to an already impressive list of services which can be monitored by the plugin. As it currently stands my lifestream tracks my activity on:

• Twitter
• Flickr
• Steam
• GfW Live
• Backtype (obviously)
• Digg
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Last.fm
• Delicio.us

It also supports many more websites which I don’t use, as well as any generic RSS feed. As well as generating a dynamic stream, the plugin is also able to generate regular digests, much like my summaries of weekly tweets.

Twitter Tools

Twitter tools is probably THE tool for intergration between your blog and twitter. Not only does it allow one to make tweets from within WordPress (admittedly a fairly useless feature), but also allows one to generate automatic tweets when new blog posts are made. This blog also makes use of its API for retrieving recent tweets, both for the status bar at the bottom, and for the widget in the sidebar. The option for weekly tweet summaries is also useful, although the ability to make a blogpost for every tweet is somewhat more questionable.

Others

I have plenty of other plugins running on this blog, many of which have been active from the beginning. WordPress.com stats allows a self hosted blog to make use of wordpress.com’s stat tracking tools, WP-Footnotes¹, Collapsing Categories is a simple javascript widget which collapses down subcategories in the sidebar, Better Blogroll helps you configure the number and order of the links in your blogroll, while Configurable Tag Cloud provides additional layers of customisation for the tag cloud.

1. Makes it very easy to add footnotes to blog posts, and is surprisingly customizable

I’ve just started playing around with Spotify, a service which would seem to hit the ‘too good to be true’ warning, and would have done so if I hadn’t seen it covered in the mainstream press.

Spotify is a free audio player available from www.spotify.com. Unlike other audio players, such as winamp, iTunes¹, Media Player or Songbird, Spotify will not limit you to playing just your own music; it will allow you to play any music. Well, any in its library, something which I’ll come to later. While this may sound like a dodgy file-share front end, it is in fact legitimate, fully legal and licensed. The service is ad supported, although so far they appear to be less regular, and less annoying than radio adverts. You can’t skip them, and they pause if you mute your system. However, if the ads annoy you, and you decide you want to go ad free, you can do so for £9.99 a month.

The interface is clean, fast and smooth, especially in contrast to the positively clunky Songbird. It’s styling are clearly inspired by Apple, although the window doesn’t look out of place on my Windows system. Its easy to search for and find tracks, however the interface feels a touch limited at times. For example, if I search for tracks by Queen it successfully finds 4862 tracks, these cover the band, other bands with the word Queen in them (eg. Queen Latifah) as well as albums and tracks containing the word Queen. At the top of the search it provides links, which look as though they should narrow your search, but instead link you to a page about the band/album. This detail is a nice addition, and you can add tracks from these pages, but it can make searching a touch cumbersome. Fortunately it is possible to write quite detailed search strings, and gain control that way. It is also the case that once you have sorted your search results, new results are no longer appended to the bottom. While this is understandable when it comes to maintaining the sort, it could cause problems if your track makes a later appearance.

The interface also has limitations when it comes to playlist management. It is possible to get a track playing in two ways, double clicking it, or queuing it to the playlist. The former begins it playing immediately, and adds the remainder (or a subsection thereof if there are lots of results) of the current search to your playlist in a greyed out fashion. These will be played automatically once the currently playing track has ended. However any tracks that you add manually following this will be highlighted in white, and added immediately after your last manually queued track, or whatever is playing currently. This behaviour is excellent, as it allows for a quick dive into a genre or band, or more careful queing up of songs. The interface also allows you to easily re-order playlists, including bringing the grey, automatically queued tracks to the front, or middle, of your manual playlist.² However it is not possible to modify this automatically generated playlist, meaning that if I notice it has queued up a track I don’t like, I have to wait for it to play and skip, rather then removing it from the playlist. However this approach does allow one to be listening to, say, a random selection of Rock from 1960-1980, and then easily add a track of interest to begin playing immediately after whatever is currently playing, or at least after the last manually added track.

Spotify will live and breathe on the diversity of its library. Limited selections is a major issue with many digital music retailers, and Spotify suffers similarly. While I was able to find any Queen song I so desired for instance, the selection of Pink Floyd was limited to a few covers and tribute bands.³ Some bands sit in the middle of this continuum, with the odd few tracks being picked up due to collaborations, of compilation albums. I imagine this situation is one which will improve with time, but as it currently stands Spotify will not be replacing many people’s media libraries. However, it is far from a useless selection, and includes a mix of mainstream and Indie labels. A nice touch is that the library also includes a few interviews and other shows, which are sorted into suitable categories and thus will occasionally crop up in automatic playlists. I haven’t yet found out if it is possible to control whether this happens or not.

As well as the few limitations of the library size, it also has a few problems with annotation. For example, clicking the screenshot above and you’ll see that it classes Atomic Kitten as rock, which seems a bit of a stretch, even for categories which are often subjective.

