Sinclair to Return to the Market

In a surprise announcement, Sinclair Research, manufactures of a number of classic 1980′s personal computers including the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum, revealed that they were to return to the home computing market.
Founder of the company, Sir Clive Sinclair, revealed that the company had decided that the current market provided an excellent opportunity for the company to introduce its new product. “In the 1980s, Sinclair revolutionised the home computing market, and provided access to affordable computing technology to thousands of homes. It was Sinclair which sat at the centre of the early British computer games development scene, and gave birth to many of today’s prominent developers. In 2009, Sinclair hopes to release a new system, and encourage many of these leading developers to return home.”
Sinclair seemed initially coy when asked about system specifications, but began to reveal more information when he caught representatives from Sony and Microsoft sniggering at the back. “Obviously times have changed significantly since Sinclair last released a system, and the company has not stood still. The new system, the Sinclair ZX Millennium, will have a top of the range eight,” he paused, “Megahertz processor, and a whopping 512Kb RAM, that’s half a megabyte!” Sinclair looked unimpressed with the lack-lustre response from the crowd, and sighed before continuing, “These improvements have allowed us to take full advantage in improvements in display screen technology, delivering a full 576i resolution in a stunning 32 colours, all via your SCART lead for the crispest image reproduction. With the ZX Millennium your games will look just like cartoons, and thanks to the efforts of our engineers, we have been able to completely eliminate the problem of attribute clash.” Sinclair beamed, and looked around the audience for a reaction, clearly expecting this to be a bombshell, “That means that Dizzy can stand in front of a bush, and still look white,” he clarified, before collapsing forlornly after he was met with cold silence.
Karen Farley, of Modern Videogamer (US) asked whether the ZX Millennium would still rely on the cassette tapes used with previous systems. “Of course not,” responded Sinclair, “Our engineers initially toyed with the possibility of distributing games on compact disc, as the ability to skip tracks would allow a user to easily choose which game or piece of software to load, the media also had an improved shelf life when compared to cassette tapes. However we realised that this would show no appreciable improvement in loading times, as games would still be delivered as audio streams. Instead we decided to make the microdrive standard for the ZX Millenium.”
The ZX Millenium will be available from November 2009, priced at £175.

FIFA 1660

EA Sports today announced the release of FIFA 1660. Talking about the game, and EA spokesman said, “Electronic Arts have been developing soccer video-games since 1993, and rapidly made itself one of the foremost names in the genre. Since the release of FIFA International Soccer in 1993, EA Sports have released over fifteen titles on twenty-six different systems. This doesn’t include countless spin-offs and other variations. During this time, EA Sports has constantly tried to innovate and move the game forward, keeping up with the fast-paced game of football itself. Each year we have strived not only to introduce great new features, but also to ensure that the game reflects of the latest changes to teams, players and league tables. However, this led us to consider, what if we looked back.
In FIFA 1660 we take soccer back to its roots. Set before the rules of football were fully finalised, FIFA 1660 sees you enjoying the earlier, less codified game. With no referee or linesmen, players find themselves less restricted by the rules, and thus the new reaction-touch fight system allows for punches and kicks to be thrown at nearby players. The same system is also used to fend off those attempting to enforce the law, and disrupt the game.
Authentic historical research has attempted to ensure that the game-play accurately reflects the game as it was played at that time, and historical records have been used to provide names for the player database. Thus, when you play, you can be sure that your team are made up of genuine 17th Century players!”
FIFA 1660 will be released in Spring 2010 on Xbox 360, PS3, Wii and PC.

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.

The latest campaigns from the British Transport police continues this tradition. Below are two desgins that were rejected.³

Click for full size

1. Also, as I write this, BBC News 24 keeps mentioning that the police raids in several Northern English cities have revealed photographs of possible terrorist targets. No mention how these differer from tourist photos.
2. Of course, in some of these situations other ‘reasons’ were given. However I can’t help feel that none of these ‘reasons’ would have raised suspicion is the passengers were not of Middle Eastern appearance
3. Of course they are actually parodies. Although I realise that it can be difficult to tell when faced with some of the real posters.

A Helpful Error Message (Click for Bigger)

• You find yourself referring to friends as @twittername
• You find yourself constrained to speaking in sentences of a maximum of 140 characters.
• Before recounting an interesting fact you read in the newspaper you find yourself saying RT @guardiannews
• When in an accident, you reach for a phone, not to call the police, but to tweet the incident.
• You won’t pick up on a company’s press release unless they’ve also tweeted it.
• You had to stop synching your facebook status to your twitter account as you were overwhelming everyone’s news feeds.
• Your twitter account has begun to replace your RSS reader.
• When your parents point out that they never heard about your marriage, children and pending promotion you patiently point out that it is all available in your twitter feed.
• You don’t find anything odd about knowing exactly what @stephenfry are for breakfast.
• You follow more people on twitter than you meet in the average day.
• You follow more people on twitter than you meet in the average year.