So how does Spotify compare to something like Last.fm? Well firstly Spotify give you far much more control over what you are playing, and is far less dependent on having a browser. It makes it theoretically possible to use Spotify to entirely replace your music library, a task for which last.fm is neither designed nor suited. Both feature mechanisms of being introduced to new music, although only Last.fm’s system dynamically responds to your tastes. Spotify doesn’t even allow you to rate tracks, and I feel it could gain significantly by replicating Last.fm’s Love/Hate ratings, allowing you to completely forbid tracks, or make them easy to find in future. While it is possible to add favourite tracks to a playlist, a favourites system would allow users to easily find ‘my favourite 1970s Rock tracks’ for example. The other major area is the social side of things, one in which spotify is surprisingly lacking. While it is possible to share music and even colaberate on playlists, this is all achieved outside the Spotify player, and even the website. This isn’t perhaps a failiure, but does seem a surprising oversight in this age of social media. However it is possible to scrobble Spotify tracks to Last.fm, so ther use of one certainly doesn’t preclude the other. Overall though the two systems currently perform different functions, last.fm being a site for discovering new music and sharing what you are interested in, while Spotify is attempting to replace the local media library.

One final feature I feel could benifit Spotify is support for local media libraries. While its eventual goal may be to entirely replace local media collections, or at least digital ones, it is not there quite yet. This feature would encourage people to abandon their current local media players more regularly in favour of Spotify, and would also help ease bandwidth for tracks which are already stored locally.

In summary, Spotify may very well be the future of digital music, but that future isn’t quite here yet. However, Spotify is still in beta, and makes a very impressive present.

1. Which annoyingly I keep Malaproping on and calling iPlayer.
2. I realise this talk of automatic and manual playlists is confusing. What I’ve dubbed the automatic playlist is a list of songs cued up through selecting a radio station or by double clicking a track in a search result. This playlist is greyed out and located at the end of any manually queued up tracks; it will only begin playing if it gets to the end of the manually queued playlist, and will automatically extend itself using the same search parameters if it nears the end.
3. This does’t actually appear to be a label problem as EMI, Sony, Warner, and Universal are all signed up, among others.

This review is compiled from my posts on Rock, Paper, Shotgun and the snopes message boards.

I’ve just finished Aquaria, one of the most beautiful and magical games I’ve played. On its surface the game can be thought of as borrowing from Ecco the Dolphin and Metroid.

Aquaria is a beautiful game

I got it shortly before Christmas on the recommendation of someone on RPS with the intent of playing it on my netbook. However the small screen made this a bit fiddly, and the graphic quality was cranked right down, meaning that I lost one of the main appeals of the game. However I then picked the game up on my desktop one evening when I wasn’t feeling like playing some of the other titles I got recently. I fell in love, and for the past couple of weeks its all I played.

Firstly, the game is beautiful, both visually and audibly. Fantastic artwork seems to flow and move naturally, creating one of the most visually rich and dynamic environments in gaming. This creates a game environment which feels amazingly emotive, and ultimately feeds in to the feelings of loss and loneliness which are woven into the plot. Exploration forms a central part of the gameplay and is truly rewarding in itself.

The plot is simple on the surface, but has a subtlety to it which rewards closer inspection. It is a rare game where you can actually identify themes, and a still rarer one where those themes are interwoven in different parts of the game design.

I’m actually feeling somewhat saddened that it now looks as though there will not be the hinted sequel. The feelings of intense heartbreak for dubious rewards is something I am familiar with, in the entirely unrelated field of completing a PhD, so I can’t criticise the team’s reluctance to pour themselves back into the project. I just hope that their move to pursue independent projects may allow them to return to Aquaria in the future.

I strongly recommend the game to anyone who has a half-way decent PC or Mac, as the game has very low specification requirements, and even manages to work on my netbook (although it is not entirely smooth and looks so much nicer on a larger screen). The game is available on Steam.

The third part of the ‘On art and Games’ series won’t be appearing this week, but instead will be up once its done. That’s not to say I’ve been ignoring it, but these things can take a while to put together, and I don’t want to fling the whole thing together in a rush. I’ve also reconsidered the idea of it being a fixed series, as its a far larger topic than I had first suspected. Instead, I expect the series will be interleaved in with other posts, and each article will be more or less self contained.

Ch…Ch…Ch…Changes

So this leaves a bit of a stream of conciousness affair here instead. If anyone actually is reading this blog regularly, you’ll have noticed the ‘this weeks tweets’ post which appeared this Wednesday. As you may have gathered, this is an automated weekly affair and ties in with my use of Twitter. You might also have noticed the ‘lifestream’ tab, a page which summarises my activity across the web, perfect for all you stalker types.

Time and Tide

The title of this blog post refers to the weekend’s tendency to disappear. I had intended to get some food shopping done, but suddenly it was six and I hadn’t got to the supermarket. I was in the lab though, before ayone thinks I was in bed. Odly enough this is probably actually a good thing, as I had forgotten than I was heading home later this week for my Mum’s birthday. I had planned a whole week of food.

The Great Train Ticket Gamble¹

Oddly, talking of going home I had a great time playing the ‘find the cheapest train ticket’ game. It turns out that the answer was Megatrain from Edinburgh to Birmingham, and then a standard return from Birmingham to Kemble. I could have actually done it cheaper with an offpeak return, but that would have left 15 minutes to change trains in Birmingham, which is a bit tight if one of my connections suffers a delay. I’m still slightly confused at what happened to one of the tickets offered to me between Birmingham and Kemble, as it seemed to change price. This isn’t unusual for ‘advanced’ tickets, but only standard tickets were availible at that point.

And Now for Something Completely Different

This was originally going to go in On Art anf Games [Part3] but never really fitted. So I’ll stick it here instead, where is still doesn’t fit but at least its surroundings are similarly muddled.

And now, finally to football is over, sao I can start watching Being Human.

1. I almost went for the great train robbery, but the price was fairly reasonable in the end