Please add your own ideas in the comments, or alternatively tweet them with the #A2T hashtag.

My stats

I first started using twitter back in August 2007 but for ages the twitter bug didn’t bite, and I rarely even tweeted. My Twitterholic stats show that after an initial burst of activity my account lay dormant until almost a year later when I began slow regular tweets, and added a few friends. Then, at the beginning of this year I gained more friends and followers and began tweeting much more regularly.

Perhaps unsurprisingly this increase in tweeting also seems to correspond with my new-years blogging resolution.

Anyone who has played a game on the Xbox 360, or has looked at a growing number of PC Games, will be familiar with the concept of achievements. Achievements are a way of meta-gaming, giving the player a reward outside of the game, for completing various in game tasks. These tasks can vary from simply completing the tutorial, through killing a certain number of enemies, to something as bizarre as carrying a garden gnome through the whole game so as it may be launched into orbit at the end.
Life doesn’t have achievements; there are no amusingly named awards which pop up at the lower edge of your vision whenever you complete a particularly important life event. Unless you were a member of the Scouts or similar, you won’t have a little collection of icons representing the various things you have accomplished. This, I think, is one of the reasons why computer games will eventually win out over life, and we will all sit in large virtual reality booths getting achievements to our hearts content. Or something.
But before this great revolution can occur, I present the proposed list of achievements which will be available in Life 2.0. Note that it will be impossible to get all achievements in one lifetime; this is to encourage replay ability, something currently unavailable outside certain religious groups.

Achievements

Achieved _

Unattained _

Phew, that took far longer than it should have done and I don’t even get an achievement.

Edit: Ahh, much better. I ran my blog through a second time, and I find this word list slightly less worrying. (Card is so large thanks to the ‘what have I got in my wallet post)

Dwarf Fortress is a freeware indie game, that comes in at just 5.3 MB, that’s just 37 centipeggles for those familiar with Rock, Paper, Shotgun. However inside this small package you have one of the most detailed and absorbing games I have ever played.

Dwarf Fortress is really two games in one; fortress mode is a strategy/management game; adventurer mode is a Rogue alike RPG. Both games are set in the same world, and when your fortress finally falls you can descend into it in adventure mode and read the story of its fall engraved in its walls, and perhaps pick up a few artifacts that your dwarves themselves created.

However it is fortress mode which recieves the most attention, and rightly so. To attempt to compare it to commercial games would be to describe a breeding experiment involving Dungeon Keeper, The Settlers, and a DOS era word processor. In attempting to describe my first impressions of the game over at the snopes message boards I said the following:

I’ve been looking at the arcane and unwieldy ‘Dwarf Fortress,’ a freeware ASCII strategy/Roguealike game with the depth of an oceanic trench and an interface that would make the cockpit of a space shuttle seem user friendly. Despite its rudimentary graphics, the game still manages to take quite a chunk out of my computers processing power.

The games motto is ‘loosing is fun’ and that is something I fear may soon hit me. The first winter has hit and already I appear to have run out of seeds and yet have just taken an influx of new migrants which has doubled the population of my fortress. My carpenter has been working flat out to produce new beds for the migrants, while I’ve been very fortunate that one of the newcommers brought an axe with them, as the only one my party brought with them at the begining was stolen from the bedside of one of my dwarfs by an invading kobold.

Unfortunately I have no weapons, as I can’t build a smithy without an anvil, and the trading caravan that was supposed to bring one left with impatince as not only was my trade depot not built, but my broker was asleep when the caravan arrived.

Of course I can always slaughter some of the horses that gave birth in my Dining room, and the dogs have been trained up to hunt. My brewer is working efficiently, although I fear I may have brewed up too much alcohol, depleting valuble food reserves in the process. Still, my leader is a bit an alcoholic, so maybe she’ll get through the supplies.

I’m also dreading the day when I accidently mine into a nearby pond, flooding half my fortress.

That fortress survived a flooding, but sucumbed later, not to invaders, but rather to the after effects:

Dead, all dead. A series of invading goblins were bravely fought off by my quickly recruited militia, but we suffered heavy losses. Many of the Dwarves were severely depressed, and their refusal to work meant that the bodies of their friends began to rot in the corridors. In an attempt to raise the mood ‘Stoney,’ the leader, threw a party, however tragedy was to occur. A woodcutter flipped, sinking into a blood-frenzy, murdering half the dwarves in the party, and chasing the rest through the tunnels of my fortress. Those that weren’t killed slipped irreversibly into depression, and the death of the leader ensured they all stood arround doing very little. Eventualy the mad woodcutter was taken down but it was too late, the three remaining Dwarves starved in their beds until a final invading goblin force wiped them all out.

I’m now on my second fortress, located in the same world as the first, but some distance away. I learnt lessons from the first, and dug myself in much deeper, with only an entrance. Still, at one point I was down to a couple of dwarves, before a huge influx of immigrants rescued me. I’ve flooded half the fortress and rescued it, using the drained flood water to tide my fortress through the winter when all surface water was frozen and beer had run out.

I’ve got regular trade going on with elves, dwarves and humans, although have managed to annoy the elves on one occasion. (I’d dread to think what it would be like cooking for elves. The vegitarianism isn’t a problem (although I’m sure my dwarves don’t agree) but I fear they’d also object to my wooden table.) I’ve now extended my defenses, which seems to have attracted even more attention from the goblins than I was getting previously. The last siege was fought off with few casualties, but a smaller ambush proved to be a greater issue as my moat froze over in the winter, allowing them to bypass the bridge.

The game is still under development, and new features are continuously being added. It seems that the next version will look at military activity during world generation, with the eventual goal of providing the player with the ability to launch invasions against other settlements. However, the immediate results will be seen as a more detailed world history, and more variation in the civilizations you meet.

The early issues with the interface faded quickly as I became more familiar with the game, you get used to it. I…I don’t even see the code. All I see is dwarf, elephant, tower-cap. However, the game still seems to be throwing new challenges at me as my fortress gets larger, not to mention my projects are getting more and more ambitious. My warehouse/tower next to my trade depot is more or less complete, although still needs a final roof. My new defense network is mostly up and running, and I think I’ve got my resevoir systems hooked up correctly. Of course, I need to think about draining that moat. but that will involve blocking off the feeder chanels, so shall probably have to wait until winter rolls around again.

Pockets:
* Wallet
* Keys + USB drive
* Mobile Phone
* Twix Wrapper

Rucksack:
* Raincoat
* Old pair of trainers (Broken)
* 8 Reciepts
* Notepad
* Direct Debit request that should have been mailed a week ago
* A Ball of String (Seriously! What is that doing in there!?)
* iRiver H120 MP3 Player, remote and headphones
* Bus Ticket Dated 31st Jan 08
* Glasses Case (Contains Cloth)
* Train Ticket, Cheltnham Spa To Edinburgh, 04 Jan 2008
* 35-in-1 USB Card Reader
* 3 Payslips
* 1 Envelope containing:
2 Train Ticket reciepts and accompanying address card
* £40 Virgin Wines voucher
* 1 Treasury Tag
* 1 pen
* 1p piece

Sorry, disabled comments on this post as I was getting hit by credit vultures.

Now I must admit to liking the theatre, even if I don’t actually go all that often. There’s something vaguely ‘magical’ that it has, that the cinema has either lost, perhaps just through familiarity, or half an hour of previews. I know there’s a perfect word to capture what I want to say, only its slipped my mind.

But onto the production itself. Well although I don’t have much to compare it with I was pleasantly surprised, not only was it accessible but I actually enjoyed it. It was completely lacking in any pretentiousness, and had a style which was almost ‘cartoon like’ in nature, using a caricature of the well established Hollywood version of Suburban America and the characters within. Not only that but these characters were shown not just through different clothing and roles, but also in the manner in which they danced and moved.

My fears that it would be difficult to understand were also unfounded. It was surprising how much could be conveyed without the need for words. In some ways the ‘cartoon’ style helped here as it allowed for exaggerated actions, without them looking unnecessarily cheesy or grandiose. Secondly the choreography was excellent, seamlessly combining the movements associated with progressing the plot with more set-piece dance moments, which were themselves woven into the presented world as much as possible.

Once again my preconceptions were dashed when I was surprised by the variety in the styles of dance. The stereotyped image of the ballet I held before hand was one mainly of pirouettes and leotards, and although I realised that this was probably inaccurate I had still imagined that the style of dance was fairly rigidly defined. However ‘Edward Scissorhands’ embraced a number of styles from what I would consider ‘Traditional ballet,’ through dance more closely resembling ‘rock and roll,’ to the more general choreographed movements around the set. Clearly my prior understanding of ballet was deeply limited, and instead it is the central role of choreography and (non-vocal?) music to a production that is important, rather than a set style of dance.

Technically the production was excellent. Scene changes were smooth and barely noticeable and yet managed to produce dramatic changes in mood and setting. Not only did the set fly in and out un-noticed, but it did so without any disruption to the action on stage, leading to a number of moments of genuine surprise when the back-lights went up to reveal a completely different set to the one which was present a moment before. The set design also managed to match the character of the rest of the production, and produced a contracts between the Gothic opening and suburban America.

Overall I was very impressed. Although my experience is limited, and thus I am unable to compare it with other productions, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and rate it highly on its own merits. Yet ‘Edward Scissorhands’ was presented to me representing more than just itself, and also managed to destroy my preconceptions of what ballet was. While I’m sure there are a few ballets which will lie closely along my preconceptions the concept itself is no longer a turn-off, and I’m fully prepared to go along to another ballet in future, especially if its as good as ‘Edward Scissorhands.’